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Language: English
by
THEODOR MOMMSEN
by
DEDICATIONS
To My Friend
The Second:--
To My Dear Associates
and
CONTENTS
BOOK I: The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy
CHAPTER
I. Introduction
XII. Religion
XV. Art
BOOK II: From the Abolition of the Monarchy in Rome to the Union
of Italy
CHAPTER
CHAPTER
I. Carthage
CHAPTER
CHAPTER
* * * * *
Preparer's Note
This work contains many literal citations of and references to foreign
words, sounds, and alphabetic symbols drawn from many languages,
including Gothic and Phoenician, but chiefly Latin and Greek. This
English Gutenberg edition, constrained to the characters of 7-bit
ASCII code, adopts the following orthographic conventions:
5) Dr. Mommsen has given his dates in terms of Roman usage, A.U.C.;
that is, from the founding of Rome, conventionally taken to be 753
B. C. The preparer of this document has appended to the end of
this combined text (Books I-V) a table of conversion between the
two systems.
"The translation has been prepared from the third edition of the
original, published in the spring of the present year at Berlin.
The sheets have been transmitted to Dr. Mommsen, who has kindly
communicated to me such suggestions as occurred to him. I have
thus been enabled, more especially in the first volume, to correct
those passages where I had misapprehended or failed to express the
author's meaning, and to incorporate in the English work various
additions and corrections which do not appear in the original.
"The reader may perhaps be startled by the occurrence now and then
of modes of expression more familiar and colloquial than is usually
the case in historical works. This, however, is a characteristic
feature of the original, to which in fact it owes not a little
of its charm. Dr. Mommsen often uses expressions that are not
to be found in the dictionary, and he freely takes advantage of
the unlimited facilities afforded by the German language for the
coinage or the combination of words. I have not unfrequently, in
deference to his wishes, used such combinations as 'Carthagino-Sicilian,'
'Romano-Hellenic,' although less congenial to our English idiom,
for the sake of avoiding longer periphrases.
"In Dr. Mommsen's book, as in every other German work that has
occasion to touch on abstract matters, there occur sentences couched
in a peculiar terminology and not very susceptible of translation.
There are one or two sentences of this sort, more especially in
the chapter on Religion in the 1st volume, and in the critique of
Euripides as to which I am not very confident that I have seized
or succeeded in expressing the meaning. In these cases I have
translated literally.
"In the spelling of proper names I have generally adopted the Latin
orthography as more familiar to scholars in this country, except
in cases where the spelling adopted by Dr. Mommsen is marked by any
special peculiarity. At the same time entire uniformity in this
respect has not been aimed at.
Since that time no change has been made, except the issue in 1870
of an Index. But, as Dr. Mommsen was good enough some time ago
to send to me a copy in which he had taken the trouble to mark the
alterations introduced in the more recent editions of the original,
I thought it due to him and to the favour with which the translation
had been received that I should subject it to such a fresh revision
as should bring it into conformity with the last form (eighth
edition) of the German, on which, as I learn from him, he hardly
contemplates further change. As compared with the first English
edition, the more considerable alterations of addition, omission,
or substitution amount, I should think, to well-nigh a hundred pages.
I have corrected various errors in renderings, names, and dates
(though not without some misgiving that others may have escaped
notice or been incurred afresh); and I have still further broken
up the text into paragraphs and added marginal headings.
The Index, which was not issued for the German book till nine years
after the English translation was published, has now been greatly
enlarged from its more recent German form, and has been, at the
expenditure of no small labour, adapted to the altered paging of
the English. I have also prepared, as an accompaniment to it, a
collation of pagings, which will materially facilitate the finding of
references made to the original or to the previous English editions.
September 1894.
The Roman and Greek money has uniformly been commuted on the basis
of assuming the libral as and sestertius, and the denarius and
Attic drachma, respectively as equal, and taking for all sums above
100 denarii the present value in gold, and for all sums under 100
denarii the present value in silver, of the corresponding weight.
The Roman pound (=327.45 grammes) of gold, equal to 4000 sesterces,
has thus, according to the ratio of gold to silver 1:15.5, been
reckoned at 304 1/2 Prussian thalers [about 43 pounds sterling],
and the denarius, according to the value of silver, at 7 Prussian
groschen [about 8d.].(1)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Introduction
XII. Religion
XV. Art
BOOK FIRST
Thucydides.
CHAPTER I
Introduction
Ancient History
Italy
Our aim is to exhibit the last act of this great historical drama,
to relate the ancient history of the central peninsula projecting
from the northern continent into the Mediterranean. It is formed
by the mountain-system of the Apennines branching off in a southern
direction from the western Alps. The Apennines take in the first
instance a south-eastern course between the broader gulf of the
Mediterranean on the west, and the narrow one on the east; and in the
close vicinity of the latter they attain their greatest elevation,
which, however, scarce reaches the line of perpetual snow, in
the Abruzzi. From the Abruzzi the chain continues in a southern
direction, at first undivided and of considerable height; after
a depression which formsa hill-country, it splits into a somewhat
flattened succession of heights towards the south-east and a more
rugged chain towards the south, and in both directions terminates
in the formation of narrow peninsulas.
The flat country on the north, extending between the Alps and the
Apennines as far down as the Abruzzi, does not belong geographically,
nor until a very late period even historically, to the southern land
of mountain and hill, the Italy whose history is here to engage
our attention. It was not till the seventh century of the city
that the coast-district from Sinigaglia to Rimini, and not till the
eighth that the basin of the Po, became incorporated with Italy.
The ancient boundary of Italy on the north was not the Alps but
the Apennines. This mountain-system nowhere rises abruptly into
a precipitous chain, but, spreading broadly over the land and
enclosing many valleys and table-lands connected by easy passes,
presents conditions which well adapt it to become the settlement of
man. Still more suitable in this respect are the adjacent slopes
and the coast-districts on the east, south, and west. On the
east coast the plain of Apulia, shut in towards the north by the
mountain-block of the Abruzzi and only broken by the steep isolated
ridge of Garganus, stretches in a uniform level with but a scanty
development of coast and stream. On the south coast, between the
two peninsulas in which the Apennines terminate, extensive lowlands,
poorly provided with harbours but well watered and fertile,
adjoin the hill-country of the interior. The west coast presents
a far-stretching domain intersected by considerable streams, in
particular by the Tiber, and shaped by the action of the waves and
of the once numerous volcanoes into manifold variety of hill and
valley, harbour and island. Here the regions of Etruria, Latium,
and Campania form the very flower of the land of Italy. South of
Campania, the land in front of the mountains gradually diminishes,
and the Tyrrhenian Sea almost washes their base. Moreover, as
the Peloponnesus is attached to Greece, so the island of Sicily is
attached to Italy--the largest and fairest isle of the Mediterranean,
having a mountainous and partly desert interior, but girt, especially
on the east and south, by a broad belt of the finest coast-land,
mainly the result of volcanic action. Geographically the Sicilian
mountains are a continuation of the Apennines, hardly interrupted
by the narrow "rent" --Pegion--of the straits; and in its historical
relations Sicily was in earlier times quite as decidedly a part of
Italy as the Peloponnesus was of Greece, a field for the struggles
of the same races, and the seat of a similar superior civilization.
Italian History
We intend here to relate the history of Italy, not simply the history
of the city of Rome. Although, in the formal sense of political
law, it was the civic community of Rome which gained the sovereignty
first of Italy and then of the world, such a view cannot be held
to express the higher and real meaning of history. What has been
called the subjugation of Italy by the Romans appears rather,
when viewed in its true light, as the consolidation into an united
state of the whole Italian stock--a stock of which the Romans were
doubtless the most powerful branch, but still were only a branch.
The history of Italy falls into two main sections: (1) its internal
history down to its union under the leadership of the Latin stock,
and (2) the history of its sovereignty over the world. Under the
first section, which will occupy the first two books, we shall have
to set forth the settlement of the Italian stock in the peninsula;
the imperilling of its national and political existence, and
its partial subjugation, by nations of other descent and older
civilization, Greeks and Etruscans; the revolt of the Italians
against the strangers, and the annihilation or subjection of the
latter; finally, the struggles between the two chief Italian stocks,
the Latins and the Samnites, for the hegemony of the peninsula, and
the victory of the Latins at the end of the fourth century before
the birth of Christ--or of the fifth century of the city. The second
section opens with the Punic wars; it embraces the rapid extension
of the dominion of Rome up to and beyond the natural boundaries of
Italy, the long status quo of the imperial period, and the collapse
of the mighty empire. These events will be narrated in the third
and following books.
CHAPTER II
Iapygians
Italians
Indo-Germanic Culture
During the period when the Indo-Germanic nations which are now
separated still formed one stock speaking the same language, they
attained a certain stage of culture, and they had a vocabulary
corresponding to it. This vocabulary the several nations carried
along with them, in its conventionally established use, as a common
dowry and a foundation for further structures of their own. In it
we find not merely the simplest terms denoting existence, actions,
perceptions, such as -sum-, -do-, -pater-, the original echo of the
impression which the external world made on the mind of man, but
also a number of words indicative of culture (not only as respects
their roots, but in a form stamped upon them by custom) which are
the common property of the Indo-Germanic family, and which cannot
be explained either on the principle of an uniform development
in the several languages, or on the supposition of their having
subsequently borrowed one from another. In this way we possess
evidence of the development of pastoral life at that remote epoch
in the unalterably fixed names of domestic animals; the Sanscrit
-gaus- is the Latin -bos-, the Greek --bous--; Sanscrit -avis- is
the Latin -ovis-, Greek --ois--; Sanscrit -asvas-, Latin -equus-,
Greek --ippos--; Sanscrit -hansas-, Latin -anser-, Greek --chein--;
Sanscrit -atis-, Latin -anas-, Greek --neissa--; in like manner
-pecus-, -sus-, -porcus-, -taurus-, -canis-, are Sanscrit words.
Even at this remote period accordingly the stock, on which from the
days of Homer down to our own time the intellectual development of
mankind has been dependent, had already advanced beyond the lowest
stage of civilization, the hunting and fishing epoch, and had
attained at least comparative fixity of abode. On the other hand,
we have as yet no certain proofs of the existence of agriculture
at this period. Language rather favours the negative view. Of the
Latin-Greek names of grain none occurs in Sanscrit with the single
exception of --zea--, which philologically represents the Sanscrit
-yavas-, but denotes in the Indian barley, in Greek spelt. It must
indeed be granted that this diversity in the names of cultivated
plants, which so strongly contrasts with the essential agreement in
the appellations of domestic animals, does not absolutely preclude
the supposition of a common original agriculture. In the circumstances
of primitive times transport and acclimatizing are more difficult
in the case of plants than of animals; and the cultivation of rice
among the Indians, that of wheat and spelt among the Greeks and
Romans, and that of rye and oats among the Germans and Celts, may
all be traceable to a common system of primitive tillage. On the
other hand the name of one cereal common to the Greeks and Indians
only proves, at the most, that before the separation of the stocks
they gathered and ate the grains of barley and spelt growing wild
in Mesopotamia,(3) not that they already cultivated grain. While,
however, we reach no decisive result in this way, a further light
is thrown on the subject by our observing that a number of the most
important words bearing on this province of culture occur certainly
in Sanscrit, but all of them in a more general signification.
-Agras-among the Indians denotes a level surface in general; -kurnu-,
anything pounded; -aritram-, oar and ship; -venas-, that which is
pleasant in general, particularly a pleasant drink. The words are
thus very ancient; but their more definite application to the field
(-ager-), to the grain to be ground (-granum-), to the implement
which furrows the soil as the ship furrows the surface of the sea
(-aratrum-), to the juice of the grape (-vinum-), had not yet taken
place when the earliest division of the stocks occurred, and it
is not to be wondered at that their subsequent applications came
to be in some instances very different, and that, for example, the
corn intended to be ground, as well as the mill for grinding it
(Gothic -quairinus-, Lithuanian -girnos-,(4)) received their names
from the Sanscrit -kurnu-. We may accordingly assume it as probable,
that the primeval Indo-Germanic people were not yet acquainted with
agriculture, and as certain, that, if they were so, it played but
a very subordinate part in their economy; for had it at that time
held the place which it afterwards held among the Greeks and Romans,
it would have left a deeper impression upon the language.
On the other hand the building of houses and huts by the Indo-Germans
is attested by the Sanscrit -dam(as)-, Latin -domus-, Greek --domos--;
Sanscrit -vesas-, Latin -vicus-, Greek --oikos--; Sanscrit -dvaras-,
Latin -fores-, Greek --thura--; further, the building of oar-boats
by the names of the boat, Sanscrit -naus-, Latin -navis-, Greek
--naus--, and of the oar, Sanscrit -aritram-, Greek --eretmos--,
Latin -remus-, -tri-res-mis-; and the use of waggons and the breaking
in of animals for draught and transport by the Sanscrit -akshas-
(axle and cart), Latin -axis-, Greek --axon--, --am-axa--; Sanscrit
-iugam-, Latin -iugum-, Greek --zugon--. The words that denote
clothing- Sanscrit -vastra-, Latin -vestis-, Greek --esthes--; as
well as those that denote sewing and spinning-Sanscrit -siv-, Latin
-suo-; Sanscrit -nah-, Latin -neo-, Greek --netho--, are alike
in all Indo-Germanic languages. This cannot, however, be equally
affirmed of the higher art of weaving.(5) The knowledge of the
use of fire in preparing food, and of salt for seasoning it, is a
primeval heritage of the Indo-Germanic nations; and the same may
be affirmed regarding the knowledge of the earliest metals employed
as implements or ornaments by man. At least the names of copper
(-aes-) and silver (-argentum-), perhaps also of gold, are met with
in Sanscrit, and these names can scarcely have originated before
man had learned to separate and to utilize the ores; the Sanscrit
-asis-, Latin -ensis-, points in fact to the primeval use of metallic
weapons.
Graeco-Italian Culture
Agriculture
All that may be called the patriarchal element in the state rested
in Greece and Italy on the same foundations. Under this head comes
especially the moral and decorous arrangement of social life,(9)
which enjoined monogamy on the husband and visited with heavy
penalties the infidelity of the wife, and which recognized the
equality of the sexes and the sanctity of marriage in the high
position which it assigned to the mother within the domestic circle.
On the other hand the rigorous development of the marital and still
more of the paternal authority, regardless of the natural rights of
persons as such, was a feature foreign to the Greeks and peculiarly
Italian; it was in Italy alone that moral subjection became
transformed into legal slavery. In the same way the principle of
the slave being completely destitute of legal rights--a principle
involved in the very nature of slavery--was maintained by the Romans
with merciless rigour and carried out to all its consequences;
whereas among the Greeks alleviations of its harshness were early
introduced both in practice and in legislation, the marriage of
slaves, for example, being recognized as a legal relation.
On the household was based the clan, that is, the community of the
descendants of the same progenitor; and out of the clan among the
Greeks as well as the Italians arose the state. But while under
the weaker political development of Greece the clan-bond maintained
itself as a corporate power in contradistinction to that of
the state far even into historical times, the state in Italy made
its appearance at once complete, in so far as in presence of its
authority the clans were quite neutralized and it exhibited an
association not of clans, but of citizens. Conversely, again, the
individual attained, in presence of the clan, an inward independence
and freedom of personal development far earlier and more completely
in Greece than in Rome--a fact reflected with great clearness in
the Greek and Roman proper names, which, originally similar, came
to assume very different forms. In the more ancient Greek names
the name of the clan was very frequently added in an adjective form
to that of the individual; while, conversely, Roman scholars were
aware that their ancestors bore originally only one name, the later
-praenomen-. But while in Greece the adjectival clan-name early
disappeared, it became, among the Italians generally and not merely
among the Romans, the principal name; and the distinctive individual
name, the -praenomen-, became subordinate. It seems as if the small
and ever diminishing number and the meaningless character of the
Italian, and particularly of the Roman, individual names, compared
with the luxuriant and poetical fulness of those of the Greeks,
were intended to illustrate the truth that it was characteristic
of the one nation to reduce all to a level, of the other to promote
the free development of personality. The association in communities
of families under patriarchal chiefs, which we may conceive to
have prevailed in the Graeco-Italian period, may appear different
enough from the later forms of Italian and Hellenic polities; yet
it must have already contained the germs out of which the future
laws of both nations were moulded. The "laws of king Italus,"
which were still applied in the time of Aristotle, may denote the
institutions essentially common to both. These laws must have
provided for the maintenance of peace and the execution of justice
within the community, for military organization and martial law
in reference to its external relations, for its government by a
patriarchal chief, for a council of elders, for assemblies of the
freemen capable of bearing arms, and for some sort of constitution.
Judicial procedure (-crimen-, --krinein--, expiation (-poena-,
--poinei--), retaliation (-talio-, --talao--, --tleinai--, are
Graeco-Italian ideas. The stern law of debt, by which the debtor
was directly responsible with his person for the repayment of what
he had received, is common to the Italians, for example, with
the Tarentine Heracleots. The fundamental ideas of the Roman
constitution--a king, a senate, and an assembly entitled simply to
ratify or to reject the proposals which the king and senate should
submit to it--are scarcely anywhere expressed so distinctly as
in Aristotle's account of the earlier constitution of Crete. The
germs of larger state-confederacies in the political fraternizing
or even amalgamation of several previously independent stocks
(symmachy, synoikismos) are in like manner common to both nations.
The more stress is to be laid on this fact of the common foundations
of Hellenic and Italian polity, that it is not found to extend to
the other Indo-Germanic stocks; the organization of the Germanic
community, for example, by no means starts, like that of the Greeks
and Romans, from an elective monarchy. But how different the
polities were that were constructed on this common basis in Italy
and Greece, and how completely the whole course of their political
development belongs to each as its distinctive property,(10) it
will be the business of the sequel to show.
Religion
Art
Lastly, what holds good of real life is true also of its counterfeit
in jest and play, which everywhere, and especially in the earliest
period of full and simple existence, do not exclude the serious,
but veil it. The simplest elements of art are in Latium and Hellas
quite the same; the decorous armed dance, the "leap" (-triumpus-,
--thriambos--, --di-thyrambos--); the masquerade of the "full people"
(--satyroi--, -satura-), who, wrapped in the skins of sheep and
goats, wound up the festival with their jokes; lastly, the pipe,
which with suitable strains accompanied and regulated the solemn
as well as the merry dance. Nowhere, perhaps, does the especially
close relationship of the Hellenes and Italians come to light so
clearly as here; and yet in no other direction did the two nations
manifest greater divergence as they became developed. The training
of youth remained in Latium strictly confined to the narrow limits
of domestic education; in Greece the yearning after a varied
yet harmonious training of mind and body created the sciences of
Gymnastics and Paideia, which were cherished by the nation and by
individuals as their highest good. Latium in the poverty of its
artistic development stands almost on a level with uncivilized
peoples; Hellas developed with incredible rapidity out of its
religious conceptions the myth and the worshipped idol, and out of
these that marvellous world of poetry and sculpture, the like of
which history has not again to show. In Latium no other influences
were powerful in public and private life but prudence, riches, and
strength; it was reserved for the Hellenes to feel the blissful
ascendency of beauty, to minister to the fair boy-friend with an
enthusiasm half sensuous, half ideal, and to reanimate their lost
courage with the war-songs of the divine singer.
With all these facts before us, we cannot allow that there ever was
a time when the Greeks in all Hellenic cantons subsisted by purely
pastoral husbandry. If it was the possession of cattle, and not of
land, which in Greece as in Italy formed the basis and the standard
of all private property, the reason of this was not that agriculture
was of later introduction, but that it was at first conducted on
the system of joint possession. Of course a purely agricultural
economy cannot have existed anywhere before the separation of
the stocks; on the contrary, pastoral husbandry was (more or less
according to locality) combined with it to an extent relatively
greater than was the case in later times.
CHAPTER III
Indo-Germanic Migrations
Latium
The plain of Latium must have been in primeval times the scene of
the grandest conflicts of nature, while the slowly formative agency
of water deposited, and the eruptions of mighty volcanoes upheaved,
the successive strata of that soil on which was to be decided the
question to what people the sovereignty of the world should belong.
Latium is bounded on the east by the mountains of the Sabines and
Aequi which form part of the Apennines; and on the south by the
Volscian range rising to the height of 4000 feet, which is separated
from the main chain of the Apennines by the ancient territory of
the Hernici, the tableland of the Sacco (Trerus, a tributary of the
Liris), and stretching in a westerly direction terminates in the
promontory of Terracina. On the west its boundary is the sea, which
on this part of the coast forms but few and indifferent harbours.
On the north it imperceptibly merges into the broad hill-land
of Etruria. The region thus enclosed forms a magnificent plain
traversed by the Tiber, the "mountain-stream" which issues from
the Umbrian, and by the Anio, which rises in the Sabine mountains.
Hills here and there emerge, like islands, from the plain; some
of them steep limestone cliffs, such as that of Soracte in the
north-east, and that of the Circeian promontory on the south-west,
as well as the similar though lower height of the Janiculum near
Rome; others volcanic elevations, whose extinct craters had become
converted into lakes which in some cases still exist; the most
important of these is the Alban range, which, free on every side,
stands forth from the plain between the Volscian chain and the
river Tiber.
Here settled the stock which is known to history under the name
of the Latins, or, as they were subsequently called by way of
distinction from the Latin communities beyond the bounds of Latium,
the "Old Latins" (-prisci Latini-). But the territory occupied
by them, the district of Latium, was only a small portion of the
central plain of Italy. All the country north of the Tiber was to
the Latins a foreign and even hostile domain, with whose inhabitants
no lasting alliance, no public peace, was possible, and such armistices
as were concluded appear always to have been for a limited period.
The Tiber formed the northern boundary from early times; and neither
in history nor in the more reliable traditions has any reminiscence
been preserved as to the period or occasion of the establishment
of a frontier line so important in its results. We find, at the
time when our history begins, the flat and marshy tracts to the
south of the Alban range in the hands of Umbro-Sabellian stocks, the
Rutuli and Volsci; Ardea and Velitrae are no longer in the number
of originally Latin towns. Only the central portion of that region
between the Tiber, the spurs of the Apennines, the Alban Mount, and
the sea--a district of about 700 square miles, not much larger than
the present canton of Zurich--was Latium proper, the "plain,"(2)
as it appears to the eye of the observer from the heights of Monte
Cavo. Though the country is a plain, it is not monotonously flat.
With the exception of the sea-beach which is sandy and formed in
part by the accumulations of the Tiber, the level is everywhere
broken by hills of tufa moderate in height though often somewhat
steep, and by deep fissures of the ground. These alternating
elevations and depressions of the surface lead to the formation
of lakes in winter; and the exhalations proceeding in the heat of
summer from the putrescent organic substances which they contain
engender that noxious fever-laden atmosphere, which in ancient
times tainted the district as it taints it at the present day. It
is a mistake to suppose that these miasmata were first occasioned
by the neglect of cultivation, which was the result of the misgovernment
in the last century of the Republic and under the Papacy. Their
cause lies rather in the want of natural outlets for the water;
and it operates now as it operated thousands of years ago. It is
true, however, that the malaria may to a certain extent be banished
by thoroughness of tillage--a fact which has not yet received its
full explanation, but may be partly accounted for by the circumstance
that the working of the surface accelerates the drying up of the
stagnant waters. It must always remain a remarkable phenomenon,
that a dense agricultural population should have arisen in regions
where no healthy population can at present subsist, and where the
traveller is unwilling to tarry even for a single night, such as
the plain of Latium and the lowlands of Sybaris and Metapontum.
We must bear in mind that man in a low stage of civilization
has generally a quicker perception of what nature demands, and a
greater readiness in conforming to her requirements; perhaps, also,
a more elastic physical constitution, which accommodates itself
more readily to the conditions of the soil where he dwells. In
Sardinia agriculture is prosecuted under physical conditions
precisely similar even at the present day; the pestilential atmosphere
exists, but the peasant avoids its injurious effects by caution in
reference to clothing, food, and the choice of his hours of labour.
In fact, nothing is so certain a protection against the "aria cattiva"
as wearing the fleece of animals and keeping a blazing fire; which
explains why the Roman countryman went constantly clothed in heavy
woollen stuffs, and never allowed the fire on his hearth to be
extinguished. In other respects the district must have appeared
attractive to an immigrant agricultural people: the soil is easily
laboured with mattock and hoe and is productive even without
being manured, although, tried by an Italian standard, it does not
yield any extraordinary return: wheat yields on an average about
five-fold.(3) Good water is not abundant; the higher and more
sacred on that account was the esteem in which every fresh spring
was held by the inhabitants.
Latin Settlements
Clan-Villages
The Roman territory was divided in the earliest times into a number
of clan-districts, which were subsequently employed in the formation
of the earliest "rural wards" (-tribus rusticae-). Tradition
informs us as to the -tribus Claudia-, that it originated from
the settlement of the Claudian clansmen on the Anio; and that the
other districts of the earliest division originated in a similar
manner is indicated quite as certainly by their names. These
names are not, like those of the districts added at a later period,
derived from the localities, but are formed without exception from
the names of clans; and the clans who thus gave their names to
the wards of the original Roman territory are, so far as they have
not become entirely extinct (as is the case with the -Camilii-,
-Galerii-, -Lemonii-, -Pollii-, -Pupinii-, -Voltinii-), the very
oldest patrician families of Rome, the -Aemilii-, -Cornelii-, -Fabii-,
-Horatii-, -Menenii-, -Papirii-, -Romilii-, -Sergii-, -Voturii-.
It is worthy of remark, that not one of these clans can be shown to
have taken up its settlement in Rome only at a later epoch. Every
Italian, and doubtless also every Hellenic, canton must, like the
Roman, have been divided into a number of groups associated at once
by locality and by clanship; such a clan-settlement is the "house"
(--oikia--) of the Greeks, from which very frequently the --komai--
and --demoi-- originated among them, like the tribus in Rome. The
corresponding Italian terms "house" -vicus-or "district" (-pagus-,
from -pangere-) indicate, in like manner, the joint settlement
of the members of a clan, and thence come by an easily understood
transition to signify in common use hamlet or village. As each
household had its own portion of land, so the clan-household or
village had a clan-land belonging to it, which, as will afterwards
be shown, was managed up to a comparatively late period after the
analogy of household--land, that is, on the system of joint-possession.
Whether it was in Latium itself that the clan-households became
developed into clan-villages, or whether the Latins were already
associated in clans when they immigrated into Latium, are questions
which we are just as little able to answer as we are to determine
what was the form assumed by the management on joint account,
which such an arrangement required,(4) or how far, in addition to
the original ground of common ancestry, the clan may have been based
on the incorporation or co-ordination from without of individuals
not related to it by blood.
Cantons
Alba
The summits of the last offshoots of the Sabine range form natural
fastnesses of the Latin plain; and the canton-strongholds there
gave rise at a later period to the considerable towns of Tibur and
Praeneste. Labici too, Gabii, and Nomentum in the plain between the
Alban and Sabine hills and the Tiber, Rome on the Tiber, Laurentum
and Lavinium on the coast, were all more or less ancient centres
of Latin colonization, not to speak of many others less famous and
in some cases almost forgotten.
From the most ancient times there were held, in connection with
the religious festival on the Mount of Alba, assemblies of the
representatives of the several communities at the neighbouring
Latin seat of justice at the source of the Ferentina (near Marino).
Indeed such a confederacy cannot be conceived to exist without
having a certain power of superintendence over the associated body,
and without possessing a system of law binding on all. Tradition
records, and we may well believe, that the league exercised
jurisdiction in reference to violations of federal law, and that
it could in such cases pronounce even sentence of death. The later
communion of legal rights and, in some sense, of marriage that
subsisted among the Latin communities may perhaps be regarded as
an integral part of the primitive law of the league, so that any
Latin man could beget lawful children with any Latin woman and
acquire landed property and carry on trade in any part of Latium.
The league may have also provided a federal tribunal of arbitration
for the mutual disputes of the cantons; on the other hand, there
is no proof that the league imposed any limitation on the sovereign
right of each community to make peace or war. In like manner
there can be no doubt that the constitution of the league implied
the possibility of its waging defensive or even aggressive war
in its own name; in which case, of course, it would be necessary
to have a federal commander-in-chief. But we have no reason to
suppose that in such an event each community was compelled by law
to furnish a contingent for the army, or that, conversely, any
one was interdicted from undertaking a war on its own account even
against a member of the league. There are, however, indications
that during the Latin festival, just as was the case during the
festivals of the Hellenic leagues, "a truce of God" was observed
throughout all Latium;(5) and probably on that occasion even tribes
at feud granted safe-conducts to each other.
These very general outlines must suffice: any attempt to draw the
lines more sharply would only falsify the picture. The manifold play
of mutual attraction and repulsion among those earliest political
atoms, the cantons, passed away in Latium without witnesses competent
to tell the tale. We must now be content to realise the one great
abiding fact that they possessed a common centre, to which they
did not sacrifice their individual independence, but by means of
which they cherished and increased the feeling of their belonging
collectively to the same nation. By such a common possession the
way was prepared for their advance from that cantonal individuality,
with which the history of every people necessarily begins, to the
national union with which the history of every people ends or at
any rate ought to end.
1. I. II. Italians
CHAPTER IV
Ramnes
About fourteen miles up from the mouth of the river Tiber hills of
moderate elevation rise on both banks of the stream, higher on the
right, lower on the left bank. With the latter group there has been
closely associated for at least two thousand five hundred years the
name of the Romans. We are unable, of course, to tell how or when
that name arose; this much only is certain, that in the oldest
form of it known to us the inhabitants of the canton are called not
Romans, but Ramnians (Ramnes); and this shifting of sound, which
frequently occurs in the older period of a language, but fell very
early into abeyance in Latin,(1) is an expressive testimony to the
immemorial antiquity of the name. Its derivation cannot be given with
certainty; possibly "Ramnes" may mean "the people on the stream."
Tities, Luceres
But they were not the only dwellers on the hills by the bank
of the Tiber. In the earliest division of the burgesses of Rome a
trace has been preserved of the fact that that body arose out of
the amalgamation of three cantons once probably independent, the
Ramnians, Tities, and Luceres, into a single commonwealth--in other
words, out of such a --synoikismos-- as that from which Athens
arose in Attica.(2) The great antiquity of this threefold division
of the community(3) is perhaps best evinced by the fact that the
Romans, in matters especially of constitutional law, regularly
used the forms -tribuere- ("to divide into three") and -tribus-
("a third") in the general sense of "to divide" and "a part," and
the latter expression (-tribus-), like our "quarter," early lost
its original signification of number. After the union each of these
three communities--once separate, but now forming subdivisions of
a single community--still possessed its third of the common domain,
and had its proportional representation in the burgess-force and
in the council of the elders. In ritual also, the number divisible
by three of the members of almost all the oldest colleges--of the
Vestal Virgins, the Salii, the Arval Brethren, the Luperci, the
Augurs-- probably had reference to that three-fold partition. These
three elements into which the primitive body of burgesses in Rome
was divided have had theories of the most extravagant absurdity
engrafted upon them. The irrational opinion that the Roman nation
was a mongrel people finds its support in that division, and its
advocates have striven by various means to represent the three
great Italian races as elements entering into the composition of
the primitive Rome, and to transform a people which has exhibited
in language, polity, and religion, a pure and national development
such as few have equalled, into a confused aggregate of Etruscan
and Sabine, Hellenic and, forsooth! even Pelasgian fragments.
From these settlements the later Rome arose. The founding of a city
in the strict sense, such as the legend assumes, is of course to
be reckoned altogether out of the question: Rome was not built in
a day. But the serious consideration of the historian may well be
directed to the inquiry, in what way Rome can have so early attained
the prominent political position which it held in Latium--so
different from what the physical character of the locality would
have led us to anticipate. The site of Rome is less healthy and
less fertile than that of most of the old Latin towns. Neither the
vine nor the fig succeed well in the immediate environs, and there
is a want of springs yielding a good supply of water; for neither
the otherwise excellent fountain of the Camenae before the Porta
Capena, nor the Capitoline well, afterwards enclosed within the
Tullianum, furnish it in any abundance. Another disadvantage arises
from the frequency with which the river overflows its banks. Its
very slight fall renders it unable to carry off the water, which
during the rainy season descends in large quantities from the
mountains, with sufficient rapidity to the sea, and in consequence
it floods the low-lying lands and the valleys that open between the
hills, and converts them into swamps. For a settler the locality
was anything but attractive. In antiquity itself an opinion was
expressed that the first body of immigrant cultivators could scarce
have spontaneously resorted in search of a suitable settlement to
that unhealthy and unfruitful spot in a region otherwise so highly
favoured, and that it must have been necessity, or rather some
special motive, which led to the establishment of a city there.
Even the legend betrays its sense of the strangeness of the fact:
the story of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Alba under
the leadership of the sons of an Alban prince, Romulus and Remus,
is nothing but a naive attempt of primitive quasi-history to explain
the singular circumstance of the place having arisen on a site so
unfavourable, and to connect at the same time the origin of Rome
with the general metropolis of Latium. Such tales, which profess
to be historical but are merely improvised explanations of no very
ingenious character, it is the first duty of history to dismiss; but
it may perhaps be allowed to go a step further, and after weighing
the special relations of the locality to propose a positive conjecture
not regarding the way in which the place originated, but regarding
the circumstances which occasioned its rapid and surprising prosperity
and led to its occupying its peculiar position in Latium.
This cannot have been the result of mere accident. The Tiber was
the natural highway for the traffic of Latium; and its mouth, on
a coast scantily provided with harbours, became necessarily the
anchorage of seafarers. Moreover, the Tiber formed from very ancient
times the frontier defence of the Latin stock against their northern
neighbours. There was no place better fitted for an emporium of the
Latin river and sea traffic, and for a maritime frontier fortress
of Latium, than Rome. It combined the advantages of a strong position
and of immediate vicinity to the river; it commanded both banks of
the stream down to its mouth; it was so situated as to be equally
convenient for the river navigator descending the Tiber or the
Anio, and for the seafarer with vessels of so moderate a size as
those which were then used; and it afforded greater protection from
pirates than places situated immediately on the coast. That Rome
was indebted, if not for its origin, at any rate for its importance,
to these commercial and strategical advantages of its position,
there are accordingly numerous further indications, which are
of very different weight from the statements of quasi-historical
romances. Thence arose its very ancient relations with Caere, which
was to Etruria what Rome was to Latium, and accordingly became Rome's
most intimate neighbour and commercial ally. Thence arose the unusual
importance of the bridge over the Tiber, and of bridge-building
generally in the Roman commonwealth. Thence came the galley in the
city arms; thence, too, the very ancient Roman port-duties on the
exports and imports of Ostia, which were from the first levied only
on what was to be exposed for sale (-promercale-), not on what was
for the shipper's own use (-usuarium-), and which were therefore
in reality a tax upon commerce. Thence, to anticipate, the
comparatively early occurrence in Rome of coined money, and of
commercial treaties with transmarine states. In this sense, then,
certainly Rome may have been, as the legend assumes, a creation
rather than a growth, and the youngest rather than the oldest among
the Latin cities. Beyond doubt the country was already in some
degree cultivated, and the Alban range as well as various other
heights of the Campagna were occupied by strongholds, when the Latin
frontier emporium arose on the Tiber. Whether it was a resolution
of the Latin confederacy, or the clear-sighted genius of some
unknown founder, or the natural development of traffic, that called
the city of Rome into being, it is vain even to surmise.
The Palatine was the original seat of the Roman community, the oldest
and originally the only ring-wall. The urban settlement, however,
began at Rome as well as elsewhere not within, but under the
protection of, the stronghold; and the oldest settlements with
which we are acquainted, and which afterwards formed the first and
second regions in the Servian division of the city, lay in a circle
round the Palatine. These included the settlement on the declivity
of the Cermalus with the "street of the Tuscans"--a name in which
there may have been preserved a reminiscence of the commercial
intercourse between the Caerites and Romans already perhaps carried
on with vigour in the Palatine city--and the settlement on the
Velia; both of which subsequently along with the stronghold-hill
itself constituted one region in the Servian city. Further, there
were the component elements of the subsequent second region--the
suburb on the Caelian, which probably embraced only its extreme point
above the Colosseum; that on the Carinae, the spur which projects
from the Esquiline towards the Palatine; and, lastly, the valley
and outwork of the Subura, from which the whole region received
its name. These two regions jointly constituted the incipient city;
and the Suburan district of it, which extended at the base of the
stronghold, nearly from the Arch of Constantine to S. Pietro in
Vincoli, and over the valley beneath, appears to have been more
considerable and perhaps older than the settlements incorporated
by the Servian arrangement in the Palatine district, because in the
order of the regions the former takes precedence of the latter. A
remarkable memorial of the distinction between these two portions
of the city was preserved in one of the oldest sacred customs of
the later Rome, the sacrifice of the October horse yearly offered
in the -Campus Martius-: down to a late period a struggle took
place at this festival for the horse's head between the men of the
Subura and those of the Via Sacra, and according as victory lay
with the former or with the latter, the head was nailed either to
the Mamilian Tower (site unknown) in the Subura, or to the king's
palace under the Palatine. It was the two halves of the old city
that thus competed with each other on equal terms. At that time,
accordingly, the Esquiliae (which name strictly used is exclusive
of the Carinae) were in reality what they were called, the "outer
buildings" (-exquiliae-, like -inquilinus-, from -colere-) or
suburb: this became the third region in the later city division,
and it was always held in inferior consideration as compared with
the Suburan and Palatine regions. Other neighbouring heights also,
such as the Capitol and the Aventine, may probably have been occupied
by the community of the Seven Mounts; the "bridge of piles" in
particular (-pons sublicius-), thrown over the natural pier of the
island in the Tiber, must have existed even then--the pontifical
college alone is sufficient evidence of this--and the -tete de
pont- on the Etruscan bank, the height of the Janiculum, would not
be left unoccupied; but the community had not as yet brought either
within the circuit of its fortifications. The regulation which
was adhered to as a ritual rule down to the latest times, that the
bridge should be composed simply of wood without iron, manifestly
shows that in its original practical use it was to be merely a
flying bridge, which must be capable of being easily at any time
broken off or burnt. We recognize in this circumstance how insecure
for a long time and liable to interruption was the command of the
passage of the river on the part of the Roman community.
But the Palatine city was not the only one that in ancient times
existed within the circle afterwards enclosed by the Servian walls;
opposite to it, in its immediate vicinity, there lay a second city
on the Quirinal. The "old stronghold" (-Capitolium vetus-) with a
sanctuary of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and a temple of the goddess
of Fidelity in which state treaties were publicly deposited, forms
the evident counterpart of the later Capitol with its temple to
Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and with its shrine of Fides Romana
likewise destined as it were for a repository of international
law, and furnishes a sure proof that the Quirinal also was once
the centre of an independent commonwealth. The same fact may be
inferred from the double worship of Mars on the Palatine and the
Quirinal; for Mars was the type of the warrior and the oldest chief
divinity of the burgess communities of Italy. With this is connected
the further circumstance that his ministers, the two primitive
colleges of the "Leapers" (-Salii-) and of the "Wolves" (-Luperci-)
existed in the later Rome in duplicate: by the side of the Salii
of the Palatine there were also Salii of the Quirinal; by the side
of the Quinctian Luperci of the Palatine there was a Fabian guild
of Luperci, which in all probability had their sanctuary on the
Quirinal.(5)
Lastly, even the name has not been lost by which the men of the
Quirinal distinguished themselves from their Palatine neighbours.
As the Palatine city took the name of "the Seven Mounts," its
citizens called themselves the "mount-men" (-montani-), and the
term "mount," while applied to the other heights belonging to the
city, was above all associated with the Palatine; so the Quirinal
height--although not lower, but on the contrary somewhat higher,
than the former--as well as the adjacent Viminal never in the strict
use of the language received any other name than "hill" (collis).
In the ritual records, indeed, the Quirinal was not unfrequently
designated as the "hill" without further addition. In like manner
the gate leading out from this height was usually called the
"hill-gate" (-porta collina-); the priests of Mars settled there
were called those "of the hill" (-Salii collini-) in contrast to
those of the Palatium (-Salii Palatini-) and the fourth Servian
region formed out of this district was termed the hill-region
(-tribus collina-)(6) The name of Romans primarily associated with
the locality was probably appropriated by these "Hill-men" as well
as by those of the "Mounts;" and the former perhaps designated
themselves as "Romans of the Hill" (-Romani collini-). That a
diversity of race may have lain at the foundation of this distinction
between the two neighbouring cities is possible; but evidence
sufficient to warrant our pronouncing a community established on
Latin soil to be of alien lineage is, in the case of the Quirinal
community, totally wanting.(7)
Thus the site of the Roman commonwealth was still at this period
occupied by the Mount-Romans of the Palatine and the Hill-Romans
of the Quirinal as two separate communities confronting each other
and doubtless in many respects at feud, in some degree resembling
the Montigiani and the Trasteverini in modern Rome. That the
community of the Seven Mounts early attained a great preponderance
over that of the Quirinal may with certainty be inferred both from
the greater extent of its newer portions and suburbs, and from
the position of inferiority in which the former Hill-Romans were
obliged to acquiesce under the later Servian arrangement. But
even within the Palatine city there was hardly a true and complete
amalgamation of the different constituent elements of the settlement.
We have already mentioned how the Subura and the Palatine annually
contended for the horse's head; the several Mounts also, and even
the several curies (there was as yet no common hearth for the
city, but the various hearths of the curies subsisted side by side,
although in the same locality) probably felt themselves to be as
yet more separated than united; and Rome as a whole was probably
rather an aggregate of urban settlements than a single city. It
appears from many indications that the houses of the old and powerful
families were constructed somewhat after the manner of fortresses
and were rendered capable of defence--a precaution, it may be
presumed, not unnecessary. It was the magnificent structure ascribed
to king Servius Tullius that first surrounded not merely those two
cities of the Palatine and Quirinal, but also the heights of the
Capitol and the Aventine which were not comprehended within their
enclosure, with a single great ring-wall, and thereby created
the new Rome--the Rome of history. But ere this mighty work was
undertaken, the relations of Rome to the surrounding country had
beyond doubt undergone a complete revolution. As the period, during
which the husbandman guided his plough on the seven hills of Rome
just as on the other hills of Latium, and the usually unoccupied
places of refuge on particular summits alone presented the germs
of a more permanent settlement, corresponds to the earliest epoch
of the Latin stock without trace of traffic or achievement; as
thereafter the flourishing settlement on the Palatine and in the
"Seven Rings" was coincident with the occupation of the mouths of
the Tiber by the Roman community, and with the progress of the Latins
to a more stirring and freer intercourse, to an urban civilization
in Rome more especially, and perhaps also to a more consolidated
political union in the individual states as well as in the confederacy;
so the Servian wall, which was the foundation of a single great
city, was connected with the epoch at which the city of Rome was
able to contend for, and at length to achieve, the sovereignty of
the Latin league.
5. That the Quinctian Luperci had precedence in rank over the Fabian
is evident from the circumstance that the fabulists attribute the
Quinctii to Romulus, the Fabii to Remus (Ovid, Fast. ii. 373 seq.;
Vict. De Orig. 22). That the Fabii belonged to the Hill-Romans is
shown by the sacrifice of their -gens- on the Quirinal (Liv. v.
46, 52), whether that sacrifice may or may not have been connected
with the Lupercalia.
CHAPTER V
The family formed an unity. It consisted of the free man who upon
his father's death had become his own master, and the spouse whom
the priests by the ceremony of the sacred salted cake (-confarreatio-)
had solemnly wedded to share with him water and fire, with their son
and sons' sons and the lawful wives of these, and their unmarried
daughters and sons' daughters, along with all goods and substance
pertaining to any of its members. The children of daughters on
the other hand were excluded, because, if born in wedlock, they
belonged to the family of the husband; and if begotten out of
wedlock, they had no place in a family at all. To the Roman citizen
a house of his own and the blessing of children appeared the end
and essence of life. The death of the individual was not an evil,
for it was a matter of necessity; but the extinction of a household
or of a clan was injurious to the community itself, which in the
earliest times therefore opened up to the childless the means of
avoiding such a fatality by their adopting the children of others
as their own.
The Roman family from the first contained within it the conditions
of a higher culture in the moral adjustment of the mutual relations of
its members. Man alone could be head of a family. Woman did not
indeed occupy a position inferior to man in the acquiring of property
and money; on the contrary the daughter inherited an equal share
with her brother, and the mother an equal share with her children.
But woman always and necessarily belonged to the household, not
to the community; and in the household itself she necessarily held
a position of domestic subjection--the daughter to her father,
the wife to her husband,(1) the fatherless unmarried woman to her
nearest male relatives; it was by these, and not by the king, that
in case of need woman was called to account. Within the house,
however, woman was not servant but mistress. Exempted from the
tasks of corn-grinding and cooking which according to Roman ideas
belonged to the menials, the Roman housewife devoted herself in
the main to the superintendence of her maid-servants, and to the
accompanying labours of the distaff, which was to woman what the
plough was to man.(2) In like manner, the moral obligations of
parents towards their children were fully and deeply felt by the
Roman nation; and it was reckoned a heinous offence if a father
neglected or corrupted his child, or if he even squandered his
property to his child's disadvantage.
But not only was the power of the master of the house substantially
unlimited and responsible to no one on earth; it was also, as long
as he lived, unchangeable and indestructible. According to the
Greek as well as Germanic laws the grown-up son, who was practically
independent of his father, was also independent legally; but the
power of the Roman father could not be dissolved during his life
either by age or by insanity, or even by his own free will, excepting
only that the person of the holder of the power might change, for
the child might certainly pass by way of adoption into the power
of another father, and the daughter might pass by a lawful marriage
out of the hand of her father into the hand of her husband and,
leaving her own -gens- and the protection of her own god to enter
into the -gens- of her husband and the protection of his god,
became thenceforth subject to him as she had hitherto been to her
father. According to Roman law it was made easier for the slave to
obtain release from his master than for the son to obtain release
from his father; the manumission of the former was permitted at an
early period, and by simple forms; the release of the latter was
only rendered possible at a much later date, and by very circuitous
means. Indeed, if a master sold his slave and a father his son
and the purchaser released both, the slave obtained his freedom,
but the son by the release simply reverted into his father's power
as before. Thus the inexorable consistency with which the Romans
carried out their conception of the paternal and marital power
converted it into a real right of property.
So strongly was the unity of the family realized, that even the
death of the master of the house did not entirely dissolve it.
The descendants, who were rendered by that occurrence independent,
regarded themselves as still in many respects an unity; a principle
which was made use of in arranging the succession of heirs and in
many other relations, but especially in regulating the position
of the widow and unmarried daughters. As according to the older
Roman view a woman was not capable of having power either over
others or over herself, the power over her, or, as it was in this
case more mildly expressed, the "guardianship" (-tutela-) remained
with the house to which she belonged, and was now exercised in the
room of the deceased house-master by the whole of the nearest male
members of the family; ordinarily, therefore, by sons over their
mother and by brothers over their sisters. In this sense the
family, once founded, endured unchanged till the male stock of its
founder died out; only the bond of connection must of course have
become practically more lax from generation to generation, until
at length it became impossible to prove the original unity. On
this, and on this alone, rested the distinction between family and
clan, or, according to the Roman expression, between -agnati- and
-gentiles-. Both denoted the male stock; but the family embraced
only those individuals who, mounting up from generation to generation,
were able to set forth the successive steps of their descent from
a common progenitor; the clan (-gens-) on the other hand comprehended
also those who were merely able to lay claim to such descent from
a common ancestor, but could no longer point out fully the intermediate
links so as to establish the degree of their relationship. This
is very clearly expressed in the Roman names: when they speak
of "Quintus, son of Quintus, grandson of Quintus and so on,
the Quintian," the family reaches as far as the ascendants are
designated individually, and where the family terminates the clan
is introduced supplementary, indicating derivation from the common
ancestor who has bequeathed to all his descendants the name of the
"children of Quintus."
The King
As the house-master was not simply the greatest but the only power
in the house, so the king was not merely the first but the only
holder of power in the state. He might indeed form colleges of
men of skill composed of those specially conversant with the rules
of sacred or of public law, and call upon them for their advice;
he might, to facilitate his exercise of power, entrust to others
particular functions, such as the making communications to the
burgesses, the command in war, the decision of processes of minor
importance, the inquisition of crimes; he might in particular, if
he was compelled to quit the bounds of the city, leave behind him
a "city-warden" (-praefectus urbi-) with the full powers of an
-alter ego-; but all official power existing by the side of the
king's was derived from the latter, and every official held his
office by the king's appointment and during the king's pleasure. All
the officials of the earliest period, the extraordinary city-warden
as well as the "leaders of division" (-tribuni-, from -tribus-,
part) of the infantry (-milites-) and of the cavalry (-celeres-)
were merely commissioned by the king, and not magistrates in the
subsequent sense of the term. The regal power had not and could
not have any external check imposed upon it by law: the master of
the community had no judge of his acts within the community, any
more than the housefather had a judge within his household. Death
alone terminated his power. The choice of the new king lay with the
council of elders, to which in case of a vacancy the interim-kingship
(-interregnum-) passed. A formal cooperation in the election
of king pertained to the burgesses only after his nomination; -de
jure- the kingly office was based on the permanent college of the
Fathers (-patres-), which by means of the interim holder of the
power installed the new king for life. Thus "the august blessing
of the gods, under which renowned Rome was founded," was transmitted
from its first regal recipient in constant succession to those that
followed him, and the unity of the state was preserved unchanged
notwithstanding the personal change of the holders of power.
The Community
The Senate
1. This was not merely the case under the old religious marriage
(-matrimonium confarreatione-); the civil marriage also (-matrimonium
consensu-), although not in itself giving to the husband proprietary
power over his wife, opened up the way for his acquiring this
proprietary power, inasmuch as the legal ideas of "formal delivery"
(-coemptio-), and "prescription" (-usus-), were applied without
ceremony to such a marriage. Till he acquired it, and in particular
therefore during the period which elapsed before the completion of
the prescription, the wife was (just as in the later marriage by
-causae probatio-, until that took place), not -uxor-, but -pro
uxore-. Down to the period when Roman jurisprudence became a
completed system the principle maintained its ground, that the wife
who was not in her husband's power was not a married wife, but only
passed as such (-uxor tantummodo habetur-. Cicero, Top. 3, 14).
3. I. III. Clan-villages
4. Dionysius affirms (v. 25) that lameness excluded from the supreme
magistracy. That Roman citizenship was a condition for the regal
office as well as for the consulate, is so very self-evident as to
make it scarcely worth while to repudiate expressly the fictions
respecting the burgess of Cures.
5. I. III. Clan-villages
10. Among the eight ritual institutions of Numa, Dionysius (ii. 64)
after naming the Curiones and Flamines, specifies as the third the
leaders of the horsemen (--oi eigemones ton Kelerion--). According to
the Praenestine calendar a festival was celebrated at the Comitium
on the 19th March [adstantibus pon]tificibus et trib(unis) celer(um).
Valerius Antias (in Dionys. i. 13, comp. iii. 41) assigns to
the earliest Roman cavalry a leader, Celer, and three centurions;
whereas in the treatise De viris ill. i, Celer himself is termed
-centurio-. Moreover Brutus is affirmed to have been -tribunus
celerum- at the expulsion of the kings (Liv. i. 59), and according
to Dionysius (iv. 71) to have even by virtue of this office made the
proposal to banish the Tarquins. And, lastly, Pomponius (Dig. i.
2, 2, 15, 19) and Lydus in a similar way, partly perhaps borrowing
from him (De Mag. i. 14, 37), identify the -tribunus celerum- with
the Celer of Antias, the -magister equitum- of the dictator under
the republic, and the -Praefectus praetorio- of the empire.
CHAPTER VI
Under such circumstances the only wonder is that the Roman patriciate
did not disappear much more rapidly than it actually did. The fact
of its still continuing for a prolonged period a numerous community
can scarcely be accounted for by the bestowal of Roman burgess-rights
on several distinguished foreign clans, which after emigrating
from their homes or after the conquest of their cities received
the Roman franchise--for such grants appear to have occurred but
sparingly from the first, and to have become always the more rare
as the franchise increased in value. A cause of greater influence,
in all likelihood, was the introduction of the civil marriage,
by which a child begotten of patrician parents living together as
married persons, although without -confarreatio-, acquired full
burgess-rights equally with the child of a -confarreatio- marriage.
It is at least probable that the civil marriage, which already
existed in Rome before the Twelve Tables but was certainly not an
original institution, was introduced for the purpose of preventing
the disappearance of the patriciate.(4) To this connection
belong also the measures which were already in the earliest times
adopted with a view to maintain a numerous posterity in the several
households.(5)
Plebs
Cavalry
Levy-Districts
Census
In this way, while hitherto there had been distinguished only two
classes of members of the community, burgesses and clients, there
were now established those three political classes, which exercised
a dominant influence over the constitutional law of Rome for many
centuries.
When and how this new military organization of the Roman community
came into existence, can only be conjectured. It presupposes the
existence of the four regions; in other words, the Servian wall must
have been erected before the reform took place. But the territory
of the city must also have considerably exceeded its original limits,
when it could furnish 8000 holders of full hides and as many who
held lesser portions, or sons of such holders. We are not acquainted
with the superficial extent of the normal Roman farm; but it is
not possible to estimate it as under twenty -jugera-.(12) If we
reckon as a minimum 10,000 full hides, this would imply a superficies
of 190 square miles of arable land; and on this calculation, if we
make a very moderate allowance for pasture, the space occupied by
houses, and ground not capable of culture, the territory, at the
period when this reform was carried out, must have had at least
an extent of 420 square miles, probably an extent still more
considerable. If we follow tradition, we must assume a number of
84,000 burgesses who were freeholders and capable of bearing arms;
for such, we are told, were the numbers ascertained by Servius at
the first census. A glance at the map, however, shows that this
number must be fabulous; it is not even a genuine tradition, but
a conjectural calculation, by which the 16,800 capable of bearing
arms who constituted the normal strength of the infantry appeared
to yield, on an average of five persons to each family, the number
of 84,000 burgesses, and this number was confounded with that
of those capable of bearing arms. But even according to the more
moderate estimates laid down above, with a territory of some 16,000
hides containing a population of nearly 20,000 capable of bearing
arms and at least three times that number of women, children, and
old men, persons who had no land, and slaves, it is necessary to
assume not merely that the region between the Tiber and Anio had
been acquired, but that the Alban territory had also been conquered,
before the Servian constitution was established; a result with
which tradition agrees. What were the numerical proportions of
patricians and plebeians originally in the army, cannot be ascertained.
Upon the whole it is plain that this Servian institution did not
originate in a conflict between the orders. On the contrary, it
bears the stamp of a reforming legislator like the constitutions of
Lycurgus, Solon, and Zaleucus; and it has evidently been produced
under Greek influence. Particular analogies may be deceptive, such
as the coincidence noticed by the ancients that in Corinth also
widows and orphans were charged with the provision of horses for
the cavalry; but the adoption of the armour and arrangements of
the Greek hoplite system was certainly no accidental coincidence.
Now if we consider the fact that it was in the second century of
the city that the Greek states in Lower Italy advanced from the pure
clan-constitution to a modified one, which placed the preponderance
in the hands of the landholders, we shall recognize in that movement
the impulse which called forth in Rome the Servian reform--a change
of constitution resting in the main on the same fundamental idea,
and only directed into a somewhat different course by the strictly
monarchical form of the Roman state.(13)
7. For the same reason, when the levy was enlarged after
the admission of the Hill-Romans, the equites were doubled, while
in the infantry force instead of the single "gathering" (-legio-)
two legions were called out (vi. Amalgamation of the Palatine and
Quirinal Cities).
13. The analogy also between the so-called Servian constitution and
the treatment of the Attic --metoeci-- deserves to be particularly
noticed. Athens, like Rome, opened her gates at a comparatively
early period to the --metoeci--, and afterwards summoned them also
to share the burdens of the state. We cannot suppose that any
direct connection existed in this instance between Athens and Rome;
but the coincidence serves all the more distinctly to show how the
same causes--urban centralization and urban development--everywhere
and of necessity produce similar effects.
CHAPTER VII
The Latin communities situated on the upper Tiber and between the
Tiber and the Anio-Antemnae, Crustumerium, Ficulnea, Medullia,
Caenina, Corniculum, Cameria, Collatia,--were those which pressed
most closely and sorely on Rome, and they appear to have forfeited
their independence in very early times to the arms of the Romans.
The only community that subsequently appears as independent in this
district was Nomentum; which perhaps saved its freedom by alliance
with Rome. The possession of Fidenae, the -tete de pont- of the
Etruscans on the left bank of the Tiber, was contested between the
Latins and the Etruscans--in other words, between the Romans and
Veientes--with varying results. The struggle with Gabii, which
held the plain between the Anio and the Alban hills, was for a
long period equally balanced: down to late times the Gabine dress
was deemed synonymous with that of war, and Gabine ground the
prototype of hostile soil.(2) By these conquests the Roman territory
was probably extended to about 190 square miles. Another very
early achievement of the Roman arms was preserved, although in a
legendary dress, in the memory of posterity with greater vividness
than those obsolete struggles: Alba, the ancient sacred metropolis
of Latium, was conquered and destroyed by Roman troops. How the
collision arose, and how it was decided, tradition does not tell:
the battle of the three Roman with the three Alban brothers born at
one birth is nothing but a personification of the struggle between
two powerful and closely related cantons, of which the Roman at
least was triune. We know nothing at all beyond the naked fact of
the subjugation and destruction of Alba by Rome.(3)
The form of the Roman hegemony over Latium was, in general, that
of an alliance on equal terms between the Roman community on the
one hand and the Latin confederacy on the other, establishing a
perpetual peace throughout the whole domain and a perpetual league
for offence and defence. "There shall be peace between the Romans
and all communities of the Latins, as long as heaven and earth
endure; they shall not wage war with each other, nor call enemies
into the land, nor grant passage to enemies: help shall be rendered
by all in concert to any community assailed, and whatever is won
in joint warfare shall be equally distributed." The stipulated
equality of rights in trade and exchange, in commercial credit
and in inheritance, tended, by the manifold relations of business
intercourse to which it led, still further to interweave the
interests of communities already connected by the ties of similar
language and manners, and in this way produced an effect somewhat
similar to that of the abolition of customs-restrictions in our own
day. Each community certainly retained in form its own law: down
to the time of the Social war Latin law was not necessarily identical
with Roman: we find, for example, that the enforcing of betrothal
by action at law, which was abolished at an early period in Rome,
continued to subsist in the Latin communities. But the simple and
purely national development of Latin law, and the endeavour to
maintain as far as possible uniformity of rights, led at length
to the result, that the law of private relations was in matter and
form substantially the same throughout all Latium. This uniformity
of rights comes most distinctly into view in the rules laid down
regarding the loss and recovery of freedom on the part of the
individual burgess. According to an ancient and venerable maxim
of law among the Latin stock no burgess could become a slave
in the state wherein he had been free, or suffer the loss of his
burgess-rights while he remained within it: if he was to be punished
with the loss of freedom and of burgess-rights (which was the same
thing), it was necessary that he should be expelled from the state
and should enter on the condition of slavery among strangers. This
maxim of law was now extended to the whole territory of the league;
no member of any of the federal states might live as a slave within
the bounds of the league. Applications of this principle are seen
in the enactment embodied in the Twelve Tables, that the insolvent
debtor, in the event of his creditor wishing to sell him, must be
sold beyond the boundary of the Tiber, in other words, beyond the
territory of the league; and in the clause of the second treaty
between Rome and Carthage, that an ally of Rome who might be taken
prisoner by the Carthaginians should be free so soon as he entered
a Roman seaport. Although there did not probably subsist a general
intercommunion of marriage within the league, yet, as has been
already remarked(8) intermarriage between the different communities
frequently occurred. Each Latin could primarily exercise political
rights only where he was enrolled as a burgess; but on the other
hand it was implied in an equality of private rights, that any Latin
could take up his abode in any place within the Latin bounds; or,
to use the phraseology of the present day, there existed, side by
side with the special burgess-rights of the individual communities,
a general right of settlement co-extensive with the confederacy;
and, after the plebeian was acknowledged in Rome as a burgess,
this right became converted as regards Rome into full freedom of
settlement. It is easy to understand how this should have turned
materially to the advantage of the capital, which alone in Latium
offered the means of urban intercourse, urban acquisition, and urban
enjoyments; and how the number of --metoeci-- in Rome should have
increased with remarkable rapidity, after the Latin land came to
live in perpetual peace with Rome.
The work, however, was not complete so long as the ground, protected
by so laborious exertions from outward foes, was not also reclaimed
from the dominion of the water, which permanently occupied the
valley between the Palatine and the Capitol, so that there was
perhaps even a ferry there, and which converted the valleys between
the Capitol and the Velia and between the Palatine and the Aventine
into marshes. The subterranean drains still existing at the
present day, composed of magnificent square blocks, which excited
the astonishment of posterity as a marvellous work of regal Rome,
must rather be reckoned to belong to the following epoch, for
travertine is the material employed and we have many accounts of
new structures of the kind in the times of the republic; but the
scheme itself belongs beyond doubt to the regal period, although
presumably to a later epoch than the designing of the Servian wall
and the Capitoline stronghold. The spots thus drained or dried
supplied large open spaces such as were needed by the new enlarged
city. The assembling-place of the community, which had hitherto been
the Area Capitolina at the stronghold itself, was now transferred to
the flat space, where the ground fell from the stronghold towards
the city (-comitium-), and which stretched thence between the
Palatine and the Carinae, in the direction of the Velia. At that
side of the -comitium- which adjoined the stronghold, and upon the
stronghold-wall which arose above the -comitium- in the fashion
of a balcony, the members of the senate and the guests of the city
had the place of honour assigned to them on occasion of festivals
and assemblies of the people; and at the place of assembly itself
was erected the senate-house, which afterwards bore the name of the
Curia Hostilia. The platform for the judgment-seat (-tribunal-),
and the stage whence the burgesses were addressed (the later rostra),
were likewise erected on the -comitium- itself. Its prolongation in
the direction of the Velia became the new market (-forum Romanum-).
At the end of the latter, beneath the Palatine, rose the
community-house, which included the official dwelling of the king
(-regia-) and the common hearth of the city, the rotunda forming
the temple of Vesta; at no great distance, on the south side of the
Forum, there was erected a second round building connected with the
former, the store-room of the community or temple of the Penates,
which still stands at the present day as the porch of the church
Santi Cosma e Damiano. It is a feature significant of the new city
now united in a way very different from the settlement of the "seven
mounts," that, over and above the hearths of the thirty curies
which the Palatine Rome had been content with associating in one
building, the Servian Rome presented this general and single hearth
for the city at large.(15) Along the two longer sides of the Forum
butchers' shops and other traders' stalls were arranged. In the
valley between the Palatine and Aventine a "ring" was staked off
for races; this became the Circus. The cattle-market was laid out
immediately adjoining the river, and this soon became one of the
most densely peopled quarters of Rome. Temples and sanctuaries
arose on all the summits, above all the federal sanctuary of Diana on
the Aventine,(16) and on the summit of the stronghold the far-seen
temple of Father Diovis, who had given to his people all this glory,
and who now, when the Romans were triumphing over the surrounding
nations, triumphed along with them over the subject gods of the
vanquished.
12. For the chief thoroughfare, the -Via Sacra-, led from that
quarter to the stronghold; and the bending in towards the gate may
still be clearly recognized in the turn which this makes to the
left at the arch of Severus. The gate itself must have disappeared
under the huge structures which were raised in after ages on the
Clivus. The so-called gate at the steepest part of the Capitoline
Mount, which is known by the name of Janualis or Saturnia, or the
"open," and which had to stand always open in times of war, evidently
had merely a religious significance, and never was a real gate.
13. Four such guilds are mentioned (1) the -Capitolini- (Cicero,
ad Q. fr. ii. 5, 2), with -magistri- of their own (Henzen, 6010,
6011), and annual games (Liv. v. 50; comp. Corp. Inscr. Lat. i. n.
805); (2) the -Mercuriales- (Liv. ii. 27; Cicero, l. c.; Preller,
Myth. p. 597) likewise with -magistri- (Henzen, 6010), the guild
from the valley of the Circus, where the temple of Mercury stood;
(3) the -pagani Aventinenses- likewise with -magistri- (Henzen,
6010); and (4) the -pagani pagi Ianiculensis- likewise with -magistri-
(C. I. L. i. n. 801, 802). It is certainly not accidental that
these four guilds, the only ones of the sort that occur in Rome,
belong to the very two hills excluded from the four local tribes
but enclosed by the Servian wall, the Capitol and the Aventine, and
the Janiculum belonging to the same fortification; and connected
with this is the further fact that the expression -montani paganive-
is employed as a designation of the whole inhabitants in connection
with the city (comp. besides the well-known passage, Cic. de Domo,
28, 74, especially the law as to the city aqueducts in Festus, v.
sifus, p. 340; [-mon]tani paganive si[fis aquam dividunto-]). The
-montani-, properly the inhabitants of the three regions of the
Palatine town (iv. The Hill-Romans On the Quirinal), appear to be
here put -a potiori- for the whole population of the four regions
of the city proper. The -pagani- are, undoubtedly, the residents
of the Aventine and Janiculum not included in the tribes, and the
analogous -collegia- of the Capitol and the Circus valley.
15. Both the situation of the two temples, and the express testimony
of Dionysius, ii. 65, that the temple of Vesta lay outside of the
Roma quadrata, prove that these structures were connected with the
foundation not of the Palatine, but of the second (Servian) city.
Posterity reckoned this -regia- with the temple of Vesta as a scheme
of Numa; but the cause which gave rise to that hypothesis is too
manifest to allow of our attaching any weight to it.
CHAPTER VIII
Umbro-Sabellian Migration
Samnites
The chief branch, however, of the Umbrian stock threw itself eastward
from Sabina into the mountains of the Abruzzi, and the adjacent
hill-country to the south of them. Here, as on the west coast,
they occupied the mountainous districts, whose thinly scattered
population gave way before the immigrants or submitted to their
yoke; while in the plain along the Apulian coast the ancient native
population, the Iapygians, upon the whole maintained their ground,
although involved in constant feuds, especially on the northern
frontier about Luceria and Arpi. When these migrations took place,
cannot of course be determined; but it was presumably about the
time when kings ruled in Rome. Tradition reports that the Sabines,
pressed by the Umbrians, vowed a -ver sacrum-, that is, swore
that they would give up and send beyond their bounds the sons and
daughters born in the year of war, so soon as these should reach
maturity, that the gods might at their pleasure destroy them
or bestow upon them new abodes in other lands. One band was led
by the ox of Mars; these were the Safini or Samnites, who in the
first instance established themselves on the mountains adjoining
the river Sagrus, and at a later period proceeded to occupy the
beautiful plain on the east of the Matese chain, near the sources
of the Tifernus. Both in their old and in their new territory
they named their place of public assembly--which in the one case
was situated near Agnone, in the other near Bojano--from the ox
which led them Bovianum. A second band was led by the woodpecker
of Mars; these were the Picentes, "the woodpecker-people," who
took possession of what is now the March of Ancona. A third band
was led by the wolf (-hirpus-) into the region of Beneventum;
these were the Hirpini. In a similar manner the other small tribes
branched off from the common stock--the Praetuttii near Teramo; the
Vestini on the Gran Sasso; the Marrucini near Chieti; the Frentani
on the frontier of Apulia; the Paeligni on the Majella mountains;
and lastly the Marsi on the Fucine lake, coming in contact with
the Volscians and Latins. All of these tribes retained, as these
legends clearly show, a vivid sense of their relationship and of
their having come forth from the Sabine land. While the Umbrians
succumbed in the unequal struggle and the western offshoots of the
same stock became amalgamated with the Latin or Hellenic population,
the Sabellian tribes prospered in the seclusion of their distant
mountain land, equally remote from collision with the Etruscans,
the Latins, and the Greeks. There was little or no development
of an urban life amongst them; their geographical position almost
wholly precluded them from engaging in commercial intercourse, and
the mountain-tops and strongholds sufficed for the necessities of
defence, while the husbandmen continued to dwell in open hamlets
or wherever each found the well-spring and the forest or pasture
that he desired. In such circumstances their constitution remained
stationary; like the similarly situated Arcadians in Greece, their
communities never became incorporated into a single state; at the
utmost they only formed confederacies more or less loosely connected.
In the Abruzzi especially, the strict seclusion of the mountain
valleys seems to have debarred the several cantons from intercourse
either with each other or with the outer world. They maintained but
little connection with each other and continued to live in complete
isolation from the rest of Italy; and in consequence, notwithstanding
the bravery of their inhabitants, they exercised less influence
than any other portion of the Italian nation on the development of
the history of the peninsula.
On the other hand the Samnite people decidedly exhibited the highest
political development among the eastern Italian stock, as the Latin
nation did among the western. From an early period, perhaps from
its first immigration, a comparatively strong political bond held
together the Samnite nation, and gave to it the strength which
subsequently enabled it to contend with Rome on equal terms for the
first place in Italy. We are as ignorant of the time and manner of
the formation of the bond, as we are of its federal constitution;
but it is clear that in Samnium no single community was preponderant,
and still less was there any town to serve as a central rallying
point and bond of union for the Samnite stock, such as Rome was
for the Latins. The strength of the land lay in its -communes-
of husbandmen, and authority was vested in the assembly formed of
their representatives; it was this assembly which in case of need
nominated a federal commander-in-chief. In consequence of its
constitution the policy of this confederacy was not aggressive like
the Roman, but was limited to the defence of its own bounds; only
where the state forms a unity is power so concentrated and passion
so strong, that the extension of territory can be systematically
pursued. Accordingly the whole history of the two nations is
prefigured in their diametrically opposite systems of colonization.
Whatever the Romans gained, was a gain to the state: the conquests
of the Samnites were achieved by bands of volunteers who went
forth in search of plunder and, whether they prospered or were
unfortunate, were left to their own resources by their native home.
The conquests, however, which the Samnites made on the coasts of
the Tyrrhenian and Ionic seas, belong to a later age; during the
regal period in Rome they seem to have been only gaining possession
of the settlements in which we afterwards find them. As a single
incident in the series of movements among the neighbouring peoples
caused by this Samnite settlement may be mentioned the surprise of
Cumae by Tyrrhenians from the Upper Sea, Umbrians, and Daunians in
the year 230. If we may give credit to the accounts of the matter
which present certainly a considerable colouring of romance, it
would appear that in this instance, as was often the case in such
expeditions, the intruders and those whom they supplanted combined
to form one army, the Etruscans joining with their Umbrian enemies,
and these again joined by the Iapygians whom the Umbrian settlers
had driven towards the south. Nevertheless the undertaking proved
a failure: on this occasion at least the Hellenic superiority in
the art of war, and the bravery of the tyrant Aristodemus, succeeded
in repelling the barbarian assault on the beautiful seaport.
CHAPTER IX
The Etruscans
Etruscan Nationality
But, while the Etruscans differed thus widely from the Graeco-Italian
family of languages, no one has yet succeeded in connecting them
with any other known race. All sorts of dialects have been examined
with a view to discover affinity with the Etruscan, sometimes by simple
interrogation, sometimes by torture, but all without exception in
vain. The geographical position of the Basque nation would naturally
suggest it for comparison; but even in the Basque language no
analogies of a decisive character have been brought forward. As
little do the scanty remains of the Ligurian language which have
reached our time, consisting of local and personal names, indicate
any connection with the Tuscans. Even the extinct nation which has
constructed those enigmatical sepulchral towers, called -Nuraghe-,
by thousands in the islands of the Tuscan Sea, especially in
Sardinia, cannot well be connected with the Etruscans, for not a
single structure of the same character is to be met with in Etruscan
territory. The utmost we can say is that several traces, that seem
tolerably trustworthy, point to the conclusion that the Etruscans
may be on the whole numbered with the Indo-Germans. Thus -mi- in the
beginning of many of the older inscriptions is certainly --emi--,
--eimi--, and the genitive form of consonantal stems veneruf -rafuvuf-is
exactly reproduced in old Latin, corresponding to the old Sanscrit
termination -as. In like manner the name of the Etruscan Zeus,
-Tina-or -Tinia-, is probably connected with the Sanscrit -dina-,
meaning day, as --Zan-- is connected with the synonymous -diwan-.
But, even granting this, the Etruscan people appears withal scarcely
less isolated "The Etruscans," Dionysius said long ago, "are like
no other nation in language and manners;" and we have nothing to
add to his statement.
Etruria
From the time at which the river Tiber became the line of demarcation
between Etruria on the one side and Umbria and Latium on the other,
peaceful relations probably upon the whole prevailed in that quarter,
and no essential change seems to have taken place in the boundary
line, at least so far as concerned the Latin frontier. Vividly
as the Romans were impressed by the feeling that the Etruscan was
a foreigner, while the Latin was their countryman, they yet seem
to have stood in much less fear of attack or of danger from the
right bank of the river than, for example, from their kinsmen in
Gabii and Alba; and this was natural, for they were protected in
that direction not merely by the broad stream which formed a natural
boundary, but also by the circumstance, so momentous in its bearing
on the mercantile and political development of Rome, that none of
the more powerful Etruscan towns lay immediately on the river, as
did Rome on the Latin bank. The Veientes were the nearest to the
Tiber, and it was with them that Rome and Latium came most frequently
into serious conflict, especially for the possession of Fidenae,
which served the Veientes as a sort of -tete de pont- on the left
bank just as the Janiculum served the Romans on the right, and
which was sometimes in the hands of the Latins, sometimes in those
of the Etruscans. The relations of Rome with the somewhat more
distant Caere were on the whole far more peaceful and friendly than
those which we usually find subsisting between neighbours in early
times. There are doubtless vague legends, reaching back to times
of distant antiquity, about conflicts between Latium and Caere;
Mezentius the king of Caere, for instance, is asserted to have
obtained great victories over the Latins, and to have imposed upon
them a wine-tax; but evidence much more definite than that which
attests a former state of feud is supplied by tradition as to
an especially close connection between the two ancient centres of
commercial and maritime intercourse in Latium and Etruria. Sure
traces of any advance of the Etruscans beyond the Tiber, by land,
are altogether wanting. It is true that Etruscans are named
in the first ranks of the great barbarian host, which Aristodemus
annihilated in 230 under the walls of Cumae;(7) but, even if
we regard this account as deserving credit in all its details, it
only shows that the Etruscans had taken part in a great plundering
expedition. It is far more important to observe that south of the
Tiber no Etruscan settlement can be pointed out as having owed its
origin to founders who came by land; and that no indication whatever
is discernible of any serious pressure by the Etruscans upon the
Latin nation. The possession of the Janiculum and of both banks of
the mouth of the Tiber remained, so far as we can see, undisputed
in the hands of the Romans. As to the migrations of bodies of
Etruscans to Rome, we find an isolated statement drawn from Tuscan
annals, that a Tuscan band, led by Caelius Vivenna of Volsinii and
after his death by his faithful companion Mastarna, was conducted
by the latter to Rome. This may be trustworthy, although the
derivation of the name of the Caelian Mount from this Caelius is
evidently a philological invention, and even the addition that this
Mastarna became king in Rome under the name of Servius Tullius is
certainly nothing but an improbable conjecture of the archaeologists
who busied themselves with legendary parallels. The name of the
"Tuscan quarter" at the foot of the Palatine(8) points further to
Etruscan settlements in Rome.
The Tarquins
It can hardly, moreover, be doubted that the last regal family which
ruled over Rome, that of the Tarquins, was of Etruscan origin,
whether it belonged to Tarquinii, as the legend asserts, or
to Caere, where the family tomb of the Tarchnas has recently been
discovered. The female name Tanaquil or Tanchvil interwoven with
the legend, while it is not Latin, is common in Etruria. But
the traditional story--according to which Tarquin was the son of
a Greek who had migrated from Corinth to Tarquinii, and came to
settle in Rome as a --metoikos-- is neither history nor legend,
and the historical chain of events is manifestly in this instance
not confused merely, but completely torn asunder. If anything more
can be deduced from this tradition beyond the bare and at bottom
indifferent fact that at last a family of Tuscan descent swayed the
regal sceptre in Rome, it can only be held as implying that this
dominion of a man of Tuscan origin ought not to be viewed either
as a dominion of the Tuscans or of any one Tuscan community over
Rome, or conversely as the dominion of Rome over southern Etruria.
There is, in fact, no sufficient ground either for the one hypothesis
or for the other. The history of the Tarquins had its arena in
Latium, not in Etruria; and Etruria, so far as we can see, during
the whole regal period exercised no influence of any essential
moment on either the language or customs of Rome, and did not at
all interrupt the regular development of the Roman state or of the
Latin league.
The Tuscan constitution, like the Greek and Latin, was based on the
gradual transition of the community to an urban life. The early
direction of the national energies towards navigation, trade, and
manufactures appears to have called into existence urban commonwealths,
in the strict sense of the term, earlier in Etruria than elsewhere
in Italy. Caere is the first of all the Italian towns that is
mentioned in Greek records. On the other hand we find that the
Etruscans had on the whole less of the ability and the disposition
for war than the Romans and Sabellians: the un-Italian custom of
employing mercenaries for fighting occurs among the Etruscans at
a very early period. The oldest constitution of the communities
must in its general outlines have resembled that of Rome. Kings or
Lucumones ruled, possessing similar insignia and probably therefore
a similar plenitude of power with the Roman kings. A strict line
of demarcation separated the nobles from the common people. The
resemblance in the clan-organization is attested by the analogy
of the system of names; only, among the Etruscans, descent on the
mother's side received much more consideration than in Roman law.
The constitution of their league appears to have been very lax. It
did not embrace the whole nation; the northern and the Campanian
Etruscans were associated in confederacies of their own, just
in the same way as the communities of Etruria proper. Each of
these leagues consisted of twelve communities, which recognized a
metropolis, especially for purposes of worship, and a federal head
or rather a high priest, but appear to have been substantially equal
in respect of rights; while some of them at least were so powerful
that neither could a hegemony establish itself, nor could the
central authority attain consolidation. In Etruria proper Volsinii
was the metropolis; of the rest of its twelve towns we know by
trustworthy tradition only Perusia, Vetulonium, Volci, and Tarquinii.
It was, however, quite as unusual for the Etruscans really to act
in concert, as it was for the Latin confederacy to do otherwise.
Wars were ordinarily carried on by a single community, which
endeavoured to interest in its cause such of its neighbours as
it could; and when an exceptional case occurred in which war was
resolved on by the league, individual towns very frequently kept
aloof from it. The Etruscan confederations appear to have been
from the first--still more than the other Italian leagues formed
on a similar basis of national affinity--deficient in a firm and
paramount central authority.
umaramlisia(--"id:theta")ipurenaie(--"id:theta")eeraisieepanamine
(--"id:theta")unastavhelefu- or -mi ramu(--"id:theta")af kaiufinaia-.
3. We may form some idea of the sound which the language now had
from the commencement of the great inscription of Perusia; -eulat
tanna laresul ameva(--"id:chi")r lautn vel(--"id:theta")inase
stlaafunas slele(--"id:theta")caru-.
CHAPTER X
Phoenicians in Italy
The dates of the earlier voyages and settlements will probably always
remain enveloped in darkness. We may still, however, distinctly
recognize a certain order of sequence. In the oldest Greek document,
which belongs, like the earliest intercourse with the west, to
the lonians of Asia Minor--the Homeric poems--the horizon scarcely
extends beyond the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. Sailors
driven by storms into the western sea might have brought to Asia
Minor accounts of the existence of a western land and possibly
also of its whirlpools and island-mountains vomiting fire: but in
the age of the Homeric poetry there was an utter want of trustworthy
information respecting Sicily and Italy, even in that Greek land
which was the earliest to enter into intercourse with the west;
and the story-tellers and poets of the east could without fear of
contradiction fill the vacant realms of the west, as those of the
west in their turn filled the fabulous east, with their castles in
the air. In the poems of Hesiod the outlines of Italy and Sicily
appear better defined; there is some acquaintance with the native
names of tribes, mountains, and cities in both countries; but Italy
is still regarded as a group of islands. On the other hand, in
all the literature subsequent to Hesiod, Sicily and even the whole
coast of Italy appear as known, at least in a general sense, to the
Hellenes. The order of succession of the Greek settlements may in
like manner be ascertained with some degree of precision. Thucydides
evidently regarded Cumae as the earliest settlement of note in the
west; and certainly he was not mistaken. It is true that many a
landing-place lay nearer at hand for the Greek mariner, but none
were so well protected from storms and from barbarians as the island
of Ischia, upon which the town was originally situated; and that
such were the prevailing considerations that led to this settlement,
is evident from the very position which was subsequently selected
for it on the mainland--the steep but well-protected cliff, which
still bears to the present day the venerable name of the Anatolian
mother-city. Nowhere in Italy, accordingly, were the scenes of
the legends of Asia Minor so vividly and tenaciously localized as
in the district of Cumae, where the earliest voyagers to the west,
full of those legends of western wonders, first stepped upon the
fabled land and left the traces of that world of story, which they
believed that they were treading, in the rocks of the Sirens and
the lake of Avernus leading to the lower world. On the supposition,
moreover, that it was in Cumae that the Greeks first became the
neighbours of the Italians, it is easy to explain why the name
of that Italian stock which was settled immediately around Cumae,
the name of Opicans, came to be employed by them for centuries
afterwards to designate the Italians collectively. There is a
further credible tradition, that a considerable interval elapsed
between the settlement at Cumae and the main Hellenic immigration
into Lower Italy and Sicily, and that in this immigration Ionians
from Chalcis and from Naxos took the lead. Naxos in Sicily is said
to have been the oldest of all the Greek towns founded by strict
colonization in Italy or Sicily; the Achaean and Dorian colonizations
followed, but not until a later period.
Tarentum
While the most easterly of the Greek settlements in Italy thus rapidly
rose into splendour, those which lay furthest to the north, in the
neighbourhood of Vesuvius, attained a more moderate prosperity.
There the Cumaeans had crossed from the fertile island of Aenaria
(Ischia) to the mainland, and had built a second home on a hill
close by the sea, from whence they founded the seaport of Dicaearchia
(afterwards Puteoli) and, moreover, the "new city" Neapolis. They
lived, like the Chalcidian cities generally in Italy and Sicily,
in conformity with the laws which Charondas of Catana (about 100)
had established, under a constitution democratic but modified by
a high census, which placed the power in the hands of a council
of members selected from the wealthiest men--a constitution which
proved lasting and kept these cities free, upon the whole, from
the tyranny alike of usurpers and of the mob. We know little as to
the external relations of these Campanian Greeks. They remained,
whether from necessity or from choice, confined to a district of
even narrower limits than the Tarentines; and issuing from it not
for purposes of conquest and oppression, but for the holding of
peaceful commercial intercourse with the natives, they created the
means of a prosperous existence for themselves, and at the same time
took the foremost place among the missionaries of Greek civilization
in Italy.
While on the one side of the straits of Rhegium the whole southern
coast of the mainland and its western coast as far as Vesuvius,
and on the other the larger eastern half of the island of Sicily,
were Greek territory, the west coast of Italy northward of Vesuvius
and the whole of the east coast were in a position essentially
different. No Greek settlements arose on the Italian seaboard of
the Adriatic; and with this we may evidently connect the comparatively
small number and subordinate importance of the Greek colonies
planted on the opposite Illyrian shore and on the numerous adjacent
islands. Two considerable mercantile towns, Epidamnus or Dyrrachium
(now Durazzo, 127), and Apollonia (near Avlona, about 167), were
founded upon the portion of this coast nearest to Greece during
the regal period of Rome; but no old Greek colony can be pointed
out further to the north, with the exception perhaps of the
insignificant settlement at Black Corcyra (Curzola, about 174?). No
adequate explanation has yet been given why the Greek colonization
developed itself in this direction to so meagre an extent. Nature
herself appeared to direct the Hellenes thither, and in fact from
the earliest times there existed a regular traffic to that region
from Corinth and still more from the settlement at Corcyra (Corfu)
founded not long after Rome (about 44); a traffic, which had as its
emporia on the Italian coast the towns of Spina and Atria, situated
at the mouth of the Po. The storms of the Adriatic, the inhospitable
character at least of the Illyrian coasts, and the barbarism of
the natives are manifestly not in themselves sufficient to explain
this fact. But it was a circumstance fraught with the most momentous
consequences for Italy, that the elements of civilization which
came from the east did not exert their influence on its eastern
provinces directly, but reached them only through the medium of those
that lay to the west. The Adriatic commerce carried on by Corinth
and Corcyra was shared by the most easterly mercantile city of
Magna Graecia, the Doric Tarentum, which by the possession of Hydrus
(Otranto) had the command, on the Italian side, of the entrance of
the Adriatic. Since, with the exception of the ports at the mouth
of the Po, there were in those times no emporia worthy of mention
along the whole east coast--the rise of Ancona belongs to a far
later period, and later still the rise of Brundisium--it may well
be conceived that the mariners of Epidamnus and Apollonia frequently
discharged their cargoes at Tarentum. The Tarentines had also much
intercourse with Apulia by land; all the Greek civilization to be
met with in the south-east of Italy owed its existence to them.
That civilization, however, was during the present period only in
its infancy; it was not until a later epoch that the Hellenism of
Apulia was developed.
If, as was undoubtedly the case, the foreigners, ever in those times
intent on piracy and plunder as well as trade, did not fail, when
opportunity offered, to levy contributions on the natives and to
carry them off as slaves, the natives on their part exercised the
right of retaliation; and that the Latins and Tyrrhenes retaliated
with greater energy and better fortune than their neighbours in
the south of Italy, is attested not merely by the legends to that
effect, but by the actual results. In these regions the Italians
succeeded in resisting the foreigners and in retaining, or at any
rate soon resuming, the mastery not merely of their own mercantile
cities and mercantile ports, but also of their own sea. The same
Hellenic invasion which crushed and denationalized the races of
the south of Italy, directed the energies of the peoples of Central
Italy--very much indeed against the will of their instructors--towards
navigation and the founding of towns. It must have been in this
quarter that the Italians first exchanged the raft and the boat for
the oared galley of the Phoenicians and Greeks. Here too we first
encounter great mercantile cities, particularly Caere in southern
Etruria and Rome on the Tiber, which, if we may judge from their
Italian names as well as from their being situated at some distance
from the sea, were--like the exactly similar commercial towns at
the mouth of the Po, Spina and Atria, and Ariminum further to the
south--certainly not Greek, but Italian foundations. It is not
in our power, as may easily be supposed, to exhibit the historical
course of this earliest reaction of Italian nationality against
foreign aggression; but we can still recognize the fact, which was
of the greatest importance as bearing upon the further development
of Italy, that this reaction took a different course in Latium and
in southern Etruria from that which it exhibited in the properly
Tuscan and adjoining provinces.
Etruscan Commerce
The Etruscans however by no means confined themselves to robbery
and pillage. The peaceful intercourse which they held with Greek
towns is attested by the gold and silver coins which, at least from
the year 200, were struck by the Etruscan cities, and in particular
by Populonia, after a Greek model and a Greek standard. The
circumstance, moreover, that these coins are modelled not upon
those of Magna Graecia, but rather upon those of Attica and even
Asia Minor, is perhaps an indication of the hostile attitude in
which the Etruscans stood towards the Italian Greeks. For commerce
they in fact enjoyed the most favourable position, far more
advantageous than that of the inhabitants of Latium. Inhabiting
the country from sea to sea, they commanded the great Italian free
ports on the western waters, the mouths of the Po and the Venice
of that time on the eastern sea, and the land route which from
ancient times led from Pisa on the Tyrrhene Sea to Spina on the
Adriatic, while in the south of Italy they commanded the rich plains
of Capua and Nola. They were the holders of the most important
Italian articles of export, the iron of Aethalia, the copper
of Volaterrae and Campania, the silver of Populonia, and even the
amber which was brought to them from the Baltic.(6) Under the
protection of their piracy, which constituted as it were a rude
navigation act, their own commerce could not fail to flourish.
It need not surprise us to find Etruscan and Milesian merchants
competing in the market of Sybaris, nor need we be astonished to
learn that the combination of privateering and commerce on a great
scale generated the unbounded and senseless luxury, in which the
vigour of Etruria early wasted away.
7. I. X. Phoenicians in Italy
9. The name -Afri-, already current in the days of Ennius and Cato
(comp. -Scipio Africanus-), is certainly not Greek, and is most
probably cognate with that of the Hebrews.
10. The adjective -Sarranus- was from early times applied by the
Romans to the Tyrian purple and the Tyrian flute; and -Sarranus-was
in use also as a surname, at least from the time of the war with
Hannibal. -Sarra-, which occurs in Ennius and Plautus as the name
of the city, was perhaps formed from -Sarranus-, not directly from
the native name -Sor-. The Greek form, -Tyrus-, -Tyrius-, seems
not to occur in any Roman author anterior to Afranius (ap. Fest.
p. 355 M.). Compare Movers, Phon. ii. x, 174.
CHAPTER XI
The laws of most of the Italian stocks are lost in oblivion. Some
information regarding the law of the Latin land alone has survived
in Roman tradition.
Jurisdiction
Crimes
The king inflicted at his discretion fines payable to the state for
trespasses against order and for police offences; they consisted
in a definite number (hence the name -multa-) of cattle or sheep.
It was in his power also to pronounce sentence of scourging.
In all other cases, where the individual alone was injured and
not the public peace, the state only interposed upon the appeal of
the party injured, who caused his opponent, or in case of need by
laying violent hands on him compelled him, to appear personally along
with himself before the king. When both parties had appeared and
the plaintiff had orally stated his demand, while the defendant had
in similar fashion refused to comply with it, the king might either
investigate the cause himself or have it disposed of by a deputy
acting in his name. The regular form of satisfaction for such an
injury was a compromise arranged between the injurer and the injured;
the state only interfered supplementarily, when the aggressor did
not satisfy the party aggrieved by an adequate expiation (-poena-),
when any one had his property detained or his just demand was not
fulfilled.
Theft
Injuries
Property
Since the arable land among the Romans was long cultivated upon
the system of joint possession and was not distributed until a
comparatively late age, the idea of property was primarily associated
not with immoveable estate, but with "estate in slaves and cattle"
(-familia pecuniaque-). It was not the right of the stronger that
was regarded as the foundation of a title to it; on the contrary,
all property was considered as conferred by the community upon the
individual burgess for his exclusive possession and use; and therefore
it was only the burgess, and such as the community accounted in
this respect as equal to burgesses, that were capable of holding
property. All property passed freely from hand to hand. The Roman
law made no substantial distinction between moveable and immoveable
estate (from the time that the latter was regarded as private
property at all), and recognized no absolute vested interest of
children or other relatives in the paternal or family property.
Nevertheless it was not in the power of the father arbitrarily
to deprive his children of their right of inheritance, because he
could neither dissolve the paternal power nor execute a testament
except with consent of the whole community, which might be, and
certainly under such circumstances often was, refused. In his
lifetime no doubt the father might make dispositions disadvantageous
to his children; for the law was sparing of personal restrictions
on the proprietor and allowed, upon the whole, every grown-up
man freely to dispose of his property. The regulation, however,
under which he who alienated his hereditary property and deprived
his children of it was placed by order of the magistrate under
guardianship like a lunatic, was probably as ancient as the period
when the arable land was first divided and thereby private property
generally acquired greater importance for the commonwealth. In
this way the two antagonistic principles--the unlimited right of
the owner to dispose of his own, and the preservation of the family
property unbroken--were as far as possible harmonized in the Roman
law. Permanent restrictions on property were in no case allowed,
with the exception of servitudes such as those indispensable in
husbandry. Heritable leases and ground-rents charged upon property
could not legally exist. The law as little recognized mortgaging;
but the same purpose was served by the immediate delivery of the
property in pledge to the creditor as if he were its purchaser,
who thereupon gave his word of honour (-fiducia-) that he would not
alienate the object pledged until the payment fell due, and would
restore it to his debtor when the sum advanced had been repaid.
Contracts
Private Process
Guardianship
Law of Inheritance
After a man's death his property fell to the nearest heirs: in the
division all who were equal in proximity of relationship--women
included--shared alike, and the widow along with her children was
admitted to her proportional share. A dispensation from the legal
order of succession could only be granted by the assembly of the
people; previous to which the consent of the priests had to be
obtained on account of the ritual obligations attaching to succession.
Such dispensations appear nevertheless to have become at an early
period very frequent. In the event of a dispensation not being
procured, the want of it might be in some measure remedied by
means of the completely free control which every one had over his
property during his lifetime. His whole property was transferred
to a friend, who distributed it after death according to the wishes
of the deceased.
Manumission
Manumission was unknown to the law of very early times. The owner
might indeed refrain from exercising his proprietary rights; but
this did not cancel the existing impossibility of master and slave
coming under mutual obligations; still less did it enable the slave
to acquire, in relation to the community, the rights of a guest
or of a burgess. Accordingly manumission must have been at first
simply -de facto-, not -de jure-; and the master cannot have been
debarred from the possibility of again at pleasure treating the
freedman as a slave. But there was a departure from this principle
in cases where the master came under obligation not merely towards
the slave, but towards the community, to leave him in possession
of freedom. There was no special legal form, however, for thus
binding the master--the best proof that there was at first no
such thing as a manumission,--but those methods were employed for
this object which the law otherwise presented, testament, action,
or census. If the master had either declared his slave free when
executing his last will in the assembly of the people, or had allowed
his slave to claim freedom in his own presence before a judge or
to get his name inscribed in the valuation-roll, the freedman was
regarded not indeed as a burgess, but as personally free in relation
to his former master and his heirs, and was accordingly looked upon
at first as a client, and in later times as a plebeian.(7)
Such were the laws under which burgesses and clients lived in Rome.
Between these two classes, so far as we can see, there subsisted from
the beginning complete equality of private rights. The foreigner
on the other hand, if he had not submitted to a Roman patron and thus
lived as a client, was beyond the pale of the law both in person
and in property. Whatever the Roman burgess took from him was
as rightfully acquired as was the shellfish, belonging to nobody,
which was picked up by the sea-shore; but in the case of ground
lying beyond the Roman bounds, while the Roman burgess might take
practical possession, he could not be regarded as in a legal sense
its proprietor; for the individual burgess was not entitled to
advance the bounds of the community. The case was different in
war: whatever the soldier who was fighting in the ranks of the levy
gained, whether moveable or immoveable property, fell not to him,
but to the state, and accordingly here too it depended upon the
state whether it would advance or contract its bounds.
4. The -mancipatio- in its developed form must have been more recent
than the Servian reform, as the selection of mancipable objects,
which had for its aim the fixing of agricultural property, shows,
and as even tradition must have assumed, for it makes Servius the
inventor of the balance. But in its origin the -mancipatio- must
be far more ancient; for it primarily applies only to objects which
are acquired by grasping with the hand, and must therefore in its
earliest form have belonged to the epoch when property consisted
essentially in slaves and cattle (-familia pecuniaque-). The enumeration
of those objects which had to be acquired by -mancipatio-, falls
accordingly to be ranked as a Servian innovation; the -mancipatio-
itself, and consequently the use also of the balance and of copper,
are older. Beyond doubt -mancipatio- was originally the universal
form of purchase, and occurred in the case of all articles even
after the Servian reform; it was only a misunderstanding of later
ages which put upon the rule, that certain articles had to be
transferred by -mancipatio-, the construction that these articles
only and no others could be so transferred.
5. Viz. for the year of ten months one twelfth part of the capital
(-uncia-), which amounts to 8 1/3 per cent for the year of ten,
and 10 per cent for the fear of twelve, months.
CHAPTER XII
Religion
Roman Religion
Handicraft and art, on the other hand, are represented in this cycle
of the gods only by the god of fire and of smith's work, Vulcanus,
to whom besides the day named after him (-Volcanalia-, August 23)
the second festival of the consecration of trumpets was dedicated
(-tubilustrium-, May 23), and eventually also by the festival of
Carmentis (-Carmentalia- January 11, 15), who probably was adored
originally as the goddess of spells and of song and only inferentially
as protectress of births.
The central object not only of Roman but of Italian worship generally
in that epoch when the Italian stock still dwelt by itself in the
peninsula was, according to all indications, the god Maurs or Mars,
the killing god,(3) preeminently regarded as the divine champion
of the burgesses, hurling the spear, protecting the flock,
and overthrowing the foe. Each community of course possessed its
own Mars, and deemed him to be the strongest and holiest of all;
and accordingly every "-ver sacrum-" setting out to found a new
community marched under the protection of its own Mars. To Mars
was dedicated the first month not only in the Roman calendar of
the months, which in no other instance takes notice of the gods,
but also probably in all the other Latin and Sabellian calendars:
among the Roman proper names, which in like manner contain no allusion
to any gods, Marcus, Mamercus, and Mamurius appear in prevailing
use from very early times; with Mars and his sacred woodpecker was
connected the oldest Italian prophecy; the wolf, the animal sacred
to Mars, was the badge of the Roman burgesses, and such sacred
national legends as the Roman imagination was able to produce
referred exclusively to the god Mars and to his duplicate Quirinus.
In the list of festivals certainly Father Diovis--a purer and
more civil than military reflection of the character of the Roman
community--occupies a larger space than Mars, just as the priest
of Jupiter has precedence over the two priests of the god of war;
but the latter still plays a very prominent part in the list, and
it is even quite likely that, when this arrangement of festivals
was established, Jovis stood by the side of Mars like Ahuramazda
by the side of Mithra, and that the worship of the warlike Roman
community still really centred at this time in the martial god of
death and his March festival, while it was not the "care-destroyer"
afterwards introduced by the Greeks, but Father Jovis himself, who
was regarded as the god of the heart-gladdening wine.
Spirits
Priests
Lastly, as the state made arrangements for the cycle of its gods,
so each burgess might make similar arrangements within his individual
sphere, and might not only present sacrifices, but might also
consecrate set places and ministers, to his own divinities.
Augurs--Pontifices
Under the Roman constitution and that of the Latin communities in
general there were originally but two such colleges; that of the
augurs and that of the Pontifices.(11)
Fetiales
By the side of these two oldest and most eminent corporations of men
versed in spiritual lore may be to some extent ranked the college
of the twenty state-heralds (-fetiales-, of uncertain derivation),
destined as a living repository to preserve traditionally the
remembrance of the treaties concluded with neighbouring communities,
to pronounce an authoritative opinion on alleged infractions of
treaty-rights, and in case of need to attempt reconciliation or
declare war. They had precisely the same position with reference
to international, as the Pontifices had with reference to religious,
law; and were therefore, like the latter, entitled to point out
the law, although not to administer it.
But in however high repute these colleges were, and important and
comprehensive as were the functions assigned to them, it was never
forgotten--least of all in the case of those which held the highest
position--that their duty was not to command, but to tender skilled
advice, not directly to obtain the answer of the gods, but to
explain the answer when obtained to the inquirer. Thus the highest
of the priests was not merely inferior in rank to the king, but
might not even give advice to him unasked. It was the province of
the king to determine whether and when he would take an observation
of birds; the "bird-seer" simply stood beside him and interpreted
to him, when necessary, the language of the messengers of heaven.
In like manner the Fetialis and the Pontifex could not interfere in
matters of international or common law except when those concerned
therewith desired it. The Romans, notwithstanding all their zeal
for religion, adhered with unbending strictness to the principle
that the priest ought to remain completely powerless in the state
and--excluded from all command-- ought like any other burgess to
render obedience to the humblest magistrate.
Foreign Worships
Such was the nature and such the influence of the Roman religion
in its pure, unhampered, and thoroughly national development. Its
national character was not infringed by the fact that, from the
earliest times, modes and systems of worship were introduced from
abroad; no more than the bestowal of the rights of citizenship on
individual foreigners denationalized the Roman state. An exchange
of gods as well as of goods with the Latins in older time must
have been a matter of course; the transplantation to Rome of gods
and worships belonging to less cognate races is more remarkable.
Of the distinctive Sabine worship maintained by the Tities we
have already spoken.(14) Whether any conceptions of the gods were
borrowed from Etruria is more doubtful: for the Lases, the older
designation of the genii (from -lascivus-), and Minerva the goddess
of memory (-mens-, -menervare-), which it is customary to describe
as originally Etruscan, were on the contrary, judging from philological
grounds, indigenous to Latium. It is at any rate certain, and in
keeping with all that we otherwise know of Roman intercourse that
the Greek worship received earlier and more extensive attention
in Rome than any other of foreign origin. The Greek oracles
furnished the earliest occasion of its introduction. The language
of the Roman gods was on the whole confined to Yea and Nay or at
the most to the making their will known by the method of casting
lots, which appears in its origin Italian;(15) while from very ancient
times--although not apparently until the impulse was received from
the East--the more talkative gods of the Greeks imparted actual
utterances of prophecy. The Romans made efforts, even at an early
period, to treasure up such counsels, and copies of the leaves of
the soothsaying priestess of Apollo, the Cumaean Sibyl, were accordingly
a highly valued gift on the part of their Greek guest-friends from
Campania. For the reading and interpretation of the fortune-telling
book a special college, inferior in rank only to the augurs and
Pontifices, was instituted in early times, consisting of two men
of lore (-duoviri sacris faciundis-), who were furnished at the
expense of the state with two slaves acquainted with the Greek
language. To these custodiers of oracles the people resorted in
cases of doubt, when an act of worship was needed in order to avoid
some impending evil and they did not know to which of the gods or
with what rites it was to be performed. But Romans in search of
advice early betook themselves also to the Delphic Apollo himself.
Besides the legends relating to such an intercourse already
mentioned,(16) it is attested partly by the reception of the word
-thesaurus- so closely connected with the Delphic oracle into all
the Italian languages with which we are acquainted, and partly by
the oldest Roman form of the name of Apollo, -Aperta-, the "opener,"
an etymologizing alteration of the Doric Apellon, the antiquity of
which is betrayed by its very barbarism. The Greek Herakles was
naturalized in Italy as Herclus, Hercoles, Hercules, at an early
period and under a peculiar conception of his character, apparently
in the first instance as the god of gains of adventure and of any
extraordinary increase of wealth; for which reason the general was
wont to present the tenth of the spoil which he had procured, and
the merchant the tenth of the substance which he had obtained, to
Hercules at the chief altar (-ara maxima-) in the cattle-market.
Accordingly he became the god of mercantile covenants generally,
which in early times were frequently concluded at this altar and
confirmed by oath, and in so far was identified with the old Latin
god of good faith (-deus fidius-). The worship of Hercules was
from an early date among the most widely diffused; he was, to use
the words of an ancient author, adored in every hamlet of Italy,
and altars were everywhere erected to him in the streets of the
cities and along the country roads. The gods also of the mariner,
Castor and Polydeukes or, in Roman form, Pollux, the god of traffic
Hermes--the Roman Mercurius--and the god of healing, Asklapios or
Aesculapius, became early known to the Romans, although their public
worship only began at a later period. The name of the festival
of the "good goddess" (-bona dea-) -damium-, corresponding to the
Greek --damion-- or --deimion--, may likewise reach back as far as
this epoch. It must be the result also of ancient borrowing, that
the old -Liber pater- of the Romans was afterwards conceived as
"father deliverer" and identified with the wine-god of the Greeks,
the "releaser" (-Lyaeos-), and that the Roman god of the lower
regions was called the "dispenser of riches" (-Pluto- - -Dis pater-),
while his spouse Persephone became converted at once by change of
the initial sound and by transference of the idea into the Roman
Proserpina, that is, "germinatrix." Even the goddess of the
Romano-Latin league, Diana of the Aventine, seems to have been
copied from the federal goddess of the lonians of Asia Minor, the
Ephesian Artemis; at least her carved image in the Roman temple
was formed after the Ephesian type.(17) It was in this way alone,
through the myths of Apollo, Dionysus, Pluto, Herakles, and Artemis,
which were early pervaded by Oriental ideas, that the Aramaic
religion exercised at this period a remote and indirect influence
on Italy. We clearly perceive from these facts that the introduction
of the Greek religion was especially due to commercial intercourse,
and that it was traders and mariners who primarily brought the
Greek gods to Italy.
These individual cases however of derivation from abroad were but
of secondary moment, while the remains of the natural symbolism
of primeval times, of which the legend of the oxen of Cacus may
perhaps be a specimen,(18) had virtually disappeared. In all its
leading features the Roman religion was an organic creation of the
people among whom we find it.
The Sabellian and Umbrian worship, judging from the little we know
of it, rested upon quite the same fundamental views as the Latin
with local variations of colour and form. That it was different
from the Latin is very distinctly apparent from the founding
of a special college at Rome for the preservation of the Sabine
rites;(19) but that very fact affords an instructive illustration
of the nature of the difference. Observation of the flight of
birds was with both stocks the regular mode of consulting the gods;
but the Tities observed different birds from the Ramnian augurs.
Similar relations present themselves, wherever we have opportunity
of comparing them. Both stocks in common regarded the gods as
abstractions of the earthly and as of an impersonal nature; they
differed in expression and ritual. It was natural that these
diversities should appear of importance to the worshippers of those
days; we are no longer able to apprehend what was the characteristic
distinction, if any really existed.
But the remains of the sacred ritual of the Etruscans that have
reached us are marked by a different spirit. Their prevailing
characteristics are a gloomy and withal tiresome mysticism, ringing
the changes on numbers, soothsaying, and that solemn enthroning of
pure absurdity which at all times finds its own circle of devotees.
We are far from knowing the Etruscan worship in such completeness
and purity as we know the Latin; and it is not improbable--indeed
it cannot well be doubted--that several of its features were only
imported into it by the minute subtlety of a later period, and that
the gloomy and fantastic principles, which were most alien to the
Latin worship, are those that have been especially handed down to
us by tradition. But enough still remains to show that the mysticism
and barbarism of this worship had their foundation in the essential
character of the Etruscan people.
1. I. II. Religion
4. The facts, that gates and doors and the morning (-ianus
matutinus-) were sacred to Ianus, and that he was always invoked
before any other god and was even represented in the series of
coins before Jupiter and the other gods, indicate unmistakeably that
he was the abstraction of opening and beginning. The double-head
looking both ways was connected with the gate that opened both ways.
To make him god of the sun and of the year is the less justifiable,
because the month that bears his name was originally the eleventh,
not the first; that month seems rather to have derived its name
from the circumstance, that at this season after the rest of the
middle of winter the cycle of the labours of the field began afresh.
It was, however, a matter of course that the opening of the year
should also be included in the sphere of Ianus, especially after
Ianuarius came to be placed at its head.
8. I. III. Latium
CHAPTER XIII
Agriculture
Culture of Grain
Their husbandry was mainly occupied with the culture of the cereals.
The usual grain was spelt (-far-);(8) but different kinds of pulse,
roots, and vegetables were also diligently cultivated.
That the culture of the vine was not introduced for the first time
into Italy by Greek settlers,(9) is shown by the list of the festivals
of the Roman community which reaches back to a time preceding the
Greeks, and which presents three wine-festivals to be celebrated in
honour of "father Jovis," not in honour of the wine-god of more
recent times who was borrowed from the Greeks, the "father deliverer."
The very ancient legend which represents Mezentius king of Caere as
levying a wine-tax from the Latins or the Rutuli, and the various
versions of the widely-spread Italian story which affirms that the
Celts were induced to cross the Alps in consequence of their coming
to the knowledge of the noble fruits of Italy, especially of the
grape and of wine, are indications of the pride of the Latins in
their glorious vine, the envy of all their neighbours. A careful
system of vine-husbandry was early and generally inculcated by the
Latin priests. In Rome the vintage did not begin until the supreme
priest of the community, the -flamen- of Jupiter, had granted
permission for it and had himself made a beginning; in like manner a
Tusculan ordinance forbade the sale of new wine, until the priest
had proclaimed the festival of opening the casks. The early
prevalence of the culture of the vine is likewise attested not
only by the general adoption of wine-libations in the sacrificial
ritual, but also by the precept of the Roman priests promulgated
as a law of king Numa, that men should present in libation to the
gods no wine obtained from uncut grapes; just as, to introduce
the beneficial practice of drying the grain, they prohibited the
offering of grain undried.
The Fig
The principal fruit-tree planted was the nutritious fig, which was
probably a native of Italy. The legend of the origin of Rome wove
its threads most closely around the old fig-trees, several of which
stood near to and in the Roman Forum.(11)
It was the farmer and his sons who guided the plough, and performed
generally the labours of husbandry: it is not probable that slaves
or free day-labourers were regularly employed in the work of
the ordinary farm. The plough was drawn by the ox or by the cow;
horses, asses, and mules served as beasts of burden. The rearing
of cattle for the sake of meat or of milk did not exist at all as
a distinct branch of husbandry, or was prosecuted only to a very
limited extent, at least on the land which remained the property of
the clan; but, in addition to the smaller cattle which were driven
out together to the common pasture, swine and poultry, particularly
geese, were kept at the farm-yard. As a general rule, there was no
end of ploughing and re-ploughing: a field was reckoned imperfectly
tilled, in which the furrows were not drawn so close that harrowing
could be dispensed with; but the management was more earnest than
intelligent, and no improvement took place in the defective plough
or in the imperfect processes of reaping and of threshing. This
result is probably attributable rather to the scanty development
of rational mechanics than to the obstinate clinging of the farmers
to use and wont; for mere kindly attachment to the system of tillage
transmitted with the patrimonial soil was far from influencing the
practical Italian, and obvious improvements in agriculture, such
as the cultivation of fodder-plants and the irrigation of meadows,
may have been early adopted from neighbouring peoples or independently
developed--Roman literature itself in fact began with the discussion
of the theory of agriculture. Welcome rest followed diligent and
judicious labour; and here too religion asserted her right to soothe
the toils of life even to the humble by pauses for recreation and
for freer human movement and intercourse. Every eighth day (-nonae-),
and therefore on an average four times a month, the farmer went
to town to buy and sell and transact his other business. But rest
from labour, in the strict sense, took place only on the several
festival days, and especially in the holiday-month after the completion
of the winter sowing (-feriae sementivae-): during these set times
the plough rested by command of the gods, and not the farmer only,
but also his slave and his ox, reposed in holiday idleness.
Such, probably, was the way in which the ordinary Roman farm was
cultivated in the earliest times. The next heirs had no protection
against bad management except the right of having the spendthrift
who squandered his inherited estate placed under wardship as if he
were a lunatic.(12) Women moreover were in substance divested of
their personal right of disposal, and, if they married, a member
of the same clan was ordinarily assigned as husband, in order to
retain the estate within the clan. The law sought to check the
overburdening of landed property with debt partly by ordaining, in
the case of a debt secured over the land, the provisional transference
of the ownership of the object pledged from the debtor to the
creditor, partly, in the case of a simple loan, by the rigour of the
proceedings in execution which speedily led to actual bankruptcy;
the latter means however, as the sequel will show, attained its
object but very imperfectly. No restriction was imposed by law on
the free divisibility of property. Desirable as it might be that
co-heirs should remain in the undivided possession of their heritage,
even the oldest law was careful to keep the power of dissolving
such a partnership open at any time to any partner; it was good that
brethren should dwell together in peace, but to compel them to do
so was foreign to the liberal spirit of Roman law. The Servian
constitution moreover shows that even in the regal period of Rome
there were not wanting cottagers and garden-proprietors, with whom
the mattock took the place of the plough. It was left to custom and
the sound sense of the population to prevent excessive subdivision
of the soil; and that their confidence in this respect was not
misplaced and the landed estates ordinarily remained entire, is
proved by the universal Roman custom of designating them by permanent
individual names. The community exercised only an indirect influence
in the matter by the sending forth of colonies, which regularly led
to the establishment of a number of new full hides, and frequently
doubtless also to the suppression of a number of cottage holdings,
the small landholders being sent forth as colonists.
Landed Proprietors
Pastoral Husbandry
Handicrafts
If we further inquire how this traffic was mainly carried on, whether
by Italian merchants abroad or by foreign merchants in Italy, the
former supposition has all the probabilities in its favour, at
least so far as Latium is concerned. It is scarcely conceivable
that those Latin terms denoting the substitute for money and the
commercial loan could have found their way into general use in the
language of the inhabitants of Sicily through the mere resort of
Sicilian merchants to Ostia and their receipt of copper in exchange
for ornaments. Lastly, in regard to the persons and classes
by whom this traffic was carried on in Italy, no special superior
class of merchants distinct from and independent of the class of
landed proprietors developed itself in Rome. The reason of this
surprising phenomenon was, that the wholesale commerce of Latium was
from the beginning in the hands of the large landed proprietors--a
hypothesis which is not so singular as it seems. It was natural
that in a country intersected by several navigable rivers the great
landholder, who was paid by his tenants their quotas of produce in
kind, should come at an early period to possess barks; and there is
evidence that such was the case. The transmarine traffic conducted
on the trader's own account must therefore have fallen into the
hands of the great landholder, seeing that he alone possessed the
vessels for it and--in his produce--the articles for export.(28)
In fact the distinction between a landed and a moneyed aristocracy
was unknown to the Romans of earlier times; the great landholders
were at the same time the speculators and the capitalists. In
the case of a very energetic commerce such a combination certainly
could not have been maintained; but, as the previous representation
shows, while there was a comparatively vigorous traffic in Rome in
consequence of the trade of the Latin land being there concentrated,
Rome was by no means essentially a commercial city like Caere or
Tarentum, but was and continued to be the centre of an agricultural
community.
1. I. II. Agriculture
3. The system which we meet with in the case of the Germanic joint
tillage, combining a partition of the land in property among the
clansmen with its joint cultivation by the clan, can hardly ever
have existed in Italy. Had each clansman been regarded in Italy,
as among the Germans, in the light of proprietor of a particular
spot in each portion of the collective domain that was marked off
for tillage, the separate husbandry of later times would probably
have set out from a minute subdivision of hides. But the very
opposite was the case; the individual names of the Roman hides
(-fundus Cornelianus-) show clearly that the Roman proprietor owned
from the beginning a possession not broken up but united.
4. Cicero (de Rep. ii. 9, 14, comp. Plutarch, Q. Rom. 15) states:
-Tum (in the time of Romulus) erat res in pecore et locorum
possessionibus, ex quo pecuniosi et locupletes vocabantur--(Numa)
primum agros, quos bello Romulus ceperat, divisit viritim civibus-.
In like manner Dionysius represents Romulus as dividing the land into
thirty curial districts, and Numa as establishing boundary-stones
and introducing the festival of the Terminalia (i. 7, ii. 74; and
thence Plutarch, -Numa-, 16).
5. I. XI. Contracts
9. I. II. Agriculture
11. But there is no proper authority for the statement that the
fig-tree which stood in front of the temple of Saturn was cut down
in the year 260 (Plin. H. N. xv. 18, 77); the date CCLX. is wanting
in all good manuscripts, and has been interpolated, probably with
reference to Liv. ii. 21.
16. The comparative legal value of sheep and oxen, as is well known,
is proved by the fact that, when the cattle-fines were converted
into money-fines, the sheep was rated at ten, and the ox at a
hundred asses (Festus, v. -peculatus-, p. 237, comp. pp. 34, 144;
Gell. xi. i; Plutarch, Poplicola, ii). By a similar adjustment the
Icelandic law makes twelve rams equivalent to a cow; only in this
as in other instances the Germanic law has substituted the duodecimal
for the older decimal system.
21. This meant in the first instance the tokens used in the service
of the camp, the --xuleiphia kata phulakein brachea teleos echonta
charakteira-- (Polyb. vi. 35, 7); the four -vigiliae- of the
night-service gave name to the tokens generally. The fourfold
division of the night for the service of watching is Greek as well
as Roman; the military science of the Greeks may well have exercised
an influence--possibly through Pyrrhus (Liv. xxxv. 14)--in the
organization of the measures for security in the Roman camp. The
employment of the non-Doric form speaks for the comparatively late
date at which theword was taken over.
CHAPTER XIV
Italian Measures
Decimal System
But when at length the Hellenic trader had opened up the route to
the west coast of Italy, the measures of surface remained unaffected,
but the measures of length, of weight, and above all of capacity--in
other words those definite standards without which barter and traffic
are impossible--experienced the effects of the new international
intercourse. The oldest Roman foot has disappeared; that which we
know, and which was in use at a very early period among the Romans,
was borrowed from Greece, and was, in addition to its new Roman
subdivision into twelfths, divided after the Greek fashion into four
hand-breadths (-palmus-) and sixteen finger-breadths (-digitus-).
Further, the Roman weights were brought into a fixed proportional
relation to the Attic system, which prevailed throughout Sicily
but not in Cumae--another significant proof that the Latin traffic
was chiefly directed to the island; four Roman pounds were assumed as
equal to three Attic -minae-, or rather the Roman pound was assumed
as equal to one and a half of the Sicilian -litrae- or half-minae.(7)
But the most singular and chequered aspect is presented by the
Roman measures of capacity, as regards both their names and their
proportions. Their names have come from the Greek terms either by
corruption (-amphora-, -modius- after --medimnos--, -congius- from
--choeus--, -hemina-, -cyathus-) or by translation (-acetabulum-from
--ozubaphon--); while conversely --zesteis-- is a corruption of
-sextarius-. All the measures are not identical, but those in most
common use are so; among liquid measures the -congius- or -chus-,
the -sextarius-, and the -cyathus-, the two last also for dry
goods; the Roman -amphora- was equalized in water-weight to the
Attic talent, and at the same time stood to the Greek --metretes--
in the fixed ratio of 3:2, and to the Greek --medimnos-- of 2:1. To
one who can decipher the significance of such records, these names
and numerical proportions fully reveal the activity and importance
of the intercourse between the Sicilians and the Latins. The Greek
numeral signs were not adopted; but the Roman probably availed
himself of the Greek alphabet, when it reached him, to form ciphers
for 50 and 1000, perhaps also for 100, out of the signs for the
three aspirated letters which he had no use for. In Etruria the
sign for 100 at least appears to have been obtained in a similar
way. Afterwards, as usually happens, the systems of notation among
the two neighbouring nations became assimilated by the adoption in
substance of the Roman system in Etruria.
What we know of the oldest calendar of Rome and of some other Latin
cities--as to the Sabellian and Etruscan measurement of time we
have no traditional information--is decidedly based on the oldest
Greek arrangement of the year, which was intended to answer both
to the phases of the moon and to the seasons of the solar year,
constructed on the assumption of a lunar period of 29 1/2 days and
a solar period of 12 1/2 lunar months or 368 3/4 days, and on the
regular alternation of a full month or month of thirty days with a
hollow month or month of twenty-nine days and of a year of twelve
with a year of thirteen months, but at the same time maintained
in some sort of harmony with the actual celestial phenomena by
arbitrary curtailments and intercalations. It is possible that
this Greek arrangement of the year in the first instance came into
use among the Latins without undergoing any alteration; but the
oldest form of the Roman year which can be historically recognized
varied from its model, not indeed in the cyclical result nor yet in
the alternation of years of twelve with years of thirteen months,
but materially in the designation and in the measuring off of the
individual months. The Roman year began with the beginning of
spring; the first month in it and the only one which bears the name
of a god, was named from Mars (-Martius-), the three following from
sprouting (-aprilis-) growing (-maius-), and thriving (-iunius-),
the fifth onward to the tenth from their ordinal numbers (-quinctilis-,
-sextilis-, -september-, -october-, -november-, -december), the
eleventh from commencing (-ianuarius-),(8) with reference presumably
to the renewal of agricultural operations that followed midwinter
and the season of rest, the twelfth, and in an ordinary year the
last, from cleansing (-februarius-). To this series recurring
in regular succession there was added in the intercalary year a
nameless "labour-month" (-mercedonius-) at the close of the year,
viz. after February. And, as the Roman calendar was independent
as respected the names of the months which were probably taken from
the old national ones, it was also independent as regarded their
duration. Instead of the four years of the Greek cycle, each
composed of six months of 30 and six of 29 days and an intercalary
month inserted every second year alternately of 29 and 30 days (354 +
384 + 354 + 383 = 1475 days), the Roman calendar substituted four
years, each containing four months--the first, third, fifth, and
eighth--of 31 days and seven of 29 days, with a February of 28
days during three years and of 29 in the fourth, and an intercalary
month of 27 days inserted every second year (355 + 383 + 355 +
382 = 1475 days). In like manner this calendar departed from the
original division of the month into four weeks, sometimes of 7,
sometimes of 8 days; it made the eight-day-week run on through the
years without regard to the other relations of the calendar, as our
Sundays do, and placed the weekly market on the day with which it
began (-noundinae-). Along with this it once for all fixed the
first quarter in the months of 31 days on the seventh, in those
of 29 on the fifth day, and the full moon in the former on the
fifteenth, in the latter on the thirteenth day. As the course of
the months was thus permanently arranged, it was henceforth necessary
to proclaim only the number of days lying between the new moon and
the first quarter; thence the day of the newmoon received the name
of "proclamation-day" (-kalendae-). The first day of the second
section of the month, uniformly of 8 days, was--in conformity with
the Roman custom of reckoning, which included the -terminus ad
quem- --designated as "nine-day" (-nonae-). The day of the full
moon retained the old name of -idus- (perhaps "dividing-day").
The motive lying at the bottom of this strange remodelling of the
calendar seems chiefly to have been a belief in the salutary virtue
of odd numbers;(9) and while in general it is based on the oldest
form of the Greek year, its variations from that form distinctly
exhibit the influence of the doctrines of Pythagoras, which were
then paramount in Lower Italy, and which especially turned upon a
mystic view of numbers. But the consequence was that this Roman
calendar, clearly as it bears traces of the desire that it should
harmonize with the course both of sun and moon, in reality by
no means so corresponded with the lunar course as did at least on
the whole its Greek model, while, like the oldest Greek cycle, it
could only follow the solar seasons by means of frequent arbitrary
excisions, and did in all probability follow them but very imperfectly,
for it is scarcely likely that the calendar would be handled with
greater skill than was manifested in its original arrangement.
The retention moreover of the reckoning by months or--which is the
same thing--by years of ten months implies a tacit, but not to be
misunderstood, confession of the irregularity and untrustworthiness
of the oldest Roman solar year. This Roman calendar may be regarded,
at least in its essential features, as that generally current
among the Latins. When we consider how generally the beginning of
the year and the names of the months are liable to change, minor
variations in the numbering and designations are quite compatible
with the hypothesis of a common basis; and with such a calendar-system,
which practically was irrespective of the lunar course, the Latins
might easily come to have their months of arbitrary length, possibly
marked off by annual festivals--as in the case of the Alban months,
which varied between 16 and 36 days. It would appear probable
therefore that the Greek --trieteris-- had early been introduced
from Lower Italy at least into Latium and perhaps also among the
other Italian stocks, and had thereafter been subjected in the
calendars of the several cities to further subordinate alterations.
For the measuring of periods of more than one year the regnal years
of the kings might have been employed: but it is doubtful whether
that method of dating, which was in use in the East, occurred in Greece
or Italy during earlier times. On the other hand the intercalary
period recurring every four years, and the census and lustration
of the community connected with it, appear to have suggested
a reckoning by -lustra- similar in plan to the Greek reckoning by
Olympiads--a method, however, which early lost its chronological
significance in consequence of the irregularity that now prevailed
as to the due holding of the census at the right time.
Not less important for history than the derivation of the alphabet
is the further course of its development on Italian soil: perhaps
it is even of more importance; for by means of it a gleam of light
is thrown upon the inland commerce of Italy, which is involved
in far greater darkness than the commerce with foreigners on its
coasts. In the earliest epoch of Etruscan writing, when the alphabet
was used without material alteration as it had been introduced, its
use appears to have been restricted to the Etruscans on the Po and
in what is now Tuscany. In course of time this alphabet, manifestly
diffusing itself from Atria and Spina, reached southward along
the east coast as far as the Abruzzi, northward to the Veneti and
subsequently even to the Celts at the foot of, among, and indeed
beyond the Alps, so that its last offshoots reached as far as the
Tyrol and Styria. The more recent epoch starts with a reform of
the alphabet, the chief features of which were the introduction of
writing in broken-off lines, the suppression of the -"id:o", which
was no longer distinguished in pronunciation from the -"id:u", and
the introduction of a new letter -"id:f" for which the alphabet as
received by them had no corresponding sign. This reform evidently
arose among the western Etruscans, and while it did not find
reception beyond the Apennines, became naturalized among all the
Sabellian tribes, and especially among the Umbrians. In its further
course the alphabet experienced various fortunes in connection with
the several stocks, the Etruscans on the Arno and around Capua, the
Umbrians and the Samnites; frequently the mediae were entirely or
partially lost, while elsewhere again new vowels and consonants
were developed. But that West-Etruscan reform of the alphabet
was not merely as old as the oldest tombs found in Etruria; it was
considerably older, for the syllabarium just mentioned as found
probably in one of these tombs already presents the reformed
alphabet in an essentially modified and modernized shape; and, as
the reformed alphabet itself is relatively recent as compared with
the primitive one, the mind almost fails in the effort to reach back
to the time when that alphabet came to Italy. While the Etruscans
thus appear as the instruments in diffusing the alphabet in the
north, east, and south of the peninsula, the Latin alphabet on
the other hand was confined to Latium, and maintained its ground,
upon the whole, there with but few alterations; only the letters
-"id:gamma" -"id:kappa" and -"id:zeta" -"id:sigma" gradually
became coincident in sound, the consequence of which was, that in
each case one of the homophonous signs (-"id:kappa" -"id:zeta")
disappeared from writing. In Rome it can be shown that these were
already laid aside before the end of the fourth century of the
city,(15) and the whole monumental and literary tradition that has
reached us knows nothing of them, with a single exception.(16) Now
when we consider that in the oldest abbreviations the distinction
between -"id:gamma" -"id:c" and -"id:kappa" -"id:k" is still
regularly maintained;(17) that the period, accordingly, when the
sounds became in pronunciation coincident, and before that again
the period during which the abbreviations became fixed, lies beyond
the beginning of the Samnite wars; and lastly, that a considerable
interval must necessarily have elapsed between the introduction
of writing and the establishment of a conventional system of
abbreviation; we must, both as regards Etruria and Latium, carry
back the commencement of the art of writing to an epoch which
more closely approximates to the first incidence of the Egyptian
Sirius-period within historical times, the year 1321 B.C., than to
the year 776, with which the chronology of the Olympiads began in
Greece.(18) The high antiquity of the art of writing in Rome is
evinced otherwise by numerous and plain indications. The existence
of documents of the regal period is sufficiently attested; such
was the special treaty between Rome and Gabii, which was concluded
by a king Tarquinius and probably not by the last of that name,
and which, written on the skin of the bullock sacrificed on the
occasion, was preserved in the temple of Sancus on the Quirinal,
which was rich in antiquities and probably escaped the conflagration
of the Gauls; and such was the alliance which king Servius Tullius
concluded with Latium, and which Dionysius saw on a copper tablet
in the temple of Diana on the Aventine. What he saw, however, was
probably a copy restored after the fire with the help of a Latin
exemplar, for it was not likely that engraving on metal was practised
as early as the time of the kings. The charters of foundation of
the imperial period still refer to the charter founding this temple
as the oldest document of the kind in Rome and the common model for
all. But even then they scratched (-exarare-, -scribere-, akin to
-scrobes- (19)) or painted (-linere-, thence -littera-) on leaves
(-folium-), inner bark (-liber-), or wooden tablets (-tabula-,
-album-), afterwards also on leather and linen. The sacred records
of the Samnites as well as of the priesthood of Anagnia were
inscribed on linen rolls, and so were the oldest lists of the Roman
magistrates preserved in the temple of the goddess of recollection
(-Iuno moneta-) on the Capitol. It is scarcely necessary to recall
further proofs in the primitive marking of the pastured cattle
(-scriptura-), in the mode of addressing the senate, "fathers and
enrolled" (-patres conscripti-), and in the great antiquity of
the books of oracles, the clan-registers, and the Alban and Roman
calendars. When Roman tradition speaks of halls in the Forum,
where the boys and girls of quality were taught to read and write,
already in the earliest times of the republic, the statement may
be, but is not necessarily to be deemed, an invention. We have
been deprived of information as to the early Roman history, not in
consequence of the want of a knowledge of writing, or even perhaps
of the lack of documents, but in consequence of the incapacity of
the historians of the succeeding age, which was called to investigate
the history, to work out the materials furnished by the archives,
and of the perversity which led them to desire for the earliest
epoch a delineation of motives and of characters, accounts of
battles and narratives of revolutions, and while engaged in inventing
these, to neglect what the extant written tradition would not have
refused to yield to the serious and self-denying inquirer.
Results
5. I. XII. Priests
9. From the same cause all the festival-days are odd, as well those
recurring every month (-kalendae- on the 1st. -nonae- on the 5th
or 7th, -idus- on the 13th or 15th), as also, with but two exceptions,
those of the 45 annual festivals mentioned above (xii. Oldest Table
Of Roman Festivals). This is carried so far, that in the case of
festivals of several days the intervening even days were dropped
out, and so, for example, that of Carmentis was celebrated on Jan.
11, 15, that of the Grove-festival (-Lucaria-) on July 19, 21, and
that of the Ghosts-festival on May 9, 11, and 13.
11. The history of the alphabet among the Hellenes turns essentially
on the fact that--assuming the primitive alphabet of 23 letters,
that is to say, the Phoenician alphabet vocalized and enlarged by
the addition of the -"id:u" --proposals of very various kinds were
made to supplement and improve it, and each of these proposals has
a history of its own. The most important of these, which it is
interesting to keep in view as bearing on the history of Italian
writing, are the following:--I. The introduction of special signs
for the sounds --"id:xi" --"id:phi" --"id:chi". This proposal
is so old that all the Greek alphabets--with the single exception
of that of the islands Thera, Melos, and Crete--and all alphabets
derived from the Greek without exception, exhibit its influence.
At first probably the aim was to append the signs --"id:CHI"
= --"id:xi iota", --"id:PHI" = --"id:phi iota", and --"id:PSI"=
--"id:chi iota" to the close of the alphabet, and in this shape it
was adopted on the mainland of Hellas--with the exception of Athens
and Corinth--and also among the Sicilian and Italian Greeks. The
Greeks of Asia Minor on the other hand, and those of the islands of
the Archipelago, and also the Corinthians on the mainland appear,
when this proposal reached them, to have already had in use for the
sound --"id:xi iota" the fifteenth sign of the Phoenician alphabet
--"id:XI" (Samech); accordingly of the three new signs they adopted
the --"id:PHI" for --"id:phi iota", but employed the --"id:CHI"
not for --"id:xi iota", but for --"id:chi iota". The third sign
originally invented for --"id:chi iota" was probably allowed in
most instances to drop; only on the mainland of Asia Minor it was
retained, but received the value of --"id:psi iota". The mode of
writing adopted in Asia Minor was followed also by Athens; only in
its case not merely the --"id:psi iota", but the --"id:xi iota" also,
was not received and in their room the two consonants continued to
be written as before.--II. Equally early, if not still earlier,
an effort was made to obviate the confusion that might so easily
occur between the forms for --"id:iota S" and for --"id:s E"; for
all the Greek alphabets known to us bear traces of the endeavour to
distinguish them otherwise and more precisely. Already in very
early times two such proposals of change must have been made,
each of which found a field for its diffusion. In the one case
they employed for the sibilant--for which the Phoenician alphabet
furnished two signs, the fourteenth ( --"id:/\/\") for --"id:sh" and
the eighteenth (--"id:E") for --"id:s" --not the latter, which was
in sound the more suitable, but the former; and such was in earlier
times the mode of writing in the eastern islands, in Corinth and
Corcyra, and among the Italian Achaeans. In the other case they
substituted for the sign of --"id:i" the simple stroke --"id:I",
which was by far the more usual, and at no very late date became
at least so far general that the broken --"id:iota S" everywhere
disappeared, although individual communities retained the --"id:s"
in the form --"id:/\/\" alongside of the --"I".--III. Of later
date is the substitution of --"id:\/" for --"id:/\" (--"id:lambda")
which might readily be confounded with --"id:GAMMA gamma". This we
meet with in Athens and Boeotia, while Corinth and the communities
dependent on Corinth attained the same object by giving
to the --"id:gamma" the semicircular form --"id:C" instead of the
hook-shape.--IV. The forms for --"id:p" --"id:P (with broken-loop)"
and --"id:r" --"id:P", likewise very liable to be confounded, were
distinguished by transforming the latter into --"id:R"; which more
recent form was not used by the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Cretans,
the Italian Achaeans, and a few other districts, but on the other
hand greatly preponderated both in Greece proper and in Magna
Graecia and Sicily. Still the older form of the --"id:r" --"id:P"
did not so early and so completely disappear there as the older
form of the --"id:l"; this alteration therefore beyond doubt is to
be placed later.--V. The differentiating of the long and short -e
and the long and short -o remained in the earlier times confined
to the Greeks of Asia Minor and of the islands of the Aegean Sea.
13. That the Etruscans always were without the koppa, seems
not doubtful; for not only is no sure trace of it to be met with
elsewhere, but it is wanting in the model alphabet of the Galassi
vase. The attempt to show its presence in the syllabarium of the
latter is at any rate mistaken, for the syllabarium can and does
only take notice of the Etruscan letters that were afterwards
in common use, and to these the koppa notoriously did not belong;
moreover the sign placed at the close cannot well from its position
have any other value than that of the -f, which was in fact the last
letter in the Etruscan alphabet, and which could not be omitted in
a syllabarium exhibiting the variations of that alphabet from its
model. It is certainly surprising that the koppa should be absent
from the Greek alphabet that came to Etruria, when it otherwise
so long maintained its place in the Chalcidico-Doric ; but this
may well have been a local peculiarity of the town whose alphabet
first reached Etruria. Caprice and accident have at all times had
a share in determining whether a sign becoming superfluous shall
be retained or dropped from the alphabet; thus the Attic alphabet
lost the eighteenth Phoenician sign, but retained the others which
had disappeared from the -u.
15. At this period we shall have to place that recorded form of the
Twelve Tables, which subsequently lay before the Roman philologues,
and of which we possess fragments. Beyond doubt the code was
at its very origin committed to writing; but that those scholars
themselves referred their text not to the original exemplar, but to
an official document written down after the Gallic conflagration,
is proved by the story of the Tables having undergone reproduction
at that time. This enables us easily to explain how their text by
no means exhibited the oldest orthography, which was not unknown to
them; even apart from the consideration that in the case of such
a written document, employed, moreover, for the purpose of being
committed to memory by the young, a philologically exact transmission
cannot possibly be assumed.
18. If this view is correct, the origin of the Homeric poems (though
of course not exactly that of the redaction in which we now have
them) must have been far anterior to the age which Herodotus assigns
for the flourishing of Homer (100 before Rome); for the introduction
of the Hellenic alphabet into Italy, as well as the beginning of
intercourse at all between Hellas and Italy, belongs only to the
post-Homeric period.
20. The enigma as to how the Latins came to employ the Greek sign
corresponding to -v for the -f quite different in sound, has been
solved by the bracelet of Praeneste (xiv. Developments Of Alphabets
in Italy, note) with its -fhefhaked- for -fecit-, and thereby at the
same time the derivation of the Latin alphabet from the Chalcidian
colonies of Lower Italy has been confirmed. For in a Boeotian
inscription belonging to the same alphabet we find in the word
-fhekadamoe-(Gustav Meyer, Griech. Grammatik, sec. 244, ap. fin.)
the same combination of sound, and an aspirated v might certainly
approximate in sound to the Latin -f.
21. When Varro (ap. Augustin. De Civ. Dei, iv. 31; comp. Plutarch
Num. 8) affirms that the Romans for more than one hundred and
seventy years worshipped the gods without images, he is evidently
thinking of this primitive piece of carving, which, according to
the conventional chronology, was dedicated between 176 and 219, and,
beyond doubt, was the first statue of the gods, the consecration
of which was mentioned in the authorities which Varro had before
him. Comp, above, XIV. Development of Alphabets in Italy.
22. I. XIII. Handicrafts
Chapter XV
Art
Religious Chants
The earliest chant, in the view of the Romans, was that which the
leaves sang to themselves in the green solitude of the forest. The
whispers and pipings of the "favourable spirit" (-faunus-, from
-favere-) in the grove were reproduced for men, by those who had
the gift of listening to him, in rhythmically measured language
(-casmen-, afterwards -carmen-, from -canere-). Of a kindred nature
to these soothsaying songs of inspired men and women (-vates-) were
the incantations properly so called, the formulae for conjuring
away diseases and other troubles, and the evil spells by which they
prevented rain and called down lightning or even enticed the seed
from one field to another; only in these instances, probably from
the outset, formulae of mere sounds appear side by side with formulae
of words.(3) More firmly rooted in tradition and equally ancient
were the religious litanies which were sung and danced by the Salii
and other priesthoods; the only one of which that has come down to
us, a dance-chant of the Arval Brethren in honour of Mars probably
composed to be sung in alternate parts, deserves a place here.
To the gods:
-Nos, Lares, iuvate!
Ne veluem (= malam luem) ruem (= ruinam), Mamers,
sinas incurrere in plures!
Satur esto, fere Mars!
To the god:
Nos, Mamers, iuvato!
Metre
__--'__--'__--'__^/ __--'__--'__--'_^
Melody
Masks
Lastly, the masks used in after times for the standing characters
of the Latin popular comedy or the Atellana, as it was called:
Maccus the harlequin, Bucco the glutton, Pappus the good papa, and
the wise Dossennus--masks which have been cleverly and strikingly
compared to the two servants, the -pantalon- and the -dottore-, in
the Italian comedy of Pulcinello--already belonged to the earliest
Latin popular art. That they did so cannot of course be strictly
proved; but as the use of masks for the face in Latium in the case
of the national drama was of immemorial antiquity, while the Greek
drama in Rome did not adopt them for a century after its first
establishment, as, moreover, those Atellane masks were of decidedly
Italian origin, and as, in fine, the origination as well as
the execution of improvised pieces cannot well be conceived apart
from fixed masks assigning once for all to the player his proper
position throughout the piece, we must associate fixed masks with
the rudiments of the Roman drama, or rather regard them as constituting
those rudiments themselves.
Thus there not only existed in Latium the same fundamental elements
out of which Hellenic culture and art grew, but Hellenic culture
and art themselves exercised a powerful influence over Latium in
very early times. Not only did the Latins possess the elements
of gymnastic training, in so far as the Roman boy learned like
every farmer's son to manage horses and waggon and to handle the
hunting-spear, and as in Rome every burgess was at the same time
a soldier; but the art of dancing was from the first an object
of public care, and a powerful impulse was further given to such
culture at an early period by the introduction of the Hellenic
games. The lyrical poetry and tragedy of Hellas grew out of songs
similar to the festal lays of Rome; the ancestral lay contained the
germs of epos, the masked farce the germs of comedy; and in this
field also Grecian influences were not wanting.
A similar fate befel poetry and her sisters. The Greeks and Germans
alone possess a fountain of song that wells up spontaneously; from
the golden vase of the Muses only a few drops have fallen on the
green soil of Italy. There was no formation of legend in the strict
sense there. The Italian gods were abstractions and remained such;
they never became elevated into or, as some may prefer to say,
obscured under, a true personal shape. In like manner men, even the
greatest and noblest, remained in the view of the Italian without
exception mortal, and were not, as in the longing recollection
and affectionately cherished tradition of Greece, elevated in the
conception of the multitude into god-like heroes. But above all
no development of national poetry took place in Latium. It is
the deepest and noblest effect of the fine arts and above all of
poetry, that they break down the barriers of civil communities and
create out of tribes a nation and out of the nations a world. As
in the present day by means of our cosmopolitan literature the
distinctions of civilized nations are done away, so Greek poetic
art transformed the narrow and egoistic sense of tribal relationship
into the consciousness of Hellenic nationality, and this again
into the consciousness of a common humanity. But in Latium nothing
similar occurred. There might be poets in Alba and in Rome, but there
arose no Latin epos, nor even--what were still more conceivable--a
catechism for the Latin farmer of a kind similar to the "Works and
Days" of Hesiod. The Latin federal festival might well have become
a national festival of the fine arts, like the Olympian and Isthmian
games of the Greeks. A cycle of legends might well have gathered
around the fall of Alba, such as was woven around the conquest of
Ilion, and every community and every noble clan of Latium might
have discovered in it, or imported into it, the story of its own
origin. But neither of these results took place, and Italy remained
without national poetry or art.
The inference which of necessity follows from these facts, that the
development of the fine arts in Latium was rather a shrivelling up
than an expanding into bloom, is confirmed in a manner even now not
to be mistaken by tradition. The beginnings of poetry everywhere,
perhaps, belong rather to women than to men; the spell of incantation
and the chant for the dead pertain pre-eminently to the former,
and not without reason the spirits of song, the Casmenae or Camenae
and the Carmentis of Latium, like the Muses of Hellas, were conceived
as feminine. But the time came in Hellas, when the poet relieved
the songstress and Apollo took his place at the head of the Muses.
In Latium there was no national god of song, and the older Latin
language had no designation for the poet.(15) The power of song
emerging there was out of all proportion weaker, and was rapidly
arrested in its growth. The exercise of the fine arts was there
early restricted, partly to women and children, partly to incorporated
or unincorporated tradesmen. We have already mentioned that funeral
chants were sung by women and banquet-lays by boys; the religious
litanies also were chiefly executed by children. The musicians formed
an incorporated, the dancers and the wailing women (-praeficae-)
unincorporated, trades. While dancing, music, and singing remained
constantly in Greece--as they were originally also in Latium--reputable
employments redounding to the honour of the burgess and of the
community to which he belonged, in Latium the better portion of the
burgesses drew more and more aloof from these vain arts, and that
the more decidedly, in proportion as art came to be more publicly
exhibited and more thoroughly penetrated by the quickening impulses
derived from other lands. The use of the native pipe was sanctioned,
but the lyre remained despised; and while the national amusement of
masks was allowed, the foreign amusements of the -palaestra- were
not only regarded with indifference, but esteemed disgraceful. While
the fine arts in Greece became more and more the common property of
the Hellenes individually and collectively and thereby became the
means of developing a universal culture, they gradually disappeared
in Latium from the thoughts and feelings of the people; and, as
they degenerated into utterly insignificant handicrafts, the idea
of a general national culture to be communicated to youth never
suggested itself at all. The education of youth remained entirely
confined within the limits of the narrowest domesticity. The boy
never left his father's side, and accompanied him not only to the
field with the plough and the sickle, but also to the house of
a friend or to the council-hall, when his father was invited as a
guest or summoned to the senate. This domestic education was well
adapted to preserve man wholly for the household and wholly for
the state. The permanent intercommunion of life between father
and son, and the mutual reverence felt by adolescence for ripened
manhood and by the mature man for the innocence of youth, lay at the
root of the steadfastness of the domestic and political traditions,
of the closeness of the family bond, and in general of the grave
earnestness (-gravitas-) and character of moral worth in Roman life.
This mode of educating youth was in truth one of those institutions
of homely and almost unconscious wisdom, which are as simple as
they are profound. But amidst the admiration which it awakens we
may not overlook the fact that it could only be carried out, and
was only carried out, by the sacrifice of true individual culture
and by a complete renunciation of the equally charming and perilous
gifts of the Muses.
The plastic and delineative arts are more recent than architecture;
the house must be built before any attempt is made to decorate
gable and walls. It is not probable that these arts really gained
a place in Italy during the regal period of Rome; it was only
in Etruria, where commerce and piracy early gave rise to a great
concentration of riches, that art or handicraft--if the term be
preferred--obtained a footing in the earliest times. Greek art,
when it acted on Etruria, was still, as its copy shows, at a very
primitive stage, and the Etruscans may have learned from the Greeks
the art of working in clay and metal at a period not much later than
that at which they borrowed from them the alphabet. The silver
coins of Populonia, almost the only works that can be with any
precision assigned to this period, give no very high idea of Etruscan
artistic skill as it then stood; yet the best of the Etruscan works
in bronze, to which the later critics of art assigned so high a
place, may have belonged to this primitive age; and the Etruscan
terra-cottas also cannot have been altogether despicable, for the
oldest works in baked clay placed in the Roman temples--the statue
of the Capitoline Jupiter, and the four-horse chariot on the roof
of his temple--were executed in Veii, and the large ornaments of a
similar kind placed on the roofs of temples passed generally among
the later Romans under the name of "Tuscanic works."
1. I. XII. Priests
2. I. XIII. Handicrafts
3. Thus Cato the Elder (de R. R. 160) gives as potent against sprains
the formula: -hauat hauat hauat ista pista sista damia bodannaustra-,
which was presumably quite as obscure to its inventor as it is to
us. Of course, along with these there were also formulae of words;
e. g. it was a remedy for gout, to think, while fasting, on some
other person, and thrice nine times to utter the words, touching
the earth at the same time and spitting:--"I think of thee, mend
my feet. Let the earth receive the ill, let health with me dwell"
(-terra pestem teneto, salus hie maneto-. Varro de R. R. i. 2,
27).
4. Each of the first five lines was repeated thrice, and the call
at the close five times. Various points in the interpretation are
uncertain, particularly as respects the third line. --The three
inscriptions of the clay vase from the Quirinal (p. 277, note)
run thus: -iove sat deiuosqoi med mitat nei ted endo gosmis uirgo
sied--asted noisi ope toilesiai pakariuois--duenos med faked
(=bonus me fecit) enmanom einom dze noine (probably=die noni) med
malo statod.-Only individual words admit of being understood with
certainty; it is especially noteworthy that forms, which we have
hitherto known only as Umbrian and Oscan, like the adjective -pacer-
and the particle -einom with the value of -et, here probably meet
us withal as old-Latin.
5. I. II. Art
11. The city festival can have only lasted at first for a single
day, for in the sixth century it still consisted of four days of
scenic and one day of Circensian sports (Ritschl, Parerga, i. 313)
and it is well known that the scenic amusements were only a subsequent
addition. That in each kind of contest there was originally
only one competition, follows from Livy, xliv. 9; the running
of five-and-twenty pairs of chariots in succession on one day was
a subsequent innovation (Varro ap. Serv. Georg. iii. 18). That
only two chariots--and likewise beyond doubt only two horsemen
and two wrestlers--strove for the prize, may be inferred from the
circumstance, that at all periods in the Roman chariot-races only
as many chariots competed as there were so-called factions; and of
these there were originally only two, the white and the red. The
horsemanship-competition of patrician youths which belonged to
the Circensian games, the so-called Troia, was, as is well known,
revived by Caesar; beyond doubt it was connected with the cavalcade
of the boy-militia, which Dionysius mentions (vii. 72).
16. We shall show in due time that the Atellanae and Fescenninae
belonged not to Campanian and Etruscan, but to Latin art.
The portion of the Servian wall near the Viminal gate, discovered in
the year 1862 at the Villa Negroni, rests on a foundation of huge
blocks of tufo of 3 to 4 metres in height and breadth, on which was
then raised the outer wall from blocks of the same material and of
the same size as those elsewhere employed in the wall. The earthen
rampart piled up behind appears to have had on the upper surface
a breadth extending about 13 metres or fully 40 Roman feet, and
the whole wall-defence, including the outer wall of freestone, to
have had a breadth of as much as 15 metres or 50 Roman feet. The
portions formed of peperino blocks, which are bound with iron
clamps, have only been added in connection with subsequent labours
of repair.--Essentially similar to the Servian walls are those
discovered in the Vigna Nussiner, on the slope of the Palatine
towards the side of the Capitol, and at other points of the Palatine,
which have been declared by Jordan (Topographic, ii. 173), probably
with reason, to be remnants of the citadel-wall of the Palatine
Rome,
21. When Varro (ap. Augustin. De Civ. Dei, iv. 31; comp. Plutarch
Num. 8) affirms that the Romans for more than one hundred and
seventy years worshipped the gods without images, he is evidently
thinking of this primitive piece of carving, which, according to
the conventional chronology, was dedicated between 176 and 219, and,
beyond doubt, was the first statue of the gods, the consecration
of which was mentioned in the authorities which Varro had before
him. Comp, above, XIV. Development of Alphabets in Italy.
End of Book I
* * * * *
Preparer's Note
5) Dr. Mommsen has given his dates in terms of Roman usage, A.U.C.;
that is, from the founding of Rome, conventionally taken to be
753 B. C. The preparer of this document, has appended to the end
of this combined text (Books I-V) a table of conversion between the
two systems.
CONTENTS
BOOK II: From the Abolition of the Monarchy in Rome to the Union
of Italy
CHAPTER
BOOK SECOND
Polybius.
CHAPTER I
It was in this latter way that the monarchy was terminated in Rome.
For however much the history of the expulsion of the last Tarquinius,
"the proud," may have been interwoven with anecdotes and spun out into
a romance, it is not in its leading outlines to be called in question.
Tradition credibly enough indicates as the causes of the revolt, that
the king neglected to consult the senate and to complete its numbers;
that he pronounced sentences of capital punishment and confiscation
without advising with his counsellors; that he accumulated immense
stores of grain in his granaries, and exacted from the burgesses
military labour and task-work beyond what was due. The exasperation
of the people is attested by the formal vow which they made man by
man for themselves and for their posterity that thenceforth they would
never tolerate a king; by the blind hatred with which the name of king
was ever afterwards regarded in Rome; and above all by the enactment
that the "king for offering sacrifice" (-rex sacrorum- or
-sacrificulus-) --whom they considered it their duty to create that the
gods might not miss their accustomed mediator--should be disqualified
from holding any further office, so that this man became the foremost
indeed, but also the most powerless in the Roman commonwealth. Along
with the last king all the members of his clan were banished--a proof
how close at that time gentile ties still were. The Tarquinii
thereupon transferred themselves to Caere, perhaps their ancient
home,(1) where their family tomb has recently been discovered.
In the room of the one president holding office for life two
annual rulers were now placed at the head of the Roman community.
Collegiate Arrangement
The collegiate principle, from which the third and subsequently most
current name of the annual kings was derived, assumed in their case an
altogether peculiar form. The supreme power was not entrusted to the
two magistrates conjointly, but each consul possessed and exercised it
for himself as fully and wholly as it had been possessed and exercised
by the king. This was carried so far that, instead of one of the two
colleagues undertaking perhaps the administration of justice, and
the other the command of the army, they both administered justice
simultaneously in the city just as they both set out together to
the army; in case of collision the matter was decided by a rotation
measured by months or days. A certain partition of functions withal,
at least in the supreme military command, might doubtless take place
from the outset--the one consul for example taking the field against
the Aequi, and the other against the Volsci--but it had in no wise
binding force, and each of the colleagues was legally at liberty to
interfere at any time in the province of the other. When, therefore,
supreme power confronted supreme power and the one colleague forbade
what the other enjoined, the consular commands neutralized each other.
This peculiarly Latin, if not peculiarly Roman, institution of
co-ordinate supreme authorities--which in the Roman commonwealth on
the whole approved itself as practicable, but to which it will be
difficult to find a parallel in any other considerable state
--manifestly sprang out of the endeavour to retain the regal power
in legally undiminished fulness. They were thus led not to break
up the royal office into parts or to transfer it from an individual
to a college, but simply to double it and thereby, if necessary,
to neutralize it through its own action.
Term of Office
Right of Appeal
Where on the other hand such directions were not in existence, the
president of the community in the capital had personally to intervene;
as indeed, for example, at the introductory steps of a process he
could not under any circumstances let himself be represented by
deputy.
Nominating a Successor
We have already mentioned that the outward state of the consul was
far inferior to that of the regal office hedged round as it was
with reverence and terror, that the regal name and the priestly
consecration were withheld from him, and that the axe was taken away
from his attendants. We have to add that, instead of the purple
robe which the king had worn, the consul was distinguished from the
ordinary burgess simply by the purple border of his toga, and that,
while the king perhaps regularly appeared in public in his chariot,
the consul was bound to accommodate himself to the general rule and
like every other burgess to go within the city on foot.
The Dictator
On the whole, therefore, the consuls continued to be, as the kings had
been, the supreme administrators, judges, and generals; and even in a
religious point of view it was not the -rex sacrorum- (who was only
nominated that the name might be preserved), but the consul, who
offered prayers and sacrifices for the community, and in its name
ascertained the will of the gods with the aid of those skilled in
sacred lore. Against cases of emergency, moreover, a power was
retained of reviving at any moment, without previous consultation of
the community, the full and unlimited regal authority, so as to set
aside the limitations imposed by the collegiate arrangement and by
the special curtailments of jurisdiction. In this way the problem of
legally retaining and practically restricting the regal authority was
solved in genuine Roman fashion with equal acuteness and simplicity
by the nameless statesmen who worked out this revolution.
As in the curiate assembly those who were entitled to vote at all were
on a footing of entire equality, and therefore after the admission
of all the plebeians into the curies the result would have been a
complete democracy, it may be easily conceived that the decision of
political questions continued to be withheld from the curies; the
centuriate assembly placed the preponderating influence, not in the
hands of the nobles certainly, but in those of the possessors of
property, and the important privilege of priority in voting, which
often practically decided the election, placed it in the hands of
the -equites- or, in other words, of the rich.
Senate
The senate was not affected by the reform of the constitution in the
same way as the community. The previously existing college of elders
not only continued exclusively patrician, but retained also its
essential prerogatives--the right of appointing the interrex, and of
confirming or rejecting the resolutions adopted by the community as
constitutional or unconstitutional. In fact these prerogatives were
enhanced by the reform of the constitution, because the appointment
of the magistrates also, which fell to be made by election of the
community, was thenceforth subject to the confirmation or rejection
of the patrician senate. In cases of appeal alone its confirmation,
so far as we know, was never deemed requisite, because in these the
matter at stake was the pardon of the guilty and, when this was
granted by the sovereign assembly of the people, any cancelling
of such an act was wholly out of the question.
This, in short, was the time when the Roman burgess-body in the
later sense of the term originated. The plebeians had hitherto been
--metoeci-- who were subjected to their share of taxes and burdens,
but who were nevertheless in the eye of the law really nothing but
tolerated aliens, between whose position and that of foreigners proper
it may have seemed hardly necessary to draw a definite line of
distinction. They were now enrolled in the lists as burgesses liable
to military service, and, although they were still far from being on
a footing of legal equality--although the old burgesses still remained
exclusively entitled to perform the acts of authority constitutionally
pertaining to the council of elders, and exclusively eligible to the
civil magistracies and priesthoods, nay even by preference entitled to
participate in the usufructs of burgesses, such as the joint use of
the public pasture--yet the first and most difficult step towards
complete equalization was gained from the time when the plebeians no
longer served merely in the common levy, but also voted in the common
assembly and in the common council when its opinion was asked, and the
head and back of the poorest --metoikos-- were as well protected by
the right of appeal as those of the noblest of the old burgesses.
A second consequence of the new union of the burgesses must have been
a more definite regulation of the right of settlement, with reference
both to the Latin confederates and to other states. It became
necessary--not so much on account of the right of suffrage in the
centuries (which indeed belonged only to the freeholder) as on
account of the right of appeal, which was intended to be conceded
to the plebeian, but not to the foreigner dwelling for a time or
even permanently in Rome--to express more precisely the conditions
of the acquisition of plebeian rights, and to mark off the enlarged
burgess-body in its turn from those who were now the non-burgesses.
To thisepoch therefore we may trace back--in the views and feelings
of the people--both the invidiousness of the distinction between
patricians and plebeians, and the strict and haughty line of demarcation
between -cives Romani- and aliens. But the former civic distinction was
in its nature transient, while the latter political one was permanent;
and the sense of political unity and rising greatness, which was thus
implanted in the heart of the nation, was expansive enough first
to undermine and then to carry away with its mighty current those
paltry distinctions.
It was at this period, moreover, that law and edict were separated.
The distinction indeed had its foundation in the essential character
of the Roman state; for even the regal power in Rome was subordinate,
not superior, to the law of the land. But the profound and practical
veneration, which the Romans, like every other people of political
capacity, cherished for the principle of authority, gave birth to the
remarkable rule of Roman constitutional and private law, that every
command of the magistrate not based upon a law was at least valid
during his tenure of office, although it expired with that tenure.
It is evident that in this view, so long as the presidents were
nominated for life, the distinction between law and edict must have
practically been almost lost sight of, and the legislative activity
of the public assembly could acquire no development. On the other
hand it obtained a wide field of action after the presidents were
changed annually; and the fact was now by no means void of practical
importance, that, if the consul in deciding a process committed a
legal informality, his successor could institute a fresh trial of
the cause.
4. The day of entering on office did not coincide with the beginning
of the year (1st March), and was not at all fixed. The day of
retiring was regulated by it, except when a consul was elected
expressly in room of one who had dropped out (-consul suffectus-);
in which case the substitute succeeded to the rights and consequently
to the term of him whom he replaced. But these supplementary consuls
in the earlier period only occurred when merely one of the consuls had
dropped out: pairs of supplementary consuls are not found until the
later ages of the republic. Ordinarily, therefore, the official year
of a consul consisted of unequal portions of two civil years.
5. I. V. The King
6. I. XI. Crimes
8. I. V. The King
9. I. V. The King
14. That the first consuls admitted to the senate 164 plebeians, is
hardly to be regarded as a historical fact, but rather as a proof that
the later Roman archaeologists were unable to point out more than 136
-gentes- of the Roman nobility (Rom, Forsch. i. 121).
CHAPTER II
The Tribunate of the Plebs and the Decemvirate
Material Interests
Under the new organization of the commonwealth the old burgesses had
attained by legal means to the full possession of political power.
Governing through the magistracy which had been reduced to be their
servant, preponderating in the Senate, in sole possession of all
public offices and priesthoods, armed with exclusive cognizance of
things human and divine and familiar with the whole routine of
political procedure, influential in the public assembly through the
large number of pliant adherents attached to the several families,
and, lastly, entitled to examine and to reject every decree of the
community,--the patricians might have long preserved their practical
power, just because they had at the right time abandoned their claim
to sole legal authority. It is true that the plebeians could not but
be painfully sensible of their political disabilities; but undoubtedly
in the first instance the nobility had not much to fear from a purely
political opposition, if it understood the art of keeping the
multitude, which desired nothing but equitable administration and
protection of its material interests, aloof from political strife.
In fact during the first period after the expulsion of the kings we
meet with various measures which were intended, or at any rate seemed
to be intended, to gain the favour of the commons for the government
of the nobility especially on economic grounds. The port-dues were
reduced; when the price of grain was high, large quantities of corn
were purchased on account of the state, and the trade in salt was made
a state-monopoly, in order to supply the citizens with corn and salt
at reasonable prices; lastly, the national festival was prolonged for
an additional day. Of the same character was the ordinance which we
have already mentioned respecting property fines,(1) which was not
merely intended in general to set limits to the dangerous
fining-prerogative of the magistrates, but was also, in a significant
manner, calculated for the especial protection of the man of small means.
The magistrate was prohibited from fining the same man on the same
day to an extent beyond two sheep or beyond thirty oxen, without
granting leave to appeal; and the reason of these singular rates
can only perhaps be found in the fact, that in the case of the man of
small means possessing only a few sheep a different maximum appeared
necessary from that fixed for the wealthy proprietor of herds of oxen
--a considerate regard to the wealth or poverty of the person fined,
from which modern legislators might take a lesson.
But these regulations were merely superficial; the main current flowed
in the opposite direction. With the change in the constitution
there was introduced a comprehensive revolution in the financial and
economic relations of Rome, The government of the kings had probably
abstained on principle from enhancing the power of capital, and had
promoted as far as it could an increase in the number of farms.
The new aristocratic government, again, appears to have aimed from
the first at the destruction of the middle classes, particularly of
the intermediate and smaller holdings of land, and at the development
of a domination of landed and moneyed lords on the one hand, and of
an agricultural proletariate on the other.
Public Land
The distinction between rich and poor, which arose out of these
relations, by no means coincided with that between the clans and the
plebeians. If far the greater part of the patricians were wealthy
landholders, opulent and considerable families were, of course,
not wanting among the plebeians; and as the senate, which even then
perhaps consisted in greater part of plebeians, had assumed the
superintendence of the finances to the exclusion even of the patrician
magistrates, it was natural that all those economic advantages, for
which the political privileges of the nobility were abused, should go
to the benefit of the wealthy collectively; and the pressure fell the
more heavily upon the commons, since those who were the ablest and
the most capable of resistance were by their admission to the senate
transferred from the class of the oppressed to the ranks of
the oppressors.
The immediate crisis however proceeded not from those who felt the
disabilities of their order, but from the distress of the farmers.
The rectified annals place the political revolution in the year 244,
the social in the years 259 and 260; they certainly appear to have
followed close upon each other, but the interval was probably longer.
The strict enforcement of the law of debt--so runs the story--excited
the indignation of the farmers at large. When in the year 259 the
levy was called forth for a dangerous war, the men bound to serve
refused to obey the command. Thereupon the consul Publius Servilius
suspended for a time the application of the debtor-laws, and gave
orders to liberate the persons already imprisoned for debt as well as
prohibited further arrests; so that the farmers took their places in
the ranks and helped to secure the victory. On their return from the
field of battle the peace, which had been achieved by their exertions,
brought back their prison and their chains: with merciless rigour
the second consul, Appius Claudius, enforced the debtor-laws and his
colleague, to whom his former soldiers appealed for aid, dared not
offer opposition. It seemed as if collegiate rule had been introduced
not for the protection of the people, but to facilitate breach of
faith and despotism; they endured, however, what could not be changed.
But when in the following year the war was renewed, the word of the
consul availed no longer. It was not till Manius Valerius was
nominated dictator that the farmers submitted, partly from their awe
of the higher magisterial authority, partly from their confidence in
his friendly feeling to the popular cause--for the Valerii were one of
those old patrician clans by whom government was esteemed a privilege
and an honour, not a source of gain. The victory was again with the
Roman standards; but when the victors came home and the dictator
submitted his proposals of reform to the senate, they were thwarted
by its obstinate opposition. The army still stood in its array, as
usual, before the gates of the city. When the news arrived, the long
threatening storm burst forth; the -esprit de corps- and the compact
military organization carried even the timid and the indifferent along
with the movement. The army abandoned its general and its encampment,
and under the leadership of the commanders of the legions--the
military tribunes, who were at least in great part plebeians--marched
in martial order into the district of Crustumeria between the Tiber
and the Anio, where it occupied a hill and threatened to establish
in this most fertile part of the Roman territory a new plebeian city.
This secession showed in a palpable manner even to the most obstinate
of the oppressors that such a civil war must end with economic ruin
to themselves; and the senate gave way. The dictator negotiated an
agreement; the citizens returned within the city walls; unity was
outwardly restored. The people gave Manius Valerius thenceforth the
name of "the great" (-maximus-)--and called the mount beyond the Anio
"the sacred mount." There was something mighty and elevating in such
a revolution, undertaken by the multitude itself without definite
guidance under generals whom accident supplied, and accomplished
without bloodshed; and with pleasure and pride the citizens recalled
its memory. Its consequences were felt for many centuries: it was
the origin of the tribunate of the plebs.
Intercession
But these rights would have been ineffective, if there had not
belonged to the tribune of the people an instantaneously operative
and irresistible power of enforcing them against him who did not
regard them, and especially against the magistrate contravening them.
This was conferred in such a form that the acting in opposition to
the tribune when making use of his right, above all things the laying
hands on his person, which at the Sacred Mount every plebeian, man by
man for himself and his descendants, had sworn to protect now and in
all time to come from all harm, should be a capital crime; and the
exercise of this criminal justice was committed not to the magistrates
of the community but to those of the plebs. The tribune might in
virtue of this his judicial office call to account any burgess,
especially the consul in office, have him seized if he should not
voluntarily submit, place him under arrest during investigation or
allow him to find bail, and then sentence him to death or to a fine.
For this purpose the two plebeian aediles appointed at the same
time were attached to the tribunes as their servants and assistants,
primarily to effect arrest, on which account the same inviolable
character was assured to them also by the collective oath of the
plebeians. Moreover the aediles themselves had judicial powers like
the tribunes, but only for the minor causes that might be settled by
fines. If an appeal was lodged against the decision of tribune or
aedile, it was addressed not to the whole body of the burgesses, with
which the officials of the plebs were not entitled at all to transact
business, but to the whole body of the plebeians, which in this case
met by curies and finally decided by majority of votes.
Legislation
But what was gained by a measure which broke up the unity of the
state; which subjected the magistrates to a controlling authority
unsteady in its action and dependent on all the passions of
the moment; which in the hour of peril might have brought the
administration to a dead-lock at the bidding of any one of the
opposition chiefs elevated to the rival throne; and which, by
investing all the magistrates with co-ordinate jurisdiction in
the administration of criminal law, as it were formally transferred
that administration from the domain of law to that of politics
and corrupted it for all time coming? It is true indeed that the
tribunate, if it did not directly contribute to the political
equalization of the orders, served as a powerful weapon in the hands
of the plebeians when these soon afterwards desired admission to the
offices of state. But this was not the real design of the tribunate.
It was a concession wrung not from the politically privileged order,
but from the rich landlords and capitalists; it was designed to ensure
to the commons equitable administration of law, and to promote a more
judicious administration of finance. This design it did not, and
could not, fulfil. The tribune might put a stop to particular
iniquities, to individual instances of crying hardship; but the fault
lay not in the unfair working of a righteous law, but in a law which
was itself unrighteous, and how could the tribune regularly obstruct
the ordinary course of justice? Could he have done so, it would have
served little to remedy the evil, unless the sources of impoverishment
were stopped--the perverse taxation, the wretched system of credit,
and the pernicious occupation of the domain-lands. But such measures
were not attempted, evidently because the wealthy plebeians themselves
had no less interest in these abuses than the patricians. So this
singular magistracy was instituted, which presented to the commons an
obvious and available aid, and yet could not possibly carry out the
necessary economic reform. It was no proof of political wisdom, but a
wretched compromise between the wealthy aristocracy and the leaderless
multitude. It has been affirmed that the tribunate of the people
preserved Rome from tyranny. Were it true, it would be of little
moment: a change in the form of the state is not in itself an evil
for a people; on the contrary, it was a misfortune for the Romans
that monarchy was introduced too late, after the physical and mental
energies of the nation were exhausted. But the assertion is not
even correct; as is shown by the circumstance that the Italian states
remained as regularly free from tyrants as the Hellenic states
regularly witnessed their emergence. The reason lies simply in the
fact that tyranny is everywhere the result of universal suffrage,
and that the Italians excluded the burgesses who had no land from
their public assemblies longer than the Greeks did: when Rome departed
from this course, monarchy did not fail to emerge, and was in fact
associated with this very tribunician orifice. That the tribunate had
its use, in pointing out legitimate paths of opposition and averting
many a wrong, no one will fail to acknowledge; but it is equally
evident that, where it did prove useful, it was employed for very
different objects from those for which it had been established.
The bold experiment of allowing the leaders of the opposition a
constitutional veto, and of investing them with power to assert it
regardless of the consequences, proved to be an expedient by which
the state was politically unhinged; and social evils were prolonged
by the application of useless palliatives.
Further Dissensions
Now that civil war was organized, it pursued its course. The parties
stood face to face as if drawn up for battle, each under its leaders.
Restriction of the consular and extension of the tribunician power
were the objects contended for on the one side; the annihilation of
the tribunate was sought on the other. Legal impunity secured for
insubordination, refusal to enter the ranks for the defence of the
land, impeachments involving fines and penalties directed specially
against magistrates who had violated the rights of the commons or
who had simply provoked their displeasure, were the weapons of the
plebeians; and to these the patricians opposed violence, concert with
the public foes, and occasionally also the dagger of the assassin.
Hand-to-hand conflicts took place in the streets, and on both sides
the sacredness of the magistrate's person was violated. Many families
of burgesses are said to have migrated, and to have sought more
peaceful abodes in neighbouring communities; and we may well believe
it. The strong patriotism of the people is obvious from the fact,
not that they adopted this constitution, but that they endured it,
and that the community, notwithstanding the most vehement convulsions,
still held together.
Coriolanus
More sagacious in plan than all these party steps was the attempt
of Spurius Cassius to break down the financial omnipotence of the
rich, and so to put a stop to the true source of the evil. He was
a patrician, and none in his order surpassed him in rank and renown.
After two triumphs, in his third consulate (268), he submitted to the
burgesses a proposal to have the public domain measured and to lease
part of it for the benefit of the public treasury, while a further
portion was to be distributed among the necessitous. In other words,
he attempted to wrest the control of the public lands from the senate,
and, with the support of the burgesses, to put an end to the selfish
system of occupation. He probably imagined that his personal
distinction, and the equity and wisdom of the measure, might carry
it even amidst that stormy sea of passion and of weakness. But he
was mistaken. The nobles rose as one man; the rich plebeians took
part with them; the commons were displeased because Spurius Cassius
desired, in accordance with federal rights and equity, to give to
the Latin confederates their share in the assignation. Cassius had
to die. There is some truth in the charge that he had usurped regal
power, for he had indeed endeavoured like the kings to protect the
free commons against his own order. His law was buried along with
him; but its spectre thenceforward incessantly haunted the eyes of
the rich, and again and again it rose from the tomb against them,
until amidst the conflicts to which it led the commonwealth perished.
Decemvirs
The plan, if it should stand, was a wise one; all depended on whether
men's minds exasperated on either side with passion would accept that
peaceful adjustment. The decemvirs of the year 303 submitted their
law to the people, and it was confirmed by them, engraven on ten
tables of copper, and affixed in the Forum to the rostra in front
of the senate-house. But as a supplement appeared necessary,
decemvirs were again nominated in the year 304, who added two more
tables. Thus originated the first and only Roman code, the law of the
Twelve Tables. It proceeded from a compromise between parties, and
for that very reason could not well have contained any changes in the
existing law of a comprehensive nature, going beyond the regulation of
secondary matters and of the mere adaptation of means and ends. Even
in the system of credit no further alleviation was introduced than the
establishment of a--probably low--maximum of interest (10 per cent)
and the threatening of heavy penalties against the usurer-penalties,
characteristically enough, far heavier than those of the thief; the
harsh procedure in actions of debt remained at least in its leading
features unaltered. Still less, as may easily be conceived, were
changes contemplated in the rights of the orders. On the contrary the
legal distinction between burgesses liable to be taxed and those who
were without estate, and the invalidity of marriage between patricians
and plebeians, were confirmed anew in the law of the city. In like
manner, with a view to restrict the caprice of the magistrate and
to protect the burgess, it was expressly enacted that the later law
should uniformly have precedence over the earlier, and that no decree
of the people should be issued against a single burgess. The most
remarkable feature was the exclusion of appeal to the -comitia
tributa- in capital causes, while the privilege of appeal to the
centuries was guaranteed; which admits of explanation from the
circumstance that the penal jurisdiction was in fact usurped by the
plebs and its presidents,(11) and with the tribunate there necessarily
fell the tribunician capital process, while it was perhaps the
intention to retain the aedilician process of fine (-multa-).
The essential political significance of the measure resided far less
in the contents of the legislation than in the formal obligation now
laid upon the consuls to administer justice according to these forms
of process and these rules of law, and in the public exhibition of
the code, by which the administration of justice was subjected to the
control of publicity and the consul was compelled to dispense equal
and truly common justice to all.
5. I. XI. Property
7. That the plebeian aediles were formed after the model of the
patrician quaestors in the same way as the plebeian tribunes after
the model of the patrician consuls, is evident both as regards their
criminal functions (in which the distinction between the two
magistracies seems to have lain in their tendencies only, not in their
powers) and as regards their charge of the archives. The temple of
Ceres was to the aediles what the temple of Saturn was to the
quaestors, and from the former they derived their name. Significant
in this respect is the enactment of the law of 305 (Liv. iii. 55),
that the decrees of the senate should be delivered over to the aediles
there (p. 369), whereas, as is well known, according to the ancient
--and subsequently after the settlement of the struggles between the
orders, again preponderant--practice those decrees were committed to
the quaestors for preservation in the temple of Saturn.
9. I. III. Clan-Villages
CHAPTER III
But this league between the patricians and the wealthy plebeians by no
means bore within itself any guarantee of permanence. Beyond doubt
from the very first a portion of the leading plebeian families had
attached themselves to the movement-party, partly from a sense of what
was due to the fellow-members of their order, partly in consequence
of the natural bond which unites all who are treated as inferior,
and partly because they perceived that concessions to the multitude
were inevitable in the issue, and that, if turned to due account,
they would result in the abrogation of the exclusive rights of
the patriciate and would thereby give to the plebeian aristocracy a
decisive preponderance in the state. Should this conviction become
--as was inevitable--more and more prevalent, and should the plebeian
aristocracy at the head of its order take up the struggle with the
patrician nobility, it would wield in the tribunate a legalized
instrument of civil warfare, and it might, with the weapon of social
distress, so fight its battles as to dictate to the nobility the terms
of peace and, in the position of mediator between the two parties,
compel its own admission to the offices of state.
Their Expedients
Moreover they broke up the supreme power which had hitherto been
undivided, in order to delay their inevitable defeat by multiplying
the points to be assailed. Thus the adjustment of the budget and of
the burgess--and taxation-rolls, which ordinarily took place every
fourth year and had hitherto been managed by the consuls, was
entrusted as early as the year 319 to two valuators (-censores-),
nominated by the centuries from among the nobles for a period, at
the most, of eighteen months. The new office gradually became the
palladium of the aristocratic party, not so much on account of its
financial influence as on account of the right annexed to it of
filling up the vacancies in the senate and in the equites, and of
removing individuals from the lists of the senate, equites, and
burgesses on occasion of their adjustment. At this epoch, however,
the censorship by no means possessed the great importance and moral
supremacy which afterwards were associated with it.
Quaestorship
But the important change made in the year 333 in respect to the
quaestorship amply compensated for this success of the patrician
party. The patricio-plebeian assembly of the tribes--perhaps taking
up the ground that at least the two military paymasters were in fact
officers rather than civil functionaries, and that so far the plebeian
appeared as well entitled to the quaestorship as to the military
tribuneship--carried the point that plebeian candidates also were
admitted for the quaestorial elections, and thereby acquired for
the first time the privilege of eligibility as well as the right of
election for one of the ordinary magistracies. With justice it was
felt on the one side as a great victory, on the other as a severe
defeat, that thenceforth patrician and plebeian were equally capable
of electing and being elected to the military as well as to the urban
quaestorship.
Attempts at Counterrevolution
Praetorship--
Curule Aedileship--
Complete Opening Up of Magistracies and Priesthoods
The two hundred years' strife was brought at length to: a close by the
law of the dictator Q. Hortensius (465, 468) which was occasioned by a
dangerous popular insurrection, and which declared that the decrees of
the plebs should stand on an absolute footing of equality--instead of
their earlier conditional equivalence--with those of the whole
community. So greatly had the state of things been changed that
that portion of the burgesses which had once possessed exclusively
the right of voting was thenceforth, under the usual form of taking
votes binding for the whole burgess-body, no longer so much as asked
the question.
The struggle between the Roman clans and commons was thus
substantially at an end. While the nobility still preserved out
of its comprehensive privileges the -de facto- possession of one of
the consulships and one of the censorships, it was excluded by law
from the tribunate, the plebeian aedileship, the second consulship
and censorship, and from participation in the votes of the plebs
which were legally equivalent to votes of the whole body of burgesses.
As a righteous retribution for its perverse and stubborn resistance,
the patriciate had seen its former privileges converted into so many
disabilities. The Roman clan-nobility, however, by no means
disappeared because it had become an empty name. The less the
significance and power of the nobility, the more purely and
exclusively the patrician spirit developed itself. The haughtiness
of the "Ramnians" survived the last of their class-privileges for
centuries; after they had steadfastly striven "to rescue the consulate
from the plebeian filth" and had at length become reluctantly
convinced of the impossibility of such an achievement, they continued
at least rudely and spitefully to display their aristocratic spirit.
To understand rightly the history of Rome in the fifth and sixth
centuries, we must never overlook this sulking patricianism; it could
indeed do little more than irritate itself and others, but this it
did to the best of its ability. Some years after the passing of the
Ogulnian law (458) a characteristic instance of this sort occurred.
A patrician matron, who was married to a leading plebeian that had
attained to the highest dignities of the state, was on account of this
misalliance expelled from the circle of noble dames and was refused
admission to the common festival of Chastity; and in consequence of
that exclusion separate patrician and plebeian goddesses of Chastity
were thenceforward worshipped in Rome. Doubtless caprices of this
sort were of very little moment, and the better portion of the
clans kept themselves entirely aloof from this miserable policy of
peevishness; but it left behind on both sides a feeling of discontent,
and, while the struggle of the commons against the clans was in itself
a political and even moral necessity, these convulsive efforts to
prolong the strife--the aimless combats of the rear-guard after the
battle had been decided, as well as the empty squabbles as to rank
and standing--needlessly irritated and disturbed the public and
private life of the Roman community.
Let us first consider how far any real relief was contained in that
part of the legislation of 387 which bore upon the question. That
the enactment in favour of the free day-labourers could not possibly
accomplish its object--namely, to check the system of farming on
a large scale and by means of slaves, and to secure to the free
proletarians at least a share of work--is self-evident. In this
matter legislation could afford no relief, without shaking the
foundations of the civil organization of the period in a way that
would reach far beyond its immediate horizon. In the question of the
domains, on the other hand, it was quite possible for legislation to
effect a change; but what was done was manifestly inadequate. The new
domain-arrangement, by granting the right of driving very considerable
flocks and herds upon the public pastures, and that of occupying
domain-land not laid out in pasture up to a maximum fixed on a
high scale, conceded to the wealthy an important and perhaps even
disproportionate prior share in the produce of the domains; and by
the latter regulation conferred upon the domain-tenure, although it
remained in law liable to pay a tenth and revocable at pleasure,
as well as upon the system of occupation itself, somewhat of a legal
sanction. It was a circumstance still more suspicious, that the
new legislation neither supplemented the existing and manifestly
unsatisfactory provisions for the collection of the pasture-money
and the tenth by compulsory measures of a more effective kind, nor
prescribed any thorough revision of the domanial possessions, nor
appointed a magistracy charged with the carrying of the new laws into
effect. The distribution of the existing occupied domain-land partly
among the holders up to a fair maximum, partly among the plebeians
who had no property, in both cases in full ownership; the abolition
in future of the system of occupation; and the institution of
an authority empowered to make immediate distribution of any
future acquisitions of territory, were so clearly demanded by the
circumstances of the case, that it certainly was not through want
of discernment that these comprehensive measures were neglected.
We cannot fail to recollect that it was the plebeian aristocracy,
in other words, a portion of the very class that was practically
privileged in respect to the usufructs of the domains, which proposed
the new arrangement, and that one of its very authors, Gaius Licinius
Stolo, was among the first to be condemned for having exceeded the
agrarian maximum; and we cannot but ask whether the legislators dealt
altogether honourably, and whether they did not on the contrary
designedly evade a solution, really tending to the common benefit,
of the unhappy question of the domains. We do not mean, however, to
express any doubt that the regulations of the Licinian laws, such as
they were, might and did substantially benefit the small farmer and
the day-labourer. It must, moreover, be acknowledged that in the
period immediately succeeding the passing of the law the authorities
watched with at least comparative strictness over the observance of
its rules as to the maximum, and frequently condemned the possessors
of large herds and the occupiers of the domains to heavy fines.
In the system of taxation and of credit also efforts were made with
greater energy at this period than at any before or subsequent to it
to remedy the evils of the national economy, so far as legal measures
could do so. The duty levied in 397 of five per cent on the value of
slaves that were to be manumitted was--irrespective of the fact that
it imposed a check on the undesirable multiplication of freedmen--the
first tax in Rome that was really laid upon the rich. In like manner
efforts were made to remedy the system of credit. The usury laws,
which the Twelve Tables had established,(9) were renewed and gradually
rendered more stringent, so that the maximum of interest was
successively lowered from 10 per cent (enforced in 397) to 5 per cent
(in 407) for the year of twelve months, and at length (412) the taking
of interest was altogether forbidden. The latter foolish law remained
formally in force, but, of course, it was practically inoperative; the
standard rate of interest afterwards usual, viz. 1 per cent per month,
or 12 per cent for the civil common year--which, according to the
value of money in antiquity, was probably at that time nearly the same
as, according to its modern value, a rate of 5 or 6 per cent--must
have been already about this period established as the maximum of
appropriate interest. Any action at law for higher rates must have
been refused, perhaps even judicial claims for repayment may have been
allowed; moreover notorious usurers were not unfrequently summoned
before the bar of the people and readily condemned by the tribes to
heavy fines. Still more important was the alteration of the procedure
in cases of debt by the Poetelian law (428 or 441). On the one hand
it allowed every debtor who declared on oath his solvency to save his
personal freedom by the cession of his property; on the other hand it
abolished the former summary proceedings in execution on a loan-debt,
and laid down the rule that no Roman burgess could be led away to
bondage except upon the sentence of jurymen.
Continued Distress
A more effectual relief than any which the government was willing
or able to give was derived by the middle classes from the political
successes of the Roman community and the gradual consolidation of the
Roman sovereignty over Italy. The numerous and large colonies which
it was necessary to found for the securing of that sovereignty, the
greater part of which were sent forth in the fifth century, furnished
a portion of the agricultural proletariate with farms of their own,
while the efflux gave relief to such as remained at home. The
increase of the indirect and extraordinary sources of revenue, and
the flourishing condition of the Roman finances in general, rendered
it but seldom necessary to levy any contribution from the farmers in
the form of a forced loan. While the earlier small holdings were
probably lost beyond recovery, the rising average of Roman prosperity
must have converted the former larger landholders into farmers, and
in so far added new members to the middle class. People of rank
sought principally to secure the large newly-acquired districts for
occupation; the mass of wealth which flowed to Rome through war and
commerce must have reduced the rate of interest; the increase in the
population of the capital benefited the farmer throughout Latium;
a wise system of incorporation united a number of neighbouring and
formerly subject communities with the Roman state, and thereby
strengthened especially the middle class; finally, the glorious
victories and their mighty results silenced faction. If the distress
of the farmers was by no means removed and still less were its sources
stopped, it yet admits of no doubt that at the close of this period
the Roman middle class was on the whole in a far less oppressed
condition than in the first century after the expulsion of the kings.
Civic Equality
New Aristocracy
New Opposition
The termination of the struggles between the old and new burgesses,
the various and comparatively successful endeavours to relieve the
middle class, and the germs--already making their appearance amidst
the newly acquired civic equality--of the formation of a new
aristocratic and a new democratic party, have thus been passed
in review. It remains that we describe the shape which the new
government assumed amidst these changes, and the positions in which
after the political abolition of the nobility the three elements of
the republican commonwealth--the burgesses, the magistrates, and
the senate--stood towards each other.
The Burgess-Body--
Its Composition
The old unity and plenary legal power of the -imperium- were retained
longer in the case of the dictatorship than in that of the consulship.
Although of course as an extraordinary magistracy it had in reality
from the first its special functions, it had in law far less of a
special character than the consulate. But it also was gradually
affected by the new idea of definite powers and functions introduced
into the legal life of Rome. In 391 we first meet with a dictator
expressly nominated from theological scruples for the mere
accomplishment of a religious ceremony; and though that dictator
himself, doubtless in formal accordance with the constitution,
treated the restriction of his powers as null and took the command
of the army in spite of it, such an opposition on the part of the
magistrate was not repeated on occasion of the subsequent similarly
restricted nominations, which occurred in 403 and thenceforward very
frequently. On the contrary, the dictators thenceforth accounted
themselves bound by their powers as specially defined.
While the Roman magistrate was thus more and more completely and
definitely transformed from the absolute lord into the limited
commissioner and administrator of the community, the old
counter-magistracy, the tribunate of the people, was undergoing at
the same time a similar transformation internal rather than external.
It served a double purpose in the commonwealth. It had been from
the beginning intended to protect the humble and the weak by a
somewhat revolutionary assistance (-auxilium-) against the overbearing
violence of the magistrates; it had subsequently been employed to get
rid of the legal disabilities of the commons and the privileges of the
gentile nobility. The latter end was attained. The original object
was not only in itself a democratic ideal rather than a political
possibility, but it was also quite as obnoxious to the plebeian
aristocracy into whose hands the tribunate necessarily fell, and
quite as incompatible with the new organization which originated
in the equalization of the orders and had if possible a still more
decided aristocratic hue than that which preceded it, as it was
obnoxious to the gentile nobility and incompatible with the patrician
consular constitution. But instead of abolishing the tribunate, they
preferred to convert it from a weapon of opposition into an instrument
of government, and now introduced the tribunes of the people, who were
originally excluded from all share in administration and were neither
magistrates nor members of the senate, into the class of governing
authorities.
In reality it was the senate that governed the commonwealth, and did
so almost without opposition after the equalization of the orders.
Its very composition had undergone a change. The free prerogative of
the chief magistrates in this matter, as it had been exercised after
the setting aside of the old clan-representation,(19) had been already
subjected to very material restrictions on the abolition of the
presidency for life.(20)
A further step towards the emancipation of the senate from the power
of the magistrates took place, when the adjustment of the senatorial
lists was transferred from the supreme magistrates to subordinate
functionaries--from the consuls to the censors.(21) Certainly,
whether immediately at that time or soon afterwards, the right of
the magistrate entrusted with the preparation of the list to omit
from it individual senators on account of a stain attaching to them
and thereby to exclude them from the senate was, if not introduced,
at least more precisely defined,(22) and in this way the foundations
were laid of that peculiar jurisdiction over morals on which the high
repute of the censors was chiefly based.(23) But censures of that
sort--especially since the two censors had to be at one on the matter
--might doubtless serve to remove particular persons who did not
contribute to the credit of the assembly or were hostile to the spirit
prevailing there, but could not bring the body itself into dependence
on the magistracy.
Senatorial Government
That this new government of the senate amidst all its retention
of existing forms involved a complete revolutionizing of the old
commonwealth, is clear. That the free action of the burgesses should
be arrested and benumbed; that the magistrates should be reduced to
be the presidents of its sittings and its executive commissioners;
that a corporation for the mere tendering of advice should seize the
inheritance of both the authorities sanctioned by the constitution
and should become, although under very modest forms, the central
government of the state--these were steps of revolution and
usurpation. Nevertheless, if any revolution or any usurpation appears
justified before the bar of history by exclusive ability to govern,
even its rigorous judgment must acknowledge that this corporation
timeously comprehended and worthily fulfilled its great task. Called
to power not by the empty accident of birth, but substantially by the
free choice of the nation; confirmed every fifth year by the stern
moral judgment of the worthiest men; holding office for life, and so
not dependent on the expiration of its commission or on the varying
opinion of the people; having its ranks close and united ever after
the equalization of the orders; embracing in it all the political
intelligence and practical statesmanship that the people possessed;
absolute in dealing with all financial questions and in the guidance
of foreign policy; having complete power over the executive by virtue
of its brief duration and of the tribunician intercession which was
at the service of the senate after the termination of the quarrels
between the orders--the Roman senate was the noblest organ of the
nation, and in consistency and political sagacity, in unanimity and
patriotism, in grasp of power and unwavering courage, the foremost
political corporation of all times--still even now an "assembly of
kings," which knew well how to combine despotic energy with republican
self-devotion. Never was a state represented in its external
relations more firmly and worthily than Rome in its best times by
its senate. In matters of internal administration it certainly
cannot be concealed that the moneyed and landed aristocracy, which
was especially represented in the senate, acted with partiality in
affairs that bore upon its peculiar interests, and that the sagacity
and energy of the body were often in such cases employed far from
beneficially to the state. Nevertheless the great principle
established amidst severe conflicts, that all Roman burgesses were
equal in the eye of the law as respected rights and duties, and the
opening up of a political career (or in other words, of admission
to the senate) to every one, which was the result of that principle,
concurred with the brilliance of military and political successes in
preserving the harmony of the state and of the nation, and relieved
the distinction of classes from that bitterness and malignity which
marked the struggle of the patricians and plebeians. And, as the
fortunate turn taken by external politics had the effect of giving the
rich for more than a century ample space for themselves and rendered
it unnecessary that they should oppress the middle class, the Roman
people was enabled by means of its senate to carry out for a longer
term than is usually granted to a people the grandest of all human
undertakings--a wise and happy self-government.
7. II. I. Senate,
16. Any one who compares the consular Fasti before and after 412
will have no doubt as to the existence of the above-mentioned law
respecting re-election to the consulate; for, while before that year
a return to office, especially after three or four years, was a
common occurrence, afterwards intervals of ten years and more were
as frequent. Exceptions, however, occur in very great numbers,
particularly during the severe years of war 434-443. On the other
hand, the principle of not allowing a plurality of offices was
strictly adhered to. There is no certain instance of the combination
of two of the three ordinary curule (Liv. xxxix. 39, 4) offices (the
consulate, praetorship, and curule aedileship), but instances occur
of other combinations, such as of the curule aedileship and the office
of master of the horse (Liv. xxiii. 24, 30); of the praetorship
and censorship (Fast. Cap. a. 501); of the praetorship and the
dictatorship (Liv. viii. 12); of the consulate and the dictatorship
(Liv. viii. 12).
22. This prerogative and the similar ones with reference to the
equestrian and burgess-lists were perhaps not formally and legally
assigned to the censors, but were always practically implied in
their powers. It was the community, not the censor, that conferred
burgess-rights; but the person, to whom the latter in making up the
list of persons entitled to vote did not assign a place or assigned an
inferior one, did not lose his burgess-right, but could not exercise
the privileges of a burgess, or could only exercise them in the
inferior place, till the preparation of a new list. The same was the
case with the senate; the person omitted by the censor from his list
ceased to attend the senate, as long as the list in question remained
valid--unless the presiding magistrate should reject it and reinstate
the earlier list. Evidently therefore the important question in this
respect was not so much what was the legal liberty of the censors,
as how far their authority availed with those magistrates who had to
summon according to their lists. Hence it is easy to understand
how this prerogative gradually rose in importance, and how with the
increasing consolidation of the nobility such erasures assumed
virtually the form of judicial decisions and were virtually respected
as such. As to the adjustment of the senatorial list undoubtedly the
enactment of the Ovinian -plebiscitum- exercised a material share of
influence--that the censors should admit to the senate "the best men
out of all classes."
CHAPTER IV
But the subjugation, with which the coalition of the Etruscan and
Carthaginian nations had threatened both Greeks and Italians, was
fortunately averted by the combination of peoples drawn towards each
other by family affinity as well as by common peril. The Etruscan
army, which after the fall of Rome had penetrated into Latium, had
its victorious career checked in the first instance before the walls
of Aricia by the well-timed intervention of the Cumaeans who had
hastened to the succour of the Aricines (248). We know not how the
war ended, nor, in particular, whether Rome even at that time tore up
the ruinous and disgraceful peace. This much only is certain, that
on this occasion also the Tuscans were unable to maintain their ground
permanently on the left bank of the Tiber.
Events still more momentous, however, occurred about the same time in
Northern Italy. A new nation was knocking at the gates of the Alps:
it was the Celts; and their first pressure fell on the Etruscans.
The Celtic, Galatian, or Gallic nation received from the common mother
endowments different from those of its Italian, Germanic, and Hellenic
sisters. With various solid qualities and still more that were
brilliant, it was deficient in those deeper moral and political
qualifications which lie at the root of all that is good and great
in human development. It was reckoned disgraceful, Cicero tells us,
for the free Celts to till their fields with their own hands. They
preferred a pastoral life to agriculture; and even in the fertile
plains of the Po they chiefly practised the rearing of swine, feeding
on the flesh of their herds, and staying with them in the oak forests
day and night. Attachment to their native soil, such as characterized
the Italians and the Germans, was wanting in the Celts; while on the
other hand they delighted to congregate in towns and villages, which
accordingly acquired magnitude and importance among the Celts earlier
apparently than in Italy. Their political constitution was imperfect.
Not only was the national unity recognized but feebly as a bond of
connection--as is, in fact, the case with all nations at first--but
the individual communities were deficient in concord and firm
control, in earnest public spirit and consistency of aim. The only
organization for which they were fitted was a military one, where the
bonds of discipline relieved the individual from the troublesome task
of self-control. "The prominent qualities of the Celtic race," says
their historian Thierry, "were personal bravery, in which they
excelled all nations; an open impetuous temperament, accessible to
every impression; much intelligence, but at the same time extreme
mobility, want of perseverance, aversion to discipline and order,
ostentation and perpetual discord--the result of boundless vanity."
Cato the Elder more briefly describes them, nearly to the same effect;
"the Celts devote themselves mainly to two things--fighting and
-esprit-."(6) Such qualities--those of good soldiers but of bad
citizens--explain the historical fact, that the Celts have shaken all
states and have founded none. Everywhere we find them ready to rove
or, in other words, to march; preferring moveable property to landed
estate, and gold to everything else; following the profession of arms
as a system of organized pillage or even as a trade for hire, and
with such success at all events that even the Roman historian Sallust
acknowledges that the Celts bore off the prize from the Romans in
feats of arms. They were the true soldiers-of-fortune of antiquity,
as figures and descriptions represent them: with big but not sinewy
bodies, with shaggy hair and long mustaches--quite a contrast to the
Greeks and Romans, who shaved the head and upper lip; in variegated
embroidered dresses, which in combat were not unfrequently thrown off;
with a broad gold ring round the neck; wearing no helmets and without
missile weapons of any sort, but furnished instead with an immense
shield, a long ill-tempered sword, a dagger and a lance--all
ornamented with gold, for they were not unskilful at working in
metals. Everything was made subservient to ostentation, even wounds,
which were often subsequently enlarged for the purpose of boasting
a broader scar. Usually they fought on foot, but certain tribes on
horseback, in which case every freeman was followed by two attendants
likewise mounted; war-chariots were early in use, as they were among
the Libyans and the Hellenes in the earliest times. Various traits
remind us of the chivalry of the Middle Ages; particularly the custom
of single combat, which was foreign to the Greeks and Romans. Not
only were they accustomed during war to challenge a single enemy to
fight, after having previously insulted him by words and gestures;
during peace also they fought with each other in splendid suits of
armour, as for life or death. After such feats carousals followed as
a matter of course. In this way they led, whether under their own or
a foreign banner, a restless soldier-life; they were dispersed from
Ireland and Spain to Asia Minor, constantly occupied in fighting and
so-called feats of heroism. But all their enterprises melted away
like snow in spring; and nowhere did they create a great state or
develop a distinctive culture of their own.
Celtic Migrations--
The Celts Assail the Etruscans in Northern Italy
Conquest of Veii
The history of the war against the Veientes, Capenates, and Falisci,
and of the siege of Veii, which is said, like that of Troy, to have
lasted ten years, rests on evidence far from trustworthy. Legend and
poetry have taken possession of these events as their own, and with
reason; for the struggle in this case was waged, with unprecedented
exertions, for an unprecedented prize. It was the first occasion on
which a Roman army remained in the field summer and winter, year
after year, till its object was attained. It was the first occasion
on which the community paid the levy from the resources of the state.
But it was also the first occasion on which the Romans attempted
to subdue a nation of alien stock, and carried their arms beyond
the ancient northern boundary of the Latin land. The struggle was
vehement, but the issue was scarcely doubtful. The Romans were
supported by the Latins and Hernici, to whom the overthrow of their
dreaded neighbour was productive of scarcely less satisfaction and
advantage than to the Romans themselves; whereas Veii was abandoned
by its own nation, and only the adjacent towns of Capena and Falerii,
along with Tarquinii, furnished contingents to its help. The
contemporary attacks of the Celts would alone suffice to explain
the nonintervention of the northern communities; it is affirmed
however, and there is no reason to doubt, that this inaction of the
other Etruscans was primarily occasioned by internal factions in the
league of the Etruscan cities, and particularly by the opposition
which the regal form of government retained or restored by the
Veientes encountered from the aristocratic governments of the other
cities. Had the Etruscan nation been able or willing to take part
in the conflict, the Roman community would hardly have been able
--undeveloped as was the art of besieging at that time--to accomplish
the gigantic task of subduing a large and strong city. But isolated
and forsaken as Veii was, it succumbed (358) after a valiant
resistance to the persevering and heroic spirit of Marcus Furius
Camillus, who first opened up to his countrymen the brilliant and
perilous career of foreign conquest. The joy which this great success
excited in Rome had its echo in the Roman custom, continued down to a
late age, of concluding the festal games with a "sale of Veientes," at
which, among the mock spoils submitted to auction, the most wretched
old cripple who could be procured wound up the sport in a purple
mantle and ornaments of gold as "king of the Veientes." The city was
destroyed, and the soil was doomed to perpetual desolation. Falerii
and Capena hastened to make peace; the powerful Volsinii, which with
federal indecision had remained quiet during the agony of Veii and
took up arms after its capture, likewise after a few years (363)
consented to peace. The statement that the two bulwarks of the
Etruscan nation, Melpum and Veii, yielded on the same day, the former
to the Celts, the latter to the Romans, may be merely a melancholy
legend; but it at any rate involves a deep historical truth. The
double assault from the north and from the south, and the fall of
the two frontier strongholds, were the beginning of the end of the
great Etruscan nation.
The Celtic swarms, which had crossed the river after the fall of
Melpum, rapidly overflowed northern Italy--not merely the open country
on the right bank of the Po and along the shore of the Adriatic, but
also Etruria proper to the south of the Apennines. A few years
afterwards (363) Clusium situated in the heart of Etruria (Chiusi, on
the borders of Tuscany and the Papal State) was besieged by the Celtic
Senones; and so humbled were the Etruscans that the Tuscan city in
its straits invoked aid from the destroyers of Veii. Perhaps it would
have been wise to grant it and to reduce at once the Gauls by arms,
and the Etruscans by according to them protection, to a state of
dependence on Rome; but an intervention with aims so extensive, which
would have compelled the Romans to undertake a serious struggle on the
northern Tuscan frontier, lay beyond the horizon of the Roman policy
at that time. No course was therefore left but to refrain from all
interference. Foolishly, however, while declining to send auxiliary
troops, they despatched envoys. With still greater folly these sought
to impose upon the Celts by haughty language, and, when this failed,
they conceived that they might with impunity violate the law of
nations in dealing with barbarians; in the ranks of the Clusines they
took part in a skirmish, and in the course of it one of them stabbed
and dismounted a Gallic officer. The barbarians acted in this case
with moderation and prudence. They sent in the first instance to the
Roman community to demand the surrender of those who had outraged the
law of nations, and the senate was ready to comply with the reasonable
request. But with the multitude compassion for their countrymen
outweighed justice towards the foreigners; satisfaction was refused by
the burgesses; and according to some accounts they even nominated the
brave champions of their fatherland as consular tribunes for the
year 364,(9) which was to be so fatal in the Roman annals. Then the
Brennus or, in other words, the "king of the army" of the Gauls broke
up the siege of Clusium, and the whole Celtic host--the numbers of
which are stated at 70,000 men--turned against Rome. Such expeditions
into unknown land distant regions were not unusual for the Gauls, who
marched as bands of armed emigrants, troubling themselves little as
to the means of cover or of retreat; but it was evident that none in
Rome anticipated the dangers involved in so sudden and so mighty an
invasion. It was not till the Gauls were marching upon Rome that a
Roman military force crossed the Tiber and sought to bar their way.
Not twelve miles from the gates, opposite to the confluence of the
rivulet Allia with the Tiber, the armies met, and a battle took place
on the 18th July, 364. Even now they went into battle--not as against
an army, but as against freebooters--with arrogance and foolhardiness
and under inexperienced leaders, Camillus having in consequence of
the dissensions of the orders withdrawn from taking part in affairs.
Those against whom they were to fight were but barbarians; what need
was there of a camp, or of securing a retreat? These barbarians,
however, were men whose courage despised death, and their mode of
fighting was to the Italians as novel as it was terrible; sword in
hand the Celts precipitated themselves with furious onset on the Roman
phalanx, and shattered it at the first shock. The overthrow was
complete; of the Romans, who had fought with the river in their rear,
a large portion met their death in the attempt to cross it; such as
escaped threw themselves by a flank movement into the neighbouring
Veii. The victorious Celts stood between the remnant of the beaten
army and the capital. The latter was irretrievably abandoned to the
enemy; the small force that was left behind, or that had fled thither,
was not sufficient to garrison the walls, and three days after the
battle the victors marched through the open gates into Rome. Had they
done so at first, as they might have done, not only the city, but the
state also must have been lost; the brief interval gave opportunity
to carry away or to bury the sacred objects, and, what was more
important, to occupy the citadel and to furnish it with provisions for
the exigency. No one was admitted to the citadel who was incapable of
bearing arms--there was not food for all. The mass of the defenceless
dispersed among the neighbouring towns; but many, and in particular a
number of old men of high standing, would not survive the downfall
of the city and awaited death in their houses by the sword of the
barbarians. They came, murdered all they met with, plundered whatever
property they found, and at length set the city on fire on all sides
before the eyes of the Roman garrison in the Capitol. But they had
no knowledge of the art of besieging, and the blockade of the steep
citadel rock was tedious and difficult, because subsistence for the
great host could only be procured by armed foraging parties, and the
citizens of the neighbouring Latin cities, the Ardeates in particular,
frequently attacked the foragers with courage and success.
Nevertheless the Celts persevered, with an energy which in their
circumstances was unparalleled, for seven months beneath the rock,
and the garrison, which had escaped a surprise on a dark night only
in consequence of the cackling of the sacred geese in the Capitoline
temple and the accidental awaking of the brave Marcus Manlius, already
found its provisions beginning to fail, when the Celts received
information as to the Veneti having invaded the Senonian territory
recently acquired on the Po, and were thus induced to accept the
ransom money that was offered to procure their withdrawal. The
scornful throwing down of the Gallic sword, that it might be
outweighed by Roman gold, indicated very truly how matters stood.
The iron of the barbarians had conquered, but they sold their
victory and by selling lost it.
The Tuscans, who had taken advantage of the Celtic attack on Rome to
assail Veii, had accomplished nothing, because they had appeared in
insufficient force; the barbarians had scarcely departed, when the
heavy arm of Latium descended on the Tuscans with undiminished weight.
After the Etruscans had been repeatedly defeated, the whole of
southern Etruria as far as the Ciminian hills remained in the hands
of the Romans, who formed four new tribes in the territories of Veii,
Capena, and Falerii (367), and secured the northern boundary by
establishing the fortresses of Sutrium (371) and Nepete (381).
With rapid steps this fertile region, covered with Roman colonists,
became completely Romanized. About 396 the nearest Etruscan towns,
Tarquinii, Caere, and Falerii, attempted to revolt against the Roman
encroachments, and the deep exasperation which these had aroused in
Etruria was shown by the slaughter of the whole of the Roman prisoners
taken in the first campaign, three hundred and seven in number, in the
market-place of Tarquinii; but it was the exasperation of impotence.
In the peace (403) Caere, which as situated nearest to the Romans
suffered the heaviest retribution, was compelled to cede half its
territory to Rome, and with the diminished domain which was left
to it to withdraw from the Etruscan league, and to enter into the
relationship of subjects to Rome which had in the meanwhile been
constituted primarily for individual Latin communities. It seemed,
however, not advisable to leave to this more remote community alien in
race from the Roman such communal independence as was still retained
by the subject communities of Latium; the Caerite community received
the Roman franchise not merely without the privilege of electing or
of being elected at Rome, but also subject to the withholding of
self-administration, so that the place of magistrates of its own
was as regards justice and the census taken by those of Rome, and
a representative (-praefectus-) of the Roman praetor conducted
the administration on the spot--a form of subjection, which in
state-law first meets us here, whereby a state which had hitherto
been independent became converted into a community continuing to
subsist -de jure-, but deprived of all power of movement on its own part.
Not long afterwards (411) Falerii, which had preserved its original
Latin nationality even under Tuscan rule, abandoned the Etruscan league
and entered into perpetual alliance with Rome; and thereby the whole
of southern Etruria became in one form or other subject to Roman
supremacy. In the case of Tarquinii and perhaps of northern Etruria
generally, the Romans were content with restraining them for a
lengthened period by a treaty of peace for 400 months (403).
Pacification of Northern Italy
In northern Italy likewise the peoples that had come into collision
and conflict gradually settled on a permanent footing and within more
defined limits. The migrations over the Alps ceased, partly perhaps
in consequence of the desperate defence which the Etruscans made
in their more restricted home, and of the serious resistance of the
powerful Romans, partly perhaps also in consequence of changes unknown
to us on the north of the Alps. Between the Alps and the Apennines,
as far south as the Abruzzi, the Celts were now generally the ruling
nation, and they were masters more especially of the plains and rich
pastures; but from the lax and superficial nature of their settlement
their dominion took no deep root in the newly acquired land and by no
means assumed the shape of exclusive possession. How matters stood in
the Alps, and to what extent Celtic settlers became mingled there with
earlier Etruscan or other stocks, our unsatisfactory information as
to the nationality of the later Alpine peoples does not permit us
to ascertain; only the Raeti in the modern Grisons and Tyrol may be
described as a probably Etruscan stock. The Umbrians retained the
valleys of the Apennines, and the Veneti, speaking a different
language, kept possession of the north-eastern portion of the valley
of the Po. Ligurian tribes maintained their footing in the western
mountains, dwelling as far south as Pisa and Arezzo, and separating
the Celt-land proper from Etruria. The Celts dwelt only in the
intermediate flat country, the Insubres and Cenomani to the north
of the Po, the Boii to the south, and--not to mention smaller tribes
--the Senones on the coast of the Adriatic, from Ariminum to Ancona,
in the so-called "country of the Gauls" (-ager Gallicus-). But even
there Etruscan settlements must have continued partially at least to
subsist, somewhat as Ephesus and Miletus remained Greek under the
supremacy of the Persians. Mantua at any rate, which was protected
by its insular position, was a Tuscan city even in the time of the
empire, and Atria on the Po also, where numerous discoveries of vases
have been made, appears to have retained its Etruscan character; the
description of the coasts that goes under the name of Scylax, composed
about 418, calls the district of Atria and Spina Tuscan land. This
alone, moreover, explains how Etruscan corsairs could render the
Adriatic unsafe till far into the fifth century, and why not only
Dionysius of Syracuse covered its coasts with colonies, but even
Athens, as a remarkable document recently discovered informs us,
resolved about 429 to establish a colony in the Adriatic for
the protection of seafarers against the Tyrrhene pirates.
Whether the representation that the Italian Boii came through the more
easterly pass of the Poenine Alps rested on the ground of a genuine
legendary reminiscence, or only on the ground of an assumed connection
with the Boii dwelling to the north of the Danube, is a question that
must remain undecided.
CHAPTER V
The great achievement of the regal period was the establishment of the
sovereignty of Rome over Latium under the form of hegemony. It is in
the nature of the case evident that the change in the constitution of
Rome could not but powerfully affect both the relations of the Roman
state towards Latium and the internal organization of the Latin
communities themselves; and that it did so, is obvious from tradition.
The fluctuations which the revolution in Rome occasioned in the
Romano-Latin confederacy are attested by the legend, unusually vivid
and various in its hues, of the victory at the lake Regillus, which
the dictator or consul Aulus Postumius (255? 258?) is said to have
gained over the Latins with the help of the Dioscuri, and still more
definitely by the renewal of the perpetual league between Rome and
Latium by Spurius Cassius in his second consulate (261). These
narratives, however, give us no information as to the main matter,
the legal relation between the new Roman republic and the Latin
confederacy; and what from other sources we learn regarding that
relation comes to us without date, and can only be inserted here
with an approximation to probability.
Private Rights
The permanently united nation was able not only to maintain, but
also to extend on all sides its power. We have already(9) mentioned
that the Etruscans remained only for a short time in possession of
supremacy over Latium, and that the relations there soon returned to
the position in which they stood during the regal period; but it was
not till more than a century after the expulsion of the kings from
Rome that any real extension of the Roman boundaries took place
in this direction.
With the Sabines who occupied the middle mountain range from the
borders of the Umbrians down to the region between the Tiber and
the Anio, and who, at the epoch when the history of Rome begins,
penetrated fighting and conquering as far as Latium itself, the
Romans notwithstanding their immediate neighbourhood subsequently came
comparatively little into contact. The feeble sympathy of the Sabines
with the desperate resistance offered by the neighbouring peoples in
the east and south, is evident even from the accounts of the annals;
and--what is of more importance--we find here no fortresses to keep
the land in subjection, such as were so numerously established
especially in the Volscian plain. Perhaps this lack of opposition
was connected with the fact that the Sabine hordes probably about
this very time poured themselves over Lower Italy. Allured by the
pleasantness of the settlements on the Tifernus and Volturnus, they
appear to have interfered but little in the conflicts of which the
region to the south of the Tiber was the arena.
Far more vehement and lasting was the resistance of the Aequi, who,
having their settlements to the eastward of Rome as far as the valleys
of the Turano and Salto and on the northern verge of the Fucine lake,
bordered with the Sabines and Marsi,(10) and of the Volsci, who to the
south of the Rutuli settled around Ardea, and of the Latins extending
southward as far as Cora, possessed the coast almost as far as the
river Liris along with the adjacent islands and in the interior the
whole region drained by the Liris. We do not intend to narrate the
feuds annually renewed with these two peoples--feuds which are related
in the Roman chronicles in such a way that the most insignificant
foray is scarcely distinguishable from a momentous war, and historical
connection is totally disregarded; it is sufficient to indicate the
permanent results. We plainly perceive that it was the especial aim
of the Romans and Latins to separate the Aequi from the Volsci, and
to become masters of the communications between them; in the region
between the southern slope of the Alban range, the Volscian mountains
and the Pomptine marshes, moreover, the Latins and the Volscians
appear to have come first into contact and to have even had their
settlements intermingled.(11) In this region the Latins took
the first steps beyond the bounds of their own land, and federal
fortresses on foreign soil--Latin colonies, as they were called--were
first established, namely: in the plain Velitrae (as is alleged, about
260) beneath the Alban range itself, and Suessa in the Pomptine low
lands, in the mountains Norba (as is alleged, in 262) and Signia
(alleged to have been strengthened in 259), both of which lie at
the points of connection between the Aequian and Volscian territories.
The object was attained still more fully by the accession of the
Hernici to the league of the Romans and Latins (268), an accession
which isolated the Volscians completely, and provided the league with
a bulwark against the Sabellian tribes dwelling on the south and east;
it is easy therefore to perceive why this little people obtained the
concession of full equality with the two others in counsel and in
distribution of the spoil. The feebler Aequi were thenceforth but
little formidable; it was sufficient to undertake from time to time
a plundering expedition against them. The Rutuli also, who bordered
with Latium on the south in the plain along the coast, early
succumbed; their town Ardea was converted into a Latin colony as
early as 312.(12) The Volscians opposed a more serious resistance.
The first notable success, after those mentioned above, achieved over
them by the Romans was, remarkably enough, the foundation of Circeii
in 361, which, as long as Antium and Tarracina continued free, can
only have held communication with Latium by sea. Attempts were often
made to occupy Antium, and one was temporarily successful in 287; but
in 295 the town recovered its freedom, and it was not till after the
Gallic conflagration that, in consequence of a violent war of thirteen
years (365-377), the Romans gained a decided superiority in the
Antiate and Pomptine territory. Satricum, not far from Antium, was
occupied with a Latin colony in 369, and not long afterwards probably
Antium itself as well as Tarracina.(13) The Pomptine territory was
secured by the founding of the fortress Setia (372, strengthened in
375), and was distributed into farm-allotments and burgess-districts
in the year 371 and following years. After this date the Volscians
still perhaps rose in revolt, but they waged no further wars
against Rome.
But the more decided the successes that the league of Romans, Latins,
and Hernici achieved against the Etruscans, Aequi, Volsci, and Rutuli,
the more that league became liable to disunion. The reason lay
partly in the increase of the hegemonic power of Rome, of which
we have already spoken as necessarily springing out of the existing
circumstances, but which nevertheless was felt as a heavy burden in
Latium; partly in particular acts of odious injustice perpetrated by
the leading community. Of this nature was especially the infamous
sentence of arbitration between the Aricini and the Rutuli in Ardea
in 308, in which the Romans, called in to be arbiters regarding a
border territory in dispute between the two communities, took it to
themselves; and when this decision occasioned in Ardea internal
dissensions in which the people wished to join the Volsci, while
the nobility adhered to Rome, these dissensions were still more
disgracefully employed as a pretext for the--already mentioned
--sending of Roman colonists into the wealthy city, amongst whom the
lands of the adherents of the party opposed to Rome were distributed
(312). The main cause however of the internal breaking up of the
league was the very subjugation of the common foe; forbearance ceased
on one side, devotedness ceased on the other, from the time when they
thought that they had no longer need of each other. The open breach
between the Latins and Hernici on the one hand and the Romans on the
other was more immediately occasioned partly by the capture of Rome
by the Celts and the momentary weakness which it produced, partly by
the definitive occupation and distribution of the Pomptine territory.
The former allies soon stood opposed in the field. Already Latin
volunteers in great numbers had taken part in the last despairing
struggle of the Antiates: now the most famous of the Latin cities,
Lanuvium (371), Praeneste (372-374, 400), Tusculum (373), Tibur (394,
400), and even several of the fortresses established in the Volscian
land by the Romano-Latin league, such as Velitrae and Circeii, had to
be subdued by force of arms, and the Tiburtines were not afraid even
to make common cause against Rome with the once more advancing hordes
of the Gauls. No concerted revolt however took place, and Rome
mastered the individual towns without much trouble.
The struggle with the Hernici was more severe (392-396); the first
consular commander-in-chief belonging to the plebs, Lucius Genucius,
fell in it; but here too the Romans were victorious. The crisis
terminated with the renewal of the treaties between Rome and the Latin
and Hernican confederacies in 396. The precise contents of these
treaties are not known, but it is evident that both confederacies
submitted once more, and probably on harder terms, to the Roman
hegemony. The institution which took place in the same year of two
new tribes in the Pomptine territory shows clearly the mighty
advances made by the Roman power.
After the fall of Veii and the conquest of the Pomptine territory,
Rome evidently felt herself powerful enough to tighten the reins of
her hegemony and to reduce the whole of the Latin cities to a position
so dependent that they became in fact completely subject. At this
period (406) the Carthaginians, in a commercial treaty concluded with
Rome, bound themselves to inflict no injury on the Latins who were
subject to Rome, viz. the maritime towns of Ardea, Antium, Circeii,
and Tarracina; if, however, any one of the Latin towns should fall
away from the Roman alliance, the Phoenicians were to be allowed to
attack it, but in the event of conquering it they were bound not to
raze it, but to hand it over to the Romans. This plainly shows by
what chains the Roman community bound to itself the towns protected
by it and how much a town, which dared to withdraw from the native
protectorate, sacrificed or risked by such a course.
It is true that even now the Latin confederacy at least--if not also
the Hernican--retained its formal title to a third of the gains of
war, and doubtless some other remnants of the former equality of
rights; but what was palpably lost was important enough to explain the
exasperation which at this period prevailed among the Latins against
Rome. Not only did numerous Latin volunteers fight under foreign
standards against the community at their head, wherever they found
armies in the field against Rome; but in 405 even the Latin federal
assembly resolved to refuse to the Romans its contingent. To all
appearance a renewed rising of the whole Latin confederacy might be
anticipated at no distant date; and at that very moment a collision
was imminent with another Italian nation, which was able to encounter
on equal terms the united strength of the Latin stock. After the
overthrow of the northern Volscians no considerable people in
the first instance opposed the Romans in the south; their legions
unchecked approached the Liris. As early as 397 they had contended;
successfully with the Privernates; and in 409 occupied Sora on the
upper Liris. Thus the Roman armies had reached the Samnite frontier;
and the friendly alliance, which the two bravest and most powerful
of the Italian nations concluded with each other in 400, was the
sure token of an approaching struggle for the supremacy of Italy--a
struggle which threatened to become interwoven with the crisis within
the Latin nation.
About the period when Veii and the Pomptine plain came into the hands
of Rome, the Samnite hordes were already in possession of all Lower
Italy, with the exception of a few unconnected Greek colonies, and
of the Apulo-Messapian coast. The Greek Periplus, composed about 418,
sets down the Samnites proper with their "five tongues" as reaching
from the one sea to the other; and specifies the Campanians as
adjoining them on the Tyrrhene sea to the north, and the Lucanians
to the south, amongst whom in this instance, as often, the Bruttii
are included, and who already had the whole coast apportioned among
them from Paestum on the Tyrrhene, to Thurii on the Ionic sea. In
fact to one who compares the achievements of the two great nations
of Italy, the Latins and the Samnites, before they came into contact,
the career of conquest on the part of the latter appears far wider
and more splendid than that of the former. But the character of their
conquests was essentially different. From the fixed urban centre
which Latium possessed in Rome the dominion of the Latin stock spread
slowly on all sides, and lay within limits comparatively narrow; but
it planted its foot firmly at every step, partly by founding fortified
towns of the Roman type with the rights of dependent allies, partly
by Romanizing the territory which it conquered. It was otherwise
with Samnium. There was in its case no single leading community and
therefore no policy of conquest. While the conquest of the Veientine
and Pomptine territories was for Rome a real enlargement of power,
Samnium was weakened rather than strengthened by the rise of the
Campanian cities and of the Lucanian and Bruttian confederacies; for
every swarm, which had sought and found new settlements, thenceforward
pursued a path of its own.
The Samnite nation, moreover, could not resist the dangerous charm
of Hellenic culture; least of all in Campania, where Neapolis early
entered into friendly intercourse with the immigrants, and where
the sky itself humanized the barbarians. Nola, Nuceria, and Teanum,
although having a purely Samnite population, adopted Greek manners
and a Greek civic constitution; in fact the indigenous cantonal form
of constitution could not possibly subsist under these altered
circumstances. The Samnite cities of Campania began to coin money,
in part with Greek inscriptions; Capua became by its commerce and
agriculture the second city in Italy in point of size--the first in
point of wealth and luxury. The deep demoralization, in which,
according to the accounts of the ancients, that city surpassed all
others in Italy, is especially reflected in the mercenary recruiting
and in the gladiatorial sports, both of which pre-eminently flourished
in Capua. Nowhere did recruiting officers find so numerous a
concourse as in this metropolis of demoralized civilization; while
Capua knew not how to save itself from the attacks of the aggressive
Samnites, the warlike Campanian youth flocked forth in crowds under
self-elected -condottteri-, especially to Sicily. How deeply these
soldiers of fortune influenced by their enterprises the destinies of
Italy, we shall have afterwards to show; they form as characteristic
a feature of Campanian life as the gladiatorial sports which likewise,
if they did not originate, were at any rate carried to perfection in
Capua. There sets of gladiators made their appearance even during
banquets; and their number was proportioned to the rank of the guests
invited. This degeneracy of the most important Samnite city--a
degeneracy which beyond doubt was closely connected with the Etruscan
habits that lingered there--must have been fatal for the nation at
large; although the Campanian nobility knew how to combine chivalrous
valour and high mental culture with the deepest moral corruption, it
could never become to its nation what the Roman nobility was to the
Latin. Hellenic influence had a similar, though less powerful, effect
on the Lucanians and Bruttians as on the Campanians. The objects
discovered in the tombs throughout all these regions show how Greek
art was cherished there in barbaric luxuriance; the rich ornaments
of gold and amber and the magnificent painted pottery, which are now
disinterred from the abodes of the dead, enable us to conjecture how
extensive had been their departure from the ancient manners of their
fathers. Other indications are preserved in their writing. The old
national writing which they had brought with them from the north was
abandoned by the Lucanians and Bruttians, and exchanged for Greek;
while in Campania the national alphabet, and perhaps also the
language, developed itself under the influence of the Greek model
into greater clearness and delicacy. We meet even with isolated
traces of the influence of Greek philosophy.
In fact, it was this variance between the Samnites of the plain and
the Samnites of the mountains that led the Romans over the Liris.
The Sidicini in Teanum, and the Campanians in Capua, sought aid
from the Romans (411) against their own countrymen, who in swarms ever
renewed ravaged their territory and threatened to establish themselves
there. When the desired alliance was refused, the Campanian envoys
made offer of the submission of their country to the supremacy of
Rome: and the Romans were unable to resist the bait. Roman envoys
were sent to the Samnites to inform them of the new acquisition,
and to summon them to respect the territory of the friendly power.
The further course of events can no longer be ascertained in
detail;(20) we discover only that--whether after a campaign,
or without the intervention of a war--Rome and Samnium came to
an agreement, by which Capua was left at the disposal of the Romans,
Teanum in the hands of the Samnites, and the upper Liris in those
of the Volscians.
2. The original equality of the two armies is evident from Liv. i. 52;
viii. 8, 14, and Dionys. viii, 15; but most clearly from Polyb. vi. 26.
10. The country of the Aequi embraces not merely the valley of
the Anio above Tibur and the territory of the later Latin colonies
Carsioli (on the upper part of the Turano) and Alba (on the Fucine
lake), but also the district of the later municipium of the Aequiculi,
who are nothing but that remnant of the Aequi to which, after the
subjugation by the Romans, and after the assignation of the largest
portion of the territory to Roman or Latin colonists, municipal
independence was left.
12. Not long afterwards must have taken place the founding of the
-Nemus Dianae- in the forest of Aricia, which, according to Cato's
account (p. 12, Jordan), a Tusculan dictator accomplished for
the urban communities of old Latium, Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium,
Laurentum, Cora, and Tibur, and of the two Latin colonies (which
therefore stand last) Suessa Pometia and Ardea (-populus Ardeatis
Rutulus-). The absence of Praeneste and of the smaller communities
of the old Latium shows, as was implied in the nature of the case,
that not all the communities of the Latin league at that time took
part in the consecration. That it falls before 372 is proved by the
emergence of Pometia (II. V. Closing Of The Latin Confederation), and
the list quite accords with what can otherwise be ascertained as to
the state of the league shortly after the accession of Ardea.
13. The two do not appear as Latin colonies in the so-called Cassian
list about 372, but they so appear in the Carthaginian treaty of 406;
the towns had thus become Latin colonies in the interval.
14. In the list given by Dionysius (v. 61) of the thirty Latin
federal cities--the only list which we possess--there are named the
Ardeates, Aricini, Bovillani, Bubentani (site unknown), Corni (rather
Corani), Carventani (site unknown), Circeienses, Coriolani, Corbintes,
Cabani (perhaps the Cabenses on the Alban Mount, Bull, dell' Inst.
1861, p. 205), Fortinei (unknown), Gabini, Laurentes, Lanuvini,
Lavinates, Labicani, Nomentani, Norbani, Praenestini, Pedani,
Querquetulani (site unknown), Satricani, Scaptini, Setini, Tiburtini,
Tusculani, Tellenii (site unknown), Tolerini (site unknown), and
Veliterni. The occasional notices of communities entitled to
participate, such as of Ardea (Liv. xxxii. x), Laurentum (Liv. xxxvii.
3), Lanuvium (Liv. xli. 16), Bovillae, Gabii, Labici (Cicero, pro
Plane. 9, 23) agree with this list. Dionysius gives it on occasion
of the declaration of war by Latium against Rome in 256, and it was
natural therefore to regard--as Niebuhr did--this list as derived
from the well-known renewal of the league in 261, But, as in this list
drawn up according to the Latin alphabet the letter -g appears in a
position which it certainly had not at the time of the Twelve Tables
and scarcely came to occupy before the fifth century (see my
Unteritalische Dial. p. 33), it must be taken from a much more recent
source; and it is by far the simplest hypothesis to recognize it as
a list of those places which were afterwards regarded as the ordinary
members of the Latin confederacy, and which Dionysius in accordance
with his systematizing custom specifies as its original component
elements. As was to be expected, the list presents not a single
non-Latin community; it simply enumerates places originally Latin
or occupied by Latin colonies--no one will lay stress on Corbio and
Corioli as exceptions. Now if we compare with this list that of the
Latin colonies, there had been founded down to 372 Suessa Pometia,
Velitrae, Norba, Signia, Ardea, Circeii (361), Satricum (369), Sutrium
(371), Nepete (371), Setia (372). Of the last three founded at nearly
the same time the two Etruscan ones may very well date somewhat later
than Setia, since in fact the foundation of every town claimed
a certain amount of time, and our list cannot be free from minor
inaccuracies. If we assume this, then the list contains all the
colonies sent out up to the year 372, including the two soon
afterwards deleted from the list, Satricum destroyed in 377 and
Velitrae divested of Latin rights in 416; there are wanting only
Suessa Pometia, beyond doubt as having been destroyed before 372, and
Signia, probably because in the text of Dionysius, who mentions only
twenty-nine names, --SIGNINON-- has dropped out after --SEITINON--.
In entire harmony with this view there are absent from this list all
the Latin colonies founded after 372 as well as all places, which like
Ostia, Antemnae, Alba, were incorporated with the Roman community
before the year 370, whereas those incorporated subsequently, such
as Tusculum, Lanuvium, Velitrae, are retained in it.
15. Livy certainly states (iv. 47) that Labici became a colony in
336. But--apart from the fact that Diodorus (xiii. 6) says nothing
of it--Labici cannot have been a burgess-colony, for the town did
not lie on the coast and besides it appears subsequently as still in
possession of autonomy; nor can it have been a Latin one, for there is
not, nor can there be from the nature of these foundations, a single
other example of a Latin colony established in the original Latium.
Here as elsewhere it is most probable--especially as two -jugera- are
named as the portion of land allotted--that a public assignation to
the burgesses has been confounded with a colonial assignation ( I.
XIII. System of Joint Cultivation ).
20. Perhaps no section of the Roman annals has been more disfigured
than the narrative of the first Samnite-Latin war, as it stands or
stood in Livy, Dionysius, and Appian. It runs somewhat to the
following effect. After both consuls had marched into Campania in
411, first the consul Marcus Valerius Corvus gained a severe and
bloody victory over the Samnites at Mount Gaurus; then his colleague
Aulus Cornelius Cossus gained another, after he had been rescued from
annihilation in a narrow pass by the self-devotion of a division led
by the military tribune Publius Decius. The third and decisive battle
was fought by both consuls at the entrance of the Caudine Pass near
Suessula; the Samnites were completely vanquished--forty thousand of
their shields were picked up on the field of battle--and they were
compelled to make a peace, in which the Romans retained Capua, which
had given itself over to their possession, while they left Teanum to
the Samnites (413). Congratulations came from all sides, even from
Carthage. The Latins, who had refused their contingent and seemed to
be arming against Rome, turned their arms not against Rome but against
the Paeligni, while the Romans were occupied first with a military
conspiracy of the garrison left behind in Campania (412), then with
the capture of Privernum (413) and the war against the Antiates. But
now a sudden and singular change occurred in the position of parties.
The Latins, who had demanded in vain Roman citizenship and a share in
the consulate, rose against Rome in conjunction with the Sidicines,
who had vainly offered to submit to the Romans and knew not how to
save themselves from the Samnites, and with the Campanians, who were
already tired of the Roman rule. Only the Laurentes in Latium and the
-equites- of Campania adhered to the Romans, who on their part found
support among the Paeligni and Samnites. The Latin army fell upon
Samnium; the Romano-Samnite army, after it had marched to the Fucine
lake and from thence, avoiding Latium, into Campania, fought the
decisive battle against the combined Latins and Campanians at
Vesuvius; the consul Titus Manlius Imperiosus, after he had himself
restored the wavering discipline of the army by the execution of his
own son who had slain a foe in opposition to orders from headquarters,
and after his colleague Publius Decius Mus had appeased the gods by
sacrificing his life, at length gained the victory by calling up the
last reserves. But the war was only terminated by a second battle,
in which the consul Manlius engaged the Latins and Campanians near
Trifanum; Latium and Capua submitted, and were mulcted in a portion
of their territory.
The judicious and candid reader will not fail to observe that this
report swarms with all sorts of impossibilities. Such are the
statement of the Antiates waging war after the surrender of 377 (Liv.
vi. 33); the independent campaign of the Latins against the Paeligni,
in distinct contradiction to the stipulations of the treaties between
Rome and Latium; the unprecedented march of the Roman army through the
Marsian and Samnite territory to Capua, while all Latium was in arms
against Rome; to say nothing of the equally confused and sentimental
account of the military insurrection of 412, and the story of
its forced leader, the lame Titus Quinctius, the Roman Gotz von
Berlichingen. Still more suspicious perhaps, are the repetitions.
Such is the story of the military tribune Publius Decius modelled on
the courageous deed of Marcus Calpurnius Flamma, or whatever he was
called, in the first Punic war; such is the recurrence of the conquest
of Privernum by Gaius Plautius in the year 425, which second conquest
alone is registered in the triumphal Fasti; such is the self-immolation
of Publius Decius, repeated, as is well known, in the case of his son
in 459. Throughout this section the whole representation betrays
a different period and a different hand from the other more credible
accounts of the annals. The narrative is full of detailed pictures
of battles; of inwoven anecdotes, such as that of the praetor
of Setia, who breaks his neck on the steps of the senate-house because
he had been audacious enough to solicit the consulship, and the
various anecdotes concocted out of the surname of Titus Manlius; and
of prolix and in part suspicious archaeological digressions. In this
class we include the history of the legion--of which the notice, most
probably apocryphal, in Liv. i. 52, regarding the maniples of Romans
and Latins intermingled formed by the second Tarquin, is evidently a
second fragment, the erroneous view given of the treaty between Capua
and Rome (see my Rom. Munzwesen, p. 334, n. 122); the formularies of
self-devotion, the Campanian -denarius-, the Laurentine alliance,
and the -bina jugera- in the assignation (p. 450, note). Under such
circumstances it appears a fact of great weight that Diodorus, who
follows other and often older accounts, knows absolutely nothing of
any of these events except the last battle at Trifanum; a battle
in fact that ill accords with the rest of the narrative, which, in
accordance with the rules of poetical justice, ought to have concluded
with the death of Decius.
CHAPTER VI
While the Romans were fighting on the Liris and Volturnus, other
conflicts agitated the south-east of the peninsula. The wealthy
merchant-republic of Tarentum, daily exposed to more serious peril
from the Lucanian and Messapian bands and justly distrusting its own
sword, gained by good words and better coin the help of -condottieri-
from the mother-country. The Spartan king, Archidamus, who with
a strong band had come to the assistance of his fellow-Dorians,
succumbed to the Lucanians on the same day on which Philip conquered
at Chaeronea (416); a retribution, in the belief of the pious Greeks,
for the share which nineteen years previously he and his people had
taken in pillaging the sanctuary of Delphi. His place was taken by
an abler commander, Alexander the Molossian, brother of Olympias the
mother of Alexander the Great. In addition to the troops which he had
brought along with him he united under his banner the contingents of
the Greek cities, especially those of the Tarentines and Metapontines;
the Poediculi (around Rubi, now Ruvo), who like the Greeks found
themselves in danger from the Sabellian nation; and lastly, even the
Lucanian exiles themselves, whose considerable numbers point to the
existence of violent internal troubles in that confederacy. Thus he
soon found himself superior to the enemy. Consentia (Cosenza), which
seems to have been the federal headquarters of the Sabellians settled
in Magna Graecia, fell into his hands. In vain the Samnites came to
the help of the Lucanians; Alexander defeated their combined forces
near Paestum. He subdued the Daunians around Sipontum, and the
Messapians in the south-eastern peninsula; he already commanded from
sea to sea, and was on the point of arranging with the Romans a joint
attack on the Samnites in their native abodes. But successes so
unexpected went beyond the desires of the Tarentine merchants, and
filled them with alarm. War broke out between them and their captain,
who had come amongst them a hired mercenary and now appeared desirous
to found a Hellenic empire in the west like his nephew in the east.
Alexander had at first the advantage; he wrested Heraclea from the
Tarentines, restored Thurii, and seems to have called upon the other
Italian Greeks to unite under his protection against the Tarentines,
while he at the same time tried to bring about a peace between them
and the Sabellian tribes. But his grand projects found only feeble
support among the degenerate and desponding Greeks, and the forced
change of sides alienated from him his former Lucanian adherents: he
fell at Pandosia by the hand of a Lucanian emigrant (422).(1) On his
death matters substantially reverted to their old position. The Greek
cities found themselves once more isolated and once more left to
protect themselves as best they might by treaty or payment of tribute,
or even by extraneous aid; Croton for instance repulsed the Bruttii
about 430 with the help of the Syracusans. The Samnite tribes acquire
renewed ascendency, and were able, without troubling themselves
about the Greeks, once more to direct their eyes towards Campania
and Latium.
But there during the brief interval a prodigious change had occurred.
The Latin confederacy was broken and scattered, the last resistance
of the Volsci was overcome, the province of Campania, the richest
and finest in the peninsula, was in the undisputed and well-secured
possession of the Romans, and the second city of Italy was a
dependency of Rome. While the Greeks and Samnites were contending
with each other, Rome had almost without a contest raised herself to
a position of power which no single people in the peninsula possessed
the means of shaking, and which threatened to render all of them
subject to her yoke. A joint exertion on the part of the peoples who
were not severally a match for Rome might perhaps still burst the
chains, ere they became fastened completely. But the clearness of
perception, the courage, the self-sacrifice required for such a
coalition of numerous peoples and cities that had hitherto been for
the most part foes or at any rate strangers to each other, were not
to be found at all, or were found only when it was already too late.
After the fall of the Etruscan power and the weakening of the Greek
republics, the Samnite confederacy was beyond doubt, next to Rome, the
most considerable power in Italy, and at the same time that which was
most closely and immediately endangered by Roman encroachments. To
its lot therefore fell the foremost place and the heaviest burden in
the struggle for freedom and nationality which the Italians had to
wage against Rome. It might reckon upon the assistance of the small
Sabellian tribes, the Vestini, Frentani, Marrucini, and other smaller
cantons, who dwelt in rustic seclusion amidst their mountains, but
were not deaf to the appeal of a kindred stock calling them to take
up arms in defence of their common possessions. The assistance
of the Campanian Greeks and those of Magna Graecia (especially the
Tarentines), and of the powerful Lucanians and Bruttians would have
been of greater importance; but the negligence and supineness of the
demagogues ruling in Tarentum and the entanglement of that city in
the affairs of Sicily, the internal distractions of the Lucanian
confederacy, and above all the deep hostility that had subsisted
for centuries between the Greeks of Lower Italy and their Lucanian
oppressors, scarcely permitted the hope that Tarentum and Lucania
would make common cause with the Samnites. From the Sabines and the
Marsi, who were the nearest neighbours of the Romans and had long
lived in peaceful relations with Rome, little more could be expected
than lukewarm sympathy or neutrality. The Apulians, the ancient and
bitter antagonists of the Sabellians, were the natural allies of the
Romans. On the other hand it might be expected that the more remote
Etruscans would join the league if a first success were gained; and
even a revolt in Latium and the land of the Volsci and Hernici was
not impossible. But the Samnites--the Aetolians of Italy, in whom
national vigour still lived unimpaired--had mainly to rely on their
own energies for such perseverance in the unequal struggle as would
give the other peoples time for a generous sense of shame, for calm
deliberation, and for the mustering of their forces; a single success
might then kindle the flames of war and insurrection all around Rome.
History cannot but do the noble people the justice of acknowledging
that they understood and performed their duty.
Differences had already for several years existed between Rome and
Samnium in consequence of the continual aggressions in which the
Romans indulged on the Liris, and of which the founding of Fregellae
in 426 was the latest and most important. But it was the Greeks of
Campania that gave occasion to the outbreak of the contest. After
Cumae and Capua had become Roman, nothing so naturally suggested
itself to the Romans as the subjugation of the Greek city Neapolis,
which ruled also over the Greek islands in the bay--the only town
not yet reduced to subjection within the field of the Roman power.
The Tarentines and Samnites, informed of the scheme of the Romans to
obtain possession of the town, resolved to anticipate them; and while
the Tarentines were too remiss perhaps rather than too distant for the
execution of this plan, the Samnites actually threw into it a strong
garrison. The Romans immediately declared war nominally against the
Neapolitans, really against the Samnites (427), and began the siege
of Neapolis. After it had lasted a while, the Campanian Greeks
became weary of the disturbance of their commerce and of the foreign
garrison; and the Romans, whose whole efforts were directed to keep
states of the second and third rank by means of separate treaties
aloof from the coalition which was about to be formed, hastened, as
soon as the Greeks consented to negotiate, to offer them the most
favourable terms--full equality of rights and exemption from land
service, equal alliance and perpetual peace. Upon these conditions,
after the Neapolitans had rid themselves of the garrison by stratagem,
a treaty was concluded (428).
War in Samnium--
The Caudine Pass and the Caudine Peace
But the Roman senate, regardless of the oath of their officers and
of the fate of the hostages, cancelled the agreement, and contented
themselves with surrendering to the enemy those who had concluded it
as personally responsible for its fulfilment. Impartial history can
attach little importance to the question whether in so doing the
casuistry of Roman advocates and priests kept the letter of the law,
or whether the decree of the Roman senate violated it; under a human
and political point of view no blame in this matter rests upon the
Romans. It was a question of comparative indifference whether,
according to the formal state law of the Romans, the general in
command was or was not entitled to conclude peace without reserving
its ratification by the burgesses. According to the spirit and
practice of the constitution it was quite an established principle
that in Rome every state-agreement, not purely military, pertained
to the province of the civil authorities, and a general who concluded
peace without the instructions of the senate and the burgesses
exceeded his powers. It was a greater error on the part of the
Samnite general to give the Roman generals the choice between saving
their army and exceeding their powers, than it was on the part of
the latter that they had not the magnanimity absolutely to repel such
a suggestion; and it was right and necessary that the Roman senate
should reject such an agreement. A great nation does not surrender
what it possesses except under the pressure of extreme necessity: all
treaties making concessions are acknowledgments of such a necessity,
not moral obligations. If every people justly reckons it a point
of honour to tear to pieces by force of arms treaties that are
disgraceful, how could honour enjoin a patient adherence to a
convention like the Caudine to which an unfortunate general was
morally compelled, while the sting of the recent disgrace was
keenly felt and the vigour of the nation subsisted unimpaired?
Thus the convention of Caudium did not produce the rest which the
enthusiasts for peace in Samnium had foolishly expected from it, but
only led to war after war with exasperation aggravated on either side
by the opportunity forfeited, by the breach of a solemn engagement,
by military honour disgraced, and by comrades that had been abandoned.
The Roman officers given up were not received by the Samnites, partly
because they were too magnanimous to wreak their vengeance on those
unfortunates, partly because they would thereby have admitted the
Roman plea that the agreement bound only those who swore to it, not
the Roman state. Magnanimously they spared even the hostages whose
lives had been forfeited by the rules of war, and preferred to resort
at once to arms.
Apulia and Campania were thus in the hands of the Romans. In order
finally to secure and permanently to command the conquered territory,
several new fortresses were founded in it during the years 440-442:
Luceria in Apulia, to which on account of its isolated and exposed
situation half a legion was sent as a permanent garrison; Pontiae (the
Ponza islands) for the securing of the Campanian waters; Saticula on
the Campano-Samnite frontier, as a bulwark against Samnium; and lastly
Interamna (near Monte Cassino) and Suessa Aurunca (Sessa) on the
road from Rome to Capua. Garrisons moreover were sent to Caiatia
(Cajazzo), Sora, and other stations of military importance. The great
military road from Rome to Capua, which with the necessary embankment
for it across the Pomptine marshes the censor Appius Claudius caused
to be constructed in 442, completed the securing of Campania. The
designs of the Romans were more and more fully developed; their object
was the subjugation of Italy, which was enveloped more closely from
year to year in a network of Roman fortresses and roads. The Samnites
were already on both sides surrounded by the Roman meshes; already the
line from Rome to Luceria severed north and south Italy from each
other, as the fortresses of Norba and Signia had formerly severed the
Volsci and Aequi; and Rome now rested on the Arpani, as it formerly
rested on the Hernici. The Italians could not but see that the
freedom of all of them was gone if Samnium succumbed, and that it was
high time at length to hasten with all their might to the help of the
brave mountain people which had now for fifteen years singly sustained
the unequal struggle with the Romans.
The most natural allies of the Samnites would have been the
Tarentines; but it was part of that fatality that hung over Samnium
and over Italy in general, that at this moment so fraught with the
destinies of the future the decision lay in the hands of these
Athenians of Italy. Since the constitution of Tarentum, which was
originally after the old Doric fashion strictly aristocratic, had
become changed to a complete democracy, a life of singular activity
had sprung up in that city, which was inhabited chiefly by mariners,
fishermen, and artisans. The sentiments and conduct of the
population, more wealthy than noble, discarded all earnestness
amidst the giddy bustle and witty brilliance of their daily life, and
oscillated between the grandest boldness of enterprise and elevation
of spirit on the one hand, and a shameful frivolity and childish whim
on the other. It may not be out of place, in connection with a crisis
wherein the existence or destruction of nations of noble gifts and
ancient renown was at stake, to mention that Plato, who came to
Tarentum some sixty years before this time, according to his own
statement saw the whole city drunk at the Dionysia, and that the
burlesque farce, or "merry tragedy" as it was called, was created
in Tarentum about the very time of the great Samnite war. This
licentious life and buffoon poetry of the Tarentine fashionables and
literati had a fitting counterpart in the inconstant, arrogant, and
short-sighted policy of the Tarentine demagogues, who regularly
meddled in matters with which they had nothing to do, and kept aloof
where their immediate interests called for action. After the Caudine
catastrophe, when the Romans and Samnites stood opposed in Apulia,
they had sent envoys thither to enjoin both parties to lay down their
arms (434). This diplomatic intervention in the decisive struggle of
the Italians could not rationally have any other meaning than that of
an announcement that Tarentum had at length resolved to abandon
the neutrality which it had hitherto maintained. It had in fact
sufficient reason to do so. It was no doubt a difficult and dangerous
thing for Tarentum to be entangled in such a war; for the democratic
development of the state had directed its energies entirely to the
fleet, and while that fleet, resting upon the strong commercial
marine of Tarentum, held the first rank among the maritime powers
of Magna Graecia, the land force, on which they were in the present
case dependent, consisted mainly of hired soldiers and was sadly
disorganized. Under these circumstances it was no light undertaking
for the Tarentine republic to take part in the conflict between Rome
and Samnium, even apart from the--at least troublesome--feud in which
Roman policy had contrived to involve them with the Lucanians. But
these obstacles might be surmounted by an energetic will; and both the
contending parties construed the summons of the Tarentine envoys that
they should desist from the strife as meant in earnest. The Samnites,
as the weaker, showed themselves ready to comply with it; the Romans
replied by hoisting the signal for battle. Reason and honour dictated
to the Tarentines the propriety of now following up the haughty
injunction of their envoys by a declaration of war against Rome; but
in Tarentum neither reason nor honour characterized the government,
and they had simply been trifling in a very childish fashion with
very serious matters. No declaration of war against Rome took place;
in its stead they preferred to support the oligarchical party in the
Sicilian towns against Agathocles of Syracuse who had at a former
period been in the Tarentine service and had been dismissed in
disgrace, and following the example of Sparta, they sent a fleet
to the island--a fleet which would have rendered better service
in the Campanian seas (440).
The peoples of northern and central Italy, who seem to have been
roused especially by the establishment of the fortress of Luceria,
acted with more energy. The Etruscans first drew the sword (443), the
armistice of 403 having already expired some years before. The Roman
frontier-fortress of Sutrium had to sustain a two years' siege, and in
the vehement conflicts which took place under its walls the Romans as
a rule were worsted, till the consul of the year 444 Quintus Fabius
Rullianus, a leader who had gained experience in the Samnite wars, not
only restored the ascendency of the Roman arms in Roman Etruria, but
boldly penetrated into the land of the Etruscans proper, which had
hitherto from diversity of language and scanty means of communication
remained almost unknown to the Romans. His march through the Ciminian
Forest which no Roman army had yet traversed, and his pillaging of a
rich region that had long been spared the horrors of war, raised
all Etruria in arms. The Roman government, which had seriously
disapproved the rash expedition and had when too late forbidden the
daring leader from crossing the frontier, collected in the greatest
haste new legions, in order to meet the expected onslaught of the
whole Etruscan power. But a seasonable and decisive victory of
Rullianus, the battle at the Vadimonian lake which long lived in
the memory of the people, converted an imprudent enterprise into a
celebrated feat of heroism and broke the resistance of the Etruscans.
Unlike the Samnites who had now for eighteen years maintained the
unequal struggle, three of the most powerful Etruscan towns--Perusia,
Cortona, and Arretium--consented after the first defeat to a separate
peace for three hundred months (444), and after the Romans had once
more beaten the other Etruscans near Perusia in the following year,
the Tarquinienses also agreed to a peace of four hundred months (446);
whereupon the other cities desisted from the contest, and a temporary
cessation of arms took place throughout Etruria.
While these events were passing, the war had not been suspended in
Samnium. The campaign of 443 was confined like the preceding to the
besieging and storming of several strongholds of the Samnites; but
in the next year the war took a more vigorous turn. The dangerous
position of Rullianus in Etruria, and the reports which spread as
to the annihilation of the Roman army in the north, encouraged the
Samnites to new exertions; the Roman consul Gaius Marcius Rutilus was
vanquished by them and severely wounded in person. But the sudden
change in the aspect of matters in Etruria destroyed their newly
kindled hopes. Lucius Papirius Cursor again appeared at the head of
the Roman troops sent against the Samnites, and again remained the
victor in a great and decisive battle (445), in which the confederates
had put forth their last energies. The flower of their army--the
wearers of the striped tunics and golden shields, and the wearers of
the white tunics and silver shields--were there extirpated, and their
splendid equipments thenceforth on festal occasions decorated the rows
of shops along the Roman Forum. Their distress was ever increasing;
the struggle was becoming ever more hopeless. In the following year
(446) the Etruscans laid down their arms; and in the same year the
last town of Campania which still adhered to the Samnites, Nuceria,
simultaneously assailed on the part of the Romans by water and by
land, surrendered under favourable conditions. The Samnites found new
allies in the Umbrians of northern, and in the Marsi and Paeligni of
central, Italy, and numerous volunteers even from the Hernici joined
their ranks; but movements which might have decidedly turned the scale
against Rome, had the Etruscans still remained under arms, now simply
augmented the results of the Roman victory without seriously adding to
its difficulties. The Umbrians, who gave signs of marching on Rome,
were intercepted by Rullianus with the army of Samnium on the upper
Tiber--a step which the enfeebled Samnites were unable to prevent;
and this sufficed to disperse the Umbrian levies. The war once more
returned to central Italy. The Paeligni were conquered, as were also
the Marsi; and, though the other Sabellian tribes remained nominally
foes of Rome, in this quarter Samnium gradually came to stand
practically alone. But unexpected assistance came to them from
the district of the Tiber. The confederacy of the Hernici, called
by the Romans to account for their countrymen found among the Samnite
captives, now declared war against Rome (in 448)--more doubtless from
despair than from calculation. Some of the more considerable Hernican
communities from the first kept aloof from hostilities; but Anagnia,
by far the most eminent of the Hernican cities, carried out this
declaration of war. In a military point of view the position of the
Romans was undoubtedly rendered for the moment highly critical by this
unexpected rising in the rear of the army occupied with the siege of
the strongholds of Samnium. Once more the fortune of war favoured the
Samnites; Sora and Caiatia fell into their hands. But the Anagnines
succumbed with unexpected rapidity before troops despatched from Rome,
and these troops also gave seasonable relief to the army stationed
in Samnium: all in fact was lost. The Samnites sued for peace, but
in vain; they could not yet come to terms. The final decision was
reserved for the campaign of 449. Two Roman consular armies
penetrated--the one, under Tiberius Minucius and after his fall under
Marcus Fulvius, from Campania through the mountain passes, the other,
under Lucius Postumius, from the Adriatic upwards by the Biferno--into
Samnium, there to unite in front of Bovianum the capital; a decisive
victory was achieved, the Samnite general Statius Gellius was taken
prisoner, and Bovianum was carried by storm.
The fall of the chief stronghold of the land terminated the twenty-two
years' war. The Samnites withdrew their garrisons from Sora and
Arpinum, and sent envoys to Rome to sue for peace; the Sabellian
tribes, the Marsi, Marrucini, Paeligni, Frentani, Vestini, and
Picentes followed their example. The terms granted by Rome were
tolerable; cessions of territory were required from some of them,
from the Paeligni for instance, but they do not seem to have been of
much importance. The equal alliance was renewed between the Sabellian
tribes and the Romans (450).
The victory of Rome was complete; and she turned it to full account.
It was not from magnanimity in the conquerors--for the Romans knew
nothing of the sort--but from shrewd and far-seeing calculation that
terms so moderate were granted to the Samnites, the Tarentines, and
the more distant peoples generally. The first and main object was not
so much to compel southern Italy as quickly as possible to recognize
formally the Roman supremacy, as to supplement and complete the
subjugation of central Italy, for which the way had been prepared by
the military roads and fortresses already established in Campania and
Apulia during the last war, and by that means to separate the northern
and southern Italians into two masses cut off in a military point of
view from direct contact with each other. To this object accordingly
the next undertakings of the Romans were with consistent energy
directed. Above all they used, or made, the opportunity for getting
rid of the confederacies of the Aequi and the Hernici which had once
been rivals of the Roman single power in the region of the Tiber and
were not yet quite set aside. In the same year, in which the peace
with Samnium took place (450), the consul Publius Sempronius Sophus
waged war on the Aequi; forty townships surrendered in fifty days; the
whole territory with the exception of the narrow and rugged mountain
valley, which still in the present day bears the old name of the
people (Cicolano), passed into the possession of the Romans, and here
on the northern border of the Fucine lake was founded the fortress
Alba with a garrison of 6000 men, thenceforth forming a bulwark
against the valiant Marsi and a curb for central Italy; as was also
two years afterwards on the upper Turano, nearer to Rome, Carsioli
--both as allied communities with Latin rights.
The fact that in the case of the Hernici at least Anagnia had taken
part in the last stage of the Samnite war, furnished the desired
reason for dissolving the old relation of alliance. The fate of the
Anagnines was, as might be expected, far harder than that which had
under similar circumstances been meted out to the Latin communities
in the previous generation. They not merely had, like these, to
acquiesce in the Roman citizenship without suffrage, but they also
like the Caerites lost self-administration; out of a portion of their
territory on the upper Trerus (Sacco), moreover, a new tribe was
instituted, and another was formed at the same time on the lower Anio
(455). The only regret was that the three Hernican communities next
in importance to Anagnia, Aletrium, Verulae, and Ferentinum, had not
also revolted; for, as they courteously declined the suggestion that
they should voluntarily enter into the bond of Roman citizenship and
there existed no pretext for compelling them to do so, the Romans were
obliged not only to respect their autonomy, but also to allow to them
even the right of assembly and of intermarriage, and in this way
still to leave a shadow of the old Hernican confederacy. No such
considerations fettered their action in that portion of the Volscian
country which had hitherto been held by the Samnites. There Arpinum
and Frusino became subject, the latter town was deprived of a third
of its domain, and on the upper Liris in addition to Fregellae the
Volscian town of Sora, which had previously been garrisoned, was now
permanently converted into a Roman fortress and occupied by a legion
of 4000 men. In this way the old Volscian territory was completely
subdued, and became rapidly Romanized. The region which separated
Samnium from Etruria was penetrated by two military roads, both of
which were secured by new fortresses. The northern road, which
afterwards became the Flaminian, covered the line of the Tiber; it
led through Ocriculum, which was in alliance with Rome, to Narnia, the
name which the Romans gave to the old Umbrian fortress Nequinum when
they settled a military colony there (455). The southern, afterwards
the Valerian, ran along the Fucine lake by way of the just mentioned
fortresses of Carsioli and Alba. The small tribes within whose bounds
these colonies were instituted, the Umbrians who obstinately defended
Nequinum, the Aequians who once more assailed Alba, and the Marsians
who attacked Carsioli, could not arrest the course of Rome: the two
strong curb-fortresses were inserted almost without hindrance between
Samnium and Etruria. We have already mentioned the great roads and
fortresses instituted for permanently securing Apulia and above all
Campania: by their means Samnium was further surrounded on the east
and west with the net of Roman strongholds. It is a significant
token of the comparative weakness of Etruria that it was not deemed
necessary to secure the passes through the Ciminian Forest in a
similar mode--by a highway and corresponding fortresses. The former
frontier fortress of Sutrium continued to be in this quarter the
terminus of the Roman military line, and the Romans contented
themselves with having the road leading thence to Arretium kept
in a serviceable state for military purposes by the communities
through whose territories it passed.(4)
The high-spirited Samnite nation perceived that such a peace was more
ruinous than the most destructive war; and, what was more, it acted
accordingly. The Celts in northern Italy were just beginning to
bestir themselves again after a long suspension of warfare; moreover
several Etruscan communities there were still in arms against the
Romans, and brief armistices alternated in that quarter with vehement
but indecisive conflicts. All central Italy was still in ferment and
partly in open insurrection; the fortresses were still only in course
of construction; the way between Etruria and Samnium was not yet
completely closed. Perhaps it was not yet too late to save freedom;
but, if so, there must be no delay; the difficulty of attack
increased, the power of the assailants diminished with every year
by which the peace was prolonged. Five years had scarce elapsed since
the contest ended, and all the wounds must still have been bleeding
which the twenty-two years' war had inflicted on the peasantry of
Samnium, when in the year 456 the Samnite confederacy renewed the
struggle. The last war had been decided in favour of Rome mainly
through the alliance of Lucania with the Romans and the consequent
standing aloof of Tarentum. The Samnites, profiting by that lesson,
now threw themselves in the first instance with all their might on the
Lucanians, and succeeded in bringing their party in that quarter to
the helm of affairs, and in concluding an alliance between Samnium and
Lucania. Of course the Romans immediately declared war; the Samnites
had expected no other issue. It is a significant indication of the
state of feeling, that the Samnite government informed the Roman
envoys that it was not able to guarantee their inviolability, if
they should set foot on Samnite ground.
The war thus began anew (456), and while a second army was fighting
in Etruria, the main Roman army traversed Samnium and compelled the
Lucanians to make peace and send hostages to Rome. The following
year both consuls were able to proceed to Samnium; Rullianus conquered
at Tifernum, his faithful comrade in arms, Publius Decius Mus, at
Maleventum, and for five months two Roman armies encamped in the land
of the enemy. They were enabled to do so, because the Tuscan states
had on their own behalf entered into negotiations for peace with Rome.
The Samnites, who from the beginning could not but see that their only
chance of victory lay in the combination of all Italy against Rome,
exerted themselves to the utmost to prevent the threatened separate
peace between Etruria and Rome; and when at last their general,
Gellius Egnatius, offered to bring aid to the Etruscans in their own
country, the Etruscan federal council in reality agreed to hold out
and once more to appeal to the decision of arms. Samnium made the
most energetic efforts to place three armies simultaneously in the
field, the first destined for the defence of its own territory, the
second for an invasion of Campania, the third and most numerous
for Etruria; and in the year 458 the last, led by Egnatius himself,
actually reached Etruria in safety through the Marsian and Umbrian
territories, with whose inhabitants there was an understanding.
Meanwhile the Romans were capturing some strong places in Samnium and
breaking the influence of the Samnite party in Lucania; they were not
in a position to prevent the departure of the army led by Egnatius.
When information reached Rome that the Samnites had succeeded in
frustrating all the enormous efforts made to sever the southern
from the northern Italians, that the arrival of the Samnite bands in
Etruria had become the signal for an almost universal rising against
Rome, and that the Etruscan communities were labouring with the utmost
zeal to get their own forces ready for war and to take into their pay
Gallic bands, every nerve was strained also in Rome; the freedmen and
the married were formed into cohorts--it was felt on all hands that
the decisive crisis was near. The year 458 however passed away,
apparently, in armings and marchings. For the following year (459)
the Romans placed their two best generals, Publius Decius Mus and the
aged Quintus Fabius Rullianus, at the head of their army in Etruria,
which was reinforced with all the troops that could be spared from
Campania, and amounted to at least 60,000 men, of whom more than a
third were full burgesses of Rome. Besides this, two reserves were
formed, the first at Falerii, the second under the walls of the
capital. The rendezvous of the Italians was Umbria, towards which the
roads from the Gallic, Etruscan, and Sabellian territories converged;
towards Umbria the consuls also moved off their main force, partly
along the left, partly along the right bank of the Tiber, while at
the same time the first reserve made a movement towards Etruria, in
order if possible to recall the Etruscan troops from the main scene
of action for the defence of their homes. The first engagement did
not prove fortunate for the Romans; their advanced guard was defeated
by the combined Gauls and Samnites in the district of Chiusi. But
that diversion accomplished its object. Less magnanimous than the
Samnites, who had marched through the ruins of their towns that they
might not be absent from the chosen field of battle, a great part of
the Etruscan contingents withdrew from the federal army on the news
of the advance of the Roman reserve into Etruria, and its ranks
were greatly thinned when the decisive battle came to be fought on
the eastern declivity of the Apennines near Sentinum.
Battle of Sentinum--
Peace with Etruria
But the Samnites were of a different mind; they prepared for their
hopeless resistance with the courage of free men, which cannot
compel success but may put it to shame. When the two consular armies
advanced into Samnium, in the year 460, they encountered everywhere
the most desperate resistance; in fact Marcus Atilius was discomfited
near Luceria, and the Samnites were able to penetrate into Campania
and to lay waste the territory of the Roman colony Interamna on the
Liris. In the ensuing year Lucius Papirius Cursor, the son of the
hero of the first Samnite war, and Spurius Carvilius, gave battle on
a great scale near Aquilonia to the Samnite army, the flower of which
--the 16,000 in white tunics--had sworn a sacred oath to prefer death
to flight. Inexorable destiny, however, heeds neither the oaths nor
the supplications of despair; the Roman conquered and stormed the
strongholds where the Samnites had sought refuge for themselves and
their property. Even after this great defeat the confederates still
for years resisted the ever-increasing superiority of the enemy with
unparalleled perseverance in their fastnesses and mountains, and still
achieved various isolated advantages. The experienced arm of the old
Rullianus was once more called into the field against them (462), and
Gavius Pontius, a son perhaps of the victor of Caudium, even gained
for his nation a last victory, which the Romans meanly enough avenged
by causing him when subsequently taken to be executed in prison (463).
But there was no further symptom of movement in Italy; for the war,
which Falerii began in 461, scarcely deserves such a name. The
Samnites doubtless turned with longing eyes towards Tarentum, which
alone was still in a position to grant them aid; but it held aloof.
The same causes as before occasioned its inaction--internal
misgovernment, and the passing over of the Lucanians once more to the
Roman party in the year 456; to which fell to be added a not unfounded
dread of Agathocles of Syracuse, who just at that time had reached the
height of his power and began to turn his views towards Italy.
About 455 the latter established himself in Corcyra whence Cleonymus
had been expelled by Demetrius Poliorcetes, and now threatened the
Tarentines from the Adriatic as well as from the Ionian sea.
The cession of the island to king Pyrrhus of Epirus in 459 certainly
removed to a great extent the apprehensions which they had cherished;
but the affairs of Corcyra continued to occupy the Tarentines--in the
year 464, for instance, they helped to protect Pyrrhus in possession
of the island against Demetrius--and in like manner Agathocles did not
cease to give the Tarentines uneasiness by his Italian policy. When
he died (465) and with him the power of the Syracusans in Italy went
to wreck, it was too late; Samnium, weary of the thirty-seven years'
struggle, had concluded peace in the previous year (464) with the
Roman consul Manius Curius Dentatus, and had in form renewed its
league with Rome. On this occasion, as in the peace of 450, no
disgraceful or destructive conditions were imposed on the brave people
by the Romans; no cessions even of territory seem to have taken place.
The political sagacity of Rome preferred to follow the path which it
had hitherto pursued, and to attach in the first place the Campanian
and Adriatic coast more and more securely to Rome before proceeding to
the direct conquest of the interior. Campania, indeed, had been long
in subjection; but the far-seeing policy of Rome found it needful, in
order to secure the Campanian coast, to establish two coast-fortresses
there, Minturnae and Sinuessa (459), the new burgesses of which were
admitted according to the settled rule in the case of maritime
colonies to the full citizenship of Rome. With still greater energy
the extension of the Roman rule was prosecuted in central Italy. As
the subjugation of the Aequi and Hernici was the immediate sequel of
the first Samnite war, so that of the Sabines followed on the end of
the second. The same general, who ultimately subdued the Samnites,
Manius Curius broke down in the same year (464) the brief and feeble
resistance of the Sabines and forced them to unconditional surrender.
A great portion of the subjugated territory was immediately taken into
possession of the victors and distributed to Roman burgesses, and
Roman subject-rights (-civitas sine suffragio-) were imposed on the
communities that were left--Cures, Reate, Amiternum, Nursia. Allied
towns with equal rights were not established here; on the contrary the
country came under the immediate rule of Rome, which thus extended as
far as the Apennines and the Umbrian mountains. Nor was it even now
restricted to the territory on Rome's side of the mountains; the last
war had shown but too clearly that the Roman rule over central Italy
was only secured, if it reached from sea to sea. The establishment
of the Romans beyond the Apennines begins with the laying out of the
strong fortress of Atria (Atri) in the year 465, on the northern slope
of the Abruzzi towards the Picenian plain, not immediately on the
coast and hence with Latin rights, but still near to the sea, and the
keystone of the mighty wedge separating northern and southern Italy.
Of a similar nature and of still greater importance was the founding
of Venusia (463), whither the unprecedented number of 20,000 colonists
was conducted. That city, founded at the boundary of Samnium, Apulia,
and Lucania, on the great road between Tarentum and Samnium, in an
uncommonly strong position, was destined as a curb to keep in check
the surrounding tribes, and above all to interrupt the communications
between the two most powerful enemies of Rome in southern Italy.
Beyond doubt at the same time the southern highway, which Appius
Claudius had carried as far as Capua, was prolonged thence to Venusia.
Thus, at the close of the Samnite wars, the Roman domain closely
compact--that is, consisting almost exclusively of communities with
Roman or Latin rights--extended on the north to the Ciminian Forest,
on the east to the Abruzzi and to the Adriatic, on the south as far as
Capua, while the two advanced posts, Luceria and Venusia, established
towards the east and south on the lines of communication of their
opponents, isolated them on every side. Rome was no longer merely the
first, but was already the ruling power in the peninsula, when towards
the end of the fifth century of the city those nations, which had been
raised to supremacy in their respective lands by the favour of the
gods and by their own capacity, began to come into contact in council
and on the battle-field; and, as at Olympia the preliminary victors
girt themselves for a second and more serious struggle, so on the
larger arena of the nations, Carthage, Macedonia, and Rome now
prepared for the final and decisive contest.
3. That a formal armistice for two years subsisted between the Romans
and Samnites in 436-437 is more than improbable.
4. The operations in the campaign of 537, and still more plainly the
formation of the highway from Arretium to Bononia in 567, show that
the road from Rome to Arretium had already been rendered serviceable
before that time. But it cannot at that period have been a Roman
military road, because, judging from its later appellation of the
"Cassian way," it cannot have been constructed as a -via consularis-
earlier than 583; for no Cassian appears in the lists of Roman consuls
and censors between Spurius Cassius, consul in 252, 261, and 268--who
of course is out of the question--and Gaius Cassius Longinus, consul
in 583.
CHAPTER VII
After Rome had acquired the undisputed mastery of the world, the
Greeks were wont to annoy their Roman masters by the assertion that
Rome was indebted for her greatness to the fever of which Alexander of
Macedonia died at Babylon on the 11th of June, 431. As it was not too
agreeable for them to reflect on the actual past, they were fond of
allowing their thoughts to dwell on what might have happened, had the
great king turned his arms--as was said to have been his intention at
the time of his death--towards the west and contested the Carthaginian
supremacy by sea with his fleet, and the Roman supremacy by land with
his phalanxes. It is not impossible that Alexander may have cherished
such thoughts; nor is it necessary to resort for an explanation of
their origin to the mere difficulty which an autocrat, who is fond
of war and is well provided with soldiers and ships, experiences in
setting limits to his warlike career. It was an enterprise worthy of
a Greek great king to protect the Siceliots against Carthage and the
Tarentines against Rome, and to put an end to piracy on either sea;
and the Italian embassies from the Bruttians, Lucanians, and
Etruscans,(1) that along with numerous others made their appearance at
Babylon, afforded him sufficient opportunities of becoming acquainted
with the circumstances of the peninsula and of entering into relations
with it. Carthage with its many connections in the east could not but
attract the attention of the mighty monarch, and it was probably one
of his designs to convert the nominal sovereignty of the Persian king
over the Tyrian colony into a real one: it was not for nothing that
a Phoenician spy was found in the retinue of Alexander. Whether,
however, these ideas were dreams or actual projects, the king died
without having interfered in the affairs of the west, and his ideas
were buried with him. For but a few brief years a Greek ruler had
held in his hand the whole intellectual vigour of the Hellenic race
combined with the whole material resources of the east. On his death
the work to which his life had been devoted--the establishment of
Hellenism in the east--was by no means undone; but his empire had
barely been united when it was again dismembered, and, amidst the
constant quarrels of the different states that were formed out of
its ruins, the object of world-wide interest which they were destined
to promote--the diffusion of Greek culture in the east--though not
abandoned, was prosecuted on a feeble and stunted scale. Under such
circumstances, neither the Greek nor the Asiatico-Egyptian states
could think of acquiring a footing in the west or of turning their
efforts against the Romans or the Carthaginians. The eastern and
western state-systems subsisted side by side for a time without
crossing, politically, each other's path; and Rome in particular
remained substantially aloof from the complications in the days
of Alexander's successors. The only relations established were of
a mercantile kind; as in the instance of the free state of Rhodes,
the leading representative of the policy of commercial neutrality in
Greece and in consequence the universal medium of intercourse in an
age of perpetual wars, which about 448 concluded a treaty with Rome
--a commercial convention of course, such as was natural between a
mercantile people and the masters of the Caerite and Campanian
coasts. Even in the supply of mercenaries from Hellas, the universal
recruiting field of those times, to Italy, and to Tarentum in
particular, political relations--such as subsisted, for instance,
between Tarentum and Sparta its mother-city--exercised but a very
subordinate influence. In general the raising of mercenaries was
simply a matter of traffic, and Sparta, although it regularly supplied
the Tarentines with captains for their Italian wars, was by that
course as little involved in hostilities with the Italians, as in the
North American war of independence the German states were involved in
hostilities with the Union, to whose opponents they sold the services
of their subjects.
King Pyrrhus was the son of Aeacides, ruler of the Molossians (about
Janina), who, spared as a kinsman and faithful vassal by Alexander,
had been after his death drawn into the whirlpool of Macedonian
family-politics, and lost in it first his kingdom and then his life
(441). His son, then six years of age, was saved by Glaucias the
ruler of the Illyrian Taulantii, and in the course of the conflicts
for the possession of Macedonia he was, when still a boy, restored by
Demetrius Poliorcetes to his hereditary principality (447)--but only
to lose it again after a few years through the influence of the
opposite party (about 452), and to begin his military career as an
exiled prince in the train of the Macedonian generals. Soon his
personality asserted itself. He shared in the last campaigns of
Antigonus; and the old marshal of Alexander took delight in the born
soldier, who in the judgment of the grey-headed general only wanted
years to be already the first warrior of the age. The unfortunate
battle at Ipsus brought him as a hostage to Alexandria, to the court
of the founder of the Lagid dynasty, where by his daring and downright
character, and his soldierly spirit thoroughly despising everything
that was not military, he attracted the attention of the politic king
Ptolemy no less than he attracted the notice of the royal ladies by
his manly beauty, which was not impaired by his wild look and stately
tread. Just at this time the enterprising Demetrius was once more
establishing himself in a new kingdom, which on this occasion was
Macedonia; of course with the intention of using it as a lever to
revive the monarchy of Alexander. To keep down his ambitious designs,
it was important to give him employment at home; and Ptolemy, who knew
how to make admirable use of such fiery spirits as the Epirot youth in
the prosecution of his subtle policy, not only met the wishes of his
consort queen Berenice, but also promoted his own ends, by giving his
stepdaughter the princess Antigone in marriage to the young prince,
and lending his aid and powerful influence to support the return of
his beloved "son" to his native land (458). Restored to his paternal
kingdom, he soon carried all before him. The brave Epirots, the
Albanians of antiquity, clung with hereditary loyalty and fresh
enthusiasm to the high-spirited youth--the "eagle," as they called
him. In the confusion that arose regarding the succession to the
Macedonian throne after the death of Cassander (457), the Epirot
extended his dominions: step by step he gained the regions on the
Ambracian gulf with the important town of Ambracia, the island of
Corcyra,(2) and even a part of the Macedonian territory, and with
forces far inferior he made head against king Demetrius to the
admiration of the Macedonians themselves. Indeed, when Demetrius was
by his own folly hurled from the Macedonian throne, it was voluntarily
proffered by them to his chivalrous opponent, a kinsman of the
Alexandrid house (467). No one was in reality worthier than Pyrrhus
to wear the royal diadem of Philip and of Alexander. In an age of
deep depravity, in which princely rank and baseness began to be
synonymous, the personally unspotted and morally pure character of
Pyrrhus shone conspicuous. For the free farmers of the hereditary
Macedonian soil, who, although diminished and impoverished, were
far from sharing in that decay of morals and of valour which the
government of the Diadochi produced in Greece and Asia, Pyrrhus
appeared exactly formed to be the fitting king, --Pyrrhus, who,
like Alexander, in his household and in the circle of his friends
preserved a heart open to all human sympathies, and constantly
avoided the bearing of an Oriental sultan which was so odious to the
Macedonians; and who, like Alexander, was acknowledged to be the first
tactician of his time. But the singularly overstrained national
feeling of the Macedonians, which preferred the most paltry Macedonian
sovereign to the ablest foreigner, and the irrational insubordination
of the Macedonian troops towards every non-Macedonian leader, to which
Eumenes the Cardian, the greatest general of the school of Alexander,
had fallen a victim, put a speedy termination to the rule of the
prince of Epirus. Pyrrhus, who could not exercise sovereignty over
Macedonia with the consent of the Macedonians, and who was too
powerless and perhaps too high spirited to force himself on the nation
against its will, after reigning seven months left the country to its
native misgovernment, and went home to his faithful Epirots (467).
But the man who had worn the crown of Alexander, the brother-in-law
of Demetrius, the son-in-law of Ptolemy Lagides and of Agathocles
of Syracuse, the highly-trained tactician who wrote memoirs and
scientific dissertations on the military art, could not possibly end
his days in inspecting at a set time yearly the accounts of the royal
cattle steward, in receiving from his brave Epirots their customary
gifts of oxen and sheep, in thereupon, at the altar of Zeus, procuring
the renewal of their oath of allegiance and repeating his own
engagement to respect the laws, and--for the better confirmation of
the whole--in carousing with them all night long. If there was no
place for him on the throne of Macedonia, there was no abiding in the
land of his nativity at all; he was fitted for the first place, and
he could not be content with the second. His views therefore turned
abroad. The kings, who were quarrelling for the possession of
Macedonia, although agreeing in nothing else, were ready and glad to
concur in aiding the voluntary departure of their dangerous rival; and
that his faithful war-comrades would follow him where-ever he led, he
knew full well. Just at that time the circumstances of Italy were
such, that the project which had been meditated forty years before by
Pyrrhus's kinsman, his father's cousin, Alexander of Epirus, and quite
recently by his father-in-law Agathocles, once more seemed feasible;
and so Pyrrhus resolved to abandon his Macedonian schemes and to found
for himself and for the Hellenic nation a new empire in the west.
The interval of repose, which the peace with Samnium in 464 had
procured for Italy, was of brief duration; the impulse which led to
the formation of a new league against Roman ascendency came on this
occasion from the Lucanians. This people, by taking part with Rome
during the Samnite wars, paralyzed the action of the Tarentines and
essentially contributed to the decisive issue; and in consideration of
their services, the Romans gave up to them the Greek cities in their
territory. Accordingly after the conclusion of peace they had, in
concert with the Bruttians, set themselves to subdue these cities in
succession. The Thurines, repeatedly assailed by Stenius Statilius
the general of the Lucanians and reduced to extremities, applied for
assistance against the Lucanians to the Roman senate--just as formerly
the Campanians had asked the aid of Rome against the Samnites--and
beyond doubt with a like sacrifice of their liberty and independence.
In consequence of the founding of the fortress Venusia, Rome could
dispense with the alliance of the Lucanians; so the Romans granted
the prayer of the Thurines, and enjoined their friends and allies to
desist from their designs on a city which had surrendered itself to
Rome. The Lucanians and Bruttians, thus cheated by their more
powerful allies of their share in the common spoil, entered into
negotiations with the opposition-party among the Samnites and
Tarentines to bring about a new Italian coalition; and when the Romans
sent an embassy to warn them, they detained the envoys in captivity
and began the war against Rome with a new attack on Thurii (about
469), while at the same time they invited not only the Samnites and
Tarentines, but the northern Italians also--the Etruscans, Umbrians,
and Gauls--to join them in the struggle for freedom. The Etruscan
league actually revolted, and hired numerous bands of Gauls; the Roman
army, which the praetor Lucius Caecilius was leading to the help of
the Arretines who had remained faithful, was annihilated under the
walls of Arretium by the Senonian mercenaries of the Etruscans: the
general himself fell with 13,000 of his men (470). The Senones were
reckoned allies of Rome; the Romans accordingly sent envoys to them to
complain of their furnishing warriors to serve against Rome, and to
require the surrender of their captives without ransom. But by the
command of their chieftain Britomaris, who had to take vengeance on
the Romans for the death of his father, the Senones slew the Roman
envoys and openly took the Etruscan side. All the north of Italy,
Etruscans, Umbrians, Gauls, were thus in arms against Rome; great
results might be achieved, if its southern provinces also should
seize the moment and declare, so far as they had not already done so,
against Rome. In fact the Samnites, ever ready to make a stand on
behalf of liberty, appear to have declared war against the Romans; but
weakened and hemmed in on all sides as they were, they could be of
little service to the league; and Tarentum manifested its wonted
delay. While her antagonists were negotiating alliances, settling
treaties as to subsidies, and collecting mercenaries, Rome was acting.
The Senones were first made to feel how dangerous it was to gain a
victory over the Romans. The consul Publius Cornelius Dolabella
advanced with a strong army into their territory; all that were not
put to the sword were driven forth from the land, and this tribe was
erased from the list of the Italian nations (471). In the case of a
people subsisting chiefly on its flocks and herds such an expulsion
en masse was quite practicable; and the Senones thus expelled from
Italy probably helped to make up the Gallic hosts which soon after
inundated the countries of the Danube, Macedonia, Greece, and Asia
Minor.
The Boii
The next neighbours and kinsmen of the Senones, the Boii, terrified
and exasperated by a catastrophe which had been accomplished with so
fearful a rapidity, united instantaneously with the Etruscans, who
still continued the war, and whose Senonian mercenaries now fought
against the Romans no longer as hirelings, but as desperate avengers
of their native land. A powerful Etrusco-Gallic army marched against
Rome to retaliate the annihilation of the Senonian tribe on the
enemy's capital, and to extirpate Rome from the face of the earth more
completely than had been formerly done by the chieftain of these same
Senones. But the combined army was decidedly defeated by the Romans
at its passage of the Tiber in the neighbourhood of the Vadimonian
lake (471). After they had once more in the following year risked a
general engagement near Populonia with no better success, the Boii
deserted their confederates and concluded a peace on their own account
with the Romans (472). Thus the Gauls, the most formidable member of
the league, were conquered in detail before the league was fully
formed, and by that means the hands of Rome were left free to act
against Lower Italy, where during the years 469-471 the contest had
not been carried on with any vigour. Hitherto the weak Roman army had
with difficulty maintained itself in Thurii against the Lucanians and
Bruttians; but now (472) the consul Gaius Fabricius Luscinus appeared
with a strong army in front of the town, relieved it, defeated the
Lucanians in a great engagement, and took their general Statilius
prisoner. The smaller non-Doric Greek towns, recognizing the Romans
as their deliverers, everywhere voluntarily joined them. Roman
garrisons were left behind in the most important places, in Locri,
Croton, Thurii, and especially in Rhegium, on which latter town the
Carthaginians seem also to have had designs. Everywhere Rome had most
decidedly the advantage. The annihilation of the Senones had given to
the Romans a considerable tract of the Adriatic coast. With a view,
doubtless, to the smouldering feud with Tarentum and the already
threatened invasion of the Epirots, they hastened to make themselves
sure of this coast as well as of the Adriatic sea. A burgess colony
was sent out (about 471) to the seaport of Sena (Sinigaglia), the
former capital of the Senonian territory; and at the same time a Roman
fleet sailed from the Tyrrhene sea into the eastern waters, manifestly
for the purpose of being stationed in the Adriatic and of protecting
the Roman possessions there.
The Tarentines since the treaty of 450 had lived at peace with Rome.
They had been spectators of the long struggle of the Samnites, and of
the rapid extirpation of the Senones; they had acquiesced without
remonstrance in the establishment of Venusia, Atria, and Sena, and in
the occupation of Thurii and of Rhegium. But when the Roman fleet, on
its voyage from the Tyrrhene to the Adriatic sea, now arrived in the
Tarentine waters and cast anchor in the harbour of the friendly city,
the long, cherished resentment at length overflowed. Old treaties,
which prohibited the war-vessels of Rome from sailing to the east of
the Lacinian promontory, were appealed to by popular orators in the
assembly of the citizens. A furious mob fell upon the Roman ships of
war, which, assailed suddenly in a piratical fashion, succumbed after
a sharp struggle; five ships were taken and their crews executed
or sold into slavery; the Roman admiral himself had fallen in the
engagement. Only the supreme folly and supreme unscrupulousness of
mob-rule can account for those disgraceful proceedings. The treaties
referred to belonged to a period long past and forgotten; it is clear
that they no longer had any meaning, at least subsequently to the
founding of Atria and Sena, and that the Romans entered the bay on
the faith of the existing alliance; indeed, it was very much their
interest--as the further course of things showed--to afford the
Tarentines no sort of pretext for declaring war. In declaring war
against Rome--if such was their wish--the statesmen of Tarentum were
only doing what they should have done long before; and if they
preferred to rest their declaration of war upon the formal pretext
of a breach of treaty rather than upon the real ground, no further
objection could be taken to that course, seeing that diplomacy has
always reckoned it beneath its dignity to speak the plain truth in
plain language. But to make an armed attack upon the fleet without
warning, instead of summoning the admiral to retrace his course, was
a foolish no less than a barbarous act--one of those horrible
barbarities of civilization, when moral principle suddenly forsakes
the helm and the merest coarseness emerges in its room, as if to warn
us against the childish belief that civilization is able to extirpate
brutality from human nature.
And, as if what they had done had not been enough, the Tarentines
after this heroic feat attacked Thurii, the Roman garrison of which
capitulated in consequence of the surprise (in the winter of 472-473);
and inflicted: severe chastisement on the Thurines--the same, whom
Tarentine policy had abandoned to the Lucanians and thereby forcibly
constrained into surrender to Rome--for their desertion from the
Hellenic party to the barbarians.
Attempts at Peace
The parties in the city were almost equally balanced. At length the
ascendency remained with the national party--a result, that was due
partly to the justifiable predilection which led them, if they must
yield to a master at all, to prefer a Greek to a barbarian, but partly
also to the dread of the demagogues that Rome, notwithstanding the
moderation now forced upon it by circumstances, would not neglect on a
fitting opportunity to exact vengeance for the outrages perpetrated
by the Tarentine rabble. The city, accordingly, came to terms with
Pyrrhus. He obtained the supreme command of the troops of the
Tarentines and of the other Italians in arms against Rome, along with
the right of keeping a garrison in Tarentum. The expenses of the war
were, of course, to be borne by the city. Pyrrhus, on the other hand,
promised to remain no longer in Italy than was necessary; probably
with the tacit reservation that his own judgment should fix the time
during which he would be needed there. Nevertheless, the prey had
almost slipped out of his hands. While the Tarentine envoys--the
chiefs, no doubt, of the war party--were absent in Epirus, the state
of feeling in the city, now hard pressed by the Romans, underwent
a change. The chief command was already entrusted to Agis, a man
favourable to Rome, when the return of the envoys with the concluded
treaty, accompanied by Cineas the confidential minister of Pyrrhus,
again brought the war party to the helm.
Landing of Pyrrhus
A firmer hand now grasped the reins, and put an end to the pitiful
vacillation. In the autumn of 473 Milo, the general of Pyrrhus,
landed with 3000 Epirots and occupied the citadel of the town.
He was followed in the beginning of the year 474 by the king himself,
who landed after a stormy passage in which many lives were lost.
He transported to Tarentum a respectable but miscellaneous army,
consisting partly of the household troops, Molossians, Thesprotians,
Chaonians, and Ambraciots; partly of the Macedonian infantry and the
Thessalian cavalry, which Ptolemy king of Macedonia had conformably to
stipulation handed over to him; partly of Aetolian, Acarnanian, and
Athamanian mercenaries. Altogether it numbered 20,000 phalangitae,
2000 archers, 500 slingers, 3000 cavalry, and 20 elephants, and thus
was not much smaller than the army with which fifty years before
Alexander had crossed the Hellespont
The affairs of the coalition were in no very favourable state when the
king arrived. The Roman consul indeed, as soon as he saw the soldiers
of Milo taking the field against him instead of the Tarentine militia,
had abandoned the attack on Tarentum and retreated to Apulia; but,
with the exception of the territory of Tarentum, the Romans virtually
ruled all Italy. The coalition had no army in the field anywhere in
Lower Italy; and in Upper Italy the Etruscans, who alone were still
in arms, had in the last campaign (473) met with nothing but defeat.
The allies had, before the king embarked, committed to him the chief
command of all their troops, and declared that they were able to place
in the field an army of 350,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry. The
reality formed a sad contrast to these great promises. The army,
whose chief command had been committed to Pyrrhus, had still to be
created; and for the time being the main resources available for
forming it were those of Tarentum alone. The king gave orders for
the enlisting of an army of Italian mercenaries with Tarentine money,
and called out the able-bodied citizens to serve in the war. But the
Tarentines had not so understood the agreement. They had thought to
purchase victory, like any other commodity, with money; it was a sort
of breach of contract, that the king should compel them to fight for
it themselves. The more glad the citizens had been at first after
Milo's arrival to be quit of the burdensome service of mounting guard,
the more unwillingly they now rallied to the standards of the king:
it was necessary to threaten the negligent with the penalty of death.
This result now justified the peace party in the eyes of all, and
communications were entered into, or at any rate appeared to have been
entered into, even with Rome. Pyrrhus, prepared for such opposition,
immediately treated Tarentum as a conquered city; soldiers were
quartered in the houses, the assemblies of the people and the numerous
clubs (--sussitia--) were suspended, the theatre was shut, the
promenades were closed, and the gates were occupied with Epirot
guards. A number of the leading men were sent over the sea as
hostages; others escaped the like fate by flight to Rome. These
strict measures were necessary, for it was absolutely impossible in
any sense to rely upon the Tarentines. It was only now that the king,
in possession of that important city as a basis, could begin
operations in the field.
Preparations in Rome--
Commencement of the Conflict in Lower Italy
The Romans too were well aware of the conflict which awaited them. In
order first of all to secure the fidelity of their allies or, in other
words, of their subjects, the towns that could not be depended on were
garrisoned, and the leaders of the party of independence, where it
seemed needful, were arrested or executed: such was the case with a
number of the members of the senate of Praeneste. For the war itself
great exertions were made; a war contribution was levied; the full
contingent was called forth from all their subjects and allies; even
the proletarians who were properly exempt from obligation of service
were called to arms. A Roman army remained as a reserve in the
capital. A second advanced under the consul Tiberius Coruncanius
into Etruria, and dispersed the forces of Volci and Volsinii. The
main force was of course destined for Lower Italy; its departure was
hastened as much as possible, in order to reach Pyrrhus while still
in the territory of Tarentum, and to prevent him and his forces from
forming a junction with the Samnites and other south Italian levies
that were in arms against Rome. The Roman garrisons, that were placed
in the Greek towns of Lower Italy, were intended temporarily to check
the king's progress. But the mutiny of the troops stationed in
Rhegium--one of the legions levied from the Campanian subjects of
Rome under a Campanian captain Decius--deprived the Romans of that
important town. It was not, however, transferred to the hands of
Pyrrhus. While on the one hand the national hatred of the Campanians
against the Romans undoubtedly contributed to produce this military
insurrection, it was impossible on the other hand that Pyrrhus, who
had crossed the sea to shield and protect the Hellenes, could receive
as his allies troops who had put to death their Rhegine hosts in their
own houses. Thus they remained isolated, in close league with their
kinsmen and comrades in crime, the Mamertines, that is, the Campanian
mercenaries of Agathocles, who had by similar means gained possession
of Messana on the opposite side of the straits; and they pillaged and
laid waste for their own behoof the adjacent Greek towns, such as
Croton, where they put to death the Roman garrison, and Caulonia,
which they destroyed. On the other hand the Romans succeeded, by
means of a weak corps which advanced along the Lucanian frontier and
of the garrison of Venusia, in preventing the Lucanians and Samnites
from uniting with Pyrrhus; while the main force--four legions as it
would appear, and so, with a corresponding number of allied troops, at
least 50,000 strong--marched against Pyrrhus, under the consul Publius
Laevinus.
With a view to cover the Tarentine colony of Heraclea, the king had
taken up a position with his own and the Tarentine troops between that
city and Pandosia (3) (474). The Romans, covered by their cavalry,
forced the passage of the Siris, and opened the battle with a
vehement and successful cavalry charge; the king, who led his
cavalry in person, was thrown from his horse, and the Greek horsemen,
panic-struck by the disappearance of their leader, abandoned the field
to the squadrons of the enemy. Pyrrhus, however, put himself at the
head of his infantry, and began a fresh and more decisive engagement.
Seven times the legions and the phalanx met in shock of battle, and
still the conflict was undecided. Then Megacles, one of the best
officers of the king, fell, and, because on this hotly-contested day
he had worn the king's armour, the army for the second time believed
that the king had fallen; the ranks wavered; Laevinus already felt
sure of the victory and threw the whole of his cavalry on the flank of
the Greeks. But Pyrrhus, marching with uncovered head through the
ranks of the infantry, revived the sinking courage of his troops.
The elephants which had hitherto been kept in reserve were brought up
to meet the cavalry; the horses took fright at them; the soldiers, not
knowing how to encounter the huge beasts, turned and fled; the masses
of disordered horsemen and the pursuing elephants at length broke the
compact ranks of the Roman infantry, and the elephants in concert with
the excellent Thessalian cavalry wrought great slaughter among the
fugitives. Had not a brave Roman soldier, Gaius Minucius, the first
hastate of the fourth legion, wounded one of the elephants and thereby
thrown the pursuing troops into confusion, the Roman army would have
been extirpated; as it was, the remainder of the Roman troops
succeeded in retreating across the Siris. Their loss was great; 7000
Romans were found by the victors dead or wounded on the field of
battle, 2000 were brought in prisoners; the Romans themselves stated
their loss, including probably the wounded carried off the field, at
15,000 men. But Pyrrhus's army had suffered not much less: nearly
4000 of his best soldiers strewed the field of battle, and several of
his ablest captains had fallen. Considering that his loss fell
chiefly on the veteran soldiers who were far more difficult to be
replaced than the Roman militia, and that he owed his victory only to
the surprise produced by the attack of the elephants which could not
be often repeated, the king, skilful judge of tactics as he was, may
well at an after period have described this victory as resembling a
defeat; although he was not so foolish as to communicate that piece of
self-criticism to the public--as the Roman poets afterwards invented
the story--in the inscription of the votive offering presented by him
at Tarentum. Politically it mattered little in the first instance at
what sacrifices the victory was bought; the gain of the first battle
against the Romans was of inestimable value for Pyrrhus. His talents
as a general had been brilliantly displayed on this new field of
battle, and if anything could breathe unity and energy into the
languishing league of the Italians, the victory of Heraclea could not
fail to do so. But even the immediate results of the victory were
considerable and lasting. Lucania was lost to the Romans: Laevinus
collected the troops stationed there and marched to Apulia, The
Bruttians, Lucanians, and Samnites joined Pyrrhus unmolested. With
the exception of Rhegium, which pined under the oppression of the
Campanian mutineers, the whole of the Greek cities joined the king,
and Locri even voluntarily delivered up to him the Roman garrison; in
his case they were persuaded, and with reason, that they would not be
abandoned to the Italians. The Sabellians and Greeks thus passed over
to Pyrrhus; but the victory produced no further effect. The Latins
showed no inclination to get quit of the Roman rule, burdensome as it
might be, by the help of a foreign dynast. Venusia, although now
wholly surrounded by enemies, adhered with unshaken steadfastness to
Rome. Pyrrhus proposed to the prisoners taken on the Siris, whose
brave demeanour the chivalrous king requited by the most honourable
treatment, that they should enter his army in accordance with
the Greek fashion; but he learned that he was fighting not with
mercenaries, but with a nation. Not one, either Roman or Latin,
took service with him.
Attempts at Peace
Thus ended the campaign of 474. The separate peace which at the
decisive moment Etruria had concluded with Rome, and the king's
unexpected retreat which entirely disappointed the high-strung hopes
of the Italian confederates, counterbalanced in great measure the
impression of the victory of Heraclea. The Italians complained of the
burdens of the war, particularly of the bad discipline of the
mercenaries quartered among them, and the king, weary of the petty
quarrelling and of the impolitic as well as unmilitary conduct of his
allies, began to have a presentiment that the problem which had fallen
to him might be, despite all tactical successes, politically
insoluble. The arrival of a Roman embassy of three consulars,
including Gaius Fabricius the conqueror of Thurii, again revived in
him for a moment the hopes of peace; but it soon appeared that they
had only power to treat for the ransom or exchange of prisoners.
Pyrrhus rejected their demand, but at the festival of the Saturnalia
he released all the prisoners on their word of honour. Their keeping
of that word, and the repulse by the Roman ambassador of an attempt at
bribery, were celebrated by posterity in a manner most unbecoming and
betokening rather the dishonourable character of the later, than the
honourable feeling of that earlier, epoch.
Battle of Ausculum
In the spring of 475 Pyrrhus resumed the offensive, and advanced into
Apulia, whither the Roman army marched to meet him. In the hope of
shaking the Roman symmachy in these regions by a decisive victory, the
king offered battle a second time, and the Romans did not refuse it.
The two armies encountered each other near Ausculum (Ascoli di
Puglia). Under the banners of Pyrrhus there fought, besides
his Epirot and Macedonian troops, the Italian mercenaries, the
burgess-force--the white shields as they were called--of Tarentum,
and the allied Lucanians, Bruttians, and Samnites--altogether 70,000
infantry, of whom 16,000 were Greeks and Epirots, more than 8000
cavalry, and nineteen elephants. The Romans were supported on
that day by the Latins, Campanians, Volscians, Sabines, Umbrians,
Marrucinians, Paelignians, Frentanians, and Arpanians. They too
numbered above 70,000 infantry, of whom 20,000 were Roman citizens,
and 8000 cavalry. Both parties had made alterations in their military
system. Pyrrhus, perceiving with the sharp eye of a soldier the
advantages of the Roman manipular organization, had on the wings
substituted for the long front of his phalanxes an arrangement by
companies with intervals between them in imitation of the cohorts,
and-- perhaps for political no less than for military reasons--had
placed the Tarentine and Samnite cohorts between the subdivisions of
his own men. In the centre alone the Epirot phalanx stood in close
order. For the purpose of keeping off the elephants the Romans
produced a species of war-chariot, from which projected iron poles
furnished with chafing-dishes, and on which were fastened moveable
masts adjusted with a view to being lowered, and ending in an iron
spike--in some degree the model of the boarding-bridges which were
to play so great a part in the first Punic war.
After the death of Agathocles (465) the Greeks of Sicily were without
any leading power. While in the several Hellenic cities incapable
demagogues and incapable tyrants were replacing each other, the
Carthaginians, the old rulers of the western point, were extending
their dominion unmolested. After Agrigentum had surrendered to them,
they believed that the time had come for taking final steps towards
the end which they had kept in view for centuries, and for reducing
the whole island under their authority; they set themselves to attack
Syracuse. That city, which formerly by its armies and fleets had
disputed the possession of the island with Carthage, had through
internal dissension and the weakness of its government fallen so low
that it was obliged to seek for safety in the protection of its walls
and in foreign aid; and none could afford that aid but king Pyrrhus.
Pyrrhus was the husband of Agathocles's daughter, and his son
Alexander, then sixteen years of age, was Agathocles's grandson.
Both were in every respect natural heirs of the ambitious schemes
of the ruler of Syracuse; and if her freedom was at an end, Syracuse
might find compensation in becoming the capital of a Hellenic empire
of the West. So the Syracusans, like the Tarentines, and under
similar conditions, voluntarily offered their sovereignty to king
Pyrrhus (about 475); and by a singular conjuncture of affairs
everything seemed to concur towards the success of the magnificent
plans of the Epirot king, based as they primarily were on the
possession of Tarentum and Syracuse.
By the departure of Pyrrhus the hands of the Romans were set free
in Italy; none ventured to oppose them in the open field, and their
antagonists everywhere confined themselves to their fastnesses or
their forests. The struggle however was not terminated so rapidly as
might have been expected; partly in consequence of its nature as a
warfare of mountain skirmishes and sieges, partly also, doubtless,
from the exhaustion of the Romans, whose fearful losses are indicated
by a decrease of 17,000 in the burgess-roll from 473 to 479. In 476
the consul Gaius Fabricius succeeded in inducing the considerable
Tarentine settlement of Heraclea to enter into a separate peace, which
was granted to it on the most favourable terms. In the campaign of
477 a desultory warfare was carried on in Samnium, where an attack
thoughtlessly made on some entrenched heights cost the Romans many
lives, and thereafter in southern Italy, where the Lucanians and
Bruttians were defeated. On the other hand Milo, issuing from
Tarentum, anticipated the Romans in their attempt to surprise Croton:
whereupon the Epirot garrison made even a successful sortie against
the besieging army. At length, however, the consul succeeded by a
stratagem in inducing it to march forth, and in possessing himself
of the undefended town (477). An incident of more moment was the
slaughter of the Epirot garrison by the Locrians, who had formerly
surrendered the Roman garrison to the king, and now atoned for one act
of treachery by another. By that step the whole south coast came into
the hands of the Romans, with the exception of Rhegium and Tarentum.
These successes, however, advanced the main object but little. Lower
Italy itself had long been defenceless; but Pyrrhus was not subdued so
long as Tarentum remained in his hands and thus rendered it possible
for him to renew the war at his pleasure, and the Romans could not
think of undertaking the siege of that city. Even apart from the fact
that in siege-warfare, which had been revolutionized by Philip of
Macedonia and Demetrius Poliorcetes, the Romans were at a very decided
disadvantage when matched against an experienced and resolute Greek
commandant, a strong fleet was needed for such an enterprise, and,
although the Carthaginian treaty promised to the Romans support by
sea, the affairs of Carthage herself in Sicily were by no means in
such a condition as to enable her to grant that support.
The fatal embarkation took place towards the end of 478. On the
voyage the new Syracusan fleet had to sustain a sharp engagement with
that of Carthage, in which it lost a considerable number of vessels.
The departure of the king and the accounts of this first misfortune
sufficed for the fall of the Sicilian kingdom. On the arrival of the
news all the cities refused to the absent king money and troops; and
the brilliant state collapsed even more rapidly than it had arisen,
partly because the king had himself undermined in the hearts of
his subjects the loyalty and affection on which every commonwealth
depends, partly because the people lacked the devotedness to
renounce freedom for perhaps but a short term in order to save
their nationality. Thus the enterprise of Pyrrhus was wrecked, and
the plan of his life was ruined irretrievably; he was thenceforth an
adventurer, who felt that he had been great and was so no longer, and
who now waged war no longer as a means to an end, but in order to
drown thought amidst the reckless excitement of the game and to find,
if possible, in the tumult of battle a soldier's death. Arrived on
the Italian coast, the king began by an attempt to get possession of
Rhegium; but the Campanians repulsed the attack with the aid of the
Mamertines, and in the heat of the conflict before the town the king
himself was wounded in the act of striking down an officer of the
enemy. On the other hand he surprised Locri, whose inhabitants
suffered severely for their slaughter of the Epirot garrison, and he
plundered the rich treasury of the temple of Persephone there, to
replenish his empty exchequer. Thus he arrived at Tarentum, it is
said with 20,000 infantry and 3000 cavalry. But these were no longer
the experienced veterans of former days, and the Italians no longer
hailed them as deliverers; the confidence and hope with which they
had received the king five years before were gone; the allies were
destitute of money and of men.
The king took the field in the spring of 479 with the view of aiding
the hard-pressed Samnites, in whose territory the Romans had passed
the previous winter; and he forced the consul Manius Curius to give
battle near Beneventum on the -campus Arusinus-, before he could
form a junction with his colleague advancing from Lucania. But the
division of the army, which was intended to take the Romans in flank,
lost its way during its night march in the woods, and failed to appear
at the decisive moment; and after a hot conflict the elephants again
decided the battle, but decided it this time in favour of the Romans,
for, thrown into confusion by the archers who were stationed to
protect the camp, they attacked their own people. The victors
occupied the camp; there fell into their hands 1300 prisoners and four
elephants--the first that were seen in Rome--besides an immense spoil,
from the proceeds of which the aqueduct, which conveyed the water of
the Anio from Tibur to Rome, was subsequently built. Without troops
to keep the field and without money, Pyrrhus applied to his allies who
had contributed to his equipment for Italy, the kings of Macedonia
and Asia; but even in his native land he was no longer feared, and
his request was refused. Despairing of success against Rome and
exasperated by these refusals, Pyrrhus left a garrison in Tarentum,
and went home himself in the same year (479) to Greece, where some
prospect of gain might open up to the desperate player sooner than
amidst the steady and measured course of Italian affairs. In fact,
he not only rapidly recovered the portion of his kingdom that had
been taken away, but once more grasped, and not without success, at
the Macedonian throne. But his last plans also were thwarted by the
calm and cautious policy of Antigonus Gonatas, and still more by his
own vehemence and inability to tame his proud spirit; he still gained
battles, but he no longer gained any lasting success, and met his
death in a miserable street combat in Peloponnesian Argos (482).
In Italy the war came to an end with the battle of Beneventum; the
last convulsive struggles of the national party died slowly away.
So long indeed as the warrior prince, whose mighty arm had ventured
to seize the reins of destiny in Italy, was still among the living,
he held, even when absent, the stronghold of Tarentum against Rome.
Although after the departure of the king the peace party recovered
ascendency in the city, Milo, who commanded there on behalf of
Pyrrhus, rejected their suggestions and allowed the citizens
favourable to Rome, who had erected a separate fort for themselves
in the territory of Tarentum, to conclude peace with Rome as they
pleased, without on that account opening his gates. But when after
the death of Pyrrhus a Carthaginian fleet entered the harbour, and
Milo saw that the citizens were on the point of delivering up the city
to the Carthaginians, he preferred to hand over the citadel to the
Roman consul Lucius Papirius (482), and by that means to secure a free
departure for himself and his troops. For the Romans this was an
immense piece of good fortune. After the experiences of Philip before
Perinthus and Byzantium, of Demetrius before Rhodes, and of Pyrrhus
before Lilybaeum, it may be doubted whether the strategy of that
period was at all able to compel the surrender of a town well
fortified, well defended, and freely accessible by sea; and how
different a turn matters might have taken, had Tarentum become to the
Phoenicians in Italy what Lilybaeum was to them in Sicily! What was
done, however, could not be undone. The Carthaginian admiral, when he
saw the citadel in the hands of the Romans, declared that he had only
appeared before Tarentum conformably to the treaty to lend assistance
to his allies in the siege of the town, and set sail for Africa; and
the Roman embassy, which was sent to Carthage to demand explanations
and make complaints regarding the attempted occupation of Tarentum,
brought back nothing but a solemn confirmation on oath of that
allegation as to its ally's friendly design, with which accordingly
the Romans had for the time to rest content. The Tarentines obtained
from Rome, presumably on the intercession of their emigrants, the
restoration of autonomy; but their arms and ships had to be given up
and their walls had to be pulled down.
At length also the band that for ten years had sheltered themselves in
Rhegium were duly chastised for the breach of their military oath, as
well as for the murder of the citizens of Rhegium and of the garrison
of Croton. In this instance Rome, while vindicating her own rights
vindicated the general cause of the Hellenes against the barbarians.
Hiero, the new ruler of Syracuse, accordingly supported the Romans
before Rhegium by sending supplies and a contingent, and in
combination with the Roman expedition against the garrison of Rhegium
he made an attack upon their fellow-countrymen and fellow-criminals,
the Mamertines of Messana. The siege of the latter town was long
protracted. On the other hand Rhegium, although the mutineers
resisted long and obstinately, was stormed by the Romans in 484; the
survivors of the garrison were scourged and beheaded in the public
market at Rome, while the old inhabitants were recalled and, as far as
possible, reinstated in their possessions. Thus all Italy was, in
484, reduced to subjection. The Samnites alone, the most obstinate
antagonists of Rome, still in spite of the official conclusion of
peace continued the struggle as "robbers," so that in 485 both
consuls had to be once more despatched against them. But even the
most high-spirited national courage--the bravery of despair--comes
to an end; the sword and the gibbet at length carried quiet even
into the mountains of Samnium.
Maritime Relations
Rome itself was not exempt from a similar fate; its own waters were
likewise commanded by foreign fleets. It was indeed from the first
a maritime city, and in the period of its vigour never was so untrue
to its ancient traditions as wholly to neglect its war marine or so
foolish as to desire to be a mere continental power. Latium furnished
the finest timber for ship-building, far surpassing the famed growths
of Lower Italy; and the very docks constantly maintained in Rome are
enough to show that the Romans never abandoned the idea of possessing
a fleet of their own. During the perilous crises, however, which the
expulsion of the kings, the internal disturbances in the Romano-Latin
confederacy, and the unhappy wars with the Etruscans and Celts brought
upon Rome, the Romans could take but little interest in the state of
matters in the Mediterranean; and, in consequence of the policy of
Rome directing itself more and more decidedly to the subjugation of
the Italian continent, the growth of its naval power was arrested.
There is hardly any mention of Latin vessels of war up to the end of
the fourth century, except that the votive offering from the Veientine
spoil was sent to Delphi in a Roman vessel (360). The Antiates indeed
continued to prosecute their commerce with armed vessels and thus,
as occasion offered, to practise the trade of piracy also, and the
"Tyrrhene corsair" Postumius, whom Timoleon captured about 415, may
certainly have been an Antiate; but the Antiates were scarcely to be
reckoned among the naval powers of that period, and, had they been so,
the fact must from the attitude of Antium towards Rome have been
anything but an advantage to the latter. The extent to which the
Roman naval power had declined about the year 400 is shown by the
plundering of the Latin coasts by a Greek, presumably a Sicilian, war
fleet in 405, while at the same time Celtic hordes were traversing and
devastating the Latin land.(7) In the following year (406), and
beyond doubt under the immediate impression produced by these serious
events, the Roman community and the Phoenicians of Carthage, acting
respectively for themselves and for their dependent allies, concluded
a treaty of commerce and navigation-- the oldest Roman document of
which the text has reached us, although only in a Greek
translation.(8) In that treaty the Romans had to come under
obligation not to navigate the Libyan coast to the west of the Fair
Promontory (Cape Bon) excepting in cases of necessity. On the other
hand they obtained the privilege of freely trading, like the natives,
in Sicily, so far as it was Carthaginian; and in Africa and Sardinia
they obtained at least the right to dispose of their merchandise at a
price fixed with the concurrence of the Carthaginian officials and
guaranteed by the Carthaginian community. The privilege of free
trading seems to have been granted to the Carthaginians at least in
Rome, perhaps in all Latium; only they bound themselves neither to do
violence to the subject Latin communities,(9) nor, if they should set
foot as enemies on Latin soil, to take up their quarters for a night
on shore--in other words, not to extend their piratical inroads into
the interior--nor to construct any fortresses in the Latin land.
These were disasters no less than the defeat on the Allia, and the
Roman senate seems to have felt them as such and to have made use of
the favourable turn, which the Italian relations assumed soon after
the conclusion of the humiliating treaties with Carthage and Tarentum,
with all energy to improve its depressed maritime position. The most
important of the coast towns were furnished with Roman colonies: Pyrgi
the seaport of Caere, the colonization of which probably falls within
this period; along the west coast, Antium in 415,(11) Tarracina in
425,(12) the island of Pontia in 441,(13) so that, as Ardea and
Circeii had previously received colonists, all the Latin seaports of
consequence in the territory of the Rutuli and Volsci had now become
Latin or burgess colonies; further, in the territory of the Aurunci,
Minturnae and Sinuessa in 459;(14) in that of the Lucanians, Paestum
and Cosa in 481;(15) and, on the coast of the Adriatic, Sena Gallica
and Castrum Novum about 471,(16) and Ariminum in 486;(17) to which
falls to be added the occupation of Brundisium, which took place
immediately after the close of the Pyrrhic war. In the greater part
of these places--the burgess or maritime colonies(18)--the young men
were exempted from serving in the legions and destined solely for the
watching of the coasts. The well judged preference given at the same
time to the Greeks of Lower Italy over their Sabellian neighbours,
particularly to the considerable communities of Neapolis, Rhegium,
Locri, Thurii, and Heraclea, and their similar exemption under the
like conditions from furnishing contingents to the land army,
completed the network drawn by Rome around the coasts of Italy.
Rome very naturally sought to find support against Carthage from the
Hellenic maritime states. Her old and close relations of amity with
Massilia continued uninterrupted. The votive offering sent by Rome
to Delphi, after the conquest of Veii, was preserved there in the
treasury of the Massiliots. After the capture of Rome by the Celts
there was a collection in Massilia for the sufferers by the fire,
in which the city chest took the lead; in return the Roman senate
granted commercial advantages to the Massiliot merchants, and, at the
celebration of the games in the Forum assigned a position of honour
(-Graecostasis-) to the Massiliots by the side of the platform for the
senators. To the same category belong the treaties of commerce and
amity concluded by the Romans about 448 with Rhodes and not long after
with Apollonia, a considerable mercantile town on the Epirot coast,
and especially the closer relation, so fraught with danger for
Carthage, which immediately after the end of the Pyrrhic war
sprang up between Rome and Syracuse.(23)
While the Roman power by sea was thus very far from keeping pace with
the immense development of their power by land, and the war marine
belonging to the Romans in particular was by no means such as from the
geographical and commercial position of the city it ought to have
been, yet it began gradually to emerge out of the complete nullity to
which it had been reduced about the year 400; and, considering the
great resources of Italy, the Phoenicians might well follow its
efforts with anxious eyes.
Subject Communities
Latins
Among the subject communities the most privileged and most important
class was that of the Latin towns, which obtained accessions equally
numerous and important in the autonomous communities founded by Rome
within and even beyond Italy--the Latin colonies, as they were called
--and was always increasing in consequence of new settlements of the
same nature. These new urban communities of Roman origin, but with
Latin rights, became more and more the real buttresses of the Roman
rule over Italy. These Latins, however, were by no means those with
whom the battles of the lake Regillus and Trifanum had been fought.
They were not those old members of the Alban league, who reckoned
themselves originally equal to, if not better than, the community of
Rome, and who felt the dominion of Rome to be an oppressive yoke, as
the fearfully rigorous measures of security taken against Praeneste
at the beginning of the war with Pyrrhus, and the collisions that
evidently long continued to occur with the Praenestines in particular,
show. This old Latium had essentially either perished or become
merged in Rome, and it now numbered but few communities politically
self-subsisting, and these, with the exception of Tibur and Praeneste,
throughout insignificant. The Latium of the later times of
the republic, on the contrary, consisted almost exclusively of
communities, which from the beginning had honoured Rome as their
capital and parent city; which, settled amidst regions of alien
language and of alien habits, were attached to Rome by community of
language, of law, and of manners; which, as the petty tyrants of the
surrounding districts, were obliged doubtless to lean on Rome for
their very existence, like advanced posts leaning upon the main army;
and which, in fine, in consequence of the increasing material
advantages of Roman citizenship, were ever deriving very considerable
benefit from their equality of rights with the Romans, limited though
it was. A portion of the Roman domain, for instance, was usually
assigned to them for their separate use, and participation in the
state leases and contracts was open to them as to the Roman burgess.
Certainly in their case also the consequences of the self-subsistence
granted to them did not wholly fail to appear. Venusian inscriptions
of the time of the Roman republic, and Beneventane inscriptions
recently brought to light,(33) show that Venusia as well as Rome
had its plebs and its tribunes of the people, and that the chief
magistrates of Beneventum bore the title of consul at least about
the time of the Hannibalic war. Both communities are among the most
recent of the Latin colonies with older rights: we perceive what
pretensions were stirring in them about the middle of the fifth
century. These so-called Latins, issuing from the Roman burgess-body
and feeling themselves in every respect on a level with it, already
began to view with displeasure their subordinate federal rights and to
strive after full equalization. Accordingly the senate had exerted
itself to curtail these Latin communities--however important they were
for Rome--as far as possible, in their rights and privileges, and to
convert their position from that of allies to that of subjects, so far
as this could be done without removing the wall of partition between
them and the non-Latin communities of Italy. We have already
described the abolition of the league of the Latin communities
itself as well as of their former complete equality of rights,
and the loss of the most important political privileges belonging to
them. On the complete subjugation of Italy a further step was taken,
and a beginning was made towards the restriction of the personal
rights--that had not hitherto been touched--of the individual Latin,
especially the important right of freedom of settlement. In the case
of Ariminum founded in 486 and of all the autonomous communities
constituted afterwards, the advantage enjoyed by them, as compared
with other subjects, was restricted to their equalization with
burgesses of the Roman community so far as regarded private rights
--those of traffic and barter as well as those of inheritance.(34)
Presumably about the same time the full right of free migration
allowed to the Latin communities hitherto established--the title of
every one of their burgesses to gain by transmigration to Rome full
burgess-rights there--was, for the Latin colonies of later erection,
restricted to those persons who had attained to the highest office of
the community in their native home; these alone were allowed to
exchange their colonial burgess-rights for the Roman. This clearly
shows the complete revolution in the position of Rome. So long as
Rome was still but one among the many urban communities of Italy,
although that one might be the first, admission even to the
unrestricted Roman franchise was universally regarded as a gain for
the admitting community, and the acquisition of that franchise by
non-burgesses was facilitated in every way, and was in fact often
imposed on them as a punishment. But after the Roman community became
sole sovereign and all the others were its servants, the state of
matters changed. The Roman community began jealously to guard its
franchise, and accordingly put an end in the first instance to the old
full liberty of migration; although the statesmen of that period were
wise enough still to keep admission to the Roman franchise legally
open at least to the men of eminence and of capacity in the highest
class of subject communities. The Latins were thus made to feel that
Rome, after having subjugated Italy mainly by their aid, had now no
longer need of them as before.
As a general rule, it may be taken for granted that not only the
Latin and Hernican national confederations--as to which the fact is
expressly stated--but all such confederations subsisting in Italy, and
the Samnite and Lucanian leagues in particular, were legally dissolved
or at any rate reduced to insignificance, and that in general no
Italian community was allowed the right of acquiring property or of
intermarriage, or even the right of joint consultation and resolution,
with any other. Further, provision must have been made, under
different forms, for placing the military and financial resources of
all the Italian communities at the disposal of the leading community.
Although the burgess militia on the one hand, and the contingents of
the "Latin name" on the other, were still regarded as the main and
integral constituents of the Roman army, and in that way its national
character was on the whole preserved, the Roman -cives sine suffragio-
were called forth to join its ranks, and not only so, but beyond doubt
the non-Latin federate communities also were either bound to furnish
ships of war, as was the case with the Greek cities, or were placed on
the roll of contingent-furnishing Italians (-formula togatorum-),
as must have been ordained at once or gradually in the case of the
Apulians, Sabellians, and Etruscans. In general this contingent,
like that of the Latin communities, appears to have had its numbers
definitely fixed, although, in case of necessity, the leading
community was not precluded from making a larger requisition.
This at the same time involved an indirect taxation, as every
community was bound itself to equip and to pay its own contingent.
Accordingly it was not without design that the supply of the most
costly requisites for war devolved chiefly on the Latin, or non-Latin
federate communities; that the war marine was for the most part kept
up by the Greek cities; and that in the cavalry service the allies,
at least subsequently, were called upon to furnish a proportion thrice
as numerous as the Roman burgesses, while in the infantry the old
principle, that the contingent of the allies should not be more
numerous than the burgess army, still remained in force for a long
time at least as the rule.
System of Government--
Division and Classification of the Subjects
The system, on which this fabric was constructed and kept together,
can no longer be ascertained in detail from the few notices that have
reached us. Even the numerical proportions of the three classes of
subjects relatively to each other and to the full burgesses, can no
longer be determined even approximately;(39) and in like manner the
geographical distribution of the several categories over Italy is but
imperfectly known. The leading ideas on which the structure was
based, on the other hand, are so obvious that it is scarcely necessary
specially to set them forth. First of all, as we have already said,
the immediate circle of the ruling community was extended--partly
by the settlement of full burgesses, partly by the conferring of
passive burgess-rights--as far as was possible without completely
decentralizing the Roman community, which was an urban one and was
intended to remain so. When the system of incorporation was extended
up to and perhaps even beyond its natural limits, the communities that
were subsequently added had to submit to a position of subjection; for
a pure hegemony as a permanent relation was intrinsically impossible.
Thus not through any arbitrary monopolizing of sovereignty, but
through the inevitable force of circumstances, by the side of the
class of ruling burgesses a second class of subjects took its place.
It was one of the primary expedients of Roman rule to subdivide the
governed by breaking up the Italian confederacies and instituting as
large a number as possible of comparatively small communities, and
to graduate the pressure of that rule according to the different
categories of subjects. As Cato in the government of his household
took care that the slaves should not be on too good terms with one
another, and designedly fomented variances and factions among them,
so the Roman community acted on a great scale. The expedient was not
generous, but it was effectual.
But the Roman senate had the wisdom not to overlook the fact, that the
only means of giving permanence to despotism is moderation on the part
of the despots. On that account there was left with, or conferred on,
the dependent communities an autonomy, which included a shadow of
independence, a special share in the military and political successes
of Rome, and above all a free communal constitution--so far as
the Italian confederacy extended, there existed no community of
Helots. On that account also Rome from the very first, with a
clear-sightedness and magnanimity perhaps unparalleled in history,
waived the most dangerous of all the rights of government, the right
of taxing her subjects. At the most tribute was perhaps imposed
on the dependent Celtic cantons: so far as the Italian confederacy
extended, there was no tributary community. On that account, lastly,
while the duty of bearing arms was partially devolved on the subjects,
the ruling burgesses were by no means exempt from it; it is probable
that the latter were proportionally far more numerous than the body
of the allies; and in that body, again, probably the Latins as a whole
were liable to far greater demands upon them than the non-Latin
allied communities. There was thus a certain reasonableness in the
appropriation by which Rome ranked first, and the Latins next to her,
in the distribution of the spoil acquired in war.
Intermediate Functionaries--
Valuation of the Empire
The central administration at Rome solved the difficult problem of
preserving its supervision and control over the mass of the Italian
communities liable to furnish contingents, partly by means of the four
Italian quaestorships, partly by the extension of the Roman censorship
over the whole of the dependent communities. The quaestors of the
fleet,(42) along with their more immediate duty, had to raise
the revenues from the newly acquired domains and to control the
contingents of the new allies; they were the first Roman functionaries
to whom a residence and district out of Rome were assigned by law, and
they formed the necessary intermediate authority between the Roman
senate and the Italian communities. Moreover, as is shown by the
later municipal constitution, the chief functionaries in every Italian
community,(43) whatever might be their title, had to undertake a
valuation every fourth or fifth year--an institution, the suggestion
of which must necessarily have emanated from Rome, and which can
only have been intended to furnish the senate with a view of the
resources in men and money of the whole of Italy, corresponding
to the census in Rome.
The new Italy had thus become a political unity; it was also in
the course of becoming a national unity. Already the ruling Latin
nationality had assimilated to itself the Sabines and Volscians and
had scattered isolated Latin communities over all Italy; these germs
were merely developed, when subsequently the Latin language became
the mother-tongue of every one entitled to wear the Latin toga.
That the Romans already clearly recognized this as their aim,
is shown by the familiar extension of the Latin name to the whole body
of contingent-furnishing Italian allies.(45) Whatever can still be
recognized of this grand political structure testifies to the great
political sagacity of its nameless architects; and the singular
cohesion, which that confederation composed of so many and so
diversified ingredients subsequently exhibited under the severest
shocks, stamped their great work with the seal of success. From the
time when the threads of this net drawn as skilfully as firmly around
Italy were concentrated in the hands of the Roman community, it was a
great power, and took its place in the system of the Mediterranean
states in the room of Tarentum, Lucania, and other intermediate
and minor states erased by the last wars from the list of political
powers. Rome received, as it were, an official recognition of its new
position by means of the two solemn embassies, which in 481 were sent
from Alexandria to Rome and from Rome to Alexandria, and which, though
primarily they regulated only commercial relations, beyond doubt
prepared the way for a political alliance. As Carthage was contending
with the Egyptian government regarding Cyrene and was soon to contend
with that of Rome regarding Sicily, so Macedonia was contending with
the former for the predominant influence in Greece, with the latter
proximately for the dominion of the Adriatic coasts. The new
struggles, which were preparing on all sides, could not but influence
each other, and Rome, as mistress of Italy, could not fail to be drawn
into the wide arena which the victories and projects of Alexander the
Great had marked out as the field of conflict for his successors.
1. The story that the Romans also sent envoys to Alexander at Babylon
on the testimony of Clitarchus (Plin. Hist. Nat. iii. 5, 57), from
whom the other authorities who mention this fact (Aristus and
Asclepiades, ap. Arrian, vii. 15, 5; Memnon, c. 25) doubtless derived
it. Clitarchus certainly was contemporary with these events;
nevertheless, his Life of Alexander was decidedly a historical romance
rather than a history; and, looking to the silence of the trustworthy
biographers (Arrian, l. c.; Liv. ix. 18) and the utterly romantic
details of the account--which represents the Romans, for instance,
as delivering to Alexander a chaplet of gold, and the latter as
prophesying the future greatness of Rome--we cannot but set down this
story as one of the many embellishments which Clitarchus introduced
into the history.
5. The later Romans, and the moderns following them, give a version
of the league, as if the Romans had designedly avoided accepting the
Carthaginian help in Italy. This would have been irrational, and the
facts pronounce against it. The circumstance that Mago did not land
at Ostia is to be explained not by any such foresight, but simply by
the fact that Latium was not at all threatened by Pyrrhus and so did
not need Carthaginian aid; and the Carthaginians certainly fought for
Rome in front of Rhegium.
8. The grounds for assigning the document given in Polybius (iii. 22)
not to 245, but to 406, are set forth in my Rom. Chronologie, p. 320
f. [translated in the Appendix to this volume].
22. According to Servius (in Aen. iv. 628) it was stipulated in the
Romano-Carthaginian treaties, that no Roman should set foot on (or
rather occupy) Carthaginian, and no Carthaginian on Roman, soil, but
Corsica was to remain in a neutral position between them (-ut neque
Romani ad litora Carthaginiensium accederent neque Carthaginienses
ad litora Romanorum.....Corsica esset media inter Romanos et
Carthaginienses-). This appears to refer to our present period,
and the colonization of Corsica seems to have been prevented by
this very treaty.
24. The clause, by which a dependent people binds itself "to uphold
in a friendly manner the sovereignty of that of Rome" (-maiestatem
populi Romani comiter conservare-), is certainly the technical
appellation of that mildest form of subjection, but it probably did
not come into use till a considerably later period (Cic. pro Balbo,
16, 35). The appellation of clientship derived from private law,
aptly as in its very indefiniteness it denotes the relation (Dig.
xlix. 15, 7, i), was scarcely applied to it officially in earlier
times.
34. According to the testimony of Cicero (pro Caec. 35) Sulla gave to
the Volaterrans the former -ius- of Ariminum, that is--adds the
orator--the -ius- of the "twelve colonies" which had not the Roman
-civitas- but had full -commercium- with the Romans. Few things have
been so much discussed as the question to what places this -ius- of
the twelve towns refers; and yet the answer is not far to seek. There
were in Italy and Cisalpine Gaul--laying aside some places that soon
disappeared again--thirty-four Latin colonies established in all.
The twelve most recent of these--Ariminum, Beneventum, Firmum,
Aesernia, Brundisium, Spoletium, Cremona, Placentia, Copia, Valentia,
Bononia, and Aquileia--are those here referred to; and because
Ariminum was the oldest of these and the town for which this new
organization was primarily established, partly perhaps also because it
was the first Roman colony founded beyond Italy, the -ius- of these
colonies rightly took its name from Ariminum. This at the same time
demonstrates the truth of the view--which already had on other grounds
very high probability--that all the colonies established in Italy (in
the wider sense of the term) after the founding of Aquileia belonged
to the class of burgess-colonies.
It was only with the second half of the fourth century that the large
extensions of territory, which must have suddenly and considerably
augmented the burgess roll, began. It is reported on trustworthy
authority and is intrinsically credible, that about 416 the Roman
burgesses numbered 165,000; which very well agrees with the statement
that ten years previously, when the whole militia was called out
against Latium and the Gauls, the first levy amounted to ten legions,
that is, to 50,000 men. Subsequently to the great extensions of
territory in Etruria, Latium, and Campania, in the fifth century the
effective burgesses numbered, on an average, 250,000; immediately
before the first Punic war, 280,000 to 290,000. These numbers are
certain enough, but they are not quite available historically for
another reason, namely, that in them probably the Roman full burgesses
and the "burgesses without vote" not serving, like the Campanians, in
legions of their own, --such, e. g., as the Caerites, --are included
together in the reckoning, while the latter must at any rate -de
facto- be counted among the subjects (Rom. Forsch. ii. 396).
43. Not merely in every Latin one; for the censorship or so-called
-quinquennalitas- occurs, as is well known, also among communities
whose constitution was not formed according to the Latin scheme.
45. In strict official language, indeed, this was not the case.
The fullest designation of the Italians occurs in the agrarian law of
643, line 21; -[ceivis] Romanus sociumve nominisve Latini, quibus ex
formula togatorum [milites in terra Italia imperare solent]-; in like
manner at the 29th line of the same -peregrinus- is distinguished from
the -Latinus-, and in the decree of the senate as to the Bacchanalia
in 568 the expression is used: -ne quis ceivis Romanus neve nominis
Latini neve socium quisquam-. But in common use very frequently the
second or third of these three subdivisions is omitted, and along
with the Romans sometimes only those Latini nominis are mentioned,
sometimes only the -socii- (Weissenborn on Liv. xxii. 50, 6), while
there is no difference in the meaning. The designation -homines
nominis Latini ac socii Italici- (Sallust. Jug. 40), correct as it is
in itself, is foreign to the official -usus loquendi, which knows
-Italia-, but not -Italici-.
CHAPTER VIII
Development of Law
In the development which law underwent during this period within the
Roman community, probably the most important material innovation was
that peculiar control which the community itself, and in a subordinate
degree its office-bearers, began to exercise over the manners and
habits of the individual burgesses. The germ of it is to be sought in
the right of the magistrate to inflict property-fines (-multae-) for
offences against order.(1) In the case of all fines of more than two
sheep and thirty oxen or, after the cattle-fines had been by the
decree of the people in 324 commuted into money, of more than 3020
libral -asses- (30 pounds), the decision soon after the expulsion of
the kings passed by way of appeal into the hands of the community;(2)
and thus procedure by fine acquired an importance which it was far
from originally possessing. Under the vague category of offences
against order men might include any accusations they pleased, and by
the higher grades in the scale of fines they might accomplish whatever
they desired. The dangerous character of such arbitrary procedure was
brought to light rather than obviated by the mitigating proviso, that
these property-fines, where they were not fixed by law at a definite
sum, should not amount to half the estate belonging to the person
fined. To this class belonged the police-laws, which from the earliest
times were especially abundant in the Roman community. Such were those
enactments of the Twelve Tables, which prohibited the anointing of a
dead body by persons hired for the purpose, the dressing it out with
more than one cushion or more than three purple-edged coverings, the
decorating it with gold or gaudy chaplets, the use of dressed wood for
the funeral pile, and the perfuming or sprinkling of the pyre with
frankincense or myrrh-wine; which limited the number of flute-players
in the funeral procession to ten at most; and which forbade wailing
women and funeral banquets--in a certain measure the earliest Roman
legislation against luxury. Such also were the laws--originating
in the conflicts of the orders--directed against usury as well as
against an undue use of the common pasture and a disproportionate
appropriation of the occupiable domain-land. But far more fraught
with danger than these and similar fining-laws, which at any rate
formulated once for all the trespass and often also the measure of
punishment, was the general prerogative of every magistrate who
exercised jurisdiction to inflict a fine for an offence against order,
and, if the fine reached the amount necessary to found an appeal and
the person fined did not submit to the penalty, to bring the case
before the community. Already in the course of the fifth century
quasi-criminal proceedings had been in this way instituted against
immorality of life both in men and women, against the forestalling of
grain, witchcraft, and similar matters. Closely akin to this was the
quasi-jurisdiction of the censors, which likewise sprang up at this
period. They were invested with authority to adjust the Roman budget
and the burgess-roll, and they availed themselves of it, partly to
impose of their own accord taxes on luxury which differed only in form
from penalties on it, partly to abridge or withdraw the political
privileges of the burgess who was reported to have been guilty of any
infamous action.(3) The extent to which this surveillance was already
carried is shown by the fact that penalties of this nature were
inflicted for the negligent cultivation of a man's own land, and that
such a man as Publius Cornelius Rufinus (consul in 464, 477) was
struck off the list of senators by the censors of 479, because he
possessed silver plate to the value of 3360 sesterces (34 pounds).
No doubt, according to the rule generally applicable to the edicts of
magistrates,(4) the sentences of the censors had legal force only
during their censorship, that is on an average for the next five
years, and might be renewed or not by the next censors at pleasure.
Nevertheless this censorial prerogative was of so immense importance,
that in virtue of it the censorship, originally a subordinate
magistracy, became in rank and consideration the first of all.(5)
The government of the senate rested essentially on this twofold
police control supreme and subordinate, vested in the community and
its officials, and furnished with powers as extensive as they were
arbitrary. Like every such arbitrary government, it was productive
of much good and much evil, and we do not mean to combat the view of
those who hold that the evil preponderated. But we must not forget
that--amidst the morality external certainly but stern and energetic,
and the powerful enkindling of public spirit, that were the genuine
characteristics of this period--these institutions remained exempt
as yet from any really base misuse; and if they were the chief
instruments in repressing individual freedom, they were also the means
by which the public spirit and the good old manners and order of the
Roman community were with might and main upheld.
Administration of Justice--
Code of Common Law--
New Judicial Functionaries
Changes more comprehensive than those effected in the law itself were
introduced into--what was more important in a political point of view,
and more easily admitted of alteration--the system of judicial
administration. First of all came the important limitation of the
supreme judicial power by the embodiment of the common law in a
written code, and the obligation of the magistrate thenceforth to
decide no longer according to varying usage, but according to the
written letter, in civil as well as in criminal procedure (303, 304).
The appointment of a supreme magistrate in Rome exclusively for the
administration of justice in 387,(9) and the establishment of
separate police functionaries which took place contemporaneously
in Rome, and was imitated under Roman influence in all the Latin
communities,(10) secured greater speed and precision of justice.
These police-magistrates or aediles had, of course, a certain
jurisdiction at the same time assigned to them. On the one hand,
they were the ordinary civil judges for sales concluded in open
market, for the cattle and slave markets in particular; and on
the other hand, they ordinarily acted in processes of fines and
amercements as judges of first instance or--which was in Roman
law the same thing--as public prosecutors. In consequence of this the
administration of the laws imposing fines, and the equally indefinite
and politically important right of fining in general, were vested
mainly in them. Similar but subordinate functions, having especial
reference to the poorer classes, pertained to the three night--or
blood-masters (-tres viri nocturni- or -capitales-), first nominated
in 465; they were entrusted with the duties of nocturnal police as
regards fire and the public safety and with the superintendence of
executions, with which a certain summary jurisdiction was very soon,
perhaps even from the outset, associated.(11) Lastly from the
increasing extent of the Roman community it became necessary, out of
regard to the convenience of litigants, to station in the more remote
townships special judges competent to deal at least with minor civil
causes. This arrangement was the rule for the communities of burgesses
-sine suffragio-,(12) and was perhaps even extended to the more
remote communities of full burgesses,(13)--the first germs of a
Romano-municipal jurisdiction developing itself by the side of that
which was strictly Roman.
Changes in Procedure
Religion--
New Gods
The relations to foreign lands were the same as heretofore; but here,
and here especially, Hellenic influences were on the increase. It was
only now that temples began to rise in Rome itself in honour of the
Hellenic gods. The oldest was the temple of Castor and Pollux, which
had been vowed in the battle at lake Regillus(17) and was consecrated
on 15th July 269. The legend associated with it, that two youths of
superhuman size and beauty had been seen fighting on the battle-field
in the ranks of the Romans and immediately after the battle watering
their foaming steeds in the Roman Forum at the fountain of luturna,
and announcing the great victory, bears a stamp thoroughly un-Roman,
and was beyond doubt at a very early period modelled on the appearance
of the Dioscuri--similar down to its very details--in the famous
battle fought about a century before between the Crotoniates and
Locrians at the river Sagras. The Delphic Apollo too was not only
consulted--as was usual with all peoples that felt the influence of
Grecian culture--and presented moreover after special successes, such
as the capture of Veii, with a tenth of the spoil (360), but also had
a temple built for him in the city (323, renewed 401). The same honour
was towards the close of this period accorded to Aphrodite (459), who
was in some enigmatical way identified with the old Roman garden
goddess, Venus;(18) and to Asklapios or Aesculapius, who was obtained
by special request from Epidaurus in the Peloponnesus and solemnly
conducted to Rome (463). Isolated complaints were heard in serious
emergencies as to the intrusion of foreign superstition, presumably
the art of the Etruscan -haruspices- (as in 326); but in such cases
the police did not fail to take proper cognisance of the matter.
In Etruria on the other hand, while the nation stagnated and decayed
in political nullity and indolent opulence, the theological monopoly
of the nobility, stupid fatalism, wild and meaningless mysticism, the
system of soothsaying and of mendicant prophecy gradually developed
themselves, till they reached the height at which we afterwards find
them.
Sacerdotal System
Military System--
Manipular Legion--
Entrenchment of Camp--
Cavalry--
Officers--
Military Discipline--
Training and Classes of Soldiers--
Military Value of the Manipular Legion
That this new military organization was in the main a Roman, or at any
rate Italian, remodelling and improvement of the old Hellenic tactics
of the phalanx, is plain. If some germs of the system of reserve and
of the individualizing of the smaller subdivisions of the army are
found to occur among the later Greek strategists, especially Xenophon,
this only shows that they felt the defectiveness of the old system,
but were not well able to obviate it. The manipular legion appears
fully developed in the war with Pyrrhus; when and under what
circumstances it arose, whether at once or gradually, can no
longer be ascertained. The first tactical system which the Romans
encountered, fundamentally different from the earlier Italo-Hellenic
system, was the Celtic sword-phalanx. It is not impossible that the
subdivision of the army and the intervals between the maniples in
front were arranged with a view to resist, as they did resist, its
first and only dangerous charge; and it accords with this hypothesis
that Marcus Furius Camillus, the most celebrated Roman general of the
Gallic epoch, is presented in various detached notices as the reformer
of the Roman military system. The further traditions associated with
the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars are neither sufficiently accredited, nor
can they with certainty be duly arranged;(23) although it is in itself
probable that the prolonged Samnite mountain warfare exercised a
lasting influence on the individual development of the Roman soldier,
and that the struggle with one of the first masters of the art of war,
belonging to the school of the great Alexander, effected an
improvement in the technical features of the Roman military system.
National Economy--
The Farmers--
Farming of Estates
Capital in Rome
But while neither an opulent urban middle class nor a strictly close
body of capitalists grew up in Rome, it was constantly acquiring more
and more the character of a great city. This is plainly indicated by
the increasing number of slaves crowded together in the capital (as
attested by the very serious slave conspiracy of 335), and still more
by the increasing multitude of freedmen, which was gradually becoming
inconvenient and dangerous, as we may safely infer from the
considerable tax imposed on manumissions in 397(37) and from the
limitation of the political rights of freedmen in 450.(38) For not
only was it implied in the circumstances that the great majority of
the persons manumitted had to devote themselves to trade or commerce,
but manumission itself among the Romans was, as we have already said,
less an act of liberality than an industrial speculation, the master
often finding it more for his interest to share the profits of the
trade or commerce of the freedman than to assert his title to
the whole proceeds of the labour of his slave. The increase of
manumissions must therefore have necessarily kept pace with the
increase of the commercial and industrial activity of the Romans.
Urban Police
Building--
Impulse Given to It
The style of living also among the citizens now was altered. About
the time of Pyrrhus silver plate began to make its appearance on Roman
tables, and the chroniclers date the disappearance of shingle roofs in
Rome from 470.(40) The new capital of Italy gradually laid aside its
village-like aspect, and now began to embellish itself. It was not yet
indeed customary to strip the temples in conquered towns of their
ornaments for the decoration of Rome; but the beaks of the galleys of
Antium were displayed at the orator's platform in the Forum(41) and
on public festival days the gold-mounted shields brought home from
the battle-fields of Samnium were exhibited along the stalls of the
market.(42) The proceeds of fines were specially applied to the paving
of the highways in and near the city, or to the erection and
embellishment of public buildings. The wooden booths of the butchers,
which stretched along the Forum on both sides, gave way, first on the
Palatine side, then on that also which faced the Carinae, to the stone
stalls of the money-changers; so that this place became the Exchange
of Rome. Statues of the famous men of the past, of the kings, priests,
and heroes of the legendary period, and of the Grecian -hospes- who
was said to have interpreted to the decemvirs the laws of Solon;
honorary columns and monuments dedicated to the great burgomasters who
had conquered the Veientes, the Latins, the Samnites, to state envoys
who had perished while executing their instructions, to rich women
who had bequeathed their property to public objects, nay even to
celebrated Greek philosophers and heroes such as Pythagoras and
Alcibiades, were erected on the Capitol or in the Forum. Thus, now
that the Roman community had become a great power, Rome itself
became a great city.
Thus, when the eye turns from the development of constitutions and
from the national struggles for dominion and for freedom which
agitated Italy, and Rome in particular, from the banishment of the
Tarquinian house to the subjugation of the Samnites and the Italian
Greeks, and rests on those calmer spheres of human existence which
history nevertheless rules and pervades, it everywhere encounters the
reflex influence of the great events, by which the Roman burgesses
burst the bonds of patrician sway, and the rich variety of the
national cultures of Italy gradually perished to enrich a single
people. While the historian may not attempt to follow out the great
course of events into the infinite multiplicity of individual detail,
he does not overstep his province when, laying hold of detached
fragments of scattered tradition, he indicates the most important
changes which during this epoch took place in the national life of
Italy. That in such an inquiry the life of Rome becomes still more
prominent than in the earlier epoch, is not merely the result of the
accidental blanks of our tradition; it was an essential consequence
of the change in the political position of Rome, that the Latin
nationality should more and more cast the other nationalities of Italy
into the shade. We have already pointed to the fact, that at this
epoch the neighbouring lands--southern Etruria, Sabina, the land of
the Volscians, --began to become Romanized, as is attested by the
almost total absence of monuments of the old native dialects, and by
the occurrence of very ancient Roman inscriptions in those regions;
the admission of the Sabines to full burgess-rights at the end of this
period(44) betokens that the Latinizing of Central Italy was already
at that time the conscious aim of Roman policy. The numerous
individual assignations and colonial establishments scattered
throughout Italy were, not only in a military but also in a linguistic
and national point of view, the advanced posts of the Latin stock. The
Latinizing of the Italians was scarcely at this time generally aimed
at; on the contrary, the Roman senate seems to have intentionally
upheld the distinction between the Latin and the other nationalities,
and they did not yet, for example, allow the introduction of Latin
into official use among the half-burgess communities of Campania. The
force of circumstances, however, is stronger than even the strongest
government: the language and customs of the Latin people immediately
shared its predominance in Italy, and already began to undermine
the other Italian nationalities.
When the two great nations, both arrived at the height of their
development, began to mingle in hostile or in friendly contact, their
antagonism of character was at the same time prominently and fully
brought out--the total want of individuality in the Italian and
especially in the Roman character, as contrasted with the boundless
variety, lineal, local, and personal, of Hellenism. There was no epoch
of mightier vigour in the history of Rome than the epoch from the
institution of the republic to the subjugation of Italy. That epoch
laid the foundations of the commonwealth both within and without; it
created a united Italy; it gave birth to the traditional groundwork of
the national law and of the national history; it originated the
-pilum- and the maniple, the construction of roads and of aqueducts,
the farming of estates and the monetary system; it moulded the
she-wolf of the Capitol and designed the Ficoroni casket. But the
individuals, who contributed the several stones to this gigantic
structure and cemented them together, have disappeared without leaving
a trace, and the nations of Italy did not merge into that of Rome more
completely than the single Roman burgess merged in the Roman
community. As the grave closes alike over all whether important or
insignificant, so in the roll of the Roman burgomasters the empty
scion of nobility stands undistinguishable by the side of the great
statesman. Of the few records that have reached us from this period
none is more venerable, and none at the same time more characteristic,
than the epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio, who was consul in 456,
and three years afterwards took part in the decisive battle of
Sentinum.(49) On the beautiful sarcophagus, in noble Doric style,
which eighty years ago still enclosed the dust of the conqueror of the
Samnites, the following sentence is inscribed:--
_-'_-'_-'_||-'_-'_-'_
Innumerable others who had been at the head of the Roman commonwealth,
as well as this Roman statesman and warrior, might be commemorated as
having been of noble birth and of manly beauty, valiant and wise; but
there was no more to record regarding them. It is doubtless not the
mere fault of tradition that no one of these Cornelii, Fabii, Papirii,
or whatever they were called, confronts us in a distinct individual
figure. The senator was supposed to be no worse and no better than
other senators, nor at all to differ from them. It was not necessary
and not desirable that any burgess should surpass the rest, whether by
showy silver plate and Hellenic culture, or by uncommon wisdom and
excellence. Excesses of the former kind were punished by the censor,
and for the latter the constitution gave no scope. The Rome of this
period belonged to no individual; it was necessary for all the
burgesses to be alike, that each of them might be like a king.
Appius Claudius
11. The view formerly adopted, that these -tres viri- belonged to the
earliest period, is erroneous, for colleges of magistrates with odd
numbers are foreign to the oldest state-arrangements (Chronol. p. 15,
note 12). Probably the well-accredited account, that they were first
nominated in 465 (Liv. Ep. 11), should simply be retained, and the
otherwise suspicious inference of the falsifier Licinius Macer (in
Liv. vii. 46), which makes mention of them before 450, should be
simply rejected. At first undoubtedly the -tres viri- were nominated
by the superior magistrates, as was the case with most of the later
-magistratus minores-; the Papirian -plebiscitum-, which transferred
the nomination of them to the community (Festus, -v. sacramentum-,
p. 344, Niall.), was at any rate not issued till after the institution
of the office of -praetor peregrinus-, or at the earliest towards the
middle of the sixth century, for it names the praetor -qui inter jus
cives ius dicit-.
13. This inference is suggested by what Livy says (ix. 20) as to the
reorganization of the colony of Antium twenty years after it was
founded; and it is self-evident that, while the Romans might very
well impose on the inhabitant of Ostia the duty of settling all his
lawsuits in Rome, the same course could not be followed with townships
like Antium and Sena.
25. II. III. Combination of the Plebian Aristocracy and the Farmers
against the Nobility
32. II. IV. Etruria at Peace and on the Decline, II. V. Campanian
Hellenism
33. The conjecture that Novius Flautius, the artist who worked at
this casket for Dindia Macolnia, in Rome, may have been a Campanian,
is refuted by the old Praenestine tomb-stones recently discovered,
on which, among other Macolnii and Plautii, there occurs also a Lucius
Magulnius, son of Haulms (L. Magolnio Pla. f.).
Along with the rudiments of the Roman drama, the rudiments of Roman
historical composition belong to this period; both as regards the
contemporary recording of remarkable events, and as regards the
conventional settlement of the early history of the Roman community.
Registers of Magistrates
Capitoline Era
No era was formed for ordinary use; but in ritual matters they
reckoned from the year of the consecration of the temple of the
Capitoline Jupiter, from which the list of magistrates also started.
Annals
The idea naturally suggested itself that, along with the names of
the magistrates, the most important events occurring under their
magistracy might be noted; and from such notices appended to the
catalogue of magistrates the Roman annals arose, just as the
chronicles of the middle ages arose out of the memoranda marginally
appended to the table of Easter. But it was not until a late period
that the pontifices formed the scheme of a formal chronicle (-liber
annalis-), which should steadily year by year record the names of all
the magistrates and the remarkable events. Before the eclipse of the
sun noticed under the 5th of June 351, by which is probably meant that
of the 20th June 354, no solar eclipse was found recorded from
observation in the later chronicle of the city: its statements as to
the numbers of the census only begin to sound credible after the
beginning of the fifth century,(13) the cases of fines brought before
the people, and the prodigies expiated on behalf of the community,
appear to have been regularly introduced into the annals only after
the second half of the fifth century began. To all appearance the
institution of an organized book of annals, and--what was certainly
associated with it--the revision (which we have just explained) of the
earlier list of magistrates so as to make it a year-calendar by the
insertion, where chronologically necessary, of intercalary years, took
place in the first half of the fifth century. But even after it became
a practically recognized duty of the -pontifex maximus- to record year
after year campaigns and colonizations, pestilences and famines,
eclipses and portents, the deaths of priests and other men of note,
the new decrees of the people, and the results of the census, and
to deposit these records in his official residence for permanent
preservation and for any one's inspection, these records were still
far removed from the character of real historical writings. How scanty
the contemporary record still was at the close of this period and how
ample room is left for the caprice of subsequent annalists, is shown
with incisive clearness by a comparison of the accounts as to the
campaign of 456 in the annals and in the epitaph of the consul
Scipio.(14) The later historians were evidently unable to construct a
readable and in some measure connected narrative out of these notices
from the book of annals; and we should have difficulty, even if the
book of annals still lay before us with its original contents, in
writing from it in duly connected sequence the history of the times.
Such chronicles, however, did not exist merely in Rome; every Latin
city possessed its annals as well as its pontifices, as is clear from
isolated notices relative to Ardea for instance, Ameria, and Interamna
on the Nar; and from the collective mass of these city-chronicles
some result might perhaps have been attained similar to what has
been accomplished for the earlier middle ages by the comparison of
different monastic chronicles. Unfortunately the Romans in later times
preferred to supply the defect by Hellenic or Hellenizing falsehoods.
Family Pedigrees
Stesichorus
Timaeus
Jurisprudence
Opinions--
Table of Formulae for Actions
That the knowledge of law and the setting it forth were even now a
means of recommendation to the people and of attaining offices of
state, may be readily conceived, although the story, that the first
plebeian pontifex Publius Sempronius Sophus (consul 450), and the
first plebeian pontifex maximus Tiberius Coruncanius (consul 474),
were indebted for these priestly honours to their knowledge of law,
is probably rather a conjecture of posterity than a statement
of tradition.
Language
That the real genesis of the Latin and doubtless also of the other
Italian languages was anterior to this period, and that even at its
commencement the Latin language was substantially an accomplished
fact, is evident from the fragments of the Twelve Tables, which,
however, have been largely modernized by their semi-oral tradition.
They contain doubtless a number of antiquated words and harsh
combinations, particularly in consequence of omitting the indefinite
subject; but their meaning by no means presents, like that of the
Arval chant, any real difficulty, and they exhibit far more agreement
with the language of Cato than with that of the ancient litanies.
If the Romans at the beginning of the seventh century had difficulty
in understanding documents of the fifth, the difficulty doubtless
proceeded merely from the fact that there existed at that time in Rome
no real, least of all any documentary, research.
Technical Style
On the other hand it must have been at this period, when the
indication and redaction of law began, that the Roman technical style
first established itself--a style which at least in its developed
shape is nowise inferior to the modern legal phraseology of England in
stereotyped formulae and turns of expression, endless enumeration of
particulars, and long-winded periods; and which commends itself to the
initiated by its clearness and precision, while the layman who does
not understand it listens, according to his character and humour, with
reverence, impatience, or chagrin.
Philology
Instruction
Exact Sciences--
Regulation of the Calendar
Architecture--
Etruscan
We have already shown how wholly the architecture of all the Italian
lands was, even in its earliest period, pervaded by Hellenic elements.
Its city walls, its aqueducts, its tombs with pyramidal roofs, and its
Tuscanic temple, are not at all, or not materially, different from the
oldest Hellenic structures. No trace has been preserved of any advance
in architecture among the Etruscans during this period; we find among
them neither any really new reception, nor any original creation,
unless we ought to reckon as such the magnificent tombs, e. g. the
so-called tomb of Porsena at Chiusi described by Varro, which vividly
recalls the strange and meaningless grandeur of the Egyptian pyramids.
Latin--
The Arch
In Latium too, during the first century and a half of the republic,
it is probable that they moved solely in the previous track, and it
has already been stated that the exercise of art rather sank than rose
with the introduction of the republic.(32) There can scarcely be named
any Latin building of architectural importance belonging to this
period, except the temple of Ceres built in the Circus at Rome in 261,
which was regarded in the period of the empire as a model of the
Tuscanic style. But towards the close of this epoch a new spirit
appeared in Italian and particularly in Roman architecture;(33) the
building of the magnificent arches began. It is true that we are not
entitled to pronounce the arch and the vault Italian inventions.
It is well ascertained that at the epoch of the genesis of Hellenic
architecture the Hellenes were not yet acquainted with the arch, and
therefore had to content themselves with a flat ceiling and a sloping
roof for their temples; but the arch may very well have been a later
invention of the Hellenes originating in more scientific mechanics;
as indeed the Greek tradition refers it to the natural philosopher
Democritus (294-397). With this priority of Hellenic over Roman
arch-building the hypothesis, which has been often and perhaps justly
propounded, is quite compatible, that the vaulted roof of the Roman
great -cloaca-, and that which was afterwards thrown over the old
Capitoline well-house which originally had a pyramidal roof,(34) are
the oldest extant structures in which the principle of the arch is
applied; for it is more than probable that these arched buildings
belong not to the regal but to the republican period,(35) and that
in the regal period the Italians were acquainted only with flat or
overlapped roofs.(34) But whatever may be thought as to the invention
of the arch itself, the application of a principle on a great scale is
everywhere, and particularly in architecture, at least as important as
its first exposition; and this application belongs indisputably to the
Romans. With the fifth century began the building of gates, bridges,
and aqueducts based mainly on the arch, which is thenceforth
inseparably associated with the Roman name. Akin to this was the
development of the form of the round temple with the dome-shaped roof,
which was foreign to the Greeks, but was held in much favour with the
Romans and was especially applied by them in the case of the cults
peculiar to them, particularly the non-Greek worship of Vesta.(37)
Latin
It is a fact less known, but not less certain, that Latium also, while
inferior to Etruria in the copiousness and massiveness of its art,
was not inferior in artistic taste and practical skill. Evidently the
establishment of the Romans in Campania which took place about the
beginning of the fifth century, the conversion of the town of Cales
into a Latin community, and that of the Falernian territory near Capua
into a Roman tribe,(39) opened up in the first instance Campanian art
to the Romans. It is true that among these the art of gem-engraving so
diligently prosecuted in luxurious Etruria is entirely wanting, and we
find no indication that the Latin workshops were, like those of the
Etruscan goldsmiths and clay-workers, occupied in supplying a foreign
demand. It is true that the Latin temples were not like the Etruscan
overloaded with bronze and clay decorations, that the Latin tombs were
not like the Etruscan filled with gold ornaments, and their walls
shone not, like those of the Tuscan tombs, with paintings of various
colours. Nevertheless, on the whole the balance does not incline in
favour of the Etruscan nation. The device of the effigy of Janus,
which, like the deity itself, may be attributed to the Latins,(40)
is not unskilful, and is of a more original character than that of
any Etruscan work of art. The beautiful group of the she-wolf with the
twins attaches itself doubtless to similar Greek designs, but was--as
thus worked out--certainly produced, if not in Rome, at any rate by
Romans; and it deserves to be noted that it first appears on the
silver moneys coined by the Romans in and for Campania. In the
above-mentioned Cales there appears to have been devised soon after
its foundation a peculiar kind of figured earthenware, which was
marked with the name of the masters and the place of manufacture,
and was sold over a wide district as far even as Etruria. The little
altars of terra-cotta with figures that have recently been brought
to light on the Esquiline correspond in style of representation as in
that of ornament exactly to the similar votive gifts of the Campanian
temples. This however does not exclude Greek masters from having also
worked for Rome. The sculptor Damophilus, who with Gorgasus prepared
the painted terra-cotta figures for the very ancient temple of Ceres,
appears to have been no other than Demophilus of Himera, the teacher
of Zeuxis (about 300). The most instructive illustrations are
furnished by those branches of art in which we are able to form a
comparative judgment, partly from ancient testimonies, partly from
our own observation. Of Latin works in stone scarcely anything else
survives than the stone sarcophagus of the Roman consul Lucius Scipio,
wrought at the close of this period in the Doric style; but its noble
simplicity puts to shame all similar Etruscan works. Many beautiful
bronzes of an antique chaste style of art, particularly helmets,
candelabra, and the like articles, have been taken from Etruscan
tombs; but which of these works is equal to the bronze she-wolf
erected from the proceeds of fines in 458 at the Ruminal fig-tree in
the Roman Forum, and still forming the finest ornament of the Capitol?
And that the Latin metal-founders as little shrank from great
enterprises as the Etruscans, is shown by the colossal bronze figure
of Jupiter on the Capitol erected by Spurius Carvilius (consul in 461)
from the melted equipments of the Samnites, the chisellings of which
sufficed to cast the statue of the victor that stood at the feet of
the Colossus; this statue of Jupiter was visible even from the Alban
Mount. Amongst the cast copper coins by far the finest belong to
southern Latium; the Roman and Umbrian are tolerable, the Etruscan
almost destitute of any image and often really barbarous.
The fresco-paintings, which Gaius Fabius executed in the temple of
Health on the Capitol, dedicated in 452, obtained in design and
colouring the praise even of connoisseurs trained in Greek art in
the Augustan age; and the art-enthusiasts of the empire commended
the frescoes of Caere, but with still greater emphasis those of Rome,
Lanuvium, and Ardea, as masterpieces of painting. Engraving on metal,
which in Latium decorated not the hand-mirror, as in Etruria, but the
toilet-casket with its elegant outlines, was practised to a far less
extent in Latium and almost exclusively in Praeneste. There are
excellent works of art among the copper mirrors of Etruria as among
the caskets of Praeneste; but it was a work of the latter kind, and
in fact a work which most probably originated in the workshop of a
Praenestine master at this epoch,(41) regarding which it could with
truth be affirmed that scarcely another product of the graving of
antiquity bears the stamp of an art so finished in its beauty and
characteristic expression, and yet so perfectly pure and chaste,
as the Ficoroni -cista-.
The general character of Etruscan works of art is, on the one hand, a
sort of barbaric extravagance in material as well as in style; on the
other hand, an utter absence of original development. Where the Greek
master lightly sketches, the Etruscan disciple lavishes a scholar's
diligence; instead of the light material and moderate proportions of
the Greek works, there appears in the Etruscan an ostentatious stress
laid upon the size and costliness, or even the mere singularity, of
the work. Etruscan art cannot imitate without exaggerating; the chaste
in its hands becomes harsh, the graceful effeminate, the terrible
hideous, and the voluptuous obscene; and these features become more
prominent, the more the original stimulus falls into the background
and Etruscan art finds itself left to its own resources. Still more
surprising is the adherence to traditional forms and a traditional
style. Whether it was that a more friendly contact with Etruria at the
outset allowed the Hellenes to scatter there the seeds of art, and
that a later epoch of hostility impeded the admission into Etruria
of the more recent developments of Greek art, or whether, as is more
probable, the intellectual torpor that rapidly came over the nation
was the main cause of the phenomenon, art in Etruria remained
substantially stationary at the primitive stage which it had occupied
on its first entrance. This, as is well known, forms the reason why
Etruscan art, the stunted daughter, was so long regarded as the
mother, of Hellenic art. Still more even than the rigid adherence to
the style traditionally transmitted in the older branches of art,
the sadly inferior handling of those branches that came into vogue
afterwards, particularly of sculpture in stone and of copper-casting
as applied to coins, shows how quickly the spirit of Etruscan art
evaporated. Equally instructive are the painted vases, which are found
in so enormous numbers in the later Etruscan tombs. Had these come
into current use among the Etruscans as early as the metal plates
decorated with contouring or the painted terra-cottas, beyond doubt
they would have learned to manufacture them at home in considerable
quantity, and of a quality at least relatively good; but at the period
at which this luxury arose, the power of independent reproduction
wholly failed--as the isolated vases provided with Etruscan
inscriptions show--and they contented themselves with buying
instead of making them.
2. The account given by Dionysius (vi. 95; comp. Niebuhr, ii. 40) and
by Plutarch (Camill. 42), deriving his statement from another passage
in Dionysius regarding the Latin festival, must be understood to apply
rather to the Roman games, as, apart from other grounds, is strikingly
evident from comparing the latter passage with Liv. vi. 42 (Ritschl,
Parerg. i. p. 313). Dionysius has--and, according to his wont when in
error, persistently--misunderstood the expression -ludi maximi-.
4. I. II. Art
5. I. XV. Metre
6. I. XV. Masks
8. I. XV. Melody
12. The first places in the list alone excite suspicion, and may have
been subsequently added, with a view to round off the number of years
between the flight of the king and the burning of the city to 120.
13. I. VI. Time and the Occasion of the Reform, II. VII. System of
Government
14. II. VIII Rome and the Romans of This Epoch. According to the
annals Scipio commands in Etruria and his colleague in Samnium, and
Lucania is during this year in league with Rome; according to the
epitaph Scipio conquers two towns in Samnium and all Lucania.
20. According to his account Rome, a woman who had fled from Ilion
to Rome, or rather her daughter of the same name, married Latinos,
king of the Aborigines, and bore to him three sons, Romos, Romylos,
and Telegonos. The last, who undoubtedly emerges here as founder
of Tusculum and Praeneste, belongs, as is well known, to the legend
of Odysseus.
26. In the two epitaphs, of Lucius Scipio consul in 456, and of the
consul of the same name in 495, -m and -d are ordinarily wanting in
the termination of cases, yet -Luciom- and -Gnaivod- respectively
occur once; there occur alongside of one another in the nominative
-Cornelio- and -filios-; -cosol-, -cesor-, alongside of -consol-,
-censor-; -aidiles-, -dedet-, -ploirume- (= -plurimi-) -hec- (nom.
sing.) alongside of -aidilis-, -cepit-, -quei-, -hic-. Rhotacism is
already carried out completely; we find -duonoro-(= -bonorum-),
-ploirume-, not as in the chant of the Salii -foedesum-, -plusima-.
Our surviving inscriptions do not in general precede the age of
rhotacism; of the older -s only isolated traces occur, such as
afterwards -honos-, -labos- alongside of -honor-, -labor-; and the
similar feminine -praenomina-, -Maio- (= -maios- -maior-) and -Mino-
in recently found epitaphs at Praeneste.
28. It is at any rate a true Roman picture, which Plautus (Bacch. 431)
produces as a specimen of the good old mode of training children:--
37. The round temple certainly was not, as has been supposed, an
imitation of the oldest form of the house; on the contrary, house
architecture uniformly starts from the square form. The later Roman
theology associated this round form with the idea of the terrestrial
sphere or of the universe surrounding like a sphere the central sun
(Fest. v. -rutundam-, p. 282; Plutarch, Num. 11; Ovid, Fast. vi. 267,
seq.). In reality it may be traceable simply to the fact, that the
circular shape has constantly been recognized as the most convenient
and the safest form of a space destined for enclosure and custody.
That was the rationale of the round --thesauroi-- of the Greeks as
well as of the round structure of the Roman store-chamber or temple of
the Penates. It was natural, also, that the fireplace--that is, the
altar of Vesta--and the fire-chamber--that is, the temple of Vesta
--should be constructed of a round form, just as was done with the
cistern and the well-enclosure (-puteal-). The round style of building
in itself was Graeco-Italian as was the square form, and the former
was appropriated to the store-place, the latter to the dwelling-house;
but the architectural and religious development of the simple -tholos-
into the round temple with pillars and columns was Latin.
41. Novius Plautius (II. VIII. Capital in Rome) cast perhaps only the
feet and the group on the lid; the casket itself may have proceeded
from an earlier artist, but hardly from any other than a Praenestine,
for the use of these caskets was substantially confined to Praeneste.
End of Book II
* * * * *
From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek
States
Preparer's Note
5) Dr. Mommsen has given his dates in terms of Roman usage, A.U.C.;
that is, from the founding of Rome, conventionally taken to be
753 B. C. The preparer of this document, has appended to the end
of each volume a table of conversion between the two systems.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Carthage
BOOK THIRD
From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek
States
--Sallust.
CHAPTER I
Carthage
The Phoenicians
The Semitic stock occupied a place amidst, and yet aloof from, the
nations of the ancient classical world. The true centre of the
former lay in the east, that of the latter in the region of the
Mediterranean; and, however wars and migrations may have altered the
line of demarcation and thrown the races across each other, a deep
sense of diversity has always severed, and still severs, the Indo-
Germanic peoples from the Syrian, Israelite, and Arabic nations.
This diversity was no less marked in the case of that Semitic people
which spread more than any other in the direction of the west--the
Phoenicians. Their native seat was the narrow border of coast bounded
by Asia Minor, the highlands of Syria, and Egypt, and called Canaan,
that is, the "plain." This was the only name which the nation itself
made use of; even in Christian times the African farmer called himself
a Canaanite. But Canaan received from the Hellenes the name of
Phoenike, the "land of purple," or "land of the red men," and the
Italians also were accustomed to call the Canaanites Punians, as we
are accustomed still to speak of them as the Phoenician or Punic race.
Their Commerce
The land was well adapted for agriculture; but its excellent harbours
and the abundant supply of timber and of metals favoured above all
things the growth of commerce; and it was there perhaps, where the
opulent eastern continent abuts on the wide-spreading Mediterranean
so rich in harbours and islands, that commerce first dawned in all
its greatness upon man. The Phoenicians directed all the resources of
courage, acuteness, and enthusiasm to the full development of commerce
and its attendant arts of navigation, manufacturing, and colonization,
and thus connected the east and the west. At an incredibly early
period we find them in Cyprus and Egypt, in Greece and Sicily, in
Africa and Spain, and even on the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea.
The field of their commerce reached from Sierra Leone and Cornwall
in the west, eastward to the coast of Malabar. Through their hands
passed the gold and pearls of the East, the purple of Tyre, slaves,
ivory, lions' and panthers' skins from the interior of Africa,
frankincense from Arabia, the linen of Egypt, the pottery and fine
wines of Greece, the copper of Cyprus, the silver of Spain, tin from
England, and iron from Elba. The Phoenician mariners brought to
every nation whatever it could need or was likely to purchase; and
they roamed everywhere, yet always returned to the narrow home to
which their affections clung.
Above all, the Phoenicians, like the rest of the Aramaean nations as
compared with the Indo-Germans, lacked the instinct of political life
--the noble idea of self-governing freedom. During the most
flourishing times of Sidon and Tyre the land of the Phoenicians was
a perpetual apple of contention between the powers that ruled on the
Euphrates and on the Nile, and was subject sometimes to the Assyrians,
sometimes to the Egyptians. With half its power Hellenic cities
would have made themselves independent; but the prudent men of Sidon
calculated that the closing of the caravan-routes to the east or of
the ports of Egypt would cost them more than the heaviest tribute, and
so they punctually paid their taxes, as it might happen, to Nineveh or
to Memphis, and even, if they could not avoid it, helped with their
ships to fight the battles of the kings. And, as at home the
Phoenicians patiently bore the oppression of their masters, so also
abroad they were by no means inclined to exchange the peaceful career
of commerce for a policy of conquest. Their settlements were
factories. It was of more moment in their view to deal in buying and
selling with the natives than to acquire extensive territories in
distant lands, and to carry out there the slow and difficult work of
colonization. They avoided war even with their rivals; they allowed
themselves to be supplanted in Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the east of
Sicily almost without resistance; and in the great naval battles,
which were fought in early times for the supremacy of the western
Mediterranean, at Alalia (217) and at Cumae (280), it was the
Etruscans, and not the Phoenicians, that bore the brunt of the
struggle with the Greeks. If rivalry could not be avoided, they
compromised the matter as best they could; no attempt was ever made
by the Phoenicians to conquer Caere or Massilia. Still less, of
course, were the Phoenicians disposed to enter on aggressive war.
On the only occasion in earlier times when they took the field on the
offensive--in the great Sicilian expedition of the African Phoenicians
which ended in their defeat at Himera by Gelo of Syracuse (274)--it
was simply as dutiful subjects of the great-king and in order to avoid
taking part in the campaign against the Hellenes of the east, that
they entered the lists against the Hellenes of the west; just as their
Syrian kinsmen were in fact obliged in that same year to share the
defeat of the Persians at Salamis(1).
That the Phoenician stock did not even in Carthage renounce its policy
of passiveness, there is no lack of evidence to prove. Carthage paid,
even down to the times of its prosperity, a ground-rent for the space
occupied by the city to the native Berbers, the tribe of the Maxyes or
Maxitani; and although the sea and the desert sufficiently protected
the city from any assault of the eastern powers, Carthage appears to
have recognized--although but nominally--the supremacy of the great-
king, and to have paid tribute to him occasionally, in order to secure
its commercial communications with Tyre and the East.
Libyphoenicians
But the empire of Libya was only half of the power of Carthage; its
maritime and colonial dominion had acquired, during the same period,
a not less powerful development.
Spain
In Spain the chief station of the Phoenicians was the primitive Tyrian
settlement at Gades (Cadiz). Besides this they possessed to the west
and east of it a chain of factories, and in the interior the region of
the silver mines; so that they held nearly the modern Andalusia and
Granada, or at least the coasts of these provinces. They made no
effort to acquire the interior from the warlike native nations; they
were content with the possession of the mines and of the stations for
traffic and for shell and other fisheries; and they had difficulty in
maintaining their ground even in these against the adjoining tribes.
It is probable that these possessions were not properly Carthaginian
but Tyrian, and Gades was not reckoned among the cities tributary to
Carthage; but practically, like all the western Phoenicians, it was
under Carthaginian hegemony, as is shown by the aid sent by Carthage
to the Gaditani against the natives, and by the institution of
Carthaginian trading settlements to the westward of Gades. Ebusus and
the Baleares, again, were occupied by the Carthaginians themselves at
an early period, partly for the fisheries, partly as advanced posts
against the Massiliots, with whom furious conflicts were waged
from these stations.
Sardinia
Sicily
Lastly in Sicily the straits of Messana and the larger eastern half of
the island had fallen at an early period into the hands of the Greeks;
but the Phoenicians, with the help of the Carthaginians, retained the
smaller adjacent islands, the Aegates, Melita, Gaulos, Cossyra--the
settlement in Malta especially was rich and flourishing--and they kept
the west and north-west coast of Sicily, whence they maintained
communication with Africa by means of Motya and afterwards of
Lilybaeum and with Sardinia by means of Panormus and Soluntum.
The interior of the island remained in the possession of the natives,
the Elymi, Sicani, and Siceli. After the further advance of the
Greeks was checked, a state of comparative peace had prevailed in
the island, which even the campaign undertaken by the Carthaginians
at the instigation of the Persians against their Greek neighbours on
the island (274) did not permanently interrupt, and which continued
on the whole to subsist till the Attic expedition to Sicily (339-341).
The two competing nations made up their minds to tolerate each other,
and confined themselves in the main each to its own field.
Maritime Supremacy
Rivalry with Syracuse
Constitution of Carthage
Council
Magistrates
Aristotle, who died about fifty years before the commencement of the
first Punic war, describes the constitution of Carthage as having
changed from a monarchy to an aristocracy, or to a democracy inclining
towards oligarchy, for he designates it by both names. The conduct
of affairs was immediately vested in the hands of the Council of
Ancients, which, like the Spartan gerusia, consisted of the two kings
nominated annually by the citizens, and of twenty-eight gerusiasts,
who were also, as it appears, chosen annually by the citizens. It was
this council which mainly transacted the business of the state-making,
for instance, the preliminary arrangements for war, appointing levies
and enlistments, nominating the general, and associating with him a
number of gerusiasts from whom the sub-commanders were regularly
taken; and to it despatches were addressed. It is doubtful whether by
the side of this small council there existed a larger one; at any rate
it was not of much importance. As little does any special influence
seem to have belonged to the kings; they acted chiefly as supreme
judges, and they were frequently so named (shofetes, -praetores-).
The power of the general was greater. Isocrates, the senior
contemporary of Aristotle, says that the Carthaginians had an
oligarchical government at home, but a monarchical government in
the field; and thus the office of the Carthaginian general may be
correctly described by Roman writers as a dictatorship, although the
gerusiasts attached to him must have practically at least restricted
his power and, after he had laid down his office, a regular official
reckoning--unknown among the Romans--awaited him. There existed no
fixed term of office for the general, and for this very reason he was
doubtless different from the annual king, from whom Aristotle also
expressly distinguishes him. The combination however of several
offices in one person was not unusual among the Carthaginians, and it
is not therefore surprising that often the same person appears as at
once general and shofete.
Judges
In Their Constitution
Both Carthage and Rome ruled over communities of lineage kindred with
their own, and over numerous others of alien race. But Rome had
received into her citizenship one district after another, and had
rendered it even legally accessible to the Latin communities; Carthage
from the first maintained her exclusiveness, and did not permit the
dependent districts even to cherish a hope of being some day placed
upon an equal footing. Rome granted to the communities of kindred
lineage a share in the fruits of victory, especially in the acquired
domains; and sought, by conferring material advantages on the rich and
noble, to gain over at least a party to her own interest in the other
subject states. Carthage not only retained for herself the produce
of her victories, but even deprived the most privileged cities of
their freedom of trade. Rome, as a rule, did not wholly take away
independence even from the subject communities, and imposed a fixed
tribute on none; Carthage despatched her overseers everywhere, and
loaded even the old-Phoenician cities with a heavy tribute, while her
subject tribes were practically treated as state-slaves. In this way
there was not in the compass of the Carthagino-African state a single
community, with the exception of Utica, that would not have been
politically and materially benefited by the fall of Carthage; in the
Romano-Italic there was not one that had not much more to lose than
to gain in rebelling against a government, which was careful to avoid
injuring material interests, and which never at least by extreme
measures challenged political opposition to conflict. If Carthaginian
statesmen believed that they had attached to the interests of Carthage
her Phoenician subjects by their greater dread of a Libyan revolt
and all the landholders by means of token-money, they transferred
mercantile calculation to a sphere to which it did not apply.
Experience proved that the Roman symmachy, notwithstanding its
seemingly looser bond of connection, kept together against Pyrrhus
like a wall of rock, whereas the Carthaginian fell to pieces like a
gossamer web as soon as a hostile army set foot on African soil. It
was so on the landing of Agathocles and of Regulus, and likewise in
the mercenary war; the spirit that prevailed in Africa is illustrated
by the fact, that the Libyan women voluntarily contributed their
ornaments to the mercenaries for their war against Carthage. In
Sicily alone the Carthaginians appear to have exercised a milder rule,
and to have attained on that account better results. They granted to
their subjects in that quarter comparative freedom in foreign trade,
and allowed them to conduct their internal commerce, probably from the
outset and exclusively, with a metallic currency; far greater freedom
of movement generally was allowed to them than was permitted to the
Sardinians and Libyans. Had Syracuse fallen into Carthaginian hands,
their policy would doubtless soon have changed. But that result did
not take place; and so, owing to the well-calculated mildness of the
Carthaginian government and the unhappy distractions of the Sicilian
Greeks, there actually existed in Sicily a party really friendly to
the Phoenicians; for example, even after the island had passed to the
Romans, Philinus of Agrigentum wrote the history of the great war in
a thoroughly Phoenician spirit. Nevertheless on the whole the
Sicilians must, both as subjects and as Hellenes, have been at
least as averse to their Phoenician masters as the Samnites
and Tarentines were to the Romans.
In Finance
CHAPTER II
Campanian Mercenaries
In the second great city on the east coast, Messana, a band of foreign
soldiers had established themselves and held the city, independent
alike of Syracusans and Carthaginians. These new rulers of Messana
were Campanian mercenaries. The dissolute habits that had become
prevalent among the Sabellians settled in and around Capua,(1) had
made Campania in the fourth and fifth centuries--what Aetolia, Crete,
and Laconia were afterwards--the universal recruiting field for
princes and cities in search of mercenaries. The semi-culture that
had been called into existence there by the Campanian Greeks, the
barbaric luxury of life in Capua and the other Campanian cities,
the political impotence to which the hegemony of Rome condemned them,
while yet its rule was not so stern as wholly to withdraw from them
the right of self-disposal--all tended to drive the youth of Campania
in troops to the standards of the recruiting officers. As a matter of
course, this wanton and unscrupulous selling of themselves here, as
everywhere, brought in its train estrangement from their native land,
habits of violence and military disorder, and indifference to the
breach of their allegiance. These Campanians could see no reason why
a band of mercenaries should not seize on their own behalf any city
entrusted to their guardianship, provided only they were in a position
to hold it--the Samnites had established their dominion in Capua
itself, and the Lucanians in a succession of Greek cities, after
a fashion not much more honourable.
Mammertines
Nowhere was the state of political relations more inviting for such
enterprises than in Sicily. Already the Campanian captains who came
to Sicily during the Peloponnesian war had insinuated themselves in
this way into Entella and Aetna. Somewhere about the year 470 a
Campanian band, which had previously served under Agathocles and after
his death (465) took up the trade of freebooters on their own account,
established themselves in Messana, the second city of Greek Sicily,
and the chief seat of the anti-Syracusan party in that portion of
the island which was still in the power of the Greeks. The citizens
were slain or expelled, their wives and children and houses were
distributed among the soldiers, and the new masters of the city, the
Mamertines or "men of Mars," as they called themselves, soon became
the third power in the island, the north-eastern portion of which they
reduced to subjection in the times of confusion that succeeded the
death of Agathocles. The Carthaginians were no unwilling spectators
of these events, which established in the immediate vicinity of the
Syracusans a new and powerful adversary instead of a cognate and
ordinarily allied or dependent city. With Carthaginian aid the
Mamertines maintained themselves against Pyrrhus, and the untimely
departure of the king restored to them all their power.
Hiero of Syracuse
War between the Syracusans and the Mammertines
Much depended on the way in which the two Sicilian powers, immediately
affected by this intervention of the Romans in the affairs of the
island, and both hitherto nominally in alliance with Rome, would
regard her interference. Hiero had sufficient reason to treat the
summons, by which the Romans required him to desist from hostilities
against their new confederates in Messana, precisely in the same way
as the Samnites and Lucanians in similar circumstances had received
the occupation of Capua and Thurii, and to answer the Romans by a
declaration of war. If, however, he remained unsupported, such a war
would be folly; and it might be expected from his prudent and moderate
policy that he would acquiesce in what was inevitable, if Carthage
should be disposed for peace. This seemed not impossible. A Roman
embassy was now (489) sent to Carthage, seven years after the attempt
of the Phoenician fleet to gain possession of Tarentum, to demand
explanations as to these incidents.(4) Grievances not unfounded, but
half-forgotten, once more emerged--it seemed not superfluous amidst
other warlike preparations to replenish the diplomatic armoury
with reasons for war, and for the coming manifesto to reserve to
themselves, as was the custom of the Romans, the character of the
party aggrieved. This much at least might with entire justice be
affirmed, that the respective enterprises on Tarentum and Messana
stood upon exactly the same footing in point of design and of pretext,
and that it was simply the accident of success that made the
difference. Carthage avoided an open rupture. The ambassadors
carried back to Rome the disavowal of the Carthaginian admiral who
had made the attempt on Tarentum, along with the requisite false
oaths: the counter-complaints, which of course were not wanting on
the part of Carthage, were studiously moderate, and abstained from
characterizing the meditated invasion of Sicily as a ground for war.
Such, however, it was; for Carthage regarded the affairs of Sicily
--just as Rome regarded those of Italy--as internal matters in which
an independent power could allow no interference, and was determined
to act accordingly. But Phoenician policy followed a gentler course
than that of threatening open war. When the preparations of Rome for
sending help to the Mamertines were at length so far advanced that the
fleet formed of the war-vessels of Naples, Tarentum, Velia, and Locri,
and the vanguard of the Roman land army under the military tribune
Gaius Claudius, had appeared at Rhegium (in the spring of 490),
unexpected news arrived from Messana that the Carthaginians, having
come to an understanding with the anti-Roman party there, had as a
neutral power arranged a peace between Hiero and the Mamertines; that
the siege had in consequence been raised; and that a Carthaginian
fleet lay in the harbour of Messana, and a Carthaginian garrison in
the citadel, both under the command of admiral Hanno. The Mamertine
citizens, now controlled by Carthaginian influence, informed the Roman
commanders, with due thanks to the federal help so speedily accorded
to them, that they were glad that they no longer needed it.
The adroit and daring officer who commanded the Roman vanguard
nevertheless set sail with his troops. But the Carthaginians warned
the Roman vessels to retire, and even made some of them prizes; these,
however, the Carthaginian admiral, remembering his strict orders to
give no pretext for the outbreak of hostilities, sent back to his good
friends on the other side of the straits. It almost seemed as if the
Romans had compromised themselves as uselessly before Messana, as the
Carthaginians before Tarentum. But Claudius did not allow himself
to be deterred, and on a second attempt he succeeded in landing.
Scarcely had he arrived when he called a meeting of the citizens; and,
at his wish, the Carthaginian admiral also appeared at the meeting,
still imagining that he should be able to avoid an open breach. But
the Romans seized his person in the assembly itself; and Hanno and the
Phoenician garrison in the citadel, weak and destitute of a leader,
were pusillanimous enough, the former to give to his troops the
command to withdraw, the latter to comply with the orders of their
captive general and to evacuate the city along with him. Thus the
tete de pont of the island fell into the hands of the Romans. The
Carthaginian authorities, justly indignant at the folly and weakness
of their general, caused him to be executed, and declared war against
the Romans. Above all it was their aim to recover the lost place. A
strong Carthaginian fleet, led by Hanno, son of Hannibal, appeared off
Messana; while the fleet blockaded the straits, the Carthaginian army
landing from it began the siege on the north side. Hiero, who had
only waited for the Carthaginian attack to begin the war with Rome,
again brought up his army, which he had hardly withdrawn, against
Messana, and undertook the attack on the south side of the city.
But meanwhile the Roman consul Appius Claudius Caudex had appeared at
Rhegium with the main body of his army, and succeeded in crossing on
a dark night in spite of the Carthaginian fleet. Audacity and fortune
were on the side of the Romans; the allies, not prepared for an attack
by the whole Roman army and consequently not united, were beaten in
detail by the Roman legions issuing from the city; and thus the siege
was raised. The Roman army kept the field during the summer, and
even made an attempt on Syracuse; but, when that had failed and the
siege of Echetla (on the confines of the territories of Syracuse and
Carthage) had to be abandoned with loss, the Roman army returned to
Messana, and thence, leaving a strong garrison behind them, to Italy.
The results obtained in this first campaign of the Romans out of Italy
may not quite have corresponded to the expectations at home, for the
consul had no triumph; nevertheless, the energy which the Romans
displayed in Sicily could not fail to make a great impression on the
Sicilian Greeks. In the following year both consuls and an army twice
as large entered the island unopposed. One of them, Marcus Valerius
Maximus, afterwards called from this campaign the "hero of Messana"
(-Messalla-), achieved a brilliant victory over the allied
Carthaginians and Syracusans. After this battle the Phoenician army
no longer ventured to keep the field against the Romans; Alaesa,
Centuripa, and the smaller Greek towns generally fell to the victors,
and Hiero himself abandoned the Carthaginian side and made peace and
alliance with the Romans (491). He pursued a judicious policy in
joining the Romans as soon as it appeared that their interference in
Sicily was in earnest, and while there was still time to purchase
peace without cessions and sacrifices. The intermediate states in
Sicily, Syracuse and Messana, which were unable to follow out a policy
of their own and had only the choice between Roman and Carthaginian
hegemony, could not but at any rate prefer the former; because the
Romans had very probably not as yet formed the design of conquering
the island for themselves, but sought merely to prevent its being
acquired by Carthage, and at all events Rome might be expected to
substitute a more tolerable treatment and a due protection of
commercial freedom for the tyrannizing and monopolizing system that
Carthage pursued. Henceforth Hiero continued to be the most
important, the steadiest, and the most esteemed ally of the Romans
in the island.
Capture of Agrigentum
The Romans had thus gained their immediate object. By their double
alliance with Messana and Syracuse, and the firm hold which they had
on the whole east coast, they secured the means of landing on the
island and of maintaining--which hitherto had been a very difficult
matter--their armies there; and the war, which had previously been
doubtful and hazardous, lost in a great measure its character of risk.
Accordingly, no greater exertions were made for it than for the wars
in Samnium and Etruria; the two legions which were sent over to the
island for the next year (492) sufficed, in concert with the Sicilian
Greeks, to drive the Carthaginians everywhere into their fortresses.
The commander-in-chief of the Carthaginians, Hannibal son of Gisgo,
threw himself with the flower of his troops into Agrigentum, to defend
to the last that most important of the Carthaginian inland cities.
Unable to storm a city so strong, the Romans blockaded it with
entrenched lines and a double camp; the besieged, who numbered 50,000
soon suffered from want of provisions. To raise the siege the
Carthaginian admiral Hanno landed at Heraclea, and cut off in turn the
supplies from the Roman besieging force. On both sides the distress
was great. At length a battle was resolved on, to put an end to the
state of embarrassment and uncertainty. In this battle the Numidian
cavalry showed itself just as superior to the Roman horse as the Roman
infantry was superior to the Phoenician foot; the infantry decided
the victory, but the losses even of the Romans were very considerable.
The result of the successful struggle was somewhat marred by the
circumstance that, after the battle, during the confusion and fatigue
of the conquerors, the beleaguered army succeeded in escaping from
the city and in reaching the fleet. The victory was nevertheless of
importance; Agrigentum fell into the hands of the Romans, and thus the
whole island was in their power, with the exception of the maritime
fortresses, in which the Carthaginian general Hamilcar, Hanno's
successor in command, entrenched himself to the teeth, and was not to
be driven out either by force or by famine. The war was thenceforth
continued only by sallies of the Carthaginians from the Sicilian
fortresses and their descents on the Italian coasts.
In fact, the Romans now for the first time felt the real difficulties
of the war. If, as we are told, the Carthaginian diplomatists before
the outbreak of hostilities warned the Romans not to push the matter
to a breach, because against their will no Roman could even wash his
hands in the sea, the threat was well founded. The Carthaginian fleet
ruled the sea without a rival, and not only kept the coast towns of
Sicily in due obedience and provided them with all necessaries,
but also threatened a descent upon Italy, for which reason it was
necessary in 492 to retain a consular army there. No invasion on a
large scale occurred; but smaller Carthaginian detachments landed on
the Italian coasts and levied contributions on the allies of Rome,
and what was worst of all, completely paralyzed the commerce of Rome
and her allies. The continuance of such a course for even a short
time would suffice entirely to ruin Caere, Ostia, Neapolis, Tarentum,
and Syracuse, while the Carthaginians easily consoled themselves for
the loss of the tribute of Sicily with the contributions which they
levied and the rich prizes of their privateering. The Romans now
learned, what Dionysius, Agathocles, and Pyrrhus had learned before,
that it was as difficult to conquer the Carthaginians as it was easy
to beat them in the field. They saw that everything depended on
procuring a fleet, and resolved to form one of twenty triremes and
a hundred quinqueremes. The execution, however, of this energetic
resolution was not easy. The representation originating in the
schools of the rhetoricians, which would have us believe that the
Romans then for the first time dipped their oars in water, is no doubt
a childish tale; the mercantile marine of Italy must at this time have
been very extensive, and there was no want even of Italian vessels of
war. But these were war-barks and triremes, such as had been in use
in earlier times; quinqueremes, which under the more modern system of
naval warfare that had originated chiefly in Cartilage were almost
exclusively employed in the line, had not yet been built in Italy.
The measure adopted by the Romans was therefore much as if a maritime
state of the present day were to pass at once from the building of
frigates and cutters to the building of ships of the line; and, just
as in such a case now a foreign ship of the line would, if possible,
be adopted as a pattern, the Romans referred their master shipbuilders
to a stranded Carthaginian -penteres- as a model No doubt the Romans,
had they wished, might have sooner attained their object with the aid
of the Syracusans and Massiliots; but their statesmen had too much
sagacity to desire to defend Italy by means of a fleet not Italian.
The Italian allies, however, were largely drawn upon both for the
naval officers, who must have been for the most part taken from the
Italian mercantile marine, and for the sailors, whose name (-socii
navales-) shows that for a time they were exclusively furnished by
the allies; along with these, slaves provided by the state and
the wealthier families were afterwards employed, and ere long also
the poorer class of burgesses. Under such circumstances, and when we
take into account, as is but fair, on the one hand the comparatively
low state of shipbuilding at that time, and on the other hand the
energy of the Romans, there is nothing incredible in the statement
that the Romans solved within a year the problem--which baffled
Napoleon--of converting a continental into a maritime power, and
actually launched their fleet of 120 sail in the spring of 494.
It is true, that it was by no means a match for the Carthaginian fleet
in numbers and efficiency at sea; and these were points of the greater
importance, as the naval tactics of the period consisted mainly in
manoeuvring. In the maritime warfare of that period hoplites and
archers no doubt fought from the deck, and projectile machines were
also plied from it; but the ordinary and really decisive mode of
action consisted in running foul of the enemy's vessels, for which
purpose the prows were furnished with heavy iron beaks: the vessels
engaged were in the habit of sailing round each other till one or the
other succeeded in giving the thrust, which usually proved decisive.
Accordingly the crew of an ordinary Greek trireme, consisting of about
200 men, contained only about 10 soldiers, but on the other hand 170
rowers, from 50 to 60 on each deck; that of a quinquereme numbered
about 300 rowers, and soldiers in proportion.
The happy idea occurred to the Romans that they might make up for
what their vessels, with their unpractised officers and crews,
necessarily lacked in ability of manoeuvring, by again assigning a
more considerable part in naval warfare to the soldiers. They
stationed at the prow of each vessel a flying bridge, which could be
lowered in front or on either side; it was furnished on both sides
with parapets, and had space for two men in front. When the enemy's
vessel was sailing up to strike the Roman one, or was lying alongside
of it after the thrust had been evaded, the bridge on deck was
suddenly lowered and fastened to its opponent by means of a grappling-
iron: this not only prevented the running down, but enabled the Roman
marines to pass along the bridge to the enemy's deck and to carry it
by assault as in a conflict on land. No distinct body of marines
was formed, but land troops were employed, when required, for this
maritime service. In one instance as many as 120 legionaries fought
in each ship on occasion of a great naval battle; in that case however
the Roman fleet had at the same time a landing-army on board.
In this way the Romans created a fleet which was a match for the
Carthaginians. Those err, who represent this building of a Roman
fleet as a fairy tale, and besides they miss their aim; the feat must
be understood in order to be admired. The construction of a fleet by
the Romans was in very truth a noble national work--a work through
which, by their clear perception of what was needful and possible, by
ingenuity in invention, and by energy in resolution and in execution,
they rescued their country from a position which was worse than at
first it seemed.
The outset, nevertheless, was not favourable to the Romans. The Roman
admiral, the consul Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, who had sailed for
Messana with the first seventeen vessels ready for sea (494), fancied,
when on the voyage, that he should be able to capture Lipara by a
coup de main. But a division of the Carthaginian fleet stationed at
Panormus blockaded the harbour of the island where the Roman vessels
rode at anchor, and captured the whole squadron along with the consul
without a struggle. This, however, did not deter the main fleet from
likewise sailing, as soon as its preparations were completed, for
Messana. On its voyage along the Italian coast it fell in with a
Carthaginian reconnoitring squadron of less strength, on which it
had the good fortune to inflict a loss more than counterbalancing
the first loss of the Romans; and thus successful and victorious it
entered the port of Messana, where the second consul Gaius Duilius
took the command in room of his captured colleague. At the promontory
of Mylae, to the north-west of Messana, the Carthaginian fleet, that
advanced from Panormus under the command of Hannibal, encountered the
Roman, which here underwent its first trial on a great scale. The
Carthaginians, seeing in the ill-sailing and unwieldy vessels of the
Romans an easy prey, fell upon them in irregular order; but the newly
invented boarding-bridges proved their thorough efficiency. The Roman
vessels hooked and stormed those of the enemy as they came up one
by one; they could not be approached either in front or on the sides
without the dangerous bridge descending on the enemy's deck. When the
battle was over, about fifty Carthaginian vessels, almost the half of
the fleet, were sunk or captured by the Romans; among the latter was
the ship of the admiral Hannibal, formerly belonging to king Pyrrhus.
The gain was great; still greater the moral effect of the victory.
Rome had suddenly become a naval power, and held in her hand the
means of energetically terminating a war which threatened to be
endlessly prolonged and to involve the commerce of Italy in ruin.
Two plans were open to the Romans. They might attack Carthage on the
Italian islands and deprive her of the coast fortresses of Sicily and
Sardinia one after another--a scheme which was perhaps practicable
through well-combined operations by land and sea; and, in the event of
its being accomplished, peace might either be concluded with Carthage
on the basis of the cession of these islands, or, should such terms
not be accepted or prove unsatisfactory, the second stage of the war
might be transferred to Africa. Or they might neglect the islands and
throw themselves at once with all their strength on Africa, not, in
the adventurous style of Agathocles, burning their vessels behind them
and staking all on the victory of a desperate band, but covering with
a strong fleet the communications between the African invading army
and Italy; and in that case a peace on moderate terms might be
expected from the consternation of the enemy after the first
successes, or, if the Romans chose, they might by pushing matters
to an extremity compel the enemy to entire surrender.
Attack on Africa
Naval Victory of Ecnomus
The spirit of the Carthaginians was broken: they sued for peace.
But the conditions which the consul proposed--not merely the cession
of Sicily and Sardinia, but the conclusion of an alliance on unequal
terms with Rome, which would have bound the Carthaginians to renounce
a war-marine of their own and to furnish vessels for the Roman wars
--conditions which would have placed Carthage on a level with Neapolis
and Tarentum, could not be accepted, so long as a Carthaginian army
kept the field and a Carthaginian fleet kept the sea, and the capital
stood unshaken.
Preparations of Carthage
Defeat of Regulus
When spring came (499), the state of affairs had so changed, that now
the Carthaginians were the first to take the field and to offer battle
to the Romans. It was natural that they should do so, for everything
depended on their getting quit of the army of Regulus, before
reinforcements could arrive from Italy. The same reason should have
led the Romans to desire delay; but, relying on their invincibleness
in the open field, they at once accepted battle notwithstanding their
inferiority of strength--for, although the numbers of the infantry on
both sides were nearly the same, their 4000 cavalry and 100 elephants
gave to the Carthaginians a decided superiority--and notwithstanding
the unfavourable nature of the ground, the Carthaginians having taken
up their position in a broad plain presumably not far from Tunes.
Xanthippus, who on this day commanded the Carthaginians, first threw
his cavalry on that of the enemy, which was stationed, as usual, on
the two flanks of the line of battle; the few squadrons of the Romans
were scattered like dust in a moment before the masses of the enemy's
horse, and the Roman infantry found itself outflanked by them and
surrounded. The legions, unshaken by their apparent danger, advanced
to attack the enemy's line; and, although the row of elephants placed
as a protection in front of it checked the right wing and centre of
the Romans, the left wing at any rate, marching past the elephants,
engaged the mercenary infantry on the right of the enemy, and
overthrew them completely. But this very success broke up the Roman
ranks. The main body indeed, assailed by the elephants in front and
by the cavalry on the flanks and in the rear, formed square, and
defended itself with heroic courage, but the close masses were at
length broken and swept away. The victorious left wing encountered
the still fresh Carthaginian centre, where the Libyan infantry
prepared a similar fate for it. From the nature of the ground and the
superior numbers of the enemy's cavalry, all the combatants in these
masses were cut down or taken prisoners; only two thousand men,
chiefly, in all probability, the light troops and horsemen who were
dispersed at the commencement, gained--while the Roman legions stood
to be slaughtered--a start sufficient to enable them with difficulty
to reach Clupea. Among the few prisoners was the consul himself, who
afterwards died in Carthage; his family, under the idea that he had
not been treated by the Carthaginians according to the usages of war,
wreaked a most revolting vengeance on two noble Carthaginian captives,
till even the slaves were moved to pity, and on their information the
tribunes put a stop to the shameful outrage.(7)
Evacuation of Africa
When the terrible news reached Rome, the first care of the Romans was
naturally directed to the saving of the force shut up in Clupea. A
Roman fleet of 350 sail immediately started, and after a noble victory
at the Hermaean promontory, in which the Carthaginians lost 114 ships,
it reached Clupea just in time to deliver from their hard-pressed
position the remains of the defeated army which were there entrenched.
Had it been despatched before the catastrophe occurred, it might have
converted the defeat into a victory that would probably have put an
end to the Punic wars. But so completely had the Romans now lost
their judgment, that after a successful conflict before Clupea they
embarked all their troops and sailed home, voluntarily evacuating
that important and easily defended position which secured to
them facilities for landing in Africa, and abandoning their
numerous African allies without protection to the vengeance of the
Carthaginians. The Carthaginians did not neglect the opportunity of
filling their empty treasury, and of making their subjects clearly
understand the consequences of unfaithfulness. An extraordinary
contribution of 1000 talents of silver (244,000 pounds) and 20,000
oxen was levied, and the sheiks in all the communities that had
revolted were crucified; it is said that there were three thousand of
them, and that this revolting atrocity on the part of the Carthaginian
authorities really laid the foundation of the revolution which broke
forth in Africa some years later. Lastly, as if to fill up the
measure of misfortune to the Romans even as their measure of success
had been filled before, on the homeward voyage of the fleet three-
fourths of the Roman vessels perished with their crews in a violent
storm; only eighty reached their port (July 499). The captains had
foretold the impending mischief, but the extemporised Roman admirals
had nevertheless given orders to sail.
Siege of Lilybaeum
But the new consul Publius Claudius considered the task of maintaining
the investment of Lilybaeum too trifling: he preferred to change once
more the plan of operations, and with his numerous newly-manned
vessels suddenly to surprise the Carthaginian fleet which was waiting
in the neighbouring harbour of Drepana. With the whole blockading
squadron, which had taken on board volunteers from the legions, he
started about midnight, and sailing in good order with his right wing
by the shore, and his left in the open sea, he safely reached the
harbour of Drepana at sunrise. Here the Phoenician admiral Atarbas
was in command. Although surprised, he did not lose his presence of
mind or allow himself to be shut up in the harbour, but as the Roman
ships entered the harbour, which opens to the south in the form of
a sickle, on the one side, he withdrew his vessels from it by the
opposite side which was still free, and stationed them in line on the
outside. No other course remained to the Roman admiral but to recall
as speedily as possible the foremost vessels from the harbour, and to
make his arrangements for battle in like manner in front of it; but in
consequence of this retrograde movement he lost the free choice of his
position, and was obliged to accept battle in a line, which on the one
hand was outflanked by that of the enemy to the extent of five ships
--for there was not time fully to deploy the vessels as they issued
from the harbour--and on the other hand was crowded so close on the
shore that his vessels could neither retreat, nor sail behind the
line so as to come to each other's aid. Not only was the battle lost
before it began, but the Roman fleet was so completely ensnared that
it fell almost wholly into the hands of the enemy. The consul indeed
escaped, for he was the first who fled; but 93 Roman vessels, more
than three-fourths of the blockading fleet, with the flower of the
Roman legions on board, fell into the hands of the Phoenicians. It
was the first and only great naval victory which the Carthaginians
gained over the Romans. Lilybaeum was practically relieved on the
side towards the sea, for though the remains of the Roman fleet
returned to their former position, they were now much too weak
seriously to blockade a harbour which had never been wholly closed,
and they could only protect themselves from the attack of the
Carthaginian ships with the assistance of the land army. That single
imprudent act of an inexperienced and criminally thoughtless officer
had thrown away all that had been with so much difficulty attained
by the long and galling warfare around the fortress; and those war-
vessels of the Romans which his presumption had not forfeited were
shortly afterwards destroyed by the folly of his colleague.
The second consul, Lucius Junius Pullus, who had received the charge
of lading at Syracuse the supplies destined for the army at Lilybaeum,
and of convoying the transports along the south coast of the island
with a second Roman fleet of 120 war-vessels, instead of keeping his
ships together, committed the error of allowing the first convoy
to depart alone and of only following with the second. When the
Carthaginian vice-admiral, Carthalo, who with a hundred select ships
blockaded the Roman fleet in the port of Lilybaeum, received the
intelligence, he proceeded to the south coast of the island, cut off
the two Roman squadrons from each other by interposing between them,
and compelled them to take shelter in two harbours of refuge on the
inhospitable shores of Gela and Camarina. The attacks of the
Carthaginians were indeed bravely repulsed by the Romans with the help
of the shore batteries, which had for some time been erected there
as everywhere along the coast; but, as the Romans could not hope to
effect a junction and continue their voyage, Carthalo could leave
the elements to finish his work. The next great storm, accordingly,
completely annihilated the two Roman fleets in their wretched
roadsteads, while the Phoenician admiral easily weathered it on
the open sea with his unencumbered and well-managed ships.
The Romans, however, succeeded in saving the greater part
of the crews and cargoes (505).
The Roman senate was in perplexity. The war had now reached its
sixteenth year; and they seemed to be farther from their object in
the sixteenth than in the first. In this war four large fleets had
perished, three of them with Roman armies on board; a fourth select
land army had been destroyed by the enemy in Libya; to say nothing of
the numerous losses which had been occasioned by the minor naval
engagements, and by the battles, and still more by the outpost
warfare and the diseases, of Sicily.
What a multitude of human lives the war swept away may be seen from
the fact, that the burgess-roll merely from 502 to 507 decreased by
about 40,000, a sixth part of the entire number; and this does not
include the losses of the allies, who bore the whole brunt of the war
by sea, and, in addition, at least an equal proportion with the Romans
of the warfare by land. Of the financial loss it is not possible to
form any conception; but both the direct damage sustained in ships and
-materiel-, and the indirect injury through the paralyzing of trade,
must have been enormous. An evil still greater than this was the
exhaustion of all the methods by which they had sought to terminate
the war. They had tried a landing in Africa with their forces fresh
and in the full career of victory, and had totally failed. They had
undertaken to storm Sicily town by town; the lesser places had fallen,
but the two mighty naval strongholds of Lilybaeum and Drepana stood
more invincible than ever. What were they to do? In fact, there was
to some extent reason for despondency. The fathers of the city became
faint-hearted; they allowed matters simply to take their course,
knowing well that a war protracted without object or end was more
pernicious for Italy than the straining of the last man and the last
penny, but without that courage and confidence in the nation and in
fortune, which could demand new sacrifices in addition to those that
had already been lavished in vain. They dismissed the fleet; at the
most they encouraged privateering, and with that view placed the war-
vessels of the state at the disposal of captains who were ready to
undertake a piratical warfare on their own account. The war by land
was continued nominally, because they could not do otherwise; but
they were content with observing the Sicilian fortresses and barely
maintaining what they possessed,--measures which, in the absence
of a fleet, required a very numerous army and extremely
costly preparations.
Now, if ever, the time had come when Carthage was in a position to
humble her mighty antagonist. She, too, of course must have felt
some exhaustion of resources; but, in the circumstances, the
Phoenician finances could not possibly be so disorganized as to
prevent the Carthaginians from continuing the war--which cost them
little beyond money--offensively and with energy. The Carthaginian
government, however, was not energetic, but on the contrary weak and
indolent, unless impelled to action by an easy and sure gain or by
extreme necessity. Glad to be rid of the Roman fleet, they foolishly
allowed their own also to fall into decay, and began after the example
of the enemy to confine their operations by land and sea to the petty
warfare in and around Sicily.
Thus there ensued six years of uneventful warfare (506-511), the most
inglorious in the history of this century for Rome, and inglorious
also for the Carthaginian people. One man, however, among the latter
thought and acted differently from his nation. Hamilcar, named Barak
or Barcas (i. e. lightning), a young officer of much promise, took
over the supreme command in Sicily in the year 507. His army, like
every Carthaginian one, was defective in a trustworthy and experienced
infantry; and the government, although it was perhaps in a position to
create such an infantry and at any rate was bound to make the attempt,
contented itself with passively looking on at its defeats or at most
with nailing the defeated generals to the cross. Hamilcar resolved to
take the matter into his own hands. He knew well that his mercenaries
were as indifferent to Carthage as to Rome, and that he had to expect
from his government not Phoenician or Libyan conscripts, but at the
best a permission to save his country with his troops in his own way,
provided it cost nothing. But he knew himself also, and he knew men.
His mercenaries cared nothing for Carthage; but a true general is able
to substitute his own person for his country in the affections of his
soldiers; and such an one was this young commander. After he had
accustomed his men to face the legionaries in the warfare of outposts
before Drepana and Lilybaeum, he established himself with his force on
Mount Ercte (Monte Pellegrino near Palermo), which commands like a
fortress the neighbouring country; and making them settle there with
their wives and children, levied contributions from the plains, while
Phoenician privateers plundered the Italian coast as far as Cumae. He
thus provided his people with copious supplies without asking money
from the Carthaginians, and, keeping up the communication with Drepana
by sea, he threatened to surprise the important town of Panormus in
his immediate vicinity. Not only were the Romans unable to expel
him from his stronghold, but after the struggle had lasted awhile at
Ercte, Hamilcar formed for himself another similar position at Eryx.
This mountain, which bore half-way up the town of the same name and
on its summit the temple of Aphrodite, had been hitherto in the hands
of the Romans, who made it a basis for annoying Drepana. Hamilcar
deprived them of the town and besieged the temple, while the Romans
in turn blockaded him from the plain. The Celtic deserters from the
Carthaginian army who were stationed by the Romans at the forlorn post
of the temple--a reckless pack of marauders, who in the course of this
siege plundered the temple and perpetrated every sort of outrage
--defended the summit of the rock with desperate courage; but Hamilcar
did not allow himself to be again dislodged from the town, and kept
his communications constantly open by sea with the fleet and the
garrison of Drepana. The war in Sicily seemed to be assuming a turn
more and more unfavourable for the Romans. The Roman state was losing
in that warfare its money and its soldiers, and the Roman generals
their repute; it was already clear that no Roman general was a
match for Hamilcar, and the time might be calculated when even the
Carthaginian mercenary would be able boldly to measure himself
against the legionary. The privateers of Hamilcar appeared with ever-
increasing audacity on the Italian coast: already a praetor had been
obliged to take the field against a band of Carthaginian rovers which
had landed there. A few years more, and Hamilcar might with his fleet
have accomplished from Sicily what his son subsequently undertook by
the land route from Spain.
Conclusion of Peace
Let us pause for a moment over the conflict, which extended the
dominion of Rome beyond the circling sea that encloses the peninsula.
It was one of the longest and most severe which the Romans ever waged;
many of the soldiers who fought in the decisive battle were unborn
when the contest began. Nevertheless, despite the incomparably noble
incidents which it now and again presented, we can scarcely name any
war which the Romans managed so wretchedly and with such vacillation,
both in a military and in a political point of view. It could hardly
be otherwise. The contest occurred amidst a transition in their
political system--the transition from an Italian policy, which no
longer sufficed, to the policy befitting a great state, which had not
yet been found. The Roman senate and the Roman military system were
excellently organized for a purely Italian policy. The wars which
such a policy provoked were purely continental wars, and always rested
on the capital situated in the middle of the peninsula as the ultimate
basis of operations, and proximately on the chain of Roman fortresses.
The problems to be solved were mainly tactical, not strategical;
marches and operations occupied but a subordinate, battles held the
first, place; fortress warfare was in its infancy; the sea and naval
war hardly crossed men's thoughts even incidentally. We can easily
understand--especially if we bear in mind that in the battles of that
period, where the naked weapon predominated, it was really the hand-
to-hand encounter that proved decisive--how a deliberative assembly
might direct such operations, and how any one who just was burgomaster
might command the troops. All this was changed in a moment. The
field of battle stretched away to an incalculable distance, to the
unknown regions of another continent, and beyond a broad expanse of
sea; every wave was a highway for the enemy; from any harbour he
might be expected to issue for his onward march. The siege of
strong places, particularly maritime fortresses, in which the first
tacticians of Greece had failed, had now for the first time to be
attempted by the Romans. A land army and the system of a civic
militia no longer sufficed. It was essential to create a fleet, and,
what was more difficult, to employ it; it was essential to find out
the true points of attack and defence, to combine and to direct
masses, to calculate expeditions extending over long periods and great
distances, and to adjust their co-operation; if these things were not
attended to, even an enemy far weaker in the tactics of the field
might easily vanquish a stronger opponent. Is there any wonder that
the reins of government in such an exigency slipped from the hands of
a deliberative assembly and of commanding burgomasters?
It was plain, that at the beginning of the war the Romans did not
know what they were undertaking; it was only during the course of the
struggle that the inadequacies of their system, one after another,
forced themselves on their notice--the want of a naval power, the
lack of fixed military leadership, the insufficiency of their
generals, the total uselessness of their admirals. In part these
evils were remedied by energy and good fortune; as was the case with
the want of a fleet. That mighty creation, however, was but a grand
makeshift, and always remained so. A Roman fleet was formed, but it
was rendered national only in name, and was always treated with the
affection of a stepmother; the naval service continued to be little
esteemed in comparison with the high honour of serving in the legions;
the naval officers were in great part Italian Greeks; the crews were
composed of subjects or even of slaves and outcasts. The Italian
farmer was at all times distrustful of the sea; and of the three
things in his life which Cato regretted one was, that he had travelled
by sea when he might have gone by land. This result arose partly out
of the nature of the case, for the vessels were oared galleys and the
service of the oar can scarcely be ennobled; but the Romans might at
least have formed separate legions of marines and taken steps towards
the rearing of a class of Roman naval officers. Taking advantage
of the impulse of the nation, they should have made it their aim
gradually to establish a naval force important not only in numbers
but in sailing power and practice, and for such a purpose they had a
valuable nucleus in the privateering that was developed during the
long war; but nothing of the sort was done by the government.
Nevertheless the Roman fleet with its unwieldy grandeur was the
noblest creation of genius in this war, and, as at its beginning, so
at its close it was the fleet that turned the scale in favour of Rome.
Rome was victorious at last. But her acquiescence in a gain far less
than had at first been demanded and indeed offered, as well as the
energetic opposition which the peace encountered in Rome, very clearly
indicate the indecisive and superficial character of the victory and
of the peace; and if Rome was the victor, she was indebted for her
victory in part no doubt to the favour of the gods and to the energy
of her citizens, but still more to the errors of her enemies in the
conduct of the war--errors far surpassing even her own.
3. The Mamertines entered quite into the same position towards Rome
as the Italian communities, bound themselves to furnish ships (Cic.
Verr. v. 19, 50), and, as the coins show, did not possess the right
of coining silver.
8. The statement (Zon. viii. 17) that the Carthaginians had to promise
that they would not send any vessels of war into the territories of
the Roman symmachy--and therefore not to Syracuse, perhaps even not
to Massilia--sounds credible enough; but the text of the treaty says
nothing of it (Polyb. iii. 27).
CHAPTER III
In the western sea which was of far more account for Italy than the
Adriatic, the most important position, the large and fertile island
of Sicily copiously furnished with harbours, had been by the peace
with Carthage transferred for the most part into the possession of the
Romans. King Hiero of Syracuse indeed, who during the last twenty-two
years of the war had adhered with unshaken steadfastness to the Roman
alliance, might have had a fair claim to an extension of territory;
but, if Roman policy had begun the war with the resolution of
tolerating only secondary states in the island, the views of the
Romans at its close decidedly tended towards the seizure of Sicily
for themselves. Hiero might be content that his territory--namely, in
addition to the immediate district of Syracuse, the domains of Elorus,
Neetum, Acrae, Leontini, Megara, and Tauromenium--and his independence
in relation to foreign powers, were (for want of any pretext to
curtail them) left to him in their former compass; he might well be
content that the war between the two great powers had not ended in
the complete overthrow of the one or of the other, and that there
consequently still remained at least a possibility of subsistence for
the intermediate power in Sicily. In the remaining and by far the
larger portion of Sicily, at Panormus, Lilybaeum, Agrigentum, Messana,
the Romans effected a permanent settlement.
Sardinia Roman
The Libyan Insurrection
Corsica
They only regretted that the possession of that beautiful island was
not enough to convert the western waters into a Roman inland sea,
so long as Sardinia still remained Carthaginian. Soon, however,
after the conclusion of the peace there appeared an unexpected
prospect of wresting from the Carthaginians this second island of the
Mediterranean. In Africa, immediately after peace had been concluded
with Rome, the mercenaries and the subjects of the Phoenicians joined
in a common revolt. The blame of the dangerous insurrection was
mainly chargeable on the Carthaginian government. In the last years
of the war Hamilcar had not been able to pay his Sicilian mercenaries
as formerly from his own resources, and he had vainly requested that
money might be sent to him from home; he might, he was told, send his
forces to Africa to be paid off. He obeyed; but as he knew the men,
he prudently embarked them in small subdivisions, that the authorities
might pay them off by troops or might at least separate them, and
thereupon he laid down his command. But all his precautions were
thwarted not so much by the emptiness of the exchequer, as by the
collegiate method of transacting business and the folly of the
bureaucracy. They waited till the whole army was once more united in
Libya, and then endeavoured to curtail the pay promised to the men.
Of course a mutiny broke out among the troops, and the hesitating and
cowardly demeanour of the authorities showed the mutineers what they
might dare. Most of them were natives of the districts ruled by, or
dependent on, Carthage; they knew the feelings which had been provoked
throughout these districts by the slaughter decreed by the government
after the expedition of Regulus(1) and by the fearful pressure of
taxation, and they knew also the character of their government, which
never kept faith and never pardoned; they were well aware of what
awaited them, should they disperse to their homes with pay exacted by
mutiny. The Carthaginians had for long been digging the mine, and
they now themselves supplied the men who could not but explode it.
Like wildfire the revolution spread from garrison to garrison, from
village to village; the Libyan women contributed their ornaments to
pay the wages of the mercenaries; a number of Carthaginian citizens,
amongst whom were some of the most distinguished officers of the
Sicilian army, became the victims of the infuriated multitude;
Carthage was already besieged on two sides, and the Carthaginian
army marching out of the city was totally routed in consequence of
the blundering of its unskilful leader.
When the Romans thus saw their hated and still dreaded foe involved in
a greater danger than any ever brought on that foe by the Roman wars,
they began more and more to regret the conclusion of the peace of 513
--which, if it was not in reality precipitate, now at least appeared
so to all--and to forget how exhausted at that time their own state
had been and how powerful had then been the standing of their
Carthaginian rival. Shame indeed forbade their entering into
communication openly with the Carthaginian rebels; in fact, they gave
an exceptional permission to the Carthaginians to levy recruits for
this war in Italy, and prohibited Italian mariners from dealing with
the Libyans. But it may be doubted whether the government of Rome
was very earnest in these acts of friendly alliance; for, in spite
of them, the dealings between the African insurgents and the Roman
mariners continued, and when Hamilcar, whom the extremity of the peril
had recalled to the command of the Carthaginian army, seized and
imprisoned a number of Italian captains concerned in these dealings,
the senate interceded for them with the Carthaginian government and
procured their release. The insurgents themselves appeared to
recognize in the Romans their natural allies. The garrisons in
Sardinia, which like the rest of the Carthaginian army had declared
in favour of the insurgents, offered the possession of the island to
the Romans, when they saw that they were unable to hold it against the
attacks of the un-conquered mountaineers of the interior (about 515);
and similar offers came even from the community of Utica, which had
likewise taken part in the revolt and was now hard pressed by the
arms of Hamilcar. The latter suggestion was declined by the Romans,
chiefly doubtless because its acceptance would have carried them
beyond the natural boundaries of Italy and therefore farther than
the Roman government was then disposed to go; on the other hand they
entertained the offers of the Sardinian mutineers, and took over
from them the portion of Sardinia which had been in the hands of the
Carthaginians (516). In this instance, even more than in the affair
of the Mamertines, the Romans were justly liable to the reproach that
the great and victorious burgesses had not disdained to fraternize
and share the spoil with a venal pack of mercenaries, and had not
sufficient self-denial to prefer the course enjoined by justice and
by honour to the gain of the moment. The Carthaginians, whose troubles
reached their height just about the period of the occupation of
Sardinia, were silent for the time being as to the unwarrantable
violence; but, after this peril had been, contrary to the expectations
and probably contrary to the hopes of the Romans, averted by the
genius of Hamilcar, and Carthage had been reinstated to her full
sovereignty in Africa (517), Carthaginian envoys immediately appeared
at Rome to require the restitution of Sardinia. But the Romans, not
inclined to restore their booty, replied with frivolous or at any rate
irrelevant complaints as to all sorts of injuries which they alleged
that the Carthaginians had inflicted on the Roman traders, and
hastened to declare war;(2) the principle, that in politics power
is the measure of right, appeared in its naked effrontery. Just
resentment urged the Carthaginians to accept that offer of war; had
Catulus insisted upon the cession of Sardinia five years before, the
war would probably have pursued its course. But now, when both
islands were lost, when Libya was in a ferment, and when the state was
weakened to the utmost by its twenty-four years' struggle with Rome
and the dreadful civil war that had raged for nearly five years more,
they were obliged to submit It was only after repeated entreaties,
and after the Phoenicians had bound themselves to pay to Rome a
compensation of 1200 talents (292,000 pounds) for the warlike
preparations which had been wantonly occasioned, that the Romans
reluctantly desisted from war. Thus the Romans acquired Sardinia
almost without a struggle; to which they added Corsica, the ancient
possession of the Etruscans, where perhaps some detached Roman
garrisons still remained over from the last war.(3) In Sardinia,
however, and still more in the rugged Corsica, the Romans restricted
themselves, just as the Phoenicians had done, to an occupation of
the coasts. With the natives in the interior they were continually
engaged in war or, to speak more correctly, in hunting them like wild
beasts; they baited them with dogs, and carried what they captured to
the slave market; but they undertook no real conquest. They had
occupied the islands not on their own account, but for the security
of Italy. Now that the confederacy possessed the three large islands,
it might call the Tyrrhene Sea its own.
But, side by side with this essential equality of rights, there was
established a distinction, very important in its effects, between the
Italian communities on the one hand and the transmarine communities
on the other. While the treaties concluded with the Italian towns
imposed on them a fixed contingent for the army or the fleet of
the Romans, such a contingent was not imposed on the transmarine
communities, with which no binding paction was entered into at all,
but they lost the right of arms,(8) with the single exception that
they might be employed on the summons of the Roman praetor for the
defence of their own homes. The Roman government regularly sent
Italian troops, of the strength which it had fixed, to the islands;
in return for this, a tenth of the field-produce of Sicily, and a toll
of 5 per cent on the value of all articles of commerce exported from
or imported into the Sicilian harbours, were paid to Rome. To the
islanders these taxes were nothing new. The imposts levied by the
Persian great-king and the Carthaginian republic were substantially of
the same character with that tenth; and in Greece also such a taxation
had for long been, after Oriental precedent, associated with the
-tyrannis- and often also with a hegemony. The Sicilians had in this
way long paid their tenth either to Syracuse or to Carthage, and had
been wont to levy customs-dues no longer on their own account. "We
received," says Cicero, "the Sicilian communities into our clientship
and protection in such a way that they continued under the same law
under which they had lived before, and obeyed the Roman community
under relations similar to those in which they had obeyed their
own rulers." It is fair that this should not be forgotten; but to
continue an injustice is to commit injustice. Viewed in relation not
to the subjects, who merely changed masters, but to their new rulers,
the abandonment of the equally wise and magnanimous principle of Roman
statesmanship--viz., that Rome should accept from her subjects simply
military aid, and never pecuniary compensation in lieu of it--was of
a fatal importance, in comparison with which all alleviations in the
rates and the mode of levying them, as well as all exceptions in
detail, were as nothing. Such exceptions were, no doubt, made in
various cases. Messana was directly admitted to the confederacy of
the -togati-, and, like the Greek cities in Italy, furnished its
contingent to the Roman fleet. A number of other cities, while not
admitted to the Italian military confederacy, yet received in addition
to other favours immunity from tribute and tenths, so that their
position in a financial point of view was even more favourable than
that of the Italian communities. These were Segesta and Halicyae,
which were the first towns of Carthaginian Sicily that joined the
Roman alliance; Centuripa, an inland town in the east of the island,
which was destined to keep a watch over the Syracusan territory in its
neighbourhood;(9) Halaesa on the northern coast, which was the first
of the free Greek towns to join the Romans, and above all Panormus,
hitherto the capital of Carthaginian, and now destined to become
that of Roman, Sicily. The Romans thus applied to Sicily the ancient
principle of their policy, that of subdividing the dependent
communities into carefully graduated classes with different
privileges; but, on the average, the Sardinian and Sicilian
communities were not in the position of allies but in the
manifest relation of tributary subjection.
In the Adriatic sea, at the entrance of which the important and long-
contemplated colony of Brundisium had at length been founded before
the close of the war with Carthage (510), the supremacy of Rome was
from the very first decided. In the western sea Rome had been obliged
to rid herself of rivals; in the eastern, the quarrels of the Hellenes
themselves prevented any of the states in the Grecian peninsula from
acquiring or retaining power. The most considerable of them, that of
Macedonia, had through the influence of Egypt been dislodged from the
upper Adriatic by the Aetolians and from the Peloponnesus by the
Achaeans, and was scarcely even in a position to defend its northern
frontier against the barbarians. How concerned the Romans were to
keep down Macedonia and its natural ally, the king of Syria, and how
closely they associated themselves with the Egyptian policy directed
to that object, is shown by the remarkable offer which after the end
of the war with Carthage they made to king Ptolemy III. Euergetes,
to support him in the war which he waged with Seleucus II. Callinicus
of Syria (who reigned 507-529) on account of the murder of Berenice,
and in which Macedonia had probably taken part with the latter.
Generally, the relations of Rome with the Hellenistic states became
closer; the senate already negotiated even with Syria, and interceded
with the Seleucus just mentioned on behalf of the Ilians with whom
the Romans claimed affinity.
Illyrian Piracy
Expedition against Scodra
Even the evil of piracy, which was naturally in such a state of
matters the only trade that flourished on the Adriatic coast, and
from which the commerce of Italy suffered greatly, was submitted to by
the Romans with an undue measure of patience, --a patience intimately
connected with their radical aversion to maritime war and their
wretched marine. But at length it became too flagrant. Favoured by
Macedonia, which no longer found occasion to continue its old function
of protecting Hellenic commerce from the corsairs of the Adriatic for
the benefit of its foes, the rulers of Scodra had induced the Illyrian
tribes--nearly corresponding to the Dalmatians, Montenegrins, and
northern Albanians of the present day--to unite for joint piratical
expeditions on a great scale.
But the Romans went further, and established themselves on the east
coast. The Illyrians of Scodra were rendered tributary to Rome;
Demetrius of Pharos, who had passed over from the service of Teuta to
that of the Romans, was installed, as a dependent dynast and ally of
Rome, over the islands and coasts of Dalmatia; the Greek cities
Corcyra, Epidamnus, Apollonia, and the communities of the Atintanes
and Parthini were attached to Rome under mild forms of symmachy.
These acquisitions on the east coast of the Adriatic were not
sufficiently extensive to require the appointment of a special
auxiliary consul; governors of subordinate rank appear to have
been sent to Corcyra and perhaps also to other places, and the
superintendence of these possessions seems to have been entrusted
to the chief magistrates who administered Italy.(11) Thus the most
important maritime stations in the Adriatic became subject, like
Sicily and Sardinia, to the authority of Rome. What other result was
to be expected? Rome was in want of a good naval station in the upper
Adriatic--a want which was not supplied by her possessions on the
Italian shore; her new allies, especially the Greek commercial towns,
saw in the Romans their deliverers, and doubtless did what they could
permanently to secure so powerful a protection; in Greece itself
no one was in a position to oppose the movement; on the contrary,
the praise of the liberators was on every one's lips. It may be a
question whether there was greater rejoicing or shame in Hellas, when,
in place of the ten ships of the line of the Achaean league, the most
warlike power in Greece, two hundred sail belonging to the barbarians
now entered her harbours and accomplished at a blow the task, which
properly belonged to the Greeks, but in which they had failed so
miserably. But if the Greeks were ashamed that the salvation of their
oppressed countrymen had to come from abroad, they accepted the
deliverance at least with a good grace; they did not fail to receive
the Romans solemnly into the fellowship of the Hellenic nation by
admitting them to the Isthmian games and the Eleusinian mysteries.
Northern Italy
Celtic Wars
In fact the Boii had already renewed the war in 516, and their
chiefs Atis and Galatas had--without, it is true, the authority of the
general diet--summoned the Transalpine Gauls to make common cause with
them. The latter had numerously answered the call, and in 518 a
Celtic army, such as Italy had not seen for long, encamped before
Ariminum. The Romans, for the moment much too weak to attempt a
battle, concluded an armistice, and to gain time allowed envoys from
the Celts to proceed to Rome, who ventured in the senate to demand
the cession of Ariminum--it seemed as if the times of Brennus had
returned. But an unexpected incident put an end to the war before it
had well begun. The Boii, dissatisfied with their unbidden allies and
afraid probably for their own territory, fell into variance with the
Transalpine Gauls. An open battle took place between the two Celtic
hosts; and, after the chiefs of the Boii had been put to death by
their own men, the Transalpine Gauls returned home. The Boii were
thus delivered into the hands of the Romans, and the latter were at
liberty to expel them like the Senones, and to advance at least to
the Po; but they preferred to grant the Boii peace in return for
the cession of some districts of their land (518). This was probably
done, because they were just at that time expecting the renewed
outbreak of war with Carthage; but, after that war had been averted by
the cession of Sardinia, true policy required the Roman government to
take possession as speedily and entirely as possible of the country up
to the Alps. The constant apprehensions on the part of the Celts as
to such a Roman invasion were therefore sufficiently justified; but
the Romans were in no haste. So the Celts on their part began the
war, either because the Roman assignations of land on the east coast
(522), although not a measure immediately directed against them, made
them apprehensive of danger; or because they perceived that a war with
Rome for the possession of Lombardy was inevitable; or, as is perhaps
most probable, because their Celtic impatience was once more weary of
inaction and preferred to arm for a new warlike expedition. With the
exception of the Cenomani, who acted with the Veneti and declared for
the Romans, all the Italian Celts concurred in the war, and they were
joined by the Celts of the upper valley of the Rhone, or rather by
a number of adventurers belonging to them, under the leaders
Concolitanus and Aneroestus.(15) With 50,000 warriors on foot, and
20,000 on horseback or in chariots, the leaders of the Celts advanced
to the Apennines (529). The Romans had not anticipated an attack on
this side, and had not expected that the Celts, disregarding the Roman
fortresses on the east coast and the protection of their own kinsmen,
would venture to advance directly against the capital. Not very long
before a similar Celtic swarm had in an exactly similar way overrun
Greece. The danger was serious, and appeared still more serious than
it really was. The belief that Rome's destruction was this time
inevitable, and that the Roman soil was fated to become the property
of the Gauls, was so generally diffused among the multitude in Rome
itself that the government reckoned it not beneath its dignity to
allay the absurd superstitious belief of the mob by an act still more
absurd, and to bury alive a Gaulish man and a Gaulish woman in the
Roman Forum with a view to fulfil the oracle of destiny. At the same
time they made more serious preparations. Of the two consular armies,
each of which numbered about 25,000 infantry and 1100 cavalry, one
was stationed in Sardinia under Gaius Atilius Regulus, the other at
Ariminum under Lucius Aemilius Papus. Both received orders to repair
as speedily as possible to Etruria, which was most immediately
threatened. The Celts had already been under the necessity of leaving
a garrison at home to face the Cenomani and Veneti, who were allied
with Rome; now the levy of the Umbrians was directed to advance from
their native mountains down into the plain of the Boii, and to inflict
all the injury which they could think of on the enemy upon his own
soil. The militia of the Etruscans and Sabines was to occupy the
Apennines and if possible to obstruct the passage, till the regular
troops could arrive. A reserve was formed in Rome of 50,000 men.
Throughout all Italy, which on this occasion recognized its true
champion in Rome, the men capable of service were enrolled, and stores
and materials of war were collected.
Battle of Telamon
All this, however, required time. For once the Romans had allowed
themselves to be surprised, and it was too late at least to save
Etruria. The Celts found the Apennines hardly defended, and plundered
unopposed the rich plains of the Tuscan territory, which for long had
seen no enemy. They were already at Clusium, three days' march from
Rome, when the army of Ariminum, under the consul Papus, appeared on
their flank, while the Etruscan militia, which after crossing the
Apennines had assembled in rear of the Gauls, followed the line of the
enemy's march. Suddenly one evening, after the two armies had already
encamped and the bivouac fires were kindled, the Celtic infantry again
broke up and retreated on the road towards Faesulae (Fiesole): the
cavalry occupied the advanced posts during the night, and followed the
main force next morning. When the Tuscan militia, who had pitched
their camp close upon the enemy, became aware of his departure, they
imagined that the host had begun to disperse, and marched hastily in
pursuit. The Gauls had reckoned on this very result: their infantry,
which had rested and was drawn up in order, awaited on a well-chosen
battlefield the Roman militia, which came up from its forced march
fatigued and disordered. Six thousand men fell after a furious
combat, and the rest of the militia, which had been compelled to seek
refuge on a hill, would have perished, had not the consular army
appeared just in time. This induced the Gauls to return homeward.
Their dexterously-contrived plan for preventing the union of the two
Roman armies and annihilating the weaker in detail, had only been
partially successful; now it seemed to them advisable first of all to
place in security their considerable booty. For the sake of an easier
line of march they proceeded from the district of Chiusi, where they
were, to the level coast, and were marching along the shore, when
they found an unexpected obstacle in the way. It was the Sardinian
legions, which had landed at Pisae; and, when they arrived too late to
obstruct the passage of the Apennines, had immediately put themselves
in motion and were advancing along the coast in a direction opposite
to the march of the Gauls. Near Telamon (at the mouth of the Ombrone)
they met with the enemy. While the Roman infantry advanced with close
front along the great road, the cavalry, led by the consul Gaius
Atilius Regulus in person, made a side movement so as to take the
Gauls in flank, and to acquaint the other Roman army under Papus as
soon as possible with their arrival. A hot cavalry engagement took
place, in which along with many brave Romans Regulus fell; but he had
not sacrificed his life in vain: his object was gained. Papus became
aware of the conflict, and guessed how matters stood; he hastily
arrayed his legions, and on both sides the Celtic host was now pressed
by Roman legions. Courageously it made its dispositions for the
double conflict, the Transalpine Gauls and Insubres against the
troops of Papus, the Alpine Taurisci and the Boii against the
Sardinian infantry; the cavalry combat pursued its course apart on
the flank. The forces were in numbers not unequally matched, and the
desperate position of the Gauls impelled them to the most obstinate
resistance. But the Transalpine Gauls, accustomed only to close
fighting, gave way before the missiles of the Roman skirmishers; in
the hand-to-hand combat the better temper of the Roman weapons placed
the Gauls at a disadvantage; and at last an attack in flank by the
victorious Roman cavalry decided the day. The Celtic horsemen made
their escape; the infantry, wedged in between the sea and the three
Roman armies, had no means of flight. 10,000 Celts, with their king
Concolitanus, were taken prisoners; 40,000 others lay dead on the
field of battle; Aneroestus and his attendants had, after the Celtic
fashion, put themselves to death.
The Celts Attacked in Their Own Land
The victory was complete, and the Romans were firmly resolved to
prevent the recurrence of such surprises by the complete subjugation
of the Celts on the south of the Alps. In the following year (530)
the Boii submitted without resistance along with the Lingones; and in
the year after that (531) the Anares; so that the plain as far as the
Po was in the hands of the Romans. The conquest of the northern bank
of the river cost a more serious struggle. Gaius Flaminius crossed
the river in the newly-acquired territory of the Anares (somewhere
near Piacenza) in 531; but during the crossing, and still more while
making good his footing on the other bank, he suffered so heavy losses
and found himself with the river in his rear in so dangerous a
position, that he made a capitulation with the enemy to secure a free
retreat, which the Insubres foolishly conceded. Scarce, however, had
he escaped when he appeared in the territory of the Cenomani, and,
united with them, advanced for the second time from the north into the
canton of the Insubres. The Gauls perceived what was now the object
of the Romans, when it was too late: they took from the temple of
their goddess the golden standards called the "immovable," and with
their whole levy, 50,000 strong, they offered battle to the Romans.
The situation of the latter was critical: they were stationed with
their back to a river (perhaps the Oglio), separated from home by the
enemy's territory, and left to depend for aid in battle as well as for
their line of retreat on the uncertain friendship of the Cenomani.
There was, however, no choice. The Gauls fighting in the Roman ranks
were placed on the left bank of the stream; on the right, opposite to
the Insubres, the legions were drawn up, and the bridges were broken
down that they might not be assailed, at least in the rear, by their
dubious allies.
In this way undoubtedly the river cut off their retreat, and their way
homeward lay through the hostile army. But the superiority of the
Roman arms and of Roman discipline achieved the victory, and the army
cut its way through: once more the Roman tactics had redeemed the
blunders of the general. The victory was due to the soldiers and
officers, not to the generals, who gained a triumph only through
popular favour in opposition to the just decree of the senate. Gladly
would the Insubres have made peace; but Rome required unconditional
subjection, and things had not yet come to that pass. They tried to
maintain their ground with the help of their northern kinsmen; and,
with 30,000 mercenaries whom they had raised amongst these and their
own levy, they received the two consular armies advancing once more in
the following year (532) from the territory of the Cenomani to invade
their land. Various obstinate combats took place; in a diversion,
attempted by the Insubres against the Roman fortress of Clastidium
(Casteggio, below Pavia), on the right bank of the Po, the Gallic
king Virdumarus fell by the hand of the consul Marcus Marcellus. But,
after a battle already half won by the Celts but ultimately decided
in favour of the Romans, the consul Gnaeus Scipio took by assault
Mediolanum, the capital of the Insubres, and the capture of that town
and of Comum terminated their resistance. Thus the Celts of Italy
were completely vanquished, and as, just before, the Romans had shown
to the Hellenes in the war with the pirates the difference between a
Roman and a Greek sovereignty of the seas, so they had now brilliantly
demonstrated that Rome knew how to defend the gates of Italy against
freebooters on land otherwise than Macedonia had guarded the gates of
Greece, and that in spite of all internal quarrels Italy presented as
united a front to the national foe, as Greece exhibited distraction
and discord.
The boundary of the Alps was reached, in so far as the whole flat
country on the Po was either rendered subject to the Romans, or, like
the territories of the Cenomani and Veneti, was occupied by dependent
allies. It needed time, however, to reap the consequences of this
victory and to Romanize the land. In this the Romans did not adopt
a uniform mode of procedure. In the mountainous northwest of Italy
and in the more remote districts between the Alps and the Po they
tolerated, on the whole, the former inhabitants; the numerous wars,
as they are called, which were waged with the Ligurians in particular
(first in 516) appear to have been slave-hunts rather than wars, and,
often as the cantons and valleys submitted to the Romans, Roman
sovereignty in that quarter was hardly more than a name. The
expedition to Istria also (533) appears not to have aimed at much
more than the destruction of the last lurking-places of the Adriatic
pirates, and the establishment of a communication by land along the
coast between the Italian conquests of Rome and her acquisitions on
the other shore. On the other hand the Celts in the districts south
of the Po were doomed irretrievably to destruction; for, owing to
the looseness of the ties connecting the Celtic nation, none of the
northern Celtic cantons took part with their Italian kinsmen except
for money, and the Romans looked on the latter not only as their
national foes, but as the usurpers of their natural heritage. The
extensive assignations of land in 522 had already filled the whole
territory between Ancona and Ariminum with Roman colonists, who
settled here without communal organization in market-villages and
hamlets. Further measures of the same character were taken, and
it was not difficult to dislodge and extirpate a half-barbarous
population like the Celtic, only partially following agriculture,
and destitute of walled towns. The great northern highway, which had
been, probably some eighty years earlier, carried by way of Otricoli
to Narni, and had shortly before been prolonged to the newly-founded
fortress of Spoletium (514), was now (534) carried, under the name of
the "Flaminian" road, by way of the newly-established market-village
Forum Flaminii (near Foligno), through the pass of Furlo to the coast,
and thence along the latter from Fanum (Fano) to Ariminum; it was the
first artificial road which crossed the Apennines and connected the
two Italian seas. Great zeal was manifested in covering the newly-
acquired fertile territory with Roman townships. Already, to cover
the passage of the Po, the strong fortress of Placentia (Piacenza)
had been founded on the right bank; not far from it Cremona had been
laid out on the left bank, and the building of the walls of Mutina
(Modena), in the territory taken away from the Boii, had far advanced
--already preparations were being made for further assignations of
land and for continuing the highway, when sudden event interrupted
the Romans in reaping the fruit of their successes.
2. That the cession of the islands lying between Sicily and Italy,
which the peace of 513 prescribed to the Carthaginians, did not
include the cession of Sardinia is a settled point (III. II. Remarks
On the Roman Conduct of the War); but the statement, that the Romans
made that a pretext for their occupation of the island three years
after the peace, is ill attested. Had they done so, they would merely
have added a diplomatic folly to the political effrontery.
6. That this was the case may be gathered partly from the appearance
of the "Siculi" against Marcellus (Liv. xxvi. 26, seq.), partly from
the "conjoint petitions of all the Sicilian communities" (Cicero,
Verr. ii. 42, 102; 45, 114; 50, 146; iii. 88, 204), partly from well-
known analogies (Marquardt, Handb. iii. i, 267). Because there was no
-commercium- between the different towns, it by no means follows that
there was no -concilium-.
7. The right of coining gold and silver was not monopolized by Rome
in the provinces so strictly as in Italy, evidently because gold
and silver money not struck after the Roman standard was of less
importance. But in their case too the mints were doubtless, as a
rule, restricted to the coinage of copper, or at most silver, small
money; even the most favourably treated communities of Roman Sicily,
such as the Mamertines, the Centuripans, the Halaesines, the
Segestans, and also in the main the Pacormitaus coined only copper.
15. These, whom Polybius designates as the "Celts in the Alps and on
the Rhone, who on account of their character as military adventurers
are called Gaesatae (free lances)," are in the Capitoline Fasti named
-Germani-. It is possible that the contemporary annalists may have
here mentioned Celts alone, and that it was the historical speculation
of the age of Caesar and Augustus that first induced the redactors of
these Fasti to treat them as "Germans." If, on the other hand, the
mention of the Germans in the Fasti was based on contemporary records
--in which case this is the earliest mention of the name--we shall here
have to think not of the Germanic races who were afterwards so called,
but of a Celtic horde.
CHAPTER IV
The treaty with Rome in 513 gave to the Carthaginians peace, but they
paid for it dearly. That the tribute of the largest portion of Sicily
now flowed into the enemy's exchequer instead of the Carthaginian
treasury, was the least part of their loss. They felt a far keener
regret when they not merely had to abandon the hope of monopolizing
all the sea-routes between the eastern and the western Mediterranean
--just as that hope seemed on the eve of fulfilment--but also saw
their whole system of commercial policy broken up, the south-western
basin of the Mediterranean, which they had hitherto exclusively
commanded, converted since the loss of Sicily into an open
thoroughfare for all nations, and the commerce of Italy rendered
completely independent of the Phoenician. Nevertheless the quiet
men of Sidon might perhaps have prevailed on themselves to acquiesce
in this result. They had met with similar blows already; they had
been obliged to share with the Massiliots, the Etruscans, and the
Sicilian Greeks what they had previously possessed alone; even now
the possessions which they retained, Africa, Spain, and the gates of
the Atlantic Ocean, were sufficient to confer power and prosperity.
But in truth, where was their security that these at least would
continue in their hands? The demands made by Regulus, and his very
near approach to the obtaining of what he asked, could only be
forgotten by those who were willing to forget; and if Rome should now
renew from Lilybaeum the enterprise which she had undertaken with so
great success from Italy, Carthage would undoubtedly fall, unless the
perversity of the enemy or some special piece of good fortune should
intervene to save it No doubt they had peace for the present; but the
ratification of that peace had hung on a thread, and they knew what
public opinion in Rome thought of the terms on which it was concluded.
It might be that Rome was not yet meditating the conquest of Africa
and was as yet content with Italy; but if the existence of the
Carthaginian state depended on that contentment, the prospect was but
a sorry one; and where was the security that the Romans might not find
it even convenient for their Italian policy to extirpate rather than
reduce to subjection their African neighbour?
In short, Carthage could only regard the peace of 513 in the light
of a truce, and could not but employ it in preparations for the
inevitable renewal of the war; not for the purpose of avenging the
defeat which she had suffered, nor even with the primary view of
recovering what she had lost, but in order to secure for herself an
existence that should not be dependent on the good-will of the enemy.
But when a war of annihilation is surely, though in point of time
indefinitely, impending over a weaker state, the wiser, more
resolute, and more devoted men--who would immediately prepare for the
unavoidable struggle, accept it at a favourable moment, and thus cover
their defensive policy by a strategy of offence--always find
themselves hampered by the indolent and cowardly mass of the money-
worshippers, of the aged and feeble, and of the thoughtless who are
minded merely to gain time, to live and die in peace, and to postpone
at any price the final struggle. So there was in Carthage a party
for peace and a party for war, both, as was natural, associating
themselves with the political distinction which already existed
between the conservatives and the reformers. The former found its
support in the governing boards, the council of the Ancients and that
of the Hundred, led by Hanno the Great, as he was called; the latter
found its support in the leaders of the multitude, particularly the
much-respected Hasdrubal, and in the officers of the Sicilian army,
whose great successes under the leadership of Hamilcar, although they
had been otherwise fruitless, had at least shown to the patriots a
method which seemed to promise deliverance from the great danger that
beset them. Vehement feud had probably long subsisted between these
parties, when the Libyan war intervened to suspend the strife. We
have already related how that war arose. After the governing party
had instigated the mutiny by their incapable administration which
frustrated all the precautionary measures of the Sicilian officers,
had converted that mutiny into a revolution by the operation of their
inhuman system of government, and had at length brought the country to
the verge of ruin by their military incapacity--and particularly that
of their leader Hanno, who ruined the army--Hamilcar Barcas, the hero
of Ercte, was in the perilous emergency solicited by the government
itself to save it from the effects of its blunders and crimes. He
accepted the command, and had the magnanimity not to resign it
even when they appointed Hanno as his colleague. Indeed, when the
indignant army sent the latter home, Hamilcar had the self-control
a second time to concede to him, at the urgent request of the
government, a share in the command; and, in spite of his enemies and
in spite of such a colleague, he was able by his influence with the
insurgents, by his dexterous treatment of the Numidian sheiks, and
by his unrivalled genius for organization and generalship, in a
singularly short time to put down the revolt entirely and to recall
rebellious Africa to its allegiance (end of 517).
During this war the patriot party had kept silence; now it spoke out
the louder. On the one hand this catastrophe had brought to light
the utterly corrupt and pernicious character of the ruling oligarchy,
their incapacity, their coterie-policy, their leanings towards the
Romans. On the other hand the seizure of Sardinia, and the
threatening attitude which Rome on that occasion assumed, showed
plainly even to the humblest that a declaration of war by Rome was
constantly hanging like the sword of Damocles over Carthage, and that,
if Carthage in her present circumstances went to war with Rome,
the consequence must necessarily be the downfall of the Phoenician
dominion in Libya. Probably there were in Carthage not a few who,
despairing of the future of their country, counselled emigration to
the islands of the Atlantic; who could blame them? But minds of the
nobler order disdain to save themselves apart from their nation,
and great natures enjoy the privilege of deriving enthusiasm from
circumstances in which the multitude of good men despair. They
accepted the new conditions just as Rome dictated them; no course
was left but to submit and, adding fresh bitterness to their former
hatred, carefully to cherish and husband resentment--that last
resource of an injured nation. They then took steps towards a
political reform.(1) They had become sufficiently convinced of the
incorrigibleness of the party in power: the fact that the governing
lords had even in the last war neither forgotten their spite nor
learned greater wisdom, was shown by the effrontery bordering on
simplicity with which they now instituted proceedings against Hamilcar
as the originator of the mercenary war, because he had without full
powers from the government made promises of money to his Sicilian
soldiers. Had the club of officers and popular leaders desired to
overthrow this rotten and wretched government, it would hardly have
encountered much difficulty in Carthage itself; but it would have met
with more formidable obstacles in Rome, with which the chiefs of the
government in Carthage already maintained relations that bordered on
treason. To all the other difficulties of the position there fell
to be added the circumstance, that the means of saving their country
had to be created without allowing either the Romans, or their own
government with its Roman leanings, to become rightly aware of
what was doing.
Hamilcar Commander-in-Chief
Thus there stood at the head of the army the one man, who had given
proof in the Sicilian and in the Libyan wars that fate had destined
him, if any one, to be the saviour of his country. Never perhaps was
the noble struggle of man with fate waged more nobly than by him.
The army was expected to save the state; but what sort of army?
The Carthaginian civic militia had fought not badly under Hamilcar's
leadership in the Libyan war; but he knew well, that it is one thing
to lead out the merchants and artisans of a city, which is in the
extremity of peril, for once to battle, and another to form them
into soldiers. The patriotic party in Carthage furnished him with
excellent officers, but it was of course almost exclusively the
cultivated class that was represented in it. He had no citizen-
militia, at most a few squadrons of Libyphoenician cavalry. The task
was to form an army out of Libyan forced recruits and mercenaries; a
task possible in the hands of a general like Hamilcar, but possible
even for him only on condition that he should be able to pay his men
punctually and amply. But he had learned, by experience in Sicily,
that the state revenues of Carthage were expended in Carthage itself
on matters much more needful than the payment of the armies that
fought against the enemy. The warfare which he waged, accordingly,
had to support itself, and he had to carry out on a great scale what
he had already attempted on a smaller scale at Monte Pellegrino. But
further, Hamilcar was not only a military chief, he was also a party
leader. In opposition to the implacable governing party, which
eagerly but patiently waited for an opportunity of overthrowing him,
he had to seek support among the citizens; and although their leaders
might be ever so pure and noble, the multitude was deeply corrupt and
accustomed by the unhappy system of corruption to give nothing without
being paid for it. In particular emergencies, indeed, necessity or
enthusiasm might for the moment prevail, as everywhere happens even
with the most venal corporations; but, if Hamilcar wished to secure
the permanent support of the Carthaginian community for his plan,
which at the best could only be carried out after a series of years,
he had to supply his friends at home with regular consignments of
money as the means of keeping the mob in good humour. Thus compelled
to beg or to buy from the lukewarm and venal multitude the permission
to save it; compelled to bargain with the arrogance of men whom
he hated and whom he had constantly conquered, at the price of
humiliation and of silence, for the respite indispensable for his
ends; compelled to conceal from those despised traitors to their
country, who called themselves the lords of his native city, his plans
and his contempt--the noble hero stood with few like-minded friends
between enemies without and enemies within, building upon the
irresolution of the one and of the other, at once deceiving both and
defying both, if only he might gain means, money, and men for the
contest with a land which, even were the army ready to strike the
blow, it seemed difficult to reach and scarce possible to vanquish.
He was still a young man, little beyond thirty, but he had apparently,
when he was preparing for his expedition, a foreboding that he would
not be permitted to attain the end of his labours, or to see otherwise
than afar off the promised land. When he left Carthage he enjoined
his son Hannibal, nine years of age, to swear at the altar of the
supreme God eternal hatred to the Roman name, and reared him and his
younger sons Hasdrubal and Mago--the "lion's brood," as he called
them--in the camp as the inheritors of his projects, of his genius,
and of his hatred.
Hannibal
Hannibal, who had lost a whole year through the obstinate resistance
of the Saguntines, had as usual retired for the winter of 535-6 to
Cartagena, to make all his preparations on the one hand for the attack
of Italy, on the other for the defence of Spain and Africa; for, as
he, like his father and his brother-in-law, held the supreme command
in both countries, it devolved upon him to take measures also for the
protection of his native land. The whole mass of his forces amounted
to about 120,000 infantry and 16,000 cavalry; he had also 58
elephants, 32 quinqueremes manned, and 18 not manned, besides the
elephants and vessels remaining at the capital. Excepting a few
Ligurians among the light troops, there were no mercenaries in this
Carthaginian army; the troops, with the exception of some Phoenician
squadrons, consisted mainly of the Carthaginian subjects called out
for service--Libyans and Spaniards. To insure the fidelity of the
latter the general, who knew the men with whom he had to deal, gave
them as a proof of his confidence a general leave of absence for the
whole winter; while, not sharing the narrow-minded exclusiveness of
Phoenician patriotism, he promised to the Libyans on his oath the
citizenship of Carthage, should they return to Africa victorious.
This mass of troops however was only destined in part for the
expedition to Italy. Some 20,000 men were sent to Africa, the smaller
portion of them proceeding to the capital and the Phoenician territory
proper, the majority to the western point of Africa. For the
protection of Spain 12,000 infantry, 2500 cavalry, and nearly the half
of the elephants were left behind, in addition to the fleet stationed
there; the chief command and the government of Spain were entrusted
to Hannibal's younger brother Hasdrubal. The immediate territory of
Carthage was comparatively weakly garrisoned, because the capital
afforded in case of need sufficient resources; in like manner a
moderate number of infantry sufficed for the present in Spain, where
new levies could be procured with ease, whereas a comparatively large
proportion of the arms specially African--horses and elephants--was
retained there. The chief care was bestowed in securing the
communications between Spain and Africa: with that view the fleet
remained in Spain, and western Africa was guarded by a very strong
body of troops. The fidelity of the troops was secured not only by
hostages collected from the Spanish communities and detained in the
stronghold of Saguntum, but by the removal of the soldiers from the
districts where they were raised to other quarters: the east African
militia were moved chiefly to Spain, the Spanish to Western Africa,
the West African to Carthage. Adequate provision was thus made for
defence. As to offensive measures, a squadron of 20 quinqueremes with
1000 soldiers on board was to sail from Carthage for the west coast of
Italy and to pillage it, and a second of 25 sail was, if possible,
to re-establish itself at Lilybaeum; Hannibal believed that he might
count upon the government making this moderate amount of exertion.
With the main army he determined in person to invade Italy; as was
beyond doubt part of the original plan of Hamilcar. A decisive attack
on Rome was only possible in Italy, as a similar attack on Carthage
was only possible in Libya; as certainly as Rome meant to begin her
next campaign with the latter, so certainly ought Carthage not to
confine herself at the outset either to any secondary object of
operations, such as Sicily, or to mere defence--defeat would in
any case involve equal destruction, but victory would not yield
equal fruit.
Method of Attack
The reason for Hannibal's preference of the land route to that by sea
is less obvious; for that neither the maritime supremacy of the Romans
nor their league with Massilia could have prevented a landing at
Genoa, is evident, and was shown by the sequel. Our authorities fail
to furnish us with several of the elements, on which a satisfactory
answer to this question would depend, and which cannot be supplied by
conjecture. Hannibal had to choose between two evils. Instead of
exposing himself to the unknown and less calculable contingencies of
a sea voyage and of naval war, it must have seemed to him the better
course to accept the assurances, which beyond doubt were seriously
meant, of the Boii and Insubres, and the more so that, even if the
army should land at Genoa, it would still have mountains to cross;
he could hardly know exactly, how much smaller are the difficulties
presented by the Apennines at Genoa than by the main chain of the
Alps. At any rate the route which he took was the primitive Celtic
route, by which many much larger hordes had crossed the Alps: the
ally and deliverer of the Celtic nation might without temerity
venture to traverse it.
Departure of Hannibal
Position of Rome
Their Uncertain Plans for War
The Roman state was in a plight, such as may occur even in firmly-
established and sagacious aristocracies. The Romans knew doubtless
what they wished to accomplish, and they took various steps; but
nothing was done rightly or at the right time. They might long ago
have been masters of the gates of the Alps and have settled matters
with the Celts; the latter were still formidable, and the former were
open. They might either have had friendship, with Carthage, had they
honourably kept the peace of 513, or, had they not been disposed for
peace, they might long ago have conquered Cartilage: the peace was
practically broken by the seizure of Sardinia, and they allowed the
power of Carthage to recover itself undisturbed for twenty years.
There was no great difficulty in maintaining peace with Macedonia; but
they had forfeited her friendship for a trifling gain. There must
have been a lack of some leading statesman to take a connected and
commanding view of the position of affairs; on all hands either too
little was done, or too much. Now the war began at a time and at a
place which they had allowed the enemy to determine; and, with all
their well-founded conviction of military superiority, they were
perplexed as to the object to be aimed at and the course to be
followed in their first operations. They had at their disposal more
than half a million of serviceable soldiers; the Roman cavalry alone
was less good, and relatively less numerous, than the Carthaginian,
the former constituting about a tenth, the latter an eighth, of the
whole number of troops taking the field. None of the states affected
by the war had any fleet corresponding to the Roman fleet of 220
quinqueremes, which had just returned from the Adriatic to the western
sea. The natural and proper application of this crushing superiority
of force was self-evident. It had been long settled that the war
ought to be opened with a landing in Africa. The subsequent turn
taken by events had compelled the Romans to embrace in their scheme
of the war a simultaneous landing in Spain, chiefly to prevent the
Spanish army from appearing before the walls of Carthage. In
accordance with this plan they ought above all, when the war had been
practically opened by Hannibal's attack on Saguntum in the beginning
of 535, to have thrown a Roman army into Spain before the town fell;
but they neglected the dictates of interest no less than of honour.
For eight months Saguntum held out in vain: when the town passed into
other hands, Rome had not even equipped her armament for landing in
Spain. The country, however, between the Ebro and the Pyrenees was
still free, and its tribes were not only the natural allies of the
Romans, but had also, like the Saguntines, received from Roman
emissaries promises of speedy assistance. Catalonia may be reached by
sea from Italy in not much longer time than from Cartagena by and: had
the Romans started, like the Phoenicians, in April, after the formal
declaration of war that had taken place in the interval, Hannibal
might have encountered the Roman legions on the line of the Ebro.
At length, certainly, the greater part of the army and of the fleet
was got ready for the expedition to Africa, and the second consul
Publius Cornelius Scipio was ordered to the Ebro; but he took time,
and when an insurrection broke out on the Po, he allowed the army that
was ready for embarkation to be employed there, and formed new legions
for the Spanish expedition. So although Hannibal encountered on the
Ebro very vehement resistance, it proceeded only from the natives;
and, as under existing circumstances time was still more precious to
him than the blood of his men, he surmounted the opposition after some
months with the loss of a fourth part of his army, and reached the
line of the Pyrenees. That the Spanish allies of Rome would be
sacrificed a second time by that delay might have been as certainly
foreseen, as the delay itself might have been easily avoided; but
probably even the expedition to Italy itself, which in the spring of
536 must not have been anticipated in Rome, would have been averted
by the timely appearance of the Romans in Spain. Hannibal had by no
means the intention of sacrificing his Spanish "kingdom," and throwing
himself like a desperado on Italy. The time which he had spent in
the siege of Saguntum and in the reduction of Catalonia, and the
considerable corps which he left behind for the occupation of the
newly-won territory between the Ebro and the Pyrenees, sufficiently
show that, had a Roman army disputed the possession of Spain with him,
he would not have been content to withdraw from it; and--which was the
main point--had the Romans been able to delay his departure from Spain
for but a few weeks, winter would have closed the passes of the Alps
before Hannibal reached them, and the African expedition would have
departed without hindrance for its destination.
Hannibal in Gaul
Scipio at Massilia
Passage of the Rhone
Hannibal, who after the passage of the Rhone had in a great assembly
of the army explained to his troops the object of his expedition, and
had brought forward the Celtic chief Magilus himself, who had arrived
from the valley of the Po, to address the army through an interpreter,
meanwhile continued his march to the passes of the Alps without
obstruction. Which of these passes he should choose, could not be
at once determined either by the shortness of the route or by the
disposition of the inhabitants, although he had no time to lose
either in circuitous routes or in combat. He had necessarily to
select a route which should be practicable for his baggage, his
numerous cavalry, and his elephants, and in which an army could
procure sufficient means of subsistence either by friendship or by
force; for, although Hannibal had made preparations to convey
provisions after him on beasts of burden, these could only meet for
a few days the wants of an army which still, notwithstanding its great
losses, amounted to nearly 50,000 men. Leaving out of view the coast
route, which Hannibal abstained from taking not because the Romans
barred it, but because it would have led him away from his
destination, there were only two routes of note leading across the
Alps from Gaul to Italy in ancient times:(3) the pass of the Cottian
Alps (Mont Genevre) leading into the territory of the Taurini (by Susa
or Fenestrelles to Turin), and that of the Graian Alps (the Little St.
Bernard) leading into the territory of the Salassi (to Aosta and
Ivrea). The former route is the shorter; but, after leaving the
valley of the Rhone, it passes by the impracticable and unfruitful
river-valleys of the Drac, the Romanche, and the upper Durance,
through a difficult and poor mountain country, and requires at least
a seven or eight days' mountain march. A military road was first
constructed there by Pompeius, to furnish a shorter communication
between the provinces of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul.
The route by the Little St. Bernard is somewhat longer; but after
crossing the first Alpine wall that forms the eastern boundary of
the Rhone valley, it keeps by the valley of the upper Isere, which
stretches from Grenoble by way of Chambery up to the very foot of the
Little St. Bernard or, in other words, of the chain of the higher
Alps, and is the broadest, most fertile and most populous of all the
Alpine valleys. Moreover, the pass of the Little St. Bernard, while
not the lowest of all the natural passes of the Alps, is by far the
easiest; although no artificial road was constructed there, an
Austrian corps with artillery crossed the Alps by that route in 1815.
And lastly this route, which only leads over two mountain ridges, has
been from the earliest times the great military route from the Celtic
to the Italian territory. The Carthaginian army had thus in fact no
choice. It was a fortunate coincidence, but not a motive influencing
the decision of Hannibal, that the Celtic tribes allied with him in
Italy inhabited the country up to the Little St. Bernard, while
the route by Mont Genevre would have brought him at first into the
territory of the Taurini, who were from ancient times at feud with
the Insubres.
So the Carthaginian army marched in the first instance up the Rhone
towards the valley of the upper Isere, not, as might be presumed, by
the nearest route up the left bank of the lower Isere from Valence to
Grenoble, but through the "island" of the Allobroges, the rich, and
even then thickly peopled, low ground, which is enclosed on the north
and west by the Rhone, on the south by the Isere, and on the east
by the Alps. The reason of this movement was, that the nearest route
would have led them through an impracticable and poor mountain-
country, while the "island" was level and extremely fertile, and was
separated by but a single mountain-wall from the valley of the upper
Isere. The march along the Rhone into, and across, the "island"
to the foot of the Alpine wall was accomplished in sixteen days: it
presented little difficulty, and in the "island" itself Hannibal
dexterously availed himself of a feud that had broken out between two
chieftains of the Allobroges to attach to his interests one of the
most important of the chiefs, who not only escorted the Carthaginians
through the whole plain, but also supplied them with provisions, and
furnished the soldiers with arms, clothing, and shoes. But the
expedition narrowly escaped destruction at the crossing of the first
Alpine chain, which rises precipitously like a wall, and over which
only a single available path leads (over the Mont du Chat, near the
hamlet Chevelu). The population of the Allobroges had strongly
occupied the pass. Hannibal learned the state of matters early enough
to avoid a surprise, and encamped at the foot, until after sunset the
Celts dispersed to the houses of the nearest town; he then seized the
pass in the night Thus the summit was gained; but on the extremely
steep path, which leads down from the summit to the lake of Bourget,
the mules and horses slipped and fell. The assaults, which at
suitable points were made by the Celts upon the army in march, were
very annoying, not so much of themselves as by reason of the turmoil
which they occasioned; and when Hannibal with his light troops threw
himself from above on the Allobroges, these were chased doubtless
without difficulty and with heavy loss down the mountain, but the
confusion, in the train especially, was further increased by the noise
of the combat. So, when after much loss he arrived in the plain,
Hannibal immediately attacked the nearest town, to chastise and
terrify the barbarians, and at the same time to repair as far as
possible his loss in sumpter animals and horses. After a day's repose
in the pleasant valley of Chambery the army continued its march up the
Isere, without being detained either by want of supplies or by attacks
so long as the valley continued broad and fertile. It was only when
on the fourth day they entered the territory of the Ceutrones (the
modern Tarantaise) where the valley gradually contracts, that they had
again greater occasion to be on their guard. The Ceutrones received
the army at the boundary of their country (somewhere about Conflans)
with branches and garlands, furnished cattle for slaughter, guides,
and hostages; and the Carthaginians marched through their territory
as through a friendly land. When, however, the troops had reached the
very foot of the Alps, at the point where the path leaves the Isere,
and winds by a narrow and difficult defile along the brook Reclus
up to the summit of the St. Bernard, all at once the militia of the
Ceutrones appeared partly in the rear of the army, partly on the
crests of the rocks enclosing the pass on the right and left, in
the hope of cutting off the train and baggage. But Hannibal, whose
unerring tact had seen in all those advances made by the Ceutrones
nothing but the design of procuring at once immunity for their
territory and a rich spoil, had in expectation of such an attack
sent forward the baggage and cavalry, and covered the march with all
his infantry. By this means he frustrated the design of the enemy,
although he could not prevent them from moving along the mountain
slopes parallel to the march of the infantry, and inflicting very
considerable loss by hurling or rolling down stones. At the "white
stone" (still called -la roche blanche-), a high isolated chalk cliff
standing at the foot of the St. Bernard and commanding the ascent to
it, Hannibal encamped with his infantry, to cover the march of the
horses and sumpter animals laboriously climbing upward throughout
the whole night; and amidst continual and very bloody conflicts he at
length on the following day reached the summit of the pass. There,
on the sheltered table-land which spreads to the extent of two and a
half miles round a little lake, the source of the Doria, he allowed
the army to rest. Despondency had begun to seize the minds of the
soldiers. The paths that were becoming ever more difficult, the
provisions failing, the marching through defiles exposed to the
constant attacks of foes whom they could not reach, the sorely thinned
ranks, the hopeless situation of the stragglers and the wounded, the
object which appeared chimerical to all save the enthusiastic leader
and his immediate staff--all these things began to tell even on the
African and Spanish veterans. But the confidence of the general
remained ever the same; numerous stragglers rejoined the ranks; the
friendly Gauls were near; the watershed was reached, and the view of
the descending path, so gladdening to the mountain-pilgrim, opened up:
after a brief repose they prepared with renewed courage for the last
and most difficult undertaking, --the downward march. In it the army
was not materially annoyed by the enemy; but the advanced season--it
was already the beginning of September--occasioned troubles in the
descent, equal to those which had been occasioned in the ascent by the
attacks of the adjoining tribes. On the steep and slippery mountain-
slope along the Doria, where the recently-fallen snow had concealed
and obliterated the paths, men and animals went astray and slipped,
and were precipitated into the chasms. In fact, towards the end of
the first day's march they reached a portion of the path about 200
paces in length, on which avalanches are constantly descending from
the precipices of the Cramont that overhang it, and where in cold
summers snow lies throughout the year. The infantry passed over;
but the horses and elephants were unable to cross the smooth masses
of ice, on which there lay but a thin covering of freshly-fallen snow,
and the general encamped above the difficult spot with the baggage,
the cavalry, and the elephants. On the following day the horsemen,
by zealous exertion in entrenching, prepared a path for horses and
beasts of burden; but it was not until after a further labour of three
days with constant reliefs, that the half-famished elephants could at
length be conducted over. In this way the whole army was after a
delay of four days once more united; and after a further three days'
march through the valley of the Doria, which was ever widening and
displaying greater fertility, and whose inhabitants the Salassi,
clients of the Insubres, hailed in the Carthaginians their allies
and deliverers, the army arrived about the middle of September in the
plain of Ivrea, where the exhausted troops were quartered in the
villages, that by good nourishment and a fortnight's repose they might
recruit from their unparalleled hardships. Had the Romans placed a
corps, as they might have done, of 30,000 men thoroughly fresh and
ready for action somewhere near Turin, and immediately forced on a
battle, the prospects of Hannibal's great plan would have been very
dubious; fortunately for him, once more, they were not where they
should have been, and they did not disturb the troops of the enemy
in the repose which was so greatly needed.(4)
Results
1. Our accounts as to these events are not only imperfect but one-
sided, for of course it was the version of the Carthaginian peace
party which was adopted by the Roman annalists. Even, however, in
our fragmentary and confused accounts (the most important are those of
Fabius, in Polyb. iii. 8; Appian. Hisp. 4; and Diodorus, xxv. p. 567)
the relations of the parties appear dearly enough. Of the vulgar
gossip by which its opponents sought to blacken the "revolutionary
combination" (--etaireia ton ponerotaton anthropon--) specimens may
be had in Nepos (Ham. 3), to which it will be difficult perhaps
to find a parallel.
2. The Barca family conclude the most important state treaties, and
the ratification of the governing board is a formality (Pol. iii. 21).
Rome enters her protest before them and before the senate (Pol. iii.
15). The position of the Barca family towards Carthage in many points
resembles that of the Princes of Orange towards the States-General.
3. It was not till the middle ages that the route by Mont Cenis became
a military road. The eastern passes, such as that over the Poenine
Alps or the Great St. Bernard--which, moreover, was only converted
into a military road by Caesar and Augustus--are, of course, in this
case out of the question.
When Hannibal reached the summit of the St. Bernard, "the peaks were
already beginning to be thickly covered with snow" (Pol. iii. 54),
snow lay on the route (Pol. iii. 55), perhaps for the most part snow
not freshly fallen, but proceeding from the fall of avalanches. At
the St. Bernard winter begins about Michaelmas, and the falling of
snow in September; when the Englishmen already mentioned crossed
the mountain at the end of August, they found almost no snow on
their road, but the slopes on both sides were covered with it.
Hannibal thus appears to have arrived at the pass in the beginning
of September; which is quite compatible with the statement that
he arrived there "when the winter was already approaching"
--for --sunaptein ten tes pleiados dusin-- (Pol. iii. 54) does
not mean anything more than this, least of all, the day of the
heliacal setting of the Pleiades (about 26th October); comp.
Ideler, Chronol. i. 241.
If Hannibal reached Italy nine days later, and therefore about the
middle of September, there is room for the events that occurred from
that time up to the battle of the Trebia towards the end of December
(--peri cheimerinas tropas--, Pol. iii. 72), and in particular for
the transporting of the army destined for Africa from Lilybaeum to
Placentia. This hypothesis further suits the statement that the
day of departure was announced at an assembly of the army --upo ten
earinen oran-- (Pol. iii. 34), and therefore towards the end of March,
and that the march lasted five (or, according to App. vii. 4, six)
months. If Hannibal was thus at the St. Bernard in the beginning of
September, he must have reached the Rhone at the beginning of August
--for he spent thirty days in making his way from the Rhone thither
--and in that case it is evident that Scipio, who embarked at
the beginning of summer (Pol. iii. 41) and so at latest by the
commencement of June, must have spent much time on the voyage or
remained for a considerable period in singular inaction at Massilia.
CHAPTER V
The appearance of the Carthaginian army on the Roman side of the Alps
changed all at once the situation of affairs, and disconcerted the
Roman plan of war. Of the two principal armies of the Romans, one had
landed in Spain and was already engaged with the enemy there: it was
no longer possible to recall it. The second, which was destined
for Africa under the command of the consul Tiberius Sempronius, was
fortunately still in Sicily: in this instance Roman delay for once
proved useful. Of the two Carthaginian squadrons destined for Italy
and Sicily, the first was dispersed by a storm, and some of its
vessels were captured by the Syracusans near Messana; the second had
endeavoured in vain to surprise Lilybaeum, and had thereafter been
defeated in a naval engagement off that port. But the continuance of
the enemy's squadrons in the Italian waters was so inconvenient, that
the consul determined, before crossing to Africa, to occupy the small
islands around Sicily, and to drive away the Carthaginian fleet
operating against Italy. The summer passed away in the conquest of
Melita, in the chase after the enemy's squadron, which he expected
to find at the Lipari islands while it had made a descent near Vibo
(Monteleone) and pillaged the Bruttian coast, and, lastly, in gaining
information as to a suitable spot for landing on the coast of Africa;
so that the army and fleet were still at Lilybaeum, when orders
arrived from the senate that they should return with all possible
speed for the defence of their homes.
In this way, while the two great Roman armies, each in itself equal
in numbers to that of Hannibal, remained at a great distance from the
valley of the Po, the Romans were quite unprepared for an attack in
that quarter. No doubt a Roman army was there, in consequence of
an insurrection that had broken out among the Celts even before the
arrival of the Carthaginian army. The founding of the two Roman
strongholds of Placentia and Cremona, each of which received 6000
colonists, and more especially the preparations for the founding of
Mutina in the territory of the Boii, had already in the spring of 536
driven the Boii to revolt before the time concerted with Hannibal;
and the Insubres had immediately joined them. The colonists already
settled in the territory of Mutina, suddenly attacked, took refuge in
the town. The praetor Lucius Manlius, who held the chief command at
Ariminum, hastened with his single legion to relieve the blockaded
colonists; but he was surprised in the woods, and no course was left
to him after sustaining great loss but to establish himself upon a
hill and to submit to a siege there on the part of the Boii, till
a second legion sent from Rome under the praetor Lucius Atilius
succeeded in relieving army and town, and in suppressing for the
moment the Gaulish insurrection. This premature rising of the Boii
on the one hand, by delaying the departure of Scipio for Spain,
essentially promoted the plans of Hannibal; on the other hand, but
for its occurrence he would have found the valley of the Po entirely
unoccupied, except the fortresses. But the Roman corps, whose two
severely thinned legions did not number 20,000 soldiers, had enough
to do to keep the Celts in check, and did not think of occupying the
passes of the Alps. The Romans only learned that the passes were
threatened, when in August the consul Publius Scipio returned without
his army from Massilia to Italy, and perhaps even then they gave
little heed to the matter, because, forsooth, the foolhardy attempt
would be frustrated by the Alps alone. Thus at the decisive hour and
on the decisive spot there was not even a Roman outpost. Hannibal had
full time to rest his army, to capture after a three days' siege the
capital of the Taurini which closed its gates against him, and to
induce or terrify into alliance with him all the Ligurian and Celtic
communities in the upper basin of the Po, before Scipio, who had
taken the command in the Po valley, encountered him.
Scipio had thus solved his difficult task completely and brilliantly.
The Roman army, now close on 40,000 strong, and though not a match for
its antagonist in cavalry, at least equal in infantry, had simply to
remain in its existing position, in order to compel the enemy either
to attempt in the winter season the passage of the river and an attack
upon the camp, or to suspend his advance and to test the fickle temper
of the Gauls by the burden of winter quarters. Clear, however, as
this was, it was no less clear that it was now December, and that
under the course proposed the victory might perhaps be gained by Rome,
but would not be gained by the consul Tiberius Sempronius, who held
the sole command in consequence of Scipio's wound, and whose year of
office expired in a few months. Hannibal knew the man, and neglected
no means of alluring him to fight. The Celtic villages that had
remained faithful to the Romans were cruelly laid waste, and, when
this brought on a conflict between the cavalry, Hannibal allowed his
opponents to boast of the victory. Soon thereafter on a raw rainy
day a general engagement came on, unlocked for by the Romans. From
the earliest hour of the morning the Roman light troops had been
skirmishing with the light cavalry of the enemy; the latter slowly
retreated, and the Romans eagerly pursued it through the deeply
swollen Trebia to follow up the advantage which they had gained.
Suddenly the cavalry halted; the Roman vanguard found itself face to
face with the army of Hannibal drawn up for battle on a field chosen
by himself; it was lost, unless the main body should cross the stream
with all speed to its support. Hungry, weary, and wet, the Romans
came on and hastened to form in order of battle, the cavalry, as
usual, on the wings, the infantry in the centre. The light troops,
who formed the vanguard on both sides, began the combat: but the
Romans had already almost exhausted their missiles against the
cavalry, and immediately gave way. In like manner the cavalry gave
way on the wings, hard pressed by the elephants in front, and
outflanked right and left by the far more numerous Carthaginian horse.
But the Roman infantry proved itself worthy of its name: at the
beginning of the battle it fought with very decided superiority
against the infantry of the enemy, and even when the repulse of the
Roman horse allowed the enemy's cavalry and light-armed troops to turn
their attacks against the Roman infantry, the latter, although ceasing
to advance, obstinately maintained its ground. At this stage a select
Carthaginian band of 1000 infantry, and as many horsemen, under the
leadership of Mago, Hannibal's youngest brother, suddenly emerged from
an ambush in the rear of the Roman army, and fell upon the densely
entangled masses. The wings of the army and the rear ranks of the
Roman centre were broken up and scattered by this attack, while the
first division, 10,000 men strong, in compact array broke through the
Carthaginian line, and made a passage for itself obliquely through the
midst of the enemy, inflicting great loss on the opposing infantry and
more especially on the Gallic insurgents. This brave body, pursued
but feebly, thus reached Placentia. The remaining mass was for the
most part slaughtered by the elephants and light troops of the enemy
in attempting to cross the river: only part of the cavalry and some
divisions of infantry were able, by wading through the river, to gain
the camp whither the Carthaginians did not follow them, and thus they
too reached Placentia.(1) Few battles confer more honour on the Roman
soldier than this on the Trebia, and few at the same time furnish
graver impeachment of the general in command; although the candid
judge will not forget that a commandership in chief expiring on a
definite day was an unmilitary institution, and that figs cannot be
reaped from thistles. The victory came to be costly even to the
victors. Although the loss in the battle fell chiefly on the Celtic
insurgents, yet a multitude of the veteran soldiers of Hannibal died
afterwards from diseases engendered by that raw and wet winter day,
and all the elephants perished except one.
The effect of this first victory of the invading army was, that the
national insurrection now spread and assumed shape without hindrance
throughout the Celtic territory. The remains of the Roman army of
the Po threw themselves into the fortresses of Placentia and Cremona:
completely cut off from home, they were obliged to procure their
supplies by way of the river. The consul Tiberius Sempronius only
escaped, as if by miracle, from being taken prisoner, when with a
weak escort of cavalry he went to Rome on account of the elections.
Hannibal, who would not hazard the health of his troops by further
marches at that inclement season, bivouacked for the winter where he
was; and, as a serious attempt on the larger fortresses would have
led to no result, contented himself with annoying the enemy by attacks
on the river port of Placentia and other minor Roman positions. He
employed himself mainly in organizing the Gallic insurrection: more
than 60,000 foot soldiers and 4000 horsemen from the Celts are said
to have joined his army.
It was these motives, and not the entreaties of the Gauls that he
should spare their country--which would not have influenced him--that
induced Hannibal now to forsake, as it were, his newly acquired basis
of operations against Italy, and to transfer the scene of war to Italy
itself. Before doing so he gave orders that all the prisoners should
be brought before him. He ordered the Romans to be separated and
loaded with chains as slaves--the statement that Hannibal put to death
all the Romans capable of bearing arms, who here and elsewhere fell
into his hands, is beyond doubt at least strongly exaggerated. On the
other hand, all the Italian allies were released without ransom, and
charged to report at home that Hannibal waged war not against Italy,
but against Rome; that he promised to every Italian community the
restoration of its ancient independence and its ancient boundaries;
and that the deliverer was about to follow those whom he had set free,
bringing release and revenge. In fact, when the winter ended, he
started from the valley of the Po to search for a route through
the difficult defiles of the Apennines. Gaius Flaminius, with the
Etruscan army, was still for the moment at Arezzo, intending to move
from that point towards Lucca in order to protect the vale of the Arno
and the passes of the Apennines, so soon as the season should allow.
But Hannibal anticipated him. The passage of the Apennines was
accomplished without much difficulty, at a point as far west as
possible or, in other words, as distant as possible from the enemy;
but the marshy low grounds between the Serchio and the Arno were so
flooded by the melting of the snow and the spring rains, that the army
had to march four days in water, without finding any other dry spot
for resting by night than was supplied by piling the baggage or by
the sumpter animals that had fallen. The troops underwent unutterable
sufferings, particularly the Gallic infantry, which marched behind the
Carthaginians along tracks already rendered impassable: they murmured
loudly and would undoubtedly have dispersed to a man, had not the
Carthaginian cavalry under Mago, which brought up the rear, rendered
flight impossible. The horses, assailed by a distemper in their
hoofs, fell in heaps; various diseases decimated the soldiers;
Hannibal himself lost an eye in consequence of ophthalmia.
Flaminius
But Hannibal was more farsighted than king Pyrrhus. He did not march
on Rome; nor even against Gnaeus Servilius, an able general, who had
with the help of the fortresses on the northern road preserved his
army hitherto uninjured, and would perhaps have kept his antagonist
at bay. Once more a movement occurred which was quite unexpected.
Hannibal marched past the fortress of Spoletium, which he attempted in
vain to surprise, through Umbria, fearfully devastated the territory
of Picenum which was covered all over with Roman farmhouses, and
halted on the shores of the Adriatic. The men and horses of his
army had not yet recovered from the painful effects of their spring
campaign; here he rested for a considerable time to allow his army to
recruit its strength in a pleasant district and at a fine season of
the year, and to reorganize his Libyan infantry after the Roman mode,
the means for which were furnished to him by the mass of Roman arms
among the spoil. From this point, moreover, he resumed his long-
interrupted communication with his native land, sending his messages
of victory by water to Carthage. At length, when his army was
sufficiently restored and had been adequately exercised in the use
of the new arms, he broke up and marched slowly along the coast into
southern Italy.
Hannibal, well served by his spies in Rome and in the Roman army,
immediately learned how matters stood, and, as usual, adjusted the
plan of his campaign in accordance with the individual character of
the opposing leader. Passing the Roman army, he marched over the
Apennines into the heart of Italy towards Beneventum, took the open
town of Telesia on the boundary between Samnium and Campania, and
thence turned against Capua, which as the most important of all the
Italian cities dependent on Rome, and the only one standing in some
measure on a footing of equality with it, had for that very reason
felt more severely than any other community the oppression of the
Roman government. He had formed connections there, which led him to
hope that the Campanians might revolt from the Roman alliance; but in
this hope he was disappointed. So, retracing his steps, he took the
road to Apulia. During all this march of the Carthaginian army the
dictator had followed along the heights, and had condemned his
soldiers to the melancholy task of looking on with arms in their
hands, while the Numidian cavalry plundered the faithful allies far
and wide, and the villages over all the plain rose in flames. At
length he opened up to the exasperated Roman army the eagerly-coveted
opportunity of attacking the enemy. When Hannibal had begun his
retreat, Fabius intercepted his route near Casilinum (the modern
Capua), by strongly garrisoning that town on the left bank of the
Volturnus and occupying the heights that crowned the right bank with
his main army, while a division of 4000 men encamped on the road
itself that led along by the river. But Hannibal ordered his light-
armed troops to climb the heights which rose immediately alongside
of the road, and to drive before them a number of oxen with lighted
faggots on their horns, so that it seemed as if the Carthaginian army
were thus marching off during the night by torchlight. The Roman
division, which barred the road, imagining that they were evaded and
that further covering of the road was superfluous, marched by a side
movement to the same heights. Along the road thus left free Hannibal
then retreated with the bulk of his army, without encountering the
enemy; next morning he without difficulty, but with severe loss to
the Romans, disengaged and recalled his light troops. Hannibal then
continued his march unopposed in a north-easterly direction; and
by a widely-circuitous route, after traversing and laying under
contribution the lands of the Hirpinians, Campanians, Samnites,
Paelignians, and Frentanians without resistance, he arrived with rich
booty and a full chest once more in the region of Luceria, just as
the harvest there was about to begin. Nowhere in his extensive march
had he met with active opposition, but nowhere had he found allies.
Clearly perceiving that no course remained for him but to take up
winter quarters in the open field, he began the difficult operation
of collecting the winter supplies requisite for the army, by means of
its own agency, from the fields of the enemy. For this purpose he
had selected the broad and mostly flat district of northern Apulia,
which furnished grain and grass in abundance, and which could be
completely commanded by his excellent cavalry. An entrenched camp
was constructed at Gerunium, twenty-five miles to the north of
Luceria. Two-thirds of the army were daily despatched from it to
bring in the stores, while Hannibal with the remainder took up a
position to protect the camp and the detachments sent out.
The master of the horse, Marcus Minucius, who held temporary command
in the Roman camp during the absence of the dictator, deemed this a
suitable opportunity for approaching the enemy more closely, and
formed a camp in the territory of the Larinates; where on the one hand
by his mere presence he checked the sending out of detachments and
thereby hindered the provisioning of the enemy's army, and on the
other hand, in a series of successful conflicts in which his troops
encountered isolated Phoenician divisions and even Hannibal himself,
drove the enemy from their advanced positions and compelled them to
concentrate themselves at Gerunium. On the news of these successes,
which of course lost nothing in the telling, the storm broke, forth
in the capital against Quintus Fabius. It was not altogether
unwarranted. Prudent as it was on the part of Rome to abide by the
defensive and to expect success mainly from the cutting off of the
enemy's means of subsistence, there was yet something strange in a
system of defence and of starving out, under which the enemy had laid
waste all central Italy without opposition beneath the eyes of a Roman
army of equal numbers, and had provisioned themselves sufficiently for
the winter by an organized method of foraging on the greatest scale.
Publius Scipio, when he commanded on the Po, had not adopted this view
of a defensive attitude, and the attempt of his successor to imitate
him at Casilinum had failed in such a way as to afford a copious fund
of ridicule to the scoffers of the city. It was wonderful that the
Italian communities had not wavered, when Hannibal so palpably showed
them the superiority of the Phoenicians and the nullity of Roman aid;
but how long could they be expected to bear the burden of a double
war, and to allow themselves to be plundered under the very eyes of
the Roman troops and of their own contingents? Finally, it could not
be alleged that the condition of the Roman army compelled the general
to adopt this mode of warfare. It was composed, as regarded its core,
of the capable legions of Ariminum, and, by their side, of militia
called out, most of whom were likewise accustomed to service; and, far
from being discouraged by the last defeats, it was indignant at the
but little honourable task which its general, "Hannibal's lackey,"
assigned to it, and it demanded with a loud voice to be led against
the enemy. In the assemblies of the people the most violent
invectives were directed against the obstinate old man. His political
opponents, with the former praetor Gaius Terentius Varro at their
head, laid hold of the quarrel--for the understanding of which we must
not forget that the dictator was practically nominated by the senate,
and the office was regarded as the palladium of the conservative
party--and, in concert with the discontented soldiers and the
possessors of the plundered estates, they carried an unconstitutional
and absurd resolution of the people conferring the dictatorship, which
was destined to obviate the evils of a divided command in times of
danger, on Marcus Minucius,(4) who had hitherto been the lieutenant
of Quintus Fabius, in the same way as on Fabius himself. Thus the
Roman army, after its hazardous division into two separate corps had
just been appropriately obviated, was once more divided; and not only
so, but the two sections were placed under leaders who notoriously
followed quite opposite plans of war. Quintus Fabius of course
adhered more than ever to his methodical inaction; Marcus Minucius,
compelled to justify in the field of battle his title of dictator,
made a hasty attack with inadequate forces, and would have been
annihilated had not his colleague averted greater misfortune by the
seasonable interposition of a fresh corps. This last turn of matters
justified in some measure the system of passive resistance. But in
reality Hannibal had completely attained in this campaign all that
arms could attain: not a single material operation had been frustrated
either by his impetuous or by his deliberate opponent; and his
foraging, though not unattended with difficulty, had yet been in the
main so successful that the army passed the winter without complaint
in the camp at Gerunium. It was not the Cunctator that saved Rome,
but the compact structure of its confederacy and, not less perhaps,
the national hatred with which the Phoenician hero was regarded on
the part of Occidentals.
Despite all its misfortunes, Roman pride stood no less unshaken than
the Roman symmachy. The donations which were offered by king Hiero of
Syracuse and the Greek cities in Italy for the next campaign--the war
affected the latter less severely than the other Italian allies of
Rome, for they sent no contingents to the land army--were declined
with thanks; the chieftains of Illyria were informed that they could
not be allowed to neglect payment of their tribute; and even the
king of Macedonia was once more summoned to surrender Demetrius of
Pharos. The majority of the senate, notwithstanding the semblance
of legitimation which recent events had given to the Fabian system
of delay, had firmly resolved to depart from a mode of war that was
slowly but certainly ruining the state; if the popular dictator had
failed in his more energetic method of warfare, they laid the blame
of the failure, and not without reason, on the fact that they had
adopted a half-measure and had given him too few troops. This error
they determined to avoid and to equip an army, such as Rome had never
sent out before--eight legions, each raised a fifth above the normal
strength, and a corresponding number of allies--enough to crush an
opponent who was not half so strong. Besides this, a legion under
the praetor Lucius Postumius was destined for the valley of the Po,
in order, if possible, to draw off the Celts serving in the army of
Hannibal to their homes. These resolutions were judicious; everything
depended on their coming to an equally judicious decision respecting
the supreme command. The stiff carriage of Quintus Fabius, and
the attacks of the demagogues which it provoked, had rendered the
dictatorship and the senate generally more unpopular than ever:
amongst the people, not without the connivance of their leaders,
the foolish report circulated that the senate was intentionally
prolonging the war. As, therefore, the nomination of a dictator was
not to be thought of, the senate attempted to procure the election of
suitable consuls; but this only had the effect of thoroughly rousing
suspicion and obstinacy. With difficulty the senate carried one of
its candidates, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, who had with judgment
conducted the Illyrian war in 535;(5) an immense majority of the
citizens assigned to him as colleague the candidate of the popular
party, Gaius Terentius Varro, an incapable man, who was known only by
his bitter opposition to the senate and more especially as the main
author of the proposal to elect Marcus Minucius co-dictator, and who
was recommended to the multitude solely by his humble birth and his
coarse effrontery.
Battle at Cannae
While these preparations for the next campaign were being made in
Rome, the war had already recommenced in Apulia. As soon as the
season allowed him to leave his winter quarters, Hannibal, determining
as usual the course of the war and assuming the offensive, set out
from Gerunium in a southerly direction, and marching past Luceria
crossed the Aufidus and took the citadel of Cannae (between Canosa
and Barletta) which commanded the plain of Canusium, and had hitherto
served the Romans as their chief magazine. The Roman army which,
since Fabius had conformably to the constitution resigned his
dictatorship in the middle of autumn, was now commanded by Gnaeus
Servilius and Marcus Regulus, first as consuls then as proconsuls,
had been unable to avert a loss which they could not but feel. On
military as well as on political grounds, it became more than ever
necessary to arrest the progress of Hannibal by a pitched battle.
With definite orders to this effect from the senate, accordingly, the
two new commanders-in-chief, Paullus and Varro, arrived in Apulia in
the beginning of the summer of 538. With the four new legions and a
corresponding contingent of Italians which they brought up, the Roman
army rose to 80,000 infantry, half burgesses, half allies, and 6000
cavalry, of whom one-third were burgesses and two-thirds allies;
whereas Hannibal's army numbered 10,000 cavalry, but only about 40,000
infantry. Hannibal wished nothing so much as a battle, not merely for
the general reasons which we have explained above, but specially
because the wide Apulian plain allowed him to develop the whole
superiority of his cavalry, and because the providing supplies for
his numerous army would soon, in spite of that excellent cavalry, be
rendered very difficult by the proximity of an enemy twice as strong
and resting on a chain of fortresses. The leaders of the Roman forces
also had, as we have said, made up their minds on the general question
of giving battle, and approached the enemy with that view; but the
more sagacious of them saw the position of Hannibal, and were disposed
accordingly to wait in the first instance and simply to station
themselves in the vicinity of the enemy, so as to compel him to retire
and accept battle on a ground less favourable to him. Hannibal
encamped at Cannae on the right bank of the Aufidus. Paullus pitched
his camp on both banks of the stream, so that the main force came to
be stationed on the left bank, but a strong corps took up a position
on the right immediately opposite to the enemy, in order to impede his
supplies and perhaps also to threaten Cannae. Hannibal, to whom it
was all-important to strike a speedy blow, crossed the stream with the
bulk of his troops, and offered battle on the left bank, which Paullus
did not accept. But such military pedantry was disapproved by the
democratic consul--so much had been said about men taking the field
not to stand guard, but to use their swords--and he gave orders
accordingly to attack the enemy, wherever and whenever they found him.
According to the old custom foolishly retained, the decisive voice in
the council of war alternated between the commanders-in-chief day by
day; it was necessary therefore on the following day to submit, and
to let the hero of the pavement have his way. On the left bank,
where the wide plain offered full scope to the superior cavalry of
the enemy, certainly even he would not fight; but he determined to
unite the whole Roman forces on the right bank, and there, taking up
a position between the Carthaginian camp and Cannae and seriously
threatening the latter, to offer battle. A division of 10,000 men
was left behind in the principal Roman camp, charged to capture the
Carthaginian encampment during the conflict and thus to intercept the
retreat of the enemy's army across the river. The bulk of the Roman
army, at early dawn on the and August according to the unconnected,
perhaps in tune according to the correct, calendar, crossed the river
which at this season was shallow and did not materially hamper the
movements of the troops, and took up a position in line near the
smaller Roman camp to the westward of Cannae. The Carthaginian army
followed and likewise crossed the stream, on which rested the right
Roman as well as the left Carthaginian wing. The Roman cavalry was
stationed on the wings: the weaker portion consisting of burgesses,
led by Paullus, on the right next the river; the stronger consisting
of the allies, led by Varro, on the left towards the plain. In the
centre was stationed the infantry in unusually deep files, under the
command of the consul of the previous year Gnaeus Servilius. Opposite
to this centre Hannibal arranged his infantry in the form of a
crescent, so that the Celtic and Iberian troops in their national
armour formed the advanced centre, and the Libyans, armed after the
Roman fashion, formed the drawn-back wings on either side. On the
side next the river the whole heavy cavalry under Hasdrubal was
stationed, on the side towards the plain the light Numidian horse.
After a short skirmish between the light troops the whole line was
soon engaged. Where the light cavalry of the Carthaginians fought
against the heavy cavalry of Varro, the conflict was prolonged,
amidst constant charges of the Numidians, without decisive result.
In the centre, on the other hand, the legions completely overthrew
the Spanish and Gallic troops that first encountered them; eagerly the
victors pressed on and followed up their advantage. But meanwhile, on
the right wing, fortune had turned against the Romans. Hannibal had
merely sought to occupy the left cavalry wing of the enemy, that he
might bring Hasdrubal with the whole regular cavalry to bear against
the weaker right and to overthrow it first. After a brave resistance,
the Roman horse gave way, and those that were not cut down were chased
up the river and scattered in the plain; Paullus, wounded, rode to the
centre to turn or, if not, to share the fate of the legions. These,
in order the better to follow up the victory over the advanced
infantry of the enemy, had changed their front disposition into a
column of attack, which, in the shape of a wedge, penetrated the
enemy's centre. In this position they were warmly assailed on both
sides by the Libyan infantry wheeling inward upon them right and left,
and a portion of them were compelled to halt in order to defend
themselves against the flank attack; by this means their advance was
checked, and the mass of infantry, which was already too closely
crowded, now had no longer room to develop itself at all. Meanwhile
Hasdrubal, after having completed the defeat of the wing of Paullus,
had collected and arranged his cavalry anew and led them behind the
enemy's centre against the wing of Varro. His Italian cavalry,
already sufficiently occupied with the Numidians, was rapidly
scattered before the double attack, and Hasdrubal, leaving the
pursuit of the fugitives to the Numidians, arranged his squadrons
for the third time, to lead them against the rear of the Roman
infantry. This last charge proved decisive. Flight was not possible,
and quarter was not given. Never, perhaps, was an army of such size
annihilated on the field of battle so completely, and with so little
loss to its antagonist, as was the Roman army at Cannae. Hannibal
had lost not quite 6000 men, and two-thirds of that loss fell upon
the Celts, who sustained the first shock of the legions. On the other
hand, of the 76,000 Romans who had taken their places in the line of
battle 70,000 covered the field, amongst whom were the consul Lucius
Paullus, the proconsul Gnaeus Servilius, two-thirds of the staff-
officers, and eighty men of senatorial rank. The consul Gaius Varro
was saved solely by his quick resolution and his good steed, reached
Venusia, and was not ashamed to survive. The garrison also of the
Roman camp, 10,000 strong, were for the most part made prisoners of
war; only a few thousand men, partly of these troops, partly of the
line, escaped to Canusium. Nay, as if in this year an end was to
be made with Rome altogether, before its close the legion sent to
Gaul fell into an ambush, and was, with its general Lucius Postumius
who was nominated as consul for the next year, totally destroyed
by the Gauls.
Consequences of the Battle of Cannae
Prevention of Reinforcements from Spain
In Sicily king Hiero had during the years of peace maintained a policy
of neutrality, so far as he could do so with safety, and he had shown
a disposition to accommodate the Carthaginians during the perilous
crises after the peace with Rome, particularly by sending supplies of
corn. There is no doubt that he saw with the utmost regret a renewed
breach between Carthage and Rome; but he had no power to avert it, and
when it occurred he adhered with well-calculated fidelity to Rome.
But soon afterwards (in the autumn of 538) death removed the old man
after a reign of fifty-four years. The grandson and successor of the
prudent veteran, the young and incapable Hieronymus, entered at once
into negotiations with the Carthaginian diplomatists; and, as they
made no difficulty in consenting to secure to him by treaty, first,
Sicily as far as the old Carthagino-Sicilian frontier, and then, when
he rose in the arrogance of his demands, the possession even of the
whole island, he entered into alliance with Carthage, and ordered
the Syracusan fleet to unite with the Carthaginian which had come
to threaten Syracuse. The position of the Roman fleet at Lilybaeum,
which already had to deal with a second Carthaginian squadron
stationed near the Aegates, became all at once very critical, while at
the same time the force that was in readiness at Rome for embarkation
to Sicily had, in consequence of the defeat at Cannae, to be diverted
to other and more urgent objects.
Capua and Most of the Communities of Lower Italy Pass over to Hannibal
Above all came the decisive fact, that now at length the fabric of the
Roman confederacy began to be unhinged, after it had survived unshaken
the shocks of two severe years of war. There passed over to the side
of Hannibal Arpi in Apulia, and Uzentum in Messapia, two old towns
which had been greatly injured by the Roman colonies of Luceria and
Brundisium; all the towns of the Bruttii--who took the lead--with the
exception of the Petelini and the Consentini who had to be besieged
before yielding; the greater portion of the Lucanians; the Picentes
transplanted into the region of Salernum; the Hirpini; the Samnites
with the exception of the Pentri; lastly and chiefly, Capua the
second city of Italy, which was able to bring into the field 30,000
infantry and 4000 horse, and whose secession determined that of
the neighbouring towns Atella and Caiatia. The aristocratic party,
indeed, attached by many ties to the interest of Rome everywhere,
and more especially in Capua, very earnestly opposed this change of
sides, and the obstinate internal conflicts which arose regarding it
diminished not a little the advantage which Hannibal derived from
these accessions. He found himself obliged, for instance, to have one
of the leaders of the aristocratic party in Capua, Decius Magius, who
even after the entrance of the Phoenicians obstinately contended for
the Roman alliance, seized and conveyed to Carthage; thus furnishing
a demonstration, very inconvenient for himself, of the small value of
the liberty and sovereignty which had just been solemnly assured to
the Campanians by the Carthaginian general. On the other hand, the
south Italian Greeks adhered to the Roman alliance--a result to which
the Roman garrisons no doubt contributed, but which was still more due
to the very decided dislike of the Hellenes towards the Phoenicians
themselves and towards their new Lucanian and Bruttian allies, and
their attachment on the other hand to Rome, which had zealously
embraced every opportunity of manifesting its Hellenism, and had
exhibited towards the Greeks in Italy an unwonted gentleness. Thus
the Campanian Greeks, particularly Neapolis, courageously withstood
the attack of Hannibal in person: in Magna Graecia Rhegium, Thurii,
Metapontum, and Tarentum did the same notwithstanding their very
perilous position. Croton and Locri on the other hand were partly
carried by storm, partly forced to capitulate, by the united
Phoenicians and Bruttians; and the citizens of Croton were conducted
to Locri, while Bruttian colonists occupied that important naval
station. The Latin colonies in southern Italy, such as Brundisium,
Venusia, Paesturn, Cosa, and Cales, of course maintained unshaken
fidelity to Rome. They were the strongholds by which the conquerors
held in check a foreign land, settled on the soil of the surrounding
population, and at feud with their neighbours; they, too, would be the
first to be affected, if Hannibal should keep his word and restore to
every Italian community its ancient boundaries. This was likewise
the case with all central Italy, the earliest seat of the Roman rule,
where Latin manners and language already everywhere preponderated, and
the people felt themselves to be the comrades rather than the subjects
of their rulers. The opponents of Hannibal in the Carthaginian senate
did not fail to appeal to the fact that not one Roman citizen or one
Latin community had cast itself into the arms of Carthage. This
groundwork of the Roman power could only be broken up, like the
Cyclopean walls, stone by stone.
Such were the consequences of the day of Cannae, in which the flower
of the soldiers and officers of the confederacy, a seventh of the
whole number of Italians capable of bearing arms, perished. It was
a cruel but righteous punishment for the grave political errors with
which not merely some foolish or miserable individuals, but the Roman
people themselves, were justly chargeable. A constitution adapted for
a small country town was no longer suitable for a great power; it was
simply impossible that the question as to the leadership of the armies
of the city in such a war should be left year after year to be decided
by the Pandora's box of the balloting-urn. As a fundamental revision
of the constitution, if practicable at all, could not at least be
undertaken now, the practical superintendence of the war, and in
particular the bestowal and prolongation of the command, should have
been at once left to the only authority which was in a position to
undertake it--the senate--and there should have been reserved for the
comitia the mere formality of confirmation. The brilliant successes
of the Scipios in the difficult arena of Spanish warfare showed what
might in this way be achieved. But political demagogism, which was
already gnawing at the aristocratic foundations of the constitution,
had seized on the management of the Italian war. The absurd
accusation, that the nobles were conspiring with the enemy without,
had made an impression on the "people." The saviours to whom
political superstition looked for deliverance, Gaius Flaminius and
Gaius Varro, both "new men" and friends of the people of the purest
dye, had accordingly been empowered by the multitude itself to execute
the plans of operations which, amidst the approbation of that
multitude, they had unfolded in the Forum; and the results were the
battles on the Trasimene lake and at Cannae. Duty required that the
senate, which now of course understood its task better than when it
recalled half the army of Regulus from Africa, should take into its
hands the management of affairs, and should oppose such mischievous
proceedings; but when the first of those two defeats had for the
moment placed the rudder in its hands, it too had hardly acted in a
manner unbiassed by the interests of party. Little as Quintus Fabius
may be compared with these Roman Cleons, he had yet conducted the war
not as a mere military leader, but had adhered to his rigid attitude
of defence specially as the political opponent of Gaius Flaminius; and
in the treatment of the quarrel with his subordinate, had done what he
could to exasperate at a time when unity was needed. The consequence
was, first, that the most important instrument which the wisdom of
their ancestors had placed in the hands of the senate just for such
cases--the dictatorship--broke down in his hands; and, secondly--at
least indirectly--the battle of Cannae. But the headlong fall of the
Roman power was owing not to the fault of Quintus Fabius or Gaius
Varro, but to the distrust between the government and the governed--to
the variance between the senate and the burgesses. If the deliverance
and revival of the state were still possible, the work had to begin at
home with the re-establishment of unity and of confidence. To have
perceived this and, what is of more importance, to have done it,
and done it with an abstinence from all recriminations however just,
constitutes the glorious and imperishable honour of the Roman senate.
When Varro--alone of all the generals who had command in the battle
--returned to Rome, and the Roman senators met him at the gate and
thanked him that he had not despaired of the salvation of his country,
this was no empty phraseology veiling the disaster under sounding
words, nor was it bitter mockery over a poor wretch; it was the
conclusion of peace between the government and the governed. In
presence of the gravity of the time and the gravity of such an appeal,
the chattering of demagogues was silent; henceforth the only thought
of the Romans was how they might be able jointly to avert the common
peril. Quintus Fabius, whose tenacious courage at this decisive
moment was of more service to the state than all his feats of war,
and the other senators of note took the lead in every movement, and
restored to the citizens confidence in themselves and in the future.
The senate preserved its firm and unbending attitude, while messengers
from all sides hastened to Rome to report the loss of battles, the
secession of allies, the capture of posts and magazines, and to ask
reinforcements for the valley of the Po and for Sicily at a time
when Italy was abandoned and Rome was almost without a garrison.
Assemblages of the multitude at the gates were forbidden; onlookers
and women were sent to their houses; the time of mourning for the
fallen was restricted to thirty days that the service of the gods of
joy, from which those clad in mourning attire were excluded, might
not be too long interrupted--for so great was the number of the
fallen, that there was scarcely a family which had not to lament its
dead. Meanwhile the remnant saved from the field of battle had been
assembled by two able military tribunes, Appius Claudius and Publius
Scipio the younger, at Canusium. The latter managed, by his lofty
spirit and by the brandished swords of his faithful comrades, to
change the views of those genteel young lords who, in indolent despair
of the salvation of their country, were thinking of escape beyond the
sea. The consul Gaius Varro joined them with a handful of men; about
two legions were gradually collected there; the senate gave orders
that they should be reorganized and reduced to serve in disgrace and
without pay. The incapable general was on a suitable pretext recalled
to Rome; the praetor Marcus Claudius Marcellus, experienced in the
Gallic wars, who had been destined to depart for Sicily with the fleet
from Ostia, assumed the chief command. The utmost exertions were made
to organize an army capable of taking the field. The Latins were
summoned to render aid in the common peril. Rome itself set the
example, and called to arms all the men above boyhood, armed the
debtor-serfs and criminals, and even incorporated in the army eight
thousand slaves purchased by the state. As there was a want of arms,
they took the old spoils from the temples, and everywhere set the
workshops and artisans in action. The senate was completed, not as
timid patriots urged, from the Latins, but from the Roman burgesses
who had the best title. Hannibal offered a release of captives at the
expense of the Roman treasury; it was declined, and the Carthaginian
envoy who had arrived with the deputation of captives was not admitted
into the city: nothing should look as if the senate thought of peace.
Not only were the allies to be prevented from believing that Rome was
disposed to enter into negotiations, but even the meanest citizen was
to be made to understand that for him as for all there was no peace,
and that safety lay only in victory.
CHAPTER VI
The Crisis
Not only did the chain of Roman fortresses everywhere cut the nerves
and sinews of the land, but the Roman rule, continued for many years,
had rendered the inhabitants unused to arms--they furnished only a
moderate contingent to the Roman armies--had appeased their ancient
hatred, and had gained over a number of individuals everywhere to the
interest of the ruling community. They joined the conqueror of the
Romans, indeed, after the cause of Rome seemed fairly lost, but they
felt that the question was no longer one of liberty; it was simply
the exchange of an Italian for a Phoenician master, and it was not
enthusiasm, but despair that threw the Sabellian communities into
the arms of the victor. Under such circumstances the war in Italy
flagged. Hannibal, who commanded the southern part of the peninsula
as far up as the Volturnus and Garganus, and who could not simply
abandon these lands again as he had abandoned that of the Celts, had
now likewise a frontier to protect, which could not be left uncovered
with impunity; and for the purpose of defending the districts that he
had gained against the fortresses which everywhere defied him and the
armies advancing from the north, and at the same time of resuming the
difficult offensive against central Italy, his forces--an army of
about 40,000 men, without reckoning the Italian contingents--were far
from sufficient.
Marcellus
From the field of battle Hannibal had turned his steps to Campania, He
knew Rome better than the simpletons, who in ancient and modern times
have fancied that he might have terminated the struggle by a march on
the enemy's capital. Modern warfare, it is true, decides a war on the
field of battle; but in ancient times, when the system of attacking
fortresses was far less developed than the system of defence, the most
complete success in the field was on numberless occasions neutralized
by the resistance of the walls of the capitals. The council and
citizens of Carthage were not at all to be compared to the senate
and people of Rome; the peril of Carthage after the first campaign of
Regulus was infinitely more urgent than that of Rome after the battle
of Cannae; yet Carthage had made a stand and been completely
victorious. With what colour could it be expected that Rome would now
deliver her keys to the victor, or even accept an equitable peace?
Instead therefore of sacrificing practicable and important successes
for the sake of such empty demonstrations, or losing time in the
besieging of the two thousand Roman fugitives enclosed within the
walls of Canusium, Hannibal had immediately proceeded to Capua before
the Romans could throw in a garrison, and by his advance had induced
this second city of Italy after long hesitation to join him. He might
hope that, in possession of Capua, he would be able to seize one of
the Campanian ports, where he might disembark the reinforcements which
his great victories had wrung from the opposition at home.
When the Romans learned whither Hannibal had gone, they also left
Apulia, where only a weak division was retained, and collected
their remaining forces on the right bank of the Volturnus. With
the two legions saved from Cannae Marcus Marcellus marched to Teanum
Sidicinum, where he was joined by such troops as were at the moment
disposable from Rome and Ostia, and advanced--while the dictator
Marcus Junius slowly followed with the main army which had been
hastily formed--as far as the Volturnus at Casilinum, with a view if
possible to save Capua. That city he found already in the power of
the enemy; but on the other hand the attempts of the enemy on Neapolis
had been thwarted by the courageous resistance of the citizens, and
the Romans were still in good time to throw a garrison into that
important port. With equal fidelity the two other large coast towns,
Cumae and Nuceria, adhered to Rome. In Nola the struggle between
the popular and senatorial parties as to whether they should attach
themselves to the Carthaginians or to the Romans, was still undecided.
Informed that the former were gaining the superiority, Marcellus
crossed the river at Caiatia, and marching along the heights of
Suessula so as to evade the enemy's army, he reached Nola in
sufficient time to hold it against the foes without and within.
In a sally he even repulsed Hannibal in person with considerable loss;
a success which, as the first defeat sustained by Hannibal, was of far
more importance from its moral effect than from its material results.
In Campania indeed, Nuceria, Acerrae, and, after an obstinate siege
prolonged into the following year (539), Casilinum also, the key
of the Volturnus, were conquered by Hannibal, and the severest
punishments were inflicted on the senates of these towns which had
adhered to Rome. But terror is a bad weapon of proselytism; the
Romans succeeded, with comparatively trifling loss, in surmounting the
perilous moment of their first weakness. The war in Campania came to
a standstill; then winter came on, and Hannibal took up his quarters
in Capua, the luxury of which was by no means fraught with benefit to
his troops who for three years had not been under a roof. In the next
year (539) the war acquired another aspect. The tried general Marcus
Marcellus, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus who had distinguished himself
in the campaign of the previous year as master of the horse to the
dictator, and the veteran Quintus Fabius Maximus, took--Marcellus as
proconsul, the two others as consuls--the command of the three Roman
armies which were destined to surround Capua and Hannibal; Marcellus
resting on Nola and Suessula, Maximus taking a position on the right
bank of the Volturnus near Cales, and Gracchus on the coast near
Liternum, covering Neapolis and Cumae. The Campanians, who marched
to Hamae three miles from Cumae with a view to surprise the Cumaeans,
were thoroughly defeated by Gracchus; Hannibal, who had appeared
before Cumae to wipe out the stain, was himself worsted in a combat,
and when the pitched battle offered by him was declined, retreated
in ill humour to Capua. While the Romans in Campania thus not only
maintained what they possessed, but also recovered Compulteria and
other smaller places, loud complaints were heard from the eastern
allies of Hannibal. A Roman army under the praetor Marcus Valerius
had taken position at Luceria, partly that it might, in connection
with the Roman fleet, watch the east coast and the movements of the
Macedonians; partly that it might, in connection with the army of
Nola, levy contributions on the revolted Samnites, Lucanians, and
Hirpini. To give relief to these, Hannibal turned first against his
most active opponent, Marcus Marcellus; but the latter achieved under
the walls of Nola no inconsiderable victory over the Phoenician army,
and it was obliged to depart, without having cleared off the stain,
from Campania for Arpi, in order at length to check the progress of
the enemy's army in Apulia. Tiberius Gracchus followed it with his
corps, while the two other Roman armies in Campania made arrangements
to proceed next spring to the attack of Capua.
The clear vision of Hannibal had not been dazzled by his victories.
It became every day more evident that he was not thus gaining his
object Those rapid marches, that adventurous shifting of the war to
and fro, to which Hannibal was mainly indebted for his successes,
were at an end; the enemy had become wiser; further enterprises were
rendered almost impossible by the inevitable necessity of defending
what had been gained. The offensive was not to be thought of; the
defensive was difficult, and threatened every year to become more so.
He could not conceal from himself that the second half of his great
task, the subjugation of the Latins and the conquest of Rome, could
not be accomplished with his own forces and those of his Italian
allies alone. Its accomplishment depended on the council at Carthage,
on the head-quarters at Cartagena, on the courts of Pella and of
Syracuse. If all the energies of Africa, Spain, Sicily, and Macedonia
should now be exerted in common against the common enemy; if Lower
Italy should become the great rendezvous for the armies and fleets of
the west, south, and east; he might hope successfully to finish what
the vanguard under his leadership had so brilliantly begun. The most
natural and easy course would have been to send to him adequate
support from home; and the Carthaginian state, which had remained
almost untouched by the war and had been brought from deep decline so
near to complete victory by a small band of resolute patriots acting
of their own accord and at their own risk, could beyond doubt have
done this. That it would have been possible for a Phoenician fleet
of any desired strength to effect a landing at Locri or Croton,
especially as long as the port of Syracuse remained open to the
Carthaginians and the fleet at Brundisium was kept in check by
Macedonia, is shown by the unopposed disembarkation at Locri of 4000
Africans, whom Bomilcar about this time brought over from Carthage to
Hannibal, and still more by Hannibal's undisturbed embarkation, when
all had been already lost. But after the first impression of the
victory of Cannae had died away, the peace party in Carthage, which
was at all times ready to purchase the downfall of its political
opponents at the expense of its country, and which found faithful
allies in the shortsightedness and indolence of the citizens, refused
the entreaties of the general for more decided support with the half-
simple, half-malicious reply, that he in fact needed no help inasmuch
as he was really victor; and thus contributed not much less than
the Roman senate to save Rome. Hannibal, reared in the camp and a
stranger to the machinery of civic factions, found no popular leader
on whose support he could rely, such as his father had found in
Hasdrubal; and he was obliged to seek abroad the means of saving
his native country--means which itself possessed in rich abundance
at home.
War in Sicily
Siege of Syracuse
First of all the war in Sicily came to an end. It had formed no part
of Hannibal's original plan to excite a war on the island; but partly
through accident, chiefly through the boyish vanity of the imprudent
Hieronymus, a land war had broken out there, which--doubtless because
Hannibal had not planned it--the Carthaginian council look up with
especial zeal. After Hieronymus was killed at the close of 539, it
seemed more than doubtful whether the citizens would persevere in
the policy which he had pursued. If any city had reason to adhere
to Rome, that city was Syracuse; for the victory of the Carthaginians
over the Romans could not but give to the former, at any rate, the
sovereignty of all Sicily, and no one could seriously believe that
the promises made by Carthage to the Syracusans would be really kept.
Partly induced by this consideration, partly terrified by the
threatening preparations of the Romans--who made every effort to
bring once more under their complete control that important island,
the bridge between Italy and Africa, and now for the campaign of 540
sent their best general, Marcus Marcellus, to Sicily--the Syracusan
citizens showed a disposition to obtain oblivion of the past by a
timely return to the Roman alliance. But, amidst the dreadful
confusion in the city--which after the death of Hieronymus was
agitated alternately by endeavours to re-establish the ancient freedom
of the people and by the -coups de main- of the numerous pretenders to
the vacant throne, while the captains of the foreign mercenary troops
were the real masters of the place--Hannibal's dexterous emissaries,
Hippocrates and Epicydes, found opportunity to frustrate the projects
of peace. They stirred up the multitude in the name of liberty;
descriptions, exaggerated beyond measure, of the fearful punishment
that the Romans were said to have inflicted on the Leontines, who had
just been re-conquered, awakened doubts even among the better portion
of the citizens whether it was not too late to restore their old
relations with Rome; while the numerous Roman deserters among the
mercenaries, mostly runaway rowers from the fleet, were easily
persuaded that a peace on the part of the citizens with Rome would
be their death-warrant. So the chief magistrates were put to death,
the armistice was broken, and Hippocrates and Epicydes undertook
the government of the city. No course was left to the consul except
to undertake a siege; but the skilful conduct of the defence,
in which the Syracusan engineer Archimedes, celebrated as a learned
mathematician, especially distinguished himself, compelled the Romans
after besieging the city for eight months to convert the siege into
a blockade by sea and land.
Nor was Philip the first to renew the hostilities. The fall of
Tarentum (542), by which Hannibal acquired an excellent port on the
coast which was the most convenient for the landing of a Macedonian
army, induced the Romans to parry the blow from a distance and to give
the Macedonians so much employment at home that they could not think
of an attempt on Italy. The national enthusiasm in Greece had of
course evaporated long ago. With the help of the old antagonism to
Macedonia, and of the fresh acts of imprudence and injustice of which
Philip had been guilty, the Roman admiral Laevinus found no difficulty
in organizing against Macedonia a coalition of the intermediate and
minor powers under the protectorate of Rome. It was headed by the
Aetolians, at whose diet Laevinus had personally appeared and had
gained its support by a promise of the Acarnanian territory which
the Aetolians had long coveted. They concluded with Rome a modest
agreement to rob the other Greeks of men and land on the joint
account, so that the land should belong to the Aetolians, the men
and moveables to the Romans. They were joined by the states of anti-
Macedonian, or rather primarily of anti-Achaean, tendencies in Greece
proper; in Attica by Athens, in the Peloponnesus by Elis and Messene
and especially by Sparta, the antiquated constitution of which had
been just about this time overthrown by a daring soldier Machanidas,
in order that he might himself exercise despotic power under the
name of king Pelops, a minor, and might establish a government of
adventurers sustained by bands of mercenaries. The coalition was
joined moreover by those constant antagonists of Macedonia, the
chieftains of the half-barbarous Thracian and Illyrian tribes, and
lastly by Attalus king of Pergamus, who followed out his own interest
with sagacity and energy amidst the ruin of the two great Greek states
which surrounded him, and had the acuteness even now to attach himself
as a client to Rome when his assistance was still of some value.
Resultless Warfare
Peace between Philip and the Greeks
Peace between Philip and Rome
Spanish War
In Spain, where the spirit of Hamilcar and Hannibal was powerful, the
struggle was more earnest. Its progress was marked by the singular
vicissitudes incidental to the peculiar nature of the country and the
habits of the people. The farmers and shepherds, who inhabited the
beautiful valley of the Ebro and the luxuriantly fertile Andalusia as
well as the rough intervening highland region traversed by numerous
wooded mountain ranges, could easily be assembled in arms as a general
levy; but it was difficult to lead them against the enemy or even to
keep them together at all. The towns could just as little be combined
for steady and united action, obstinately as in each case they bade
defiance to the oppressor behind their walls. They all appear to have
made little distinction between the Romans and the Carthaginians;
whether the troublesome guests who had established themselves in the
valley of the Ebro, or those who had established themselves on the
Guadalquivir, possessed a larger or smaller portion of the peninsula,
was probably to the natives very much a matter of indifference; and
for that reason the tenacity of partisanship so characteristic of
Spain was but little prominent in this war, with isolated exceptions
such as Saguntum on the Roman and Astapa on the Carthaginian side.
But, as neither the Romans nor the Africans had brought with them
sufficient forces of their own, the war necessarily became on both
sides a struggle to gain partisans, which was decided rarely by solid
attachment, more usually by fear, money, or accident, and which, when
it seemed about to end, resolved itself into an endless series of
fortress-sieges and guerilla conflicts, whence it soon revived with
fresh fury. Armies appeared and disappeared like sandhills on the
seashore; on the spot where a hill stood yesterday, not a trace of
it remains today. In general the superiority was on the side of
the Romans, partly because they at first appeared in Spain as the
deliverers of the land from Phoenician despotism, partly because of
the fortunate selection of their leaders and of the stronger nucleus
of trustworthy troops which these brought along with them. It is
hardly possible, however, with the very imperfect and--in point of
chronology especially--very confused accounts which have been handed
down to us, to give a satisfactory view of a war so conducted.
Publius Scipio
After the removal of Hasdrubal Barcas the two generals who were
left in Spain determined for the time being to retire, Hasdrubal
son of Gisgo to Lusitania, Mago even to the Baleares; and, until new
reinforcements should arrive from Africa, they left the light cavalry
of Massinissa alone to wage a desultory warfare in Spain, as Muttines
had done so successfully in Sicily. The whole east coast thus fell
into the power of the Romans. In the following year (547) Hanno
actually made his appearance from Africa with a third army, whereupon
Mago and Hasdrubal returned to Andalusia. But Marcus Silanus defeated
the united armies of Mago and Hanno, and captured the latter in
person. Hasdrubal upon this abandoned the idea of keeping the open
field, and distributed his troops among the Andalusian cities, of
which Scipio was during this year able to storm only one, Oringis.
The Phoenicians seemed vanquished; but yet they were able in the
following year (548) once more to send into the field a powerful army,
32 elephants, 4000 horse, and 70,000 foot, far the greater part of
whom, it is true, were hastily-collected: Spanish militia. Again
a battle took place at Baecula. The Roman army numbered little
more than half that of the enemy, and was also to a considerable
extent composed of Spaniards. Scipio, like Wellington in similar
circumstances, disposed his Spaniards so that they should not partake
in the fight--the only possible mode of preventing their dispersion
--while on the other hand he threw his Roman troops in the first
instance on the Spaniards. The day was nevertheless obstinately
contested; but at length the Romans were the victors, and, as a matter
of course, the defeat of such an army was equivalent to its complete
dissolution--Hasdrubal and Mago singly made their escape to Gades.
The Romans were now without a rival in the peninsula; the few towns
that did not submit with good will were subdued one by one, and some
of them were punished with cruel severity. Scipio was even able to
visit Syphax on the African coast, and to enter into communications
with him and also with Massinissa with reference to an expedition
to Africa--a foolhardy venture, which was not warranted by any
corresponding advantage, however much the report of it might please
the curiosity of the citizens of the capital at home. Gades alone,
where Mago held command, was still Phoenician. For a moment it seemed
as if, after the Romans had entered upon the Carthaginian heritage and
had sufficiently undeceived the expectation cherished here and there
among the Spaniards that after the close of the Phoenician rule they
would get rid of their Roman guests also and regain their ancient
freedom, a general insurrection against the Romans would break forth
in Spain, in which the former allies of Rome would take the lead.
The sickness of the Roman general and the mutiny of one of his corps,
occasioned by their pay being in arrear for many years, favoured
the rising. But Scipio recovered sooner than was expected, and
dexterously suppressed the tumult among the soldiers; upon which
the communities that had taken the lead in the national rising were
subdued at once before the insurrection gained ground. Seeing that
nothing came of this movement and Gades could not be permanently held,
the Carthaginian government ordered Mago to gather together whatever
could be got in ships, troops, and money, and with these, if possible,
to give another turn to the war in Italy. Scipio could not prevent
this--his dismantling of the fleet now avenged itself--and he was a
second time obliged to leave in the hands of his gods the defence,
with which he had been entrusted, of his country against new
invasions. The last of Hamilcar's sons left the peninsula without
opposition. After his departure Gades, the oldest and last possession
of the Phoenicians on Spanish soil, submitted on favourable conditions
to the new masters. Spain was, after a thirteen years' struggle,
converted from a Carthaginian into a Roman province, in which the
conflict with the Romans was still continued for centuries by means of
insurrections always suppressed and yet never subdued, but in which at
the moment no enemy stood opposed to Rome. Scipio embraced the first
moment of apparent peace to resign his command (in the end of 548),
and to report at Rome in person the victories which he had achieved
and the provinces which he had won.
Italian War
Position of the Armies
In the following year (541) the Romans recovered the rich and
important Arpi, whose citizens, after the Roman soldiers had stolen
into the town, made common cause with them against the Carthaginian
garrison. In general the bonds of the symmachy formed by Hannibal
were relaxing; a number of the leading Capuans and several of the
Bruttian towns passed over to Rome; even a Spanish division of the
Phoenician army, when informed by Spanish emissaries of the course
of events in their native land, passed from the Carthaginian into
the Roman service.
The year 542 was more unfavourable for the Romans in consequence of
fresh political and military errors, of which Hannibal did not fail
to take advantage. The connections which Hannibal maintained in the
towns of Magna Graecia had led to no serious result; save that the
hostages from Tarentum and Thurii, who were kept at Rome, were induced
by his emissaries to make a foolhardy attempt at escape, in which they
were speedily recaptured by the Roman posts. But the injudicious
spirit of revenge displayed by the Romans was of more service to
Hannibal than his intrigues; the execution of all the hostages who
had sought to escape deprived them of a valuable pledge, and the
exasperated Greeks thenceforth meditated how they might open
their gates to Hannibal. Tarentum was actually occupied by the
Carthaginians in consequence of an understanding with the citizens and
of the negligence of the Roman commandant; with difficulty the Roman
garrison maintained itself in the citadel. The example of Tarentum
was followed by Heraclea, Thurii, and Metapontum, from which town the
garrison had to be withdrawn in order to save the Tarentine Acropolis.
These successes so greatly increased the risk of a Macedonian landing,
that Rome felt herself compelled to direct renewed attention and
renewed exertions to the Greek war, which had been almost totally
neglected; and fortunately the capture of Syracuse and the favourable
state of the Spanish war enabled her to do so.
At the chief seat of war, in Campania, the struggle went on with very
varying success. The legions posted in the neighbourhood of Capua had
not yet strictly invested the city, but had so greatly hindered the
cultivation of the soil and the ingathering of the harvest, that the
populous city was in urgent need of supplies from without. Hannibal
accordingly collected a considerable supply of grain, and directed
the Campanians to receive it at Beneventum; but their tardiness gave
the consuls Quintus Flaccus and Appius Claudius time to come up, to
inflict a severe defeat on Hanno who protected the grain, and to seize
his camp and all his stores. The two consuls then invested the town,
while Tiberius Gracchus stationed himself on the Appian Way to prevent
Hannibal from approaching to relieve it But that brave officer fell
in consequence of the shameful stratagem of a perfidious Lucanian;
and his death was equivalent to a complete defeat, for his army,
consisting mostly of those slaves whom he had manumitted, dispersed
after the fall of their beloved leader. So Hannibal found the road to
Capua open, and by his unexpected appearance compelled the two consuls
to raise the blockade which they had barely begun. Their cavalry had
already, before Hannibal's arrival, been thoroughly defeated by the
Phoenician cavalry, which lay as a garrison in Capua under Hanno and
Bostar, and by the equally excellent Campanian horse. The total
destruction of the regular troops and free bands in Lucania led by
Marcus Centenius, a man imprudently promoted from a subaltern to be
a general, and the not much less complete defeat of the negligent and
arrogant praetor Gnaeus Fulvius Flaccus in Apulia, closed the long
series of the misfortunes of this year. But the stubborn perseverance
of the Romans again neutralized the rapid success of Hannibal, at
least at the most decisive point. As soon as Hannibal turned his back
on Capua to proceed to Apulia, the Roman armies once more gathered
around that city, one at Puteoli and Volturnum under Appius Claudius,
another at Casilinum under Quintus Fulvius, and a third on the Nolan
road under the praetor Gaius Claudius Nero. The three camps, well
entrenched and connected with one another by fortified lines,
precluded all access to the place, and the large, inadequately
provisioned city could not but find itself compelled by the mere
investment to surrender at no distant time, should no relief arrive.
As the winter of 542-3 drew to an end, the provisions were almost
exhausted, and urgent messengers, who were barely able to steal
through the well-guarded Roman lines, requested speedy help from
Hannibal, who was at Tarentum, occupied with the siege of the
citadel. With 33 elephants and his best troops he departed by
forced marches from Tarentum for Campania, captured the Roman post at
Caiatia, and took up his camp on Mount Tifata close by Capua, in the
confident expectation that the Roman generals would, now raise the
siege as they had done the year before. But the Romans, who had had
time to entrench their camps and their lines like a fortress, did not
stir, and looked on unmoved from their ramparts, while on one side
the Campanian horsemen, on the other the Numidian squadrons, dashed
against their lines. A serious assault could not be thought of by
Hannibal; he could foresee that his advance would soon draw the other
Roman armies after him to Campania, if even before their arrival the
scarcity of supplies in a region so systematically foraged did not
drive him away. Nothing could be done in that quarter.
Capua Capitulates
But this was a poor compensation for the now inevitable fall of Capua.
Long had its citizens, particularly the better passes, anticipated
with sorrowful forebodings what was coming; the senate-house and the
administration of the city were left almost exclusively to the leaders
of the popular party hostile to Rome. Now despair seized high and
low, Campanians and Phoenicians alike. Twenty-eight senators chose a
voluntary death; the remainder gave over the city to the discretion of
an implacably exasperated foe. Of course a bloody retribution had to
follow; the only discussion was as to whether the process should be
long or short: whether the wiser and more appropriate course was to
probe to the bottom the further ramifications of the treason even
beyond Capua, or to terminate the matter by rapid executions. Appius
Claudius and the Roman senate wished to take the former course; the
latter view, perhaps the less inhuman, prevailed. Fifty-three of the
officers and magistrates of Capua were scourged and beheaded in the
marketplaces of Cales and Teanum by the orders and before the eyes
of the proconsul Quintus Flaccus, the rest of the senators were
imprisoned, numbers of the citizens were sold into slavery, and the
estates of the more wealthy were confiscated. Similar penalties were
inflicted upon Atella and Caiatia. These punishments were severe;
but, when regard is had to the importance of the revolt of Capua
from Rome, and to what was the ordinary if not warrantable usage of
war in those times, they were not unnatural. And had not the citizens
themselves pronounced their own sentence, when immediately after their
defection they put to death all the Roman citizens present in Capua at
the time of the revolt? But it was unjustifiable in Rome to embrace
this opportunity of gratifying the secret rivalry that had long
subsisted between the two largest cities of Italy, and of wholly
annihilating, in a political point of view, her hated and envied
competitor by abolishing the constitution of the Campanian city.
Immense was the impression produced by the fall of Capua, and all the
more that it had not been brought about by surprise, but by a two
years' siege carried on in spite of all the exertions of Hannibal.
It was quite as much a token that the Romans had recovered their
ascendency in Italy, as its defection some years before to Hannibal
had been a token that that ascendency was lost. In vain Hannibal had
tried to counteract the impression of this news on his allies by the
capture of Rhegium or of the citadel of Tarentum. His forced march
to surprise Rhegium had yielded no result. The citadel of Tarentum
suffered greatly from famine, after the Tarentino-Carthaginian
squadron closed the harbour; but, as the Romans with their much more
powerful fleet were able to cut off the supplies from that squadron
itself, and the territory, which Hannibal commanded, scarce sufficed
to maintain his army, the besiegers on the side next the sea suffered
not much less than did the besieged in the citadel, and at length they
left the harbour. No enterprise was now successful; Fortune herself
seemed to have deserted the Carthaginians. These consequences of the
fall of Capua--the deep shock given to the respect and confidence
which Hannibal had hitherto enjoyed among the Italian allies, and the
endeavours made by every community that was not too deeply compromised
to gain readmission on tolerable terms into the Roman symmachy
--affected Hannibal much more keenly than the immediate loss. He had
to choose one of two courses; either to throw garrisons into the
wavering towns, in which case he would weaken still more his army
already too weak and would expose his trusty troops to destruction in
small divisions or to treachery--500 of his select Numidian horsemen
were put to death in this way in 544 on the defection of the town of
Salapia; or to pull down and burn the towns which could not be
depended on, so as to keep them out of the enemy's hands--a course,
which could not raise the spirits of his Italian clients. On the
fall of Capua the Romans felt themselves once more confident as to
the final issue of the war in Italy; they despatched considerable
reinforcements to Spain, where the existence of the Roman army was
placed in jeopardy by the fall of the two Scipios; and for the first
time since the beginning of the war they ventured on a diminution in
the total number of their troops, which had hitherto been annually
augmented notwithstanding the annually-increasing difficulty of
levying them, and had risen at last to 23 legions. Accordingly in
the next year (544) the Italian war was prosecuted more remissly than
hitherto by the Romans, although Marcus Marcellus had after the close
of the Sicilian war resumed the command of the main army; he applied
himself to the besieging of fortresses in the interior, and had
indecisive conflicts with the Carthaginians. The struggle for the
Acropolis of Tarentum also continued without decisive result. In
Apulia Hannibal succeeded in defeating the proconsul Gnaeus Fulvius
Centumalus at Herdoneae. In the following year (545) the Romans took
steps to regain possession of the second large city, which had passed
over to Hannibal, the city of Tarentum. While Marcus Marcellus
continued the struggle against Hannibal in person with his wonted
obstinacy and energy, and in a two days' battle, beaten on the first
day, achieved on the second a costly and bloody victory; while the
consul Quintus Fulvius induced the already wavering Lucanians and
Hirpinians to change sides and to deliver up their Phoenician
garrisons; while well-conducted razzias from Rhegium compelled
Hannibal to hasten to the aid of the hard-pressed Bruttians;
the veteran Quintus Fabius, who had once more--for the fifth
time--accepted the consulship and along with it the commission to
reconquer Tarentum, established himself firmly in the neighbouring
Messapian territory, and the treachery of a Bruttian division of
the garrison surrendered to him the city. Fearful excesses were
committed by the exasperated victors. They put to death all of
the garrison or of the citizens whom they could find, and pillaged
the houses. 30,000 Tarentines are said to have been sold as slaves,
and 3000 talents (730,000 pounds) are stated to have been sent to the
state treasury. It was the last feat in arms of the general of eighty
years; Hannibal arrived to the relief of the city when all was over,
and withdrew to Metapontum.
After Hannibal had thus lost his most important acquisitions and
found himself hemmed in by degrees to the south-western point of the
peninsula, Marcus Marcellus, who had been chosen consul for the next
year (546), hoped that, in connection with his capable colleague
Titus Quintius Crispinus, he should be able to terminate the war by a
decisive attack. The old soldier was not disturbed by the burden of
his sixty years; sleeping and waking he was haunted by the one thought
of defeating Hannibal and of liberating Italy. But fate reserved that
wreath of victory for a younger brow. While engaged in an unimportant
reconnaissance in the district of Venusia, both consuls were suddenly
attacked by a division of African cavalry. Marcellus maintained the
unequal struggle--as he had fought forty years before against Hamilcar
and fourteen years before at Clastidium--till he sank dying from
his horse; Crispinus escaped, but died of his wounds received
in the conflict (546).
It was now the eleventh year of the war. The danger which some years
before had threatened the very existence of the state seemed to have
vanished; but all the more the Romans felt the heavy burden--a burden
pressing more severely year after year--of the endless war. The
finances of the state suffered beyond measure. After the battle of
Cannae (538) a special bank-commission (-tres viri mensarii-) had
been appointed, composed of men held in the highest esteem, to form
a permanent and circumspect board of superintendence for the public
finances in these difficult times. It may have done what it could;
but the state of things was such as to baffle all financial sagacity.
At the very beginning of the war the Romans had debased the silver and
copper coin, raised the legal value of the silver piece more than a
third, and issued a gold coin far above the value of the metal. This
very soon proved insufficient; they were obliged to take supplies from
the contractors on credit, and connived at their conduct because they
needed them, till the scandalous malversation at last induced the
aediles to make an example of some of the worst by impeaching them
before the people. Appeals were often made, and not in vain, to the
patriotism of the wealthy, who were in fact the very persons that
suffered comparatively the most. The soldiers of the better classes
and the subaltern officers and equites in a body, either voluntarily
or constrained by the -esprit de corps-, declined to receive pay.
The owners of the slaves armed by the state and manumitted after the
engagement at Beneventum(3) replied to the bank-commission, which
offered them payment, that they would allow it to stand over to the
end of the war (540). When there was no longer money in the exchequer
for the celebration of the national festivals and the repairs of the
public buildings, the companies which had hitherto contracted for
these matters declared themselves ready to continue their services for
a time without remuneration (540). A fleet was even fitted out and
manned, just as in the first Punic war, by means of a voluntary loan
among the rich (544). They spent the moneys belonging to minors; and
at length, in the year of the conquest of Tarentum, they laid hands
on the last long-spared reserve fund (164,000 pounds). The state
nevertheless was unable to meet its most necessary payments; the pay
of the soldiers fell dangerously into arrear, particularly in the more
remote districts. But the embarrassment of the state was not the
worst part of the material distress. Everywhere the fields lay
fallow: even where the war did not make havoc, there was a want of
hands for the hoe and the sickle. The price of the -medimnus-
(a bushel and a half) had risen to 15 -denarii- (10s.), at least three
times the average price in the capital; and many would have died of
absolute want, if supplies had not arrived from Egypt, and if, above
all, the revival of agriculture in Sicily(4) had not prevented the
distress from coming to the worst. The effect which such a state of
things must have had in ruining the small farmers, in eating away
the savings which had been so laboriously acquired, and in
converting flourishing villages into nests of beggars and brigands,
is illustrated by similar wars of which fuller details have
been preserved.
The Allies
Still more ominous than this material distress was the increasing
aversion of the allies to the Roman war, which consumed their
substance and their blood. In regard to the non-Latin communities,
indeed, this was of less consequence. The war itself showed that they
could do nothing, so long as the Latin nation stood by Rome; their
greater or less measure of dislike was not of much moment. Now,
however, Latium also began to waver. Most of the Latin communes in
Etruria, Latium, the territory of the Marsians, and northern Campania
--and so in those very districts of Italy which directly had suffered
least from the war--announced to the Roman senate in 545 that
thenceforth they would send neither contingents nor contributions,
and would leave it to the Romans themselves to defray the costs of a
war waged in their interest. The consternation in Rome was great;
but for the moment there were no means of compelling the refractory.
Fortunately all the Latin communities did not act in this way. The
colonies in the land of the Gauls, in Picenum, and in southern Italy,
headed by the powerful and patriotic Fregellae, declared on the
contrary that they adhered the more closely and faithfully to Rome; in
fact, it was very clearly evident to all of these that in the present
war their existence was, if possible, still more at stake than that of
the capital, and that this war was really waged not for Rome merely,
but for the Latin hegemony in Italy, and in truth for the independence
of the Italian nation. That partial defection itself was certainly
not high treason, but merely the result of shortsightedness and
exhaustion; beyond doubt these same towns would have rejected with
horror an alliance with the Phoenicians. But still there was a
variance between Romans and Latins, which did not fail injuriously
to react on the subject population of these districts. A dangerous
ferment immediately showed itself in Arretium; a conspiracy organized
in the interest of Hannibal among the Etruscans was discovered, and
appeared so perilous that Roman troops were ordered to march thither.
The military and police suppressed this movement without difficulty;
but it was a significant token of what might happen in those
districts, if once the Latin strongholds ceased to inspire terror.
Hasdrubal's Approach
New Armaments
Hasdrubal and Hannibal on the March
As in the times of the utmost danger, Rome once more called out
twenty-three legions. Volunteers were summoned to arm, and those
legally exempt from military service were included in the levy.
Nevertheless, they were taken by surprise. Far earlier than either
friends or foes expected, Hasdrubal was on the Italian side of the
Alps (547); the Gauls, now accustomed to such transits, were readily
bribed to open their passes, and furnished what the army required.
If the Romans had any intention of occupying the outlets of the Alpine
passes, they were again too late; already they heard that Hasdrubal
was on the Po, that he was calling the Gauls to arms as successfully
as his brother had formerly done, that Placentia was invested. With
all haste the consul Marcus Livius proceeded to the northern army; and
it was high time that he should appear. Etruria and Umbria were in
sullen ferment; volunteers from them reinforced the Phoenician army.
His colleague Gaius Nero summoned the praetor Gaius Hostilius Tubulus
from Venusia to join him, and hastened with an army of 40,000 men to
intercept the march of Hannibal to the north. The latter collected
all his forces in the Bruttian territory, and, advancing along the
great road leading from Rhegium to Apulia, encountered the consul at
Grumentum. An obstinate engagement took place in which Nero claimed
the victory; but Hannibal was able at all events, although with some
loss, to evade the enemy by one of his usual adroit flank-marches, and
to reach Apulia without hindrance. There he halted, and encamped at
first at Venusia, then at Canusium: Nero, who had followed closely in
his steps, encamped opposite to him at both places. That Hannibal
voluntarily halted and was not prevented from advancing by the Roman
army, appears to admit of no doubt; the reason for his taking up his
position exactly at this point and not farther to the north, must have
depended on arrangements concerted between himself and Hasdrubal, or
on conjectures as to the route of the latter's march, with which we
are not acquainted. While the two armies thus lay inactive, face to
face, the despatch from Hasdrubal which was anxiously expected in
Hannibal's camp was intercepted by the outposts of Nero. It stated
that Hasdrubal intended to take the Flaminian road, in other words,
to keep in the first instance along the coast and then at Fanum to
turn across the Apennines towards Narnia, at which place he hoped to
meet Hannibal. Nero immediately ordered the reserve in the capital
to proceed to Narnia as the point selected for the junction of the two
Phoenician armies, while the division stationed at Capua went to the
capital, and a new reserve was formed there. Convinced that Hannibal
was not acquainted with the purpose of his brother and would continue
to await him in Apulia, Nero resolved on the bold experiment of
hastening northward by forced marches with a small but select corps
of 7000 men and, if possible, in connection with his colleague,
compelling Hasdrubal to fight. He was able to do so, for the Roman
army which he left behind still continued strong enough either to
hold its ground against Hannibal if he should attack it, or to
accompany him and to arrive simultaneously with him at the
decisive scene of action, should he depart.
Battle of Sena
Death of Hasdrubal
Nero found his colleague Marcus Livius at Sena Gallica awaiting the
enemy. Both consuls at once marched against Hasdrubal, whom they
found occupied in crossing the Metaurus. Hasdrubal wished to avoid
a battle and to escape from the Romans by a flank movement, but his
guides left him in the lurch; he lost his way on the ground strange to
him, and was at length attacked on the march by the Roman cavalry
and detained until the Roman infantry arrived and a battle became
inevitable. Hasdrubal stationed the Spaniards on the right wing, with
his ten elephants in front of it, and the Gauls on the left, which he
kept back. Long the fortune of battle wavered on the right wing, and
the consul Livius who commanded there was hard pressed, till Nero,
repeating his strategical operation as a tactical manoeuvre, allowed
the motionless enemy opposite to him to remain as they stood, and
marching round his own army fell upon the flank of the Spaniards.
This decided the day. The severely bought and very bloody victory was
complete; the army, which had no retreat, was destroyed, and the camp
was taken by assault. Hasdrubal, when he: saw the admirably-conducted
battle lost, sought and found like his father an honourable soldier's
death. As an officer and a man, he was worthy to be the brother
of Hannibal.
On the day after the battle Nero started, and after scarcely fourteen
days' absence once more confronted Hannibal in Apulia, whom no message
had reached, and who had not stirred. The consul brought the message
with him; it was the head of Hannibal's brother, which the Roman
ordered to be thrown into the enemy's outposts, repaying in this
way his great antagonist, who scorned to war with the dead, for
the honourable burial which he had given to Paullus, Gracchus, and
Marcellus. Hannibal saw that his hopes had been in vain, and that
all was over. He abandoned Apulia and Lucania, even Metapontum,
and retired with his troops to the land of the Bruttians, whose ports
formed his only means of withdrawal from Italy. By the energy of the
Roman generals, and still more by a conjuncture of unexampled good
fortune, a peril was averted from Rome, the greatness of which
justified Hannibal's tenacious perseverance in Italy, and which fully
bears comparison with the magnitude of the peril of Cannae. The joy
in Rome was boundless; business was resumed as in time of peace; every
one felt that the danger of the war was surmounted.
The army and fleet were reduced; the Roman and Latin farmers were
brought back to their desolate homesteads the exchequer was filled by
the sale of a portion of the Campanian domains. The administration
of the state was regulated anew and the disorders which had prevailed
were done away; the repayment of the voluntary war-loan was begun,
and the Latin communities that remained in arrears were compelled
to fulfil their neglected obligations with heavy interest.
Mago in Italy
Mago, the youngest son of Hamilcar, set himself to his task more
earnestly. With the remains of the Spanish army, which he had
conducted in the first instance to Minorca, he landed in 549 at Genoa,
destroyed the city, and summoned the Ligurians and Gauls to arms.
Gold and the novelty of the enterprise led them now, as always, to
come to him in troops; he had formed connections even throughout
Etruria, where political prosecutions never ceased. But the troops
which he had brought with him were too few for a serious enterprise
against Italy proper; and Hannibal likewise was much too weak, and his
influence in Lower Italy had fallen much too low, to permit him to
advance with any prospect of success. The rulers of Carthage had not
been willing to save their native country, when its salvation was
possible; now, when they were willing, it was possible no longer.
Nobody probably in the Roman senate doubted either that the war on
the part of Carthage against Rome was at an end, or that the war on
the part of Rome against Carthage must now be begun; but unavoidable
as was the expedition to Africa, they were afraid to enter on its
preparation. They required for it, above all, an able and beloved
leader; and they had none. Their best generals had either fallen in
the field of battle, or they were, like Quintus Fabius and Quintus
Fulvius, too old for such an entirely new and probably tedious war.
The victors of Sena, Gaius Nero and Marcus Livius, would perhaps have
been equal to the task, but they were both in the highest degree
unpopular aristocrats; it was doubtful whether they would succeed in
procuring the command--matters had already reached such a pass that
ability, as such, determined the popular choice only in times of grave
anxiety--and it was more than doubtful whether these were the men to
stimulate the exhausted people to fresh exertions. At length Publius
Scipio returned from Spain, and the favourite of the multitude, who
had so brilliantly fulfilled, or at any rate seemed to have fulfilled,
the task with which it had entrusted him, was immediately chosen
consul for the next year. He entered on office (549) with the firm
determination of now realizing that African expedition which he had
projected in Spain. In the senate, however, not only was the party
favourable to a methodical conduct of the war unwilling to entertain
the project of an African expedition so long as Hannibal remained in
Italy, but the majority was by no means favourably disposed towards
the young general himself. His Greek refinement and his modern
culture and tone of thought were but little agreeable to the austere
and somewhat boorish fathers of the city; and serious doubts existed
both as to his conduct of the Spanish war and as to his military
discipline. How much ground there was for the objection that he
showed too great indulgence towards his officers of division, was very
soon demonstrated by the disgraceful proceedings of Gaius Pleminius at
Locri, the blame of which certainly was indirectly chargeable to the
scandalous negligence which marked Scipio's supervision. In the
proceedings in the senate regarding the organization of the African
expedition and the appointment of a general for it, the new consul,
wherever usage or the constitution came into conflict with his private
views, showed no great reluctance to set such obstacles aside, and
very clearly indicated that in case of need he was disposed to rely
for support against the governing board on his fame and his popularity
with the people. These things could not but annoy the senate and
awaken, moreover, serious apprehension as to whether, in the impending
decisive war and the eventual negotiations for peace with Carthage,
such a general would hold himself bound by the instructions which he
received--an apprehension which his arbitrary management of the
Spanish expedition was by no means fitted to allay. Both sides,
however, displayed wisdom enough not to push matters too far. The
senate itself could not fail to see that the African expedition was
necessary, and that it was not wise indefinitely to postpone it; it
could not fail to see that Scipio was an extremely able officer and so
far well adapted to be the leader in such a war, and that he, if any
one, could prevail on the people to protract his command as long as
was necessary and to put forth their last energies. The majority came
to the resolution not to refuse to Scipio the desired commission,
after he had previously observed, at least in form, the respect due to
the supreme governing board and had submitted himself beforehand to
the decree of the senate. Scipio was to proceed this year to Sicily
to superintend the building of the fleet, the preparation of siege
materials, and the formation of the expeditionary army, and then in
the following year to land in Africa. For this purpose the army of
Sicily--still composed of those two legions that were formed from the
remnant of the army of Cannae--was placed at his disposal, because a
weak garrison and the fleet were quite sufficient for the protection
of the island; and he was permitted moreover to raise volunteers in
Italy. It was evident that the senate did not appoint the expedition,
but merely allowed it: Scipio did not obtain half the resources which
had formerly been placed at the command of Regulus, and he got that
very corps which for years had been subjected by the senate to
intentional degradation. The African army was, in the view of the
majority of the senate, a forlorn hope of disrated companies and
volunteers, the loss of whom in any event the state had no great
occasion to regret.
Any one else than Scipio would perhaps have declared that the African
expedition must either be undertaken with other means, or not at all;
but Scipio's confidence accepted the terms, whatever they were, solely
with the view of attaining the eagerly-coveted command. He carefully
avoided, as far as possible, the imposition of direct burdens on the
people, that he might not injure the popularity of the expedition.
Its expenses, particularly those of building the fleet which were
considerable, were partly procured by what was termed a voluntary
contribution of the Etruscan cities--that is, by a war tribute imposed
as a punishment on the Arretines and other communities disposed to
favour the Phoenicians--partly laid upon the cities of Sicily. In
forty days the fleet was ready for sea. The crews were reinforced by
volunteers, of whom seven thousand from all parts of Italy responded
to the call of the beloved officer. So Scipio set sail for Africa in
the spring of 550 with two strong legions of veterans (about 30,000
men), 40 vessels of war, and 400 transports, and landed successfully,
without meeting the slightest resistance, at the Fair Promontory in
the neighbourhood of Utica.
Preparations in Africa
After such defeats the Carthaginian peace party, which had been
reduced to silence for sixteen years, was able once more to raise its
head and openly to rebel against the government of the Barcides and
the patriots. Hasdrubal son of Gisgo was in his absence condemned
by the government to death, and an attempt was made to obtain an
armistice and peace from Scipio. He demanded the cession of their
Spanish possessions and of the islands of the Mediterranean, the
transference of the kingdom of Syphax to Massinissa, the surrender of
all their vessels of war except 20, and a war contribution of 4000
talents (nearly 1,000,000 pounds)--terms which seemed so singularly
favourable to Carthage, that the question obtrudes itself whether they
were offered by Scipio more in his own interest or in that of Rome.
The Carthaginian plenipotentiaries accepted them under reservation of
their being ratified by the respective authorities, and accordingly a
Carthaginian embassy was despatched to Rome. But the patriot party in
Carthage were not disposed to give up the struggle so cheaply; faith
in the nobleness of their cause, confidence in their great leader,
even the example that had been set to them by Rome herself, stimulated
them to persevere, apart from the fact that peace of necessity
involved the return of the opposite party to the helm of affairs
and their own consequent destruction. The patriotic party had the
ascendency among the citizens; it was resolved to allow the opposition
to negotiate for peace, and meanwhile to prepare for a last and
decisive effort. Orders were sent to Mago and Hannibal to return with
all speed to Africa. Mago, who for three years (549-551) had been
labouring to bring about a coalition in Northern Italy against Rome,
had just at this time in the territory of the Insubres (about Milan)
been defeated by the far superior double army of the Romans. The
Roman cavalry had been brought to give way, and the infantry had been
thrown into confusion; victory seemed on the point of declaring for
the Carthaginians, when a bold attack by a Roman troop on the enemy's
elephants, and above all a serious wound received by their beloved and
able commander, turned the fortune of the battle. The Phoenician army
was obliged to retreat to the Ligurian coast, where it received and
obeyed the order to embark; but Mago died of his wound on the voyage.
Hannibal would probably have anticipated the order, had not the
last negotiations with Philip presented to him a renewed prospect of
rendering better service to his country in Italy than in Libya; when
he received it at Croton, where he latterly had his head-quarters, he
lost no time in complying with it. He caused his horses to be put
to death as well as the Italian soldiers who refused to follow him
over the sea, and embarked in the transports that had been long in
readiness in the roadstead of Croton. The Roman citizens breathed
freely, when the mighty Libyan lion, whose departure no one even now
ventured to compel, thus voluntarily turned his back on Italian
ground. On this occasion the decoration of a grass wreath was
bestowed by the senate and burgesses on the only survivor of the Roman
generals who had traversed that troubled time with honour, the veteran
of nearly ninety years, Quintus Fabius. To receive this wreath--which
by the custom of the Romans the army that a general had saved
presented to its deliverer--at the hands of the whole community was
the highest distinction which had ever been bestowed upon a Roman
citizen, and the last honorary decoration accorded to the old general,
who died in the course of that same year (551). Hannibal, doubtless
not under the protection of the armistice, but solely through his
rapidity of movement and good fortune, arrived at Leptis without
hindrance, and the last of the "lion's brood" of Hamilcar trode once
more, after an absence of thirty-six years, his native soil. He had
left it, when still almost a boy, to enter on that noble and yet so
thoroughly fruitless career of heroism, in which he had set out
towards the west to return homewards from the east, having described
a wide circle of victory around the Carthaginian sea. Now, when what
he had wished to prevent, and what he would have prevented had he been
allowed, was done, he was summoned to help and if possible, to save;
and he obeyed without complaint or reproach.
Recommencement of Hostilities
On his arrival the patriot party came forward openly; the disgraceful
sentence against Hasdrubal was cancelled; new connections were formed
with the Numidian sheiks through the dexterity of Hannibal; and not
only did the assembly of the people refuse to ratify the peace
practically concluded, but the armistice was broken by the plundering
of a Roman transport fleet driven ashore on the African coast, and by
the seizure even of a Roman vessel of war carrying Roman envoys. In
just indignation Scipio started from his camp at Tunes (552) and
traversed the rich valley of the Bagradas (Mejerdah), no longer
allowing the townships to capitulate, but causing the inhabitants of
the villages and towns to be seized en masse and sold. He had already
penetrated far into the interior, and was at Naraggara (to the west of
Sicca, now El Kef, on the frontier between Tunis and Algiers), when
Hannibal, who had marched out from Hadrumetum, fell in with him. The
Carthaginian general attempted to obtain better conditions from the
Roman in a personal conference; but Scipio, who had already gone to
the extreme verge of concession, could not possibly after the breach
of the armistice agree to yield further, and it is not credible that
Hannibal had any other object in this step than to show to the
multitude that the patriots were not absolutely opposed to peace.
The conference led to no result.
Battle of Zama
Peace
After this day folly alone could counsel a continuance of the war on
the part of Carthage. On the other hand it was in the power of the
Roman general immediately to begin the siege of the capital, which was
neither protected nor provisioned, and, unless unforeseen accidents
should intervene, now to subject Carthage to the fate which Hannibal
had wished to bring upon Rome. Scipio did not do so; he granted peace
(553), but no longer upon the former terms. Besides the concessions
which had already in the last negotiations been demanded in favour of
Rome and of Massinissa, an annual contribution of 200 talents (48,000
pounds) was imposed for fifty years on the Carthaginians; and they had
to bind themselves that they would not wage war against Rome or its
allies or indeed beyond the bounds of Africa at all, and that in
Africa they would not wage war beyond their own territory without
having sought the permission of Rome--the practical effect of which
was that Carthage became tributary and lost her political
independence. It even appears that the Carthaginians were bound
in certain cases to furnish ships of war to the Roman fleet.
Out of Italy
The immediate results of the war out of Italy were, the conversion
of Spain into two Roman provinces--which, however, were in perpetual
insurrection; the union of the hitherto dependent kingdom of Syracuse
with the Roman province of Sicily; the establishment of a Roman
instead of a Carthaginian protectorate over the most important
Numidian chiefs; and lastly the conversion of Carthage from a powerful
commercial state into a defenceless mercantile town. In other words,
it established the uncontested hegemony of Rome over the western
region of the Mediterranean. Moreover, in its further development,
it led to that necessary contact and interaction between the state
systems of the east and the west, which the first Punic war had
only foreshadowed; and thereby gave rise to the proximate decisive
interference of Rome in the conflicts of the Alexandrine monarchies.
In Italy
As to its results in Italy, first of all the Celts were now certainly,
if they had not been already beforehand, destined to destruction; and
the execution of the doom was only a question of time. Within the
Roman confederacy the effect of the war was to bring into more
distinct prominence the ruling Latin nation, whose internal union
had been tried and attested by the peril which, notwithstanding
isolated instances of wavering, it had surmounted on the whole in
faithful fellowship; and to depress still further the non-Latin or
non-Latinized Italians, particularly the Etruscans and the Sabellians
of Lower Italy. The heaviest punishment or rather vengeance was
inflicted partly on the most powerful, partly on those who were at
once the earliest and latest, allies of Hannibal--the community of
Capua, and the land of the Bruttians. The Capuan constitution was
abolished, and Capua was reduced from the second city into the first
village of Italy; it was even proposed to raze the city and level
it with the ground. The whole soil, with the exception of a few
possessions of foreigners or of Campanians well disposed towards Rome,
was declared by the senate to be public domain, and was thereafter
parcelled out to small occupiers on temporary lease. The Picentes on
the Silarus were similarly treated; their capital was razed, and the
inhabitants were dispersed among the surrounding villages. The doom
of the Bruttians was still more severe; they were converted en masse
into a sort of bondsmen to the Romans, and were for ever excluded from
the right of bearing arms. The other allies of Hannibal also dearly
expiated their offence. The Greek cities suffered severely, with the
exception of the few which had steadfastly adhered to Rome, such as
the Campanian Greeks and the Rhegines. Punishment not much lighter
awaited the Arpanians and a number of other Apulian, Lucanian, and
Samnite communities, most of which lost portions of their territory.
On a part of the lands thus acquired new colonies were settled. Thus
in the year 560 a succession of burgess-colonies was sent to the best
ports of Lower Italy, among which Sipontum (near Manfredonia) and
Croton may be named, as also Salernum placed in the former territory
of the southern Picentes and destined to hold them in check, and above
all Puteoli, which soon became the seat of the genteel -villeggiatura-
and of the traffic in Asiatic and Egyptian luxuries. Thurii became
a Latin fortress under the new name of Copia (560), and the rich
Bruttian town of Vibo under the name of Valentia (562). The veterans
of the victorious army of Africa were settled singly on various
patches of land in Samnium and Apulia; the remainder was retained as
public land, and the pasture stations of the grandees of Rome replaced
the gardens and arable fields of the farmers. As a matter of course,
moreover, in all the communities of the peninsula the persons of note
who were not well affected to Rome were got rid of, so far as this
could be accomplished by political processes and confiscations of
property. Everywhere in Italy the non-Latin allies felt that their
name was meaningless, and that they were thenceforth subjects of Rome;
the vanquishing of Hannibal was felt as a second subjugation of Italy,
and all the exasperation and all the arrogance of the victor vented
themselves especially on the Italian allies who were not Latin. Even
the colourless Roman comedy of this period, well subjected as it was
to police control, bears traces of this. When the subjugated towns
of Capua and Atella were abandoned without restraint to the unbridled
wit of the Roman farce, so that the latter town became its very
stronghold, and when other writers of comedy jested over the fact
that the Campanian serfs had already learned to survive amidst the
deadly atmosphere in which even the hardiest race of slaves, the
Syrians, pined away; such unfeeling mockeries re-echoed the scorn of
the victors, but not less the cry of distress from the down-trodden
nations. The position in which matters stood is shown by the anxious
carefulness, which during the ensuing Macedonian war the senate
evinced in the watching of Italy, and by the reinforcements which were
despatched from Rome to the most important colonies, to Venusia in
554, Narnia in 555, Cosa in 557, and Cales shortly before 570.
What blanks were produced by war and famine in the ranks of the
Italian population, is shown by the example of the burgesses of
Rome, whose numbers during the war had fallen almost a fourth.
The statement, accordingly, which puts the whole number of Italians
who fell in the war under Hannibal at 300,000, seems not at all
exaggerated. Of course this loss fell chiefly on the flower of the
burgesses, who in fact furnished the -elite- as well as the mass of
the combatants. How fearfully the senate in particular was thinned,
is shown by the filling up of its complement after the battle of
Cannae, when it had been reduced to 123 persons, and was with
difficulty restored to its normal state by an extraordinary nomination
of 177 senators. That, moreover, the seventeen years' war, which had
been carried on simultaneously in all districts of Italy and towards
all the four points of the compass abroad, must have shaken to the
very heart the national economy, is, as a general position, clear; but
our tradition does not suffice to illustrate it in detail. The state
no doubt gained by the confiscations, and the Campanian territory in
particular thenceforth remained an inexhaustible source of revenue to
the state; but by this extension of the domain system the national
prosperity of course lost just about as much as at other times it had
gained by the breaking up of the state lands. Numbers of flourishing
townships--four hundred, it was reckoned--were destroyed and ruined;
the capital laboriously accumulated was consumed; the population were
demoralized by camp life; the good old traditional habits of the
burgesses and farmers were undermined from the capital down to the
smallest village. Slaves and desperadoes associated themselves in
robber-bands, of the dangers of which an idea may be formed from the
fact that in a single year (569) 7000 men had to be condemned for
highway robbery in Apulia alone; the extension of the pastures,
with their half-savage slave-herdsmen, favoured this mischievous
barbarizing of the land. Italian agriculture saw its very existence
endangered by the proof, first afforded in this war, that the Roman
people could be supported by grain from Sicily and from Egypt instead
of that which they reaped themselves.
Nevertheless the Roman, whom the gods had allowed to survive the close
of that gigantic struggle, might look with pride to the past and with
confidence to the future. Many errors had been committed, but much
suffering had also been endured; the people, whose whole youth capable
of arms had for ten years hardly laid aside shield or sword, might
excuse many faults. The living of different nations side by side in
peace and amity upon the whole--although maintaining an attitude of
mutual antagonism--which appears to be the aim of modern phases of
national life, was a thing foreign to antiquity. In ancient times it
was necessary to be either anvil or hammer; and in the final struggle
between the victors victory remained with the Romans. Whether they
would have the judgment to use it rightly--to attach the Latin nation
by still closer bonds to Rome, gradually to Latinize Italy, to rule
their dependents in the provinces as subjects and not to abuse them as
slaves, to reform the constitution, to reinvigorate and to enlarge the
tottering middle class--many a one might ask. If they should know how
to use it, Italy might hope to see happy times, in which prosperity
based on personal exertion under favourable circumstances, and the
most decisive political supremacy over the then civilized world, would
impart a just self-reliance to every member of the great whole,
furnish a worthy aim for every ambition, and open a career for every
talent. It would, no doubt, be otherwise, should they fail to use
aright their victory. But for the moment doubtful voices and gloomy
apprehensions were silent, when from all quarters the warriors and
victors returned to their homes; thanksgivings and amusements, and
rewards to the soldiers and burgesses were the order of the day;
the released prisoners of war were sent home from Gaul, Africa,
and Greece; and at length the youthful conqueror moved in splendid
procession through the decorated streets of the capital, to deposit
his laurels in the house of the god by whose direct inspiration, as
the pious whispered one to another, he had been guided in counsel
and in action.
Notes for Chapter VI
5. Of the two places bearing this name, the more westerly, situated
about 60 miles west of Hadrumetum, was probably the scene of the
battle (comp. Hermes, xx. 144, 318). The time was the spring or
summer of the year 552; the fixing of the day as the 19th October,
on account of the alleged solar eclipse, is of no account.
CHAPTER VII
The West from the Peace of Hannibal to the Close of the Third Period
The war waged by Hannibal had interrupted Rome in the extension of her
dominion to the Alps or to the boundary of Italy, as was even now the
Roman phrase, and in the organization and colonizing of the Celtic
territories. It was self-evident that the task would now be resumed
at the point where it had been broken off, and the Celts were well
aware of this. In the very year of the conclusion of peace with
Carthage (553) hostilities had recommenced in the territory of the
Boii, who were the most immediately exposed to danger; and a first
success obtained by them over the hastily-assembled Roman levy,
coupled with the persuasions of a Carthaginian officer, Hamilcar, who
had been left behind from the expedition of Mago in northern Italy,
produced in the following year (554) a general insurrection spreading
beyond the two tribes immediately threatened, the Boii and Insubres.
The Ligurians were driven to arms by the nearer approach of the
danger, and even the youth of the Cenomani on this occasion listened
less to the voice of their cautious chiefs than to the urgent appeal
of their kinsmen who were in peril. Of "the two barriers against the
raids of the Gauls," Placentia and Cremona, the former was sacked--not
more than 2000 of the inhabitants of Placentia saved their lives--and
the second was invested. In haste the legions advanced to save what
they could. A great battle took place before Cremona. The dexterous
management and the professional skill of the Phoenician leader failed
to make up for the deficiencies of his troops; the Gauls were unable
to withstand the onset of the legions, and among the numerous dead who
covered the field of battle was the Carthaginian officer. The Celts,
nevertheless, continued the struggle; the same Roman army which had
conquered at Cremona was next year (555), chiefly through the fault of
its careless leader, almost destroyed by the Insubres; and it was not
till 556 that Placentia could be partially re-established. But the
league of the cantons associated for the desperate struggle suffered
from intestine discord; the Boii and Insubres quarrelled, and the
Cenomani not only withdrew from the national league, but purchased
their pardon from the Romans by a disgraceful betrayal of their
countrymen; during a battle in which the Insubres engaged the Romans
on the Mincius, the Cenomani attacked in rear, and helped to destroy,
their allies and comrades in arms (557). Thus humbled and left in the
lurch, the Insubres, after the fall of Comum, likewise consented to
conclude a separate peace (558). The conditions, which the Romans
prescribed to the Cenomani and Insubres, were certainly harder than
they had been in the habit of granting to the members of the Italian
confederacy; in particular, they were careful to confirm by law the
barrier of separation between Italians and Celts, and to enact that
never should a member of these two Celtic tribes be capable of
acquiring the citizenship of Rome. But these Transpadane Celtic
districts were allowed to retain their existence and their national
constitution--so that they formed not town-domains, but tribal
cantons--and no tribute, as it would seem, was imposed on them.
They were intended to serve as a bulwark for the Roman settlements
south of the Po, and to ward off from Italy the incursions of the
migratory northern tribes and the aggressions of the predatory
inhabitants of the Alps, who were wont to make regular razzias in
these districts. The process of Latinizing, moreover, made rapid
progress in these regions; the Celtic nationality was evidently far
from able to oppose such resistance as the more civilized nations of
Sabellians and Etruscans. The celebrated Latin comic poet Statius
Caecilius, who died in 586, was a manumitted Insubrian; and Polybius,
who visited these districts towards the close of the sixth century,
affirms, not perhaps without some exaggeration, that in that quarter
only a few villages among the Alps remained Celtic. The Veneti, on
the other hand, appear to have retained their nationality longer.
A different course was adopted with the region on the south of the Po,
which the Roman senate had determined to incorporate with Italy. The
Boii, who were immediately affected by this step, defended themselves
with the resolution of despair. They even crossed the Po and made an
attempt to rouse the Insubres once more to arms (560); they blockaded
a consul in his camp, and he was on the point of succumbing; Placentia
maintained itself with difficulty against the constant assaults of
the exasperated natives. At length the last battle was fought at
Mutina; it was long and bloody, but the Romans conquered (561);
and thenceforth the struggle was no longer a war, but a slave-hunt.
The Roman camp soon was the only asylum in the Boian territory;
thither the better part of the still surviving population began to
take refuge; and the victors were able, without much exaggeration, to
report to Rome that nothing remained of the nation of the Boii but old
men and children. The nation was thus obliged to resign itself to the
fate appointed for it. The Romans demanded the cession of half the
territory (563); the demand could not be refused, and even within the
diminished district which was left to the Boii, they soon disappeared,
and amalgamated with their conquerors.(1)
After the Romans had thus cleared the ground for themselves,
the fortresses of Placentia and Cremona, whose colonists had been
in great part swept away or dispersed by the troubles of the last few
years, were reorganized, and new settlers were sent thither. The new
foundations were, in or near the former territory of the Senones,
Potentia (near Recanati not far from Ancona: in 570) and Pisaurum
(Pesaro: in 570), and, in the newly acquired district of the Boii, the
fortresses of Bononia (565), Mutina (571), and Parma (571); the colony
of Mutina had been already instituted before the war under Hannibal,
but that war had interrupted the completion of the settlement.
The construction of fortresses was associated, as was always the case,
with the formation of military roads. The Flaminian way was prolonged
from its northern termination at Ariminum, under the name of the
Aemilian way, to Placentia (567). Moreover, the road from Rome to
Arretium or the Cassian way, which perhaps had already been long a
municipal road, was taken in charge and constructed anew by the Roman
community probably in 583; while in 567 the track from Arretium over
the Apennines to Bononia as far as the new Aemilian road had been put
in order, and furnished a shorter communication between Rome and the
fortresses on the Po. By these comprehensive measures the Apennines
were practically superseded as the boundary between the Celtic and
Italian territories, and were replaced by the Po. South of the Po
there henceforth prevailed mainly the urban constitution of the
Italians, beyond it mainly the cantonal constitution of the Celts;
and, if the district between the Apennines and the Po was still
reckoned Celtic land, it was but an empty name.
Liguria
With the more western Ligurian tribes, who held the Genoese Apennines
and the Maritime Alps, there were incessant conflicts. They were
troublesome neighbours, accustomed to pillage by land and by sea: the
Pisans and Massiliots suffered no little injury from their incursions
and their piracies. But no permanent results were gained amidst these
constant hostilities, or perhaps even aimed at; except apparently
that, with a view to have a communication by land with Transalpine
Gaul and Spain in addition to the regular route by sea, the Romans
endeavoured to clear the great coast road from Luna by way of Massilia
to Emporiae, at least as far as the Alps--beyond the Alps it devolved
on the Massiliots to keep the coast navigation open for Roman vessels
and the road along the shore open for travellers by land. The
interior with its impassable valleys and its rocky fastnesses,
and with its poor but dexterous and crafty inhabitants, served
the Romans mainly as a school of war for the training and hardening
of soldiers and officers.
Corsica
Sardinia
Wars as they are called, of a similar character with those against the
Ligurians, were waged with the Corsicans and to a still greater extent
with the inhabitants of the interior of Sardinia, who retaliated for
the predatory expeditions directed against them by sudden attacks on
the districts along the coast. The expedition of Tiberius Gracchus
against the Sardinians in 577 was specially held in remembrance,
not so much because it gave "peace" to the province, as because
he asserted that he had slain or captured as many as 80,000 of
the islanders, and dragged slaves thence in such multitudes to
Rome that "cheap as a Sardinian" became a proverb.
Carthage
Hannibal
Reform of the Carthaginian Constitution
Hannibal's Flight
This pliability on the part of the vanquished, however was not mere
patience and resignation. There was still in Carthage a patriotic
party, and at its head stood the man who, wherever fate placed him,
was still dreaded by the Romans. It had not abandoned the idea of
resuming the struggle by taking advantage of those complications that
might be easily foreseen between Rome and the eastern powers; and, as
the failure of the magnificent scheme of Hamilcar and his sons had
been due mainly to the Carthaginian oligarchy, the chief object was
internally to reinvigorate the country for this new struggle. The
salutary influence of adversity, and the clear, noble, and commanding
mind of Hannibal, effected political and financial reforms. The
oligarchy, which had filled up the measure of its guilty follies by
raising a criminal process against the great general, charging him
with having intentionally abstained from the capture of Rome and with
embezzlement of the Italian spoil--that rotten oligarchy was, on the
proposition of Hannibal, overthrown, and a democratic government was
introduced such as was suited to the circumstances of the citizens
(before 559). The finances were so rapidly reorganized by the
collection of arrears and of embezzled moneys and by the introduction
of better control, that the contribution due to Rome could be paid
without burdening the citizens in any way with extraordinary taxes.
The Roman government, just then on the point of beginning its critical
war with the great-king of Asia, observed the progress of these
events, as may easily be conceived, with apprehension; it was no
imaginary danger that the Carthaginian fleet might land in Italy and
a second war under Hannibal might spring up there, while the Roman
legions fighting in Asia Minor. We can scarcely, therefore, censure
the Romans for sending an embassy to Carthage (in 559) which was
presumably charged to demand the surrender of Hannibal. The spiteful
Carthaginian oligarchs, who sent letter after letter to Rome to
denounce to the national foe the hero who had overthrown them as
having entered into secret communications with the powers unfriendly
to Rome, were contemptible, but their information was probably
correct; and, true as it was that that embassy involved a humiliating
confession of the dread with which the simple shofete of Carthage
inspired so powerful a people, and natural and honourable as it was
that the proud conqueror of Zama should take exception in the senate
to so humiliating a step, still that confession was nothing but the
simple truth, and Hannibal was of a genius so extraordinary, that none
but sentimental politicians in Rome could tolerate him longer at the
head of the Carthaginian state. The marked recognition thus accorded
to him by the Roman government scarcely took himself by surprise.
As it was Hannibal and not Carthage that had carried on the last war,
so it was he who had to bear the fate of the vanquished. The
Carthaginians could do nothing but submit and be thankful that
Hannibal, sparing them the greater disgrace by his speedy and prudent
flight to the east, left to his ancestral city merely the lesser
disgrace of having banished its greatest citizen for ever from his
native land, confiscated his property, and razed his house. The
profound saying that those are the favourites of the gods, on whom
they lavish infinite joys and infinite sorrows, thus verified itself
in full measure in the case of Hannibal.
Numidians
While the power of the Phoenicians was thus sinking in the land of
their choice, just as it had long ago succumbed in their original
home, a new state grew up by their side. The northern coast of Africa
has been inhabited from time immemorial, and is inhabited still, by
the people, who themselves assume the name of Shilah or Tamazigt, whom
the Greeks and Romans call Nomades or Numidians, i. e. the "pastoral"
people, and the Arabs call Berbers, although they also at times
designate them as "shepherds" (Shawie), and to whom we are wont to
give the name of Berbers or Kabyles. This people is, so far as its
language has been hitherto investigated, related to no other known
nation. In the Carthaginian period these tribes, with the exception
of those dwelling immediately around Carthage or immediately on the
coast, had on the whole maintained their independence, and had also
substantially retained their pastoral and equestrian life, such as the
inhabitants of the Atlas lead at the present day; although they were
not strangers to the Phoenician alphabet and Phoenician civilization
generally,(2) and instances occurred in which the Berber sheiks had
their sons educated in Carthage and intermarried with the families of
the Phoenician nobility. It was not the policy of the Romans to have
direct possessions of their own in Africa; they preferred to rear a
state there, which should not be of sufficient importance to be able
to dispense with Roman protection, and yet should be sufficiently
strong to keep down the power of Carthage now that it was restricted
to Africa, and to render all freedom of movement impossible for the
tortured city. They found what they sought among the native princes.
About the time of the Hannibalic war the natives of North Africa were
subject to three principal kings, each of whom, according to the
custom there, had a multitude of princes bound to follow his banner;
Bocchar king of the Mauri, who ruled from the Atlantic Ocean to the
river Molochath (now Mluia, on the boundary between Morocco and the
French territory); Syphax king of the Massaesyli, who ruled from the
last-named point to the "Perforated Promontory," as it was called
(Seba Rus, between Jijeli and Bona), in what are now the provinces of
Oran and Algiers; and Massinissa king of the Massyli, who ruled from
the Tretum Promontorium to the boundary of Carthage, in what is now
the province of Constantine. The most powerful of these, Syphax king
of Siga, had been vanquished in the last war between Rome and Carthage
and carried away captive to Rome, where he died in captivity. His
wide dominions were mainly given to Massinissa; although Vermina the
son of Syphax by humble petition recovered a small portion of his
father's territory from the Romans (554), he was unable to deprive
the earlier ally of the Romans of his position as the privileged
oppressor of Carthage.
Massinissa
Massinissa became the founder of the Numidian kingdom; and seldom has
choice or accident hit upon a man so thoroughly fitted for his post.
In body sound and supple up to extreme old age; temperate and sober
like an Arab; capable of enduring any fatigue, of standing on the same
spot from morning to evening, and of sitting four-and-twenty hours on
horseback; tried alike as a soldier and a general amidst the romantic
vicissitudes of his youth as well as on the battle-fields of Spain,
and not less master of the more difficult art of maintaining
discipline in his numerous household and order in his dominions;
with equal unscrupulousness ready to throw himself at the feet of his
powerful protector, or to tread under foot his weaker neighbour; and,
in addition to all this, as accurately acquainted with the
circumstances of Carthage, where he was educated and had been on
familiar terms in the noblest houses, as he was filled with an African
bitterness of hatred towards his own and his people's oppressors,
--this remarkable man became the soul of the revival of his nation,
which had seemed on the point of perishing, and of whose virtues and
faults he appeared as it were a living embodiment. Fortune favoured
him, as in everything, so especially in the fact, that it allowed
him time for his work. He died in the ninetieth year of his age
(516-605), and in the sixtieth year of his reign, retaining to the
last the full possession of his bodily and mental powers, leaving
behind him a son one year old and the reputation of having been
the strongest man and the best and most fortunate king of his age.
Extension and Civilization of Numidia
In Spain the Greek and Phoenician towns along the coast, such as
Emporiae, Saguntum, New Carthage, Malaca, and Gades, submitted to the
Roman rule the more readily, that, left to their own resources, they
would hardly have been able to protect themselves from the natives;
as for similar reasons Massilia, although far more important and more
capable of self-defence than those towns, did not omit to secure a
powerful support in case of need by closely attaching itself to the
Romans, to whom it was in return very serviceable as an intermediate
station between Italy and Spain. The natives, on the other hand, gave
to the Romans endless trouble. It is true that there were not wanting
the rudiments of a national Iberian civilization, although of its
special character it is scarcely possible for us to acquire any clear
idea. We find among the Iberians a widely diffused national writing,
which divides itself into two chief kinds, that of the valley of the
Ebro, and the Andalusian, and each of these was presumably subdivided
into various branches: this writing seems to have originated at a very
early period, and to be traceable rather to the old Greek than to the
Phoenician alphabet. There is even a tradition that the Turdetani
(round Seville) possessed lays from very ancient times, a metrical
book of laws of 6000 verses, and even historical records; at any rate
this tribe is described as the most civilized of all the Spanish
tribes, and at the same time the least warlike; indeed, it regularly
carried on its wars by means of foreign mercenaries. To the same
region probably we must refer the descriptions given by Polybius of
the flourishing condition of agriculture and the rearing of cattle
in Spain--so that, in the absence of opportunity of export, grain and
flesh were to be had at nominal prices--and of the splendid royal
palaces with golden and silver jars full of "barley wine." At least a
portion of the Spaniards, moreover, zealously embraced the elements of
culture which the Romans brought along with them, so that the process
of Latinizing made more rapid progress in Spain than anywhere else in
the transmarine provinces. For example, warm baths after the Italian
fashion came into use even at this period among the natives. Roman
money, too, was to all appearance not only current in Spain far
earlier than elsewhere out of Italy, but was imitated in Spanish
coins; a circumstance in some measure explained by the rich silver-
mines of the country. The so-called "silver of Osca" (now Huesca
in Arragon), i. e. Spanish -denarii- with Iberian inscriptions, is
mentioned in 559; and the commencement of their coinage cannot be
placed much later, because the impression is imitated from that of
the oldest Roman -denarii-.
But, while in the southern and eastern provinces the culture of the
natives may have so far prepared the way for Roman civilization and
Roman rule that these encountered no serious difficulties, the west
and north on the other hand, and the whole of the interior, were
occupied by numerous tribes more or less barbarous, who knew little of
any kind of civilization--in Intercatia, for instance, the use of gold
and silver was still unknown about 600--and who were on no better
terms with each other than with the Romans. A characteristic trait
in these free Spaniards was the chivalrous spirit of the men and, at
least to an equal extent, of the women. When a mother sent forth her
son to battle, she roused his spirit by the recital of the feats of
his ancestors; and the fairest maiden unasked offered her hand in
marriage to the bravest man. Single combat was common, both with
a view to determine the prize of valour, and for the settlement of
lawsuits; even disputes among the relatives of princes as to the
succession were settled in this way. It not unfrequently happened
that a well-known warrior confronted the ranks of the enemy and
challenged an antagonist by name; the defeated champion then
surrendered his mantle and sword to his opponent, and even entered
into relations of friendship and hospitality with him. Twenty years
after the close of the second Punic war, the little Celtiberian
community of Complega (in the neighbourhood of the sources of the
Tagus) sent a message to the Roman general, that unless he sent to
them for every man that had fallen a horse, a mantle, and a sword,
it would fare ill with him. Proud of their military honour, so that
they frequently could not bear to survive the disgrace of being
disarmed, the Spaniards were nevertheless disposed to follow any
one who should enlist their services, and to stake their lives in
any foreign quarrel. The summons was characteristic, which a Roman
general well acquainted with the customs of the country sent to a
Celtiberian band righting in the pay of the Turdetani against the
Romans--either to return home, or to enter the Roman service with
double pay, or to fix time and place for battle. If no recruiting
officer made his appearance, they met of their own accord in free
bands, with the view of pillaging the more peaceful districts and
even of capturing and occupying towns, quite after the manner of the
Campanians. The wildness and insecurity of the inland districts are
attested by the fact that banishment into the interior westward of
Cartagena was regarded by the Romans as a severe punishment, and that
in periods of any excitement the Roman commandants of Further Spain
took with them escorts of as many as 6000 men. They are still more
clearly shown by the singular relations subsisting between the Greeks
and their Spanish neighbours in the Graeco-Spanish double city of
Emporiae, at the eastern extremity of the Pyrenees. The Greek
settlers, who dwelt on the point of the peninsula separated on the
landward side from the Spanish part of the town by a wall, took care
that this wall should be guarded every night by a third of their civic
force, and that a higher official should constantly superintend the
watch at the only gate; no Spaniard was allowed to set foot in the
Greek city, and the Greeks conveyed their merchandise to the natives
only in numerous and well-escorted companies.
The territory which the Romans acquired in Spain in the course of the
second Punic war was from the beginning divided into two masses--the
province formerly Carthaginian, which embraced in the first instance
the present districts of Andalusia, Granada, Murcia, and Valencia, and
the province of the Ebro, or the modern Arragon and Catalonia, the
fixed quarters of the Roman army during the last war. Out of these
territories were formed the two Roman provinces of Further and Hither
Spain. The Romans sought gradually to reduce to subjection the
interior corresponding nearly to the two Castiles, which they
comprehended under the general name of Celtiberia, while they were
content with checking the incursions of the inhabitants of the western
provinces, more especially those of the Lusitanians in the modern
Portugal and the Spanish Estremadura, into the Roman territory;
with the tribes on the north coast, the Callaecians, Asturians,
and Cantabrians, they did not as yet come into contact at all.
The territories thus won, however, could not be maintained and secured
without a standing garrison, for the governor of Hither Spain had no
small trouble every year with the chastisement of the Celtiberians,
and the governor of the more remote province found similar employment
in repelling the Lusitanians. It was needful accordingly to maintain
in Spain a Roman army of four strong legions, or about 40,000 men,
year after year; besides which the general levy had often to be called
out in the districts occupied by Rome, to reinforce the legions. This
was of great importance for two reasons: it was in Spain first, at
least first on any larger scale, that the military occupation of the
land became continuous; and it was there consequently that the service
acquired a permanent character. The old Roman custom of sending
troops only where the exigencies of war at the moment required them,
and of not keeping the men called to serve, except in very serious
and important wars, under arms for more than a year, was found
incompatible with the retention of the turbulent and remote Spanish
provinces beyond the sea; it was absolutely impossible to withdraw
the troops from these, and very dangerous even to relieve them
extensively. The Roman burgesses began to perceive that dominion over
a foreign people is an annoyance not only to the slave, but to the
master, and murmured loudly regarding the odious war-service of Spain.
While the new generals with good reason refused to allow the relief of
the existing corps as a whole, the men mutinied and threatened that,
if they were not allowed their discharge, they would take it of
their own accord.
The wars themselves, which the Romans waged in Spain, were but of
a subordinate importance. They began with the very departure of
Scipio,(3) and continued as long as the war under Hannibal lasted.
After the peace with Carthage (in 553) there was a cessation of
arms in the peninsula; but only for a short time. In 557 a general
insurrection broke out in both provinces; the commander of the
Further province was hard pressed; the commander of Hither Spain was
completely defeated, and was himself slain. It was necessary to take
up the war in earnest, and although in the meantime the able praetor
Quintus Minucius had mastered the first danger, the senate resolved in
559 to send the consul Marcus Cato in person to Spain. On landing at
Emporiae he actually found the whole of Hither Spain overrun by the
insurgents; with difficulty that seaport and one or two strongholds
in the interior were still held for Rome. A pitched battle took place
between the insurgents and the consular army, in which, after an
obstinate conflict man against man, the Roman military skill at length
decided the day with its last reserve. The whole of Hither Spain
thereupon sent in its submission: so little, however, was this
submission meant in earnest, that on a rumour of the consul having
returned to Rome the insurrection immediately recommenced. But the
rumour was false; and after Cato had rapidly reduced the communities
which had revolted for the second time and sold them -en masse- into
slavery, he decreed a general disarming of the Spaniards in the Hither
province, and issued orders to all the towns of the natives from the
Pyrenees to the Guadalquivir to pull down their walls on one and the
same day. No one knew how far the command extended, and there was no
time to come to any understanding; most of the communities complied;
and of the few that were refractory not many ventured, when the Roman
army soon appeared before their walls, to await its assault.
Administration of Spain
2. III. I. Libyphoenicians
5. 1 Maccab. viii. 3. "And Judas heard what the Romans had done
to the land of Hispania to become masters of the silver and gold
mines there."
CHAPTER VIII
Asia
The second of the great states, Asia, was nothing but Persia
superficially remodelled and Hellenized--the empire of "the king
of kings," as its master was wont to call himself in a style
characteristic at once of his arrogance and of his weakness--with the
same pretensions to rule from the Hellespont to the Punjab, and with
the same disjointed organization; an aggregate of dependent states in
various degrees of dependence, of insubordinate satrapies, and of
half-free Greek cities. In Asia Minor more especially, which was
nominally included in the empire of the Seleucidae, the whole north
coast and the greater part of the eastern interior were practically
in the hands of native dynasties or of the Celtic hordes that had
penetrated thither from Europe; a considerable portion of the west was
in the possession of the kings of Pergamus, and the islands and coast
towns were some of them Egyptian, some of them free; so that little
more was left to the great-king than the interior of Cilicia, Phrygia,
and Lydia, and a great number of titular claims, not easily made good,
against free cities and princes--exactly similar in character to the
sovereignty of the German emperor, in his day, beyond his hereditary
dominions. The strength of the empire was expended in vain endeavours
to expel the Egyptians from the provinces along the coast; in frontier
strife with the eastern peoples, the Parthians and Bactrians; in feuds
with the Celts, who to the misfortune of Asia Minor had settled within
its bounds; in constant efforts to check the attempts of the eastern
satraps and of the Greek cities of Asia Minor to achieve their
independence; and in family quarrels and insurrections of pretenders.
None indeed of the states founded by the successors of Alexander were
free from such attempts, or from the other horrors which absolute
monarchy in degenerate times brings in its train; but in the kingdom
of Asia these evils were more injurious than elsewhere, because, from
the lax composition of the empire, they usually led to the severance
of particular portions from it for longer or shorter periods.
Egypt
The mutual relations of the three great states are evident from
what has been said. The maritime power, which ruled the coasts and
monopolized the sea, could not but after the first great success
--the political separation of the European from the Asiatic continent
--direct its further efforts towards the weakening of the two great
states on the mainland, and consequently towards the protection of the
several minor states; whereas Macedonia and Asia, while regarding each
other as rivals, recognized above all their common adversary in Egypt,
and combined, or at any rate ought to have combined, against it.
Pergamus
Greece
Epirots, Acarnanians, Boeotians
The Athenians
The Aetolians
The Achaeans
In the Peloponnesus, the Achaean league had united the best elements
of Greece proper in a confederacy based on civilization, national
spirit, and peaceful preparation for self-defence. But the vigour
and more especially the military efficiency of the league had,
notwithstanding its outward enlargement, been arrested by the selfish
diplomacy of Aratus. The unfortunate variances with Sparta, and the
still more lamentable invocation of Macedonian interference in the
Peloponnesus, had so completely subjected the Achaean league to
Macedonian supremacy, that the chief fortresses of the country
thenceforward received Macedonian garrisons, and the oath of
fidelity to Philip was annually taken there.
Such was the state of things in the east, at the time when the wall of
political separation between the east and the west was broken down and
the eastern powers, Philip of Macedonia leading the way, were induced
to interfere in the relations of the west. We have already set forth
to some extent the origin of this interference and the course of the
first Macedonian war (540-549); and we have pointed out what Philip
might have accomplished during the second Punic war, and how little
of all that Hannibal was entitled to expect and to count on was really
fulfilled. A fresh illustration had been afforded of the truth, that
of all haphazards none is more hazardous than an absolute hereditary
monarchy. Philip was not the man whom Macedonia at that time
required; yet his gifts were far from insignificant He was a genuine
king, in the best and worst sense of the term. A strong desire to
rule in person and unaided was the fundamental trait of his character;
he was proud of his purple, but he was no less proud of other gifts,
and he had reason to be so. He not only showed the valour of a
soldier and the eye of a general, but he displayed a high spirit in
the conduct of public affairs, whenever his Macedonian sense of honour
was offended. Full of intelligence and wit, he won the hearts of all
whom he wished to gain, especially of the men who were ablest and most
refined, such as Flamininus and Scipio; he was a pleasant boon
companion and, not by virtue of his rank alone, a dangerous wooer.
But he was at the same time one of the most arrogant and flagitious
characters, which that shameless age produced. He was in the habit of
saying that he feared none save the gods; but it seemed almost as if
his gods were those to whom his admiral Dicaearchus regularly offered
sacrifice--Godlessness (-Asebeia-) and Lawlessness (-Paranomia-). The
lives of his advisers and of the promoters of his schemes possessed no
sacredness in his eyes, nor did he disdain to pacify his indignation
against the Athenians and Attalus by the destruction of venerable
monuments and illustrious works of art; it is quoted as one of his
maxims of state, that "whoever causes the father to be put to death
must also kill the sons." It may be that to him cruelty was not,
strictly, a delight; but he was indifferent to the lives and
sufferings of others, and relenting, which alone renders men
tolerable, found no place in his hard and stubborn heart. So abruptly
and harshly did he proclaim the principle that no promise and no moral
law are binding on an absolute king, that he thereby interposed the
most serious obstacles to the success of his plans. No one can deny
that he possessed sagacity and resolution, but these were, in a
singular manner, combined with procrastination and supineness; which
is perhaps partly to be explained by the fact, that he was called in
his eighteenth year to the position of an absolute sovereign, and that
his ungovernable fury against every one who disturbed his autocratic
course by counter-argument or counter-advice scared away from him all
independent counsellors. What various causes cooperated to produce
the weak and disgraceful management which he showed in the first
Macedonian war, we cannot tell; it may have been due perhaps to that
indolent arrogance which only puts forth its full energies against
danger when it becomes imminent, or perhaps to his indifference
towards a plan which was not of his own devising and his jealousy of
the greatness of Hannibal which put him to shame. It is certain that
his subsequent conduct betrayed no further trace of the Philip,
through whose negligence the plan of Hannibal suffered shipwreck.
When Philip concluded his treaty with the Aetolians and Romans in
548-9, he seriously intended to make a lasting peace with Rome, and
to devote himself exclusively in future to the affairs of the east.
It admits of no doubt that he saw with regret the rapid subjugation of
Carthage; and it may be, that Hannibal hoped for a second declaration
of war from Macedonia, and that Philip secretly reinforced the last
Carthaginian army with mercenaries.(2) But the tedious affairs in
which he had meanwhile involved himself in the east, as well as the
nature of the alleged support, and especially the total silence of the
Romans as to such a breach of the peace while they were searching for
grounds of war, place it beyond doubt, that Philip was by no means
disposed in 551 to make up for what he ought to have done ten years
before. He had turned his eyes to an entirely different quarter.
But even had this not been so, the interests of all Greek commercial
cities were at stake. They could not possibly allow the mild and
almost purely nominal Egyptian rule to be supplanted by the Macedonian
despotism, with which urban self-government and freedom of commercial
intercourse were not at all compatible; and the fearful treatment
of the Cians showed that the matter at stake was not the right of
confirming the charters of the towns, but the life or death of one and
all. Lampsacus had already fallen, and Thasos had been treated like
Cius; no time was to be lost. Theophiliscus, the vigilant -strategus-
of Rhodes, exhorted his citizens to meet the common danger by common
resistance, and not to suffer the towns and islands to become one by
one a prey to the enemy. Rhodes resolved on its course, and declared
war against Philip. Byzantium joined it; as did also the aged Attalus
king of Pergamus, personally and politically the enemy of Philip.
While the fleet of the allies was mustering on the Aeolian coast,
Philip directed a portion of his fleet to take Chios and Samos. With
the other portion he appeared in person before Pergamus, which however
he invested in vain; he had to content himself with traversing the
level country and leaving the traces of Macedonian valour on the
temples which he destroyed far and wide. Suddenly he departed and
re-embarked, to unite with his squadron which was at Samos. But the
Rhodo-Pergamene fleet followed him, and forced him to accept battle in
the straits of Chios. The number of the Macedonian decked vessels
was smaller, but the multitude of their open boats made up for this
inequality, and the soldiers of Philip fought with great courage.
But he was at length defeated. Almost half of his decked vessels,
24 sail, were sunk or taken; 6000 Macedonian sailors and 3000 soldiers
perished, amongst whom was the admiral Democrates; 2000 were taken
prisoners. The victory cost the allies no more than 800 men and six
vessels. But, of the leaders of the allies, Attalus had been cut off
from his fleet and compelled to let his own vessel run aground at
Erythrae; and Theophiliscus of Rhodes, whose public spirit had decided
the question of war and whose valour had decided the battle, died on
the day after it of his wounds. Thus while the fleet of Attalus went
home and the Rhodian fleet remained temporarily at Chios, Philip, who
falsely ascribed the victory to himself, was able to continue his
voyage and to turn towards Samos, in order to occupy the Carian towns.
On the Carian coast the Rhodians, not on this occasion supported by
Attalus, gave battle for the second time to the Macedonian fleet under
Heraclides, near the little island of Lade in front of the port of
Miletus. The victory, claimed again by both sides, appears to have
been this time gained by the Macedonians; for while the Rhodians
retreated to Myndus and thence to Cos, the Macedonians occupied
Miletus, and a squadron under Dicaearchus the Aetolian occupied the
Cyclades. Philip meanwhile prosecuted the conquest of the Rhodian
possessions on the Carian mainland, and of the Greek cities: had he
been disposed to attack Ptolemy in person, and had he not preferred to
confine himself to the acquisition of his own share in the spoil, he
would now have been able to think even of an expedition to Egypt. In
Caria no army confronted the Macedonians, and Philip traversed without
hindrance the country from Magnesia to Mylasa; but every town in that
country was a fortress, and the siege-warfare was protracted without
yielding or promising any considerable results. Zeuxis the satrap of
Lydia supported the ally of his master with the same lukewarmness as
Philip had manifested in promoting the interests of the Syrian king,
and the Greek cities gave their support only under the pressure
of fear or force. The provisioning of the army became daily more
difficult; Philip was obliged today to plunder those who but yesterday
had voluntarily supplied his wants, and then he had reluctantly to
submit to beg afresh. Thus the good season of the year gradually drew
to an end, and in the interval the Rhodians had reinforced their fleet
and had also been rejoined by that of Attalus, so that they were
decidedly superior at sea. It seemed almost as if they might cut off
the retreat of the king and compel him to take up winter quarters in
Caria, while the state of affairs at home, particularly the threatened
intervention of the Aetolians and Romans, urgently demanded his
return. Philip saw the danger; he left garrisons amounting together
to 3000 men, partly in Myrina to keep Pergamus in check, partly in
the petty towns round Mylasa--Iassus, Bargylia, Euromus and Pedasa
--to secure for him the excellent harbour and a landing place in
Caria; and, owing to the negligence with which the allies guarded the
sea, he succeeded in safely reaching the Thracian coast with his fleet
and arriving at home before the winter of 553-4.
Meanwhile, the spring of 554 had arrived, and the war had recommenced.
Philip first threw himself once more upon Thrace, where he occupied
all the places on the coast, in particular Maronea, Aenus, Elaeus,
and Sestus; he wished to have his European possessions secured against
the risk of a Roman landing. He then attacked Abydus on the Asiatic
coast, the acquisition of which could not but be an object of
importance to him, for the possession of Sestus and Abydus would bring
him into closer connection with his ally Antiochus, and he would no
longer need to be apprehensive lest the fleet of the allies might
intercept him in crossing to or from Asia Minor. That fleet commanded
the Aegean Sea after the withdrawal of the weaker Macedonian squadron:
Philip confined his operations by sea to maintaining garrisons on
three of the Cyclades, Andros, Cythnos, and Paros, and fitting out
privateers. The Rhodians proceeded to Chios, and thence to Tenedos,
where Attalus, who had passed the winter at Aegina and had spent his
time in listening to the declamations of the Athenians, joined them
with his squadron. The allies might probably have arrived in time
to help the Abydenes, who heroically defended themselves; but they
stirred not, and so at length the city surrendered, after almost all
who were capable of bearing arms had fallen in the struggle before the
walls. After the capitulation a large portion of the inhabitants fell
by their own hand--the mercy of the victor consisted in allowing the
Abydenes a term of three days to die voluntarily. Here, in the camp
before Abydus. the Roman embassy, which after the termination of its
business in Syria and Egypt had visited and dealt with the minor Greek
states, met with the king, and submitted the proposals which it had
been charged to make by the senate, viz. that the king should wage no
aggressive war against any Greek state, should restore the possessions
which he had wrested from Ptolemy, and should consent to an
arbitration regarding the injury inflicted on the Pergamenes and
Rhodians. The object of the senate, which sought to provoke the king
to a formal declaration of war, was not gained; the Roman ambassador,
Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, obtained from the king nothing but the polite
reply that he would excuse what the envoy had said because he was
young, handsome, and a Roman.
The senate now had what they wanted; and in the summer of 554 they
were able to propose to the comitia a declaration of war "on account
of an attack on a state in alliance with Rome." It was rejected on the
first occasion almost unanimously: foolish or evil-disposed tribunes
of the people complained of the senate, which would allow the citizens
no rest; but the war was necessary and, in strictness, was already
begun, so that the senate could not possibly recede. The burgesses
were induced to yield by representations and concessions. It is
remarkable that these concessions were made mainly at the expense of
the allies. The garrisons of Gaul, Lower Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia,
amounting in all to 20,000 men, were exclusively taken from the allied
contingents that were in active service--quite contrary to the former
principles of the Romans. All the burgess troops, on the other hand,
that had continued under arms from the Hannibalic war, were
discharged; volunteers alone, it was alleged, were to be enrolled for
the Macedonian war, but they were, as was afterwards found, for the
most part forced volunteers--a fact which in the autumn of 555
called forth a dangerous military revolt in the camp of Apollonia.
Six legions were formed of the men newly called out; of these two
remained in Rome and two in Etruria, and only two embarked at
Brundisium for Macedonia, led by the consul Publius Sulpicius Galba.
Thus it was once more clearly demonstrated, that the sovereign burgess
assemblies, with their shortsighted resolutions dependent often on
mere accident, were no longer at all fitted to deal with the
complicated and difficult relations into which Rome was drawn by her
victories; and that their mischievous intervention in the working of
the state machine led to dangerous modifications of the measures which
in a military point of were necessary, and to the still more dangerous
course of treating the Latin allies as inferiors.
It was a circumstance still more ominous, that even among the Greek
states firmly attached to the interests of Macedonia--the Epirots,
Acarnanians, Boeotians, and Achaeans--the Acarnanians and Boeotians
alone stood steadfastly by Philip. With the Epirots the Roman envoys
negotiated not without success; Amynander, king of the Athamanes, in
particular closely attached himself to Rome. Even among the Achaeans,
Philip had offended many by the murder of Aratus; while on the other
hand he had thereby paved the way for a more free development of the
confederacy. Under the leadership of Philopoemen (502-571, for the
first time -strategus- in 546) it had reorganized its military system,
recovered confidence in itself by successful conflicts with Sparta,
and no longer blindly followed, as in the time of Aratus, the policy
of Macedonia. The Achaean league, which had to expect neither profit
nor immediate injury from the thirst of Philip for aggrandizement,
alone in all Hellas looked at this war from an impartial and national-
Hellenic point of view. It perceived--what there was no difficulty in
perceiving--that the Hellenic nation was thereby surrendering itself
to the Romans even before these wished or desired its surrender, and
attempted accordingly to mediate between Philip and the Rhodians;
but it was too late. The national patriotism, which had formerly
terminated the federal war and had mainly contributed to bring about
the first war between Macedonia and Rome, was extinguished the Achaean
mediation remained fruitless, and in vain Philip visited the cities
and islands to rekindle the zeal of the nation--its apathy was the
Nemesis for Cius and Abydus. The Achaeans, as they could effect
no change and were not disposed to render help to either party,
remained neutral.
Thus the winter passed away. With the spring of 555 the proconsul
Publius Sulpicius broke up from his winter camp, determined to conduct
his legions from Apollonia by the shortest route into Macedonia
proper. This principal attack from the west was to be supported by
three subordinate attacks; on the north by an invasion of the Dardani
and Illyrians; on the east by an attack on the part of the combined
fleet of the Romans and allies, which assembled at Aegina; while
lastly the Athamanes, and the Aetolians also, if the attempt to induce
them to share in the struggle should prove successful, were to advance
from the south. After Galba had crossed the mountains pierced by the
Apsus (now the Beratind), and had marched through the fertile plain of
Dassaretia, he reached the mountain range which separates Illyria from
Macedonia, and crossing it, entered the proper Macedonian territory.
Philip had marched to meet him; but in the extensive and thinly-
peopled regions of Macedonia the antagonists for a time sought each
other in vain; at length they met in the province of Lyncestis, a
fertile but marshy plain not far from the north-western frontier,
and encamped not 1000 paces apart. Philip's army, after he had been
joined by the corps detached to occupy the northern passes, numbered
about 20,000 infantry and 2000 cavalry; the Roman army was nearly
as strong. The Macedonians however had the great advantage, that,
fighting in their native land and well acquainted with its highways
and byways, they had little trouble in procuring supplies of
provisions, while they had encamped so close to the Romans that
the latter could not venture to disperse for any extensive foraging.
The consul repeatedly offered battle, but the king persisted in
declining it; and the combats between the light troops, although
the Romans gained some advantages in them, produced no material
alteration. Galba was obliged to break up his camp and to pitch
another eight miles off at Octolophus, where he conceived that he
could more easily procure supplies. But here too the divisions sent
out were destroyed by the light troops and cavalry of the Macedonians;
the legions were obliged to come to their help, whereupon the
Macedonian vanguard, which had advanced too far, were driven back to
their camp with heavy loss; the king himself lost his horse in the
action, and only saved his life through the magnanimous self-devotion
of one of his troopers. From this perilous position the Romans were
liberated through the better success of the subordinate attacks which
Galba had directed the allies to make, or rather through the weakness
of the Macedonian forces. Although Philip had instituted levies
as large as possible in his own dominions, and had enlisted Roman
deserters and other mercenaries, he had not been able to bring into
the field (over and above the garrisons in Asia Minor and Thrace)
more than the army, with which in person he confronted the consul;
and besides, in order to form even this, he had been obliged to leave
the northern passes in the Pelagonian territory undefended. For the
protection of the east coast he relied partly on the orders which
he had given for the laying waste of the islands of Sciathus and
Peparethus, which might have furnished a station to the enemy's fleet,
partly on the garrisoning of Thasos and the coast and on the fleet
organized at Demetrias under Heraclides. For the south frontier
be had been obliged to reckon solely upon the more than doubtful
neutrality of the Aetolians. These now suddenly joined the league
against Macedonia, and immediately in conjunction with the Athamanes
penetrated into Thessaly, while simultaneously the Dardani and
Illyrians overran the northern provinces, and the Roman fleet
under Lucius Apustius, departing from Corcyra, appeared in the
eastern waters, where the ships of Attalus, the Rhodians, and
the Istrians joined it.
Philip did not disturb the Roman main army in its retreat, but turned
by forced marches against the Aetolians and Athamanians who, in the
belief that the legions were occupying the attention of the king, were
fearlessly and recklessly plundering the rich vale of the Peneius,
defeated them completely, and compelled such as did not fall to make
their escape singly through the well-known mountain paths. The
effective strength of the confederacy was not a little diminished by
this defeat, and not less by the numerous enlistments made in Aetolia
on Egyptian account. The Dardani were chased back over the mountains
by Athena-goras, the leader of Philip's light troops, without
difficulty and with severe loss. The Roman fleet also did not
accomplish much; it expelled the Macedonian garrison from Andros,
punished Euboea and Sciathus, and then made attempts on the Chalcidian
peninsula, which were, however, vigorously repulsed by the Macedonian
garrison at Mende. The rest of the summer was spent in the capture
of Oreus in Euboea, which was long delayed by the resolute defence of
the Macedonian garrison. The weak Macedonian fleet under Heraclides
remained inactive at Heraclea, and did not venture to dispute the
possession of the sea with the enemy. The latter went early to
winter quarters, the Romans proceeding to the Piraeeus and Corcyra,
the Rhodians and Pergamenes going home.
But the fortunate issue of the last campaign had so raised the courage
or the arrogance of Philip, that, after having assured himself afresh
of the neutrality of the Achaeans and the fidelity of the Macedonians
by the sacri fice of some strong places and of the detested admiral
Heraclides, he next spring (556) assumed the offensive and advanced
into the territory of the Atintanes, with a view to form a well-
entrenched camp in the narrow pass, where the Aous (Viosa) winds
its way between the mountains Aeropus and Asnaus. Opposite to him
encamped the Roman army reinforced by new arrivals of troops, and
commanded first by the consul of the previous year, Publius Villius,
and then from the summer of 556 by that year's consul, Titus Quinctius
Flamininus. Flamininus, a talented man just thirty years of age,
belonged to the younger generation who began to lay aside the
patriotism as well as the habits of their forefathers and, though not
unmindful of their fatherland, were still more mindful of themselves
and of Hellenism. A skilful officer and a better diplomatist, he was
in many respects admirably adapted for the management of the troubled
affairs of Greece. Yet it would perhaps have been better both for
Rome and for Greece, if the choice had fallen on one less full of
Hellenic sympathies, and if the general despatched thither had been
a man, who would neither have been bribed by delicate flattery nor
stung by pungent sarcasm; who would not amidst literary and
artistic reminiscences have overlooked the pitiful condition of the
constitutions of the Hellenic states; and who, while treating Hellas
according to its deserts, would have spared the Romans the trouble of
striving after unattainable ideals.
The south, on the other hand, was still in the main retained under
the power of Macedonia by the fortresses of Chalcis and Corinth, which
maintained communication with each other through the territory of the
Boeotians who were friendly to the Macedonians, and by the Achaean
neutrality; and as it was too late to advance into Macedonia this
year, Flamininus resolved to direct his land army and fleet in the
first place against Corinth and the Achaeans. The fleet, which had
again been joined by the Rhodian and Pergamene ships, had hitherto
been employed in the capture and pillage of two of the smaller towns
in Euboea, Eretria and Carystus; both however, as well as Oreus,
were thereafter abandoned, and reoccupied by Philocles the Macedonian
commandant of Chalcis. The united fleet proceeded thence to
Cenchreae, the eastern port of Corinth, to threaten that strong
fortress. On the other side Flamininus advanced into Phocis and
occupied the country, in which Elatea alone sustained a somewhat
protracted siege: this district, and Anticyra in particular on the
Corinthian gulf, were chosen as winter quarters. The Achaeans, who
thus saw on the one hand the Roman legions approaching and on the
other the Roman fleet already on their own coast, abandoned their
morally honourable, but politically untenable, neutrality. After
the deputies from the towns most closely attached to Macedonia
--Dyme, Megalopolis, and Argos--had left the diet, it resolved to
join the coalition against Philip. Cycliades and other leaders of
the Macedonian party went into exile; the troops of the Achaeans
immediately united with the Roman fleet and hastened to invest Corinth
by land, which city--the stronghold of Philip against the Achaeans
--had been guaranteed to them on the part of Rome in return for
their joining the coalition. Not only, however, did the Macedonian
garrison, which was 1300 strong and consisted chiefly of Italian
deserters, defend with determination the almost impregnable city,
but Philocles also arrived from Chalcis with a division of 1500 men,
which not only relieved Corinth but also invaded the territory of
the Achaeans and, in concert with the citizens who were favourable
to Macedonia, wrested from them Argos. But the recompense of such
devotedness was, that the king delivered over the faithful Argives
to the reign of terror of Nabis of Sparta. Philip hoped, after the
accession of the Achaeans to the Roman coalition, to gain over Nabis
who had hitherto been the ally of the Romans; for his chief reason
for joining the Roman alliance had been that he was opposed to the
Achaeans and since 550 was even at open war with them. But the
affairs of Philip were in too desperate a condition for any one
to feel satisfaction in joining his side now. Nabis indeed accepted
Argos from Philip, but he betrayed the traitor and remained in
alliance with Flamininus, who, in his perplexity at being now
allied with two powers that were at war with each other, had in
the meantime arranged an armistice of four months between the
Spartans and Achaeans.
Thus winter came on; and Philip once more availed himself of it to
obtain if possible an equitable peace. At a conference held at Nicaea
on the Maliac gulf the king appeared in person, and endeavoured to
come to an understanding with Flamininus. With haughty politeness he
repelled the forward insolence of the petty chiefs, and by marked
deference to the Romans, as the only antagonists on an equality with
him, he sought to obtain from them tolerable terms. Flamininus was
sufficiently refined to feel himself flattered by the urbanity of
the vanquished prince towards himself and his arrogance towards the
allies, whom the Roman as well as the king had learned to despise;
but his powers were not ample enough to meet the king's wishes. He
granted him a two months' armistice in return for the evacuation of
Phocis and Locris, and referred him, as to the main matter, to his
government. The Roman senate had long been at one in the opinion that
Macedonia must give up all her possessions abroad; accordingly, when
the ambassadors of Philip appeared in Rome, they were simply asked
whether they had full powers to renounce all Greece and in particular
Corinth, Chalcis, and Demetrias, and when they said that they had not,
the negotiations were immediately broken off, and it was resolved
that the war should be prosecuted with vigour. With the help of the
tribunes of the people, the senate succeeded in preventing a change
in the chief command--which had often proved so injurious--and in
prolonging the command of Flamininus; he obtained considerable
reinforcements, and the two former commanders-in-chief, Publius Galba
and Publius Villius, were instructed to place themselves at his
disposal. Philip resolved once more to risk a pitched battle.
To secure Greece, where all the states except the Acarnanians and
Boeotians were now in arms against him, the garrison of Corinth was
augmented to 6000 men, while he himself, straining the last energies
of exhausted Macedonia and enrolling children and old men in the ranks
of the phalanx, brought into the field an army of about 26,000 men,
of whom 16,000 were Macedonian -phalangitae-.
Preliminaries of Peace
Greece Free
Scodra
The Achaean League Enlarged
The Aetolians
The only exceptions to this general rule were, the Illyrian provinces
eastward of Epidamnus, which fell to Pleuratus the ruler of Scodra,
and rendered that state of robbers and pirates, which a century before
had been humbled by the Romans,(3) once more one of the most powerful
of the petty principalities in those regions; some townships in
western Thessaly, which Amynander had occupied and was allowed to
retain; and the three islands of Paros, Scyros, and Imbros, which were
presented to Athens in return for her many hardships and her still
more numerous addresses of thanks and courtesies of all sorts. The
Rhodians, of course, retained their Carian possessions, and the
Pergamenes retained Aegina. The remaining allies were only indirectly
rewarded by the accession of the newly-liberated cities to the several
confederacies. The Achaeans were the best treated, although they were
the latest in joining the coalition against Philip; apparently for the
honourable reason, that this federation was the best organized and
most respectable of all the Greek states. All the possessions of
Philip in the Peloponnesus and on the Isthmus, and consequently
Corinth in particular, were incorporated with their league. With the
Aetolians on the other hand the Romans used little ceremony; they were
allowed to receive the towns of Phocis and Locris into their symmachy,
but their attempts to extend it also to Acarnania and Thessaly were in
part decidedly rejected, in part postponed, and the Thessalian cities
were organized into four small independent confederacies. The Rhodian
city-league reaped the benefit of the liberation of Thasos, Lemnos,
and the towns of Thrace and Asia Minor.
Peace was thus established, externally at least, among the petty Greek
states. But the internal condition of the several communities also
furnished employment to the Roman arbiter. The Boeotians openly
displayed their Macedonian tendencies, even after the expulsion of the
Macedonians from Greece; after Flamininus had at their request allowed
their countrymen who were in the service of Philip to return home,
Brachyllas, the most decided partisan of Macedonia, was elected to the
presidency of the Boeotian confederacy, and Flamininus was otherwise
irritated in every way. He bore it with unparalleled patience; but
the Boeotians friendly to Rome, who knew what awaited them after the
departure of the Romans, determined to put Brachyllas to death, and
Flamininus, whose permission they deemed it necessary to ask, at least
did not forbid them. Brachyllas was accordingly killed; upon which
the Boeotians were not only content with prosecuting the murderers,
but lay in wait for the Roman soldiers passing singly or in small
parties through their territories, and killed about 500 of them.
This was too much to be endured; Flamininus imposed on them a fine
of a talent for every soldier; and when they did not pay it, he
collected the nearest troops and besieged Coronea (558). Now they
betook themselves to entreaty; Flamininus in reality desisted on the
intercession of the Achaeans and Athenians, exacting but a very
moderate fine from those who were guilty; and although the Macedonian
party remained continuously at the helm in the petty province, the
Romans met their puerile opposition simply with the forbearance of
superior power. In the rest of Greece Flamininus contented himself
with exerting his influence, so far as he could do so without
violence, over the internal affairs especially of the newly-freed
communities; with placing the council and the courts in the hands of
the more wealthy and bringing the anti-Macedonian party to the helm;
and with attaching as much as possible the civic commonwealths to the
Roman interest, by adding everything, which in each community should
have fallen by martial law to the Romans, to the common property of
the city concerned. The work was finished in the spring of 560;
Flamininus once more assembled the deputies of all the Greek
communities at Corinth, exhorted them to a rational and moderate use
of the freedom conferred on them, and requested as the only return for
the kindness of the Romans, that they would within thirty days send to
him the Italian captives who had been sold into Greece during the
Hannibalic war. Then he evacuated the last fortresses in which Roman
garrisons were still stationed, Demetrias, Chalcis along with the
smaller forts dependent upon it in Euboea, and Acrocorinthus--thus
practically giving the lie to the assertion of the Aetolians that
Rome had inherited from Philip the "fetters" of Greece--and departed
homeward with all the Roman troops and the liberated captives.
Results
3. There are still extant gold staters, with the head of Flamininus
and the inscription "-T. Quincti(us)-," struck in Greece under the
government of the liberator of the Hellenes. The use of the Latin
language is a significant compliment.
CHAPTER IX
In the kingdom of Asia the diadem of the Seleucidae had been worn since
531 by king Antiochus the Third, the great-great-grandson of the founder
of the dynasty. He had, like Philip, begun to reign at nineteen years
of age, and had displayed sufficient energy and enterprise, especially
in his first campaigns in the east, to warrant his being without too
ludicrous impropriety addressed in courtly style as "the Great." He
had succeeded--more, however, through the negligence of his opponents
and of the Egyptian Philopator in particular, than through any ability
of his own--in restoring in some degree the integrity of the monarchy,
and in reuniting with his crown first the eastern satrapies of Media
and Parthyene, and then the separate state which Achaeus had founded
on this side of the Taurus in Asia Minor. A first attempt to wrest
from the Egyptians the coast of Syria, the loss of which he sorely
felt, had, in the year of the battle of the Trasimene lake, met with a
bloody repulse from Philopator at Raphia; and Antiochus had taken good
care not to resume the contest with Egypt, so long as a man--even
though he were but an indolent one--occupied the Egyptian throne.
But, after Philopator's death (549), the right moment for crushing
Egypt appeared to have arrived; with that view Antiochus entered into
concert with Philip, and had thrown himself upon Coele-Syria, while
Philip attacked the cities of Asia Minor. When the Romans interposed
in that quarter, it seemed for a moment as if Antiochus would make
common cause with Philip against them--the course suggested by the
position of affairs, as well as by the treaty of alliance. But, not
far-seeing enough to repel at once with all his energy any
interference whatever by the Romans in the affairs of the east,
Antiochus thought that his best course was to take advantage of the
subjugation of Philip by the Romans (which might easily be foreseen),
in order to secure the kingdom of Egypt, which he had previously been
willing to share with Philip, for himself alone. Notwithstanding the
close relations of Rome with the court of Alexandria and her royal
ward, the senate by no means intended to be in reality, what it was in
name, his "protector;" firmly resolved to give itself no concern
about Asiatic affairs except in case of extreme necessity, and to
limit the sphere of the Roman power by the Pillars of Hercules and the
Hellespont, it allowed the great-king to take his course. He himself
was not probably in earnest with the conquest of Egypt proper--which
was more easily talked of than achieved--but he contemplated the
subjugation of the foreign possessions of Egypt one after another, and
at once attacked those in Cilicia as well as in Syria and Palestine.
The great victory, which he gained in 556 over the Egyptian general
Scopas at Mount Panium near the sources of the Jordan, not only gave
him complete possession of that region as far as the frontier of Egypt
proper, but so alarmed the Egyptian guardians of the young king that,
to prevent Antiochus from invading Egypt, they submitted to a peace
and sealed it by the betrothal of their ward to Cleopatra the daughter
of Antiochus. When he had thus achieved his first object, he
proceeded in the following year, that of the battle of Cynoscephalae,
with a strong fleet of 100 decked and 100 open vessels to Asia Minor,
to take possession of the districts that formerly belonged to Egypt on
the south and west coasts of Asia Minor--probably the Egyptian
government had ceded these districts, which were -de facto- in the
hands of Philip, to Antiochus under the peace, and had renounced all
their foreign possessions in his favour--and to recover the Greeks of
Asia Minor generally for his empire. At the same time a strong Syrian
land-army assembled in Sardes.
This enterprise had an indirect bearing on the Romans who from the
first had laid it down as a condition for Philip that he should
withdraw his garrisons from Asia Minor and should leave to the
Rhodians and Pergamenes their territory and to the free cities their
former constitution unimpaired, and who had now to look on while
Antiochus took possession of them in Philip's place. Attalus and the
Rhodians found themselves now directly threatened by Antiochus with
precisely the same danger as had driven them a few years before into
the war with Philip; and they naturally sought to involve the Romans
in this war as well as in that which had just terminated. Already in
555-6 Attalus had requested from the Romans military aid against
Antiochus, who had occupied his territory while the troops of Attalus
were employed in the Roman war. The more energetic Rhodians even
declared to king Antiochus, when in the spring of 557 his fleet
appeared off the coast of Asia Minor, that they would regard its
passing beyond the Chelidonian islands (off the Lycian coast) as a
declaration of war; and, when Antiochus did not regard the threat,
they, emboldened by the accounts that had just arrived of the battle
at Cynoscephalae, had immediately begun the war and had actually
protected from the king the most important of the Carian cities,
Caunus, Halicarnassus, and Myndus, and the island of Samos. Most of
the half-free cities had submitted to Antiochus, but some of them,
more especially the important cities of Smyrna, Alexandria Troas, and
Lampsacus, had, on learning the discomfiture of Philip, likewise taken
courage to resist the Syrian; and their urgent entreaties were
combined with those of the Rhodians.
While the storm was thus gathering from far and wide against Rome, it
was on this, as on all occasions, the Hellenes implicated in the
enterprise, who were of the least moment, and yet took action of the
greatest importance and with the utmost impatience. The exasperated
and arrogant Aetolians began by degrees to persuade themselves that
Philip had been vanquished by them and not by the Romans, and could
not even wait till Antiochus should advance into Greece. Their policy
is characteristically expressed in the reply, which their -strategus-
gave soon afterwards to Flamininus, when he requested a copy of the
declaration of war against Rome: that he would deliver it to him in
person, when the Aetolian army should encamp on the Tiber. The
Aetolians acted as the agents of the Syrian king in Greece and
deceived both parties, by representing to the king that all the
Hellenes were waiting with open arms to receive him as their true
deliverer, and by telling those in Greece who were disposed to listen
to them that the landing of the king was nearer than it was in
reality. Thus they actually succeeded in inducing the simple
obstinacy of Nabis to break loose and to rekindle in Greece the flame
of war two years after Flamininus's departure, in the spring of 562;
but in doing so they missed their aim. Nabis attacked Gythium, one of
the towns of the free Laconians that by the last treaty had been
annexed to the Achaean league, and took it; but the experienced
-strategus- of the Achaeans, Philopoemen, defeated him at the
Barbosthenian mountains, and the tyrant brought back barely a fourth
part of his army to his capital, in which Philopoemen shut him up. As
such a commencement was no sufficient inducement for Antiochus to come
to Europe, the Aetolians resolved to possess themselves of Sparta,
Chalcis, and Demetrias, and by gaining these important towns to
prevail upon the king to embark. In the first place they thought to
become masters of Sparta, by arranging that the Aetolian Alexamenus
should march with 1000 men into the town under pretext of bringing a
contingent in terms of the alliance, and should embrace the
opportunity of making away with Nabis and of occupying the town. This
was done, and Nabis was killed at a review of the troops; but, when
the Aetolians dispersed to plunder the town, the Lacedaemonians found
time to rally and slew them to the last man. The city was then
induced by Philopoemen to join the Achaean league. After this
laudable project of the Aetolians had thus not only deservedly failed,
but had had precisely the opposite effect of uniting almost the whole
Peloponnesus in the hands of the other party, it fared little better
with them at Chalcis, for the Roman party there called in the citizens
of Eretria and Carystus in Euboea, who were favourable to Rome, to
render seasonable aid against the Aetolians and the Chalcidian exiles.
On the other hand the occupation of Demetrias was successful, for the
Magnetes to whom the city had been assigned were, not without reason,
apprehensive that it had been promised by the Romans to Philip as a
prize in return for his aid against Antiochus; several squadrons of
Aetolian horse moreover managed to steal into the town under the
pretext of forming an escort for Eurylochus, the recalled head of the
opposition to Rome. Thus the Magnetes passed over, partly of their
own accord, partly by compulsion, to the side of the Aetolians, and
the latter did not fail to make use of the fact at the court of the
Seleucid.
Macedonia
Antiochus in Greece
For the moment, indeed, Antiochus had anticipated the Romans in Greece
proper. Chalcis was garrisoned by the Greek allies of the Romans, and
refused the first summons but the fortress surrendered when Antiochus
advanced with all his force; and a Roman division, which arrived too
late to occupy it, was annihilated by Antiochus at Deliurn. Euboea
was thus lost to the Romans. Antiochus still made even in winter
an attempt, in concert with the Aetolians and Athamanes, to gain
Thessaly; Thermopylae was occupied, Pherae and other towns were taken,
but Appius Claudius came up with 2000 men from Apollonia, relieved
Larisa, and took up his position there. Antiochus, tired of the
winter campaign, preferred to return to his pleasant quarters at
Chalcis, where the time was spent merrily, and the king even, in spite
of his fifty years and his warlike schemes, wedded a fair Chalcidian.
So the winter of 562-3 passed, without Antiochus doing much more than
sending letters hither and thither through Greece: he waged the war
--a Roman officer remarked--by means of pen and ink.
Battle at Thermopylae
Greece Occupied by the Romans
Resistance of the Aetolians
Instead of returning with all speed to Asia and evacuating the field
before an enemy in every respect superior, Antiochus resolved to
entrench himself at Thermopylae, which he had occupied, and there to
await the arrival of the great army from Asia. He himself took up a
position in the chief pass, and commanded the Aetolians to occupy the
mountain-path, by which Xerxes had formerly succeeded in turning the
Spartans. But only half of the Aetolian contingent was pleased to
comply with this order of the commander-in-chief; the other 2000 men
threw themselves into the neighbouring town of Heraclea, where they
took no other part in the battle than that of attempting during its
progress to surprise and plunder the Roman camp. Even the Aetolians
posted on the heights discharged their duty of watching with
remissness and reluctance; their post on the Callidromus allowed
itself to be surprised by Cato, and the Asiatic phalanx, which the
consul had meanwhile assailed in front, dispersed, when the Romans
hastening down the mountain fell upon its flank. As Antiochus had
made no provision for any case and had not thought of retreat, the
army was destroyed partly on the field of battle, partly during its
flight; with difficulty a small band reached Demetrias, and the king
himself escaped to Chalcis with 500 men. He embarked in haste for
Ephesus; Europe was lost to him all but his possessions in Thrace, and
even the fortresses could be no longer defended Chalcis surrendered to
the Romans, and Demetrias to Philip, who received permission--as a
compensation for the conquest of the town of Lamia in Achaia
Phthiotis, which he was on the point of accomplishing and had then
abandoned by orders of the consul--to make himself master of all the
communities that had gone over to Antiochus in Thessaly proper, and
even of the territories bordering on Aetolia, the districts of Dolopia
and Aperantia. All the Greeks that had pronounced in favour of
Antiochus hastened to make their peace; the Epirots humbly besought
pardon for their ambiguous conduct, the Boeotians surrendered at
discretion, the Eleans and Messenians, the latter after some struggle,
submitted to the Achaeans. The prediction of Hannibal to the king was
fulfilled, that no dependence at all could be placed upon the Greeks,
who would submit to any conqueror. Even the Aetolians, when their
corps shut up in Heraclea had been compelled after obstinate
resistance to capitulate, attempted to make their peace with the
sorely provoked Romans; but the stringent demands of the Roman consul,
and a consignment of money seasonably arriving from Antiochus,
emboldened them once more to break off the negotiations and to sustain
for two whole months a siege in Naupactus. The town was already
reduced to extremities, and its capture or capitulation could not have
been long delayed, when Flamininus, constantly striving to save every
Hellenic community from the worst consequences of its own folly and
from the severity of his ruder colleagues, interposed and arranged in
the first instance an armistice on tolerable terms. This terminated,
at least for the moment, armed resistance in Greece.
But when the Roman fleet arrived partly from Cane, partly from the
Hellespont, and was after some time joined by twenty new ships of the
Rhodians at Samos, Polyxenidas was once more compelled to shut himself
up in the harbour of Ephesus. As he declined the offered naval
battle, and as, owing to the small numbers of the Roman force, an
attack by land was not to be thought of, nothing remained for the
Roman fleet but to take up its position in like manner at Samos. A
division meanwhile proceeded to Patara on the Lycian coast, partly to
relieve the Rhodians from the very troublesome attacks that were
directed against them from that quarter, partly and chiefly to prevent
the hostile fleet, which Hannibal was expected to bring up, from
entering the Aegean Sea. When the squadron sent against Patara
achieved nothing, the new admiral Lucius Aemilius Regillus, who had
arrived with 20 war-vessels from Rome and had relieved Gaius Livius at
Samos, was so indignant that he proceeded thither with the whole
fleet; his officers with difficulty succeeded, while they were on
their voyage, in making him understand that the primary object was not
the conquest of Patara but the command of the Aegean Sea, and in
inducing him to return to Samos. On the mainland of Asia Minor
Seleucus had in the meanwhile begun the siege of Pergamus, while
Antiochus with his chief army ravaged the Pergamene territory and the
possessions of the Mytilenaeans on the mainland; they hoped to crush
the hated Attalids, before Roman aid appeared. The Roman fleet went
to Elaea and the port of Adramytium to help their ally; but, as the
admiral wanted troops, he accomplished nothing. Pergamus seemed lost;
but the laxity and negligence with which the siege was conducted
allowed Eumenes to throw into the city Achaean auxiliaries under
Diophanes, whose bold and successful sallies compelled the Gallic
mercenaries, whom Antiochus had entrusted with the siege, to raise it.
Expedition to Asia
The conqueror of Zama had been selected at Rome to conduct the war on
the Asiatic continent; he practically exercised the supreme command
for the nominal commander-in-chief, his brother Lucius Scipio, whose
intellect was insignificant, and who had no military capacity. The
reserve hitherto stationed in Lower Italy was destined for Greece, the
army of Glabrio for Asia: when it became known who was to command it,
5000 veterans from the Hannibalic war voluntarily enrolled, to fight
once more under their beloved leader. In the Roman July, but
according to the true time in March, the Scipios arrived at the army
to commence the Asiatic campaign; but they were disagreeably surprised
to find themselves instead involved, in the first instance, in an
endless struggle with the desperate Aetolians. The senate, finding
that Flamininus pushed his boundless consideration for the Hellenes
too far, had left the Aetolians to choose between paying an utterly
exorbitant war contribution and unconditional surrender, and thus had
driven them anew to arms; none could tell when this warfare among
mountains and strongholds would come to an end. Scipio got rid
of the inconvenient obstacle by concerting a six-months' armistice,
and then entered on his march to Asia. As the one fleet of the enemy
was only blockaded in the Aegean Sea, and the other, which was coming
up from the south, might daily arrive there in spite of the squadron
charged to intercept it, it seemed advisable to take the land route
through Macedonia and Thrace and to cross the Hellespont. In that
direction no real obstacles were to be anticipated; for Philip of
Macedonia might be entirely depended on, Prusias king of Bithynia was
in alliance with the Romans, and the Roman fleet could easily
establish itself in the straits. The long and weary march along the
coast of Macedonia and Thrace was accomplished without material loss;
Philip made provision on the one hand for supplying their wants, on
the other for their friendly reception by the Thracian barbarians.
They had lost so much time however, partly with the Aetolians, partly
on the march, that the army only reached the Thracian Chersonese about
the time of the battle of Myonnesus. But the marvellous good fortune
of Scipio now in Asia, as formerly in Spain and Africa, cleared his
path of all difficulties.
While the Romans, after disembarking on the Asiatic shore, paused for
some days to refresh themselves and to await their leader who was
detained behind by religious duties, ambassadors from the great-king
arrived in their camp to negotiate for peace. Antiochus offered half
the expenses of the war, and the cession of his European possessions
as well as of all the Greek cities in Asia Minor that had gone over to
Rome; but Scipio demanded the whole costs of the war and the surrender
of all Asia Minor. The former terms, he declared, might have been
accepted, had the army still been before Lysimachia, or even on the
European side of the Hellespont; but they did not suffice now, when
the steed felt the bit and knew its rider. The attempts of the great-
king to purchase peace from his antagonist after the Oriental manner
by sums of money--he offered the half of his year's revenues!--failed
as they deserved; the proud burgess, in return for the gratuitous
restoration of his son who had fallen a captive, rewarded the great-
king with the friendly advice to make peace on any terms. This was
not in reality necessary: had the king possessed the resolution to
prolong the war and to draw the enemy after him by retreating into the
interior, a favourable issue was still by no means impossible. But
Antiochus, irritated by the presumably intentional arrogance of his
antagonist, and too indolent for any persevering and consistent
warfare, hastened with the utmost eagerness to expose his unwieldy,
but unequal, and undisciplined mass of an army to the shock of the
Roman legions.
Battle of Magnesia
Conclusion of Peace
Expedition against the Celts of Asia Minor
Regulation of the Affairs of Asia Minor
The king sued for peace and consented to the terms proposed by the
Romans, which, as usual, were just the same as those offered before
the battle and consequently included the cession of Asia Minor. Till
they were ratified, the army remained in Asia Minor at the expense of
the king; which came to cost him not less than 3000 talents (730,000
pounds). Antiochus himself in his careless fashion soon consoled
himself for the loss of half his kingdom; it was in keeping with his
character, that he declared himself grateful to the Romans for saving
him the trouble of governing too large an empire. But with the day of
Magnesia Asia was erased from the list of great states; and never
perhaps did a great power fall so rapidly, so thoroughly, and so
ignominiously as the kingdom of the Seleucidae under this Antiochus
the Great. He himself was soon afterwards (567) slain by the
indignant inhabitants of Elymais at the head of the Persian gulf, on
occasion of pillaging the temple of Bel, with the treasures of which
he had sought to replenish his empty coffers.
The Roman government, after having achieved the victory, had to
arrange the affairs of Asia Minor and of Greece. If the Roman rule
was here to be erected on a firm foundation, it was by no means enough
that Antiochus should have renounced the supremacy in the west of Asia
Minor. The circumstances of the political situation there have been
set forth above.(6) The Greek free cities on the Ionian and Aeolian
coast, as well as the kingdom of Pergamus of a substantially similar
nature, were certainly the natural pillars of the new Roman supreme
power, which here too came forward essentially as protector of the
Hellenes kindred in race. But the dynasts in the interior of Asia
Minor and on the north coast of the Black Sea had hardly yielded for
long any serious obedience to the kings of Asia, and the treaty with
Antiochus alone gave to the Romans no power over the interior. It was
indispensable to draw a certain line within which the Roman influence
was henceforth to exercise control. Here the element of chief
importance was the relation of the Asiatic Hellenes to the Celts who
had been for a century settled there. These had formally apportioned
among them the regions of Asia Minor, and each one of the three
cantons raised its fixed tribute from the territory laid under
contribution. Doubtless the burgesses of Pergamus, under the vigorous
guidance of their presidents who had thereby become hereditary
princes, had rid themselves of the unworthy yoke; and the fair
afterbloom of Hellenic art, which had recently emerged afresh from the
soil, had grown out of these last Hellenic wars sustained by a
national public spirit. But it was a vigorous counterblow, not a
decisive success; again and again the Pergamenes had to defend with
arms their urban peace against the raids of the wild hordes from the
eastern mountains, and the great majority of the other Greek cities
probably remained in their old state of dependence.(7)
The affairs of Asia Minor were regulated partly by the peace with
Antiochus (565), partly by the ordinances of a Roman commission
presided over by the consul Volso. Antiochus had to furnish hostages,
one of whom was his younger son of the same name, and to pay a war-
contribution--proportional in amount to the treasures of Asia--of
15,000 Euboic talents (3,600,000 pounds), a fifth of which was to be
paid at once, and the remainder in twelve yearly instalments. He was
called, moreover, to cede all the lands which he possessed in Europe
and, in Asia Minor, all his possessions and claims of right to the
north of the range of the Taurus and to the west of the mouth of the
Cestrus between Aspendus and Perga in Pamphylia, so that he retained
nothing in Asia Minor but eastern Pamphylia and Cilicia. His
protectorate over its kingdoms and principalities of course ceased.
Asia, or, as the kingdom of the Seleucids was thenceforth usually and
more appropriately named, Syria, lost the right of waging aggressive
wars against the western states, and in the event of a defensive war,
of acquiring territory from them on the conclusion of peace; lost,
moreover, the right of navigating the sea to the west of the mouth of
the Calycadnus in Cilicia with vessels of war, except for the
conveyance of envoys, hostages, or tribute; was further prevented from
keeping more than ten decked vessels in all, except in the case of a
defensive war, from taming war-elephants, and lastly from the levying
of mercenaries in the western states, or receiving political refugees
and deserters from them at court. The war vessels which he possessed
beyond the prescribed number, the elephants, and the political
refugees who had sought shelter with him, he delivered up. By way of
compensation the great-king received the title of a friend of the
Roman commonwealth. The state of Syria was thus by land and sea
completely and for ever dislodged from the west; it is a significant
indication of the feeble and loose organization of the kingdom of the
Seleucidae, that it alone, of all the great states conquered by Rome
never after the first conquest desired a second appeal to the decision
of arms.
Armenia
Cappadocia
Bithynia
All the rest, forming by far the largest share of the spoil, fell to
the Attalids, whose ancient fidelity to Rome, as well as the hardships
endured by Eumenes in the war and his personal merit in connection
with the issue of the decisive battle, were rewarded by Rome as no
king ever rewarded his ally. Eumenes received, in Europe, the
Chersonese with Lysimachia; in Asia--in addition to Mysia which he
already possessed--the provinces of Phrygia on the Hellespont, Lydia
with Ephesus and Sardes, the northern district of Caria as far as the
Maeander with Tralles and Magnesia, Great Phrygia and Lycaonia along
with a portion of Cilicia, the district of Milyas between Phrygia and
Lycia, and, as a port on the southern sea, the Lycian town Telmissus.
There was a dispute afterwards between Eumenes and Antiochus regarding
Pamphylia, as to how far it lay on this side of or beyond the
prescribed boundary, and accordingly belonged to the former or to the
latter. He further acquired the protectorate over, and the right of
receiving tribute from, those Greek cities which did not receive
absolute freedom; but it was stipulated in this case that the cities
should retain their charters, and that the tribute should not be
heightened. Moreover, Antiochus had to bind himself to pay to Eumenes
the 350 talents (85,000 pounds) which he owed to his father Attalus,
and likewise to pay a compensation of 127 talents (31,000 pounds) for
arrears in the supplies of corn. Lastly, Eumenes obtained the royal
forests and the elephants delivered up by Antiochus, but not the ships
of war, which were burnt: the Romans tolerated no naval power by the
side of their own. By these means the kingdom of the Attalids became
in the east of Europe and Asia what Numidia was in Africa, a powerful
state with an absolute constitution dependent on Rome, destined and
able to keep in check both Macedonia and Syria without needing, except
in extraordinary cases, Roman support. With this creation dictated by
policy the Romans had as far as possible combined the liberation of
the Asiatic Greeks, which was dictated by republican and national
sympathy and by vanity. About the affairs of the more remote east
beyond the Taurus and Halys they were firmly resolved to give
themselves no concern. This is clearly shown by the terms of the
peace with Antiochus, and still more decidedly by the peremptory
refusal of the senate to guarantee to the town of Soli in Cilicia the
freedom which the Rhodians requested for it. With equal fidelity they
adhered to the fixed principle of acquiring no direct transmarine
possessions. After the Roman fleet had made an expedition to Crete
and had accomplished the release of the Romans sold thither into
slavery, the fleet and land army left Asia towards the end of the
summer of 566; on which occasion the land army, which again marched
through Thrace, in consequence of the negligence of the general
suffered greatly on the route from the attacks of the barbarians.
The Romans brought nothing home from the east but honour and gold,
both of which were already at this period usually conjoined in the
practical shape assumed by the address of thanks--the golden chaplet.
Settlement of Greece
Conflicts and Peace with the Aetolians
European Greece also had been agitated by this Asiatic war, and needed
reorganization. The Aetolians, who had not yet learned to reconcile
themselves to their insignificance, had, after the armistice concluded
with Scipio in the spring of 564, rendered intercourse between Greece
and Italy difficult and unsafe by means of their Cephallenian
corsairs; and not only so, but even perhaps while the armistice yet
lasted, they, deceived by false reports as to the state of things in
Asia, had the folly to place Amynander once more on his Athamanian
throne, and to carry on a desultory warfare with Philip in the
districts occupied by him on the borders of Aetolia and Thessaly, in
the course of which Philip suffered several discomfitures. After
this, as a matter of course, Rome replied to their request for peace
by the landing of the consul Marcus Fulvius Nobilior. He arrived
among the legions in the spring of 565, and after fifteen days' siege
gained possession of Ambracia by a capitulation honourable for the
garrison; while simultaneously the Macedonians, Illyrians, Epirots,
Acarnanians, and Achaeans fell upon the Aetolians. There was no such
thing as resistance in the strict sense; after repeated entreaties of
the Aetolians for peace the Romans at length desisted from the war,
and granted conditions which must be termed reasonable when viewed
with reference to such pitiful and malicious opponents. The Aetolians
lost all cities and territories which were in the hands of their
adversaries, more especially Ambracia which afterwards became free and
independent in consequence of an intrigue concocted in Rome against
Marcus Fulvius, and Oenia which was given to the Acarnanians: they
likewise ceded Cephallenia. They lost the right of making peace and
war, and were in that respect dependent on the foreign relations of
Rome. Lastly, they paid a large sum of money. Cephallenia opposed
this treaty on its own account, and only submitted when Marcus Fulvius
landed on the island. In fact, the inhabitants of Same, who feared
that they would be dispossessed from their well-situated town by a
Roman colony, revolted after their first submission and sustained a
four months' siege; the town, however, was finally taken and the whole
inhabitants were sold into slavery.
Macedonia
The Achaeans
It was otherwise with the Achaeans. They had, in the course of the
war with Antiochus, gratified their long-cherished wish to bring the
whole Peloponnesus into their confederacy; for first Sparta, and then,
after the expulsion of the Asiatics from Greece, Elis and Messene had
more or less reluctantly joined it. The Romans had allowed this to
take place, and had even tolerated the intentional disregard of Rome
which marked their proceedings. When Messene declared that she wished
to submit to the Romans but not to enter the confederacy, and the
latter thereupon employed force, Flamininus had not failed to remind
the Achaeans that such separate arrangements as to the disposal of a
part of the spoil were in themselves unjust, and were, in the relation
in which the Achaeans stood to the Romans, more than unseemly; and yet
in his very impolitic complaisance towards the Hellenes he had
substantially done what the Achaeans willed. But the matter did not
end there. The Achaeans, tormented by their dwarfish thirst for
aggrandizement, would not relax their hold on the town of Pleuron in
Aetolia which they had occupied during the war, but on the contrary
made it an involuntary member of their confederacy; they bought
Zacynthus from Amynander the lieutenant of the last possessor, and
would gladly have acquired Aegina also. It was with reluctance that
they gave up the former island to Rome, and they heard with great
displeasure the good advice of Flamininus that they should content
themselves with their Peloponnesus.
Death of Hannibal
Thus the protectorate of the Roman community now embraced all the
states from the eastern to the western end of the Mediterranean.
There nowhere existed a state that the Romans would have deemed it
worth while to fear. But there still lived a man to whom Rome
accorded this rare honour--the homeless Carthaginian, who had
raised in arms against Rome first all the west and then all the east,
and whose schemes perhaps had been only frustrated by infamous
aristocratic policy in the former case, and by stupid court policy in
the latter. Antiochus had been obliged to bind himself in the treaty
of peace to deliver up Hannibal; but the latter had escaped, first to
Crete, then to Bithynia,(8) and now lived at the court of Prusias king
of Bithynia, employed in aiding the latter in his wars with Eumenes,
and victorious as ever by sea and by land. It is affirmed that he was
desirous of stirring up Prusias also to make war on Rome; a folly,
which, as it is told, sounds very far from credible. It is more
certain that, while the Roman senate deemed it beneath its dignity to
have the old man hunted out in his last asylum--for the tradition
which inculpates the senate appears to deserve no credit--Flamininus,
whose restless vanity sought after new opportunities for great
achievements, undertook on his own part to deliver Rome from Hannibal
as he had delivered the Greeks from their chains, and, if not to
wield--which was not diplomatic--at any rate to whet and to point,
the dagger against the greatest man of his time. Prusias, the most
pitiful among the pitiful princes of Asia, was delighted to grant the
little favour which the Roman envoy in ambiguous terms requested; and,
when Hannibal saw his house beset by assassins, he took poison. He
had long been prepared to do so, adds a Roman, for he knew the Romans
and the word of kings. The year of his death is uncertain; probably
he died in the latter half of the year 571, at the age of sixty-seven.
When he was born, Rome was contending with doubtful success for the
possession of Sicily; he had lived long enough to see the West wholly
subdued, and to fight his own last battle with the Romans against the
vessels of his native city which had itself become Roman; and he was
constrained at last to remain a mere spectator, while Rome overpowered
the East as the tempest overpowers the ship that has no one at the
helm, and to feel that he alone was the pilot that could have
weathered the storm. There was left to him no further hope to be
disappointed, when he died; but he had honestly, through fifty years
of struggle, kept the oath which he had sworn when a boy.
Death of Scipio
About the same time, probably in the same year, died also the man whom
the Romans were wont to call his conqueror, Publius Scipio. On him
fortune had lavished all the successes which she denied to his
antagonist--successes which did belong to him, and successes which did
not. He had added to the empire Spain, Africa, and Asia; and Rome,
which he had found merely the first community of Italy, was at his
death mistress of the civilized world. He himself had so many titles
of victory, that some of them were made over to his brother and his
cousin.(9) And yet he too spent his last years in bitter vexation,
and died when little more than fifty years of age in voluntary
banishment, leaving orders to his relatives not to bury his remains
in the city for which he had lived and in which his ancestors reposed.
It is not exactly known what drove him from the city. The charges of
corruption and embezzlement, which were directed against him and still
more against his brother Lucius, were beyond doubt empty calumnies,
which do not sufficiently explain such bitterness of feeling; although
it is characteristic of the man, that instead of simply vindicating
himself by means of his account-books, he tore them in pieces in
presence of the people and of his accusers, and summoned the Romans
to accompany him to the temple of Jupiter and to celebrate the
anniversary of his victory at Zama. The people left the accuser on
the spot, and followed Scipio to the Capitol; but this was the last
glorious day of the illustrious man. His proud spirit, his belief
that he was different from, and better than, other men, his very
decided family-policy, which in the person of his brother Lucius
especially brought forward a clumsy man of straw as a hero, gave
offence to many, and not without reason. While genuine pride protects
the heart, arrogance lays it open to every blow and every sarcasm, and
corrodes even an originally noble-minded spirit. It is throughout,
moreover, the distinguishing characteristic of such natures as that of
Scipio--strange mixtures of genuine gold and glittering tinsel--that
they need the good fortune and the brilliance of youth in order
to exercise their charm, and, when this charm begins to fade, it is
the charmer himself that is most painfully conscious of the change.
3. For this we have the testimony of Polybius (xxviii. i), which the
sequel of the history of Judaea completely confirms; Eusebius (p. 117,
-Mai-) is mistaken in making Philometor ruler of Syria. We certainly
find that about 567 farmers of the Syrian taxes made their payments at
Alexandria (Joseph, xii. 4, 7); but this doubtless took place without
detriment to the rights of sovereignty, simply because the dowry of
Cleopatra constituted a charge on those revenues; and from this very
circumstance presumably arose the subsequent dispute.
CHAPTER X
King Perseus
Resources of Macedonia
Bastarnae
Genthius
Cotys
In the regions on the east of Macedonia towards the lower Danube the
most powerful of the Thracian chieftains, the brave and sagacious
Cotys, prince of the Odrysians and ruler of all eastern Thrace from
the Macedonian frontier on the Hebrus (Maritza) down to the fringe of
coast covered with Greek towns, was in the closest alliance with
Perseus. Of the other minor chiefs who in that quarter took part
with Rome, one, Abrupolis prince of the Sagaei, was, in consequence
of a predatory expedition directed against Amphipolis on the Strymon,
defeated by Perseus and driven out of the country. From these regions
Philip had drawn numerous colonists, and mercenaries were to be had
there at any time and in any number.
Among the unhappy nation of the Hellenes Philip and Perseus had, long
before declaring war against Rome carried on a lively double system of
proselytizing, attempting to gain over to the side of Macedonia on the
one hand the national, and on the other--if we may be permitted the
expression--the communistic, party. As a matter of course, the whole
national party among the Asiatic as well as the European Greeks was
now at heart Macedonian; not on account of isolated unrighteous acts
on the part of the Roman deliverers, but because the restoration of
Hellenic nationality by a foreign power involved a contradiction in
terms, and now, when it was in truth too late, every one perceived
that the most detestable form of Macedonian rule was less fraught with
evil for Greece than a free constitution springing from the noblest
intentions of honourable foreigners. That the most able and upright
men throughout Greece should be opposed to Rome was to be expected;
the venal aristocracy alone was favourable to the Romans, and here
and there an isolated man of worth, who, unlike the great majority,
was under no delusion as to the circumstances and the future of the
nation. This was most painfully felt by Eumenes of Pergamus, the main
upholder of that extraneous freedom among the Greeks. In vain he
treated the cities subject to him with every sort of consideration;
in vain he sued for the favour of the communities and diets by fair-
sounding words and still better-sounding gold; he had to learn that
his presents were declined, and that all the statues that had formerly
been erected to him were broken in pieces and the honorary tablets
were melted down, in accordance with a decree of the diet,
simultaneously throughout the Peloponnesus (584). The name of Perseus
was on all lips; even the states that formerly were most decidedly
anti-Macedonian, such as the Achaeans, deliberated as to the
cancelling of the laws directed against Macedonia; Byzantium,
although situated within the kingdom of Pergamus, sought and obtained
protection and a garrison against the Thracians not from Eumenes, but
from Perseus, and in like manner Lampsacus on the Hellespont joined
the Macedonian: the powerful and prudent Rhodians escorted the Syrian
bride of king Perseus from Antioch with their whole magnificent war-
fleet--for the Syrian war-vessels were not allowed to appear in the
Aegean--and returned home highly honoured and furnished with rich
presents, more especially with wood for shipbuilding; commissioners
from the Asiatic cities, and consequently subjects of Eumenes, held
secret conferences with Macedonian deputies in Samothrace. That
sending of the Rhodian war-fleet had at least the aspect of a
demonstration; and such, certainly, was the object of king Perseus,
when he exhibited himself and all his army before the eyes of the
Hellenes under pretext of performing a religious ceremony at Delphi.
That the king should appeal to the support of this national
partisanship in the impending war, was only natural. But it was wrong
in him to take advantage of the fearful economic disorganization of
Greece for the purpose of attaching to Macedonia all those who desired
a revolution in matters of property and of debt. It is difficult to
form any adequate idea of the unparalleled extent to which the
commonwealths as well as individuals in European Greece--excepting the
Peloponnesus, which was in a somewhat better position in this respect
--were involved in debt. Instances occurred of one city attacking and
pillaging another merely to get money--the Athenians, for example,
thus attacked Oropus--and among the Aetolians, Perrhaebians, and
Thessalians formal battles took place between those that had property
and those that had none. Under such circumstances the worst outrages
were perpetrated as a matter of course; among the Aetolians, for
instance, a general amnesty was proclaimed and a new public peace was
made up solely for the purpose of entrapping and putting to death a
number of emigrants. The Romans attempted to mediate; but their
envoys returned without success, and announced that both parties were
equally bad and that their animosities were not to be restrained. In
this case there was, in fact, no longer other help than the officer
and the executioner; sentimental Hellenism began to be as repulsive as
from the first it had been ridiculous. Yet king Perseus sought to
gain the support of this party, if it deserve to be called such--of
people who had nothing, and least of all an honourable name, to lose
--and not only issued edicts in favour of Macedonian bankrupts, but
also caused placards to be put up at Larisa, Delphi, and Delos, which
summoned all Greeks that were exiled on account of political or other
offences or on account of their debts to come to Macedonia and to
look for full restitution of their former honours and estates. As may
easily be supposed, they came; the social revolution smouldering
throughout northern Greece now broke out into open flame, and the
national-social party there sent to Perseus for help. If Hellenic
nationality was to be saved only by such means, the question might
well be asked, with all respect for Sophocles and Phidias, whether
the object was worth the cost.
The senate saw that it had delayed too long already, and that it was
time to put an end to such proceedings. The expulsion of the Thracian
chieftain Abrupolis who was in alliance with the Romans, and the
alliances of Macedonia with the Byzantines, Aetolians, and part of the
Boeotian cities, were equally violations of the peace of 557, and
sufficed for the official war-manifesto: the real ground of war was
that Macedonia was seeking to convert her formal sovereignty into a
real one, and to supplant Rome in the protectorate of the Hellenes.
As early as 581 the Roman envoys at the Achaean diet stated pretty
plainly, that an alliance with Perseus was equivalent to casting off
the alliance of Rome. In 582 king Eumenes came in person to Rome with
a long list of grievances and laid open to the senate the whole
situation of affairs; upon which the senate unexpectedly in a secret
sitting resolved on an immediate declaration of war, and furnished the
landing-places in Epirus with garrisons. For the sake of form an
embassy was sent to Macedonia, but its message was of such a nature
that Perseus, perceiving that he could not recede, replied that he
was ready to conclude with Rome a new alliance on really equal terms,
but that he looked upon the treaty of 557 as cancelled; and he bade
the envoys leave the kingdom within three days. Thus war was
practically declared.
This was in the autumn of 582. Perseus, had he wished, might have
occupied all Greece and brought the Macedonian party everywhere to the
helm, and he might perhaps have crushed the Roman division of 5000 men
stationed under Gnaeus Sicinius at Apollonia and have disputed the
landing of the Romans. But the king, who already began to tremble at
the serious aspect of affairs, entered into discussions with his
guest-friend the consular Quintus Marcius Philippus, as to the
frivolousness of the Roman declaration of war, and allowed himself to
be thereby induced to postpone the attack and once more to make an
effort for peace with Rome: to which the senate, as might have been
expected, only replied by the dismissal of all Macedonians from Italy
and the embarkation of the legions. Senators of the older school no
doubt censured the "new wisdom" of their colleague, and his un-Roman
artifice; but the object was gained and the winter passed away without
any movement on the part of Perseus. The Romati diplomatists made all
the more zealous use of the interval to deprive Perseus of any support
in Greece. They were sure of the Achaeans. Even the patriotic party
among them--who had neither agreed with those social movements, nor
had soared higher than the longing after a prudent neutrality--had no
idea of throwing themselves into the arms of Perseus; and, besides,
the opposition party there had now been brought by Roman influence to
the helm, and attached itself absolutely to Rome. The Aetolian league
had doubtless asked aid from Perseus in its internal troubles; but
the new strategus, Lyciscus, chosen under the eyes of the Roman
ambassadors, was more of a Roman partisan than the Romans themselves.
Among the Thessalians also the Roman party retained the ascendency.
Even the Boeotians, old partisans as they were of Macedonia, and sunk
in the utmost financial disorder, had not in their collective capacity
declared openly for Perseus; nevertheless at least three of their
cities, Thisbae, Haliartus and Coronea, had of their own accord
entered into engagements with him. When on the complaint of the Roman
envoy the government of the Boeotian confederacy communicated to him
the position of things, he declared that it would best appear which
cities adhered to Rome, and which did not, if they would severally
pronounce their decision in his presence; and thereupon the Boeotian
confederacy fell at once to pieces. It is not true that the great
structure of Epaminondas was destroyed by the Romans; it actually
collapsed before they touched it, and thus indeed became the prelude
to the dissolution of the other still more firmly consolidated leagues
of Greek cities.(3) With the forces of the Boeotian towns friendly
to Rome the Roman envoy Publius Lentulus laid siege to Haliartus,
even before the Roman fleet appeared in the Aegean.
Chalcis was occupied with Achaean, and the province of Orestis with
Epirot, forces: the fortresses of the Dassaretae and Illyrians on the
west frontier of Macedonia were occupied by the troops of Gnaeus
Sicinius; and as soon as the navigation was resumed, Larisa received a
garrison of 2000 men. Perseus during all this remained inactive and
had not a foot's breadth of land beyond his own territory, when in the
spring, or according to the official calendar in June, of 583, the
Roman legions landed on the west coast. It is doubtful whether
Perseus would have found allies of any mark, even had he shown as much
energy as he displayed remissness; but, as circumstances stood, he
remained of course completely isolated, and those prolonged attempts
at proselytism led, for the time at least, to no result. Carthage,
Genthius of Illyria, Rhodes and the free cities of Asia Minor, and
even Byzantium hitherto so very friendly with Perseus, offered to the
Romans vessels of war; which these, however, declined. Eumenes put
his land army and his ships on a war footing. Ariarathes king of
Cappadocia sent hostages, unsolicited, to Rome. The brother-in-law of
Perseus, Prusias II. king of Bithynia, remained neutral. No one
stirred in all Greece. Antiochus IV. king of Syria, designated
in court style "the god, the brilliant bringer of victory," to
distinguish him from his father the "Great," bestirred himself, but
only to wrest the Syrian coast during this war from the entirely
impotent Egypt.
Paullus
At length the Romans resolved to send the right man to Greece. This
was Lucius Aemilius Paullus, son of the consul of the same name that
fell at Cannae; a man of the old nobility but of humble means, and
therefore not so successful in the comitia as on the battle-field,
where he had remarkably distinguished himself in Spain and still more
so in Liguria. The people elected him for the second time consul in
the year 586 on account of his merits--a course which was at that
time rare and exceptional. He was in all respects the right man: an
excellent general of the old school, strict as respected both himself
and his troops, and, notwithstanding his sixty years, still hale and
vigorous; an incorruptible magistrate--"one of the few Romans of that
age, to whom one could not offer money," as a contemporary says of
him--and a man of Hellenic culture, who, even when commander-in-chief,
embraced the opportunity of travelling through Greece to inspect its
works of art.
Thus perished the empire of Alexander the Great, which had subdued and
Hellenized the east, 144 years after its founder's death.
Macedonia Broken Up
The senate had resolved that the peril, which the unseasonable
gentleness of Flamininus had brought on Rome, should not recur.
Macedonia was abolished. In the conference at Amphipolis on the
Strymon the Roman commission ordained that the compact, thoroughly
monarchical, single state should be broken up into four republican-
federative leagues moulded on the system of the Greek confederacies,
viz. that of Amphipolis in the eastern regions, that of Thessalonica
with the Chalcidian peninsula, that of Pella on the frontiers of
Thessaly, and that of Pelagonia in the interior. Intermarriages
between persons belonging to different confederacies were to be
invalid, and no one might be a freeholder in more than one of them.
All royal officials, as well as their grown-up sons, were obliged to
leave the country and resort to Italy on pain of death; the Romans
still dreaded, and with reason, the throbbings of the ancient loyalty.
The law of the land and the former constitution otherwise remained in
force; the magistrates were of course nominated by election in each
community, and the power in the communities as well as in the
confederacies was placed in the hands of the upper class. The royal
domains and royalties were not granted to the confederacies, and these
were specially prohibited from working the gold and silvei mines,
a chief source of the national wealth; but in 596 they were again
permitted to work at least the silver-mines.(6) The import of salt,
and the export of timber for shipbuilding, were prohibited. The land-
tax hitherto paid to the king ceased, and the confederacies and
communities were left to tax themselves; but these had to pay to Rome
half of the former land-tax, according to a rate fixed once for all,
amounting in all to 100 talents annually (24,000 pounds).(7) The
whole land was for ever disarmed, and the fortress of Demetrias was
razed; on the northern frontier alone a chain of posts was to be
retained to guard against the incursions of the barbarians. Of the
arms given up, the copper shields were sent to Rome, and the rest
were burnt.
The Romans gained their object. The Macedonian land still on two
occasions took up arms at the call of princes of the old reigning
house; but otherwise from that time to the present day it has remained
without a history.
Illyria Broken Up
Cotys
Thus the affairs of the north were settled, and Macedonia also was at
last released from the yoke of monarchy--in fact Greece was more free
than ever; a king no longer existed anywhere.
But the Romans did not confine themselves to cutting the nerves and
sinews of Macedonia. The senate resolved at once to render all the
Hellenic states, friend and foe, for ever incapable of harm, and to
reduce all of them alike to the same humble clientship. The course
pursued may itself admit of justification; but the mode in which it
was carried out in the case of the more powerful of the Greek client-
states was unworthy of a great power, and showed that the epoch of
the Fabii and the Scipios was at an end.
The state most affected by this change in the position of parties was
the kingdom of the Attalids, which had been created and fostered by
Rome to keep Macedonia in check, and which now, after the destruction
of Macedonia, was forsooth no longer needed. It was not easy to find
a tolerable pretext for depriving the prudent and considerate Eumenes
of his privileged position, and allowing him to fall into disfavour.
All at once, about the time when the Romans were encamped at
Heracleum, strange reports were circulated regarding him--that he was
in secret intercourse with Perseus; that his fleet had been suddenly,
as it were, wafted away; that 500 talents had been offered for his
non-participation in the campaign and 1500 for his mediation to
procure peace, and that the agreement had only broken down through the
avarice of Perseus. As to the Pergamene fleet, the king, after having
paid his respects to the consul, went home with it at the same time
that the Roman fleet went into winter quarters. The story about
corruption was as certainly a fable as any newspaper canard of the
present day; for that the rich, cunning, and consistent Attalid, who
had primarily occasioned the breach between Rome and Macedonia by
his journey in 582 and had been on that account wellnigh assassinated
by the banditti of Perseus, should--at the moment when the real
difficulties of a war, of whose final issue, moreover, he could never
have had any serious doubt, were overcome--have sold to the instigator
of the murder his share in the spoil for a few talents, and should
have perilled the work of long years for so pitiful a consideration,
may be set down not merely as a fabrication, but as a very silly one.
That no proof was found either in the papers of Perseus or elsewhere,
is sufficiently certain; for even the Romans did not venture to
express those suspicions aloud, But they gained their object. Their
wishes appeared in the behaviour of the Roman grandees towards
Attalus, the brother of Eumenes, who had commanded the Pergamene
auxiliary troops in Greece. Their brave and faithful comrade was
received in Rome with open arms and invited to ask not for his
brother, but for himself--the senate would be glad to give him a
kingdom of his own. Attalus asked nothing but Aenus and Maronea. The
senate thought that this was only a preliminary request, and granted
it with great politeness. But when he took his departure without
having made any further demands, and the senate came to perceive that
the reigning family in Pergamus did not live on such terms with each
other as were customary in princely houses, Aenus and Maronea were
declared free cities. The Pergamenes obtained not a foot's breadth
of territory out of the spoil of Macedonia; if after the victory over
Antiochus the Romans had still saved forms as respected Philip, they
were now disposed to hurt and to humiliate. About this time the
senate appears to have declared Pamphylia, for the possession of which
Eumenes and Antiochus had hitherto contended, independent. What was
of more importance, the Galatians--who had been substantially in the
power of Eumenes, ever since he had expelled the king of Pontus by
force of arms from Caiatia and had on making peace extorted from him
the promise that he would maintain no further communication with the
Galatian princes--now, reckoning beyond doubt on the variance that had
taken place between Eumenes and the Romans, if not directly instigated
by the latter, rose against Eumenes, overran his kingdom, and brought
him into great danger. Eumenes besought the mediation of the Romans;
the Roman envoy declared his readiness to mediate, but thought it
better that Attalus, who commanded the Pergamene army, should not
accompany him lest the barbarians might be put into ill humour.
Singularly enough, he accomplished nothing; in fact, he told on
his return that his mediation had only exasperated the barbarians.
No long time elapsed before the independence of the Galatians was
expressly recognized and guaranteed by the senate. Eumenes determined
to proceed to Rome in person, and to plead his cause in the senate.
But the latter, as if troubled by an evil conscience, suddenly decreed
that in future kings should not be allowed to come to Rome; and
despatched a quaestor to meet him at Brundisium, to lay before him
this decree of the senate, to ask him what he wanted, and to hint to
him that they would be glad to see his speedy departure. The king was
long silent; at length he said that he desired nothing farther, and
re-embarked. He saw how matters stood: the epoch of half-powerful and
half-free alliance was at an end; that of impotent subjection began.
Humiliation of Rhodes
With Syria and Egypt the Romans could go to work more summarily.
War had broken out between them; and Coelesyria and Palaestina formed
once more the subject of dispute. According to the assertion of the
Egyptians, those provinces had been ceded to Egypt on the marriage of
the Syrian Cleopatra: this however the court of Babylon, which was in
actual possession, disputed. Apparently the charging of her dowry on
the taxes of the Coelesyrian cities gave occasion to the quarrel, and
the Syrian side was in the right; the breaking out of the war was
occasioned by the death of Cleopatra in 581, with which at latest the
payments of revenue terminated. The war appears to have been begun by
Egypt; but king Antiochus Epiphanes gladly embraced the opportunity
of once more--and for the last time--endeavouring to achieve the
traditional aim of the policy of the Seleucidae, the acquisition of
Egypt, while the Romans were employed in Macedonia. Fortune seemed
favourable to him. The king of Egypt at that time, Ptolemy VI,
Philometor, the son of Cleopatra, had hardly passed the age of boyhood
and had bad advisers; after a great victory on the Syro-Egyptian
frontier Antiochus was able to advance into the territories of his
nephew in the same year in which the legions landed in Greece (583),
and soon had the person of the king in his power. Matters began to
look as if Antiochus wished to possess himself of all Egypt in
Philometor's name; Alexandria accordingly closed its gates against
him, deposed Philometor, and nominated as king in his stead his
younger brother, named Euergetes II, or the Fat. Disturbances in his
own kingdom recalled the Syrian king from Egypt; when he returned, he
found that the brothers had come to an understanding during his
absence; and he then continued the war against both. Just as he lay
before Alexandria, not long after the battle of Pydna (586), the Roman
envoy Gaius Popillius, a harsh rude man, arrived, and intimated to him
the command of the senate that he should restore all that he had
conquered and should evacuate Egypt within a set term. Antiochus
asked time for consideration; but the consular drew with his staff a
circle round the king, and bade him declare his intentions before he
stepped beyond the circle. Antiochus replied that he would comply;
and marched off to his capital that he might there, in his character
of "the god, the brilliant bringer of victory," celebrate in Roman
fashion his conquest of Egypt and parody the triumph of Paullus.
To the Achaeans, who, as usual, were not content till they got the
answer which they anticipated, the senate, wearied by constant
requests for the commencement of the investigation, at length roundly
declared that till further orders the persons concerned were to remain
in Italy. There they were placed in country towns in the interior,
and tolerably well treated; but attempts to escape were punished with
death. The position of the former officials removed from Macedonia
was, in all probability, similar. This expedient, violent as it was,
was still, as things stood, the most lenient, and the enraged Greeks
of the Roman party were far from content with the paucity of the
executions. Lyciscus had accordingly deemed it proper, by way of
preliminary, to have 500 of the leading men of the Aetolian patriotic
party slain at the meeting of the diet; the Roman commission, which
needed the man, suffered the deed to pass unpunished, and merely
censured the employment of Roman soldiers in the execution of this
Hellenic usage. We may presume, however, that the Romans instituted
the system of deportation to Italy partly in order to prevent such
horrors. As in Greece proper no power existed even of such importance
as Rhodes or Pergamus, there was no need in its case for any further
humiliation; the steps taken were taken only in the exercise of
justice--in the Roman sense, no doubt, of that term--and for
the prevention of the most scandalous and palpable outbreaks of
party discord.
All the Hellenistic states had thus been completely subjected to the
protectorate of Rome, and the whole empire of Alexander the Great had
fallen to the Roman commonwealth just as if the city had inherited it
from his heirs. From all sides kings and ambassadors flocked to Rome
to congratulate her; and they showed that fawning is never more abject
than when kings are in the antechamber. King Massinissa, who only
desisted from presenting himself in person on being expressly
prohibited from doing so, ordered his son to declare that he
regarded himself as merely the beneficiary, and the Romans as the true
proprietors, of his kingdom, and that he would always be content with
what they were willing to leave to him. There was at least truth
in this. But Prusias king of Bithynia, who had to atone for his
neutrality, bore off the palm in this contest of flattery; he fell on
his face when he was conducted into the senate, and did homage to "the
delivering gods." As he was so thoroughly contemptible, Polybius tells
us, they gave him a polite reply, and presented him with the fleet
of Perseus.
The moment was at least well chosen for such acts of homage. Polybius
dates from the battle of Pydna the full establishment of the universal
empire of Rome. It was in fact the last battle in which a civilized
state confronted Rome in the field on a footing of equality with her
as a great power; all subsequent struggles were rebellions or wars
with peoples beyond the pale of the Romano-Greek civilization
--with barbarians, as they were called. The whole civilized world
thenceforth recognized in the Roman senate the supreme tribunal, whose
commissions decided in the last resort between kings and nations; and
to acquire its language and manners foreign princes and youths of
quality resided in Rome. A clear and earnest attempt to get rid of
this dominion was in reality made only once--by the great Mithradates
of Pontus. The battle of Pydna, moreover, marks the last occasion on
which the senate still adhered to the state-maxim that they should, if
possible, hold no possessions and maintain no garrisons beyond the
Italian seas, but should keep the numerous states dependent on them in
order by a mere political supremacy. The aim of their policy was that
these states should neither decline into utter weakness and anarchy,
as had nevertheless happened in Greece nor emerge out of their half-
free position into complete independence, as Macedonia had attempted
to do not without success. No state was to be allowed utterly to
perish, but no one was to be permitted to stand on its own resources.
Accordingly the vanquished foe held at least an equal, often a better,
position with the Roman diplomatists than the faithful ally; and,
while a defeated opponent was reinstated, those who attempted to
reinstate themselves were abased--as the Aetolians, Macedonia after
the Asiatic war, Rhodes, and Pergamus learned by experience. But not
only did this part of protector soon prove as irksome to the masters
as to the servants; the Roman protectorate, with its ungrateful
Sisyphian toil that continually needed to be begun afresh, showed
itself to be intrinsically untenable. Indications of a change of
system, and of an increasing disinclination on the part of Rome to
tolerate by its side intermediate states even in such independence as
was possible for them, were very clearly given in the destruction of
the Macedonian monarchy after the battle of Pydna, The more and more
frequent and more and more unavoidable intervention in the internal
affairs of the petty Greek states through their misgovernment and
their political and social anarchy; the disarming of Macedonia, where
the northern frontier at any rate urgently required a defence
different from that of mere posts; and, lastly, the introduction of
the payment of land-tax to Rome from Macedonia and Illyria, were so
many symptoms of the approaching conversion of the client states
into subjects of Rome.
The Italian and Extra-Italian Policy of Rome
If, in conclusion, we glance back at the career of Rome from the union
of Italy to the dismemberment of Macedonia, the universal empire of
Rome, far from appearing as a gigantic plan contrived and carried out
by an insatiable thirst for territorial aggrandizement, appears to
have been a result which forced itself on the Roman government
without, and even in opposition to, its wish. It is true that the
former view naturally suggests itself--Sallust is right when he makes
Mithradates say that the wars of Rome with tribes, cities, and kings
originated in one and the same prime cause, the insatiable longing
after dominion and riches; but it is an error to give forth this
judgment--influenced by passion and the event--as a historical fact.
It is evident to every one whose observation is not superficial, that
the Roman government during this whole period wished and desired
nothing but the sovereignty of Italy; that they were simply desirous
not to have too powerful neighbours alongside of them; and that--not
out of humanity towards the vanquished, but from the very sound view
that they ought not to suffer the kernel of their empire to be stifled
by the shell--they earnestly opposed the introduction first of Africa,
then of Greece, and lastly of Asia into the sphere of the Roman
protectorate, till circumstances in each case compelled, or at least
suggested with irresistible force, the extension of that sphere. The
Romans always asserted that they did not pursue a policy of conquest,
and that they were always the party assailed; and this was something
more, at any rate, than a mere phrase. They were in fact driven to
all their great wars with the exception of that concerning Sicily--to
those with Hannibal and Antiochus, no less than to those with Philip
and Perseus--either by a direct aggression or by an unparalleled
disturbance of the existing political relations; and hence they were
ordinarily taken by surprise on their outbreak. That they did not
after victory exhibit the moderation which they ought to have done in
the interest more especially of Italy itself; that the retention of
Spain, for instance, the undertaking of the guardianship of Africa,
and above all the half-fanciful scheme of bringing liberty everywhere
to the Greeks, were in the light of Italian policy grave errors, is
sufficiently clear. But the causes of these errors were, on the
one hand a blind dread of Carthage, on the other a still blinder
enthusiasm for Hellenic liberty; so little did the Romans exhibit
during this period the lust of conquest, that they, on the contrary,
displayed a very judicious dread of it. The policy of Rome throughout
was not projected by a single mightly intellect and bequeathed
traditionally from generation to generation; it was the policy of a
very able but somewhat narrow-minded deliberative assembly, which had
far too little power of grand combination, and far too much of a right
instinct for the preservation of its own commonwealth, to devise
projects in the spirit of a Caesar or a Napoleon. The universal
empire of Rome had its ultimate ground in the political development of
antiquity in general. The ancient world knew nothing of a balance of
power among nations; and therefore every nation which had attained
internal unity strove either directly to subdue its neighbors, as did
the Hellenic states, or at any rate to render them innocuous, as Rome
did,--an effort, it is true, which also issued ultimately in
subjugation. Egypt was perhaps the only great power in antiquity
which seriously pursued a system of equilibrium; on the opposite
system Seleucus and Antigonous, Hannibal and Scipio, came into
collision. And, if it seems to us sad that all the other richly-
endowed and highly-developed nations of antiquity had to perish in
order to enrich a single one out of the whole, and that all in the
long run appear to have only arisen to contribute to the greatness
of Italy and to the decay involved in that greatness, yet historical
justice must acknowledge that this result was not produced by the
military superiority of the legion over the phalanx, but was the
necessary development of the international relations of antiquity
generally-so that the issue was not decided by provoking chance,
but was the fulfillment of an unchangeable, and therefore
endurable, destiny.
4. The recently discovered decree of the senate of 9th Oct. 584, which
regulates the legal relations of Thisbae (Ephemeris epigraphica, 1872,
p. 278, fig.; Mitth. d. arch. Inst., in Athen, iv. 235, fig.), gives
a clear insight into these relations.
5. The story, that the Romans, in order at once to keep the promise
which had guaranteed his life and to take vengeance on him, put him
to death by depriving him of sleep, is certainly a fable.
CHAPTER XI
Patricio-Plebian Nobility
The dependence -de jure- of the Roman senate of the republic, more
especially of the larger patricio-plebeian senate, on the magistracy
had rapidly become lax, and had in fact been converted into
independence. The subordination of the public magistracies to
the state-council, introduced by the revolution of 244;(9) the
transference of the right of summoning men to the senate from the
consul to the censor;(10) lastly, and above all, the legal recognition
of the right of those who had been curule magistrates to a seat and
vote in the senate,(11) had converted the senate from a council
summoned by the magistrates and in many respects dependent on them
into a governing corporation virtually independent, and in a certain
sense filling up its own ranks; for the two modes by which its members
obtained admission--election to a curule office and summoning by the
censor--were both virtually in the power of the governing board
itself. The burgesses, no doubt, at this epoch were still too
independent to allow the entire exclusion of non-nobles from the
senate, and the nobility were perhaps still too judicious even to wish
for this; but, owing to the strictly aristocratic gradations in the
senate itself--in which those who had been curule magistrates were
sharply distinguished, according to their respective classes of
-consulares-, -praetorii-, and -aedilicii-, from the senators who
had not entered the senate through a curule office and were therefore
excluded from debate--the non-nobles, although they probably sat in
considerable numbers in the senate, were reduced to an insignificant
and comparatively uninfluential position in it, and the senate became
substantially a mainstay of the nobility.
In the case of civil offices, the first and chief object was to
limit re-election to the supreme magistracies. This was certainly
necessary, if the presidency of annual kings was not to be an empty
name; and even in the preceding period reelection to the consulship
was not permitted till after the lapse often years, while in the case
if the censorship it was altogether forbidden.(15) No farther law was
passed in the period before us; but an increased stringency in its
application is obvious from the fact that, while the law as to the ten
years' interval was suspended in 537 during the continuance of the war
in Italy, there was no farther dispensation from it afterwards, and
indeed towards the close of this period re-election seldom occurred at
all. Moreover, towards the end of this epoch (574) a decree of the
people was issued, binding the candidates for public magistracies to
undertake them in a fixed order of succession, and to observe certain
intervals between the offices, and certain limits of age. Custom,
indeed, had long prescribed both of these; but it was a sensibly
felt restriction of the freedom of election, when the customary
qualification was raised into a legal requirement, and the right of
disregarding such requirements in extraordinary cases was withdrawn
from the elective body. In general, admission to the senate was
thrown open to persons belonging to the ruling families without
distinction as to ability, while not only were the poorer and humbler
ranks of the population utterly precluded from access to the offices
of government, but all Roman burgesses not belonging to the hereditary
aristocracy were practically excluded, not indeed exactly from the
senate, but from the two highest magistracies, the consulship and the
censorship. After Manius Curius and Gaius Fabricius,(16) no instance
can be pointed out of a consul who did not belong to the social
aristocracy, and probably no instance of the kind occurred at all.
But the number of the -gentes-, which appear for the first time in the
lists of consuls and censors in the half-century from the beginning of
the war with Hannibal to the close of that with Perseus, is extremely
limited; and by far the most of these, such as the Flaminii, Terentii,
Porcii, Acilii, and Laelii, may be referred to elections by the
opposition, or are traceable to special aristocratic connections.
The election of Gaius Laelius in 564, for instance, was evidently
due to the Scipios. The exclusion of the poorer classes from the
government was, no doubt, required by the altered circumstances of the
case. Now that Rome had ceased to be a purely Italian state and had
adopted Hellenic culture, it was no longer possible to take a small
farmer from the plough and to set him at the head of the community.
But it was neither necessary nor beneficial that the elections should
almost without exception be confined to the narrow circle of the
curule houses, and that a "new man" could only make his way into that
circle by a sort of usurpation.(17) No doubt a certain hereditary
character was inherent not merely in the nature of the senate as
an institution, in so far as it rested from the outset on a
representation of the clans,(18) but in the nature of aristocracy
generally, in so far as statesmanly wisdom and statesmanly experience
are bequeathed from the able father to the able son, and the inspiring
spirit of an illustrious ancestry fans every noble spark within the
human breast into speedier and more brilliant flame. In this sense
the Roman aristocracy had been at all times hereditary; in fact, it
had displayed its hereditary character with great naivete in the old
custom of the senator taking his sons with him to the senate, and of
the public magistrate decorating his sons, as it were by anticipation,
with the insignia of the highest official honour--the purple border of
the consular, and the golden amulet-case of the triumphator. But,
while in the earlier period the hereditariness of the outward dignity
had been to a certain extent conditioned by the inheritance of
intrinsic worth, and the senatorial aristocracy had guided the state
not primarily by virtue of hereditary right, but by virtue of the
highest of all rights of representation--the right of the excellent,
as contrasted with the ordinary, man--it sank in this epoch (and with
specially great rapidity after the end of the Hannibalic war) from its
original high position, as the aggregate of those in the community who
were most experienced in counsel and action, down to an order of lords
filling up its ranks by hereditary succession, and exercising
collegiate misrule.
Family Government
Indeed, matters had already at this time reached such a height, that
out of the grave evil of oligarchy there emerged the still worse evil
of usurpation of power by particular families. We have already
spoken(19) of the offensive family-policy of the conqueror of Zama,
and of his unhappily successful efforts to cover with his own laurels
the incapacity and pitifulness of his brother; and the nepotism of the
Flaminini was, if possible, still more shameless and scandalous than
that of the Scipios. Absolute freedom of election in fact turned to
the advantage of such coteries far more than of the electing body.
The election of Marcus Valerius Corvus to the consulship at twenty-
three had doubtless been for the benefit of the state; but now, when
Scipio obtained the aedileship at twenty-three and the consulate at
thirty, and Flamininus, while not yet thirty years of age, rose from
the quaestorship to the consulship, such proceedings involved serious
danger to the republic. Things had already reached such a pass, that
the only effective barrier against family rule and its consequences
had to be found in a government strictly oligarchical; and this was
the reason why even the party otherwise opposed to the oligarchy
agreed to restrict the freedom of election.
The government bore the stamp of this gradual change in the spirit of
the governing class. It is true that the administration of external
affairs was still dominated at this epoch by that consistency and
energy, by which the rule of the Roman community over Italy had been
established. During the severe disciplinary times of the war as to
Sicily the Roman aristocracy had gradually raised itself to the height
of its new position; and if it unconstitutionally usurped for the
senate functions of government which by right foil to be shared
between the magistrates and the comitia alone, it vindicated the step
by its certainly far from brilliant, but sure and steady, pilotage
of the vessel of the state during the Hannibalic storm and the
complications thence arising, and showed to the world that the Roman
senate was alone able, and in many respects alone deserved, to rule
the wide circle of the Italo-Hellenic states. But admitting the noble
attitude of the ruling Roman senate in opposition to the outward foe
--an attitude crowned with the noblest results--we may not overlook
the fact, that in the less conspicuous, and yet far more important
and far more difficult, administration of the internal affairs of the
state, both the treatment of the existing arrangements and the new
institutions betray an almost opposite spirit, or, to speak more
correctly, indicate that the opposite tendency has already acquired
the predominance in this field.
But this increase of revenue was for the most part counterbalanced by
the increasing expenditure. The provinces, Sicily perhaps excepted,
probably cost nearly as much as they yielded; the expenditure on
highways and other structures rose in proportion to the extension of
territory; the repayment also of the advances (-tributa-) received
from the freeholder burgesses during times of severe war formed a
burden for many a year afterwards on the Roman treasury. To these
fell to be added very considerable losses occasioned to the revenue
by the mismanagement, negligence, or connivance of the supreme
magistrates. Of the conduct of the officials in the provinces, of
their luxurious living at the expense of the public purse, of their
embezzlement more especially of the spoil, of the incipient system of
bribery and extortion, we shall speak in the sequel. How the state
fared generally as regarded the farming of its revenues and the
contracts for supplies and buildings, may be estimated from the
circumstance, that the senate resolved in 587 to desist from the
working of the Macedonian mines that had fallen to Rome, because the
lessees of the minerals would either plunder the subjects or cheat
the exchequer--truly a naive confession of impotence, in which the
controlling board pronounced its own censure. Not only was the duty
from the occupied domain-land allowed tacitly to fall into abeyance,
as has been already mentioned, but private buildings in the capital
and elsewhere were suffered to encroach on ground which was public
property, and the water from the public aqueducts was diverted to
private purposes: great dissatisfaction was created on one occasion
when a censor took serious steps against such trespassers, and
compelled them either to desist from the separate use of the public
property, or to pay the legal rate for the ground and water. The
conscience of the Romans, otherwise in economic matters so scrupulous,
showed, so far as the community was concerned, a remarkable laxity.
"He who steals from a burgess," said Cato, "ends his days in chains
and fetters; but he who steals from the community ends them in gold
and purple." If, notwithstanding the fact that the public property
of the Roman community was fearlessly and with impunity plundered by
officials and speculators, Polybius still lays stress on the rarity
of embezzlement in Rome, while Greece could hardly produce a single
official who had not touched the public money, and on the honesty with
which a Roman commissioner or magistrate would upon his simple word of
honour administer enormous sums, while in the case of the paltriest
sum in Greece ten letters were sealed and twenty witnesses were
required and yet everybody cheated, this merely implies that social
and economic demoralization had advanced much further in Greece than
in Rome, and in particular, that direct and palpable peculation was
not as yet so flourishing in the one case as in the other. The
general financial result is most clearly exhibited to us by the state
of the public buildings, and by the amount of cash in the treasury.
We find in times of peace a fifth, in times of war a tenth, of the
revenues expended on public buildings; which, in the circumstances,
does not seem to have been a very copious outlay. With these sums, as
well as with fines which were not directly payable into the treasury,
much was doubtless done for the repair of the highways in and near the
capital, for the formation of the chief Italian roads,(23) and for the
construction of public buildings. Perhaps the most important of the
building operations in the capital, known to belong to this period,
was the great repair and extension of the network of sewers throughout
the city, contracted for probably in 570, for which 24,000,000
sesterces (240,000 pounds) were set apart at once, and to which it may
be presumed that the portions of the -cloacae- still extant, at least
in the main, belong. To all appearance however, even apart from the
severe pressure of war, this period was inferior to the last section
of the preceding epoch in respect of public buildings; between 482 and
607 no new aqueduct was constructed at Rome. The treasure of the
state, no doubt, increased; the last reserve in 545, when: they found
themselves under the necessity of laying hands on it, amounted only to
164,000 pounds (4000 pounds of gold);(24) whereas a short time after
the close of this period (597) close on 860,000 pounds in precious
metals were stored in the treasury. But, when we take into account
the enormous extraordinary revenues which in the generation after the
close of the Hannibalic war came into the Roman treasury, the latter
sum surprises us rather by its smallness than by its magnitude. So
far as with the extremely meagre statements before us it is allowable
to speak of results, the finances of the Roman state exhibit doubtless
an excess of income over expenditure, but are far from presenting a
brilliant result as a whole.
Italian Subjects
Passive Burgesses
Dediticii
Allies
Latins
That the Latins--which term now denoted the few towns in old Latium
that were not included in the Roman burgess-union, such as Tibur and
Praeneste, the allied cities placed in law on the same footing with
them, such as several of the Hernican towns, and the Latin colonies
dispersed throughout Italy--were still at this time in a better
position, is implied in their very name; but they too had, in
proportion, hardly less deteriorated. The burdens imposed on them
were unjustly increased, and the pressure of military service was more
and more devolved from the burgesses upon them and the other Italian
allies. For instance, in 536, nearly twice as many of the allies were
called out as of the burgesses: after the end of the Hannibalic war
all the burgesses received their discharge, but not all the allies;
the latter were chiefly employed for garrison duty and for the odious
service in Spain; in the triumphal largess of 577 the allies received
not as formerly an equal share with the burgesses, but only the half,
so that amidst the unrestrained rejoicing of that soldiers' carnival
the divisions thus treated as inferior followed the chariot of victory
in sullen silence: in the assignations of land in northern Italy the
burgesses received ten jugera of arable land each, the non-burgesses
three -jugera- each. The unlimited liberty of migration had already
at an earlier period been taken from the Latin communities, and
migration to Rome was only allowed to them in the event of their
leaving behind children of their own and a portion of their estate in
the community which had been their home.(28) But these burdensome
requirements were in various ways evaded or transgressed; and the
crowding of the burgesses of Latin townships to Rome, and the
complaints of their magistrates as to the increasing depopulation
of the cities and the impossibility under such circumstances of
furnishing the fixed contingent, led the Roman government to institute
police-ejections from the capital on a large scale (567, 577). The
measure might be unavoidable, but it was none the less severely felt.
Moreover, the towns laid out by Rome in the interior of Italy began
towards the close of this period to receive instead of Latin rights
the full franchise, which previously had only been given to the
maritime colonies; and the enlargement of the Latin body by the
accession of new communities, which hitherto had gone on so regularly,
thus came to an end. Aquileia, the establishment of which began in
571, was the latest of the Italian colonies of Rome that received
Latin rights; the full franchise was given to the colonies, sent forth
nearly at the same time, of Potentia, Pisaurum, Mutina, Parma, and
Luna (570-577). The reason for this evidently lay in the decline of
the Latin as compared with the Roman franchise. The colonists
conducted to the new settlements were always, and now more than ever,
chosen in preponderating number from the Roman burgesses; and even
among the poorer portion of these there was a lack of people willing,
for the sake even of acquiring considerable material advantages, to
exchange their rights as burgesses for those of the Latin franchise.
It cannot be denied that these changes -de facto- and -de jure- in
the relations of the Italian subjects exhibit at least an intimate
connection and consistency. The situation of the subject classes was
throughout deteriorated in proportion to the gradations previously
subsisting, and, while the government had formerly endeavoured to
soften the distinctions and to provide means of transition from one to
another, now the intermediate links were everywhere set aside and the
connecting bridges were broken down. As within the Roman burgess-body
the ruling class separated itself from the people, uniformly withdrew
from public burdens, and uniformly took for itself the honours and
advantages, so the burgesses in their turn asserted their distinction
from the Italian confederacy, and excluded it more and more from the
joint enjoyment of rule, while transferring to it a double or triple
share in the common burdens. As the nobility, in relation to the
plebeians, returned to the close exclusiveness of the declining
patriciate, so did the burgesses in relation to the non-burgesses;
the plebeiate, which had become great through the liberality of
its institutions, now wrapped itself up in the rigid maxims of
patricianism. The abolition of the passive burgesses cannot in itself
be censured, and, so far as concerned the motive which led to it,
belongs presumably to another connection to be discussed afterwards;
but through its abolition an intermediate link was lost. Far more
fraught with peril, however, was the disappearance of the distinction
between the Latin and the other Italian communities. The privileged
position of the Latin nation within Italy was the foundation of the
Roman power; that foundation gave way, when the Latin towns began to
feel that they were no longer privileged partakers in the dominion of
the powerful cognate community, but substantially subjects of Rome
like the rest, and when all the Italians began to find their position
equally intolerable. It is true, that there were still distinctions:
the Bruttians and their companions in misery were already treated
exactly like slaves and conducted themselves accordingly, deserting,
for instance, from the fleet in which they served as galley-slaves,
whenever they could, and gladly taking service against Rome; and the
Celtic, and above all the transmarine, subjects formed by the side of
the Italians a class still more oppressed and intentionally abandoned
by the government to contempt and maltreatment at the hands of the
Italians. But such distinctions, while implying a gradation of
classes among the subjects, could not withal afford even a remote
compensation for the earlier contrast between the cognate, and the
alien, Italian subjects. A profound dissatisfaction prevailed through
the whole Italian confederacy, and fear alone prevented it from
finding loud expression. The proposal made in the senate after the
battle at Cannae, to give the Roman franchise and a seat in the senate
to two men from each Latin community, was made at an unseasonable
time, and was rightly rejected; but it shows the apprehension with
which men in the ruling community even then viewed the relations
between Latium and Rome. Had a second Hannibal now carried the war to
Italy, it may be doubted whether he would have again been thwarted by
the steadfast resistance of the Latin name to a foreign domination.
The Provinces
But by far the most important institution which this epoch introduced
into the Roman commonwealth, and that at the same time which involved
the most decided and fatal deviation from the course hitherto pursued,
was the new provincial magistracies. The earlier state-law of Rome
knew nothing of tributary subjects: the conquered communities were
either sold into slavery, or merged in the Roman commonwealth, or
lastly, admitted to an alliance which secured to them at least
communal independence and freedom from taxation. But the Carthaginian
possessions in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain, as well as the kingdom of
Hiero, had paid tribute and rent to their former masters: if Rome was
desirous of retaining these possessions at all, it was in the judgment
of the short-sighted the most judicious, and undoubtedly the most
convenient, course to administer the new territories entirely in
accordance with the rules heretofore observed. Accordingly the Romans
simply retained the Carthagino-Hieronic provincial constitution, and
organized in accordance with it those provinces also, such as Hither
Spain, which they wrested from the barbarians. It was the shirt of
Nessus which they inherited from the enemy. Beyond doubt at first
the Roman government intended, in imposing taxes on their subjects,
not strictly to enrich themselves, but only to cover the cost of
administration and defence; but they already deviated from this
course, when they made Macedonia and Illyria tributary without
undertaking the government or the guardianship of the frontier there.
The fact, however, that they still maintained moderation in the
imposition of burdens was of little consequence, as compared with the
conversion of their sovereignty into a right yielding profit at all;
the fall was the same, whether a single apple was taken or the tree
was plundered.
The Opposition
If the new nobility was less sharply defined than the old aristocracy
of the clans, and if the encroachment on the other burgesses as
respected the joint enjoyment of political rights was in the one
case -de jure-, in the other only -de facto-, the second form of
inferiority was for that very reason worse to bear and worse to throw
off than the first. Attempts to throw it off were, as a matter of
course, not wanting. The opposition rested on the support of the
public assembly, as the nobility did on the senate: in order to
understand the opposition, we must first describe the Roman burgess-
body during this period as regards its spirit and its position in the
commonwealth.
How much the military discipline and the martial spirit of the
burgesses suffered from this conversion of war into a traffic in
plunder, may be traced in the campaigns against Perseus; and the
spread of cowardice was manifested in a way almost scandalous during
the insignificant Istrian war (in 576). On occasion of a trifling
skirmish magnified by rumour to gigantic dimensions, the land army
and the naval force of the Romans, and even the Italians, ran off
homeward, and Cato found it necessary to address a special reproof to
his countrymen for their cowardice. In this too the youth of quality
took precedence. Already during the Hannibalic war (545) the censors
found occasion to visit with severe penalties the remissness of those
who were liable to military service under the equestrian census.
Towards the close of this period (574?) a decree of the people
prescribed evidence of ten years' service as a qualification for
holding any public magistracy, with a view to compel the sons of
the nobility to enter the army.
Title-Hunting
But perhaps nothing so clearly evinces the decay of genuine pride and
genuine honour in high and low alike as the hunting after insignia and
titles, which appeared under different forms of expression, but with
substantial identity of character, among all ranks and classes. So
urgent was the demand for the honour of a triumph that there was
difficulty in upholding the old rule, which accorded a triumph only
to the ordinary supreme magistrate who augmented the power of the
commonwealth in open battle, and thereby, it is true, not unfrequently
excluded from that honour the very authors of the most important
successes. There was a necessity for acquiescence, while those
generals, who had in vain solicited, or had no prospect of attaining,
a triumph from the senate or the burgesses, marched in triumph on
their own account at least to the Alban Mount (first in 523). No
combat with a Ligurian or Corsican horde was too insignificant to be
made a pretext for demanding a triumph. In order to put an end to the
trade of peaceful triumphators, such as were the consuls of 574, the
granting of a triumph was made to depend on the producing proof of a
pitched battle which had cost the lives of at least 5000 of the enemy;
but this proof was frequently evaded by false bulletins--already in
houses of quality many an enemy's armour might be seen to glitter,
which had by no means come thither from the field of battle. While
formerly the commander-in-chief of the one year had reckoned it an
honour to serve next year on the staff of his successor, the fact that
the consular Cato took service as a military tribune under Tiberius
Sempronius Longus (560) and Manius Glabrio (563;(47)), was now
regarded as a demonstration against the new-fashioned arrogance.
Formerly the thanks of the community once for all had sufficed for
service rendered to the state: now every meritorious act seemed to
demand a permanent distinction. Already Gaius Duilius, the victor of
Mylae (494), had gained an exceptional permission that, when he walked
in the evening through the streets of the capital, he should be
preceded by a torch-bearer and a piper. Statues and monuments, very
often erected at the expense of the person whom they purported to
honour, became so common, that it was ironically pronounced a
distinction to have none. But such merely personal honours did not
long suffice. A custom came into vogue, by which the victor and his
descendants derived a permanent surname from the victories they had
won--a custom mainly established by the victor of Zama who got himself
designated as the hero of Africa, his brother as the hero of Asia, and
his cousin as the hero of Spain.(48) The example set by the higher
was followed by the humbler classes. When the ruling order did not
disdain to settle the funeral arrangements for different ranks and to
decree to the man who had been censor a purple winding-sheet, it could
not complain of the freedmen for desiring that their sons at any rate
might be decorated with the much-envied purple border. The robe, the
ring, and the amulet-case distinguished not only the burgess and the
burgess's wife from the foreigner and the slave, but also the person
who was free-born from one who had been a slave, the son of free-born,
from the son of manumitted, parents, the son of the knight and the
senator from the common burgess, the descendant of a curule house from
the common senator(49)--and this in a community where all that was
good and great was the work of civil equality!
Police Reform
Assignations of Land
Far more practical and more useful were the attempts made to
counteract the spread of decay by indirect means; among which, beyond
doubt, the assignations of new farms out of the domain land occupy the
first place. These assignations were made in great numbers and of
considerable extent in the period between the first and second war
with Carthage, and again from the close of the latter till towards the
end of this epoch. The most important of them were the distribution
of the Picenian possessions by Gaius Flaminius in 522;(51) the
foundation of eight new maritime colonies in 560;(52) and above all
the comprehensive colonization of the district between the Apennines
and the Po by the establishment of the Latin colonies of Placentia,
Cremona,(53) Bononia,(54) and Aquileia,(55) and of the burgess-
colonies, Potentia, Pisaurum, Mutina, Parma, and Luna(56) in the years
536 and 565-577. By far the greater part of these highly beneficial
foundations may be ascribed to the reforming party. Cato and those
who shared his opinions demanded such measures, pointing, on the
one hand, to the devastation of Italy by the Hannibalic war and the
alarming diminution of the farms and of the free Italian population
generally, and, on the other, to the widely extended possessions of
the nobles--occupied along with, and similarly to, property of their
own--in Cisalpine Gaul, in Samnium, and in the Apulian and Bruttian
districts; and although the rulers of Rome did not probably comply
with these demands to the extent to which they might and should have
complied with them, yet they did not remain deaf to the warning voice
of so judicious a man.
Thus this reform did not introduce a new principle into the
constitution, but only brought into general application the principle
that had long regulated the working of the practically more frequent
and more important form of the burgess-assemblies. Its democratic,
but by no means demagogic, tendency is clearly apparent in the
position which it took up towards the proper supports of every really
revolutionary party, the proletariate and the freedmen. For that
reason the practical significance of this alteration in the order of
voting regulating the primary assemblies must not be estimated too
highly. The new law of election did not prevent, and perhaps did
not even materially impede, the contemporary formation of a new
politically privileged order. It is certainly not owing to the mere
imperfection of tradition, defective as it undoubtedly is, that we are
nowhere able to point to a practical influence exercised by this much-
discussed reform on the course of political affairs. An intimate
connection, we may add, subsisted between this reform, and the
already-mentioned abolition of the Roman burgess-communities -sine
suffragio-, which were gradually merged in the community of full
burgesses. The levelling spirit of the party of progress suggested
the abolition of distinctions within the middle class, while the
chasm between burgesses and non-burgesses was at the same time
widened and deepened.
Reviewing what the reform party of this age aimed at and obtained, we
find that it undoubtedly exerted itself with patriotism and energy to
check, and to a certain extent succeeded in checking, the spread of
decay--more especially the falling off of the farmer class and the
relaxation of the old strict and frugal habits--as well as the
preponderating political influence of the new nobility. But we fail
to discover any higher political aim. The discontent of the multitude
and the moral indignation of the better classes found doubtless in
this opposition their appropriate and powerful expression; but we do
not find either a clear insight into the sources of the evil, or any
definite and comprehensive plan of remedying it. A certain want of
thought pervades all these efforts otherwise so deserving of honour,
and the purely defensive attitude of the defenders forebodes little
good for the sequel. Whether the disease could be remedied at all by
human skill, remains fairly open to question; the Roman reformers of
this period seem to have been good citizens rather than good
statesmen, and to have conducted the great struggle between the
old civism and the new cosmopolitanism on their part after a somewhat
inadequate and narrow-minded fashion.
Demagogism
But, as this period witnessed the rise of a rabble by the side of the
burgesses, so it witnessed also the emergence of a demagogism that
flattered the populace alongside of the respectable and useful party
of opposition. Cato was already acquainted with men who made a trade
of demagogism; who had a morbid propensity for speechifying, as others
had for drinking or for sleeping; who hired listeners, if they could
find no willing audience otherwise; and whom people heard as they
heard the market-crier, without listening to their words or, in the
event of needing help, entrusting themselves to their hands. In his
caustic fashion the old man describes these fops formed after the
model of the Greek talkers of the agora, dealing in jests and
witticisms, singing and dancing, ready for anything; such an one was,
in his opinion, good for nothing but to exhibit himself as harlequin
in a procession and to bandy talk with the public--he would sell his
talk or his silence for a bit of bread. In reality these demagogues
were the worst enemies of reform. While the reformers insisted above
all things and in every direction on moral amendment, demagogism
preferred to insist on the limitation of the powers of the government
and the extension of those of the burgesses.
Under the former head the most important innovation was the practical
abolition of the dictatorship. The crisis occasioned by Quintus
Fabius and his popular opponents in 537(61) gave the death-blow to
this all-along unpopular institution. Although the government once
afterwards, in 538, under the immediate impression produced by the
battle of Cannae, nominated a dictator invested with active command,
it could not again venture to do so in more peaceful times. On
several occasions subsequently (the last in 552), sometimes after
a previous indication by the burgesses of the person to be nominated,
a dictator was appointed for urban business; but the office, without
being formally abolished, fell practically into desuetude. Through
its abeyance the Roman constitutional system, so artificially
constructed, lost a corrective which was very desirable with reference
to its peculiar feature of collegiate magistrates;(62) and the
government, which was vested with the sole power of creating a
dictatorship or in other words of suspending the consuls, and
ordinarily designated also the person who was to be nominated as
dictator, lost one of its most important instruments. Its place
was but very imperfectly supplied by the power--which the senate
thenceforth claimed--of conferring in extraordinary emergencies,
particularly on the sudden outbreak of revolt or war, a quasi-
dictatorial power on the supreme magistrates for the time being, by
instructing them "to take measures for the safety of the commonwealth
at their discretion," and thus creating a state of things similar to
the modern martial law.
Along with this change the formal powers of the people in the
nomination of magistrates as well as in questions of government,
administration, and finance, received a hazardous extension. The
priesthoods--particularly those politically most important, the
colleges of men of lore--according to ancient custom filled up the
vacancies in their own ranks, and nominated also their own presidents,
where these corporations had presidents at all; and in fact, for such
institutions destined to transmit the knowledge of divine things from
generation to generation, the only form of election in keeping with
their spirit was cooptation. It was therefore--although not of great
political importance--significant of the incipient disorganization of
the republican arrangements, that at this time (before 542), while
election into the colleges themselves was left on its former footing,
the designation of the presidents--the -curiones- and -pontifices-
--from the ranks of those corporations was transferred from the
colleges to the community. In this case, however, with a pious regard
for forms that is genuinely Roman, in order to avoid any error, only a
minority of the tribes, and therefore not the "people," completed the
act of election.
Interference of the Community in War and Administration
Not the party of the government only, but the party of reform also,
very properly regarded the military, executive, and financial
government as the legitimate domain of the senate, and carefully
abstained from making full use of, to say nothing of augmenting, the
formal power vested in primary assemblies that were inwardly doomed to
inevitable dissolution. Never even in the most limited monarchy was a
part so completely null assigned to the monarch as was allotted to the
sovereign Roman people: this was no doubt in more than one respect to
be regretted, but it was, owing to the existing state of the comitial
machine, even in the view of the friends of reform a matter of
necessity. For this reason Cato and those who shared his views never
submitted to the burgesses a question, which trenched on government
strictly so called; and never, directly or indirectly, by decree of
the burgesses extorted from the senate the political or financial
measures which they wished, such as the declaration of war against
Carthage and the assignations of land. The government of the senate
might be bad; the primary assemblies could not govern at all. Not
that an evil-disposed majority predominated in them; on the contrary
the counsel of a man of standing, the loud call of honour, and the
louder call of necessity were still, as a rule, listened to in the
comitia, and averted the most injurious and disgraceful results.
The burgesses, before whom Marcellus pleaded his cause, ignominiously
dismissed his accuser, and elected the accused as consul for the
following year: they suffered themselves also to be persuaded of the
necessity of the war against Philip, terminated the war against
Perseus by the election of Paullus, and accorded to the latter his
well-deserved triumph. But in order to such elections and such
decrees there was needed some special stimulus; in general the mass
having no will of its own followed the first impulse, and folly or
accident dictated the decision.
Disorganisation of Government
But the weakening of the government and the weakening of the community
itself were among the lesser dangers that sprang from this demagogism.
Still more directly the factious violence of individual ambition
pushed itself forward under the aegis of the constitutional rights of
the burgesses. That which formally issued forth as the will of the
supreme authority in the state was in reality very often the mere
personal pleasure of the mover; and what was to be the fate of a
commonwealth in which war and peace, the nomination and deposition of
the general and his officers, the public chest and the public
property, were dependent on the caprices of the multitude and its
accidental leaders? The thunder-storm had not yet burst; but the
clouds were gathering in denser masses, and occasional peals of
thunder were already rolling through the sultry air. It was a
circumstance, moreover, fraught with double danger, that the
tendencies which were apparently most opposite met together at their
extremes both as regarded ends and as regarded means. Family policy
and demagogism carried on a similar and equally dangerous rivalry in
patronizing and worshipping the rabble. Gaius Flaminius was regarded
by the statesmen of the following generation as the initiator of that
course from which proceeded the reforms of the Gracchi and--we may
add--the democratico-monarchical revolution that ensued. But Publius
Scipio also, although setting the fashion to the nobility in
arrogance, title-hunting, and client-making, sought support for his
personal and almost dynastic policy of opposition to the senate in the
multitude, which he not only charmed by the dazzling effect of his
personal qualities, but also bribed by his largesses of grain; in the
legions, whose favour he courted by all means whether right or wrong;
and above all in the body of clients, high and low, that personally
adhered to him. Only the dreamy mysticism, on which the charm as well
as the weakness of that remarkable man so largely depended, never
suffered him to awake at all, or allowed him to awake but imperfectly,
out of the belief that he was nothing, and that he desired to be
nothing, but the first burgess of Rome.
17. The stability of the Roman nobility may be clearly traced, more
especially in the case of the patrician -gentes-, by means of the
consular and aedilician Fasti. As is well known, the consulate was
held by one patrician and one plebeian in each year from 388 to 581
(with the exception of the years 399, 400, 401, 403, 405, 409, 411, in
which both consuls were patricians). Moreover, the colleges of curule
aediles were composed exclusively of patricians in the odd years of
the Varronian reckoning, at least down to the close of the sixth
century, and they are known for the sixteen years 541, 545, 547, 549,
551, 553, 555, 557, 561, 565, 567, 575, 585, 589, 591, 593. These
patrician consuls and aediles are, as respects their -gentes-,
distributed as follows:--
Cornelii 15 15 15
Valerii 10 8 4
Claudii 4 8 2
Aemilii 9 6 2
Fabii 6 6 1
Manlii 4 6 1
Postumii 2 6 2
Servilii 3 4 2
Quinctii 2 3 1
Furii 2 3 -
Sulpicii 6 4 2
Veturii - 2 -
Papirii 3 1 -
Nautii 2 - -
Julii 1 - 1
Foslii 1 - -
--- --- ---
70 70 32
Thus the fifteen or sixteen houses of the high nobility, that were
powerful in the state at the time of the Licinian laws, maintained
their ground without material change in their relative numbers--which
no doubt were partly kept up by adoption--for the next two centuries,
and indeed down to the end of the republic. To the circle of the
plebeian nobility new -gentes- doubtless were from time to time added;
but the old plebian houses, such as the Licinii, Fulvii, Atilii,
Domitii, Marcii, Junii, predominate very decidedly in the Fasti
throughout three centuries.
23. The expenses of these were, however, probably thrown in great part
on the adjoining inhabitants. The old system of making requisitions
of task-work was not abolished: it must not unfrequently have happened
that the slaves of the landholders were called away to be employed in
the construction of roads. (Cato, de R. R. 2 )
45. The laying out of the circus is attested. Respecting the origin
of the plebeian games there is no ancient tradition (for what is said
by the Pseudo-Asconius, p. 143, Orell. is not such); but seeing that
they were celebrated in the Flaminian circus (Val. Max. i, 7, 4), and
first certainly occur in 538, four years after it was built (Liv.
xxiii. 30), what we have stated above is sufficiently proved.
48. III. IX. Death of Scipio. The first certain instance of such a
surname is that of Manius Valerius Maximus, consul in 491, who, as
conqueror of Messana, assumed the name Messalla (ii. 170): that the
consul of 419 was, in a similar manner, called Calenus, is an error.
The presence of Maximus as a surname in the Valerian (i. 348) and
Fabian (i. 397) clans is not quite analogous.
Roman Economics
Farming of Estates
Their Size
Object of Husbandry
Means of Husbandry
Cattle
The labours of the field were performed by means of oxen which were
employed for ploughing, and of asses, which were used specially for
the carriage of manure and for driving the mill; perhaps a horse also
was kept, apparently for the use of the master. These animals were
not reared on the estate, but were purchased; oxen and horses at least
were generally castrated. Cato assigns to an estate of 100 -jugera-
one, to one of 240 -jugera- three, yoke of oxen; a later writer on
agriculture, Saserna, assigns two yoke to the 200 -jugera-. Three
asses were, according to Cato's estimate, required for the smaller,
and four for the larger, estate.
Slaves
Other Labourers
The husbandry of the petty farmer differed from that of the estate-
holder only or chiefly in its being on a smaller scale. The owner
himself and his children in this case worked along with the slaves or
in their room. The quantity of cattle was reduced, and, where an
estate no longer covered the expenses of the plough and of the yoke
that drew it, the hoe formed the substitute. The culture of the olive
and the vine was less prominent, or was entirely wanting.
Pastoral Husbandry
Results
Competition of Transmarine Corn
When the small holdings ceased to yield any substantial clear return,
the farmers were irretrievably ruined, and the more so that they
gradually, although more slowly than the other classes, lost the moral
tone and frugal habits of the earlier ages of the republic It was
merely a question of time, how rapidly the hides of the Italian
farmers would, by purchase or by resignation, become merged in
the larger estates.
The landlord was better able to maintain himself than the farmer.
The former produced at a cheaper rate than the latter, when, instead
of letting his land according to the older system to petty temporary
lessees, he caused it according to the newer system to be cultivated
by his slaves. Accordingly, where this course had not been adopted
even at an earlier period,(12) the competition of Sicilian slave-corn
compelled the Italian landlord to follow it, and to have the work
performed by slaves without wife or child instead of families of free
labourers. The landlord, moreover, could hold his ground better
against competitors by means of improvements or changes in
cultivation, and he could content himself with a smaller return from
the soil than the farmer, who wanted capital and intelligence and who
merely had what was requisite for his subsistence. Hence the Roman
landholder comparatively neglected the culture of grain--which in many
rases seems to have been restricted to the raising of the quantity
required for the staff of labourers(13)--and gave increased attention
to the production of oil and wine as well as to the breeding of
cattle. These, under the favourable climate of Italy, had no need to
fear foreign competition; Italian wine, Italian oil, Italian wool not
only commanded the home markets, but were soon sent abroad; the valley
of the Po, which could find no consumption for its corn, provided the
half of Italy with swine and bacon. With this the statements that
have reached us as to the economic results of the Roman husbandry very
well agree. There is some ground for assuming that capital invested
in land was reckoned to yield a good return at 6 per cent; this
appears to accord with the average interest of capital at this period,
which was about twice as much. The rearing of cattle yielded on the
whole better results than arable husbandry: in the latter the vineyard
gave the best return, next came the vegetable garden and the olive
orchard, while meadows and corn-fields yielded least.(14)
Management of Money
Moneylending
Speculation of Contractors
Commerce
Manufacturing Industry
The Roman mercantile transactions of this period fully kept pace with
the contemporary development of political power, and were no less
grand of their kind. Any one who wishes to have a clear idea of the
activity of the traffic with other lands, needs only to look into the
literature, more especially the comedies, of this period, in which the
Phoenician merchant is brought on the stage speaking Phoenician, and
the dialogue swarms with Greek and half Greek words and phrases.
But the extent and zealous prosecution of Roman business-dealings may
be traced most distinctly by means of coins and monetary relations.
The Roman denarius quite kept pace with the Roman legions. We have
already mentioned(19) that the Sicilian mints--last of all that of
Syracuse in 542--were closed or at any rate restricted to small money
in consequence of the Roman conquest, and that in Sicily and Sardinia
the -denarius- obtained legal circulation at least side by side with
the older silver currency and probably very soon became the exclusive
legal tender. With equal if not greater rapidity the Roman silver
coinage penetrated into Spain, where the great silver-mines existed
and there was virtually no earlier national coinage; at a very
early period the Spanish towns even began to coin after the Roman
standard.(20) On the whole, as Carthage coined only to a very limited
extent,(21) there existed not a single important mint in addition to
that of Rome in the region of the western Mediterranean, with the
exception of that of Massilia and perhaps also those of the Illyrian
Greeks in Apollonia and Dyrrhachium. Accordingly, when the Romans
began to establish themselves in the region of the Po, these mints
were about 525 subjected to the Roman standard in such a way, that,
while they retained the right of coining silver, they uniformly
--and the Massiliots in particular--were led to adjust their
--drachma-- to the weight of the Roman three-quarter -denarius-, which
the Roman government on its part began to coin, primarily for the use
of Upper Italy, under the name of the "coin of victory" (-victoriatus-
). This new system, dependent on the Roman, not merely prevailed
throughout the Massiliot, Upper Italian, and Illyrian territories; but
these coins even penetrated into the barbarian lands on the north,
those of Massilia, for instance, into the Alpine districts along the
whole basin of the Rhone, and those of Illyria as far as the modern
Transylvania. The eastern half of the Mediterranean was not yet
reached by the Roman money, as it had not yet fallen under the direct
sovereignty of Rome; but its place was filled by gold, the true and
natural medium for international and transmarine commerce. It is
true that the Roman government, in conformity with its strictly
conservative character, adhered--with the exception of a temporary
coinage of gold occasioned by the financial embarrassment during the
Hannibalic war(22)--steadfastly to the rule of coining silver only in
addition to the national-Italian copper; but commerce had already
assumed such dimensions, that it was able even in the absence of money
to conduct its transactions with gold by weight. Of the sum in cash,
which lay in the Roman treasury in 597, scarcely a sixth was coined or
uncoined silver, five-sixths consisted of gold in bars,(23) and beyond
doubt the precious metals were found in all the chests of the larger
Roman capitalists in substantially similar proportions. Already
therefore gold held the first place in great transactions; and,
as may be further inferred from this fact, in general commerce the
preponderance belonged to that carried on with foreign lands, and
particularly with the east, which since the times of Philip and
Alexander the Great had adopted a gold currency.
Roman Wealth
Mercantile Spirit
Associations
All this laid the foundation for that endurance of Roman wealth,
which was perhaps still more remarkable than its magnitude. The
phenomenon, unique perhaps of its kind, to which we have already
called attention(27)--that the standing of the great clans remained
almost the same throughout several centuries--finds its explanation
in the somewhat narrow but solid principles on which they managed
their mercantile property.
Moneyed Aristocracy
Civil equality, which had already received a fatal wound through the
rise of the ruling order of lords, suffered an equally severe blow in
consequence of the line of social demarcation becoming more and more
distinctly drawn between the rich and the poor. Nothing more
effectually promoted this separation in a downward direction than the
already-mentioned rule--apparently a matter of indifference, but in
reality involving the utmost arrogance and insolence on the part of
the capitalists--that it was disgraceful to take money for work; a
wall of partition was thus raised not merely between the common day-
labourer or artisan and the respectable landlord or manufacturer, but
also between the soldier or subaltern and the military tribune, and
between the clerk or messenger and the magistrate. In an upward
direction a similar barrier was raised by the Claudian law suggested
by Gaius Flaminius (shortly before 536), which prohibited senators
and senators' sons from possessing sea-going vessels except for the
transport of the produce of their estates, and probably also from
participating in public contracts--forbidding them generally from
carrying on whatever the Romans included under the head of
"speculation" (-quaestus-).(28) It is true that this enactment was
not called for by the senators; it was on the contrary a work of the
democratic opposition, which perhaps desired in the first instance
merely to prevent the evil of members of the governing class
personally entering into dealings with the government. It may be,
moreover, that the capitalists in this instance, as so often
afterwards, made common cause with the democratic party, and seized
the opportunity of diminishing competition by the exclusion of the
senators. The former object was, of course, only very imperfectly
attained, for the system of partnership opened up to the senators
ample facilities for continuing to speculate in secret; but this
decree of the people drew a legal line of demarcation between those
men of quality who did not speculate at all or at any rate not openly
and those who did, and it placed alongside of the aristocracy which
was primarily political an aristocracy which was purely moneyed--the
equestrian order, as it was afterwards called, whose rivalries with
the senatorial order fill the history of the following century.
Cato the leader of the reform party expresses himself still more
emphatically than the comedian. "Lending money at interest," he says
in the preface to his treatise on agriculture, "has various
advantages; but it is not honourable. Our forefathers accordingly
ordained, and inscribed it among their laws, that the thief should be
bound to pay twofold, but the man who takes interest fourfold,
compensation; whence we may infer how much worse a citizen they deemed
the usurer than the thief." There is no great difference, he elsewhere
considers, between a money-lender and a murderer; and it must be
allowed that his acts did not fall short of his words--when governor
of Sardinia, by his rigorous administration of the law he drove the
Roman bankers to their wits' end. The great majority of the ruling
senatorial order regarded the system of the speculators with dislike,
and not only conducted themselves in the provinces on the whole with
more integrity and honour than these moneyed men, but often acted as
a restraint on them. The frequent changes of the Roman chief
magistrates, however, and the inevitable inequality in their mode
of handling the laws, necessarily abated the effort to check such
proceedings.
Development of Italy
The general result of this system is only too clearly obvious in the
changed proportions of the population. It is true that the condition
of the various districts of Italy was very unequal, and some were even
prosperous. The farms, instituted in great numbers in the region
between the Apennines and the Po at the time of its colonization, did
not so speedily disappear. Polybius, who visited that quarter not
long after the close of the present period, commends its numerous,
handsome, and vigorous population: with a just legislation as to corn
it would doubtless have been possible to make the basin of the Po, and
not Sicily the granary of the capital. In like manner Picenum and the
so-called -ager Gallicus- acquired a numerous body of farmers through
the distributions of domain-land consequent on the Flaminian law of
522--a body, however, which was sadly reduced in the Hannibalic war.
In Etruria, and perhaps also in Umbria, the internal condition of the
subject communities was unfavourable to the flourishing of a class
of free farmers, Matters were better in Latium--which could not be
entirely deprived of the advantages of the market of the capital, and
which had on the whole been spared by the Hannibalic war--as well as
in the secluded mountain-valleys of the Marsians and Sabellians. On
the other hand the Hannibalic war had fearfully devastated southern
Italy and had ruined, in addition to a number of smaller townships,
its two largest cities, Capua and Tarentum, both once able to send
into the field armies of 30,000 men. Samnium had recovered from the
severe wars of the fifth century: according to the census of 529 it
was in a position to furnish half as many men capable of arms as all
the Latin towns, and it was probably at that time, next to the -ager
Romanus-, the most flourishing region of the peninsula. But the
Hannibalic war had desolated the land afresh, and the assignations
of land in that quarter to the soldiers of Scipio's army, although
considerable, probably did not cover the loss. Campania and Apulia,
both hitherto well-peopled regions, were still worse treated in the
same war by friend and foe. In Apulia, no doubt, assignations of land
took place afterwards, but the colonies instituted there were not
successful. The beautiful plain of Campania remained more populous;
but the territory of Capua and of the other communities broken up in
the Hannibalic war became state-property, and the occupants of it were
uniformly not proprietors, but petty temporary lessees. Lastly, in
the wide Lucanian and Bruttian territories the population, which was
already very thin before the Hannibalic war, was visited by the whole
severity of the war itself and of the penal executions that followed
in its train; nor was much done on the part of Rome to revive the
agriculture there--with the exception perhaps of Valentia (Vibo,
now Monteleone), none of the colonies established there attained
real prosperity.
With every allowance for the inequality in the political and economic
circumstances of the different districts and for the comparatively
flourishing condition of several of them, the retrogression is yet on
the whole unmistakeable, and it is confirmed by the most indisputable
testimonies as to the general condition of Italy. Cato and Polybius
agree in stating that Italy was at the end of the sixth century far
weaker in population than at the end of the fifth, and was no longer
able to furnish armies so large as in the first Punic war. The
increasing difficulty of the levy, the necessity of lowering the
qualification for service in the legions, and the complaints of the
allies as to the magnitude of the contingents to be furnished by them,
confirm these statements; and, in the case of the Roman burgesses, the
numbers tell the same tale. In 502, shortly after the expedition of
Regulus to Africa, they amounted to 298,000 men capable of bearing
arms; thirty years later, shortly before the commencement of the
Hannibalic war (534), they had fallen off to 270,000, or about a
tenth, and again twenty years after that, shortly before the end of
the same war (550), to 214,000, or about a fourth; and a generation
afterwards--during which no extraordinary losses occurred, but the
institution of the great burgess-colonies in the plain of northern
Italy in particular occasioned a perceptible and exceptional increase
--the numbers of the burgesses had hardly again reached the point at
which they stood at the commencement of this period. If we had
similar statements regarding the Italian population generally,
they would beyond all doubt exhibit a deficit relatively still more
considerable. The decline of the national vigour less admits of
proof; but it is stated by the writers on agriculture that flesh and
milk disappeared more and more from the diet of the common people.
At the same time the slave population increased, as the free
population declined. In Apulia, Lucania, and the Bruttian land,
pastoral husbandry must even in the time of Cato have preponderated
over agriculture; the half-savage slave-herdsmen were here in reality
masters in the house. Apulia was rendered so insecure by them that a
strong force had to be stationed there; in 569 a slave-conspiracy
planned on the largest scale, and mixed up with the proceedings of the
Bacchanalia, was discovered there, and nearly 7000 men were condemned
as criminals. In Etruria also Roman troops had to take the field
against a band of slaves (558), and even in Latium there were
instances in which towns like Setia and Praeneste were in danger of
being surprised by a band of runaway serfs (556). The nation was
visibly diminishing, and the community of free burgesses was resolving
itself into a body composed of masters and slaves; and, although it
was in the first instance the two long wars with Carthage which
decimated and ruined both the burgesses and the allies, the Roman
capitalists beyond doubt contributed quite as much as Hamilcar and
Hannibal to the decline in the vigour and the numbers of the Italian
people. No one can say whether the government could have rendered
help; but it was an alarming and discreditable fact, that the circles
of the Roman aristocracy, well-meaning and energetic as in great part
they were, never once showed any insight into the real gravity of the
situation or any foreboding of the full magnitude of the danger. When
a Roman lady belonging to the high nobility, the sister of one of the
numerous citizen-admirals who in the first Punic war had ruined the
fleets of the state, one day got among a crowd in the Roman Forum, she
said aloud in the hearing of those around, that it was high time to
place her brother once more at the head of the fleet and to relieve
the pressure in the market-place by bleeding the citizens afresh
(508). Those who thus thought and spoke were, no doubt, a small
minority; nevertheless this outrageous speech was simply a forcible
expression of the criminal indifference with which the whole noble
and rich world looked down on the common citizens and farmers.
They did not exactly desire their destruction, but they allowed it to
run its course; and so desolation advanced with gigantic steps over
the flourishing land of Italy, where countless free men had just been
enjoying a moderate and merited prosperity.
It is obvious that the products which Italy had not originally are for
the most part those very products which seem to us truly "Italian;"
and if modern Germany, as compared with the Germany visited by Caesar,
may be called a southern land, Italy has since in no less degree
acquired a "more southern" aspect.
4. The lease lirst assumed real importance when the Roman capitalists
began to acquire transmarine possessions on a great scale; then indeed
they knew how to value it, when a temporary lease was continued
through several generations (Colum. i. 7, 3).
5. That the space between the vines was occupied not by grain, but
only at the most by such fodder plants as easily grew in the shade, is
evident from Cato (33, comp. 137), and accordingly Columella (iii. 3)
calculates on no other accessory gain in the case of a vineyard except
the produce of the young shoots sold. On the other hand, the orchard
(-arbustum-) was sown like any corn field (Colum. ii. 9, 6). It was
only where the vine was trained on living trees that corn was
cultivated in the intervals between them.
6. Mago, or his translator (in Varro, R. R., i. 17, 3), advises that
slaves should not be bred, but should be purchased not under 22 years
of age; and Cato must have had a similar course in view, as the
personal staff of his model farm clearly shows, although he does not
exactly say so. Cato (2) expressly counsels the sale of old and
diseased slaves. The slave-breeding described by Columella (I. I.
Italian History), under which female slaves who had three sons were
exempted from labour, and the mothers of four sons were even
manumitted, was doubtless an independent speculation rather than a
part of the regular management of the estate--similar to the trade
pursued by Cato himself of purchasing slaves to be trained and sold
again (Plutarch, Cat. Mai. 21). The characteristic taxation mentioned
in this same passage probably has reference to the body of servants
properly so called (-familia urbana-).
8. Cato does not expressly say this as to the vintage, but Varro does
so (I. II. Relation of the Latins to the Umbro-Samnites), and it is
implied in the nature of the case. It would have been economically an
error to fix the number of the slaves on a property by the standard of
the labours of harvest; and least of all, had such been the case,
would the grapes have been sold on the tree, which yet was frequently
done (Cato, 147).
11. The medium price of grain in the capital may be assumed at least
for the seventh and eighth centuries of Rome at one -denarius- for the
Roman -modius-, or 2 shillings 8 pence per bushel of wheat, for which
there is now paid (according to the average of the prices in the
provinces of Brandenburg and Pomerania from 1816 to 1841) about 3
shillings 5 pence. Whether this not very considerable difference
between the Roman and the modern prices depends on a rise in the value
of corn or on a fall in the value of silver, can hardly be decided.
14. That the Roman landlord made on an average 6 per cent from his
capital, may be inferred from Columella, iii. 3, 9. We have a more
precise estimate of the expense and produce only in the case of the
vine yard, for which Columella gives the following calculation of
the cost per -jugerum-:
23. There were in the treasury 17,410 Roman pounds of gold, 22,070
pounds of uncoined, and 18,230 pounds of coined, silver. The legal
ratio of gold to silver was: 1 pound of gold = 4000 sesterces, or 1:
11.91.
26. In the remarkable model contract given by Cato (141) for the
letting of the olive harvest, there is the following paragraph:--
28. Livy (xxi. 63; comp. Cic. Verr. v. 18, 45) mentions only the
enactment as to the sea-going vessels; but Asconius (in Or. in toga
cand. p. 94, Orell.) and Dio. (lv. 10, 5) state that the senator was
also forbidden by law to undertake state-contracts (-redemptiones-);
and, as according to Livy "all speculation was considered unseemly for
a senator," the Claudian law probably reached further than he states.
29. Cato, like every other Roman, invested a part of his means in the
breeding of cattle, and in commercial and other undertakings. But it
was not his habit directly to violate the laws; he neither speculated
in state-leases--which as a senator he was not allowed to do--nor
practised usury. It is an injustice to charge him with a practice in
the latter respect at variance with his theory; the -fenus nauticum-,
in which he certainly engaged, was not a branch of usury prohibited by
the law; it really formed an essential part of the business of
chartering and freighting vessels.
CHAPTER XIII
Life in the case of the Roman was spent under conditions of austere
restraint, and, the nobler he was, the less he was a free man.
All-powerful custom restricted him to a narrow range of thought
and action; and to have led a serious and strict or, to use the
characteristic Latin expressions, a sad and severe life, was his
glory. No one had more and no one had less to do than to keep his
household in good order and manfully bear his part of counsel and
action in public affairs. But, while the individual had neither the
wish nor the power to be aught else than a member of the community,
the glory and the might of that community were felt by every
individual burgess as a personal possession to be transmitted along
with his name and his homestead to his posterity; and thus, as one
generation after another was laid in the tomb and each in succession
added its fresh contribution to the stock of ancient honours, the
collective sense of dignity in the noble families of Rome swelled into
that mighty civic pride, the like of which the earth has never seen
again, and the traces of which, as strange as they are grand, seem to
us, wherever we meet them, to belong as it were to another world. It
was one of the characteristic peculiarities of this powerful sense of
citizenship, that it was, while not suppressed, yet compelled by the
rigid simplicity and equality that prevailed among the citizens to
remain locked up within the breast during life, and was only allowed
to find expression after death; but then it was displayed in the
funeral rites of the man of distinction so conspicuously and
intensely, that this ceremonial is better fitted than any other
phenomenon of Roman life to give to us who live in later times a
glimpse of that wonderful spirit of the Romans.
A Roman Funeral
Hellenism in Politics
But the real struggle between Hellenism and its national antagonists
during the present period was carried on in the field of faith, of
manners, and of art and literature; and we must not omit to attempt
some delineation of this great strife of principles, however difficult
it may be to present a summary view of the myriad forms and aspects
which the conflict assumed.
The extent to which the old simple faith still retained a living hold
on the Italians is shown very clearly by the admiration or
astonishment which this problem of Italian piety excited among the
contemporary Greeks. On occasion of the quarrel with the Aetolians it
was reported of the Roman commander-in-chief that during battle he was
solely occupied in praying and sacrificing like a priest; whereas
Polybius with his somewhat stale moralizing calls the attention of his
countrymen to the political usefulness of this piety, and admonishes
them that a state cannot consist of wise men alone, and that such
ceremonies are very convenient for the sake of the multitude.
Religious Economy
The Romans did not create a "God of gold," as they had formerly
created a "God of silver";(2) nevertheless he reigned in reality alike
over the highest and lowest spheres of religious life. The old pride
of the Latin national religion--the moderation of its economic
demands--was irrevocably gone.
Theology
At the same time its ancient simplicity also departed. Theology, the
spurious offspring of reason and faith, was already occupied in
introducing its own tedious prolixity and solemn inanity into the old
homely national faith, and thereby expelling the true spirit of that
faith. The catalogue of the duties and privileges of the priest of
Jupiter, for instance, might well have a place in the Talmud. They
pushed the natural rule--that no religious service can be acceptable
to the gods unless it is free from flaw--to such an extent in
practice, that a single sacrifice had to be repeated thirty times in
succession on account of mistakes again and again committed, and that
the games, which also formed a part of divine service, were regarded
as undone if the presiding magistrate had committed any slip in word
or deed or if the music even had paused at a wrong time, and so had to
be begun afresh, frequently for several, even as many as seven, times
in succession.
Irreligious Spirit
Thus the old national religion was visibly on the decline; and, as
the great trees of the primeval forest were uprooted the soil became
covered with a rank growth of thorns and of weeds that had never been
seen before. Native superstitions and foreign impostures of the most
various hues mingled, competed, and conflicted with each other. No
Italian stock remained exempt from this transmuting of old faith into
new superstition. As the lore of entrails and of lightning was
cultivated among the Etruscans, so the liberal art of observing birds
and conjuring serpent? flourished luxuriantly among the Sabellians
and more particularly the Marsians. Even among the Latin nation, and
in fact in Rome itself, we meet with similar phenomena, although they
are, comparatively speaking, less conspicuous. Such for instance were
the lots of Praeneste, and the remarkable discovery at Rome in 573 of
the tomb and posthumous writings of the king Numa, which are alleged
to have prescribed religious rites altogether strange and unheard of.
But the credulous were to their regret not permitted to learn more
than this, coupled with the fact that the books looked very new; for
the senate laid hands on the treasure and ordered the rolls to be
summarily thrown into the fire. The home manufacture was thus quite
sufficient to meet such demands of folly as might fairly be expected;
but the Romans were far from being content with it. The Hellenism of
that epoch, already denationalized and pervaded by Oriental mysticism,
introduced not only unbelief but also superstition in its most
offensive and dangerous forms to Italy; and these vagaries moreover
had quite a special charm, precisely because they were foreign.
Worship of Cybele
Worship of Bacchus
The effect was only too rapidly and fearfully apparent. A few years
later (568) rites of the most abominable character came to the
knowledge of the Roman authorities; a secret nocturnal festival in
honour of the god Bacchus had been first introduced into Etruria
through a Greek priest, and, spreading like a cancer, had rapidly
reached Rome and propagated itself over all Italy, everywhere
corrupting families and giving rise to the most heinous crimes,
unparalleled unchastity, falsifying of testaments, and murdering by
poison. More than 7000 men were sentenced to punishment, most of them
to death, on this account, and rigorous enactments were issued as to
the future; yet they did not succeed in repressing the ongoings, and
six years later (574) the magistrate to whom the matter fell
complained that 3000 men more had been condemned and still there
appeared no end of the evil.
Repressive Measures
But in such times reason from the first plays a losing game against
unreason. The government, no doubt, interfered; the pious impostors
were punished and expelled by the police; every foreign worship not
specially sanctioned was forbidden; even the consulting of the
comparatively innocent lot-oracle of Praeneste was officially
prohibited in 512; and, as we have already said, those who took part
in the Bacchanalia were rigorously prosecuted. But, when once men's
heads are thoroughly turned, no command of the higher authorities
avails to set them right again. How much the government was obliged
to concede, or at any rate did concede, is obvious from what has been
stated. The Roman custom, under which the state consulted Etruscan
sages in certain emergencies and the government accordingly took steps
to secure the traditional transmission of Etruscan lore in the noble
families of Etruria, as well as the permission of the secret worship
of Demeter, which was not immoral and was restricted to women, may
probably be ranked with the earlier innocent and comparatively
indifferent adoption of foreign rites. But the admission of the
worship of the Mother of the Gods was a bad sign of the weakness which
the government felt in presence of the new superstition, perhaps even
of the extent to which it was itself pervaded by it; and it showed in
like manner either an unpardonable negligence or something still
worse, that the authorities only took steps against such proceedings
as the Bacchanalia at so late a stage, and even then on an accidental
information.
Austerity of Manners
Catos's Family Life
The picture, which has been handed down to us of the life of Cato the
Elder, enables us in substance to perceive how, according to the ideas
of the respectable burgesses of that period, the private life of the
Roman should be spent. Active as Cato was as a statesman, pleader,
author, and mercantile speculator, family life always formed with him
the central object of existence; it was better, he thought, to be a
good husband than a great senator. His domestic discipline was
strict. The servants were not allowed to leave the house without
orders, nor to talk of what occurred to the household to strangers.
The more severe punishments were not inflicted capriciously, but
sentence was pronounced and executed according to a quasi-judicial
procedure: the strictness with which offences were punished may be
inferred from the fact, that one of his slaves who had concluded a
purchase without orders from his master hanged himself on the matter
coming to Cato's ears. For slight offences, such as mistakes
committed in waiting at table, the consular was wont after dinner to
administer to the culprit the proper number of lashes with a thong
wielded by his own hand. He kept his wife and children in order no
less strictly, but by other means; for he declared it sinful to lay
hands on a wife or grown-up children in the same way as on slaves.
In the choice of a wife he disapproved marrying for money, and
recommended men to look to good descent; but he himself married in
old age the daughter of one of his poor clients. Moreover he adopted
views in regard to continence on the part of the husband similar to
those which everywhere prevail in slave countries; a wife was
throughout regarded by him as simply a necessary evil. His writings
abound in invectives against the chattering, finery-loving,
ungovernable fair sex; it was the opinion of the old lord that "all
women are plaguy and proud," and that, "were men quit of women, our
life might probably be less godless." On the other hand the rearing
of children born in wedlock was a matter which touched his heart and
his honour, and the wife in his eyes existed strictly and solely for
the children's sake. She nursed them ordinarily herself, or, if she
allowed her children to be suckled by female slaves, she also allowed
their children in return to draw nourishment from her own breast; one
of the few traits, which indicate an endeavour to mitigate the
institution of slavery by ties of human sympathy--the common impulses
of maternity and the bond of foster-brotherhood. The old general was
present in person, whenever it was possible, at the washing and
swaddling of his children. He watched with reverential care over
their childlike innocence; he assures us that he was as careful lest
he should utter an unbecoming word in presence of his children as if
he had been in presence of the Vestal Virgins, and that he never
before the eyes of his daughters embraced their mother, except when
she had become alarmed during a thunder-storm. The education of the
son was perhaps the noblest portion of his varied and variously
honourable activity. True to his maxim, that a ruddy-checked boy was
worth more than a pale one, the old soldier in person initiated his
son into all bodily exercises, and taught him to wrestle, to ride, to
swim, to box, and to endure heat and cold. But he felt very justly,
that the time had gone by when it sufficed for a Roman to be a good
farmer and soldier; and be felt also that it could not but have an
injurious influence on the mind of his boy, if he should subsequently
learn that the teacher, who had rebuked and punished him and had won
his reverence, was a mere slave. Therefore he in person taught the
boy what a Roman was wont to learn, to read and write and know the law
of the land; and even in his later years he worked his way so far into
the general culture of the Hellenes, that he was able to deliver to
his son in his native tongue whatever in that culture he deemed to be
of use to a Roman. All his writings were primarily intended for his
son, and he wrote his historical work for that son's use with large
distinct letters in his own hand. He lived in a homely and frugal
style. His strict parsimony tolerated no expenditure on luxuries. He
allowed no slave to cost him more than 1500 -denarii- (65 pounds) and
no dress more than 100 -denarii- (4 pounds: 6 shillings); no carpet was
to be seen in his house, and for a long time there was no whitewash on
the walls of the rooms. Ordinarily he partook of the same fare with
his servants, and did not buffer his outlay in cash for the meal to
exceed 30 -asses- (2 shillings); in time of war even wine was
uniformly banished from his table, and he drank water or, according to
circumstances, water mixed with vinegar. On the other hand, he was no
enemy to hospitality; he was fond of associating both with his club in
town and with the neighbouring landlords in the country; he sat long
at table, and, as his varied experience and his shrewd and ready wit
made him a pleasant companion, he disdained neither the dice nor the
wine-flask: among other receipts in his book on husbandry he even
gives a tried recipe for the case of a too hearty meal and too deep
potations. His life up to extreme old age was one of ceaseless
activity. Every moment was apportioned and occupied; and every
evening he was in the habit of turning over in his mind what he had
heard, said, or done during the day. Thus he found time for his own
affairs as well as for those of his friends and of the state, and time
also for conversation and pleasure; everything was done quickly and
without many words, and his genuine spirit of activity hated nothing
so much as bustle or a great ado about trifles. So lived the man who
was regarded by his contemporaries and by posterity as the true model
of a Roman burgess, and who appeared as it were the living embodiment
of the--certainly somewhat coarse-grained--energy and probity of Rome
in contrast with Greek indolence and Greek immorality; as a later
Roman poet says:
New Manners
The ties of family life became relaxed with fearful rapidity. The
evil of grisettes and boy-favourites spread like a pestilence, and, as
matters stood, it was not possible to take any material steps in the
way of legislation against it. The high tax, which Cato as censor
(570) laid on this most abominable species of slaves kept for luxury,
would not be of much moment, and besides fell practically into disuse
a year or two afterwards along with the property-tax generally.
Celibacy--as to which grave complaints were made as early as 520--and
divorces naturally increased in proportion. Horrible crimes were
perpetrated in the bosom of families of the highest rank; for
instance, the consul Gaius Calpurnius Piso was poisoned by his wife
and his stepson, in order to occasion a supplementary election to the
consulship and so to procure the supreme magistracy for the latter
--a plot which was successful (574). Moreover the emancipation of
women began. According to old custom the married woman was subject
in law to the marital power which was parallel with the paternal, and
the unmarried woman to the guardianship of her nearest male -agnati-,
which fell little short of the paternal power; the wife had no
property of her own, the fatherless virgin and the widow had at any
rate no right of management. But now women began to aspire to
independence in respect to property, and, getting quit of the
guardianship of their -agnati- by evasive lawyers' expedients
--particularly through mock marriages--they took the management
of their property into their own hands, or, in the event of being
married, sought by means not much better to withdraw themselves
from the marital power, which under the strict letter of the law was
necessary. The mass of capital which was collected in the hands of
women appeared to the statesmen of the time so dangerous, that they
resorted to the extravagant expedient of prohibiting by law the
testamentary nomination of women as heirs (585), and even sought by a
highly arbitrary practice to deprive women for the most part of the
collateral inheritances which fell to them without testament. In like
manner the exercise of family jurisdiction over women, which was
connected with that marital and tutorial power, became practically
more and more antiquated. Even in public matters women already
began to have a will of their own and occasionally, as Cato thought,
"to rule the rulers of the world;" their influence was to be traced
in the burgess-assembly, and already statues were erected in the
provinces to Roman ladies.
Luxury
Increase of Amusements
CHAPTER XIV
Knowledge of Languages
Language lies at the root of all mental culture; and this was
especially the case in Rome. In a community where so much importance
was attached to speeches and documents, and where the burgess, at an
age which is still according to modern ideas regarded as boyhood, was
already entrusted with the uncontrolled management of his property and
might perhaps find it necessary to make formal speeches to the
assembled community, not only was great value set all along on the
fluent and polished use of the mother-tongue, but efforts were early
made to acquire a command of it in the years of boyhood. The Greek
language also was already generally diffused in Italy in the time of
Hannibal. In the higher circles a knowledge of that language, which
was the general medium of intercourse for ancient civilization, had
long been a far from uncommon accomplishment; and now, when the change
of Rome's position in the world had so enormously increased the
intercourse with foreigners and the foreign traffic, such a knowledge
was, if not necessary, yet presumably of very material importance to
the merchant as well as the statesman. By means of the Italian slaves
and freedmen, a very large portion of whom were Greek or half-Greek
by birth the Greek language and Greek knowledge to a certain extent
reached even the lower ranks of the population, especially in the
capital. The comedies of this period may convince us that even the
humbler classes of the capital were familiar with a sort of Latin,
which could no more be properly understood without a knowledge of
Greek than the English of Sterne or the German of Wieland without
a knowledge of French.(1) Men of senatorial families, however, not
only addressed a Greek audience in Greek, but even published their
speeches--Tiberius Gracchus (consul in 577 and 591) so published a
speech which he had given at Rhodes--and in the time of Hannibal wrote
their chronicles in Greek, as we shall have occasion to mention more
particularly in the sequel. Individuals went still farther. The
Greeks honoured Flamininus by complimentary demonstrations in the
Roman language,(2) and he returned the compliment; the "great general
of the Aeneiades" dedicated his votive gifts to the Greek gods after
the Greek fashion in Greek distichs.(3) Cato reproached another
senator with the fact, that he had the effrontery to deliver Greek
recitations with the due modulation at Greek revels.
Livius Andronicus
In the very earliest Roman author the later development appears, as it
were, in embryo. The Greek Andronikos (from before 482, till after
547), afterwards as a Roman burgess called Lucius(6) Livius
Andronicus, came to Rome at an early age in 482 among the other
captives taken at Tarentum(7) and passed into the possession of the
conqueror of Sena(8) Marcus Livius Salinator (consul 535, 547). He
was employed as a slave, partly in acting and copying texts, partly in
giving instruction in the Latin and Greek languages, which he taught
both to the children of his master and to other boys of wealthy
parents in and out of the house. He distinguished himself so much in
this way that his master gave him freedom, and even the authorities,
who not unfrequently availed themselves of his services--commissioning
him, for instance, to prepare a thanksgiving-chant after the fortunate
turn taken by the Hannibalic war in 547--out of regard for him
conceded to the guild of poets and actors a place for their common
worship in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine. His authorship
arose out of his double occupation. As schoolmaster he translated the
Odyssey into Latin, in order that the Latin text might form the basis
of his Latin, as the Greek text was the basis of his Greek,
instruction; and this earliest of Roman school-books maintained its
place in education for centuries. As an actor, he not only like every
other wrote for himself the texts themselves, but he also published
them as books, that is, he read them in public and diffused them by
copies. What was still more important, he substituted the Greek drama
for the old essentially lyrical stage poetry. It was in 514, a year
after the close of the first Punic war, that the first play was
exhibited on the Roman stage. This creation of an epos, a tragedy,
and a comedy in the Roman language, and that by a man who was more
Roman than Greek, was historically an event; but we cannot speak of
his labours as having any artistic value. They make no sort of claim
to originality; viewed as translations, they are characterized by a
barbarism which is only the more perceptible, that this poetry does
not naively display its own native simplicity, but strives, after a
pedantic and stammering fashion, to imitate the high artistic culture
of the neighbouring people. The wide deviations from the original
have arisen not from the freedom, but from the rudeness of the
imitation; the treatment is sometimes insipid, sometimes turgid, the
language harsh and quaint.(9) We have no difficulty in believing the
statement of the old critics of art, that, apart from the compulsory
reading at school, none of the poems of Livius were taken up a second
time. Yet these labours were in various respects norms for succeeding
times. They began the Roman translated literature, and naturalized
the Greek metres in Latium. The reason why these were adopted only
in the dramas, while the Odyssey of Livius was written in the national
Saturnian measure, evidently was that the iambuses and trochees of
tragedy and comedy far more easily admitted of imitation in Latin
than the epic dactyls.
Audience
That only one piece was produced each day we infer from the fact,
that the spectators come from home at the beginning of the piece
(Poen. 10), and return home after its close (Epid. Pseud. Rud. Stich.
Truc. ap. fin.). They went, as these passages show, to the theatre
after the second breakfast, and were at home again for the midday
meal; the performance thus lasted, according to our reckoning, from
about noon till half-past two o'clock, and a piece of Plautus, with
music in the intervals between the acts, might probably occupy nearly
that length of time (comp. Horat. Ep. ii. i, 189). The passage, in
which Tacitus (Ann. xiv. 20) makes the spectators spend "whole days"
in the theatre, refers to the state of matters at a later period.
Comedy
Roman Comedy
Its Hellenism a Necessary Result of the Law
Such were the foundations, and such the elements which shaped the
growth, of Roman comedy. Originality was in its case excluded not
merely by want of aesthetic freedom, but in the first instance,
probably, by its subjection to police control. Among the considerable
number of Latin comedies of this sort which are known to us, there is
not one that did not announce itself as an imitation of a definite
Greek model; the title was only complete when the names of the Greek
piece and of its author were also given, and if, as occasionally
happened, the "novelty" of a piece was disputed, the question was
merely whether it had been previously translated. Comedy laid the
scene of its plot abroad not only frequently, but regularly and under
the pressure of necessity; and that species of art derived its special
name (-fabula palliata-) from the fact, that the scene was laid away
from Rome, usually in Athens, and thai the -dramatis personae- were
Greeks or at any rate not Romans. The foreign costume is strictly
carried out even in detail, especially in those things in which the
uncultivated Roman was distinctly sensible of the contrast, Thus the
names of Rome and the Romans are avoided, and, where they are referred
to, they are called in good Greek "foreigners" (-barbari-); in like
manner among the appellations of moneys and coins, that occur ever
so frequently, there does not once appear a Roman coin. We form a
strange idea of men of so great and so versatile talents as Naevius
and Plautus, if we refer such things to their free choice: this
strange and clumsy "exterritorial" character of Roman comedy
was undoubtedly due to causes very different from aesthetic
considerations. The transference of such social relations, as are
uniformly delineated in the new Attic comedy, to the Rome of the
Hannibalic period would have been a direct outrage on its civic order
and morality. But, as the dramatic spectacles at this period were
regularly given by the aediles and praetors who were entirely
dependent on the senate, and even extraordinary festivals, funeral
games for instance, could not take place without permission of the
government; and as the Roman police, moreover, was not in the habit
of standing on ceremony in any case, and least of all in dealing with
the comedians; the reason is self-evident why this comedy, even after
it was admitted as one of the Roman national amusements, might still
bring no Roman upon the stage, and remained as it were banished to
foreign lands.
Political Neutrality
The compilers were still more decidedly prohibited from naming any
living person in terms either of praise or censure, as well as from
any captious allusion to the circumstances of the times. In the whole
repertory of the Plautine and post-Plautine comedy, there is not,
so far as we know, matter for a single action of damages. In like
manner--if we leave out of view some wholly harmless jests--we meet
hardly any trace of invectives levelled at communities (invectives
which, owing to the lively municipal spirit of the Italians, would
have been specially dangerous), except the significant scoff at the
unfortunate Capuans and Atellans (18) and, what is remarkable, various
sarcasms on the arrogance and the bad Latin of the Praenestines.(19)
In general no references to the events or circumstances of the
present occur in the pieces of Plautus. The only exceptions are,
congratulations on the course of the war(20) or on the peaceful times;
general sallies directed against usurious dealings in grain or money,
against extravagance, against bribery by candidates, against the
too frequent triumphs, against those who made a trade of collecting
forfeited fines, against farmers of the revenue distraining for
payment, against the dear prices of the oil-dealers; and once--in the
-Curculio- --a more lengthened diatribe as to the doings in the Roman
market, reminding us of the -parabases- of the older Attic comedy, and
but little likely to cause offence(21) But even in the midst of such
patriotic endeavours, which from a police point of view were entirely
in order, the poet interrupts himself;
As he himself says,
he may have often written at variance with police rules, and put
dangerous questions, such as:
But the Roman police was not disposed like the Attic to hold stage-
invectives and political diatribes as privileged, or even to tolerate
them at all. Naevius was put in prison for these and similar sallies,
and was obliged to remain there, till he had publicly made amends and
recantation in other comedies. These quarrels, apparently, drove
him from his native land; but his successors took warning from his
example--one of them indicates very plainly, that he has no desire
whatever to incur an involuntary gagging like his colleague Naevius.
Thus the result was accomplished--not much less unique of its kind
than the conquest of Hannibal--that, during an epoch of the most
feverish national excitement, there arose a national stage utterly
destitute of political tinge.
Roman Barbarism
Metrical Treatment
Scenic Arrangements
Lastly, the arrangements for the production of the pieces on the stage
bore the like stamp of indifference to aesthetic requirements on the
part of the managers and the public. The stage of the Greeks--which
on account of the extent of the theatre and from the performances
taking place by day made no pretension to acting properly so called,
employed men to represent female characters, and absolutely required
an artificial strengthening of the voice of the actor--was entirely
dependent, in a scenic as well as acoustic point of view, on the use
of facial and resonant masks. These were well known also in Rome; in
amateur performances the players appeared without exception masked.
But the actors who were to perform the Greek comedies in Rome were
not supplied with the masks--beyond doubt much more artificial--that
were necessary for them; a circumstance which, apart from all else in
connection with the defective acoustic arrangements of the stage,(26)
not only compelled the actor to exert his voice unduly, but drove
Livius to the highly inartistic but inevitable expedient of having
the portions which were to be sung performed by a singer not belonging
to the staff of actors, and accompanied by the mere dumb show of the
actor within whose part they fell. As little were the givers of the
Roman festivals disposed to put themselves to material expense for
decorations and machinery. The Attic stage regularly presented a
street with houses in the background, and had no shifting decorations;
but, besides various other apparatus, it possessed more especially
a contrivance for pushing forward on the chief stage a smaller one
representing the interior of a house. The Roman theatre, however, was
not provided with this; and we can hardly therefore throw the blame
on the poet, if everything, even childbirth, was represented on
the street.
Aesthetic Result
Such was the nature of the Roman comedy of the sixth century. The
mode in which the Greek dramas were transferred to Rome furnishes a
picture, historically invaluable, of the diversity in the culture
of the two nations; but in an aesthetic and a moral point of view the
original did not stand high, and the imitation stood still lower. The
world of beggarly rabble, to whatever extent the Roman editors might
take possession of it under the benefit of the inventory, presented
in Rome a forlorn and strange aspect, shorn as it were of its delicate
characteristics: comedy no longer rested on the basis of reality, but
persons and incidents seemed capriciously or carelessly mingled as in
a game of cards; in the original a picture from life, it became in the
reproduction a caricature. Under a management which could announce
a Greek agon with flute-playing, choirs of dancers, tragedians, and
athletes, and eventually convert it into a boxing-match;(27) and in
presence of a public which, as later poets complain, ran away en masse
from the play, if there were pugilists, or rope-dancers, or even
gladiators to be seen; poets such as the Roman composers were--workers
for hire and of inferior social position--were obliged even perhaps
against their own better judgment and their own better taste to
accommodate themselves more or less to the prevailing frivolity and
rudeness. It was quite possible, nevertheless, that there might arise
among them individuals of lively and vigorous talent, who were able at
least to repress the foreign and factitious element in poetry, and,
when they had found their fitting sphere, to produce pleasing and
even important creations.
Naevius
At the head of these stood Gnaeus Naevius, the first Roman who
deserves to be called a poet, and, so far as the accounts preserved
regarding him and the few fragments of his works allow us to form
an opinion, to all appearance as regards talent one of the most
remarkable and most important names in the whole range of Roman
literature. He was a younger contemporary of Andronicus--his poetical
activity began considerably before, and probably did not end till
after, the Hannibalic war--and felt in a general sense his influence;
he was, as is usually the case in artificial literatures, a worker in
all the forms of art produced by his predecessor, in epos, tragedy,
and comedy, and closely adhered to him in the matter of metres.
Nevertheless, an immense chasm separates the poets and their poems.
Naevius was neither freedman, schoolmaster, nor actor, but a citizen
of unstained character although not of rank, belonging probably to one
of the Latin communities of Campania, and a soldier in the first Punic
war.(28) In thorough contrast to the language of Livius, that of
Naevius is easy and clear, free from all stiffness and affectation,
and seems even in tragedy to avoid pathos as it were on purpose; his
verses, in spite of the not unfrequent -hiatus- and various other
licences afterwards disallowed, have a smooth and graceful flow.(29)
While the quasi-poetry of Livius proceeded, somewhat like that of
Gottsched in Germany, from purely external impulses and moved wholly
in the leading-strings of the Greeks, his successor emancipated Roman
poetry, and with the true divining-rod of the poet struck those
springs out of which alone in Italy a native poetry could well up
--national history and comedy. Epic poetry no longer merely
furnished the schoolmaster with a lesson-book, but addressed itself
independently to the hearing and reading public. Composing for the
stage had been hitherto, like the preparation of the stage costume, a
subsidiary employment of the actor or a mechanical service performed
for him; with Naevius the relation was inverted, and the actor now
became the servant of the composer. His poetical activity is marked
throughout by a national stamp. This stamp is most distinctly
impressed on his grave national drama and on his national epos, of
which we shall have to speak hereafter; but it also appears in his
comedies, which of all his poetic performances seem to have been the
best adapted to his talents and the most successful. It was probably,
as we have already said,(30) external considerations alone that
induced the poet to adhere in comedy so much as he did to the Greek
originals; and this did not prevent him from far outstripping his
successors and probably even the insipid originals in the freshness of
his mirth and in the fulness of his living interest in the present;
indeed in a certain sense he reverted to the paths of the Aristophanic
comedy. He felt full well, and in his epitaph expressed, what he had
been to his nation:
Such proud language on the part of the man and the poet well befitted
one who had witnessed and had personally taken part in the struggles
with Hamilcar and with Hannibal, and who had discovered for the
thoughts and feelings of that age--so deeply agitated and so
elevated by mighty joy--a poetical expression which, if not exactly
the highest, was sound, adroit, and national. We have already
mentioned(31) the troubles into which his licence brought him with
the authorities, and how, driven presumably by these troubles from
Rome, he ended his life at Utica. In his instance likewise the
individual life was sacrificed for the common weal, and the
beautiful for the useful.
Plautus
Caecilius
Moral Result
National Comedy
Titinius
But, while the government did not allow the Roman comedian to depict
the state of things in his native city or to bring his fellow-citizens
on the stage, a national Latin comedy was not absolutely precluded
from springing up; for the Roman burgesses at this period were not yet
identified with the Latin nation, and the poet was at liberty to lay
the plot of his pieces in the Italian towns of Latin rights just as
in Athens or Massilia. In this way, in fact, the Latin original
comedy arose (-fabula togata- (35)): the earliest known composer
of such pieces, Titinius, flourished probably about the close of
this period.(36)
This comedy was also based on the new Attic intrigue-piece; it was
not translation, however, but imitation; the scene of the piece lay
in Italy, and the actors appeared in the national dress,(37) the
-toga-. Here the Latin life and doings were brought out with peculiar
freshness. The pieces delineate the civil life of the middle-sized
towns of Latium; the very titles, such as -Psaltria- or -Ferentinatis-
, -Tibicina-, -Iurisperita-, -Fullones-, indicate this; and many
particular incidents, such as that of the townsman who has his shoes
made after the model of the sandals of the Alban kings, tend to
confirm it. The female characters preponderate in a remarkable manner
over the male.(38) With genuine national pride the poet recalls
the great times of the Pyrrhic war, and looks down on his new
Latin neighbours,--
This comedy belongs to the stage of the capital quite as much as did
the Greek; but it was probably animated by something of that rustic
antagonism to the ways and the evils of a great town, which appeared
contemporaneously in Cato and afterwards in Varro. As in the German
comedy, which proceeded from the French in much the same way as the
Roman comedy from the Attic, the French Lisette was very soon
superseded by the -Frauenzimmerchen- Franziska, so the Latin national
comedy sprang up, if not with equal poetical power, at any rate with
the same tendency and perhaps with similar success, by the side of
the Hellenizing comedy of the capital.
Tragedies
Euripides
Greek tragedy as well as Greek comedy came in the course of this epoch
to Rome. It was a more valuable, and in a certain respect also an
easier, acquisition than comedy. The Greek and particularly the
Homeric epos, which was the basis of tragedy, was not unfamiliar
to the Romans, and was already interwoven with their own national
legends; and the susceptible foreigner found himself far more at home
in the ideal world of the heroic myths than in the fish-market of
Athens. Nevertheless tragedy also promoted, only with less abruptness
and less vulgarity, the anti-national and Hellenizing spirit; and in
this point of view it was a circumstance of the most decisive
importance, that the Greek tragic stage of this period was chiefly
under the sway of Euripides (274-348). This is not the place for a
thorough delineation of that remarkable man and of his still more
remarkable influence on his contemporaries and posterity; but the
intellectual movements of the later Greek and the Graeco-Roman epoch
were to so great an extent affected by him, that it is indispensable
to sketch at least the leading outlines of his character. Euripides
was one of those poets who raise poetry doubtless to a higher level,
but in this advance manifest far more the true sense of what ought to
be than the power of poetically creating it. The profound saying which
morally as well as poetically sums up all tragic art--that action is
passion--holds true no doubt also of ancient tragedy; it exhibits
man in action, but it makes no real attempt to individualize him.
The unsurpassed grandeur with which the struggle between man and
destiny fulfils its course in Aeschylus depends substantially on
the circumstance, that each of the contending powers is only conceived
broadly and generally; the essential humanity in Prometheus and
Agamemnon is but slightly tinged by poetic individualizing. Sophocles
seizes human nature under its general conditions, the king, the old
man, the sister; but not one of his figures displays the microcosm of
man in all his aspects--the features of individual character. A high
stage was here reached, but not the highest; the delineation of man
in his entireness and the entwining of these individual--in themselves
finished--figures into a higher poetical whole form a greater
achievement, and therefore, as compared with Shakespeare, Aeschylus
and Sophocles represent imperfect stages of development. But, when
Euripides undertook to present man as he is, the advance was logical
and in a certain sense historical rather than poetical. He was
able to destroy the ancient tragedy, but not to create the modern.
Everywhere he halted half-way. Masks, through which the expression
of the life of the soul is, as it were, translated from the particular
into the general, were as necessary for the typical tragedy of
antiquity as they are incompatible with the tragedy of character;
but Euripides retained them. With remarkably delicate tact the older
tragedy had never presented the dramatic element, to which it was
unable to allow free scope, unmixed, but had constantly fettered it
in some measure by epic subjects from the superhuman world of gods and
heroes and by the lyrical choruses. One feels that Euripides was
impatient under these fetters: with his subjects he came down at least
to semi-historic times, and his choral chants were of so subordinate
importance, that they were frequently omitted in subsequent
performance and hardly to the injury of the pieces; but yet he has
neither placed his figures wholly on the ground of reality, nor
entirely thrown aside the chorus. Throughout and on all sides he is
the full exponent of an age in which, on the one hand, the grandest
historical and philosophical movement was going forward, but in which,
on the other hand, the primitive fountain of all poetry--a pure and
homely national life--had become turbid. While the reverential piety
of the older tragedians sheds over their pieces as it were a reflected
radiance of heaven; while the limitation of the narrow horizon of the
older Hellenes exercises its satisfying power even over the hearer;
the world of Euripides appears in the pale glimmer of speculation as
much denuded of gods as it is spiritualised, and gloomy passions shoot
like lightnings athwart the gray clouds. The old deeply-rooted faith
in destiny has disappeared; fate governs as an outwardly despotic
power, and the slaves gnash their teeth as they wear its fetters.
That unbelief, which is despairing faith, speaks in this poet with
superhuman power. Of necessity therefore the poet never attains a
plastic conception overpowering himself, and never reaches a truly
poetic effect on the whole; for which reason he was in some measure
careless as to the construction of his tragedies, and indeed not
unfrequently altogether spoiled them in this respect by providing no
central interest either of plot or person--the slovenly fashion of
weaving the plot in the prologue, and of unravelling it by a -Deus ex
machina- or a similar platitude, was in reality brought into vogue by
Euripides. All the effect in his case lies in the details; and with
great art certainly every effort has in this respect been made to
conceal the irreparable want of poetic wholeness. Euripides is
a master in what are called effects; these, as a rule, have a
sensuously-sentimental colouring, and often moreover stimulate
the sensuous impression by a special high seasoning, such as the
interweaving of subjects relating to love with murder or incest.
The delineations of Polyxena willing to die and of Phaedra pining
away under the grief of secret love, above all the splendid picture
of the mystic ecstasies of the Bacchae, are of the greatest beauty
in their kind; but they are neither artistically nor morally pure,
and the reproach of Aristophanes, that the poet was unable to paint a
Penelope, was thoroughly well founded. Of a kindred character is the
introduction of common compassion into the tragedy of Euripides.
While his stunted heroes or heroines, such as Menelaus in the -Helena-,
Andromache, Electra as a poor peasant's wife, the sick and ruined
merchant Telephus, are repulsive or ridiculous and ordinarily both,
the pieces, on the other hand, which keep more to the atmosphere of
common reality and exchange the character of tragedy for that of the
touching family-piece or that almost of sentimental comedy, such as
the -Iphigenia in Aulis-, the -Ion-, the -Alcestis-, produce perhaps
the most pleasing effect of all his numerous works. With equal
frequency, but with less success, the poet attempts to bring into play
an intellectual interest. Hence springs the complicated plot, which
is calculated not like the older tragedy to move the feelings, but
rather to keep curiosity on the rack; hence the dialectically pointed
dialogue, to us non-Athenians often absolutely intolerable; hence the
apophthegms, which are scattered throughout the pieces of Euripides
like flowers in a pleasure-garden; hence above all the psychology of
Euripides, which rests by no means on direct reproduction of human
experience, but on rational reflection. His Medea is certainly in so
far painted from life, that she is before departure properly provided
with money for her voyage; but of the struggle in the soul between
maternal love and jealousy the unbiassed reader will not find much in
Euripides. But, above all, poetic effect is replaced in the tragedies
of Euripides by moral or political purpose. Without strictly or
directly entering on the questions of the day, and having in view
throughout social rather than political questions, Euripides in the
legitimate issues of his principles coincided with the contemporary
political and philosophical radicalism, and was the first and chief
apostle of that new cosmopolitan humanity which broke up the old Attic
national life. This was the ground at once of that opposition which
the ungodly and un-Attic poet encountered among his contemporaries,
and of that marvellous enthusiasm, with which the younger generation
and foreigners devoted themselves to the poet of emotion and of love,
of apophthegm and of tendency, of philosophy and of humanity. Greek
tragedy in the hands of Euripides stepped beyond its proper sphere and
consequently broke down; but the success of the cosmopolitan poet was
only promoted by this, since at the same time the nation also stepped
beyond its sphere and broke down likewise. The criticism of
Aristophanes probably hit the truth exactly both in a moral and in a
poetical point of view; but poetry influences the course of history
not in proportion to its absolute value, but in proportion as it is
able to forecast the spirit of the age, and in this respect Euripides
was unsurpassed. And thus it happened, that Alexander read him
diligently; that Aristotle developed the idea of the tragic poet with
special reference to him; that the latest poetic and plastic art in
Attica as it were originated from him (for the new Attic comedy did
nothing but transfer Euripides into a comic form, and the school of
painters which we meet with in the designs of the later vases derived
its subjects no longer from the old epics, but from the Euripidean
tragedy); and lastly that, the more the old Hellas gave place to the
new Hellenism, the more the fame and influence of the poet increased,
and Greek life abroad, in Egypt as well as in Rome, was directly or
indirectly moulded in the main by Euripides.
Roman Tragedy
The tragic drama of the Romans is far less known to us than the comic:
on the whole the same features, which have been noticed in the case of
comedy, are presented by tragedy also. The dramatic stock, in like
manner, was mainly formed by translations of Greek pieces. The
preference was given to subjects derived from the siege of Troy and
the legends immediately connected with it, evidently because this
cycle of myths alone was familiar to the Roman public through
instruction at school; by their side incidents of striking horror
predominate, such as matricide or infanticide in the -Eumenides-,
the -Alcmaeon-, the -Cresphontes-, the -Melanippe-, the -Medea-, and
the immolation of virgins in the -Polyxena-, the -Erechthides-, the
-Andromeda-, the -Iphigenia- --we cannot avoid recalling the fact,
that the public for which these tragedies were prepared was in the
habit of witnessing gladiatorial games. The female characters and
ghosts appear to have made the deepest impression. In addition to the
rejection of masks, the most remarkable deviation of the Roman edition
from the original related to the chorus. The Roman theatre, fitted up
doubtless in the first instance for comic plays without chorus, had
not the special dancing-stage (-orchestra-) with the altar in the
middle, on which the Greek chorus performed its part, or, to speak
more correctly, the space thus appropriated among the Greeks served
with the Romans as a sort of pit; accordingly the choral dance at
least, with its artistic alternations and intermixture of music and
declamation, must have been omitted in Rome, and, even if the chorus
was retained, it had but little importance. Of course there were
various alterations of detail, changes in the metres, curtailments,
and disfigurements; in the Latin edition of the -Iphigenia- of
Euripides, for instance, the chorus of women was--either after the
model of another tragedy, or by the editor's own device--converted
into a chorus of soldiers. The Latin tragedies of the sixth century
cannot be pronounced good translations in our sense of the word;(41)
yet it is probable that a tragedy of Ennius gave a far less imperfect
image of the original of Euripides than a comedy of Plautus gave of
the original of Menander.
and the enthusiasm with which he celebrates his own artistic poetry:
The clever man had an instinctive assurance that he had spread his
sails to a prosperous breeze; Greek tragedy became, and thenceforth
remained, a possession of the Latin nation.
National Dramas
Recitative Poetry
Recitative poetry also took its rise during this epoch at Rome.
Livius naturalized the custom which among the ancients held the
place of our modern publication--the public reading of new works by
the author--in Rome, at least to the extent of reciting them in his
school. As poetry was not in this instance practised with a view to
a livelihood, or at any rate not directly so, this branch of it was
not regarded by public opinion with such disfavour as writing for the
stage: towards the end of this epoch one or two Romans of quality had
publicly come forward in this manner as poets.(51) Recitative poetry
however was chiefly cultivated by those poets who occupied themselves
with writing for the stage, and the former held a subordinate place as
compared with the latter; in fact, a public to which read poetry might
address itself can have existed only to a very limited extent at this
period in Rome.
Satura
Above all, lyrical, didactic, and epigrammatic poetry found but feeble
representation. The religious festival chants--as to which the annals
of this period certainly have already thought it worth while to
mention the author--as well as the monumental inscriptions on temples
and tombs, for which the Saturnian remained the regular measure,
hardly belong to literature proper. So far as the minor poetry makes
its appearance at all, it presents itself ordinarily, and that as
early as the time of Naevius, under the name of -satura-. This term
was originally applied to the old stage-poem without action, which
from the time of Livius was driven off the stage by the Greek drama;
but in its application to recitative poetry it corresponds in some
measure to our "miscellaneous poems," and like the latter denotes not
any positive species or style of art, but simply poems not of an epic
or dramatic kind, treating of any matters (mostly subjective), and
written in any form, at the pleasure of the author. In addition to
Cato's "poem on Morals" to be noticed afterwards, which was presumably
written in Saturnian verses after the precedent of the older first
attempts at a national didactic poetry,(52) there came under this
category especially the minor poems of Ennius, which that writer,
who was very fertile in this department, published partly in his
collection of -saturae-, partly separately. Among these were brief
narrative poems relating to the legendary or contemporary history of
his country; editions of the religious romance of Euhemerus,(53) of
the poems dealing with natural philosophy circulating in the name
of Epicharmus,(54) and of the gastronomies of Archestratus of Gela,
a poet who treated of the higher cookery; as also a dialogue between
Life and Death, fables of Aesop, a collection of moral maxims,
parodies and epigrammatic trifles--small matters, but indicative
of the versatile powers as well as the neological didactic tendencies
of the poet, who evidently allowed himself the freest range in this
field, which the censorship did not reach.
Metrical Annals
Naevius
Ennius
Ennius proposed to himself the very same task as Naevius; but the
similarity of the subject only brings out into stronger relief the
political and poetical contrast between the national and the anti-
national poet. Naevius sought out for the new subject a new form;
Ennius fitted or forced it into the forms of the Hellenic epos. The
hexameter took the place of the Saturnian verse; the ornate style of
the Homeridae, striving after plastic vividness of delineation,
took the place of the homely historic narrative. Wherever the
circumstances admit, Homer is directly translated; e. g. the burial of
those that fell at Heraclea is described after the model of the burial
of Patroclus, and under the helmet of Marcus Livius Stolo, the
military tribune who fights with the Istrians, lurks none other than
the Homeric Ajax; the reader is not even spared the Homeric invocation
of the Muse. The epic machinery is fully set agoing; after the battle
of Cannae, for instance, Juno in a full council of the gods pardons
the Romans, and Jupiter after obtaining the consent of his wife
promises them a final victory over the Carthaginians. Nor do the
"Annals" fail to betray the neological and Hellenistic tendencies of
the author. The very employment of the gods for mere decoration bears
this stamp. The remarkable vision, with which the poem opens, tells
in good Pythagorean style how the soul now inhabiting Quintus Ennius
had previously been domiciled in Homer and still earlier in a peacock,
and then in good physicist style explains the nature of things and
the relation of the body to the mind. Even the choice of the subject
serves the same purpose--at any rate the Hellenic literati of all ages
have found an especially suitable handle for their Graeco-cosmopolite
tendencies in this very manipulation of Roman history. Ennius lays
stress on the circumstance that the Romans were reckoned Greeks:
Prose Literature
A prose literature arose in Rome not much later than Roman poetry,
but in a very different way. It experienced neither the artificial
furtherance, by which the school and the stage prematurely forced the
growth of Roman poetry, nor the artificial restraint, to which Roman
comedy in particular was subjected by the stern and narrow-minded
censorship of the stage. Nor was this form of literary activity
placed from the outset under the ban of good society by the stigma
which attached to the "ballad-singer." Accordingly the prose
literature, while far less extensive and less active than the
contemporary poetical authorship, had a far more natural growth.
While poetry was almost wholly in the hands of men of humble rank and
not a single Roman of quality appears among the celebrated poets of
this age, there is, on the contrary, among the prose writers of this
period hardly a name that is not senatorial; and it is from the
circles of the highest aristocracy, from men who had been consuls and
censors--the Fabii, the Gracchi, the Scipios--that this literature
throughout proceeds. The conservative and national tendency, in the
nature of the case, accorded better with this prose authorship than
with poetry; but here too--and particularly in the most important
branch of this literature, historical composition--the Hellenistic
bent had a powerful, in fact too powerful, influence both on matter
and form.
Writing of History
In the legendary period the history of the origin of the city of Rome
was set forth with great minuteness; and in its case the peculiar
difficulty had to be surmounted, that there were, as we have already
shown,(59) two wholly irreconcileable versions of it in circulation:
the national version, which, in its leading outlines at least, was
probably already embodied in the book of Annals, and the Greek
version of Timaeus, which cannot have remained unknown to these Roman
chroniclers. The object of the former was to connect Rome with
Alba, that of the latter to connect Rome with Troy; in the former
accordingly the city was built by Romulus son of the Alban king,
in the latter by the Trojan prince Aeneas. To the present epoch,
probably either to Naevius or to Pictor, belongs the amalgamation of
the two stories. The Alban prince Romulus remains the founder of
Rome, but becomes at the same time the grandson of Aeneas; Aeneas does
not found Rome, but is represented as bringing the Roman Penates to
Italy and building Lavinium as their shrine, while his son Ascanius
founds Alba Longa, the mother-city of Rome and the ancient metropolis
of Latium. All this was a sorry and unskilful patchwork. The view
that the original Penates of Rome were preserved not, as had hitherto
been believed, in their temple in the Roman Forum, but in the shrine
at Lavinium, could not but be offensive to the Romans; and the Greek
fiction was a still worse expedient, inasmuch as under it the gods
only bestowed on the grandson what they had adjudged to the grandsire.
But the redaction served its object: without exactly denying the
national origin of Rome, it yet deferred to the Hellenizing tendency,
and legalized in some degree that desire to claim kindred with Aeneas
and his descendants which was already at this epoch greatly in
vogue;(60) and thus it became the stereotyped, and was soon accepted
as the official, account of the origin of the mighty community.
Apart from the fable of the origin of the city, the Greek
historiographers had otherwise given themselves little or no concern
as to the Roman commonwealth; so that the presentation of the further
course of the national history must have been chiefly derived from
native sources. But the scanty information that has reached us does
not enable us to discern distinctly what sort of traditions, in
addition to the book of Annals, were at the command of the earliest
chroniclers, and what they may possibly have added of their own.
The anecdotes inserted from Herodotus(61) were probably still foreign
to these earliest annalists, and a direct borrowing of Greek materials
in this section cannot be proved. The more remarkable, therefore, is
the tendency, which is everywhere, even in the case of Cato the enemy
of the Greeks, very distinctly apparent, not only to connect Rome with
Hellas, but to represent the Italian and Greek nations as having been
originally identical. To this tendency we owe the primitive-Italians
or Aborigines who were immigrants from Greece, and the primitive-
Greeks or Pelasgians whose wanderings brought them to Italy.
The current story led with some measure of connection, though the
connecting thread was but weak and loose through the regal period down
to the institution of the republic; but at that point legend dried up;
and it was not merely difficult but altogether impossible to form a
narrative, in any degree connected and readable, out of the lists of
magistrates and the scanty notices appended to them. The poets felt
this most. Naevius appears for that reason to have passed at once
from the regal period to the war regarding Sicily: Ennius, who in the
third of his eighteen books was still describing the regal period and
in the sixth had already reached the war with Pyrrhus, must have
treated the first two centuries of the republic merely in the most
general outline. How the annalists who wrote in Greek managed the
matter, we do not know. Cato adopted a peculiar course. He felt no
pleasure, as he himself says, "in relating what was set forth on the
tablet in the house of the Pontifex Maximus, how often wheat had been
dear, and when the sun or moon had been eclipsed;" and so he devoted
the second and third books of his historical work to accounts of the
origin of the other Italian communities and of their admission to the
Roman confederacy. He thus got rid of the fetters of chronicle, which
reports events year by year under the heading of the magistrates for
the time being; the statement in particular, that Cato's historical
work narrated events "sectionally," must refer to this feature of his
method. This attention bestowed on the other Italian communities,
which surprises us in a Roman work, had a bearing on the political
position of the author, who leaned throughout on the support of the
municipal Italy in his opposition to the doings of the capital; while
it furnished a sort of substitute for the missing history of Rome
from the expulsion of king Tarquinius down to the Pyrrhic war, by
presenting in its own way the main result of that history--the union
of Italy under the hegemony of Rome.
Contemporary History
Science
Grammar
Medicine
Mathematics
Jurisprudence
Cato's Encyclopaedia
Thus poetry and literature made their entrance into Rome along with
the sovereignty of the world, or, to use the language of a poet of
the age of Cicero:
In the districts using the Sabellian and Etruscan dialects also there
must have been at the same period no want of intellectual movement
Tragedies in the Etruscan language are mentioned, and vases with
Oscan inscriptions show that the makers of them were acquainted with
Greek comedy. The question accordingly presents itself, whether,
contemporarily with Naevius and Cato, a Hellenizing literature like
the Roman may not have been in course of formation on the Arnus and
Volturnus. But all information on the point is lost, and history
can in such circumstances only indicate the blank.
Hellenizing Literature
The Roman literature is the only one as to which we can still form an
opinion; and, however problematical its absolute worth may appear to
the aesthetic judge, for those who wish to apprehend the history of
Rome it remains of unique value as the mirror of the inner mental
life of Italy in that sixth century--full of the din of arms and
pregnant for the future--during which its distinctively Italian phase
closed, and the land began to enter into the broader career of ancient
civilization. In it too there prevailed that antagonism, which
everywhere during this epoch pervaded the life of the nation and
characterized the age of transition. No one of unprejudiced mind,
and who is not misled by the venerable rust of two thousand years,
can be deceived as to the defectiveness of the Hellenistico-Roman
literature. Roman literature by the side of that of Greece resembles
a German orangery by the side of a grove of Sicilian orange-trees;
both may give us pleasure, but it is impossible even to conceive them
as parallel. This holds true of the literature in the mother-tongue
of the Latins still more decidedly, if possible, than of the Roman
literature in a foreign tongue; to a very great extent the former was
not the work of Romans at all, but of foreigners, of half-Greeks,
Celts, and ere long even Africans, whose knowledge of Latin was only
acquired by study. Among those who in this age came before the public
as poets, none, as we have already said, can be shown to have been
persons of rank; and not only so, but none can be shown to have
been natives of Latium proper. The very name given to the poet was
foreign; even Ennius emphatically calls himself a -poeta-(70). But
not only was this poetry foreign; it was also liable to all those
defects which are found to occur where schoolmasters become authors
and the great multitude forms the public. We have shown how comedy
was artistically debased by a regard to the multitude, and in fact
sank into vulgar coarseness; we have further shown that two of the
most influential Roman authors were schoolmasters in the first
instance and only became poets in the sequel, and that, while the
Greek philology which only sprang up after the decline of the national
literature experimented merely on the dead body, in Latium grammar and
literature had their foundations laid simultaneously and went hand
in hand, almost as in the case of modern missions to the heathen. In
fact, if we view with an unprejudiced eye this Hellenistic literature
of the sixth century--that poetry followed out professionally and
destitute of all productiveness of its own, that uniform imitation
of the very shallowest forms of foreign art, that repertoire of
translations, that changeling of epos--we are tempted to reckon
it simply one of the diseased symptoms of the epoch before us.
But such a judgment, if not unjust, would yet be just only in a very
partial sense. We must first of all consider that this artificial
literature sprang up in a nation which not only did not possess any
national poetic art, but could never attain any such art. In
antiquity, which knew nothing of the modern poetry of individual life,
creative poetical activity fell mainly within the mysterious period
when a nation was experiencing the fears and pleasures of growth:
without prejudice to the greatness of the Greek epic and tragic poets
we may assert that their poetry mainly consisted in reproducing the
primitive stories of human gods and divine men. This basis of ancient
poetry was totally wanting in Latium: where the world of gods remained
shapeless and legend remained barren, the golden apples of poetry
could not voluntarily ripen. To this falls to be added a second
and more important consideration.
National Opposition
Architecture
Ennius in the same way takes for granted that the etymological meaning
of Alexandros and Andromache is known to the spectators (Varro, de L.
L. vii. 82). Most characteristic of all are the half-Greek
formations, such as -ferritribax-, -plagipatida-, -pugilice-,
or in the -Miles Gloriosus- (213):
4. Such, e. g, was Chilo, the slave of Cato the Elder, who earned
money en bis master's behalf as a teacher of children (Plutarch,
Cato Mai. 20).
11. In 599 there were still no seats in the theatre (Ritschl, Parerg.
i. p. xviii. xx. 214; comp. Ribbeck, Trag. p. 285); but, as not only
the authors of the Plautine prologues, but Plautus himself on
various occasions, make allusions to a sitting audience (Mil. Glor.
82, 83; Aulul. iv. 9, 6; Triicul. ap. fin.; Epid. ap. fin.), most
of the spectators must have brought stools with them or have seated
themselves on the ground.
13. Women and children appear to have been at all times admitted to
the Roman theatre (Val. Max. vi. 3, 12; Plutarch., Quaest. Rom. 14;
Cicero, de Har. Resp. 12, 24; Vitruv. v. 3, i; Suetonius, Aug.
44,&c.); but slaves were -de jure- excluded (Cicero, de Har. Resp. 12,
26; Ritschl. Parerg. i. p. xix. 223), and the same must doubtless have
been the case with foreigners, excepting of course the guests of the
community, who took their places among or by the side of the senators
(Varro, v. 155; Justin, xliii. 5. 10; Sueton. Aug. 44).
17. The scanty use made of what is called the middle Attic comedy does
not require notice in a historical point of view, since it was nothing
but the Menandrian comedy in a less developed form. There is no trace
of any employment of the older comedy. The Roman tragi-comedy--after
the type of the -Amphitruo- of Plautus--was no doubt styled by the
Roman literary historians -fabula Rhinthonica-; but the newer Attic
comedians also composed such parodies, and it is difficult to see why
the Ionians should have resorted for their translations to Rhinthon
and the older writers rather than to those who were nearer to their
own times.
19. Bacch. 24; Trin. 609; True. iii. 2, 23. Naevius also, who in
fact was generally less scrupulous, ridicules the Praenestines and
Lanuvini (Com. 21, Ribb.). There are indications more than once of a
certain variance between the Praenestines and Romans (Liv. xxiii. 20,
xlii. i); and the executions in the time of Pyrrhus (ii. 18) as well
as the catastrophe in that of Sulla, were certainly connected with
this variance. --Innocent jokes, such as Capt. 160, 881, of course
passed uncensured. --The compliment paid to Massilia in Cas. v. 4., i,
deserves notice.
24. The ideas of the modern Hellas on the point of slavery are
illustrated by the passage in Euripides (Ion, 854; comp. Helena,
728):--
--En gar ti tois douloisin alochunen pherei,
Tounoma ta d' alla panta ton eleutheron
Oudeis kakion doulos, ostis esthlos e.--
26. Even when the Romans built stone theatres, these had not the
sounding-apparatus by which the Greek architects supported the efforts
of the actors (Vitruv. v. 5, 8).
28. The personal notices of Naevius are sadly confused. Seeing that
he fought in the first Punic war, he cannot have been born later than
495. Dramas, probably the first, were exhibited by him in 519 (Gell.
xii. 21. 45). That he had died as early as 550, as is usually
stated, was doubted by Varro (ap. Cic. Brut. 15, 60), and certainly
with reason; if it were true, he must have made his escape during the
Hannibalic war to the soil of the enemy. The sarcastic verses on
Scipio (p. 150) cannot have been written before the battle of
Zama. We may place his life between 490 and 560, so that he was a
contemporary of the two Scipios who fell in 543 (Cic. de Rep. iv. 10),
ten years younger than Andronicus, and perhaps ten years older than
Plautus. His Campanian origin is indicated by Gellius, and his Latin
nationality, if proof of it were needed, by himself in his epitaph.
The hypothesis that he was not a Roman citizen, but possibly a burgess
of Cales or of some other Latin town in Campania, renders the fact
that the Roman police treated him so unscrupulously the more easy
of explanation. At any rate he was not an actor, for he served in
the army.
29. Compare, e. g., with the verse of Livius the fragment from
Naevius' tragedy of -Lycurgus- :--
-Vos, qui regalis cordons custodias
Agitatis, ite actutum in frundiferos locos,
Ingenio arbusta ubi nata sunt, non obsita-;
33. III. III. The Celts Conquered by Rome, III. VII. Measures Adopted
to Check the Immigration of the Trans-Alpine Gauls
In the line before the last we should probably read -multarum leges
divumque hominumque.-
48. The following verses, excellent in matter and form, belong to the
adaptation of the -Phoenix- of Euripides:--
This last passage affords us a glimpse of the way in which the poet
worked up his original poems. It is simply an expansion of the words
which occur in the tragedy -Hectoris Lustra- (the original of which
was probably by Sophocles) as spoken by a spectator of the combat
between Hephaestus and the Scamander:--
and this is not the most absurd specimen of such recurring assonances.
He also indulged in acrostic verses (Cic. de Div. ii. 54, iii).
52. Besides Cato, we find the names of two "consulars and poets"
belonging to this period (Sueton. Vita Terent. 4)--Quintus Labeo,
consul in 571, and Marcus Popillius, consul in 581. But it remains
uncertain whether they published their poems. Even in the case of
Cato this may be doubted.
56. The following fragments will give some idea of its tone. Of Dido
he says:
Again of Amulius:
57. That this oldest prose work on the history of Rome was composed in
Greek, is established beyond a doubt by Dionys. i. 6, and Cicero, de
Div. i. 21, 43. The Latin Annals quoted under the same name by
Quintilian and later grammarians remain involved in mystery, and the
difficulty is increased by the circumstance, that there is also quoted
under the same name a very detailed exposition of the pontifical law
in the Latin language. But the latter treatise will not be attributed
by any one, who has traced the development of Roman literature in its
connection, to an author of the age of the Hannibalic war; and even
Latin annals from that age appear problematical, although it must
remain a moot question whether there has been a confusion of the
earlier with a later annalist, Quintus Fabius Maximus Servilianus
(consul in 612), or whether there existed an old Latin edition of the
Greek Annals of Fabius as well as of those of Acilius and Albinus, or
whether there were two annalists of the name of Fabius Pictor.
58. Cato's whole literary activity belonged to the period of his old
age (Cicero, Cat. ii, 38; Nepos, Cato, 3); the composition even of the
earlier books of the "Origines" falls not before, and yet probably not
long subsequent to, 586 (Plin. H. N. iii. 14, 114).
62. For instance the history of the siege of Gabii is compiled from
the anecdotes in Herodotus as to Zopyrus and the tyrant Thrasybulus,
and one version of the story of the exposure of Romulus is framed
on the model of the history of the youth of Cyrus as Herodotus
relates it.
66. Plautus (Mostell. 126) says of parents, that they teach their
children -litteras-, -iura-, -leges-; and Plutarch (Cato Mai. 20)
testifies to the same effect.
71. See the lines already quoted at III. II. The War on the Coasts of
Sicily and Sardinia.
The formation of the name -poeta- from the vulgar Greek --poetes--
instead of --poietes-- --as --epoesen-- was in use among the Attic
potters--is characteristic. We may add that -poeta- technically
denotes only the author of epic or recitative poems, not the composer
for the stage, who at this time was styled -scriba- (III. XIV. Audience;
Festus, s. v., p. 333 M.).
72. Even subordinate figures from the legends of Troy and of Herakles
niake their appearance, e. g. Talthybius (Stich. 305), Autolycus
(Bacch. 275), Parthaon (Men. 745). Moreover the most general outlines
must have been known in the case of the Theban and the Argonautic
legends, and of the stories of Bellerophon (Bacch. 810), Pentheus
(Merc. 467), Procne and Philomela (Rud. 604). Sappho and Phaon (Mil.
1247).
73. "As to these Greeks," he says to his son Marcus, "I shall tell at
the proper place, what I came to learn regarding them at Athens; and
shall show that it is useful to look into their writings, but not to
study them thoroughly. They are an utterly corrupt and ungovernable
race--believe me, this is true as an oracle; if that people bring
hither its culture, it will ruin everything, and most especially if
it send hither its physicians. They have conspired to despatch all
barbarians by their physicking, but they get themselves paid for it,
that people may trust them and that they may the more easily bring us
to ruin. They call us also barbarians, and indeed revile us by the
still more vulgar name of Opicans. I interdict thee, therefore, from
all dealings with the practitioners of the healing art."
Cato in his zeal was not aware that the name of Opicans, which had in
Latin an obnoxious meaning, was in Greek quite unobjectionable, and
that the Greeks had in the most innocent way come to designate the
Italians by that term (I. X. Time of the Greek Immigration).
75. III. II. War between the Romans and Carthaginians and Syracusans
The Revolution
Preparer's Note
7) Dr. Mommsen has given his dates in terms of Roman usage, A.U.C.;
that is, from the founding of Rome, conventionally taken to be 753 B. C.
To the end of each volume is appended a table of conversion between
the two systems.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
The Revolution
Goethe.
CHAPTER I
The Subjects
Spain
Lusitanian War
But more serious events occurred in 600. The Lusitanians, under the
leadership of a chief called Punicus, invaded the Roman territory,
defeated the two Roman governors who had united to oppose them, and
slew a great number of their troops. The Vettones (between the Tagus
and the Upper Douro) were thereby induced to make common cause with
the Lusitanians; and these, thus reinforced, were enabled to extend
their excursions as far as the Mediterranean, and to pillage even
the territory of the Bastulo-Phoenicians not far from the Roman
capital New Carthage (Cartagena). The Romans at home took the matter
seriously enough to resolve on sending a consul to Spain, a step
which had not been taken since 559; and, in order to accelerate the
despatch of aid, they even made the new consuls enter on office two
months and a half before the legal time. For this reason the day for
the consuls entering on office was shifted from the 15th of March
to the 1st of January; and thus was established the beginning of the
year, which we still make use of at the present day. But, before
the consul Quintus Fulvius Nobilior with his army arrived, a very
serious encounter took place on the right bank of the Tagus between
the praetor Lucius Mummius, governor of Further Spain, and the
Lusitanians, now led after the fall of Punicus by his successor
Caesarus (601). Fortune was at first favourable to the Romans; the
Lusitanian army was broken and their camp was taken. But the Romans,
partly already fatigued by their march and partly broken up in the
disorder of the pursuit, were at length completely beaten by their
already vanquished antagonists, and lost their own camp in addition
to that of the enemy, as well as 9000 dead.
Celtiberian War
The flame of war now blazed up far and wide. The Lusitanians on
the left bank of the Tagus, led by Caucaenus, threw themselves on
the Celtici subject to the Romans (in Alentejo), and took away their
town Conistorgis. The Lusitanians sent the standards taken from
Mummius to the Celtiberians at once as an announcement of victory
and as a warning; and among these, too, there was no want of ferment.
Two small Celtiberian tribes in the neighbourhood of the powerful
Arevacae (about the sources of the Douro and Tagus), the Belli and
the Titthi, had resolved to settle together in Segeda, one of their
towns. While they were occupied in building the walls, the Romans
ordered them to desist, because the Sempronian regulations prohibited
the subject communities from founding towns at their own discretion;
and they at the same time required the contribution of money and men
which was due by treaty but for a considerable period had not been
demanded. The Spaniards refused to obey either command, alleging
that they were engaged merely in enlarging, not in founding, a city,
and that the contribution had not been merely suspended, but
remitted by the Romans. Thereupon Nobilior appeared in Hither
Spain with an army of nearly 30,000 men, including some Numidian
horsemen and ten elephants. The walls of the new town of Segeda
still stood unfinished: most of the inhabitants submitted. But the
most resolute men fled with their wives and children to the powerful
Arevacae, and summoned these to make common cause with them against
the Romans. The Arevacae, emboldened by the victory of the
Lusitanians over Mummius, consented, and chose Carus, one of the
Segedan refugees, as their general. On the third day after his
election the valiant leader had fallen, but the Roman army was
defeated and nearly 6000 Roman burgesses were slain; the 23rd day of
August, the festival of the Volcanalia, was thenceforth held in sad
remembrance by the Romans. The fall of their general, however,
induced the Arevacae to retreat into their strongest town Numantia
(Guarray, a Spanish league to the north of Soria on the Douro),
whither Nobilior followed them. Under the walls of the town a second
engagement took place, in which the Romans at first by means of their
elephants drove the Spaniards back into the town; but while doing
so they were thrown into confusion in consequence of one of the
animals being wounded, and sustained a second defeat at the hands of
the enemy again issuing from the walls. This and other misfortunes--
such as the destruction of a corps of Roman cavalry despatched to
call forth the contingents--imparted to the affairs of the Romans in
the Hither province so unfavourable an aspect that the fortress of
Ocilis, where the Romans had their chest and their stores, passed
over to the enemy, and the Arevacae were in a position to think,
although without success, of dictating peace to the Romans. These
disadvantages, however, were in some measure counterbalanced by the
successes which Mummius achieved in the southern province. Weakened
though his army was by the disaster which it had suffered, he yet
succeeded with it in defeating the Lusitanians who had imprudently
dispersed themselves on the right bank of the Tagus; and passing
over to the left bank, where the Lusitanians had overrun the whole
Roman territory, and had even made a foray into Africa, he cleared
the southern province of the enemy.
Marcellus
To the northern province in the following year (602) the senate sent
considerable reinforcements and a new commander-in-chief in the place
of the incapable Nobilior, the consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who
had already, when praetor in 586, distinguished himself in Spain, and
had since that time given proof of his talents as a general in two
consulships. His skilful leadership, and still more his clemency,
speedily changed the position of affairs: Ocilis at once surrendered
to him; and even the Arevacae, confirmed by Marcellus in the hope
that peace would be granted to them on payment of a moderate fine,
concluded an armistice and sent envoys to Rome. Marcellus could thus
proceed to the southern province, where the Vettones and Lusitanians
had professed submission to the praetor Marcus Atilius so long as he
remained within their bounds, but after his departure had immediately
revolted afresh and chastised the allies of Rome. The arrival of
the consul restored tranquillity, and, while he spent the winter
in Corduba, hostilities were suspended throughout the peninsula.
Meanwhile the question of peace with the Arevacae was discussed at
Rome. It is a significant indication of the relations subsisting
among the Spaniards themselves, that the emissaries of the Roman
party subsisting among the Arevacae were the chief occasion of the
rejection of the proposals of peace at Rome, by representing that,
if the Romans were not willing to sacrifice the Spaniards friendly
to their interests, they had no alternative save either to send a
consul with a corresponding army every year to the peninsula or to
make an emphatic example now. In consequence of this, the ambassadors
of the Arevacae were dismissed without a decisive answer, and it was
resolved that the war should be prosecuted with vigour. Marcellus
accordingly found himself compelled in the following spring (603) to
resume the war against the Arevacae. But--either, as was asserted,
from his unwillingness to leave to his successor, who was to be
expected soon, the glory of terminating the war, or, as is perhaps
more probable, from his believing like Gracchus that a humane
treatment of the Spaniards was the first thing requisite for a lasting
peace--the Roman general after holding a secret conference with the
most influential men of the Arevacae concluded a treaty under the
walls of Numantia, by which the Arevacae surrendered to the Romans
at discretion, but were reinstated in their former rights according
to treaty on their undertaking to pay money and furnish hostages.
Lucullus
Variathus
It was not so much the inglorious successes which Lucullus and Galba
had attained in Spain, as the outbreak of the fourth Macedonian
and of the third Carthaginian war in 605, which induced the Romans
again to leave Spanish affairs in the first instance to the ordinary
governors. Accordingly the Lusitanians, exasperated rather than
humbled by the perfidy of Galba, immediately overran afresh the rich
territory of the Turdetani. The Roman governor Gaius Vetilius
(607-8?)(4) marched against them, and not only defeated them, but
drove the whole host towards a hill where it seemed lost irretrievably.
The capitulation was virtually concluded, when Viriathus--a man of
humble origin, who formerly, when a youth, had bravely defended
his flock from wild beasts and robbers and was now in more serious
conflictsa dreaded guerilla chief, and who was one of the few that had
accidentally escaped from the perfidious onslaught of Galba--warned his
countrymen against relying on the Roman word of honour, and promised
them deliverance if they would follow him. His language and his
example produced a deep effect: the army entrusted him with the
supreme command. Viriathus gave orders to the mass of his men to
proceed in detached parties, by different routes, to the appointed
rendezvous; he himself formed the best mounted and most trustworthy
into a corps of 1000 horse, with which he covered the departure of
his men. The Romans, who wanted light cavalry, did not venture to
disperse for the pursuit under the eyes of the enemy's horsemen.
After Viriathus and his band had for two whole days held in check
the entire Roman army he suddenly disappeared during the night and
hastened to the general rendezvous. The Roman general followed him,
but fell into an adroitly-laid ambush, in which he lost the half of
his army and was himself captured and slain; with difficulty the
rest of the troops escaped to the colony of Carteia on the Straits.
In all haste 5000 men of the Spanish militia were despatched from the
Ebro to reinforce the defeated Romans; but Viriathus destroyed the
corps while still on its march, and commanded so absolutely the whole
interior of Carpetania that the Romans did not even venture to seek
him there. Viriathus, now recognized as lord and king of all the
Lusitanians, knew how to combine the full dignity of his princely
position with the homely habits of a shepherd. No badge distinguished
him from the common soldier: he rose from the richly adorned marriage-
table of his father-in-law, the prince Astolpa in Roman Spain, without
having touched the golden plate and the sumptuous fare, lifted his bride
on horseback, and rode back with her to his mountains. He never took
more of the spoil than the share which he allotted to each of his
comrades. The soldier recognized the general simply by his tall
figure, by his striking sallies of wit, and above all by the fact
that he surpassed every one of his men in temperance as well as in toil,
sleeping always in full armour and fighting in front of all in battle.
It seemed as if in that thoroughly prosaic age one of the Homeric
heroes had reappeared: the name of Viriathus resounded far and wide
through Spain; and the brave nation conceived that in him it had
at length found the man who was destined to break the fetters
of alien domination.
His Successors
His Death
One behest after another was issued to the Lusitanians, each successive
demand more intolerable than its predecessors; and at length they were
required even to surrender their arms. Then Viriathus recollected
the fate of his countrymen whom Galba had caused to be disarmed, and
grasped his sword afresh. But it was too late. His wavering had
sown the seeds of treachery among those who were immediately around
him; three of his confidants, Audas, Ditalco, and Minucius from Urso,
despairing of the possibility of renewed victory, procured from the
king permission once more to enter into negotiations for peace with
Caepio, and employed it for the purpose of selling the life of the
Lusitanian hero to the foreigners in return for the assurance of
personal amnesty and further rewards. On their return to the camp
they assured the king of the favourable issue of their negotiations,
and in the following night stabbed him while asleep in his tent.
The Lusitanians honoured the illustrious chief by an unparalleled
funeral solemnity at which two hundred pairs of champions fought in
the funeral games; and still more highly by the fact, that they did
not renounce the struggle, but nominated Tautamus as their commander-
in-chief in room of the fallen hero. The plan projected by the
latter for wresting Saguntum from the Romans was sufficiently bold;
but the new general possessed neither the wise moderation nor the
military skill of his predecessor. The expedition utterly broke
down, and the army on its return was attacked in crossing the Baetis
and compelled to surrender unconditionally. Thus was Lusitania
subdued, far more by treachery and assassination on the part of
foreigners and natives than by honourable war.
Numantia
Mancinus
Scipio Aemilianus
The fall of Numantia struck at the root of the opposition that was
still here and there stirring against Rome; military demonstrations
and the imposition of fines sufficed to secure the acknowledgment of
the Roman supremacy in all Hither Spain.
The Romans, who had carefully abstained from preventing the war
Itself by seasonable interposition, had now what they wished: namely,
A serviceable pretext for war--for the Carthaginians had certainly
Now transgressed the stipulations of the treaty, that they should not
wage war against the allies of Rome or beyond their own bounds(7)--
and an antagonist already beaten beforehand. The Italian contingents
were already summoned to Rome, and the ships were assembled; the
declaration of war might issue at any moment. The Carthaginians made
every effort to avert the impending blow. Hasdrubal and Carthalo,
the leaders of the patriot party, were condemned to death, and an
embassy was sent to Rome to throw the responsibility on them.
But at the same time envoys from Utica, the second city of the
Libyan Phoenicians, arrived there with full powers to surrender
their Community wholly to the Romans--compared with such obliging
submissiveness, it seemed almost an insolence that the Carthaginians
had rested content with ordering, unbidden, the execution of their most
eminent men. The senate declared that the excuse of the Carthaginians
was found insufficient; to the question, what in that case would suffice,
the reply was given that the Carthaginians knew that themselves. They
might, no doubt, have known what the Romans wished; but yet it seemed
impossible to believe that the last hour of their loved native city had
really come. Once more Carthaginian envoys--on this occasion thirty
in number and with unlimited powers--were sent to Rome. When they
arrived, war was already declared (beginning of 605), and the double
consular army had embarked. Yet they even now attempted to dispel
the storm by complete submission. The senate replied that Rome was
ready to guarantee to the Carthaginian community its territory, its
municipal freedom and its laws, its public and private property,
provided that it would furnish to the consuls who had just departed for
Sicily within the space of a month at Lilybaeum 300 hostages from the
children of the leading families, and would fulfil the further orders
which the consuls in conformity with their instructions should issue
to them. The reply has been called ambiguous; but very erroneously,
as even at the time clearsighted men among the Carthaginians themselves
pointed out. The circumstance that everything which they could ask
was guaranteed with the single exception of the city, and that
nothing was said as to stopping the embarkation of the troops for
Africa, showed very clearly what the Roman intentions were; the
senate acted with fearful harshness, but it did not assume the
semblance of concession. The Carthaginians, however, would not open
their eyes; there was no statesman found, who had the power to move
the unstable multitude of the city either to thorough resistance or
to thorough resignation. When they heard at the same time of the
horrible decree of war and of the endurable demand for hostages, they
complied immediately with the latter, and still clung to hope, because
they had not the courage fully to realize the import of surrendering
themselves beforehand to the arbitrary will of a mortal foe.
The consuls sent back the hostages from Lilybaeum to Rome, and informed
the Carthaginian envoys that they would learn further particulars in
Africa. The landing was accomplished without resistance, and the
provisions demanded were supplied. When the gerusia of Carthage
appeared in a body at the head-quarters in Utica to receive the
further orders, the consuls required in the first instance the
disarming of the city. To the question of the Carthaginians, who
was in that case to protect them even against their own emigrants--
against the army, which had swelled to 20,000 men, under the command
of Husdrubal who had saved himself from the sentence of death by
flight--it was replied, that this would be the concern of the Romans.
Accordingly the council of the city obsequiously appeared before the
consuls, with all their fleet-material, all the military stores of the
public magazines, all the arms that were found in the possession of
private persons--to the number of 3000 catapults and 200,000 sets of
armour--and inquired whether anything more was desired. Then the
consul Lucius Marcius Censorinus rose and announced to the council,
that in accordance with the instructions given by the senate the
existing city was to be destroyed, but that the inhabitants were
at liberty to settle anew in their territory wherever they chose,
provided it were at a distance of at least ten miles from the sea.
Situation of Carthage
The Siege
While these events were passing, the close of the year had come
and with it a change of commanders; the consul Lucius Piso (606)
was somewhat late in appearing and took the command of the land
army, while Lucius Mancinus took charge of the fleet. But, if their
predecessors had done little, these did nothing at all. Instead of
prosecuting the siege of Carthage or subduing the army of Hasdrubal,
Piso employed himself in attacking the small maritime towns of the
Phoenicians, and that mostly without success. Clupea, for example,
repulsed him, and he was obliged to retire in disgrace from Hippo
Diarrhytus, after having lost the whole summer in front of it and
having had his besieging apparatus twice burnt. Neapolis was no
doubt taken; but the pillage of the town in opposition to his pledged
word of honour was not specially favourable to the progress of
the Roman arms. The courage of the Carthaginians rose. Bithyas,
a Numidian sheik, passed over to them with 800 horse; Carthaginian
envoys were enabled to attempt negotiations with the kings of Numidia
and Mauretania and even with Philip the Macedonian pretender.
It was perhaps internal intrigues--Hasdrubal the emigrant brought
the general of the same name, who commanded in the city, into
suspicion on account of his relationship with Massinissa, and
caused him to be put to death in the senate-house--rather than
the activity of the Romans, that prevented things from assuming
a turn still more favourable for Carthage.
Scipio Aemilianus
Destruction of Carthage
But by far the larger portion of the city still remained standing.
We may believe that Scipio desired its preservation; at least he
addressed a special inquiry to the senate on the subject. Scipio
Nasica once more attempted to gain a hearing for the demands of
reason and honour; but in vain. The senate ordered the general
to level the city of Carthage and the suburb of Magalia with the
ground, and to do the same with all the townships which had held by
Carthage to the last; and thereafter to pass the plough over the site
of Carthage so as to put an end in legal form to the existence of
the city, and to curse the soil and site for ever, that neither
house nor cornfield might ever reappear on the spot. The command was
punctually obeyed. The ruins burned for seventeen days: recently,
when the remains of the Carthaginian city wall were excavated, they
were found to be covered with a layer of ashes from four to five feet
deep, filled with half-charred pieces of wood, fragments of iron,
and projectiles. Where the industrious Phoenicians had bustled and
trafficked for five hundred years, Roman slaves henceforth pastured
the herds of their distant masters. Scipio, however, whom nature
had destined for a nobler part than that of an executioner, gazed
with horror on his own work; and, instead of the joy of victory,
the victor himself was haunted by a presentiment of the retribution
that would inevitably follow such a misdeed.
Province of Africa
Province of Macedonia
Greece
Achaean War
The Achaeans thus had war; and they had even actual allies, namely
the Thebans and Boeotians and also the Chalcidians. At the beginning
of 608 the Achaeans advanced into Thessaly to reduce to obedience
Heraclea near to Oeta, which, in accordance with the decree of
the senate, had detached itself from the Achaean league. The consul
Lucius Mummius, whom the senate had resolved to send to Greece,
had not yet arrived; accordingly Metellus undertook to protect
Heraclea with the Macedonian legions. When the advance of the Romans
was announced to the Achaeo-Theban army, there was no more talk of
fighting; they deliberated only how they might best succeed in reaching
once more the secure Peloponnesus; in all haste the army made off,
and did not even attempt to hold the position at Thermopylae.
But Metellus quickened the pursuit, and overtook and defeated
the Greek army near Scarpheia in Locris. The loss in prisoners and
dead was considerable; Critolaus was never heard of after the battle.
The remains of the defeated army wandered about Greece in single troops,
and everywhere sought admission in vain; the division of Patrae
was destroyed in Phocis, the Arcadian select corps at Chaeronea;
all northern Greece was evacuated, and only a small portion of
the Achaean army and of the citizens of Thebes, who fled in a body,
reached the Peloponnesus. Metellus sought by the utmost moderation
to induce the Greeks to abandon their senseless resistance, and gave
orders, for example, that all the Thebans with a single exception,
should be allowed their liberty; his well-meant endeavours were
thwarted not by the energy of the people, but by the desperation of
the leaders apprehensive for their own safety. Diaeus, who after
the fall of Critolaus had resumed the chief command, summoned all men
capable of bearing arms to the isthmus, and ordered 12,000 slaves,
natives of Greece, to be enrolled in the army; the rich were applied
to for advances, and the ranks of the friends of peace, so far as they
did not purchase their lives by bribing the ruling agents in this reign
of terror, were thinned by bloody prosecutions. The war accordingly was
continued, and after the same style. The Achaean vanguard, which, 4000
strong, was stationed under Alcamenes at Megara, dispersed as soon as
it saw the Roman standards. Metellus was just about to order an
attack upon the main force on the isthmus, when the consul Lucius
Mummius with a few attendants arrived at the Roman head-quarters
and took the command. Meanwhile the Achaeans, emboldened by a
successful attack on the too incautious Roman outposts, offered
battle to the Roman army, which was about twice as strong, at
Leucopetra on the isthmus. The Romans were not slow to accept it.
At the very first the Achaean horsemen broke off en masse before the
Roman cavalry of six times their strength; the hoplites withstood the
enemy till a flank attack by the Roman select corps brought confusion
also into their ranks. This terminated the resistance. Diaeus fled
to his home, put his wife to death, and took poison himself. All the
cities submitted without opposition; and even the impregnable Corinth,
into which Mummius for three days hesitated to enter because he
feared an ambush, was occupied by the Romans without a blow.
Province of Achaia
Destruction of Corinth
Kingdom of Pergamus
In Asia Minor, after the Seleucids were driven back, the kingdom
of Pergamus had become the first power. Not led astray by
the traditions of the Alexandrine monarchies, but sagacious and
dispassionate enough to renounce what was impossible, the Attalids
kept quiet; and endeavoured not to extend their bounds nor to
withdraw from the Roman hegemony, but to promote the prosperity of
their empire, so far as the Romans allowed, and to foster the arts
of peace. Nevertheless they did not escape the jealousy and suspicion
of Rome. In possession of the European shore of the Propontis,
of the west coast of Asia Minor, and of its interior as far as
the Cappadocian and Cilician frontiers, and in close connection with
the Syrian kings--one of whom, Antiochus Epiphanes (d. 590), had
ascendedthe throne by the aid of the Attalids--king Eumenes II had
by his power, which seemed still more considerable from the more and
more deep decline of Macedonia and Syria, instilled apprehension
in the minds even of its founders. We have already related(28)
how the senate sought to humble and weaken this ally after the third
Macedonian war by unbecoming diplomatic arts. The relations--
perplexing from the very nature of the case--of the rulers of
Pergamus towards the free or half-free commercial cities within
their kingdom, and towards their barbarous neighbours on its borders,
became complicated still more painfully by this ill humour on the part
of their patrons. As it was not clear whether, according to the
treaty of peace in 565, the heights of the Taurus in Pamphylia and
Pisidia belonged to the kingdom of Syria or to that of Pergamus,(29)
the brave Selgians, nominally recognizing, as it would seem, the Syrian
supremacy, made a prolonged and energetic resistance to the kings
Eumenes II and Attalus II in the hardly accessible mountains of
Pisidia. The Asiatic Celts also, who for a time with the permission
of the Romans had yielded allegiance to Pergamus, revolted from
Eumenes and, in concert with Prusias king of Bithynia the hereditary
enemy of the Attalids, suddenly began war against him about 587.
The king had had no time to hire mercenary troops; all his skill
and valour could not prevent the Celts from defeating the Asiatic
militia and overrunning his territory; the peculiar mediation, to which
the Romans condescended at the request of Eumenes, has already been
mentioned.(30) But, as soon as he had found time with the help of his
well-filled exchequer to raise an army capable of taking the field, he
speedily drove the wild hordes back over the frontier, and, although
Galatia remained lost to him, and his obstinately-continued attempts
to maintain his footing there were frustrated by Roman influence,(31)
he yet, in spite of all the open attacks and secret machinations which
his neighbours and the Romans directed against him, at his death
(about 595) left his kingdom in standing un-diminished. His brother
Attalus II Philadelphia (d. 616) with Roman aid repelled the attempt
of Pharnaces king of Pontus to seize the guardianship of Eumenes'
son who was a minor, and reigned in the room of his nephew, like
Antigonus Doson, as guardian for life. Adroit, able, pliant,
a genuine Attalid, he had the art to convince the suspicious senate
that the apprehensions which it had formerly cherished were baseless.
The anti-Roman party accused him of having to do with keeping the land
for the Romans, and of acquiescing in every insult and exaction at
their hands; but, sure of Roman protection, he was able to interfere
decisively in the disputes as to the succession to the throne in Syria,
Cappadocia, and Bithynia. Even from the dangerous Bithynian war, which
king Prusias II, surnamed the Hunter (572?-605), a ruler who combined
in his own person all the vices of barbarism and of civilization,
began against him, Roman intervention saved him--although not until
he had been himself besieged in his capital, and a first warning given
by the Romans had remained unattended to, and had even been scoffed at,
by Prusias (598-600). But, when his ward Attalus III Philometor
ascended the throne (616-621), the peaceful and moderate rule of
the citizen kings was replaced by the tyranny of an Asiatic sultan;
under which for instance, the king, with a view to rid himself of
the inconvenient counsel of his father's friends, assembled them in
the palace, and ordered his mercenaries to put to death first them,
and then their wives and children. Along with such recreations he
wrote treatises on gardening, reared poisonous plants, and prepared
wax models, till a sudden death carried him off.
Province of Asia
War against Aristonicus
With him the house of the Attalids became extinct. In such an event,
according to the constitutional law which held good at least for
the client-states of Rome, the last ruler might dispose of the
succession by testament. Whether it was the insane rancour against
his subjects which had tormented the last Attalid during life that
now suggested to him the thought of bequeathing his kingdom by will
to the Romans, or whether his doing so was merely a further recognition
of the practical supremacy of Rome, cannot be determined. The testament
was made;(32) the Romans accepted the bequest, and the question as to
the land and the treasure of the Attalids threw a new apple of contention
among the conflicting political parties in Rome. In Asia also this
royal testament kindled a civil war. Relying on the aversion of
the Asiatics to the foreign rule which awaited them, Aristonicus,
a natural son of Eumenes II, made his appearance in Leucae, a small
seaport between Smyrna and Phocaea, as a pretender to the crown.
Phocaea and other towns joined him, but he was defeated at sea off
Cyme by the Ephesians--who saw that a steady adherence to Rome
was the only possible way of preserving their privileges--and was
obliged to flee into the interior. The movement was believed to
have died away when he suddenly reappeared at the head of the new
"citizens of the city of the sun,"(33) in other words, of the slaves
whom he had called to freedom en masse, mastered the Lydian towns of
Thyatira and Apollonis as well as a portion of the Attalic townships,
and summoned bands of Thracian free-lances to join his standard.
The struggle was serious. There were no Roman troops in Asia;
the Asiatic free cities and the contingents of the client-princes
of Bithynia, Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Armenia, could not
withstand the pretender; he penetrated by force of arms into Colophon,
Samos, and Myndus, and already ruled over almost all his father's
kingdom, when at the close of 623 a Roman army landed in Asia.
Its commander, the consul and -pontifex maximus- Publius Licinius
Crassus Mucianus, one of the wealthiest and at the same time one of
the most cultivated men in Rome, equally distinguished as an orator
and as a jurist, was about to besiege the pretender in Leucae, but
during his preparations for that purpose allowed himself to be surprised
and defeated by his too-much-underrated opponent, and was made a prisoner
in person by a Thracian band. But he did not allow such an enemy
the triumph of exhibiting the Roman commander-in-chief as a captive;
he provoked the barbarians, who had captured him without knowing
who he was, to put him to death (beginning of 624), and the consular
was only recognised when a corpse. With him, as it would seem, fell
Ariarathes king of Cappadocia. But not long after this victory
Aristonicus was attacked by Marcus Perpenna, the successor of
Crassus; his army was dispersed, he himself was besieged and taken
prisoner in Stratonicea, and was soon afterwards executed in Rome.
The subjugation of the last towns that still offered resistance
and the definitive regulation of the country were committed, after
the sudden death of Perpenna, to Manius Aquillius (625). The same
policy was followed as in the case of the Carthaginian territory.
Western Asia
Cappadocia
Pontus
India, Bactria
The Jews
Maritime Relations
Piracy
Crete
Cilicia
Along with Crete, Cilicia soon began to become a second home for
this buccaneering system. Piracy there not only gained ground
owing to the impotence of the Syrian rulers, but the usurper Diodotus
Tryphon, who had risen from a slave to be king of Syria (608-615),
encouraged it by all means in his chief seat, the rugged or western
Cilicia, with a view to strengthen his throne by the aid of the
corsairs. The uncommonly lucrative character of the traffic with
the pirates, who were at once the principal captors of, and dealers
in slaves, procured for them among the mercantile public, even in
Alexandria, Rhodes, and Delos, a certain toleration, in which the
very governments shared at least by inaction. The evil was so
serious that the senate, about 611, sent its best man Scipio
Aemilianus to Alexandria and Syria, in order to ascertain on the spot
what could be done in the matter. But diplomatic representations of
the Romans did not make weak governments strong; there was no other
remedy but that of directly maintaining a fleet in these waters, and
for this the Roman government lacked energy and perseverance. So all
things just remained on the old footing; the piratic fleet was the
only considerable naval power in the Mediterranean; the capture of
men was the only trade that flourished there. The Roman government
was an onlooker; but the Roman merchants, as the best customers in
the slave market, kept up an active and friendly traffic with the
pirate captains, as the most important wholesale dealers in that
commodity, at Delos and elsewhere.
General Result
CHAPTER II
For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna the Roman state
enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by a ripple here and there
on the surface. Its dominion extended over the three continents;
the lustre of the Roman power and the glory of the Roman name were
constantly on the increase; all eyes rested on Italy, all talents and
all riches flowed thither; it seemed as if a golden age of peaceful
prosperity and intellectual enjoyment of life could not but there
begin. The Orientals of this period told each other with astonishment
of the mighty republic of the west, "which subdued kingdoms far and
near, and whoever heard its name trembled; but it kept good faith
with its friends and clients. Such was the glory of the Romans, and
yet no one usurped the crown and no one paraded in purple dress; but
they obeyed whomsoever from year to year they made their master, and
there was among them neither envy nor discord."
Spread of Decay
Attempts at Reform
Permanent Criminal Commissions
Vote by Ballot
Exclusion of the Senators from the Equestrian Centuries
The Public Elections
It is true that now also there was no want of opposition, and it was
even to a certain extent effectual. The administration of justice
was improved. The administrative jurisdiction, which the senate
exercised either of itself or, on occasion, by extraordinary commissions,
over the provincial magistrates, was confessedly inadequate. It was
an innovation with a momentous bearing on the whole public life of the
Roman community, when in 605, on the proposal of Lucius Calpurnius Piso,
a standing senatorial commission (-quaestio ordinaria-) was instituted to
try in judicial form the complaints of the provincials against the Roman
magistrates placed over them on the score of extortion. An effort
was made to emancipate the comitia from the predominant influence
of the aristocracy. The panacea of Roman democracy was secret voting
in the assemblies of the burgesses, which was introduced first for
the elections of magistrates by the Gabinian law (615), then for
the public tribunals by the Cassian law (617), lastly for the voting
on legislative proposals by the Papirian law (623). In a similar
way soon afterwards (about 625) the senators were by decree of the
people enjoined on admission to the senate to surrender their public
horse, and thereby to renounce their privileged place in the voting
of the eighteen equestrian centuries.(2) These measures, directed to
the emancipation of the electors from the ruling aristocratic order,
may perhaps have seemed to the party which suggested them the first
step towards a regeneration of the state; in fact they made not the
slightest change in the nullity and want of freedom of the legally
supreme organ of the Roman community; that nullity indeed was only
the more palpably evinced to all whom it did or did not concern.
Equally ostentatious and equally empty was the formal recognition
accorded to the independence and sovereignty of the burgesses by
the transference of their place of assembly from the old Comitium below
the senate-house to the Forum (about 609). But this hostility between
the formal sovereignty of the people and the practically subsisting
constitution was in great part a semblance. Party phrases were in
free circulation: of the parties themselves there was little trace in
matters really and directly practical. Throughout the whole seventh
century the annual public elections to the civil magistracies,
especially to the consulship and censorship, formed the real standing
question of the day and the focus of political agitation; but it was
only in isolated and rare instances that the different candidates
represented opposite political principles; ordinarily the question
related purely to persons, and it was for the course of affairs a
matter of indifference whether the majority of the votes fell to a
Caecilian or to a Cornelian. The Romans thus lacked that which
outweighs and compensates all the evils of party-life--the free and
common movement of the masses towards what they discern as a befitting
aim--and yet endured all those evils solely for the benefit of the
paltry game of the ruling coteries.
It was comparatively easy for the Roman noble to enter on the career
of office as quaestor or tribune of the people; but the consulship
and the censorship were attainable by him only through great exertions
prolonged for years. The prizes were many, but those really worth
having were few; the competitors ran, as a Roman poet once said, as
it were over a racecourse wide at the starting-point but gradually
narrowing its dimensions. This was right, so long as the magistracy
was--what it was called--an "honour" and men of military, political,
or juristic ability were rival competitors for the rare chaplets; but
now the practical closeness of the nobility did away with the benefit
of competition, and left only its disadvantages. With few exceptions
the young men belonging to the ruling families crowded into the
political career, and hasty and premature ambition soon caught at
means more effective than was useful action for the common good.
The first requisite for a public career came to be powerful connections;
and therefore that career began, not as formerly in the camp, but in
the ante-chambers of influential men. A new and genteel body of clients
now undertook--what had formerly been done only by dependents and
freedmen--to come and wait on their patron early in the morning, and
to appear publicly in his train. But the mob also is a great lord,
and desires as such to receive attention. The rabble began to demand
as its right that the future consul should recognize and honour the
sovereign people in every ragged idler of the street, and that every
candidate should in his "going round" (-ambitus-) salute every
individual voter by name and press his hand. The world of quality
readily entered into this degrading canvass. The true candidate
cringed not only in the palace, but also on the street, and
recommended himself to the multitude by flattering attentions,
indulgences, and civilities more or less refined. Demagogism and
the cry for reforms were sedulously employed to attract the notice and
favour of the public; and they were the more effective, the more they
attacked not things but persons. It became the custom for beardless
youths of genteel birth to introduce themselves with -eclat- into
public life by playing afresh the part of Cato with the immature
passion of their boyish eloquence, and by constituting and proclaiming
themselves state-attorneys, if possible, against some man of very
high standing and very great unpopularity; the Romans suffered the
grave institutions of criminal justice and of political police to
become a means of soliciting office. The provision or, what was
still worse, the promise of magnificent popular amusements had long
been the, as it were legal, prerequisite to the obtaining of the
consulship;(3) now the votes of the electors began to be directly
purchased with money, as is shown by the prohibition issued against
this about 595. Perhaps the worst consequence of the continual
courting of the favour of the multitude by the ruling aristocracy
was the incompatibility of such a begging and fawning part with
the position which the government should rightfully occupy in
relation to the governed. The government was thus converted from
a blessing into a curse for the people. They no longer ventured to
dispose of the property and blood of the burgesses, as exigency required,
for the good of their country. They allowed the burgesses to become
habituated to the dangerous idea that they were legally exempt from
the payment of direct taxes even by way of advance--after the war
with Perseus no further advance had been asked from the community.
They allowed their military system to decay rather than compel the
burgesses to enter the odious transmarine service; how it fared
with the individual magistrates who attempted to carry out the
conscription according to the strict letter of the law, has
already been related.(4)
Social Crisis
The crisis with which the Roman revolution was opened arose not out
of this paltry political conflict, but out of the economic and social
relations which the Roman government allowed, like everything else,
simply to take their course, and which thus found opportunity to
bring the morbid matter, that had been long fermenting, without
hindrance and with fearful rapidity and violence to maturity. From
a very early period the Roman economy was based on the two factors
--always in quest of each other, and always at variance--the husbandry
of the small farmer and the money of the capitalist. The latter in the
closest alliance with landholding on a great scale had already for
centuries waged against the farmer-class a war, which seemed as though
it could not but terminate in the destruction first of the farmers
and thereafter of the whole commonwealth, but was broken off without
being properly decided in consequence of the successful wars and the
comprehensive and ample distribution of domains for which these wars
gave facilities. It has already been shown(5) that in the same age,
which renewed the distinction between patricians and plebeians under
altered names, the disproportionate accumulation of capital was
preparing a second assault on the farming system. It is true that
the method was different. Formerly the small farmer had been ruined
by advances of money, which practically reduced him to be the steward
of his creditor; now he was crushed by the competition of transmarine,
and especially of slave-grown, corn. The capitalists kept pace with
the times; capital, while waging war against labour or in other words
against the liberty of the person, of course, as it had always done,
under the strictest form of law, waged it no longer in the unseemly
fashion which converted the free man on account of debt into a slave,
but, throughout, with slaves legitimately bought and paid; the former
usurer of the capital appeared in a shape conformable to the times
as the owner of industrial plantations. But the ultimate result was
in both cases the same--the depreciation of the Italian farms; the
supplanting of the petty husbandry, first in a part of the provinces
and then in Italy, by the farming of large estates; the prevailing
tendency to devote the latter in Italy to the rearing of cattle and
the culture of the olive and vine; finally, the replacing of the
free labourers in the provinces as in Italy by slaves. Just as the
nobility was more dangerous than the patriciate, because the former
could not, like the latter, be set aside by a change of the
constitution; so this new power of capital was more dangerous than
that of the fourth and fifth centuries, because nothing was to be
done against it by changes in the law of the land.
The abyss of misery and woe, which opens before our eyes in this most
miserable of all proletariates, may be fathomed by those who venture
to gaze into such depths; it is very possible that, compared with the
sufferings of the Roman slaves, the sum of all Negro sufferings is but
a drop. Here we are not so much concerned with the hardships of the
slaves themselves as with the perils which they brought upon the Roman
state, and with the conduct of the government in confronting them.
It is plain that this proletariate was not called into existence by
the government and could not be directly set aside by it; this could
only have been accomplished by remedies which would have been still
worse than the disease. The duty of the government was simply, on
the one hand, to avert the direct danger to property and life, with
which the slave-proletariate threatened the members of the state,
by an earnest system of police for securing order; and on the other
hand, to aim at the restriction of the proletariate, as far as possible,
by the elevation of free labour. Let us see how the Roman aristocracy
executed these two tasks.
These were the results of the police system for securing order, as
it was handled by the Roman senate and its officials in Italy and
the provinces. While the task of getting quit of the proletariate
demands and only too often transcends the whole power and wisdom of
a government, its repression by measures of police on the other hand
is for any larger commonwealth comparatively easy. It would be well
with states, if the unpropertied masses threatened them with no other
danger than that with which they are menaced by bears and wolves;
only the timid and those who trade upon the silly fears of the
multitude prophesy the destruction of civil order through servile
revolts or insurrections of the proletariate. But even to this easier
task of restraining the oppressed masses the Roman government was by no
means equal, notwithstanding the profound peace and the inexhaustible
resources of the state. This was a sign of its weakness; but not of
its weakness alone. By law the Roman governor was bound to keep the
public roads clear and to have the robbers who were caught, if they were
slaves, crucified; and naturally, for slavery is not possible without a
reign of terror. At this period in Sicily a razzia was occasionally
doubtless set on foot by the governor, when the roads became too
insecure; but, in order not to disoblige the Italian planters, the
captured robbers were ordinarily given up by the authorities to
their masters to be punished at their discretion; and those masters
were frugal people who, if their slave-herdsmen asked clothes, replied
with stripes and with the inquiry whether travellers journeyed through
the land naked. The consequence of such connivance accordingly was,
that OH the subjugation of the slave-revolt the consul Publius Rupilius
ordered all that came into his hands alive--it is said upwards of
20,000 men--to be crucified. It was in truth no longer possible
to spare capital.
Ideas of Reform
Scipio Aemilianus
Such was the external and internal condition of Rome, when the state
entered on the seventh century of its existence. Wherever the eye
turned, it encountered abuses and decay; the question could not
but force itself on every sagacious and well-disposed man, whether
this state of things was not capable of remedy or amendment. There
was no want of such men in Rome; but no one seemed more called to the
great work of political and social reform than Publius Cornelius Scipio
Aemilianus Africanus (570-625), the favourite son of Aemilius Paullus
and the adopted grandson of the great Scipio, whose glorious surname
of Africanus he bore by virtue not merely of hereditary but of
personal right. Like his father, he was a man temperate and
thoroughly healthy, never ailing in body, and never at a loss to
resolve on the immediate and necessary course of action. Even
in his youth he had kept aloof from the usual proceedings of
political novices--the attending in the antechambers of prominent
senators and the delivery of forensic declamations. On the other
hand he loved the chase--when a youth of seventeen, after having
served with distinction under his father in the campaign against
Perseus, he had asked as his reward the free range of the deer
forest of the kings of Macedonia which had been untouched for
four years--and he was especially fond of devoting his leisure to
scientific and literary enjoyment. By the care of his father he had
been early initiated into that genuine Greek culture, which elevated
him above the insipid Hellenizing of the semi-culture commonly in
vogue; by his earnest and apt appreciation of the good and bad
qualities in the Greek character, and by his aristocratic carriage,
this Roman made an impression on the courts of the east and even on
the scoffing Alexandrians. His Hellenism was especially recognizable
in the delicate irony of his discourse and in the classic purity of
his Latin. Although not strictly an author, he yet, like Cato,
committed to writing his political speeches--they were, like the letters
of his adopted sister the mother of the Gracchi, esteemed by the later
-litteratores- as masterpieces of model prose--and took pleasure in
surrounding himself with the better Greek and Roman -litterati-,
a plebeian society which was doubtless regarded with no small
suspicion by those colleagues in the senate whose noble birth was
their sole distinction. A man morally steadfast and trustworthy,
his word held good with friend and foe; he avoided buildings and
speculations, and lived with simplicity; while in money matters he
acted not merely honourably and disinterestedly, but also with a
tenderness and liberality which seemed singular to the mercantile
spirit of his contemporaries. He was an able soldier and officer;
he brought home from the African war the honorary wreath which was
wont to be conferred on those who saved the lives of citizens in
danger at the peril of their own, and terminated as general the
war which he had begun as an officer; circumstances gave him no
opportunity of trying his skill as a general on tasks really
difficult. Scipio was not, any more than his father, a man
of brilliant gifts--as is indicated by the very fact of his
predilection for Xenophon, the sober soldier and correct author-
but he was an honest and true man, who seemed pre-eminently called
to stem the incipient decay by organic reforms. All the more
significant is the fact that he did not attempt it. It is true
that he helped, as he had opportunity and means, to redress or
prevent abuses, and laboured in particular at the improvement of
the administration of justice. It was chiefly by his assistance
that Lucius Cassius, an able man of the old Roman austerity and
uprightness, was enabled to carry against the most vehement
opposition of the Optimates his law as to voting, which introduced
vote by ballot for those popular tribunals which still embraced
the most important part of the criminal jurisdiction.(23) In like
manner, although he had not chosen to take part in boyish
impeachments, he himself in his mature years put upon their trial
several of the guiltiest of the aristocracy. In a like spirit, when
commanding before Carthage and Numantia, he drove forth the women
and priests to the gates of the camp, and subjected the rabble of
soldiers once more to the iron yoke of the old military discipline;
and when censor (612), he cleared away the smooth-chinned coxcombs
among the world of quality and in earnest language urged the
citizens to adhere more faithfully to the honest customs of their
fathers. But no one, and least of all he himself, could fail to
see that increased stringency in the administration of justice and
isolated interference were not even first steps towards the healing
of the organic evils under which the state laboured. These Scipio did
not touch. Gaius Laelius (consul in 614), Scipio's elder friend and
his political instructor and confidant, had conceived the plan of
proposing the resumption of the Italian domain-land which had not
been given away but had been temporarily occupied, and of giving
relief by its distribution to the visibly decaying Italian farmers;
but he desisted from the project when he saw what a storm he was
going to raise, and was thenceforth named the "Judicious." Scipio was
of the same opinion. He was fully persuaded of the greatness of the
evil, and with a courage deserving of honour he without respect of
persons remorselessly assailed it and carried his point, where he
risked himself alone; but he was also persuaded that the country
could only be relieved at the price of a revolution similar to that
which in the fourth and fifth centuries had sprung out of the question
of reform, and, rightly or wrongly, the remedy seemed to him worse than
the disease. So with the small circle of his friends he held a middle
position between the aristocrats, who never forgave him for his advocacy
of the Cassian law, and the democrats, whom he neither satisfied nor
wished to satisfy; solitary during his life, praised after his death
by both parties, now as the champion of the aristocracy, now as
the promoter of reform. Down to his time the censors on laying
down their office had called upon the gods to grant greater power
and glory to the state: the censor Scipio prayed that they might
deign to preserve the state. His whole confession of faith lies
in that painful exclamation.
Tiberius Gracchus
But where the man who had twice led the Roman army from deep decline
to victory despaired, a youth without achievements had the boldness to
give himself forth as the saviour of Italy. He was called Tiberius
Sempronius Gracchus (591-621). His father who bore the same name
(consul in 577, 591; censor in 585), was the true model of a Roman
aristocrat. The brilliant magnificence of his aedilician games, not
produced without oppressing the dependent communities, had drawn upon
him the severe and deserved censure of the senate;(24) his interference
in the pitiful process directed against the Scipios who were personally
hostile to him(25) gave proof of his chivalrous feeling, and perhaps of
his regard for his own order; and his energetic action against the
freedmen in his censorship(26) evinced his conservative disposition.
As governor, moreover, of the province of the Ebro,(27) by his bravery
and above all by his integrity he rendered a permanent service to his
country, and at the same time raised to himself in the hearts of
the subject nation an enduring monument of reverence and affection.
His mother Cornelia was the daughter of the conqueror of Zama, who,
simply on account of that generous intervention, had chosen his former
opponent as a son-in-law; she herself was a highly cultivated and
notable woman, who after the death of her much older husband had
refused the hand of the king of Egypt and reared her three surviving
children in memory of her husband and her father. Tiberius, the
elder of the two sons, was of a good and moral disposition, of
gentle aspect and quiet bearing, apparently fitted for anything rather
than for an agitator of the masses. In all his relations and views
he belonged to the Scipionic circle, whose refined and thorough
culture, Greek and national, he and his brother and sister shared.
Scipio Aemilianus was at once his cousin and his sister's husband;
under him Tiberius, at the age of eighteen, had taken part in the
storming of Carthage, and had by his valour acquired the commendation
of the stern general and warlike distinctions. It was natural
that the able young man should, with all the vivacity and all the
stringent precision of youth, adopt and intensify the views as to
the pervading decay of the state which were prevalent in that circle,
and more especially their ideas as to the elevation of the Italian
farmers. Nor was it merely to the young men that the shrinking of
Laelius from the execution of his ideas of reform seemed to be not
judicious, but weak. Appius Claudius, who had already been consul
(611) and censor (618), one of the most respected men in the senate,
censured the Scipionic circle for having so soon abandoned the scheme
of distributing the domain-lands with all the passionate vehemence
which was the hereditary characteristic of the Claudian house; and with
the greater bitterness, apparently because he had come into personal
conflict with Scipio Aemilianus in his candidature for the censorship.
Similar views were expressed by Publius Crassus Mucianus,(28) the
-pontifex maximus- of the day, who was held in universal honour by
the senate and the citizens as a man and a jurist. Even his brother
Publius Mucius Scaevola, the founder of scientific jurisprudence in
Rome, seemed not averse to the plan of reform; and his voice was of
the greater weight, as he stood in some measure aloof from the parties.
Similar were the sentiments of Quintus Metellus, the conqueror of
Macedonia and of the Achaeans, but respected not so much on account of
his warlike deeds as because he was a model of the old discipline and
manners alike in his domestic and his public life. Tiberius Gracchus
was closely connected with these men, particularly with Appius whose
daughter he had married, and with Mucianus whose daughter was married
to his brother. It was no wonder that he cherished the idea of
resuming in person the scheme of reform, so soon as he should find
himself in a position which would constitutionally allow him the
initiative. Personal motives may have strengthened this resolution.
The treaty of peace which Mancinus concluded with the Numantines in
617, was in substance the work of Gracchus;(29) the recollection that
the senate had cancelled it, that the general had been on its account
surrendered to the enemy, and that Gracchus with the other superior
officers had only escaped a like fate through the greater favour
which he enjoyed among the burgesses, could not put the young,
upright, and proud man in better humour with the ruling aristocracy.
The Hellenic rhetoricians with whom he was fond of discussing philosophy
and politics, Diophanes of Mytilene and Gaius Blossius of Cumae,
nourished within his soul the ideals over which he brooded: when his
intentions became known in wider circles, there was no want of approving
voices, and many a public placard summoned the grandson of Africanus to
think of the poor people and the deliverance of Italy.
Tribunate of Gracchus
His Agrarian Law
War was thus declared against the great landholders, who now, as
three centuries ago, found substantially their organ in the senate;
and once more, after a long interval, a single magistrate stood forth
in earnest opposition to the aristocratic government. It took up the
conflict in the mode--sanctioned by use and wont for such cases--of
paralyzing the excesses of the magistrates by means of the magistracy
itself.(31) A colleague of Gracchus, Marcus Octavius, a resolute man
who was seriously persuaded of the objectionable character of the
proposed domain law, interposed his veto when it was about to be put
to the vote; a step, the constitutional effect of which was to set
aside the proposal. Gracchus in his turn suspended the business
of the state and the administration of justice, and placed his seal
on the public chest; the government acquiesced--it was inconvenient,
but the year would draw to an end. Gracchus, in perplexity, brought his
law to the vote a second time. Octavius of course repeated his -veto-;
and to the urgent entreaty of his colleague and former friend, that
he would not obstruct the salvation of Italy, he might reply that on
that very question, as to how Italy could be saved, opinions differed,
but that his constitutional right to use his veto against the proposal
of his colleague was beyond all doubt. The senate now made an attempt
to open up to Gracchus a tolerable retreat; two consulars challenged
him to discuss the matter further in the senate house, and the tribune
entered into the scheme with zeal. He sought to construe this
proposal as implying that the senate had conceded the principle of
distributing the domain-land; but neither was this implied in it,
nor was the senate at all disposed to yield in the matter; the
discussions ended without any result. Constitutional means were
exhausted. In earlier times under such circumstances men were not
indisposed to let the proposal go to sleep for the current year, and
to take it up again in each succeeding one, till the earnestness of
the demand and the pressure of public opinion overbore resistance.
Now things were carried with a higher hand. Gracchus seemed to himself
to have reached the point when he must either wholly renounce his
reform or begin a revolution. He chose the latter course; for he
came before the burgesses with the declaration that either he or
Octavius must retire from the college, and suggested to Octavius
that a vote of the burgesses should be taken as to which of them
they wished to dismiss. Octavius naturally refused to consent to
this strange challenge; the -intercessio- existed for the very purpose
of giving scope to such differences of opinion among colleagues. Then
Gracchus broke off the discussion with his colleague, and turned to
the assembled multitude with the question whether a tribune of the
people, who acted in opposition to the people, had not forfeited his
office; and the assembly, long accustomed to assent to all proposals
presented to it, and for the most part composed of the agricultural
proletariate which had flocked in from the country and was
personally interested in the carrying of the law, gave almost
unanimously an affirmative answer. Marcus Octavius was at the bidding
of Gracchus removed by the lictors from the tribunes' bench; and then,
amidst universal rejoicing, the agrarian law was carried and the
first allotment-commissioners were nominated. The votes fell on the
author of the law along with his brother Gaius, who was only twenty
years of age, and his father-in-law Appius Claudius. Such a family-
selection augmented the exasperation of the aristocracy. When the
new magistrates applied as usual to the senate to obtain the moneys
for their equipment and for their daily allowance, the former was
refused, and a daily allowance was assigned to them of 24 -asses-
(1 shilling). The feud spread daily more and more, and became
more envenomed and more personal. The difficult and intricate task
of defining, resuming, and distributing the domains carried strife
into every burgess-community, and even into the allied Italian towns.
The aristocracy made no secret that, while they would acquiesce perhaps
in the law because they could not do otherwise, the officious legislator
should never escape their vengeance; and the announcement of Quintus
Pompeius, that he would impeach Gracchus on the very day of his
resigning his tribunate, was far from being the worst of the threats
thrown out against the tribune. Gracchus believed, probably with
reason, that his personal safety was imperilled, and no longer
appeared in the Forum without a retinue of 3000 or 4000 men--a step
which drew down on him bitter expressions in the senate, even from
Metellus who was not averse to reform in itself. Altogether, if
he had expected to reach the goal by the carrying of his agrarian
law, he had now to learn that he was only at the starting-point.
The "people" owed him gratitude; but he was a lost man, if he had
no farther protection than this gratitude of the people, if he did
not continue indispensable to them and did not constantly attach
to himself fresh interests and hopes by means of other and more
comprehensive proposals. Just at that time the kingdom and wealth
of the Attalids had fallen to the Romans by the testament of the
last king of Pergamus;(32) Gracchus proposed to the people that the
Pergamene treasure should be distributed among the new landholders for
the procuring of the requisite implements and stock, and vindicated
generally, in opposition to the existing practice, the right of the
burgesses to decide definitively as to the new province. He is said
to have prepared farther popular measures, for shortening the period
of service, for extending the right of appeal, for abolishing the
prerogative of the senators exclusively to do duty as civil jurymen,
and even for the admission of the Italian allies to Roman
citizenship. How far his projects in reality reached, cannot be
ascertained; this alone is certain, that Gracchus saw that his only
safety lay in inducing the burgesses to confer on him for a second
year the office which protected him, and that, with a view to obtain
this unconstitutional prolongation, he held forth a prospect of
further reforms. If at first he had risked himself in order to save
the commonwealth, he was now obliged to put the commonwealth at stake
in order to his own safety.
The tribes met to elect the tribunes for the ensuing year, and
the first divisions gave their votes for Gracchus; but the opposite
party in the end prevailed with their veto, so far at least that
the assembly broke up without having accomplished its object, and
the decision was postponed to the following day. For this day Gracchus
put in motion all means legitimate and illegitimate; he appeared to the
people dressed in mourning, and commended to them his youthful son;
anticipating that the election would once more be disturbed by the
veto, he made provision for expelling the adherents of the aristocracy
by force from the place of assembly in front of the Capitoline
temple. So the second day of election came on; the votes fell as on
the preceding day, and again the veto was exercised; the tumult began.
The burgesses dispersed; the elective assembly was practically dissolved;
the Capitoline temple was closed; it was rumoured in the city, now that
Tiberius had deposed all the tribunes, now that he had resolved to
continue his magistracy without reelection.
Death of Gracchus
That the rusty machinery of the comitia should be made use of for the
elections and for legislation, was already bad enough. But when those
masses--the -comitia- primarily, and practically also the -contiones---
were permitted to interfere in the administration, and the instrument
which the senate employed to prevent such interferences was wrested out
of its hands; when this so-called burgess-body was allowed to decree
to itself lands along with all their appurtenances out of the public
purse; when any one, whom circumstances and his influence with the
proletariate enabled to command the streets for a few hours, found it
possible to impress on his projects the legal stamp of the sovereign
people's will, Rome had reached not the beginning, but the end of
popular freedom--had arrived not at democracy, but at monarchy.
For that reason in the previous period Cato and those who shared
his views never brought such questions before the burgesses,
but discussed them solely in the senate.(37) For that reason
contemporaries of Gracchus, the men of the Scipionic circle,
described the Flaminian agrarian law of 522--the first step in
that fatal career--as the beginning of the decline of Roman greatness.
For that reason they allowed the author of the domain-distribution
to fall, and saw in his dreadful end, as it were, a rampart against
similar attempts in future, while yet they maintained and turned
to account with all their energy the domain-distribution itself
which he had carried through--so sad was the state of things in
Rome that honest patriots were forced into the horrible hypocrisy
of abandoning the evil-doer and yet appropriating the fruit of
the evil deed. For that reason too the opponents of Gracchus were
in a certain sense not wrong, when they accused him of aspiring to the
crown. For him it is a fresh impeachment rather than a justification,
that he himself was probably a stranger to any such thought.
The aristocratic government was so thoroughly pernicious, that
the citizen, who was able to depose the senate and to put
himself in its place, might perhaps benefit the commonwealth
more than he injured it.
Results
But such a bold player Tiberius Gracchus was not. He was a tolerably
capable, thoroughly well-meaning, conservative patriot, who simply
did not know what he was doing; who in the fullest belief that he
was calling the people evoked the rabble, and grasped at the crown
without being himself aware of it, until the inexorable sequence of
events urged him irresistibly into the career of the demagogue-tyrant;
until the family commission, the interferences with the public
finances, the further "reforms" exacted by necessity and despair,
the bodyguard from the pavement, and the conflicts in the streets
betrayed the lamentable usurper more and more clearly to himself and
others; until at length the unchained spirits of revolution seized and
devoured the incapable conjurer. The infamous butchery, through which
he perished, condemns itself, as it condemns the aristocratic faction
whence it issued; but the glory of martyrdom, with which it has
embellished the name of Tiberius Gracchus, came in this instance,
as usually, to the wrong man. The best of his contemporaries judged
otherwise. When the catastrophe was announced to Scipio Aemilianus,
he uttered the words of Homer:
and when the younger brother of Tiberius seemed disposed to come forward
in the same career, his own mother wrote to him: "Shall then our house
have no end of madness? Where shall be the limit? Have we not yet
enough to be ashamed of, in having confused and disorganized the state?"
So spoke not the anxious mother, but the daughter of the conqueror of
Carthage, who knew and experienced a misfortune yet greater than the
death of her children.
CHAPTER III
Tiberius Gracchus was dead; but his two works, the distribution
of land and the revolution, survived their author. In presence
of the starving agricultural proletariate the senate might venture
on a murder, but it could not make use of that murder to annul
the Sempronian agrarian law; the law itself had been far more
strengthened than shaken by the frantic outbreak of party fury.
The party of the aristocracy friendly towards reform, which openly
favoured the distribution of the domains--headed by Quintus Metellus,
just about this time (623) censor, and Publius Scaevola--in concert with
the party of Scipio Aemilianus, which was at least not disinclined to
reform, gained the upper hand for the time being even in the senate;
and a decree of the senate expressly directed the triumvirs to begin
their labours. According to the Sempronian law these were to be
nominated annually by the community, and this was probably done: but
from the nature of their task it was natural that the election should
fall again and again on the same men, and new elections in the proper
sense occurred only when a place became vacant through death. Thus in
the place of Tiberius Gracchus there was appointed the father-in-law
of his brother Gaius, Publius Crassus Mucianus; and after the fall of
Mucianus in 624(1) and the death of Appius Claudius, the business of
distribution was managed in concert with the young Gaius Gracchus by
two of the most active leaders of the movement party, Marcus Fulvius
Flaccus and Gaius Papirius Carbo. The very names of these men are
vouchers that the work of resuming and distributing the occupied
domain-land was prosecuted with zeal and energy; and, in fact, proofs
to that effect are not wanting. As early as 622 the consul of that
year, Publius Popillius, the same who directed the prosecutions of
the adherents of Tiberius Gracchus, recorded on a public monument that
he was "the first who had turned the shepherds out of the domains and
installed farmers in their stead"; and tradition otherwise affirms that
the distribution extended over all Italy, and that in the formerly
existing communities the number of farms was everywhere augmented--for
it was the design of the Sempronian agrarian law to elevate the farmer-
class not by the founding of new communities, but by the strengthening
of those already in existence. The extent and the comprehensive effect
of these distributions are attested by the numerous arrangements
in the Roman art of land-measuring that go back to the Gracchan
assignations of land; for instance, a due placing of boundary-stones
so as to obviate future mistakes appears to have been first called
into existence by the Gracchan courts for demarcation and the land-
distributions. But the numbers on the burgess-rolls give the
clearest evidence. The census, which was published in 623 and actually
took place probably in the beginning of 622, yielded not more than
319,000 burgesses capable of bearing arms, whereas six years afterwards
(629) in place of the previous falling-off(2) the number rises to
395,000, that is 76,000 of an increase--beyond all doubt solely
in consequence of what the allotment-commission did for the Roman
burgesses. Whether it multiplied the farms among the Italians in
the same proportion maybe doubted; at any rate what it did accomplish
yielded a great and beneficent result. It is true that this
result was not achieved without various violations of respectable
interests and existing rights. The allotment-commission, composed
of the most decided partisans, and absolute judge in its own cause,
proceeded with its labours in a reckless and even tumultuary fashion;
public notices summoned every one, who was able, to give information
regarding the extent of the domain-lands; the old land-registers were
inexorably referred to, and not only was occupation new and old
revoked without distinction, but in various cases real private
property, as to which the holder was unable satisfactorily to prove
his tenure, was included in the confiscation. Loud and for the most
part well founded as were the complaints, the senate allowed the
distributors to pursue their course; it was clear that, if the
domain question was to be settled at all, the matter could not
be carried through without such unceremonious vigour of action.
But this acquiescence had its limit. The Italian domain-land was not
solely in the hands of Roman burgesses; large tracts of it had been
assigned in exclusive usufruct to particular allied communities by
decrees of the people or senate, and other portions had been occupied
with or without permission by Latin burgesses. The allotment-
commission at length attacked these possessions also. The resumption
of the portions simply occupied by non-burgesses was no doubt allowable
in formal law, and not less presumably the resumption of the domain-land
handed over by decrees of the senate or even by resolutions of the
burgesses to the Italian communities, since thereby the state by no
means renounced its ownership and to all appearance gave its grants
to communities, just as to private persons, subject to revocation.
But the complaints of these allied or subject communities, that Rome
did not keep the settlements that were in force, could not be simply
disregarded like the complaints of the Roman citizens injured by the
action of the commissioners. Legally the former might be no better
founded than the latter; but, while in the latter case the matter
at stake was the private interests of members of the state, in
reference to the Latin possessions the question arose, whether it was
politically right to give fresh offence to communities so important in
a military point of view and already so greatly estranged from Rome by
numerous disabilities de jure and de facto(3) through this keenly-felt
injury to their material interests. The decision lay in the hands
of the middle party; it was that party which after the fall of
Gracchus had, in league with his adherents, protected reform against
the oligarchy, and it alone was now able in concert with the oligarchy
to set a limit to reform. The Latins resorted personally to the
most prominent man of this party, Scipio Aemilianus, with a request
that he would protect their rights. He promised to do so; and
mainly through his influence,(4) in 625, a decree of the people
withdrew from the commission its jurisdiction, and remitted the
decision respecting what were domanial and what private possessions
to the censors and, as proxies for them, the consuls, to whom according
to the general principles of law it pertained. This was simply a
suspension of further domain-distribution under a mild form. The consul
Tuditanus, by no means Gracchan in his views and little inclined to
occupy himself with the difficult task of agrarian definition,
embraced the opportunity of going off to the Illyrian army and leaving
the duty entrusted to him unfulfilled. The allotment-commission no
doubt continued to subsist, but, as the judicial regulation of the
domain-land was at a standstill, it was compelled to remain inactive.
Assassination of Aemilianus
The reform-party was deeply indignant. Even men like Publius Mucius
and Quintus Metellus disapproved of the intervention of Scipio. Other
circles were not content with expressing disapproval. Scipio had
announced for one of the following days an address respecting the
relations of the Latins; on the morning of that day he was found dead
in his bed. He was but fifty-six years of age, and in full health
and vigour; he had spoken in public the day before, and then in the
evening had retired earlier than usual to his bedchamber with a view
to prepare the outline of his speech for the following day. That he
had been the victim of a political assassination, cannot be doubted;
he himself shortly before had publicly mentioned the plots formed
to murder him. What assassin's hand had during the night slain
the first statesman and the first general of his age, was never
discovered; and it does not become history either to repeat the
reports handed down from the contemporary gossip of the city, or
to set about the childish attempt to ascertain the truth out of such
materials. This much only is clear, that the instigator of the deed
must have belonged to the Gracchan party; the assassination of Scipio
was the democratic reply to the aristocratic massacre at the temple
of Fidelity. The tribunals did not interfere. The popular party,
justly fearing that its leaders Gaius Gracchus, Flaccus, and Carbo,
whether guilty or not, might be involved in the prosecution, opposed
with all its might the institution of an inquiry; and the aristocracy,
which lost in Scipio quite as much an antagonist as an ally, was not
unwilling to let the matter sleep. The multitude and men of moderate
views were shocked; none more so than Quintus Metellus, who had
disapproved of Scipio's interference against reform, but turned away
with horror from such confederates, and ordered his four sons to carry
the bier of his great antagonist to the funeral pile. The funeral
was hurried over; with veiled head the last of the family of the
conqueror of Zama was borne forth, without any one having been
previously allowed to see the face of the deceased, and the flames
of the funeral pile consumed with the remains of the illustrious
man the traces at the same time of the crime.
The history of Rome presents various men of greater genius than Scipio
Aemilianus, but none equalling him in moral purity, in the utter
absence of political selfishness, in generous love of his country,
and none, perhaps, to whom destiny has assigned a more tragic part.
Conscious of the best intentions and of no common abilities, he was
doomed to see the ruin of his country carried out before his eyes,
and to repress within him every earnest attempt to save it, because
he clearly perceived that he should only thereby make the evil worse;
doomed to the necessity of sanctioning outrages like that of Nasica,
and at the same time of defending the work of the victim against
his murderers. Yet he might say that he had not lived in vain.
It was to him, at least quite as much as to the author of the
Sempronian law, that the Roman burgesses were indebted for an increase
of nearly 80,000 new farm-allotments; he it was too who put a stop to
this distribution of the domains, when it had produced such benefit
as it could produce. That it was time to break it off, was no doubt
disputed at the moment even by well-meaning men; but the fact that
Gaius Gracchus did not seriously recur to those possessions which
might have been, and yet were not, distributed under the law of his
brother, tells very much in favour of the belief that Scipio hit
substantially the right moment. Both measures were extorted from
the parties--the first from the aristocracy, the second from the
friends of reform; for each its author paid with his life. It was
Scipio's lot to fight for his country on many a battle-field and to
return home uninjured, that he might perish there by the hand of an
assassin; but in his quiet chamber he no less died for Rome than if
he had fallen before the walls of Carthage.
Destruction of Fregallae
Gaius Gracchus
Gaius Gracchus (601-633) was very different from his brother, who
was about nine years older. Like the latter, he had no relish for
vulgar pleasures and vulgar pursuits; he was a man of thorough
culture and a brave soldier; he had served with distinction before
Numantia under his brother-in-law, and afterwards in Sardinia.
But in talent, in character, and above all in passion he was decidedly
superior to Tiberius. The clearness and self-possession, which the
young man afterwards displayed amidst the pressure of all the varied
labours requisite for the practical carrying out of his numerous laws,
betokened his genuine statesmanly talent; as the passionate devotedness
faithful even to death, with which his intimate friends clung to
him, evinced the loveable nature of that noble mind. The discipline
of suffering which he had undergone, and his compulsory reserve during
the last nine years, augmented his energy of purpose and action; the
indignation repressed within the depths of his breast only glowed there
with an intensified fervour against the party which had disorganized
his country and murdered his brother. By virtue of this fearful
vehemence of temperament he became the foremost orator that Rome ever
had; without it, we should probably have been able to reckon him among
the first statesmen of all times. Among the few remains of his
recorded orations several are, even in their present condition, of
heart-stirring power;(7) and we can well understand how those who heard
or even merely read them were carried away by the impetuous torrent
of his words. Yet, great master as he was of speech, he was himself
not unfrequently mastered by anger, so that the utterance of the
brilliant speaker became confused or faltering. It was the true image
of his political acting and suffering. In the nature of Gaius there was
no vein, such as his brother had, of that somewhat sentimental but very
short-sighted and confused good-nature, which would have desired to
change the mind of a political opponent by entreaties and tears; with
full assurance he entered on the career of revolution and strove to
reach the goal of vengeance. "To me too," his mother wrote to him,
"nothing seems finer and more glorious than to retaliate on an enemy,
so far as it can be done without the country's ruin. But if this is
not possible, then may our enemies continue and remain what they are,
a thousand times rather than that our country should perish."
Cornelia knew her son; his creed was just the reverse. Vengeance he
would wreak on the wretched government, vengeance at any price, though
he himself and even the commonwealth were to be ruined by it--the
presentiment, that fate would overtake him as certainly as his brother,
drove him only to make haste like a man mortally wounded who throws
himself on the foe. The mother thought more nobly; but the son--
with his deeply provoked, passionately excited, thoroughly Italian
nature--has been more lamented than blamed by posterity, and posterity
has been right in its judgment.
Agrarian Laws
Colony of Capua
Transmarine Colonialization
Taxation of Asia
Jury Courts
While a gold mine was thus opened for the mercantile class, and the
members of the new partnership constituted a great financial power
imposing even for the government--a "senate of merchants"-a definite
sphere of public action was at the same time assigned to them in
the jury courts. The field of the criminal procedure, which by right
came before the burgesses, was among the Romans from the first very
narrow, and was, as we have already stated,(22) still further narrowed
by Gracchus; most processes--both such as related to public crimes, and
civil causes--were decided either by single jurymen [-indices-], or by
commissions partly permanent, partly extraordinary. Hitherto both the
former and the latter had been exclusively taken from the senate;
Gracchus transferred the functions of jurymen--both in strictly civil
processes, and in the case of the standing and temporary commissions--
to the equestrian order, directing a new list of jurymen to be
annually formed after the analogy of the equestrian centuries from
all persons of equestrian rating, and excluding the senators
directly, and the young men of senatorial families by the fixing of
a certain limit of age, from such judicial functions.(23) It is not
improbable that the selection of jurymen was chiefly made to fall
on the same men who played the leading part in the great mercantile
associations, particularly those farming the revenues in Asia and
elsewhere, just because these had a very close personal interest in
sitting in the courts; and, if the lists of jurymen and the societies
of -publicani- thus coincided as regards their chiefs, we can all
the better understand the significance of the counter-senate thus
constituted. The substantial effect of this was, that, while hitherto
there had been only two authorities in the state--the government as the
administering and controlling, and the burgesses as the legislative,
authority--and the courts had been divided between them, now the moneyed
aristocracy was not only united into a compact and privileged class on
the solid basis of material interests, but also, as a judicial and
controlling power, formed part of the state and took its place almost
on a footing of equality by the side of the ruling aristocracy. All
the old antipathies of the merchants against the nobility could not
but thenceforth find only too practical an expression in the sentences
of the jurymen; above all, when the provincial governors were called
to a reckoning, the senator had to await a decision involving his
civic existence at the hands no longer as formerly of his peers,
but of great merchants and bankers. The feuds between the Roman
capitalists and the Roman governors were transplanted from the
provincial administration to the dangerous field of these processes
of reckoning. Not only was the aristocracy of the rich divided, but
care was taken that the variance should always find fresh nourishment
and easy expression.
Overthrow of Gracchus
CHAPTER IV
All those measures which were devised by Gaius Gracchus for the
promotion of the public welfare--the best but, as may readily be
conceived, also the most unpopular part of his legislation--were
allowed by the aristocracy to drop. Nothing was so speedily and so
successfully assailed as the noblest of his projects, the scheme of
introducing a legal equality first between the Roman burgesses and
Italy, and thereafter between Italy and the provinces, and--inasmuch
as the distinction between the merely ruling and consuming and the
merely serving and working members of the state was thus done away--
at the same time solving the social question by the most comprehensive
and systematic emigration known in history. With all the determination
and all the peevish obstinacy of dotage the restored oligarchy
obtruded the principle of deceased generations--that Italy must
remain the ruling land and Rome the ruling city in Italy--afresh
on the present. Even in the lifetime of Gracchus the claims of
the Italian allies had been decidedly rejected, and the great idea of
transmarine colonization had been subjected to a very serious attack,
which became the immediate cause of Gracchus' fall. After his
death the scheme of restoring Carthage was set aside with little
difficulty by the government party, although the individual allotments
already distributed there were left to the recipients. It is true
that they could not prevent a similar foundation by the democratic
party from succeeding at another point: in the course of the conquests
beyond the Alps which Marcus Flaccus had begun, the colony of Narbo
(Narbonne) was founded there in 636, the oldest transmarine burgess-
city in the Roman empire, which, in spite of manifold attacks by the
government party and in spite of a proposal directly made by the
senate to abolish it, permanently held its ground, protected, as it
probably was, by the mercantile interests that were concerned. But,
apart from this exception--in its isolation not very important--the
government was uniformly successful in preventing the assignation
of land out of Italy.
The Provinces
Occupation of Cilicia
But nowhere did the impotence and perversity of the Roman provincial
administration come to light so conspicuously as in the insurrections
of the slave proletariate, which seemed to have revived on their
former footing simultaneously with the restoration of the aristocracy.
These insurrections of the slaves swelling from revolts into wars--
which had emerged just about 620 as one, and that perhaps the proximate,
cause of the Gracchan revolution--were renewed and repeated with dreary
uniformity. Again, as thirty years before, a ferment pervaded the body
of slaves throughout the Roman empire. We have already mentioned
the Italian conspiracies. The miners in the Attic silver-mines rose
in revolt, occupied the promontory of Sunium, and issuing thence
pillaged for a length of time the surrounding country. Similar
movements appeared at other places.
But the chief seat of these fearful commotions was once more Sicily
with its plantations and its hordes of slaves brought thither from
Asia Minor. It is significant of the greatness of the evil, that
an attempt of the government to check the worst iniquities of the
slaveholders was the immediate cause of the new insurrection. That
the free proletarians in Sicily were little better than the slaves,
had been shown by their attitude in the first insurrection;(8)
after it was subdued, the Roman speculators took their revenge and
reduced numbers of the free provincials into slavery. In consequence
of a sharp enactment issued against this by the senate in 650, Publius
Licinius Nerva, the governor of Sicily at the time, appointed a court
for deciding on claims of freedom to sit in Syracuse. The court
went earnestly to work; in a short time decision was given in eight
hundred processes against the slave-owners, and the number of causes in
dependence was daily on the increase. The terrified planters hastened
to Syracuse, to compel the Roman governor to suspend such unparalleled
administration of justice; Nerva was weak enough to let himself be
terrified, and in harsh language informed the non-free persons
requesting trial that they should forgo their troublesome demand for
right and justice and should instantly return to those who called
themselves their masters. Those who were thus dismissed, instead of
doing as he bade them, formed a conspiracy and went to the mountains.
The governor was not prepared for military measures, and even the
wretched militia of the island was not immediately at hand; so that he
concluded an alliance with one of the best known captains of banditti
in the island, and induced him by the promise of personal pardon to
betray the revolted slaves into the hands of the Romans. He thus
gained the mastery over this band. But another band of runaway
slaves succeeded in defeating a division of the garrison of Enna
(Castrogiovanni); and this first success procured for the insurgents--
what they especially needed--arms and a conflux of associates.
The armour of their fallen or fugitive opponents furnished the first
basis of their military organization, and the number of the insurgents
soon swelled to many thousands. These Syrians in a foreign land
already, like their predecessors, seemed to themselves not unworthy
to be governed by kings, as were their countrymen at home; and--
parodying the trumpery king of their native land down to the very
name--they placed the slave Salvius at their head as king Tryphon.
In the district between Enna and Leontini (Lentini) where these bands
had their head-quarters, the open country was wholly in the hands of
the insurgents and Morgantia and other walled towns were already
besieged by them, when the Roman governor with his hastily-collected
Sicilian and Italian troops fell upon the slave-army in front
of Morgantia. He occupied the undefended camp; but the slaves,
although surprised, made a stand. In the combat that ensued the
levy of the island not only gave way at the first onset, but, as the
slaves allowed every one who threw down his arms to escape unhindered,
the militia almost without exception embraced the good opportunity
of taking their departure, and the Roman army completely dispersed.
Had the slaves in Morgantia been willing to make common cause with
their comrades before the gates, the town was lost; but they preferred
to accept the gift of freedom in legal form from their masters, and by
their valour helped them to save the town--whereupon the Roman governor
declared the promise of liberty solemnly given to the slaves by the
masters to be void in law, as having been illegally extorted.
Athenion
While the revolt thus spread after an alarming manner in the interior
of the island, a second broke out on the west coast. It was headed
by Athenion. He had formerly been, just like Cleon, a dreaded
captain of banditti in his native country of Cilicia, and had been
carried thence as a slave to Sicily. He secured, just as his
predecessors had done, the adherence of the Greeks and Syrians
especially by prophesyings and other edifying impostures; but skilled
in war and sagacious as he was, he did not, like the other leaders, arm
the whole mass that flocked to him, but formed out of the men able for
warfare an organized army, while he assigned the remainder to peaceful
employment. In consequence of his strict discipline, which repressed
all vacillation and all insubordinate movement in his troops, and his
gentle treatment of the peaceful inhabitants of the country and even of
the captives, he gained rapid and great successes. The Romans were on
this occasion disappointed in the hope that the two leaders would fall
out; Athenion voluntarily submitted to the far less capable king
Tryphon, and thus preserved unity among the insurgents. These soon
ruled with virtually absolute power over the flat country, where
the free proletarians again took part more or less openly with the
slaves; the Roman authorities were not in a position to take the field
against them, and had to rest content with protecting the towns,
which were in the most lamentable plight, by means of the militia of
Sicily and that of Africa brought over in all haste. The administration
of justice was suspended over the whole island, and force was
the only law. As no cultivator living in town ventured any longer
beyond the gates, and no countryman ventured into the towns, the most
fearful famine set in, and the town-population of this island which
formerly fed Italy had to be supported by the Roman authorities
sending supplies of grain. Moreover, conspiracies of the town-
slaves everywhere threatened to break out within, while the insurgent
armies lay before, the walls; even Messana was within a hair's breadth
of being conquered by Athenion.
Aquillius
Difficult as it was for the government during the serious war with
the Cimbri to place a second army in the field, it could not avoid
sending in 651 an army of 14,000 Romans and Italians, not including
the transmarine militia, under the praetor Lucius Lucullus to the
island. The united slave-army was stationed in the mountains above
Sciacca, and accepted the battle which Lucullus offered. The better
military organization of the Romans gave them the victory; Athenion
was left for dead on the field, Tryphon had to throw himself into the
mountain-fortress of Triocala; the insurgents deliberated earnestly
whether it was possible to continue the struggle longer. But the
party, which was resolved to hold out to the last man, retained the
upper hand; Athenion, who had been saved in a marvellous manner,
reappeared among his troops and revived their sunken courage; above
all Lucullus with incredible negligence took not the smallest step
to follow up his victory; in fact, he is said to have intentionally
disorganized the army and to have burned his field baggage, with a
view to screen the total inefficacy of his administration and not to
be cast into the shade by his successor. Whether this was true or
not, his successor Gaius Servilius (652) obtained no better results;
and both generals were afterwards criminally impeached and condemned
for their conduct in office--which, however, was not at all a certain
proof of their guilt. Athenion, who after the death of Tryphon
(652) was invested with the sole command, stood victorious at the
head of a considerable army, when in 653 Manius Aquillius, who had
during the previous year distinguished himself under Marius in the
war with the Teutones, was as consul and governor entrusted with the
conduct of the war. After two years of hard conflicts--Aquillius is
said to have fought in person with Athenion, and to have killed him
in single combat--the Roman general at length put down the desperate
resistance, and vanquished the insurgents in their last retreats by
famine. The slaves on the island were prohibited from bearing arms
and peace was again restored to it, or, in other words, its recent
tormentors were relieved by those of former use and wont; in fact,
the victor himself occupied a prominent place among the numerous
and energetic robber-magistrates of this period. Any one who still
required a proof of the internal quality of the government of
the restored aristocracy might be referred to the origin and
to the conduct of this second Sicilian slave-war, which,
lasted for five years.
But wherever the eye might turn throughout the wide sphere of Roman
administration, the same causes and the same effects appeared.
If the Sicilian slave-war showed how far the government was from
being equal to even its simplest task of keeping in check the
proletariate, contemporary events in Africa displayed the skill with
which the Romans now governed the client-states. About the very time
when the Sicilian slave-war broke out, there was exhibited before
the eyes of the astonished world the spectacle of an unimportant
client-prince able to carry out a fourteen years' usurpation and
insurrection against the mighty republic which had shattered the
kingdoms of Macedonia and Asia with one blow of its weighty arm--
and that not by means of arms, but through the pitiful character
of its rulers.
Numidia
Jugurtha
Soon afterwards, in 636, king Micipsa died. The testament came into
force: but the two sons of Micipsa--the vehement Hiempsal still more
than his weak elder brother--soon came into so violent collision
with their cousin whom they looked on as an intruder into the
legitimate line of succession, that the idea of a joint reign of the
three kings had to be abandoned. An attempt was made to carry out
a division of the heritage; but the quarrelling kings could not agree
as to their quotas of land and treasure, and the protecting power, to
which in this case the decisive word by right belonged, gave itself,
as usual, no concern about this affair. A rupture took place;
Adherbal and Hiempsal were disposed to characterize their father's
testament as surreptitious and altogether to dispute Jugurtha's right
of joint inheritance, while on the other hand Jugurtha came forward
as a pretender to the whole kingdom. While the discussions as to the
partition were still going on, Hiempsal was made away with by hired
assassins; then a civil war arose between Adherbal and Jugurtha, in
which all Numidia took part. With his less numerous but better
disciplined and better led troops Jugurtha conquered, and seized the
whole territory of the kingdom, subjecting the chiefs who adhered to
his cousin to the most cruel persecution. Adherbal escaped to the
Roman province and proceeded to Rome to make his complaint there.
Jugurtha had expected this, and had made his arrangements to meet the
threatened intervention. In the camp before Numantia he had learned
more from Rome than Roman tactics; the Numidian prince, introduced
to the circles of the Roman aristocracy, had at the same time been
initiated into the intrigues of Roman coteries, and had studied at
the fountain-head what might be expected from Roman nobles. Even
then, sixteen years before Micipsa's death, he had entered into
disloyal negotiations as to the Numidian succession with Roman
comrades of rank, and Scipio had been under the necessity of gravely
reminding him that it was becoming in foreign princes to be on terms
of friendship with the Roman state rather than with individual
Roman citizens. The envoys of Jugurtha appeared in Rome, furnished
with something more than words: that they had chosen the right means
of diplomatic persuasion, was shown by the result. The most zealous
champions of Adherbal's just title were with incredible rapidity
convinced that Hiempsal had been put to death by his subjects on
account of his cruelty, and that the originator of the war as to the
succession was not Jugurtha, but Adherbal. Even the leading men in
the senate were shocked at the scandal; Marcus Scaurus sought to
check it, but in vain. The senate passed over what had taken place
in silence, and ordained that the two surviving testamentary heirs
should have the kingdom equally divided between them, and that, for
the prevention of fresh quarrels, the division should be undertaken
by a commission of the senate. This was done: the consular Lucius
Opimius, well known through his services in setting aside the
revolution, had embraced the opportunity of gathering the reward
of his patriotism, and had got himself placed at the head of the
commission. The division turned out thoroughly in favour of Jugurtha,
and not to the disadvantage of the commissioners; Cirta (Constantine)
the capital with its port of Rusicade (Philippeville) was no doubt
given to Adherbal, but by that very arrangement the portion which
fell to him was the eastern part of the kingdom consisting almost
wholly of sandy deserts, while Jugurtha obtained the fertile
and populous western half (what was afterwards Mauretania
Caesariensis and Sitifensis).
Siege of Cirta
This was bad; but matters soon became worse. In order to be able
under the semblance of self-defence to defraud Adherbal of his portion,
Jugurtha provoked him to war; but when the weak man, rendered wiser
by experience, allowed Jugurtha's horsemen to ravage his territory
unhindered and contented himself with lodging complaints at Rome,
Jugurtha, impatient of these ceremonies, began the war even without
pretext. Adherbal was totally defeated in the region of the modern
Philippeville, and threw himself into his capital of Cirta in the
immediate vicinity. While the siege was in progress, and Jugurtha's
troops were daily skirmishing with the numerous Italians who were
settled in Cirta and who took a more vigorous part in the defence of
the city than the Africans themselves, the commission despatched by
the Roman senate on Adherbal's first complaint made its appearance;
composed, of course, of young inexperienced men, such as the
government of those times regularly employed in the ordinary missions
of the state. The envoys demanded that Jugurtha should allow them
as deputed by the protecting power to Adherbal to enter the city,
and generally that he should suspend hostilities and accept their
mediation. Jugurtha summarily rejected both demands, and the envoys
hastily returned home--like boys, as they were--to report to the
fathers of the city. The fathers listened to the report, and
allowed their countrymen in Cirta just to fight on as long as they
pleased. It was not till, in the fifth month of the siege, a
messenger of Adherbal stole through the entrenchments of the enemy
and a letter of the king full of the most urgent entreaties reached
the senate, that the latter roused itself and actually adopted a
resolution--not to declare war as the minority demanded but to send a
new embassy--an embassy, however, headed by Marcus Scaurus, the great
conqueror of the Taurisci and the freedmen, the imposing hero of
the aristocracy, whose mere appearance would suffice to bring the
refractory king to a different mind. In fact Jugurtha appeared, as
he was bidden, at Utica to discuss the matter with Scaurus; endless
debates were held; when at length the conference was concluded, not
the slightest result had been obtained. The embassy returned to Rome
without having declared war, and the king went off again to the
siege of Cirta. Adherbal found himself reduced to extremities and
despaired of Roman support; the Italians in Cirta moreover, weary of
the siege and firmly relying for their own safety on the terror of the
Roman name, urged a surrender. So the town capitulated. Jugurtha
ordered his adopted brother to be executed amid cruel tortures, and
all the adult male population of the town, Africans as well as
Italians, to be put to the sword (642).
Roman Intervention
Treaty between Rome and Numidia
On the news of this peace the storm once more broke forth in Rome.
Everybody knew how the peace had been brought about; even Scaurus was
evidently open to bribery, only at a price higher than the ordinary
senatorial average. The legal validity of the peace was seriously
assailed in the senate; Gaius Memmius declared that the king, if he
had really submitted unconditionally, could not refuse to appear in
Rome, and that he should accordingly be summoned before them, with
the view of ascertaining how the matter actually stood as to the
thoroughly irregular negotiations for peace by hearing both the
contracting parties. They yielded to the inconvenient demand: but
at the same time granted a safe-conduct to the king inconsistently
with the law, for he came not as an enemy, but as one who had made
his submission. Thereupon the king actually appeared at Rome and
presented himself to be heard before the assembled people, which was
with difficulty induced to respect the safe-conduct and to refrain
from tearing in pieces on the spot the murderer of the Italians at
Cirta. But scarcely had Gaius Memmius addressed his first question
to the king, when one of his colleagues interfered in virtue of his
veto and enjoined the king to be silent. Here too African gold was
more powerful than the will of the sovereign people and of its
supreme magistrates. Meanwhile the discussions respecting the
validity of the peace so concluded went on in the senate, and the
new consul Spurius Postumius Albinus zealously supported the proposal
to cancel it, in the expectation that in that case the chief command
in Africa would devolve on him. This induced Massiva, a grandson of
Massinissa living in Rome, to assert before the senate his claims
to the vacant Numidian kingdom; upon which Bomilcar, one of the
confidants of king Jugurtha, doubtless under his instructions made
away with the rival of his master by assassination, and, when he was
prosecuted on account of it, escaped with Jugurtha's aid from Rome.
This new outrage perpetrated under the eyes of the Roman government
was at least so far effectual, that the senate now cancelled the
peace and dismissed the king from the city (winter of 643-644).
The war was accordingly resumed, and the consul Spurius Albinus was
invested with the command (644). But the African army down to its
lowest ranks was in a state of disorganization corresponding to such
a political and military superintendence. Not only had discipline
ceased and the spoliation of Numidian townships and even of the
Roman provincial territory become during the suspension of hostilities
the chief business of the Roman soldiery, but not a few officers
and soldiers had as well as their generals entered into secret
understanding with the enemy. It is easy to see that such an army
could do nothing in the field; and if Jugurtha on this occasion
bribed the Roman general into inaction, as was afterwards judicially
asserted against the latter, he did in truth what was superfluous.
Spurius Albinus therefore contented himself with doing nothing.
On the other hand his brother who after his departure assumed the
interim command--the equally foolhardy and incapable Aulus Postumius--
in the middle of winter fell on the idea of seizing by a bold coup de
main the treasures of the king, which were kept in the town of Suthul
(afterwards Calama, now Guelma) difficult of access and still more
difficult of conquest. The army set out thither and reached the
town; but the siege was unsuccessful and without prospect of result,
and, when the king who had remained for a time with his troops in
front of the town went into the desert, the Roman general preferred
to pursue him. This was precisely what Jugurtha intended in a
nocturnal assault, which was favoured by the difficulties of the
ground and the secret understanding which Jugurtha had with some in
the Roman army, the Numidians captured the Roman camp, and drove
the Romans, many of whom were unarmed, before them in the most
complete and disgraceful rout. The consequence was a capitulation,
the terms of which--the marching off of the Roman army under the yoke,
the immediate evacuation of the whole Numidian territory, and the
renewal of the treaty cancelled by the senate--were dictated by
Jugurtha and accepted by the Romans (in the beginning of 645).
This was too much to be borne. While the Africans were exulting and
the prospect--thus suddenly opened up--of such an overthrow of the
alien domination as had been reckoned scarcely possible was bringing
numerous tribes of the free and half-free inhabitants of the desert
to the standards of the victorious king, public opinion in Italy was
vehemently aroused against the equally corrupt and pernicious governing
aristocracy, and broke out in a storm of prosecutions which, fostered
by the exasperation of the mercantile class, swept away a succession
of victims from the highest circles of the nobility. On the proposal
of the tribune of the people Gaius Mamilius Limetanus, in spite of the
timid attempts of the senate to avert the threatened punishment, an
extraordinary jury-commission was appointed to investigate the high
treason that had occurred in connection with the question of the
Numidian succession; and its sentences sent the two former commanders-
in-chief Gaius Bestia and Spurius Albinus as well as Lucius Opimius,
the head of the first African commission and the executioner withal
of Gaius Gracchus, along with numerous other less notable men of the
government party, guilty and innocent, into exile. That these
prosecutions, however, were only intended to appease the excitement
of public opinion, in the capitalist circles more especially, by the
sacrifice of some of the persons most compromised, and that there was
in them not the slightest trace of a rising of popular indignation
against the government itself, void as it was of right and honour,
is shown very clearly by the fact that no one ventured to attack
the guiltiest of the guilty, the prudent and powerful Scaurus; on
the contrary he was about this very time elected censor and also,
incredible as it may seem, chosen as one of the presidents of the
extraordinary commission of treason. Still less was any attempt even
made to interfere with the functions of the government, and it was
left solely to the senate to put an end to the Numidian scandal in a
manner as gentle as possible for the aristocracy; for that it was
time to do so, even the most aristocratic aristocrat probably began
to perceive.
The senate in the first place cancelled the second treaty of peace--
to surrender to the enemy the commander who had concluded it, as was
done some thirty years before, seemed according to the new ideas of
the sanctity of treaties no longer necessary--and determined, this
time in all earnest, to renew the war. The supreme command in Africa
was entrusted, as was natural, to an aristocrat, but yet to one of
the few men of quality who in a military and moral point of view were
equal to the task. The choice fell on Quintus Metellus. He was,
like the whole powerful family to which he belonged, in principle a
rigid and unscrupulous aristocrat; as a magistrate, he, no doubt,
reckoned it honourable to hire assassins for the good of the state and
would presumably have ridiculed the act of Fabricius towards Pyrrhus
as unpractical knight errantry, but he was an inflexible administrator
accessible neither to fear nor to corruption, and a judicious and
experienced warrior. In this respect he was so far free from the
prejudices of his order that he selected as his lieutenants not men
of rank, but the excellent officer Publius Rutilius Rufus, who was
esteemed in military circles for his exemplary discipline and as the
author of an altered and improved system of drill, and the brave Latin
farmer's son Gaius Marius, who had risen from the pike. Attended by
these and other able officers, Metellus presented himself in the course
of 645 as consul and commander-in-chief to the African army, which he
found in such disorder that the generals had not hitherto ventured
to lead it into the enemy's territory and it was formidable to none
save the unhappy inhabitants of the Roman province. It was
sternly and speedily reorganized, and in the spring of 646.(12)
Beyond the utterly barren mountain-range, over which lay the route of
the Romans into the interior, a plain of eighteen miles in breadth
extended as far as the river Muthul, which ran parallel to the
mountain-chain. The plain was destitute of water and of trees except
in the immediate vicinity of the river, and was only intersected by
a hill-ridge covered with low brushwood. On this ridge Jugurtha
awaited the Roman army. His troops were arranged in two masses;
the one, including a part of the infantry and the elephants, under
Bomilcar at the point where the ridge abutted on the river, the
other, embracing the flower of the infantry and all the cavalry,
higher up towards the mountain-range, concealed by the bushes.
On debouching from the mountains, the Romans saw the enemy in a
position completely commanding their right flank; and, as they could
not possibly remain on the bare and arid crest of the chain and were
under the necessity of reaching the river, they had to solve the
difficult problem of gaining the stream through the entirely open plain
of eighteen miles in breadth, under the eyes of the enemy's horsemen and
without light cavalry of their own. Metellus despatched a detachment
under Rufus straight towards the river, to pitch a camp there;
the main body marched from the defiles of the mountain-chain in an
oblique direction through the plain towards the hill-ridge, with a
view to dislodge the enemy from the latter. But this march in the
plain threatened to become the destruction of the army; for, while
Numidian infantry occupied the mountain defiles in the rear of the
Romans as the latter evacuated them, the Roman attacking column found
itself assailed on all sides by swarms of the enemy's horse, who
charged down on it from the ridge. The constant onset of the
hostile swarms hindered the advance, and the battle threatened to
resolve itself into a number of confused and detached conflicts;
while at the same time Bomilcar with his division detained the corps
under Rufus, to prevent it from hastening to the help of the hard-
pressed Roman main army. Nevertheless Metellus and Marius with a
couple of thousand soldiers succeeded in reaching the foot of the
ridge; and the Numidian infantry which defended the heights, in
spite of their superior numbers and favourable position, fled almost
without resistance when the legionaries charged at a rapid pace
up the hill. The Numidian infantry held its ground equally ill
against Rufus; it was scattered at the first charge, and the
elephants were all killed or captured on the broken ground. Late
in the evening the two Roman divisions, each victorious on its
own part and each anxious as to the fate of the other, met between
the two fields of battle. It was a battle attesting alike the
uncommon military talent of Jugurtha and the indestructible solidity
of the Roman infantry, which alone had converted their strategical
defeat into a victory. Jugurtha sent home a great part of his troops
after the battle, and restricted himself to a guerilla warfare, which
he likewise managed with skill.
The two Roman columns, the one led by Metellus, the other by Marius--
who, although by birth and rank the humblest, occupied since the
battle on the Muthul the first place among the chiefs of the staff--
traversed the Numidian territory, occupied the towns, and, when any
place did not readily open its gates, put to death the adult male
population. But the most considerable among the eastern inland
towns, Zama, opposed to the Romans a serious resistance, which the
king energetically supported. He was even successful in surprising
the Roman camp; and the Romans found themselves at last compelled to
abandon the siege and to go into winter quarters. For the sake of
more easily provisioning his army Metellus, leaving behind garrisons
in the conquered towns, transferred it into the Roman province, and
employed the opportunity of suspended hostilities to institute fresh
negotiations, showing a disposition to grant to the king a peace on
tolerable terms. Jugurtha readily entered into them; he had at
once bound himself to pay 200,000 pounds of silver, and had even
delivered up his elephants and 300 hostages, as well as 3000 Roman
deserters, who were immediately put to death. At the same time,
however, the king's most confidential counsellor, Bomilcar--who not
unreasonably apprehended that, if peace should ensue, Jugurtha would
deliver him up as the murderer of Massiva to the Roman courts--was
gained by Metellus and induced, in consideration of an assurance of
impunity as respected that murder and of great rewards, to promise
that he would deliver the king alive or dead into the hands of the
Romans. But neither that official negotiation nor this intrigue
led to the desired result. When Metellus brought forward the
suggestion that the king should give himself up in person as a
prisoner, the latter broke off the negotiations; Bomilcar's
intercourse with the enemy was discovered, and he was arrested and
executed. These diplomatic cabals of the meanest kind admit of no
apology; but the Romans had every reason to aim at the possession of
the person of their antagonist. The war had reached a point, at which
it could neither be carried farther nor abandoned. The state of
feeling in Numidia was evinced by the revolt of Vaga,(13) the most
considerable of the cities occupied by the Romans, in the winter of
646-7; on which occasion the whole Roman garrison, officers and men,
were put to death with the exception of the commandant Titus Turpilius
Silanus, who was afterwards--whether rightly or wrongly, we cannot
tell--condemned to death by a Roman court-martial and executed for
having an understanding with the enemy. The town was surprised
by Metellus on the second day after its revolt, and given over to
all the rigour of martial law; but if such was the temper of the
easy to be reached and comparatively submissive dwellers on the
banks of the Bagradas, what might be looked for farther inland and
among the roving tribes of the desert? Jugurtha was the idol of
the Africans, who readily overlooked the double fratricide in the
liberator and avenger of their nation. Twenty years afterwards a
Numidian corps which was fighting in Italy for the Romans had to
be sent back in all haste to Africa, when the son of Jugurtha
appeared in the enemy's ranks; we may infer from this, how great
was the influence which he himself exercised over his people.
What prospect was there of a termination of the struggle in regions
where the combined peculiarities of the population and of the soil
allowed a leader, who had once secured the sympathies of the
nation, to protract the war in endless guerilla conflicts, or even
to let it sleep for a time in order to revive it at the right moment
with renewed vigour?
When Metellus again took the field in 647, Jugurtha nowhere held
his ground against him; he appeared now at one point, now at another
far distant; it seemed as if they would as easily get the better of
the lions as of these horsemen of the desert. A battle was fought,
a victory was won; but it was difficult to say what had been
gained by the victory. The king had vanished out of sight in
the distance. In the interior of the modern beylik of Tunis,
close on the edge of the great desert, there lay on an oasis
provided with springs the strong place Thala;(14) thither Jugurtha
had retired with his children, his treasures, and the flower of his
troops, there to await better times. Metellus ventured to follow the
king through a desert, in which his troops had to carry water along
with them in skins forty-five miles; Thala was reached and fell after
a forty days' siege; but the Roman deserters destroyed the most
valuable part of the booty along with the building in which they
burnt themselves after the capture of the town, and--what was of more
consequence--king Jugurtha escaped with his children and his chest.
Numidia was no doubt virtually in the hands of the Romans; but,
instead of their object being thereby gained, the war seemed only
to extend over a field wider and wider. In the south the free
Gaetulian tribes of the desert began at the call of Jugurtha a
national war against the Romans. In the west Bocchus king of
Mauretania, whose friendship the Romans had in earlier times
despised, seemed now not indisposed to make common cause with his
son-in-law against them; he not only received him in his court, but,
uniting to Jugurtha's followers his own numberless swarms of horsemen,
he marched into the region of Cirta, where Metellus was in winter
quarters. They began to negotiate: it was clear that in the
person of Jugurtha he held in his hands the real prize of the
struggle for Rome. But what were his intentions--whether to sell
his son-in-law dear to the Romans, or to take up the national war
in concert with that son-in-law--neither the Romans nor Jugurtha
nor perhaps even the king himself knew; and he was in no hurry
to abandon his ambiguous position.
Marius Commander-in-Chief
Strange as it may seem, we can yet understand why the Romans now,
after king Bocchus had commenced the war, began to make most zealous
exertions to secure his friendship, which they had at first slighted
and thereafter had at least not specially sought; by doing so they
gained this advantage, that no formal declaration of war took place
on the part of Mauretania. King Bocchus was not unwilling to return
to his old ambiguous position: without dissolving his agreement with
Jugurtha or dismissing him, he entered into negotiations with the
Roman general respecting the terms of an alliance with Rome. When
they were agreed or seemed to be so, the king requested that, for
the purpose of concluding the treaty and receiving the royal captive,
Marius would send to him Lucius Sulla, who was known and acceptable
to the king partly from his having formerly appeared as envoy of
the senate at the Mauretanian court, partly from the commendations of
the Mauretanian envoys destined for Rome to whom Sulla had rendered
services on their way. Marius was in an awkward position.
His declining the suggestion would probably lead to a breach; his
accepting it would throw his most aristocratic and bravest officer
into the hands of a man more than untrustworthy, who, as every one
knew, played a double game with the Romans and with Jugurtha, and
who seemed almost to have contrived the scheme for the purpose of
obtaining for himself provisional hostages from both sides in the
persons of Jugurtha and Sulla. But the wish to terminate the war
outweighed every other consideration, and Sulla agreed to undertake
the perilous task which Marius suggested to him. He boldly departed
under the guidance of Volux the son of king Bocchus, nor did his
resolution waver even when his guide led him through the midst of
Jugurtha's camp. He rejected the pusillanimous proposals of flight
that came from his attendants, and marched, with the king's son at
his side, uninjured through the enemy. The daring officer evinced
the same decision in the discussions with the sultan, and induced
him at length seriously to make his choice.
Jugurtha was sacrificed. Under the pretext that all his requests were
to be granted, he was allured by his own father-in-law into an ambush,
his attendants were killed, and he himself was taken prisoner.
The great traitor thus fell by the treachery of his nearest relatives.
Lucius Sulla brought the crafty and restless African in chains along
with his children to the Roman headquarters; and the war which had
lasted for seven years was at an end. The victory was primarily
associated with the name of Marius. King Jugurtha in royal robes
and in chains, along with his two sons, preceded the triumphal chariot
of the victor, when he entered Rome on the 1st of January 650: by
his orders the son of the desert perished a few days afterwards in
the subterranean city-prison, the old -tullianum- at the Capitol--
the "bath of ice," as the African called it, when he crossed the
threshold in order either to be strangled or to perish from cold and
hunger there. But it could not be denied that Marius had the least
important share in the actual successes: the conquest of Numidia up
to the edge of the desert was the work of Metellus, the capture of
Jugurtha was the work of Sulla, and between the two Marius played a
part somewhat compromising the dignity of an ambitious upstart.
Marius reluctantly tolerated the assumption by his predecessor of the
name of conqueror of Numidia; he flew into a violent rage when king
Bocchus afterwards consecrated a golden effigy at the Capitol, which
represented the surrender of Jugurtha to Sulla; and yet in the eyes
of unprejudiced judges the services of these two threw the generalship
of Marius very much into the shade--more especially Sulla's brilliant
expedition to the desert, which had made his courage, his presence of
mind, his acuteness, his power over men to be recognized by the
general himself and by the whole army. In themselves these military
rivalries would have been of little moment, if they had not been mixed
up with the conflict of political parties, if the opposition had not
supplanted the senatorial general by Marius, and if the party of the
government had not, with the deliberate intention of exasperating,
praised Metellus and still more Sulla as the military celebrities
and preferred them to the nominal victor. We shall have to return
to the fatal consequences of these animosities when narrating
the internal history.
Reorganization of Numidia
Political Issues
From the close of the sixth century the Roman community ruled over
the three great peninsulas projecting from the northern continent into
the Mediterranean, at least taken as a whole. Even there however--in
the north and west of Spain, in the valleys of the Ligurian Apennines
and the Alps, and in the mountains of Macedonia and Thrace--tribes
wholly or partially free continued to defy the lax Roman government.
Moreover the continental communication between Spain and Italy as
well as between Italy and Macedonia was very superficially provided
for, and the countries beyond the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Balkan
chain--the great river basins of the Rhone, the Rhine, and the Danube--
in the main lay beyond the political horizon of the Romans. We have
now to set forth what steps were taken on the part of Rome to secure
and to round off her empire in this direction, and how at the same
time the great masses of peoples, who were ever moving to and fro
behind that mighty mountain-screen, began to beat at the gates of the
northern mountains and rudely to remind the Graeco-Roman world that
it was mistaken in believing itself the sole possessor of the earth.
Let us first glance at the region between the western Alps and the
Pyrenees. The Romans had for long commanded this part of the coast
of the Mediterranean through their client city of Massilia, one of
the oldest, most faithful, and most powerful of the allied communities
dependent on Rome. Its maritime stations, Agatha (Agde) and Rhoda
(Rosas) to the westward, and Tauroentium (Ciotat), Olbia (Hyeres?),
Antipolis (Antibes), and Nicaea (Nice) on the east secured the
navigation of the coast as well as the land-route from the Pyrenees
to the Alps; and its mercantile and political connections reached far
into the interior. An expedition into the Alps above Nice and Antibes,
directed against the Ligurian Oxybii and Decietae, was undertaken by
the Romans in 600 partly at the request of the Massiliots, partly
in their own interest; and after hot conflicts, some of which were
attended with much loss, this district of the mountains was compelled
to furnish thenceforth standing hostages to the Massiliots and to pay
them a yearly tribute. It is not improbable that about this same
period the cultivation of the vine and olive, which flourished in this
quarter after the model set by the Massiliots, was in the interest
of the Italian landholders and merchants simultaneously prohibited
throughout the territory beyond the Alps dependent on Massilia.(1)
A similar character of financial speculation marks the war, which was
waged by the Romans under the consul Appius Claudius in 611 against the
Salassi respecting the gold mines and gold washings of Victumulae (in
the district of Vercelli and Bard and in the whole valley of the Dorea
Baltea). The great extent of these washings, which deprived the
inhabitants of the country lying lower down of water for their fields,
first gave rise to an attempt at mediation and then to the armed
intervention of the Romans. The war, although the Romans began it
like all the other wars of this period with a defeat, led at last to
the subjugation of the Salassi, and the cession of the gold district
to the Roman treasury. Some forty years afterwards (654) the colony of
Eporedia (Ivrea) was instituted on the territory thus gained, chiefly
doubtless with a view to command the western, as Aquileia commanded
the eastern, passage of the Alps.
These Alpine wars first assumed a more serious character, when Marcus
Fulvius Flaccus, the faithful ally of Gaius Gracchus, took the chief
command in this quarter as consul in 629. He was the first to enter
on the career of Transalpine conquest. In the much-divided Celtic
nation at this period the canton of the Bituriges had lost its
real hegemony and retained merely an honorary presidency, and the
actually leading canton in the region from the Pyrenees to the Rhine
and from the Mediterranean to the Western Ocean was that of the
Arverni;(2) so that the statement seems not quite an exaggeration,
that it could bring into the field as many as 180,000 men. With
them the Haedui (about Autun) carried on an unequal rivalry for the
hegemony; while in north-eastern Gaul the kings of the Suessiones
(about Soissons) united under their protectorate the league of the
Belgic tribes extending as far as Britain. Greek travellers of
that period had much to tell of the magnificent state maintained by
Luerius, king of the Arvernians--how, surrounded by his brilliant train
of clansmen, his huntsmen with their pack of hounds in leash and his
band of wandering minstrels, he travelled in a silver-mounted chariot
through the towns of his kingdom, scattering the gold with a full
hand among the multitude, and gladdening above all the heart of the
minstrel with the glittering shower. The descriptions of the open
table which he kept in an enclosure of 1500 double paces square, and
to which every one who came in the way was invited, vividly remind us
of the marriage table of Camacho. In fact, the numerous Arvernian
gold coins of this period still extant show that the canton of the
Arvernians had attained to extraordinary wealth and a comparatively
high standard of civilization.
Province of Narbo
Illyria
Dalmatians
Their Subjugation
The Tribes at the Sources of the Rhine and along the Danube
Helvetii
Boii
Taurisci
Cerni
Raeti, Euganei, Veneti
In these regions the most powerful nation at that time was the great
Celtic people, which according to the native tradition(10) had issued
from its settlements on the Western Ocean and poured itself about the
same time into the valley of the Po on the south of the main chain of
the Alps and into the regions on the Upper Rhine and on the Danube to
the north of that chain. Among their various tribes, both banks of
the Upper Rhine were occupied by the powerful and rich Helvetii, who
nowhere came into immediate contact with the Romans and so lived in
peace and in treaty with them: at this time they seem to have stretched
from the lake of Geneva to the river Main, and to have occupied the
modern Switzerland, Suabia, and Franconia Adjacent to them dwelt
the Boii, whose settlements were probably in the modern Bavaria and
Bohemia.(11) To the south-east of these we meet with another Celtic
stock, which made its appearance in Styria and Carinthia under the
name of the Taurisci and afterwards of the Norici, in Friuli, Carniola,
and Istria under that of the Carni. Their city Noreia (not far from
St. Veit to the north of Klagenfurt) was flourishing and widely known
from the iron mines that were even at that time zealously worked
in those regions; still more were the Italians at this very period
allured thither by the rich seams of gold brought to light, till the
natives excluded them and took this California of that day wholly into
their own hands. These Celtic hordes streaming along on both sides of
the Alps had after their fashion occupied chiefly the flat and hill
country; the Alpine regions proper and likewise the districts along
the Adige and the Lower Po were not occupied by them, and remained
in the hands of the earlier indigenous population. Nothing certain
has yet been ascertained as to the nationality of the latter; but they
appear under the name of the Raeti in the mountains of East Switzerland
and the Tyrol, and under that of the Euganei and Veneti about Padua
and Venice; so that at this last point the two great Celtic streams
almost touched each other, and only a narrow belt of native population
separated the Celtic Cenomani about Brescia from the Celtic Carnians
in Friuli. The Euganei and Veneti had long been peaceful subjects of
the Romans; whereas the peoples of the Alps proper were not only still
free, but made regular forays down from their mountains into the
plain between the Alps and the Po, where they were not content with
levying contributions, but conducted themselves with fearful cruelty
in the townships which they captured, not unfrequently slaughtering
the whole male population down to the infant in the cradle--the practical
answer, it may be presumed, to the Roman razzias in the Alpine valleys.
How dangerous these Raetian inroads were, appears from the fact that
one of them about 660 destroyed the considerable township of Comum.
Illyrian Peoples
Japydes
Scordisci
If these Celtic and non-Celtic tribes having their settlements upon and
beyond the Alpine chain were already variously intermingled, there was,
as may easily be conceived, a still more comprehensive intermixture
of peoples in the countries on the Lower Danube, where there were no
high mountain ranges, as in the more western regions, to serve as
natural walls of partition. The original Illyrian population, of
which the modern Albanians seem to be the last pure survivors, was
throughout, at least in the interior, largely mixed with Celtic
elements, and the Celtic armour and Celtic method of warfare were
probably everywhere introduced in that quarter. Next to the Taurisci
came the Japydes, who had their settlements on the Julian Alps in the
modern Croatia as far down as Fiume and Zeng,--a tribe originally
doubtless Illyrian, but largely mixed with Celts. Bordering with these
along the coast were the already-mentioned Dalmatians, into whose rugged
mountains the Celts do not seem to have penetrated; whereas in the
interior the Celtic Scordisci, to whom the tribe of the Triballi
formerly especially powerful in that quarter had succumbed, and who
had played a principal part in the Celtic expeditions to Delphi,
were about this time the leading nation along the Lower Save as far
as the Morava in the modern Bosnia and Servia. They roamed far and
wide towards Moesia, Thrace, and Macedonia, and fearful tales were
told of their savage valour and cruel customs. Their chief place of
arms was the strong Segestica or Siscia at the point where the Kulpa
falls into the Save. The peoples who were at that time settled in
Hungary, Transylvania, Roumania, and Bulgaria still remained for the
present beyond the horizon of the Romans; the latter came into contact
only with the Thracians on the eastern frontier of Macedonia in
the Rhodope mountains.
It would have been no easy task for a government more energetic than was
the Roman government of that day to establish an organized and adequate
defence of the frontier against these wide domains of barbarism; what
was done for this important object under the auspices of the government
ment of the restoration, did not come up to even the most moderate
requirements. There seems to have been no want of expeditions against
the inhabitants of the Alps: in 636 there was a triumph over the Stoeni,
who were probably settled in the mountains above Verona; in 659 the consul
Lucius Crassus caused the Alpine valleys far and wide to De ransacked
and the inhabitants to be put to death, and yet he did not succeed in
killing enough of them to enable him to celebrate a village triumph and
to couple the laurels of the victor with his oratorical fame. But as
the Romans remained satisfied with razzias of this sort which merely
exasperated the natives without rendering them harmless, and, apparently,
withdrew the troops again after every such inroad, the state of matters
in the region beyond the Po remained substantially the same as before.
In Thrace
In Illyria
More serious conflicts took place in the Illyrian land, where complaints
were constantly made as to the turbulent Dalmatians by their neighbours
and those who navigated the Adriatic; and along the wholly exposed
northern frontier of Macedonia, which, according to the significant
expression of a Roman, extended as far as the Roman swords and spears
reached, the conflicts with the barbarians never ceased. In 619 an
expedition was undertaken against the Ardyaei or Vardaei and the Pleraei
or Paralii, a Dalmatian tribe on the coast to the north of the mouth
of the Narenta, which was incessantly perpetrating outrages on the sea
and on the opposite coast: by order of the Romans they removed from
the coast and settled in the interior, the modern Herzegovina, where
they began to cultivate the soil, but, unused to their new calling,
pined away in that inclement region. At the same time an attack was
directed from Macedonia against the Scordisci, who had, it may be
presumed, made common cause with the assailed inhabitants of the coast.
Soon afterwards (625) the consul Tuditanus in connection with the able
Decimus Brutus, the conqueror of the Spanish Callaeci, humbled
the Japydes, and, after sustaining a defeat at the outset, at length
carried the Roman arms into the heart of Dalmatia as far as the river
Kerka, 115 miles distant from Aquileia; the Japydes thenceforth appear
as a nation at peace and on friendly terms with Rome. But ten years
later (635) the Dalmatians rose afresh, once more in concert with
the Scordisci. While the consul Lucius Cotta fought against the latter
and in doing so advanced apparently as far as Segestica, his colleague
Lucius Metellus afterwards named Dalmaticus, the elder brother of the
conqueror of Numidia, marched against the Dalmatians, conquered them
and passed the winter in Salona (Spalato), which town henceforth
appears as the chief stronghold of the Romans in that region. It is
not improbable that the construction of the Via Gabinia, which led
from Salona in an easterly direction to Andetrium (near Much)
and thence farther into the interior, falls within this period.
The Romans Cross the Eastern Alps and Reach the Danube
The Cimbri
But these victories had an effect which the victors did not
anticipate. For a considerable period an "unsettled people" had
been wandering along the northern verge of the country occupied by
the Celts on both sides of the Danube. They called themselves the
Cimbri, that is, the Chempho, the champions or, as their enemies
translated it, the robbers; a designation, however, which to all
appearance had become the name of the people even before their
migration. They came from the north, and the first Celtic people
with whom they came in contact were, so far as is known, the Boii,
probably in Bohemia. More exact details as to the cause and
the direction of their migration have not been recorded by
contemporaries,(17) and cannot be supplied by conjecture, since the
state of things in those times to the north of Bohemia and the Main
and to the east of the Lower Rhine lies wholly beyond our knowledge.
But the hypothesis that the Cimbri, as well as the similar horde of
the Teutones which afterwards joined them, belonged essentially not
to the Celtic nation, to which the Romans at first assigned them,
but to the Germanic, is supported by the most definite facts: viz.,
by the appearance of two small tribes of the same name--remnants
apparently left behind in their primitive seats--the Cimbri in
the modern Denmark, the Teutones in the north-east of Germany in
the neighbourhood of the Baltic, where Pytheas, a contemporary of
Alexander the Great, makes mention of them thus early in connection
with the amber trade; by the insertion of the Cimbri and Teutones in
the list of the Germanic peoples among the Ingaevones alongside of
the Chauci; by the judgment of Caesar, who first made the Romans
acquainted with the distinction betweenthe Ge rmans and the Celts,
and who includes the Cimbri, many of whom he must himself have seen,
among the Germans; and lastly, by the very names of the peoples and
the statements as to their physical appearance and habits in other
respects, which, while applying to the men of the north generally,
are especially applicable to the Germans. On the other hand it is
conceivable enough that such a horde, after having been engaged in
wandering perhaps for many years and having in its movements near to
or within the land of the Celts doubtless welcomed every brother-in-arms
who joined it, would include a certain amount of Celtic elements; so
that it is not surprising that men of Celtic name should be at
the head of the Cimbri, or that the Romans should employ spies
speaking the Celtic tongue to gain information among them. It was
a marvellous movement, the like of which the Romans had not yet seen;
not a predatory expedition of men equipped for the purpose, nor
a "-ver sacrum-" of young men migrating to a foreign land, but a
migratory people that had set out with their women and children, with
their goods and chattels, to seek a new home. The waggon, which had
everywhere among the still not fully settled peoples of the north a
different importance from what it had among the Hellenes and the
Italians, and which universally accompanied the Celts also in their
encampments, was among the Cimbri as it were their house, where,
beneath the leather covering stretched over it, a place was found for
the wife and children and even for the house-dog as well as for the
furniture. The men of the south beheld with astonishment those tall
lank figures with the fair locks and bright blue eyes, the hardy and
stately women who were little inferior in size and strength to the
men, and the children with old men's hair, as the amazed Italians
called the flaxen-haired youths of the north. Their system of warfare
was substantially that of the Celts of this period, who no longer
fought, as the Italian Celts had formerly done, bareheaded and with
merely sword and dagger, but with copper helmets often richly adorned
and with a peculiar missile weapon, the -materis-; the large sword was
retained and the long narrow shield, along with which they probably
wore also a coat of mail. They were not destitute of cavalry; but
the Romans were superior to them in that arm. Their order of battle
was as formerly a rude phalanx professedly drawn up with just as many
ranks in depth as in breadth, the first rank of which in dangerous
combats not unfrequently tied together their metallic girdles with
cords. Their manners were rude. Flesh was frequently devoured raw.
The bravest and, if possible, the tallest man was king of the host.
Not unfrequently, after the manner of the Celts and of barbarians
generally, the time and place of the combat were previously arranged
with the enemy, and sometimes also, before the battle began, an individual
opponent was challenged to single combat. The conflict was ushered
in by their insulting the enemy with unseemly gestures, and by a
horrible noise--the men raising their battle-shout, and the women
and children increasing the din by drumming on the leathern covers
of the waggons. The Cimbrian fought bravely--death on the bed of
honour was deemed by him the only death worthy of a free man--but
after the victory he indemnified himself by the most savage brutality,
and sometimes promised beforehand to present to the gods of
battle whatever victory should place in the power of the victor.
The effects of the enemy were broken in pieces, the horses were killed,
the prisoners were hanged or preserved only to be sacrificed to the gods.
It was the priestesses--grey-haired women in white linen dresses and
unshod--who, like Iphigenia in Scythia, offered these sacrifices, and
prophesied the future from the streaming blood of the prisoner of war
or the criminal who formed the victim. How much in these customs was
the universal usage of the northern barbarians, how much was borrowed
from the Celts, and how much was peculiar to the Germans, cannot
be ascertained; but the practice of having the army accompanied
and directed not by priests, but by priestesses, may be pronounced
an undoubtedly Germanic custom. Thus marched the Cimbri into
the unknown land--an immense multitude of various origin which had
congregated round a nucleus of Germanic emigrants from the Baltic--
not without resemblance to the great bodies of emigrants, that in our
own times cross the ocean similarly burdened and similarly mingled, and
with aims not much less vague; carrying their lumbering waggon-castle,
with the dexterity which a long migratory life imparts, over streams
and mountains; dangerous to more civilized nations like the sea-wave
and the hurricane, and like these capricious and unaccountable, now
rapidly advancing, now suddenly pausing, turning aside, or receding.
They came and struck like lightning; like lightning they vanished;
and unhappily, in the dull age in which they appeared, there was
no observer who deemed it worth while accurately to describe the
marvellous meteor. When men afterwards began to trace the chain,
of which this emigration, the first Germanic movement which touched
the orbit of ancient civilization, was a link, the direct and living
knowledge of it had long passed away.
Defeat of Silanus
With a view to cover the frontier of the Rhine and the immediately
threatened territory of the Allobroges, a Roman army under Marcus
Junius Silanus appeared in 645 in Southern Gaul. The Cimbri
requested that land might be assigned to them where they might
peacefully settle--a request which certainly could not be granted.
The consul instead of replying attacked them; he was utterly defeated
and the Roman camp was taken. The new levies which were occasioned
by this misfortune were already attended with so much difficulty, that
the senate procured the abolition of the laws--presumably proceeding
from Gaius Gracchus--which limited the obligation to military service
in point of time.(19) But the Cimbri, instead of following up their
victory over the Romans, sent to the senate at Rome to repeat their
request for the assignment of land, and meanwhile employed themselves,
apparently, in the subjugation of the surrounding Celtic cantons.
Thus the Roman province and the new Roman army were left for the
moment undisturbed by the Germans; but a new enemy arose in Gaul
itself. The Helvetii, who had suffered much in the constant conflicts
with their north-eastern neighbours, felt themselves stimulated by
the example of the Cimbri to seek in their turn for more quiet and
fertile settlements in western Gaul, and had perhaps, even when the
Cimbrian hosts marched through their land, formed an alliance with
them for that purpose. Now under the leadership of Divico the forces
of the Tougeni (position unknown) and of the Tigorini (on the lake
of Murten) crossed the Jura,(20) and reached the territory of the
Nitiobroges (about Agen on the Garonne). The Roman army under the
consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, which they here encountered, allowed
itself to be decoyed by the Helvetii into an ambush, in which the
general himself and his legate, the consular Lucius Piso, along with
the greater portion of the soldiers met their death; Gaius Popillius,
the interim commander-in-chief of the force which had escaped to
the camp, was allowed to withdraw under the yoke on condition of
surrendering half the property which the troops carried with them
and furnishing hostages (647). So perilous was the state of things
for the Romans, that one of the most important towns in their
own province, Tolosa, rose against them and placed the Roman
garrison in chains.
Defeat of Arausio
They came in 649 under their king Boiorix, on this occasion seriously
meditating an inroad into Italy. They were opposed on the right bank
of the Rhone by the proconsul Caepio, on the left by the consul Gnaeus
Mallius Maximus and by his legate, the consular Marcus Aurelius
Scaurus, under him at the head of a detached corps. The first onset
fell on the latter; he was totally defeated and brought in person as
a prisoner to the enemy's head-quarters, where the Cimbrian king,
indignant at the proud warning given to him by the captive Roman
not to venture with his army into Italy, put him to death. Maximus
thereupon ordered his colleague to bring his army over the Rhone:
the latter complying with reluctance at length appeared at Arausio
(Orange) on the left bank of the river, where the whole Roman force
now stood confronting the Cimbrian army, and is alleged to have made
such an impression by its considerable numbers that the Cimbri began
to negotiate. But the two leaders lived in the most vehement discord.
Maximus, an insignificant and incapable man, was as consul the legal
superior of his prouder and better born, but not better qualified,
proconsular colleague Caepio; but the latter refused to occupy a
common camp and to devise operations in concert with him, and still,
as formerly, maintained his independent command. In vain deputies from
the Roman senate endeavoured to effect a reconciliation; a personal
conference between the generals, on which the officers insisted, only
widened the breach. When Caepio saw Maximus negotiating with the
envoys of the Cimbri, he fancied that the latter wished to gain the
sole credit of their subjugation, and threw himself with his portion of
the army alone in all haste on the enemy. He was utterly annihilated,
so that even his camp fell into the hands of the enemy (6 Oct. 649);
and his destruction was followed by the no less complete defeat
of the second Roman army. It is asserted that 80,000 Roman soldiers
and half as many of the immense and helpless body of camp-followers
perished, and that only ten men escaped: this much is certain, that only
a few out of the two armies succeeded in escaping, for the Romans had
fought with the river in their rear. It was a calamity which materially
and morally far surpassed the day of Cannae. The defeats of Carbo,
of Silanus, and of Longinus had passed without producing any permanent
impression on the Italians. They were accustomed to open every war
with disasters; the invincibleness of the Roman arms was so firmly
established, that it seemed superfluous to attend to the pretty numerous
exceptions. But the battle of Arausio, the alarming proximity of
the victorious Cimbrian army to the undefended passes of the Alps,
the insurrections breaking out afresh and with increased force both
in the Roman territory beyond the Alps and among the Lusitanians,
the defenceless condition of Italy, produced a sudden and fearful
awakening from these dreams. Men recalled the never wholly forgotten
Celtic inroads of the fourth century, the day on the Allia and
the burning of Rome: with the double force at once of the oldest
remembrance and of the freshest alarm the terror of the Gauls came
upon Italy; through all the west people seemed to be aware that
the Roman empire was beginning to totter. As after the battle
of Cannae, the period of mourning was shortened by decree of
the senate.(21) The new enlistments brought out the most painful
scarcity of men. All Italians capable of bearing arms had to swear
that they would not leave Italy; the captains of the vessels lying
in the Italian ports were instructed not to take on board any man fit
for service. It is impossible to tell what might have happened, had
the Cimbri immediately after their double victory advanced through
the gates of the Alps into Italy. But they first overran the territory
of the Arverni, who with difficulty defended themselves in their
fortresses against the enemy; and soon, weary of sieges, set out
from thence, not to Italy, but westward to the Pyrenees.
If the torpid organism of the Roman polity could still of itself reach
a crisis of wholesome reaction, that reaction could not but set in
now, when, by one of the marvellous pieces of good fortune, in which
the history of Rome is so rich, the danger was sufficiently imminent
to rouse all the energy and all the patriotism of the burgesses, and
yet did not burst upon them so suddenly as to leave no space for the
development of their resources. But the very same phenomena, which
had occurred four years previously after the African defeats, presented
themselves afresh. In fact the African and Gallic disasters were
essentially of the same kind. It may be that primarily the blame
of the former fell more on the oligarchy as a whole, that of the
latter more on individual magistrates; but public opinion justly
recognized in both, above all things, the bankruptcy of the government,
which in its progressive development imperilled first the honour and
now the very existence of the state. People just as little deceived
themselves then as now regarding the true seat of the evil, but
as little now as then did they make even an attempt to apply the
remedy at the proper point. They saw well that the system was
to blame; but on this occasion also they adhered to the method
of calling individuals to account--only no doubt this second storm
discharged itself on the heads of the oligarchy so much the more
heavily, as the calamity of 649 exceeded in extent and peril that of
645. The sure instinctive feeling of the public, that there was no
resource against the oligarchy except the -tyrannis-, was once more
apparent in their readily entering into every attempt by officers
of note to force the hand of the government and, under one form
or another, to overturn the oligarchic rule by a dictatorship.
Marius Commander-in-Chief
Of more importance than this measure of revenge was the question how
the dangerous war beyond the Alps was to be further carried on, and
first of all to whom the supreme command in it was to be committed.
With an unprejudiced treatment of the matter it was not difficult to
make a fitting choice. Rome was doubtless, in comparison with earlier
times, not rich in military notabilities; yet Quintus Maximus had
commanded with distinction in Gaul, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and
Quintus Minucius in the regions of the Danube, Quintus Metellus,
Publius Rutilius Rufus, Gaius Marius in Africa; and the object
proposed was not to defeat a Pyrrhus or a Hannibal, but again
to make good the often-tried superiority of Roman arms and Roman
tactics in opposition to the barbarians of the north--an object which
required no genius, but merely a stern and capable soldier. But it
was precisely a time when nothing was so difficult as the unprejudiced
settlement of a question of administration. The government was, as
it could not but be and as the Jugurthine war had already shown, so
utterly bankrupt in public opinion, that its ablest generals had to
retire in the full career of victory, whenever it occurred to an
officer of mark to revile them before the people and to get himself as
the candidate of the opposition appointed by the latter to the head of
affairs. It was no wonder that what took place after the victories of
Metellus was repeated on a greater scale after the defeats of Gnaeus
Mallius and Quintus Caepio. Once more Gaius Marius came forward, in
spite of the law which prohibited the holding of the consulship more
than once, as a candidate for the supreme magistracy; and not only was
he nominated as consul and charged with the chief command in the Gallic
war, while he was still in Africa at the head of the army there, but
he was reinvested with the consulship for five years in succession
(650-654)--in a way, which looked like an intentional mockery of
the exclusive spirit that the nobility had exhibited in reference
to this very man in all its folly and shortsightedness, but was also
unparalleled in the annals of the republic, and in fact absolutely
incompatible with the spirit of the free constitution of Rome.
In the Roman military system in particular--the transformation of which
from a burgess-militia into a body of mercenaries, begun in the African
war, was continued and completed by Marius during his five years of a
supreme command unlimited through the exigencies of the time still more
than through the terms of his appointment--the profound traces of this
unconstitutional commandership-in-chief of the first democratic general
remained visible for all time.
Roman Defensive
When the march was over, he broke up his encampment and followed
in the steps of the enemy, preserving rigorous order and carefully
entrenching himself night after night. The Teutones, who were striving
to gain the coast road, marching down the banks of the Rhone reached
the district of Aquae Sextiae, followed by the Romans. The light
Ligurian troops of the Romans, as they were drawing water, here came
into collision with the Celtic rear-guard, the Ambrones; the conflict
soon became general; after a hot struggle the Romans conquered and
pursued the retreating enemy up to their waggon-stronghold. This first
successful collision elevated the spirits of the general as well as of
the soldiers; on the third day after it Marius drew up his array for
a decisive battle on the hill, the summit of which bore the Roman
camp. The Teutones, long impatient to measure themselves against
their antagonists, immediately rushed up the hill and began the
conflict. It was severe and protracted: up to midday the Germans
stood like walls; but the unwonted heat of the Provengal sun
relaxed their energies, and a false alarm in their rear, where a
band of Roman camp-boys ran forth from a wooded ambuscade with loud
shouts, utterly decided the breaking up of the wavering ranks.
The whole horde was scattered, and, as was to be expected in a foreign
land, either put to death or taken prisoners. Among the captives
was king Teutobod; among the killed a multitude of women, who, not
unacquainted with the treatment which awaited them as slaves, had
caused themselves to be slain in desperate resistance at their
waggons, or had put themselves to death in captivity, after having
vainly requested to be dedicated to the service of the gods and of
the sacred virgins of Vesta (summer of 652).
Cimbrians in Italy
Thus Gaul was relieved from the Germans; and it was time, for
their brothers-in-arms were already on the south side of the Alps.
In alliance with the Helvetii, the Cimbri had without difficulty passed
from the Seine to the upper valley of the Rhine, had crossed the chain
of the Alps by the Brenner pass, and had descended thence through
the valleys of the Eisach and Adige into the Italian plain. Here
the consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus was to guard the passes; but
not fully acquainted with the country and afraid of having his flank
turned, he had not ventured to advance into the Alps themselves, but
had posted himself below Trent on the left bank of the Adige, and had
secured in any event his retreat to the right bank by the construction
of a bridge. When the Cimbri, however, pushed forward in dense
masses from the mountains, a panic seized the Roman army, and
legionaries and horsemen ran off, the latter straight for the capital,
the former to the nearest height which seemed to afford security.
With great difficulty Catulus brought at least the greater portion of
his army by a stratagem back to the river and over the bridge, before
the enemy, who commanded the upper course of the Adige and were
already floating down trees and beams against the bridge, succeeded
in destroying it and thereby cutting off the retreat of the army.
But the general had to leave behind a legion on the other bank, and
the cowardly tribune who led it was already disposed to capitulate,
when the centurion Gnaeus Petreius of Atina, struck him down and cut
his way through the midst of the enemy to the main army on the right
bank of the Adige. Thus the army, and in some degree even the
honour of their arms, was saved; but the consequences of the neglect
to occupy the passes and of the too hasty retreat were yet very
seriously felt Catulus was obliged to withdraw to the right bank of
the Po and to leave the whole plain between the Po and the Alps in
the power of the Cimbri, so that communication was maintained with
Aquileia only by sea. This took place in the summer of 652, about
the same time when the decisive battle between the Teutones and the
Romans occurred at Aquae Sextiae. Had the Cimbri continued their
attack without interruption, Rome might have been greatly embarrassed;
but on this occasion also they remained faithful to their custom of
resting in winter, and all the more, because the rich country, the
unwonted quarters under the shelter of a roof, the warm baths, and
the new and abundant supplies for eating and drinking invited them
to make themselves comfortable for the moment. Thereby the Romans
gained time to encounter them with united forces in Italy. It was
no season to resume--as the democratic general would perhaps otherwise
have done--the interrupted scheme of conquest in Gaul, such as Gaius
Gracchus had probably projected. From the battle-field of Aix the
victorious army was conducted to the Po; and after a brief stay in
the capital, where Marius refused the triumph offered to him until
he had utterly subdued the barbarians, he arrived in person at the
united armies. In the spring of 653 they again crossed the Po,
50,000 strong, under the consul Marius and the proconsul Catulus,
and marched against the Cimbri, who on their part seem to have marched
up the river with a view to cross the mighty stream at its source.
The two armies met below Vercellae not far from the confluence of
the Sesia with the Po,(25) just at the spot where Hannibal had fought
his first battle on Italian soil. The Cimbri desired battle, and
according to their custom sent to the Romans to settle the time and
place for it; Marius gratified them and named the next day--it was
the 30th July 653--and the Raudine plain, a wide level space, which
the superior Roman cavalry found advantageous for their movements.
Here they fell upon the enemy expecting them and yet taken by
surprise; for in the dense morning mist the Cimbrian cavalry found
itself in hand-to-hand conflict with the stronger cavalry of the
Romans before it anticipated attack, and was thereby thrown back
upon the infantry which was just making its dispositions for battle.
A complete victory was gained with slight loss, and the Cimbri were
annihilated. Those might be deemed fortunate who met death in the
battle, as most did, including the brave king Boiorix; more fortunate
at least than those who afterwards in despair laid hands on themselves,
or were obliged to seek in the slave-market of Rome the master who
might retaliate on the individual Northman for the audacity of having
coveted the beauteous south before it was time. The Tigorini, who had
remained behind in the passes of the Alps with the view of subsequently
following the Cimbri, ran off on the news of the defeat to their native
land. The human avalanche, which for thirteen years had alarmed the
nations from the Danube to the Ebro, from the Seine to the Po, rested
beneath the sod or toiled under the yoke of slavery; the forlorn hope
of the German migrations had performed its duty; the homeless people
of the Cimbri and their comrades were no more.
CHAPTER VI
Marius
Gaius Marius, the son of a poor day-labourer, was born in 599 at the
village of Cereatae then belonging to Arpinum, which afterwards obtained
municipal rights as Cereatae Marianae and still at the present day bears
the name of "Marius' home" (Casamare). He was reared at the plough,
in circumstances so humble that they seemed to preclude him from access
even to the municipal offices of Arpinum: he learned early--what he
practised afterwards even when a general--to bear hunger and thirst,
the heat of summer and the cold of winter, and to sleep on the hard
ground. As soon as his age allowed him, he had entered the army and
through service in the severe school of the Spanish wars had rapidly
risen to be an officer. In Scipio's Numantine war he, at that time
twenty-three years of age, attracted the notice of the stern general
by the neatness with which he kept his horse and his accoutrements,
as well as by his bravery in combat and his decorous demeanour in camp.
He had returned home with honourable scars and warlike distinctions,
and with the ardent wish to make himself a name in the career on which
he had gloriously entered; but, as matters then stood, a man of even the
highest merit could not attain those political offices, which alone led
to the higher military posts, without wealth and without connections.
The young officer acquired both by fortunate commercial speculations and
by his union with a maiden of the ancient patrician clan of the Julii.
So by dint of great efforts and after various miscarriages he succeeded,
in 639, in attaining the praetorship, in which he found opportunity of
displaying afresh his military ability as governor of Further Spain.
How he thereafter in spite of the aristocracy received the consulship in
647 and, as proconsul (648, 649), terminated the African war; and how,
called after the calamitous day of Arausio to the superintendence of
the war against the Germans, he had his consulship renewed for four
successive years from 650 to 653 (a thing unexampled in the annals of
the republic) and vanquished and annihilated the Cimbri in Cisalpine,
and the Teutones in Transalpine, Gaul--has been already related. In his
military position he had shown himself a brave and upright man, who
administered justice impartially, disposed of the spoil with rare
honesty and disinterestedness, and was thoroughly incorruptible; a
skilful organizer, who had brought the somewhat rusty machinery of the
Roman military system once more into a state of efficiency; an able
general, who kept the soldier under discipline and withal in good humour
and at the same time won his affections in comrade-like intercourse, but
looked the enemy boldly in the face and joined issue with him at the
proper time. He was not, as far as we can judge, a man of eminent
military capacity; but the very respectable qualities which he possessed
were quite sufficient under the existing circumstances to procure for
him the reputation of such capacity, and by virtue of it he had taken
his place in a fashion of unparalleled honour among the consulars and
the triumphators. But he was none the better fitted on that account for
the brilliant circle. His voice remained harsh and loud, and his look
wild, as if he still saw before him Libyans or Cimbrians, and not well-
bred and perfumed colleagues. That he was superstitious like a genuine
soldier of fortune; that he was induced to become a candidate for his
first consulship, not by the impulse of his talents, but primarily by
the utterances of an Etruscan -haruspex-; and that in the campaign with
the Teutones a Syrian prophetess Martha lent the aid of her oracles
to the council of war,--these things were not, in the strict sense,
unaristocratic: in such matters, then as at all times, the highest and
lowest strata of society met. But the want of political culture was
unpardonable; it was commendable, no doubt, that he had the skill to
defeat the barbarians, but what was to be thought of a consul who was so
ignorant of constitutional etiquette as to appear in triumphal costume
in the senate! In other respects too the plebeian character clung to
him. He was not merely--according to aristocratic phraseology--a poor
man, but, what was worse, frugal and a declared enemy of all bribery and
corruption. After the manner of soldiers he was not nice, but was fond
of his cups, especially in his later years; he knew not the art of
giving feasts, and kept a bad cook. It was likewise awkward that the
consular understood nothing but Latin and had to decline conversing
in Greek; that he felt the Greek plays wearisome might pass--he was
presumably not the only one who did so--but to confess to the feeling of
weariness was naive. Thus he remained throughout life a countryman cast
adrift among aristocrats, and annoyed by the keenly-felt sarcasms and
still more keenly--felt commiseration of his colleagues, which he
had not the self-command to despise as he despised themselves.
Marius stood aloof from the parties not much less than from society.
The measures which he carried in his tribunate of the people (635)--a
better control over the delivery of the voting-tablets with a view to
do away with the scandalous frauds that were therein practised, and the
prevention of extravagant proposals for largesses to the people(1)--do
not bear the stamp of a party, least of all that of the democratic, but
merely show that he hated what was unjust and irrational; and how could
a man like this, a farmer by birth and a soldier by inclination, have
been from the first a revolutionist? The hostile attacks of the
aristocracy had no doubt driven him subsequently into the camp of
the opponents of the government; and there he speedily found himself
elevated in the first instance to be general of the opposition, and
destined perhaps for still higher things hereafter. But this was far
more the effect of the stringent force of circumstances and of the
general need which the opposition had for a chief, than his own work;
he had at any rate since his departure for Africa in 647-8 hardly
tarried, in passing, for a brief period in the capital. It was not till
the latter half of 653 that he returned to Rome, victor over the Teutones
as over the Cimbri, to celebrate his postponed triumph now with double
honours--decidedly the first man in Rome, and yet at the same time a
novice in politics. It was certain beyond dispute, not only that Marius
had saved Rome, but that he was the only man who could have saved it;
his name was on every one's lips; the men of quality acknowledged his
services; with the people he was more popular than any one before or
after him, popular alike by his virtues and by his faults, by his
unaristocratic disinterestedness no less than by his boorish roughness;
he was called by the multitude a third Romulus and a second Camillus;
libations were poured forth to him like the gods. It was no wonder that
the head of the peasant's son grew giddy at times with all this glory;
that he compared his march from Africa to Gaul to the victorious
processions of Dionysus from continent to continent, and had a cup--none
of the smallest--manufactured for his use after the model of that of
Bacchus. There was just as much of hope as of gratitude in this
delirious enthusiasm of the people, which might well have led astray
a man of colder blood and more mature political experience. The work
of Marius seemed to his admirers by no means finished. The wretched
government oppressed the land more heavily than did the barbarians: on
him, the first man of Rome, the favourite of the people, the head of the
opposition, devolved the task of once more delivering Rome. It is true
that to one who was a rustic and a soldier the political proceedings
of the capital were strange and incongruous: he spoke as ill as he
commanded well, and displayed a far firmer bearing in presence of
the lances and swords of the enemy than in presence of the applause
or hisses of the multitude; but his inclinations were of little moment.
The hopes of which he was the object constrained him. His military
and political position was such that, if he would not break with the
glorious past, if he would not deceive the expectations of his party and
in fact of the nation, if he would not be unfaithful to his own sense of
duty, he must check the maladministration of public affairs and put an
end to the government of the restoration; and if he only possessed the
internal qualities of a head of the people, he might certainly dispense
with those which he lacked as a popular leader.
To this was added the reducing the infantry of the line to a level,
which is likewise to be referred to Marius. The Roman method of
aristocratic classification had hitherto prevailed also within the
legion. Each of the four divisions of the -velites-, the -hastati-,
the -principes-, and the -triarii---or, as we may say, the vanguard,
the first, second, and third line--had hitherto possessed its special
qualification for service, as respected property or age, and in great
part also its distinctive equipment; each had its definite place once
for all assigned in the order of battle; each had its definite military
rank and its own standard. All these distinctions were now superseded.
Any one admitted as a legionary at all needed no further qualification
in order to serve in any division; the discretion of the officers alone
decided as to his place. All distinctions of armour were set aside, and
consequently all recruits were uniformly trained. Connected, doubtless,
with this change were the various improvements which Marius introduced
in the armament, the carrying of the baggage, and similar matters, and
which furnish an honourable evidence of his insight into the practical
details of the business of war and of his care for his soldiers; and
more especially the new method of drill devised by Publius Rutilius
Rufus (consul 649) the comrade of Marius in the African war. It is a
significant fact, that this method considerably increased the military
culture of the individual soldier, and was essentially based upon the
training of the future gladiators which was usual in the fighting-
schools of the time. The arrangement of the legion became totally
different. The thirty companies (-manipuli-) of heavy infantry, which--
each in two sections (-centuriae-) composed respectively of 60 men in
the first two, and of 30 men in the third, division--had hitherto formed
the tactical unit, were replaced by 10 cohorts (-cohortes-) each with
its own standard and each of 6, or often only of 5, sections of 100
men apiece; so that, although at the same time 1200 men were saved by
the suppression of the light infantry of the legion, yet the total
numbers of the legion were raised from 4200 to from 5000 to 6000 men.
The custom of fighting in three divisions was retained, but, while
previously each division had formed a distinct corps, it was in future
left to the general to distribute the cohorts, of which he had the
disposal, in the three lines as he thought best. Military rank was
determined solely by the numerical order of the soldiers and of the
divisions. The four standards of the several parts of the legion--the
wolf, the ox with a man's head, the horse, the boar--which had hitherto
probably been carried before the cavalry and the three divisions of
heavy infantry, disappeared; there came instead the ensigns of the new
cohorts, and the new standard which Marius gave to the legion as a
whole--the silver eagle. While within the legion every trace of the
previous civic and aristocratic classification thus disappeared, and the
only distinctions henceforth occurring among the legionaries were purely
military, accidental circumstances had some decades earlier given
rise to a privileged division of the army alongside of the legions--
the bodyguard of the general. Hitherto selected men from the allied
contingents had formed the personal escort of the general; the
employment of Roman legionaries, or even men voluntarily offering
themselves, for personal service with him was at variance with the
stern disciplinary obligations of the mighty commonwealth. But when the
Numantine war had reared an army demoralized beyond parallel, and Scipio
Aemilianus, who was called to check the wild disorder, had not been able
to prevail on the government to call entirely new troops under arms, he
was at least allowed to form, in addition to a number of men whom the
dependent kings and free cities outside of the Roman bounds placed at
his disposal, a personal escort of 500 men composed of volunteer Roman
burgesses (p. 230). This cohort drawn partly from the better classes,
partly from the humbler personal clients of the general, and hence
called sometimes that of the friends, sometimes that of the headquarters
(-praetoriani-), had the duty of serving in the latter (-praetorium-)
in return for which it was exempt from camp and entrenching service
and enjoyed higher pay and greater repute.
There is hardly any doubt that Marius entered into the brilliant
prospects which his military and political position opened up to him.
It was a sad and troubled time. Men had peace, but they were not glad
of having it; the state of things was not now such as it had formerly
been after the first mighty onset of the men of the north on Rome, when,
so soon as the crisis was over, all energies were roused anew in the
fresh consciousness of recovered health, and had by their vigorous
development rapidly and amply made up for what was lost. Every one felt
that, though able generals might still once and again avert immediate
destruction, the commonwealth was only the more surely on the way to
ruin under the government of the restored oligarchy; but every one felt
also that the time was past when in such cases the burgess-body came to
its own help, and that there was no amendment so long as the place of
Gaius Gracchus remained empty. How deeply the multitude felt the blank
that was left after the disappearance of those two illustrious youths
who had opened the gates to revolution, and how childishly in fact it
grasped at any shadow of a substitute, was shown by the case of the
pretended son of Tiberius Gracchus, who, although the very sister of
the two Gracchi charged him with fraud in the open Forum, was yet chosen
by the people in 655 as tribune solely on account of his usurped name.
In the same spirit the multitude exulted in the presence of Gaius
Marius; how should it not? He, if any one, seemed the right man--he
was at any rate the first general and the most popular name of his time,
confessedly brave and upright, and recommended as regenerator of the
state by his very position aloof from the proceedings of party--how
should not the people, how should not he himself, have held that he was
so! Public opinion as decidedly as possible favoured the opposition.
It was a significant indication of this, that the proposal to have the
vacant stalls in the chief priestly colleges filled up by the burgesses
instead of the colleges themselves--which the government had frustrated
in the comitia in 609 by the suggestion of religious scruples--was
carried in 650 by Gnaeus Domitius without the senate having been able
even to venture a serious resistance. On the whole it seemed as if
nothing was wanted but a chief, who should give to the opposition a firm
rallying point and a practical aim; and this was now found in Marius.
Glaucia
Saturninus
But the most notable leaders of the popular party about this time were
men of the second sort. Such were Gaius Servilius Glaucia, called by
Cicero the Roman Hyperbolus, a vulgar fellow of the lowest origin and of
the most shameless street-eloquence, but effective and even dreaded by
reason of his pungent wit; and his better and abler associate, Lucius
Appuleius Saturninus, who even according to the accounts of his enemies
was a fiery and impressive speaker, and was at least not guided by
motives of vulgar selfishness. When he was quaestor, the charge of the
importation of corn, which had fallen to him in the usual way, had been
withdrawn from him by decree of the senate, not so much perhaps on
account of maladministration, as in order to confer this--just at that
time popular--office on one of the heads of the government party, Marcus
Scaurus, rather than upon an unknown young man belonging to none of
the ruling families. This mortification had driven the aspiring and
sensitive man into the ranks of the opposition; and as tribune of
the people in 651 he repaid what he had received with interest.
One scandalous affair had at that time followed hard upon another.
He had spoken in the open market of the briberies practised in Rome
by the envoys of king Mithradates--these revelations, compromising in
the highest degree the senate, had wellnigh cost the bold tribune his
life. He had excited a tumult against the conqueror of Numidia, Quintus
Metellus, when he was a candidate for the censorship in 652, and kept
him besieged in the Capitol till the equites liberated him not without
bloodshed; the retaliatory measure of the censor Metellus--the expulsion
with infamy of Saturninus and of Glaucia from the senate on occasion of
the revision of the senatorial roll--had only miscarried through the
remissness of the colleague assigned to Metellus. Saturninus mainly had
carried that exceptional commission against Caepio and his associates(6)
in spite of the most vehement resistance by the government party; and in
opposition to the same he had carried the keenly-contested re-election
of Marius as consul for 652. Saturninus was decidedly the most
energetic enemy of the senate and the most active and eloquent leader
of the popular party since Gaius Gracchus; but he was also violent
and unscrupulous beyond any of his predecessors, always ready to
descend into the street and to refute his antagonist with blows
instead of words.
Such were the two leaders of the so-called popular party, who now made
common cause with the victorious general. It was natural that they
should do so; their interests and aims coincided, and even in the
earlier candidatures of Marius Saturninus at least had most decidedly
and most effectively taken his side. It was agreed between them that
for 654 Marius should become a candidate for a sixth consulship,
Saturninus for a second tribunate, Glaucia for the praetorship, in order
that, possessed of these offices, they might carry out the intended
revolution in the state. The senate acquiesced in the nomination of
the less dangerous Glaucia, but did what it could to hinder the election
of Marius and Saturninus, or at least to associate with the former a
determined antagonist in the person of Quintus Metellus as his colleague
in the consulship. All appliances, lawful and unlawful, were put in
motion by both parties; but the senate was not successful in arresting
the dangerous conspiracy in the bud. Marius did not disdain in person
to solicit votes and, it was said, even to purchase them; in fact, at
the tribunician elections when nine men from the list of the government
party were proclaimed, and the tenth place seemed already secured for a
respectable man of the same complexion Quintus Nunnius, the latter was
set upon and slain by a savage band, which is said to have been mainly
composed of discharged soldiers of Marius. Thus the conspirators gained
their object, although by the most violent means. Marius was chosen as
consul, Glaucia as praetor, Saturninus as tribune of the people for 654;
the second consular place was obtained not by Quintus Metellus, but by
an insignificant man, Lucius Valerius Flaccus: the confederates might
proceed to put into execution the further schemes which they
contemplated and to complete the work broken off in 633.
Let us recall the objects which Gaius Gracchus pursued, and the means
by which he pursued them. His object was to break down the oligarchy
within and without. He aimed, on the one hand, to restore the power of
the magistrates, which had become completely dependent on the senate, to
its original sovereign rights, and to re-convert the senatorial assembly
from a governing into a deliberative board; and, on the other hand, to
put an end to the aristocratic division of the state into the three
classes of the ruling burgesses, the Italian allies, and the subjects,
by the gradual equalization of those distinctions which were
incompatible with a government not oligarchical. These ideas the three
confederates revived in the colonial laws, which Saturninus as tribune
of the people had partly introduced already (651), partly now introduced
(654).(7) As early as the former year the interrupted distribution of
the Carthaginian territory had been resumed primarily for the benefit of
the soldiers of Marius--not the burgesses only but, as it would seem,
also the Italian allies--and each of these veterans had been promised an
allotment of 100 -jugera-, or about five times the size of an ordinary
Italian farm, in the province of Africa. Now not only was the
provincial land already available claimed in its widest extent for
the Romano-Italian emigration, but also all the land of the still
independent Celtic tribes beyond the Alps, by virtue of the legal
fiction that through the conquest of the Cimbri all the territory
occupied by these had been acquired de jure by the Romans. Gaius Marius
was called to conduct the assignations of land and the farther measures
that might appear necessary in this behalf; and the temple-treasures of
Tolosa, which had been embezzled but were refunded or had still to be
refunded by the guilty aristocrats, were destined for the outfit of the
new receivers of land. This law therefore not only revived the plans of
conquest beyond the Alps and the projects of Transalpine and transmarine
colonization, which Gaius Gracchus and Flaccus had sketched, on the most
extensive scale; but, by admitting the Italians along with the Romans
to emigration and yet undoubtedly prescribing the erection of all the
new communities as burgess-colonies, it formed a first step towards
satisfying the claims--to which it was so difficult to give effect, and
which yet could not be in the long run refused--of the Italians to be
placed on an equality with the Romans. First of all, however, if the
law passed and Marius was called to the independent carrying out of
these immense schemes of conquest and assignation, he would become
practically--until those plans should be realized or rather, considering
their indefinite and unlimited character, for his lifetime--monarch of
Rome; with which view it may be presumed that Marius intended to have
his consulship annually renewed, like the tribunate of Gracchus. But,
amidst the agreement of the political positions marked out for the
younger Gracchus and for Marius in all other essential particulars,
there was yet a very material distinction between the land-assigning
tribune and the land-assigning consul in the fact, that the former was
to occupy a purely civil position, the latter a military position as
well; a distinction, which partly but by no means solely arose out of
the personal circumstances under which the two men had risen to the head
of the state. While such was the nature of the aim which Marius and his
comrades had proposed to themselves, the next question related to the
means by which they purposed to break down the resistance--which might
be anticipated to be obstinate--of the government party. Gaius Gracchus
had fought his battles with the aid of the capitalist class and the
proletariate. His successors did not neglect to make advances likewise
to these. The equites were not only left in possession of the
tribunals, but their power as jurymen was considerably increased, partly
by a stricter ordinance regarding the standing commission--especially
important to the merchants--as to extortions on the part of the public
magistrates in the provinces, which Glaucia carried probably in this
year, partly by the special tribunal, appointed doubtless as early as
651 on the proposal of Saturninus, respecting the embezzlements and
other official malversations that had occurred during the Cimbrian
movement in Gaul. For the benefit, moreover, of the proletariate of
the capital the sum below cost price, which hitherto had to be paid on
occasion of the distributions of grain for the -modius-, was lowered
from 6 1/3 -asses- to a mere nominal charge of 5/6 of an -as-.
But although they did not despise the alliance with the equites and
the proletariate of the capital, the real power by which the confederates
enforced their measures lay not in these, but in the discharged soldiers
of the Marian army, who for that very reason had been provided for in
the colonial laws themselves after so extravagant a fashion. In this
also was evinced the predominating military character, which forms
the chief distinction between this attempt at revolution and that
which preceded it.
They went to work accordingly. The corn and colonial laws encountered,
as was to be expected, the keenest opposition from the government.
They proved in the senate by striking figures, that the former must
make the public treasury bankrupt; Saturninus did not trouble himself
about that. They brought tribunician intercession to bear against
both laws; Saturninus ordered the voting to go on. They informed
the magistrates presiding at the voting that a peal of thunder had
been heard, a portent by which according to ancient belief the gods
enjoined the dismissal of the public assembly; Saturninus remarked
to the messengers that the senate would do well to keep quiet, otherwise
the thunder might very easily be followed by hail. Lastly the urban
quaestor, Quintus Caepio, the son, it may be presumed, of the general
condemned three years before,(8) and like his father a vehement
antagonist of the popular party, with a band of devoted partisans
dispersed the comitia by violence. But the tough soldiers of Marius,
who had flocked in crowds to Rome to vote on this occasion, quickly
rallied and dispersed the city bands, and on the voting ground thus
reconquered the vote on the Appuleian laws was successfully brought to
an end. The scandal was grievous; but when it came to the question
whether the senate would comply with the clause of the law that
within five days after its passing every senator should on pain of
forfeiting his senatorial seat take an oath faithfully to observe it,
all the senators took the oath with the single exception of Quintus
Metellus, who preferred to go into exile. Marius and Saturninus
were not displeased to see the best general and the ablest man among
the opposing party removed from the state by voluntary banishment.
Their object seemed to be attained; but even now to those who saw
more clearly the enterprise could not but appear a failure. The cause
of the failure lay mainly in the awkward alliance between a politically
incapable general and a street-demagogue, capable but recklessly
violent, and filled with passion rather than with the aims of a
statesman. They had agreed excellently, so long as the question related
only to plans. But when the plans came to be executed, it was very soon
apparent that the celebrated general was in politics utterly incapable;
that his ambition was that of the farmer who would cope with and,
if possible, surpass the aristocrats in titles, and not that of the
statesman who desires to govern because he feels within him the power
to do so; that every enterprise, which was based on his personal standing
as a politician, must necessarily even under the most favourable
circumstances be ruined by himself.
He knew neither the art of gaining his antagonists, nor that of keeping
his own party in subjection. The opposition against him and his
comrades was even of itself sufficiently considerable; for not only did
the government party belong to it in a body, but also a great part of
the burgesses, who guarded with jealous eyes their exclusive privileges
against the Italians; and by the course which things took the whole
class of the wealthy was also driven over to the government. Saturninus
and Glaucia were from the first masters and servants of the proletariate
and therefore not at all on a good footing with the moneyed aristocracy,
which had no objection now and then to keep the senate in check by means
of the rabble, but had no liking for street-riots and violent outrages.
As early as the first tribunate of Saturninus his armed bands had their
skirmishes with the equites; the vehement opposition which his election
as tribune for 654 encountered shows clearly how small was the party
favourable to him. It should have been the endeavour of Marius to avail
himself of the dangerous help of such associates only in moderation,
and to convince all and sundry that they were destined not to rule, but
to serve him as the ruler. As he did precisely the contrary, and the
matter came to look quite as if the object was to place the government
in the hands not of an intelligent and vigorous master, but of the mere
-canaille-, the men of material interests, terrified to death at the
prospect of such confusion, again attached themselves closely to the
senate in presence of this common danger. While Gaius Gracchus, clearly
perceiving that no government could be overthrown by means of the
proletariate alone, had especially sought to gain over to his side
the propertied classes, those who desired to continue his work began by
producing a reconciliation between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.
But the ruin of the enterprise was brought about, still more rapidly
than by this reconciliation of enemies, through the dissension which
the more than ambiguous behaviour of Marius necessarily produced among
its promoters. While the decisive proposals were brought forward by
his associates and carried after a struggle by his soldiers, Marius
maintained an attitude wholly passive, just as if the political leader
was not bound quite as much as the military, when the brunt of battle
came, to present himself everywhere and foremost in person. Nor was
this all; he was terrified at, and fled from the presence of, the
spirits which he had himself evoked. When his associates resorted to
expedients which an honourable man could not approve, but without which
in fact the object of their efforts could not be attained, he attempted,
in the fashion usual with men whose ideas of political morality are
confused, to wash his hands of participation in those crimes and at the
same time to profit by their results. There is a story that the general
once conducted secret negotiations in two different rooms of his house,
with Saturninus and his partisans in the one, and with the deputies of
the oligarchy in the other, talking with the former of striking a blow
against the senate, and with the latter of interfering against the
revolt, and that under a pretext which was in keeping with the anxiety
of the situation he went to and fro between the two conferences--a story
as certainly invented, and as certainly appropriate, as any incident in
Aristophanes. The ambiguous attitude of Marius became notorious in the
question of the oath. At first he seemed as though he would himself
refuse the oath required by the Appuleian laws on account of the
informalities that had occurred at their passing, and then swore it with
the reservation, "so far as the laws were really valid"; a reservation
which annulled the oath itself, and which of course all the senators
likewise adopted in swearing, so that by this mode of taking the oath
the validity of the laws was not secured, but on the contrary was for
the first time really called in question.
Saturninus Isolated
Saturninus Assailed and Overpowered
But the two demagogues were so compromised that they could not recede;
they had no alternative save to resign their offices in the usual way
and thereby to deliver themselves with their hands bound to their
exasperated opponents, or now to grasp the sceptre for themselves,
although they felt that they could not bear its weight. They resolved
on the latter course; Saturninus would come forward once more as a
candidate for the tribunate of the people for 655, Glaucia, although
praetor and not eligible for the consulship till two years had elapsed,
would become a candidate for the latter. In fact the tribunician
elections were decided entirely to their mind, and the attempt of
Marius to prevent the spurious Tiberius Gracchus from soliciting the
tribuneship served only to show the celebrated man what was now the
worth of his popularity; the multitude broke the doors of the prison in
which Gracchus was confined, bore him in triumph through the streets,
and elected him by a great majority as their tribune. Saturninus and
Glaucia sought to control the more important consular election by the
expedient for the removal of inconvenient competitors which had been
tried in the previous year; the counter-candidate of the government
party, Gaius Memmius--the same who eleven years before had led the
opposition against them(9)--was suddenly assailed by a band of ruffians
and beaten to death. But the government party had only waited for a
striking event of this sort in order to employ force. The senate
required the consul Gaius Marius to interfere, and the latter in reality
professed his readiness now to draw for the conservative party the
sword, which he had obtained from the democracy and had promised to
wield on its behalf. The young men were hastily called out, equipped
with arms from the public buildings, and drawn up in military array; the
senate itself appeared under arms in the Forum, with its venerable chief
Marcus Scaurus at its head. The opposite party were doubtless superior
in a street-riot, but were not prepared for such an attack; they had now
to defend themselves as they could. They broke open the doors of the
prisons, and called the slaves to liberty and to arms; they proclaimed--
so it was said at any rate--Saturninus as king or general; on the day
when the new tribunes of the people had to enter on their office, the
10th of December 654, a battle occurred in the great market-place--the
first which, since Rome existed, had ever been fought within the walls
of the capital. The issue was not for a moment doubtful. The Populares
were beaten and driven up to the Capitol, where the supply of water was
cut off from them and they were thus compelled to surrender. Marius,
who held the chief command, would gladly have saved the lives of his
former allies who were now his prisoners; Saturninus proclaimed to the
multitude that all which he had proposed had been done in concert with
the consul: even a worse man than Marius was could not but shudder at
the inglorious part which he played on this day. But he had long ceased
to be master of affairs. Without orders the youth of rank climbed
the roof of the senate-house in the Forum where the prisoners were
temporarily confined, stripped off the tiles, and with these stoned
their victims. Thus Saturninus perished with most of the more notable
prisoners. Glaucia was found in a lurking-place and likewise put
to death. Without sentence or trial there died on this day four
magistrates of the Roman people--a praetor, a quaestor, and two
tribunes of the people--and a number of other well-known men, some of
whom belonged to good families. In spite of the grave faults by which
the chiefs had invited on themselves this bloody retribution, we may
nevertheless lament them: they fell like advanced posts, which are left
unsupported by the main army and are forced to perish without aim in
a conflict of despair.
Never had the government party achieved a more complete victory, never
had the opposition suffered a more severe defeat, than on this 10th of
December. It was the least part of the success that they had got rid
of some troublesome brawlers, whose places might be supplied any day by
associates of a like stamp; it was of greater moment that the only man,
who was then in a position to become dangerous to the government, had
publicly and completely effected his own annihilation; and most
important of all that the two elements of the opposition, the capitalist
order and the proletariate, emerged from the strife wholly at variance.
It is true that this was not the work of the government; the fabric
which had been put together by the adroit hands of Gaius Gracchus
had been broken up, partly by the force of circumstances, partly
and especially by the coarse and boorish management of his incapable
successor; but in the result it mattered not whether calculation or good
fortune helped the government to its victory. A more pitiful position
can hardly be conceived than that occupied by the hero of Aquae and
Vercellae after such a disaster--all the more pitiful, because people
could not but compare it with the lustre which only a few months before
surrounded the same man. No one either on the aristocratic or the
democratic side any longer thought of the victorious general on occasion
of filling up the magistracies; the hero of six consulships could not
even venture to become a candidate in 656 for the censorship. He went
away to the east, ostensibly for the purpose of fulfilling a vow there,
but in reality that he might not be a witness of the triumphant return
of his mortal foe Quintus Metellus; he was allowed to go. He returned
and opened his house; his halls stood empty. He always hoped that
conflicts and battles would occur and that the people would once
more need his experienced arm; he thought to provide himself with an
opportunity for war in the east, where the Romans might certainly have
found sufficient occasion for energetic interference. But this also
miscarried, like every other of his wishes; profound peace continued
to prevail. Yet the longing after honours once aroused within him,
the oftener it was disappointed, ate the more deeply into his heart.
Superstitious as he was, he cherished in his bosom an old oracular
saying which had promised him seven consulships, and in gloomy
meditation brooded over the means by which this utterance was to
obtain its fulfilment and he his revenge, while he appeared to all,
himself alone excepted, insignificant and innocuous.
Still more important in its consequences than the setting aside of the
dangerous man was the deep exasperation against the Populares, as they
were called, which the insurrection of Saturninus left behind in the
party of material interests. With the most remorseless severity the
equestrian tribunals condemned every one who professed oppositional
views; Sextus Titius, for instance, was condemned not so much on
account of his agrarian law as because he had in his house a statue of
Saturninus; Gaius Appuleius Decianus was condemned, because he had as
tribune of the people characterized the proceedings against Saturninus
as illegal. Even for earlier injuries inflicted by the Populares on
the aristocracy satisfaction was now demanded, not without prospect of
success, before the equestrian tribunals. Because Gaius Norbanus had
eight years previously in concert with Saturninus driven the consular
Quintus Caepio into exile(10) he was now (659) on the ground of his own
law accused of high treason, and the jurymen hesitated long--not whether
the accused was guilty or innocent, but whether his ally Saturninus
or his enemy Caepio was to be regarded as the most deserving of their
hate--till at last they decided for acquittal. Even if people were not
more favourably disposed towards the government in itself than before,
yet, after having found themselves, although but for a moment, on the
verge of a real mob-rule, all men who had anything to lose viewed the
existing government in a different light; it was notoriously wretched
and pernicious for the state, but the anxious dread of the still more
wretched and still more pernicious government of the proletariate had
conferred on it a relative value. The current now set so much in that
direction that the multitude tore in pieces a tribune of the people
who had ventured to postpone the return of Quintus Metellus, and the
democrats began to seek their safety in league with murderers and
poisoners--ridding themselves, for example, of the hated Metellus
by poison--or even in league with the public enemy, several of them
already taking refuge at the court of king Mithradates who was secretly
preparing for war against Rome. External relations also assumed an
aspect favourable for the government. The Roman arms were employed but
little in the period from the Cimbrian to the Social war, but everywhere
with honour. The only serious conflict was in Spain, where, during
the recent years so trying for Rome (649 seq.), the Lusitanians and
Celtiberians had risen with unwonted vehemence against the Romans.
In the years 656-661 the consul Titus Didius in the northern and the consul
Publius Crassus in the southern province not only re-established with
valour and good fortune the ascendency of the Roman arms, but also razed
the refractory towns and, where it seemed necessary, transplanted the
population of the strong mountain-towns to the plains. We shall show in
the sequel that about the same time the Roman government again directed
its attention to the east which had been for a generation neglected,
and displayed greater energy than had for long been heard of in Cyrene,
Syria, and Asia Minor. Never since the commencement of the revolution
had the government of the restoration been so firmly established, or so
popular. Consular laws were substituted for tribunician; restrictions
on liberty replaced measures of progress. The cancelling of the laws of
Saturninus was a matter of course; the transmarine colonies of Marius
disappeared down to a single petty settlement on the barbarous island
of Corsica. When the tribune of the people Sextus Titius--a caricatured
Alcibiades, who was greater in dancing and ball-playing than in
politics, and whose most prominent talent consisted in breaking the
images of the gods in the streets at night--re-introduced and carried
the Appuleian agrarian law in 655, the senate was able to annul the new
law on a religious pretext without any one even attempting to defend it;
the author of it was punished, as we have already mentioned, by the
equites in their tribunals. Next year (656) a law brought in by the
two consuls made the usual four-and-twenty days' interval between the
introduction and the passing of a project of law obligatory, and forbade
the combination of several enactments different in their nature in one
proposal; by which means the unreasonable extension of the initiative
in legislation was at least somewhat restricted, and the government was
prevented from being openly taken by surprise with new laws. It became
daily more evident that the Gracchan constitution, which had survived
the fall of its author, was now, since the multitude and the moneyed
aristocracy no longer went together, tottering to its foundations.
As that constitution had been based on division in the ranks of
the aristocracy, so it seemed that dissensions in the ranks of the
opposition could not but bring about its fall. Now, if ever, the
time had come for completing the unfinished work of restoration of 633,
for making the Gracchan constitution share the fate of the tyrant,
and for replacing the governing oligarchy in the sole possession
of political power.
Livius Drusus
The question at stake was the passing of the laws drawn up by Drusus.
Of these the proposer, just like Gaius Gracchus, kept in reserve for
the moment the hazardous project of conferring the Roman franchise on
the Italian allies, and brought forward at first only the laws as to
the jurymen, the assignation of land, and the distribution of grain.
The capitalist party offered the most vehement resistance, and, in
consequence of the irresolution of the greater part of the aristocracy
and the vacillation of the comitia, would beyond question have carried
the rejection of the law as to jurymen, if it had been put to the vote
by itself. Drusus accordingly embraced all his proposals in one law;
and, as thus all the burgesses interested in the distributions of grain
and land were compelled to vote also for the law as to jurymen, he
succeeded in carrying the law with their help and that of the Italians,
who stood firmly by Drusus with the exception of the large landowners,
particularly those in Umbria and Etruria, whose domanial possessions
were threatened. It was not carried, however, until Drusus had caused
the consul Philippus, who would not desist from opposition, to be
arrested and carried off to prison by a bailiff. The people celebrated
the tribune as their benefactor, and received him in the theatre by
rising up and applauding; but the voting had not so much decided the
struggle as transferred it to another ground, for the opposite party
justly characterized the proposal of Drusus as contrary to the law
of 656(14) and therefore as null.
CHAPTER VII
From the time when the defeat of Pyrrhus had put an end to the last
war which the Italians had waged for their independence--or, in other
words, for nearly two hundred years--the Roman primacy had now
subsisted in Italy, without having been once shaken in its
foundations even under circumstances of the utmost peril. Vainly
had the heroic family of the Barcides, vainly had the successors
of Alexander the Great and of the Achaemenids, endeavoured to rouse
the Italian nation to contend with the too powerful capital; it had
obsequiously appeared in the fields of battle on the Guadalquivir
and on the Mejerdah, at the pass of Tempe and at Mount Sipylus, and
with the best blood of its youth had helped its masters to achieve
the subjugation of three continents. Its own position meanwhile had
changed, but had deteriorated rather than improved. In a material
point of view, doubtless, it had in general not much ground to
complain. Though the small and intermediate landholders throughout
Italy suffered in consequence of the injudicious Roman legislation
as to corn, the larger landlords and still more the mercantile and
capitalist class were flourishing, for the Italians enjoyed, as
respected the turning of the provinces to financial account,
substantially the same protection and the same privileges as
Roman burgesses, and thus shared to a great extent in the material
advantages of the political ascendency of the Romans. In general,
the economic and social condition of Italy was not primarily dependent
on political distinctions; there were allied districts, such as Umbria
and Etruria, in which the class of free farmers had mostly disappeared,
while in others, such as the valleys of the Abruzzi, the same
class had still maintained a tolerable footing or remained almost
unaffected--just as a similar diversity could be pointed out in the
different Roman burgess-districts. On the other hand the political
inferiority of Italy was daily displayed more harshly and more
abruptly. No formal open breach of right indeed occurred, at
least in the principal questions. The communal freedom, which
under the name of sovereignty was accorded by treaty to the Italian
communities, was on the whole respected by the Roman government;
the attack, which the Roman reform party at the commencement of the
agrarian agitation made on the Roman domains guaranteed to the
communities of better position, had not only been earnestly opposed
by the strictly conservative as well as by the middle party in Rome,
but had been very soon abandoned by the Roman opposition itself.
But the rights, which belonged and could not but belong to Rome as
the leading community--the supreme conduct of war-affairs, and the
superintendence of the whole administration--were exercised in a way
which was almost as bad as if the allies had been directly declared
to be subjects devoid of rights. The numerous modifications of the
fearfully severe martial law of Rome, which were introduced there in
the course of the seventh century, seem to have remained on the whole
limited to the Roman burgess-soldiers: this is certain as to the most
important, the abolition of executions by martial law,(1) and we may
easily conceive the impression which was produced when, as happened
in the Jugurthine war, Latin officers of repute were beheaded by
sentence of the Roman council of war, while the lowest burgess-soldier
had in the like case the right of presenting an appeal to the civil
tribunals of Rome. The proportions in which the burgesses and
Italian allies were to be drawn for military service had, as was fair,
remained undefined by treaty; but, while in earlier times the two had
furnished on an average equal numbers of soldiers,(2) now, although the
proportions of the population had changed probably in favour of the
burgesses rather than to their disadvantage, the demands on the allies
were by degrees increased disproportionately,(3) so that on the one
hand they had the chief burden of the heavier and more costly service
imposed on them, and on the other hand there were two allies now
regularly levied for one burgess. In like manner with this military
supremacy the civil superintendence, which (including the supreme
administrative jurisdiction which could hardly be separated from it)
the Roman government had always and rightly reserved to itself over
the dependent Italian communities, was extended in such a way that
the Italians were hardly less than the provincials abandoned without
protection to the caprice of any one of the numberless Roman
magistrates. In Teanum Sidicinum, one of the most considerable
of the allied towns, a consul had ordered the chief magistrate of
the town to be scourged with rods at the stake in the marketplace,
because, on the consul's wife expressing a desire to bathe in the
men's bath, the municipal officers had not driven forth the bathers
quickly enough, and the bath appeared to her not to be clean.
Similar scenes had taken place in Ferentinum, likewise a town
holding the best position in law, and even in the old and important
Latin colony of Cales. In the Latin colony of Venusia a free peasant
had been seized by a young Roman diplomatist not holding office but
passing through the town, on account of a jest which he had allowed
himself to make on the Roman's litter, had been thrown down, and
whipped to death with the straps of the litter. These occurrences are
incidentally mentioned about the time of the Fregellan insurrection;
it admits of no doubt that similar outrages frequently occurred, and
of as little that no real satisfaction for such misdeeds could anywhere
be obtained, whereas the right of appeal--not lightly violated with
impunity--protected in some measure at least the life and limbs of the
Roman burgess. In consequence of this treatment of the Italians on the
part of the Roman government, the variance, which the wisdom of their
ancestors had carefully fostered between the Latin and the other
Italian communities, could not fail, if not to disappear, at any
rate to undergo abatement.(4) The curb-fortresses of Rome and the
districts kept to their allegiance by these fortresses lived now under
the like oppression; the Latin could remind the Picentine that they
were both in like manner "subject to the fasces"; the overseers and
the slaves of former days were now united by a common hatred towards
the common despot.
While the present state of the Italian allies was thus transformed from
a tolerable relation of dependence into the most oppressive bondage,
they were at the same time deprived of every prospect of obtaining
better rights. With the subjugation of Italy the Roman burgess-body
had closed its ranks; the bestowal of the franchise on whole
communities was totally given up, its bestowal on individuals was
greatly restricted.(5) They now advanced a step farther: on occasion
of the agitation which contemplated the extension of the Roman franchise
to all Italy in the years 628, 632, the right of migration to Rome was
itself attacked, and all the non-burgesses resident in Rome were
directly ejected by decree of the people and of the senate from the
capital(6)--a measure as odious on account of its illiberality, as
dangerous from the various private interests which it injuriously
affected. In short, while the Italian allies had formerly stood to
the Romans partly in the relation of brothers under tutelage, protected
rather than ruled and not destined to perpetual minority, partly in
that of slaves tolerably treated and not utterly deprived of the hope
of manumission, they were now all of them subject nearly in equal
degree, and with equal hopelessness, to the rods and axes of their
Roman masters, and might at the utmost presume like privileged
slaves to transmit the kicks received from their masters onward
to the poor provincials.
The Rupture
Fregellan War
Difficulty of a General Insurrection
Above all, the recent occurrences had clearly shown how vain was the
expectation of the Italians that their claims would be attended to
by Rome. So long as the demands of the Italians were mixed up with
those of the revolutionary party and had in the hands of the latter
been thwarted by the folly of the masses, they might still resign
themselves to the belief that the oligarchy had been hostile merely
to the proposers, not to the proposal itself, and that there was still
a possibility that the mere intelligent senate would accept a measure
which was compatible with the nature of the oligarchy and salutary
for the state. But the recent years, in which the senate once more
ruled almost absolutely, had shed only too disagreeable a light on
the designs of the Roman oligarchy also. Instead of the expected
modifications, there was issued in 659 a consular law which most
strictly prohibited the non-burgesses from laying claim to the
franchise and threatened transgressors with trial and punishment--a
law which threw back a large number of most respectable persons who
were deeply interested in the question of equalization from the ranks
of Romans into those of Italians, and which in point of indisputable
legality and of political folly stands completely on a parallel with
that famous act which laid the foundation for the separation of North
America from the mother-country; in fact it became, just like that
act, the proximate cause of the civil war. It was only so much
the worse, that the authors of this law by no means belonged to
the obstinate and incorrigible Optimates; they were no other than
the sagacious and universally honoured Quintus Scaevola, destined,
like George Grenville, by nature to be a jurist and by fate to be
a statesman--who by his equally honourable and pernicious rectitude
inflamed more than any one else first the war between senate and
equites, and then that between Romans and Italians--and the orator
Lucius Crassus, the friend and ally of Drusus and altogether one of
the most moderate and judicious of the Optimates.
Amidst the vehement ferment, which this law and the numerous processes
arising out of it called forth throughout Italy, the star of hope once
more appeared to arise for the Italians in the person of Marcus
Drusus. That which had been deemed almost impossible--that a
conservative should take up the reforming ideas of the Gracchi,
and should become the champion of equal rights for the Italians--had
nevertheless occurred; a man of the high aristocracy had resolved to
emancipate the Italians from the Sicilian Straits to the Alps and
the government at one and the same time, and to apply all his earnest
zeal, all his trusty devotedness to these generous plans of reform.
Whether he actually, as was reported, placed himself at the head of
a secret league, whose threads ramified through Italy and whose
members bound themselves by an oath(8) to stand by each other
for Drusus and for the common cause, cannot be ascertained; but,
even if he did not lend himself to acts so dangerous and in fact
unwarrantable for a Roman magistrate, yet it is certain that he did
not keep to mere general promises, and that dangerous connections were
formed in his name, although perhaps without his consent and against
his will. With joy the Italians heard that Drusus had carried his
first proposals with the consent of the great majority of the senate;
with still greater joy all the communities of Italy celebrated not long
afterwards the recovery of the tribune, who had been suddenly attacked
by severe illness. But as the further designs of Drusus became
unveiled, a change took place; he could not venture to bring in
his chief law; he had to postpone, he had to delay, he had soon
to retire. It was reported that the majority of the senate were
vacillating and threatened to fall away from their leader; in rapid
succession the tidings ran through the communities of Italy, that the
law which had passed was annulled, that the capitalists ruled more
absolutely than ever, that the tribune had been struck by the hand
of an assassin, that he was dead (autumn of 663).
Preparations for General Revolt against Rome
The last hope that the Italians might obtain admission to Roman
citizenship by agreement was buried with Marcus Drusus. A measure,
which that conservative and energetic man had not been able under the
most favourable circumstances to induce his own party to adopt, was
not to be gained at all by amicable means. The Italians had no
course left save to submit patiently or to repeat once more, and
if possible with their united strength, the attempt which had been
crushed in the bud five-and-thirty years before by the destruction
of Fregellae--so as by force of arms either to destroy Rome and
succeed to her heritage, or at least to compel her to grant equality
of rights. The latter resolution was no doubt a resolution of
despair; as matters stood, the revolt of the isolated urban communities
against the Roman government might well appear still more hopeless
than the revolt of the American colonies against the British empire;
to all appearance the Roman government might with moderate attention
and energy of action prepare for this second insurrection the fate
of its predecessor. But was it less a resolution of despair, to sit
still and allow things to take their course? When they recollected
how the Romans had been in the habit of behaving in Italy without
provocation, what could they expect now that the most considerable
men in every Italian town had or were alleged to have had--the
consequences on either supposition being pretty much the same--an
understanding with Drusus, which was immediately directed against the
party now victorious and might well be characterized as treason? All
those who had taken part in this secret league, all in fact who
might be merely suspected of participation, had no choice left
save to begin the war or to bend their neck beneath the axe
of the executioner.
The Etruscans and Umbrians on the other hand held by Rome, as they
had already taken part with the equites against Drusus.(10) It is
a significant fact, that in these regions the landed and moneyed
aristocracy had from ancient times preponderated and the middle class
had totally disappeared, whereas among and near the Abruzzi the
farmer-class had preserved its purity and vigour better than anywhere
else in Italy: it was from the farmers accordingly and the middle
class in general that the revolt substantially proceeded, whereas the
municipal aristocracy still went hand in hand with the government of
the capital. This also readily explains the fact, that there were in
the insurgent districts isolated communities, and in the insurgent
communities minorities, adhering to the Roman alliance; the Vestinian
town Pinna, for instance, sustained a severe siege for Rome, and a
corps of loyalists that was formed in the Hirpinian country under
Minatius Magius of Aeclanum supported the Roman operations in Campania.
Lastly, there adhered to Rome the allied communities of best legal
position--in Campania Nola and Nuceria and the Greek maritime towns
Neapolis and Rhegium, and in like manner at least most of the Latin
colonies, such as Alba and Aesernia--just as in the Hannibalic war
the Latin and Greek towns on the whole had taken part with, and the
Sabellian towns against, Rome. The forefathers of the city had
based their dominion over Italy on an aristocratic classification,
and with skilful adjustment of the degrees of dependence had kept in
subjection the less privileged communities by means of those with
better rights, and the burgesses within each community by means of
the municipal aristocracy. It was only now, under the incomparably
wretched government of the oligarchy, that the solidity and strength
with which the statesmen of the fourth and fifth centuries had joined
together the stones of their structure were thoroughly put to the test;
the building, though shaken in various ways, still held out against
this storm. When we say, however, that the towns of better position
did not at the first shock abandon Rome, we by no means affirm that
they would now, as in the Hannibalic war, hold out for a length of
time and after severe defeats, without wavering in their allegiance
to Rome; that fiery trial had not yet been endured.
The first blood was thus shed, and Italy was divided into two great
military camps. It is true, as we have seen, that the insurrection
was still very far from being a general rising of the Italian allies;
but it had already acquired an extent exceeding perhaps the hopes of
the leaders themselves, and the insurgents might without arrogance
think of offering to the Roman government a fair accommodation. They
sent envoys to Rome, and bound themselves to lay down their arms in
return for admission to citizenship; it was in vain. The public
spirit, which had been so long wanting in Rome, seemed suddenly to
have returned, when the question was one of obstructing with stubborn
narrow-mindedness a demand of the subjects just in itself and now
supported by a considerable force. The immediate effect of the
Italian insurrection was, just as was the case after the defeats
which the policy of the government had suffered in Africa and Gaul,(11)
the commencement of a warfare of prosecutions, by means of which
the aristocracy of judges took vengeance on those men of the government
whom they, rightly or wrongly, looked upon as the primary cause
of this mischief. On the proposal of the tribune Quintus Varius,
in spite of the resistance of the Optimates and in spite of tribunician
interference, a special commission of high treason--formed, of course,
from the equestrian order which contended for the proposal with
open violence--was appointed for the investigation of the conspiracy
instigated by Drusus and widely ramified in Italy as well as in Rome,
out of which the insurrection had originated, and which now, when
the half of Italy was under arms, appeared to the whole of the indignant
and alarmed burgesses as undoubted treason. The sentences of this
commission largely thinned the ranks of the senatorial party favourable
to mediation: among other men of note Drusus' intimate friend, the young
and talented Gaius Cotta, was sent into banishment, and with difficulty
the grey-haired Marcus Scaurus escaped the same fate. Suspicion went
so far against the senators favourable to the reforms of Drusus, that
soon afterwards the consul Lupus reported from the camp to the senate
regarding the communications that were constantly maintained between
the Optimates in his camp and the enemy; a suspicion which, it is true,
was soon shown to be unfounded by the arrestof Marsian spies. So far
king Mithradates might not without reason assert, that the mutual
enmities of the factions were more destructive to the Roman state
than the Social War itself.
Energetic Decrees
While the leading state thus collected its energies in the prospect
of the severe war impending, the insurgents had to solve the more
difficult task of acquiring political organization during the
struggle. In the territory of the Paeligni situated in the centre
of the Marsian, Samnite, Marrucinian, and Vestinian cantons and
consequently in the heart of the insurgent districts, in the beautiful
plain on the river Pescara, the town of Corfinium was selected as the
Opposition-Rome or city of Italia, whose citizenship was conferred on
the burgesses of all the insurgent communities; there a Forum and a
senate-house were staked off on a suitable scale. A senate of five
hundred members was charged with the settlement of the constitution
and the superintendence of the war. In accordance with its directions
the burgesses selected from the men of senatorial rank two consuls and
twelve praetors, who, just like the two consuls and six praetors of
Rome, were invested with the supreme authority in war and peace.
The Latin language, which was even then the prevailing language among
the Marsians and Picentes, continued in official use, but the Samnite
language which predominated in Southern Italy was placed side by
side with it on a footing of equality; and the two were made use of
alternately on the silver pieces which the new Italian state began to
coin in its own name after Roman models and after the Roman standard,
thus appropriating likewise the monopoly of coinage which Rome had
exercised for two centuries. It is evident from these arrangements--
and was, indeed a matter of course-that the Italians now no longer
thought of wresting equality of rights from the Romans, but purposed
to annihilate or subdue them and to form a new state. But it is also
obvious that their constitution was nothing but a pure copy of that
of Rome or, in other words, was the ancient polity handed down by
tradition among the Italian nations from time immemorial:--the
organization of a city instead of the constitution of a state, with
primary assemblies as unwieldy and useless as the Roman comitia, with
a governing corporation which contained within it the same elements
of oligarchy as the Roman senate, with an executive administered in
like manner by a plurality of coordinate supreme magistrates. This
imitation descended to the minutest details; for instance, the title
of consul or praetor held by the magistrate in chief command was
after a victory exchanged by the general of the Italians also for
the title of Imperator. Nothing in fact was changed but the name;
on the coins of the insurgents the same image of the gods appears, the
inscription only being changed from Roma to Italia. This Rome of the
insurgents was distinguished--not to its advantage--from the original
Rome merely by the circumstance, that, while the latter had at any
rate an urban development, and its unnatural position intermediate
between a city and a state had formed itself at least in a natural
way, the new Italia was nothing at all but a place of congress
for the insurgents, and it was by a pure fiction of law that the
inhabitants of the peninsula were stamped as burgesses of this new
capital. But it is significant that in this case, where the sudden
amalgamation of a number of isolated cantons into a new political unity
might have so naturally suggested the idea of a representative
constitution in the modern sense, no trace of any such idea occurs;
in fact the very opposite course was followed,(12) and the communal
organization was simply reproduced in a far more absurd manner than
before. Nowhere perhaps is it so clearly apparent as in this
instance, that in the view of antiquity a free constitution was
inseparable from the appearance of the sovereign people in person in
the primary assemblies, or from a city; and that the great fundamental
idea of the modern republican-constitutional state, viz. the expression
of the sovereignty of the people by a representative assembly--an idea
without which a free state would be a chaos--is wholly modern. Even
the Italian polity, although in its somewhat representative senates
and in the diminished importance of the comitia it approximated to a
free state, never was able in the case either of Rome or of Italia
to cross the boundary-line.
Warlike Preparations
Thus began, a few months after the death of Drusus, in the winter of
663-4, the struggle--as one of the coins of the insurgents represents
it--of the Sabellian ox against the Roman she-wolf. Both sides made
zealous preparations: in Italia great stores of arms, provisions, and
money were accumulated; in Rome the requisite supplies were drawn from
the provinces and particularly from Sicily, and the long-neglected walls
were put in a state of defence against any contingency. The forces
were in some measure equally balanced. The Romans filled up the
blanks in their Italian contingents partly by increased levies from
the burgesses and from the inhabitants--already almost wholly Romanized--
of the Celtic districts on the south of the Alps, of whom 10,000
served in the Campanian army alone,(13) partly by the contingents
of the Numidians and other transmarine nations; and with the aid
of the free cities in Greece and Asia Minor they collected a war
fleet.(14) On both sides, without reckoning garrisons, as many as
100,000 soldiers were brought into the field,(15) and in the ability
of their men, in military tactics and armament, the Italians were
nowise inferior to the Romans.
The conduct of the war was very difficult both for the insurgents and
for the Romans, because the territory in revolt was very extensive and
a great number of fortresses adhering to Rome were scattered up and
down in it: so that on the one hand the insurgents found themselves
compelled to combine a siege-warfare, which broke up their forces
and consumed their time, with the protection of an extended frontier;
and on the other hand the Romans could not well do otherwise than
combat the insurrection, which had no proper centre, simultaneously
in all the insurgent districts. In a military point of view the
insurgent country fell into two divisions; in the northern, which
reached from Picenum and the Abruzzi to the northern border of
Campania and embraced the districts speaking Latin, the chief command
was held on the Italian side by the Marsian Quintus Silo, on the Roman
side by Publius Rutilius Lupus, both as consuls; in the southern,
which included Campania, Samnium, and generally the regions speaking
Sabellian, the Samnite Gaius Papius Mutilus commanded as consul of the
insurgents, and Lucius Julius Caesar as the Roman consul. With each
of the two commanders-in-chief there were associated on the Italian
side six, on the Roman side five, lieutenant-commanders, each of whom
conducted the attack or defence in a definite district, while the
consular armies were destined to act more freely and to strike the
decisive blow. The most esteemed Roman officers, such as Gaius
Marius, Quintus Catulus, and the two consulars of experience in the
Spanish war, Titus Didius and Publius Crassus, placed themselves at
the disposal of the consuls for these posts; and though the Italians
had not names so celebrated to oppose to them, yet the result
showed that their leaders were in a military point of view nowise
inferior to the Romans.
The offensive in this thoroughly desultory war was on the whole on the
side of the Romans, but was nowhere decisively assumed even on their
part. It is surprising that the Romans did not collect their troops
for the purpose of attacking the insurgents with a superior force,
and that the insurgents made no attempt to advance into Latium and to
throw themselves on the hostile capital. We are how ever too little
acquainted with their respective circumstances to judge whether or
how they could have acted otherwise, or to what extent the remissness
of the Roman government on the one hand and the looseness of the
connection among the federate communities on the other contributed
to this want of unity in the conduct of the war. It is easy to see
that with such a system there would doubtless be victories and defeats,
but the final settlement might be very long delayed; and it is no less
plain that a clear and vivid picture of such a war--which resolved
itself into a series of engagements on the part of individual corps
operating at the same time, sometimes separately, sometimes in
combination--cannot be prepared out of the remarkably fragmentary
accounts which have come down to us.
At the same time operations had also begun in Central Italy, where
the revolt of the Abruzzi and the region of the Fucine lake threatened
the capital in dangerous proximity. An independent corps under Gnaeus
Pompeius Strabo was sent into Picenum in order that, resting for
support on Firmum and Falerio, it might threaten Asculum; but the
main body of the Roman northern army took its position under the
consul Lupus on the borders of the Latin and Marsian territories,
where the Valerian and Salarian highways brought the enemy nearest to
the capital; the rivulet Tolenus (Turano), which crosses the Valerian
road between Tibur and Alba and falls into the Velino at Rieti,
separated the two armies. The consul Lupus impatiently pressed for
a decision, and did not listen to the disagreeable advice of Marius
that he should exercise his men--unaccustomed to service--in the first
instance in petty warfare. At the very outset the division of Gaius
Perpenna, 10,000 strong, was totally defeated. The commander-in-
chief deposed the defeated general from his command and united the
remnant of the corps with that which was under the orders of Marius,
but did not allow himself to be deterred from assuming the offensive
and crossing the Tolenus in two divisions, led partly by himself,
partly by Marius, on two bridges constructed not far from each other.
Publius Scato with the Marsians confronted them; he had pitched his
camp at the spot where Marius crossed the brook, but, before the
passage took place, he had withdrawn thence, leaving behind the mere
posts that guarded the camp, and had taken a position in ambush
farther up the river. There he attacked the other Roman corps under
Lupus unexpectedly during the crossing, and partly cut it down, partly
drove it into the river (11th June 664). The consul in person and
8000 of his troops fell. It could scarcely be called a compensation
that Marius, becoming at length aware of Scato's departure, had crossed
the river and not without loss to the enemy occupied their camp.
Yet this passage of the river, and a victory at the same time obtained
over the Paelignians by the general Servius Sulpicius, compelled the
Marsians to draw their line of defence somewhat back, and Marius, who
by decree of the senate succeeded Lupus as commander-in-chief, at least
prevented the enemy from gaining further successes. But, when Quintus
Caepio was soon afterwards associated in the command with equal powers,
not so much on account of a conflict which he had successfully
sustained, as because he had recommended himself to the equites then
leading the politics of Rome by his vehement opposition to Drusus,
he allowed himself to be lured into an ambush by Silo on the pretext
that the latter wished to betray to him his army, and was cut to
pieces with a great part of his force by the Marsians and Vestinians.
Marius, after Caepio's fall once more sole commander-in-chief, through
his tenacious resistance prevented his antagonist from profiting by
the advantages which he had gained, and gradually penetrated far into
the Marsian territory. He long refused battle; when he at length
gave it, he vanquished his impetuous opponent, who left on the battle--
field among other dead Herius Asinius the chieftain of the Marrucini.
In a second engagement the army of Marius and the corps of Sulla
which belonged to the army of the south co-operated to inflict on
the Marsians a still more considerable defeat, which cost them 6000 men;
but the glory of this day remained with the younger officer, for, while
Marius had given and gained the battle, Sulla had intercepted the retreat
of the fugitives and destroyed them.
Picenian War
While the conflict was proceeding thus warmly and with varying success
at the Fucine lake, the Picenian corps under Strabo had also fought
with alternations of fortune. The insurgent chiefs, Gaius Iudacilius
from Asculum, Publius Vettius Scato, and Titus Lafrenius, had
assailed it with their united forces, defeated it, and compelled it
to throw itself into Firmum, where Lafrenius kept Strabo besieged,
while Iudacilius moved into Apulia and induced Canusium, Venusia, and
the other towns still adhering to Rome in that quarter to join the
insurgents. But on the Roman side Servius Sulpicius by his victory
over the Paeligni cleared the way for his advancing into Picenum and
rendering aid to Strabo; Lafrenius was attacked by Strabo in front
and taken in rear by Sulpicius, and his camp was set on fire; he
himself fell, the remnant of his troops fled in disorder and threw
themselves into Asculum. So completely had the state of affairs
changed in Picenum, that the Italians now found themselves confined
to Asculum as the Romans were previously to Firmum, and the war was
thus once more converted into a siege.
Umbro-Etruscan Conflicts
Lastly, there was added in the course of the year to the two difficult
and straggling wars in southern and central Italy a third in the
north. The state of matters apparently so dangerous for Rome after
the first months of the war had induced a great portion of the
Umbrian, and isolated Etruscan, communities to declare for the
insurrection; so that it became necessary to despatch against the
Umbrians Aulus Plotius, and against the Etruscans Lucius Porcius Cato.
Here however the Romans encountered a far less energetic resistance
than in the Marsian and Samnite countries, and maintained a most
decided superiority in the field.
Thus the severe first year of the war came to an end, leaving behind
it, both in a military and political point of view, sorrowful
memories and dubious prospects. In a military point of view both
armies of the Romans, the Marsian as well as the Campanian, had been
weakened and discouraged by severe defeats; the northern army had
been compelled especially to attend to the protection of the capital,
the southern army at Neapolis had been seriously threatened in its
communications, as the insurgents could without much difficulty break
forth from the Marsian or Samnite territory and establish themselves
between Rome and Naples; for which reason it was found necessary to
draw at least a chain of posts from Cumae to Rome. In a political
point of view, the insurrection had gained ground on all sides during
this first year of the war; the secession of Nola, the rapid
capitulation of the strong and large Latin colony of Venusia, and
the Umbro-Etruscan revolt were suspicious signs that the Roman symmachy
was tottering to its very base and was not in a position to hold out
against this last trial. They had already made the utmost demands on
the burgesses; they had already, with a view to form that chain of
posts along the Latino-Campanian coast, incorporated nearly 6000
freedmen in the burgess-militia; they had already required the
severest sacrifices from the allies that still remained faithful;
it was not possible to draw the string of the bow any tighter
without hazarding everything.
The year 664 had begun with a most abrupt rejection of the
compromise offered by the insurgents and with the opening of a war
of prosecutions, in which the most passionate defenders of patriotic
selfishness, the capitalists, took vengeance on all those who were
suspected of having counselled moderation and seasonable concession.
On the other hand the tribune Marcus Plautius Silvanus, who entered
on his office on the 10th of December of the same year, carried a
law which took the commission of high treason out of the hands
of the capitalist jurymen, and entrusted it to other jurymen who
were nominated by the free choice of the tribes without class--
qualification; the effect of which was, that this commission was
converted from a scourge of the moderate party into a scourge of the
ultras, and sent into exile among others its own author, Quintus
Varius, who was blamed by the public voice for the worst democratic
outrages--the poisoning of Quintus Metellus and the murder of Drusus.
War in Picenum
Asculum Besieged
And Conquered
Subjugation of the Sabellians and Marsians
Thus began the second campaign in 665. The insurgents opened it,
even before winter was over, by the bold attempt--recalling the grand
passages of the Samnite wars--to send a Marsian army of 15,000 men to
Etruria with a view to aid the insurrection brewing in Northern Italy.
But Strabo, through whose district it had to pass, intercepted
and totally defeated it; only a few got back to their far distant
home. When at length the season allowed the Roman armies to assume
the offensive, Cato entered the Marsian territory and advanced,
successfully encountering the enemy there; but he fell in the region
of the Fucine lake during an attack on the enemy's camp, so that the
exclusive superintendence of the operations in Central Italy devolved
on Strabo. The latter employed himself partly in continuing the
siege of Asculum, partly in the subjugation of the Marsian, Sabellian,
and Apulian districts. To relieve his hard-pressed native town,
Iudacilius appeared before Asculum with the Picentine levy and
attacked the besieging army, while at the same time the garrison
sallied forth and threw itself on the Roman lines. It is said that
75,000 Romans fought on this day against 60,000 Italians. Victory
remained with the Romans, but Iudacilius succeeded in throwing himself
with a part of the relieving army into the town. The siege resumed
its course; it was protracted(17) by the strength of the place and the
desperate defence of the inhabitants, who fought with a recollection of
the terrible declaration of war within its walls. When Iudacilius
at length after a brave defence of several months saw the day of
capitulation approach, he ordered the chiefs of that section of
the citizens which was favourable to Rome to be put to death under
torture, and then died by his own hand. So the gates were opened,
and Roman executions were substituted for Italian; all officers and
all the respectable citizens were executed, the rest were driven forth
to beggary, and all their property was confiscated on account of
the state. During the siege and after the fall of Asculum numerous
Roman corps marched through the adjacent rebel districts, and induced
one after another to submit. The Marrucini yielded, after Servius
Sulpicius had defeated them decidedly at Teate (Chieti). The praetor
Gaius Cosconius penetrated into Apulia, took Salapia and Cannae, and
besieged Canusium. A Samnite corps under Marius Egnatius came to the
help of the unwarlike region and actually drove back the Romans, but
the Roman general succeeded in defeating it at the passage of the
Aufidus; Egnatius fell, and the rest of the army had to seek shelter
behind the walls of Canusium. The Romans again advanced as far
as Venusia and Rubi, and became masters of all Apulia. Along the
Fucine lake also and at the Majella mountains--the chief seats of
the insurrection--the Romans re-established their mastery; the Marsians
succumbed to Strabo's lieutenants, Quintus Metellus Pius and Gaius
Cinna, the Vestinians and Paelignians in the following year (666) to
Strabo himself; Italia the capital of the insurgents became once more
the modest Paelignian country-town of Corfinium; the remnant of the
Italian senate fled to the Samnite territory.
The Roman southern army, which was now under the command of Lucius
Sulla, had at the same time assumed the offensive and had penetrated
into southern Campania which was occupied by the enemy. Stabiae was
taken and destroyed by Sulla in person (30 April 665) and Herculaneum
by Titus Didius, who however fell himself (11 June) apparently at the
assault on that city. Pompeii resisted longer. The Samnite general
Lucius Cluentius came up to bring relief to the town, but he was
repulsed by Sulla; and when, reinforced by bands of Celts, he
renewed his attempt, he was, chiefly owing to the wavering of these
untrustworthy associates, so totally defeated that his camp was taken
and he himself was cut down with the greater part of his troops on
their flight towards Nola. The grateful Roman army conferred on its
general the grass-wreath--the homely badge with which the usage of
the camp decorated the soldier who had by his capacity saved a division
of his comrades. Without pausing to undertake the siege of Nola and
of the other Campanian towns still occupied by the Samnites, Sulla
at once advanced into the interior, which was the head-quarters of
the insurrection. The speedy capture and fearful punishment of
Aeclanum spread terror throughout the Hirpinian country; it submitted
even before the arrival of the Lucanian contingent which had set itself
in motion to render help, and Sulla was able to advance unhindered as
far as the territory of the Samnite confederacy. The pass, where the
Samnite militia under Mutilus awaited him, was turned, the Samnite army
was attacked in rear, and defeated; the camp was lost, the general
escaped wounded to Aesernia. Sulla advanced to Bovianum, the capital of
the Samnite country, and compelled it to surrender by a second victory
achieved beneath its walls. The advanced season alone put an end
to the campaign there.
Third Campaign
Capture of Venusia
Fall of Silo
Ferment in Rome
The Bestowal of the Franchise and Its Limitations
Secondary Effect of the Political Prosecutions
Marius
Economic Crisis
Murder of Asellio
It was the tribune of the people Publius Sulpicius Rufus who in 666
proposed to the burgesses to declare that every senator, who owed more
than 2000 -denarii- (82 pounds), should forfeit his seat in the senate;
to grant to the burgesses condemned by non-free jury courts liberty
to return home; to distribute the new burgesses among all the tribes,
and likewise to allow the right of voting in all tribes to the
freedmen. They were proposals which from the mouth of such a man
were at least somewhat surprising. Publius Sulpicius Rufus (born in
630) owed his political importance not so much to his noble birth, his
important connections, and his hereditary wealth, as to his remarkable
oratorical talent, in which none of his contemporaries equalled him.
His powerful voice, his lively gestures sometimes bordering on
theatrical display, the luxuriant copiousness of his flow of words
arrested, even if they did not convince, his hearers. As a partisan
he was from the outset on the side of the senate, and his first public
appearance (659) had been the impeachment of Norbanus who was mortally
hated by the government party.(22) Among the conservatives he belonged
to the section of Crassus and Drusus. We do not know what primarily
gave occasion to his soliciting the tribuneship of the people for 666,
and on its account renouncing his patrician nobility; but he seems
to have been by no means rendered a revolutionist through the
fact that he, like the whole middle party, had been persecuted as
revolutionary by the conservatives, and to have by no means intended
an overthrow of the constitution in the sense of Gaius Gracchus.
It would rather seem that, as the only man of note belonging to
the party of Crassus and Drusus who had come forth uninjured from
the storm of the Varian prosecutions, he felt himself called on
to complete the work of Drusus and finally to set aside the still
subsisting disabilities of the new burgesses--for which purpose he
needed the tribunate. Several acts of his even during his tribuneship
are mentioned, which betray the very opposite of demagogic designs.
For instance, he prevented by his veto one of his colleagues from
cancelling through a decree of the people the sentences of jurymen
issued under the Varian law; and when the late aedile Gaius Caesar,
passing over the praetorship, unconstitutionally became a candidate
for the consulship for 667, with the design, it was alleged, of getting
the charge of the Asiatic war afterwards entrusted to him, Sulpicius
opposed him more resolutely and sharply than any one else. Entirely
in the spirit of Drusus, he thus demanded from himself as from
others primarily and especially the maintenance of the constitution.
But in fact he was as little able as was Drusus to reconcile things
that were incompatible, and to carry out in strict form of law the
change of the constitution which he had in view--a change judicious
in itself, but never to be obtained from the great majority of the
old burgesses by amicable means. His breach with the powerful
family of the Julii--among whom in particular the consular Lucius
Caesar, the brother of Gaius, was very influential in the senate--
and withthesectionof the aristocracy adhering to it, beyond doubt
materially cooperated and carried the irascible man through personal
exasperation beyond his original design.
His proposals accordingly met with the most decided resistance from
the majority of the senate, which first, to gain time, induced the
consuls Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Quintus Pompeius Rufus, both declared
opponents of demagogism, to enjoin extraordinary religious observances,
during which the popular assemblies were suspended. Sulpicius
replied by a violent tumult, in which among other victims the young
Quintus Pompeius, son of the one and son-in-law of the other consul,
met his death and the lives of both consuls themselves were seriously
threatened--Sulla is said even to have escaped only by Marius
opening to him his house. They were obliged to yield; Sulla agreed
to countermand the announced solemnities, and the Sulpician proposals
now passed without further difficulty. But this was far from
determining their fate. Though the aristocracy in the capital might
own its defeat, there was now--for the first time since the commencement
of the revolution--yet another power in Italy which could not be
overlooked, viz. the two strong and victorious armies of the proconsul
Strabo and the consul Sulla. The political position of Strabo might
be ambiguous, but Sulla, although he had given way to open violence
for the moment, was on the best terms with the majority of the senate;
and not only so, but he had, immediately after countermanding
the solemnities, departed for Campania to join his army. To terrify
the unarmed consul by bludgeon-men or the defenceless capital by
the swords of the legions, amounted to the same thing in the end:
Sulpicius assumed that his opponent, now when he could, would
requite violence with violence and return to the capital at the head
of his legions to overthrow the conservative demagogue and his laws
along with him. Perhaps he was mistaken. Sulla was just as eager
for the war against Mithradates as he was probably averse to the
political exhalations of the capital; considering his original spirit
of indifference and his unrivalled political nonchalance, there is
great probability that he by no means intended the coup d'etat which
Sulpicius expected, and that, if he had been let alone, he would have
embarked without delay with his troops for Asia so soon as he had
captured Nola, with the siege of which he was still occupied.
Sulla was not the man to yield to such a summons. If any one had a
vocation to the chief command in the Asiatic war, it was Sulla. He
had a few years before commanded with the greatest success in the
same theatre of war; he had contributed more than any other man to
the subjugation of the dangerous Italian insurrection; as consul of
the year in which the Asiatic war broke out, he had been invested with
the command in it after the customary way and with the full consent
of his colleague, who was on friendly terms with him and related to
him by marriage. It was expecting a great deal to suppose that he
would, in accordance with a decree of the sovereign burgesses of
Rome, give up a command undertaken in such circumstances to an old
military and political antagonist, in whose hands the army might be
turned to none could tell what violent and preposterous proceedings.
Sulla was neither good-natured enough to comply voluntarily with such
an order, nor dependent enough to need to do so. His army was--
partly in consequence of the alterations of the military system
which originated with Marius, partly from the moral laxity and the
military strictness of its discipline in the hands of Sulla--little
more than a body of mercenaries absolutely devoted to their leader
and indifferent to political affairs. Sulla himself was a hardened,
cool, and clearheaded man, in whose eyes the sovereign Roman burgesses
were a rabble, the hero of Aquae Sextiae a bankrupt swindler,
formal legality a phrase, Rome itself a city without a garrison
and with its walls half in ruins, which could be far more easily
captured than Nola.
Rome Occupied
The entering legions advanced as far as the height of the Esquiline;
when the missiles and stones descending in showers from the roofs made
the soldiers waver and they began to give way, Sulla himself brandished
a blazing torch, and with firebrands and threats of setting the houses
on fire the legions cleared their way to the Esquiline market-place
(not far from S. Maria Maggiore). There the force hastily collected
by Marius and Sulpicius awaited them, and by its superior numbers
repelled the first invading columns. But reinforcements came up from
the gates; another division of the Sullans made preparations for
turning the defenders by the street of the Subura; the latter were
obliged to retire. At the temple of Tellus, where the Esquiline
begins to slope towards the great Forum, Marius attempted once more
to make a stand; he adjured the senate and equites and all the citizens
to throw themselves across the path of the legions. But he himself
had transformed them from citizens to mercenaries; his own work turned
against him: they obeyed not the government, but their general. Even
when the slaves were summoned to arm under the promise of freedom,
not more than three of them appeared. Nothing remained for the
leaders but to escape in all haste through the still unoccupied gates;
after a few hours Sulla was absolute master of Rome. That night
the watchfires of the legions blazed in the great market-place
of the capital.
Legislation of Sulla
New Complications
Cinna
Strabo
Sulla Embarks for Asia
In reality new clouds very soon began to overcast the clear sky
of the conservatives. The relations of Asia assumed daily a more
threatening character. The state had already suffered the utmost
injury through the delay which the Sulpician revolution had
occasioned in the departure of the army for Asia; the embarkation
could on no account be longer postponed. Meanwhile Sulla hoped to
leave behind him guarantees against a new assault on the oligarchy
in Italy, partly in the consuls who would be elected under the new
electoral arrangement, partly and especially in the armies employed
in suppressing the remains of the Italian insurrection. In the
consular comitia, however, the choice did not fall on the candidates
set up by Sulla, but Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who belonged to the most
determined opposition, was associated with Gnaeus Octavius, a man
certainly of strictly Optimate views. It may be presumed that it
was chiefly the capitalist party, which by this choice retaliated
on the author of the law as to interest. Sulla accepted the
unpleasant election with the declaration that he was glad to see
the burgesses making use of their constitutional liberty of choice,
and contented himself with exacting from both consuls an oath that they
would faithfully observe the existing constitution. Of the armies,
the one on which the matter chiefly depended was that of the north,
as the greater part of the Campanian army was destined to depart for
Asia. Sulla got the command of the former entrusted by decree of the
people to his devoted colleague Quintus Rufus, and procured the recall
of the former general Gnaeus Strabo in such a manner as to spare as far
as possible his feelings--the more so, because the latter belonged to
the equestrian party and his passive attitude during the Sulpician
troubles had occasioned no small anxiety to the aristocracy. Rufus
arrived at the army and took the chief command in Strabo's stead;
but a few days afterwards he was killed by the soldiers, and Strabo
returned to the command which he had hardly abdicated. He was
regarded as the instigator of the murder; it is certain that he
was a man from whom such a deed might be expected, that he reaped the
fruits of the crime, and that he punished the well-known originators
of it only with words. The removal of Rufus and the commandership of
Strabo formed a new and serious danger for Sulla; yet he did nothing
to deprive the latter of his command. Soon afterwards, when his
consulship expired, he found himself on the one hand urged by his
successor Cinna to depart at length for Asia where his presence was
certainly urgently needed, and on the other hand cited by one of
the new tribunes before the bar of the people; it was clear to
the dullest eye, that a new attack on him and his party was in
preparation, and that his opponents wished his removal. Sulla had
no alternative save either to push the matter to a breach with Cinna
and perhaps with Strabo and once more to march on Rome, or to leave
Italian affairs to take their course and to remove to another
continent. Sulla decided--whether more from patriotism or more from
indifference, will never be ascertained--for the latter alternative;
handed over the corps left behind in Samnium to the trustworthy and
experienced soldier, Quintus Metellus Pius, who was invested in
Sulla's stead with the proconsular commandership-in-chief over Lower
Italy; gave the conduct of the siege of Nola to the propraetor Appius
Claudius; and in the beginning of 667 embarked with his legions for
the Hellenic East.
CHAPTER VIII
Cyrene Romans
In many respects matters still stood as they had done thirty years
ago. The kingdom of Egypt with its two appendages of Cyrene and
Cyprus was broken up, partly de jure, partly de facto, on the death
of Euergetes II (637). Cyrene went to his natural son, Ptolemaeus
Apion, and was for ever separated from Egypt. The sovereignty of
the latter formed a subject of contention between the widow of
the last king Cleopatra (665), and his two sons Soter II Lathyrus
(673) and Alexander I (666); which gave occasion to Cyprus also to
separate itself for a considerable period from Egypt. The Romans
did not interfere in these complications; in fact, when the
Cyrenaean kingdom fell to them in 658 by the testament of the
childless king Apion, while not directly rejecting the acquisition,
they left the country in substance to itself by declaring the Greek
towns of the kingdom, Cyrene, Ptolemais, and Berenice, free cities
and even handing over to them the use of the royal domains.
The supervision of the governor of Africa over this territory was
from its remoteness merely nominal, far more so than that of the
governor of Macedonia over the Hellenic free cities. The consequences
of this measure--which beyond doubt originated not in Philhellenism,
but simply in the weakness and negligence of the Roman government--
were substantially similar to those which had occurred under the like
circumstances in Hellas; civil wars and usurpations so rent the land
that, when a Roman officer of rank accidentally made his appearance
there in 668, the inhabitants urgently besought him to regulate
their affairs and to establish a permanent government among them.
In Syria also during the interval there had not been much change,
and still less any improvement. During the twenty years' war of
succession between the two half-brothers Antiochus Grypus (658) and
Antiochus of Cyzicus(659), which after their death was inherited by
their sons, the kingdom which was the object of contention became
almost an empty name, inasmuch as the Cilician sea-kings, the Arab
sheiks of the Syrian desert, the princes of the Jews, and the
magistrates of the larger towns had ordinarily more to say than the
wearers of the diadem. Meanwhile the Romans established themselves
in western Cilicia, and the important Mesopotamia passed over
definitively to the Parthians.
Mithradates Eupator
Pontus
Such was the state in which Mithradates found matters, when his
Macedonian phalanx crossing the ridge of the Caucasus descended into
the valleys of the Kuban and Terek and his fleet at the same time
appeared in the Crimean waters. No wonder that here too, as had
already been the case in Dioscurias, the Hellenes everywhere received
the king of Pontus with open arms and regarded the half-Hellene and
his Cappadocians armed in Greek fashion as their deliverers. What
Rome had here neglected, became apparent. The demands on the rulers
of Panticapaeum for tribute had just then been raised to an exorbitant
height; the town of Chersonesus found itself hard pressed by Scilurus
king of the Scythians dwelling in the peninsula and his fifty sons;
the former were glad to surrender their hereditary lordship, and
the latter their long-preserved freedom, in order to save their
last possession, their Hellenism. It was not in vain. Mithradates'
brave generals, Diophantus and Neoptolemus, and his disciplined troops
easily got the better of the peoples of the steppes. Neoptolemus
defeated them at the straits of Panticapaeum partly by water, partly
in winter on the ice; Chersonesus was delivered, the strongholds of
the Taurians were broken, and the possession of the peninsula was
secured by judiciously constructed fortresses. Diophantus marched
against the Reuxinales or, as they were afterwards called, the Roxolani
(between the Dnieper and Don) who came forward to the aid of the Taurians;
50,000 of them fled before his 6000 phalangites, and the Pontic arms
penetrated as far as the Dnieper.(7) Thus Mithradates acquired here
a second kingdom combined with that of Pontus and, like the latter,
mainly based on a number of Greek commercial towns. It was called
the kingdom of the Bosporus; it embraced the modern Crimea with the
opposite Asiatic promontory, and annually furnished to the royal
chests and magazines 200 talents (48,000 pounds) and 270,000 bushels
of grain. The tribes of the steppe themselves from the north slope
of the Caucasus to the mouth of the Danube entered, at least in great
part, into relations of dependence on, or treaty with, the Pontic
king and, if they furnished him with no other aid, afforded at any
rate an inexhaustible field for recruiting his armies.
Lesser Armenia
Alliance with Tigranes
While thus the most important successes were gained towards the north,
the king at the same time extended his dominions towards the east and
the west. The Lesser Armenia was annexed by him and converted from a
dependent principality into an integral part of the Pontic kingdom;
but still more important was the close connection which he formed with
the king of the Greater Armenia. He not only gave his daughter
Cleopatra in marriage to Tigranes, but it was mainly through his
support that Tigranes shook off the yoke of the Arsacids and took
their place in Asia. An agreement seems to have been made between
the two to the effect that Tigranes should take in hand to occupy
Syria and the interior of Asia, and Mithradates Asia Minor and
the coasts of the Black Sea, under promise of mutual support;
and it was beyond doubt the more active and capable Mithradates
who brought about this agreement with a view to cover his rear
and to secure a powerful ally.
Lastly, in Asia Minor the king turned his eyes towards the interior
of Paphlagonia--the coast had for long belonged to the Pontic empire--
and towards Cappadocia.(8) The former was claimed on the part of
Pontus as having been bequeathed by the testament of the last of
the Pylaemenids to king Mithradates Euergetes: against this, however,
legitimate or illegitimate pretenders and the land itself protested.
As to Cappadocia, the Pontic rulers had not forgotten that this
country and Cappadocia on the sea had been formerly united, and
continually cherished ideas of reunion. Paphlagonia was occupied by
Mithradates in concert with Nicomedes king of Bithynia, with whom he
shared the land. When the senate raised objections to this course,
Mithradates yielded to its remonstrance, while Nicomedes equipped one
of his sons with the name of Pylaemenes and under this title retained
the country to himself. The policy of the allies adopted still worse
expedients in Cappadocia. King Ariarathes VI was killed by Gordius,
it was said by the orders, at any rate in the interest, of Ariarathes'
brother-in-law Mithradates Eupator: his young son Ariarathes knew no
means of meeting the encroachments of the king of Bithynia except
the ambiguous help of his uncle, in return for which the latter then
suggested to him that he should allow the murderer of his father,
who had taken flight, to return to Cappadocia. This led to a rupture
and to war; but when the two armies confronted each other ready for
battle, the uncle requested a previous conference with the nephew and
thereupon cut down the unarmed youth with his own hand. Gordius, the
murderer of the father, then undertook the government by the directions
of Mithradates; and although the indignant population rose against
him and called the younger son of the last king to the throne, the
latter was unable to offer any permanent resistance to the superior
forces of Mithradates. The speedy death of the youth placed by the
people on the throne gave to the Pontic king the greater liberty of
action, because with that youth the Cappadocian royal house became
extinct. A pseudo-Ariarathes was proclaimed as nominal regent,
just as had been done in Paphlagonia; under whose name Gordius
administered the kingdom as lieutenant of Mithradates.
Empire of Mithradates
Mightier than any native monarch for many a day had been,
Mithradates bore rule alike over the northern and the southern
shores of the Black Sea and far into the interior of Asia Minor.
The resources of the king for war by land and by sea seemed
immeasurable. His recruiting field stretched from the mouth of
the Danube to the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea; Thracians, Scythians,
Sauromatae, Bastarnae, Colchians, Iberians (in the modern Georgia)
crowded under his banners; above all he recruited his war-hosts from
the brave Bastarnae. For his fleet the satrapy of Colchis supplied
him with the most excellent timber, which was floated down from the
Caucasus, besides flax, hemp, pitch, and wax; pilots and officers
were hired in Phoenicia and Syria. The king, it was said, had
marched into Cappadocia with 600 scythe-chariots, 10,000 horse,
80,000 foot; and he had by no means mustered for this war all his
resources. In the absence of any Roman or other naval power worth
mentioning, the Pontic fleet, with Sinope and the ports of the Crimea
as its rallying points, had exclusive command of the Black Sea.
That the Roman senate asserted its general policy--of keeping down
the states more or less dependent on it--also in dealing with that
of Pontus, is shown by its attitude on occasion of the succession to
the throne after the sudden death of Mithradates V. From the boy in
minority who followed him there was taken away Great Phrygia, which
had been conferred on his father for his taking part in the war
against Aristonicus or rather for his good money,(9) and this region
was added to the territory immediately subject to Rome.(10) But,
after this boy had at length attained majority, the same senate
showed utter passiveness towards his aggressions on all sides and
towards the formation of this imposing power, the development of
which occupies perhaps a period of twenty years. It was passive,
while one of its dependent states became developed into a great
military power, having at command more than a hundred thousand
armed men; while the ruler of that state entered into the closest
connection with the new great-king of the east, who was placed partly
by his aid at the head of the states in the interior of Asia; while
he annexed the neighbouring Asiatic kingdoms and principalities under
pretexts which sounded almost like a mockery of the ill-informed
and far-distant protecting power; while, in fine, he even
established himself in Europe and ruled as king over the Tauric
peninsula, and as lord-protector almost to the Macedono-Thracian
frontier. These circumstances indeed formed the subject of
discussion in the senate; but when the illustrious corporation
consoled itself in the affair of the Paphlagonian succession with
the fact that Nicomedes appealed to his pseudo-Pylaemenes, it was
evidently not so much deceived as grateful for any pretext which
spared it from serious interference. Meanwhile the complaints
became daily more numerous and more urgent. The princes of the
Tauric Scythians, whom Mithradates had driven from the Crimea,
turned for help to Rome; those of the senators who at all reflected
on the traditional maxims of Roman policy could not but recollect
that formerly, under circumstances so wholly different, the crossing
of king Antiochus to Europe and the occupation of the Thracian
Chersonese by his troops had become the signal for the Asiatic
war,(11) and could not but see that the occupation of the Tauric
Chersonese by the Pontic king ought still less to be tolerated now.
The scale was at last turned by the practical reunion of the kingdom
of Cappadocia, respecting which, moreover, Nicomedes of Bithynia--
who on his part had hoped to gain possession of Cappadocia by
another pseudo-Ariarathes, and now saw that the Pontic pretender
excluded his own--would hardly fail to urge the Roman government to
intervention. The senate resolved that Mithradates should reinstate
the Scythian princes--so far were they driven out of the track of
right policy by their negligent style of government, that instead of
supporting the Hellenes against the barbarians they had now on the
contrary to support the Scythians against those who were half their
countrymen. Paphlagonia was declared independent, and the pseudo-
Pylaemenes of Nicomedes was directed to evacuate the country.
In like manner the pseudo-Ariarathes of Mithradates was to retire
from Cappadocia, and, as the representatives of the country refused
the freedom proffered to it, a king was once more to be appointed
by free popular election.
So it was alleged; but in fact there was little trace of any real
return of the former order of things. Scarce had Sulla left Asia,
when Tigranes king of Great Armenia fell upon Ariobarzanes the new
king of Cappadocia, expelled him, and reinstated in his stead the
Pontic pretender Ariarathes. In Bithynia, where after the death
of the old king Nicomedes II (about 663) his son Nicomedes III
Philopator had been recognized by the people and by the Roman senate
as legitimate king, his younger brother Socrates came forward as
pretender to the crown and possessed himself of the sovereignty.
It was clear that the real author of the Cappadocian as of the Bithynian
troubles was no other than Mithradates, although he refrained from
taking any open part. Every one knew that Tigranes only acted at
his beck; but Socrates also had marched into Bithynia with Pontic
troops, and the legitimate king's life was threatened by the
assassins of Mithradates. In the Crimea even and the neighbouring
countries the Pontic king had no thought of receding, but on the
contrary carried his arms farther and farther.
Thus matters stood between peace and war, and looked quite as if
they would drag on for long in the same indecisive position. But
it was not the intention of Aquillius to allow this; and, as he could
not compel his government to declare war against Mithradates, he
made use of Nicomedes for that purpose. The latter, who was under
the power of the Roman general and was, moreover, his debtor for
the accumulated war expenses and for sums promised to the general in
person, could not avoid complying with the suggestion that he should
begin war with Mithradates. The declaration of war by Bithynia
took place; but, even when the vessels of Nicomedes closed the
Bosporus against those of Pontus, and his troops marched into the
frontier districts of Pontus and laid waste the region of Amastris,
Mithradates remained still unshaken in his policy of peace; instead
of driving the Bithynians over the frontier, he lodged a complaint
with the Roman envoys and asked them either to mediate or to allow
him the privilege of self-defence. But he was informed by
Aquillius, that he must under all circumstances refrain from war
against Nicomedes. That indeed was plain. They had employed
exactly the same policy against Carthage; they allowed the victim
to be set upon by the Roman hounds and forbade its defending itself
against them. Mithradates reckoned himself lost, just as the
Carthaginians had done; but, while the Phoenicians yielded from
despair, the king of Sinope did the very opposite and assembled
his troops and ships. "Does not even he who must succumb," he is
reported to have said, "defend himself against the robber?" His son
Ariobarzanes received orders to advance into Cappadocia; a message
was sent once more to the Roman envoys to inform them of the step
to which necessity had driven the king, and to demand their
ultimatum. It was to the effect which was to be anticipated.
Although neither the Roman senate nor king Mithradates nor king
Nicomedes had desired the rupture, Aquillius desired it and war
ensued (end of 665).
Preparations of Mithradates
But the king was not content with this savage mockery, which alone
suffices to erase its author's name from the roll of true nobility.
From Ephesus king Mithradates issued orders to all the governors
and cities dependent on him to put to death on one and the same day
all Italians residing within their bounds, whether free or slaves,
without distinction of sex or age, and on no account, under severe
penalties, to aid any of the proscribed to escape; to cast forth
the corpses of the slain as a prey to the birds; to confiscate their
property and to hand over one half of it to the murderers, and the
other half to the king. The horrible orders were--excepting in a
few districts, such as the island of Cos--punctually executed,
and eighty, or according to other accounts one hundred and fifty,
thousand--if not innocent, at least defenceless--men, women, and
children were slaughtered in cold blood in one day in Asia Minor;
a fearful execution, in which the good opportunity of getting
rid of debts and the Asiatic servile willingness to perform any
executioner's office at the bidding of the sultan had at least
as much part as the comparatively noble feeling of revenge. In a
political point of view this measure was not only without any rational
object--for its financial purpose might have been attained without
this bloody edict, and the natives of Asia Minor were not to be driven
into warlike zeal even by the consciousness of the most blood-stained
guilt--but even opposed to the king's designs, for on the one hand
it compelled the Roman senate, so far as it was still capable of
energy at all, to an energetic prosecution of the war, and on the
other hand it struck at not the Romans merely, but the king's natural
allies as well, the non-Roman Italians. This Ephesian massacre
was altogether a mere meaningless act of brutally blind revenge,
which obtains a false semblance of grandeur simply through the
colossal proportions in which the character of sultanic rule
was here displayed.
The king's views altogether grew high; he had begun the war from
despair, but the unexpectedly easy victory and the non-arrival of
the dreaded Sulla occasioned a transition to the most highflown hopes.
He set up his home in the west of Asia Minor; Pergamus the seat
of the Roman governor became his new capital, the old kingdom
of Sinope was handed over to the king's son Mithradates to be
administered as a viceroyship; Cappadocia, Phrygia, Bithynia were
organized as Pontic satrapies. The grandees of the empire and the
king's favourites were loaded with rich gifts and fiefs, and not
only were the arrears of taxes remitted, but exemption from
taxation for five years was promised, to all the communities-
a measure which was as much a mistake as the massacre of the
Romans, if the king expected thereby to secure the fidelity of
the inhabitants of Asia Minor.
But not only was the Asiatic province occupied by Mithradates almost
without defending itself, chiefly in consequence of the Sulpician
revolution breaking out at a most unfavourable time; Mithradates
even directed an attack against Europe. Already since 662 the
neighbours of Macedonia on her northern and eastern frontier had been
renewing their incursions with remarkable vehemence and perseverance;
in the years 664, 665 the Thracians overran Macedonia and all Epirus
and plundered the temple of Dodona. Still more singular was the
circumstance, that with these movements was combined a renewed
attempt to place a pretender on the Macedonian throne in the person
of one Euphenes. Mithradates, who from the Crimea maintained
connections with the Thracians, was hardly a stranger to all these
events. The praetor Gaius Sentius defended himself, it is true,
against these intruders with the aid of the Thracian Dentheletae;
but it was not long before mightier opponents came against him.
Mithradates, carried away by his successes, had formed the bold
resolution that he would, like Antiochus, bring the war for the
sovereignty of Asia to a decision in Greece, and had by land and sea
directed thither the flower of his troops. His son Ariarathes
penetrated from Thrace into the weakly-defended Macedonia, subduing
the country as he advanced and parcelling it into Pontic satrapies.
Abdera and Philippi became the principal bases for the operations of
the Pontic arms in Europe. The Pontic fleet, commanded by
Mithradates' best general Archelaus, appeared in the Aegean Sea,
where scarce a Roman sail was to be found. Delos, the emporium of
the Roman commerce in those waters, was occupied and nearly 20,000
men, mostly Italians, were massacred there; Euboea suffered a similar
fate; all the islands to the east of the Malean promontory were soon
in the hands of the enemy; they might proceed to attack the mainland
itself. The assault, no doubt, which the Pontic fleet made from
Euboea on the important Demetrias, was repelled by Bruttius Sura, the
brave lieutenant of the governor of Macedonia, with his handful of
troops and a few vessels hurriedly collected, and he even occupied
the island of Sciathus; but he could not prevent the enemy from
establishing himself in Greece proper.
Sulla's Landing
Greece Occupied
The Epicurean schoolmaster had thus been vanquished; but the position
of Sulla remained in the highest degree difficult, and even
desperate. He had now been more than a year in the field without
having advanced a step worth mentioning; a single port mocked all
his exertions, while Asia was utterly left to itself, and the conquest
of Macedonia by Mithradates' lieutenants had recently been completed
by the capture of Amphipolis. Without a fleet--it was becoming daily
more apparent--it was not only impossible to secure his communications
and supplies in presence of the ships of the enemy and the numerous
pirates, but impossible to recover even the Piraeeus, to say
nothing of Asia and the islands; and yet it was difficult to see
how ships of war were to be got. As early as the winter of 667-8
Sulla had despatched one of his ablest and most dexterous officers,
Lucius Licinius Lucullus, into the eastern waters, to raise ships
there if possible. Lucullus put to sea with six open boats, which he
had borrowed from the Rhodians and other small communities; he himself
merely by an accident escaped from a piratic squadron, which captured
most of his boats; deceiving the enemy by changing his vessels he
arrived by way of Crete and Cyrene at Alexandria; but the Egyptian
court rejected his request for the support of ships of war with equal
courtesy and decision. Hardly anything illustrates so clearly as
does this fact the sad decay of the Roman state, which had once
been able gratefully to decline the offer of the kings of Egypt to
assist the Romans with all their naval force, and now itself seemed
to the Alexandrian statesmen bankrupt. To all this fell to be added
the financial embarrassment; Sulla had already been obliged to empty
the treasuries of the Olympian Zeus, of the Delphic Apollo, and of
the Epidaurian Asklepios, for which the gods were compensated by
the moiety, confiscated by way of penalty, of the Theban territory.
But far worse than all this military and financial perplexity was
the reaction of the political revolution in Rome; the rapid, sweeping,
violent accomplishment of which had far surpassed the worst
apprehensions. The revolution conducted the government in the
capital; Sulla had been deposed, his Asiatic command had been
entrusted to the democratic consul Lucius Valerius Flaccus, who
might be daily looked for in Greece. The soldiers had no doubt
adhered to Sulla, who made every effort to keep them in good humour;
but what could be expected, when money and supplies were wanting,
when the general was deposed and proscribed, when his successor
was on the way, and, in addition to all this, the war against
the tough antagonist who commanded the sea was protracted without
prospect of a close?
Battle of Chaerones
In the plain of the Cephissus not far from Chaeronea, in March 668,
the armies met. Even including the division driven back from
Thessaly, which had succeeded in accomplishing its junction with
the Roman main army, and including the Greek contingents, the Roman
army found itself opposed to a foe three times as strong and
particularly to a cavalry fur superior and from the nature of
the field of battle very dangerous, against which Sulla found it
necessary to protect his flanks by digging trenches, while in front
he caused a chain of palisades to be introduced between his first and
second lines for protection against the enemy's war-chariots. When
the war chariots rolled on to open the battle, the first line of the
Romans withdrew behind this row of stakes: the chariots, rebounding
from it and scared by the Roman slingers and archers, threw themselves
on their own line and carried confusion both into the Macedonian
phalanx and into the corps of the Italian refugees. Archelaus
brought up in haste his cavalry from both flanks and sent it to
engage the enemy, with a view to gain time for rearranging his infantry;
it charged with great fury and broke through the Roman ranks; but
the Roman infantry rapidly formed in close masses and courageously
withstood the horsemen assailing them on every side. Meanwhile Sulla
himself on the right wing led his cavalry against the exposed flank
of the enemy; the Asiatic infantry gave way before it was even properly
engaged, and its giving way carried confusion also into the masses
of the cavalry. A general attack of the Roman infantry, which
through the wavering demeanour of the hostile cavalry gained time
to breathe, decided the victory. The closing of the gates of the
camp which Archelaus ordered to check the flight, only increased
the slaughter, and when the gates at length were opened, the Romans
entered at the same time with the Asiatics. It is said that
Archelaus brought not a twelfth part of his force in safety to
Chalcis; Sulla followed him to the Euripus; he was not in a position
to cross that narrow arm of the sea.
While the king was thus by his suicidal fury provoking his
temporary subjects to rise in arms against him, he was at the same
time hard pressed by the Romans in Asia, both by sea and by land.
Lucullus, after the failure of his attempt to lead forth the Egyptian
fleet against Mithradates, had with better success repeated his
efforts to procure vessels of war in the Syrian maritime towns, and
reinforced his nascent fleet in the ports of Cyprus, Pamphylia, and
Rhodes till he found himself strong enough to proceed to the attack.
He dexterously avoided measuring himself against superior forces and
yet obtained no inconsiderable advantages. The Cnidian island and
peninsula were occupied by him, Samos was assailed, Colophon and
Chios were wrested from the enemy.
Meanwhile Flaccus had proceeded with his army through Macedonia and
Thrace to Byzantium, and thence, passing the straits, had reached
Chalcedon (end of 668). There a military insurrection broke out
against the general, ostensibly because he embezzled the spoil
from the soldiers. The soul of it was one of the chief officers
of the army, a man whose name had become a proverb in Rome for a
true mob-orator, Gaius Flavius Fimbria, who, after having differed
with his commander-in-chief, transferred the demagogic practices
which he had begun in the Forum to the camp. Flaccus was deposed
by the army and soon afterwards put to death at Nicomedia, not far
from Chalcedon; Fimbria was installed by decree of the soldiers
in his stead. As a matter of course he allowed his troops every
indulgence; in the friendly Cyzicus, for instance, the citizens
were ordered to surrender all their property to the soldiers on pain
of death, and by way of warning example two of the most respectable
citizens were at once executed. Nevertheless in a military point
of view the change of commander-in-chief was a gain; Fimbria was not,
like Flaccus, an incapable general, but energetic and talented.
At Miletopolis (on the Rhyndacus to the west of Brussa) he defeated
the younger Mithradates, who as governor of the satrapy of Pontus had
marched against him, completely in a nocturnal assault, and by this
victory opened his way to Pergamus, the capital formerly of the
Roman province and now of the Pontic king, whence he dislodged the
king and compelled him to take flight to the port of Pitane not far
off, with the view of there embarking. Just at that moment Lucullus
appeared in those waters with his fleet; Fimbria adjured him to
render assistance so that he might be enabled to capture the king.
But the Optimate was stronger in Lucullus than the patriot; he
sailed onward and the king escaped to Mitylene. The situation
of Mithradates was even thus sufficiently embarrassed. At the end
of 669 Europe was lost, Asia Minor was partly in rebellion against
him, partly occupied by a Roman army; and he was himself threatened
by the latter in his immediate vicinity. The Roman fleet under
Lucullus had maintained its position on the Trojan coast by two
successful naval engagements at the promontory of Lectum and at
the island of Tenedos; it was joined there by the ships which had
in the meanwhile been built by Sulla's orders in Thessaly, and by
it position commanding the Hellespont it secured to the general of
the Roman senatorial army a safe and easy passage next spring to Asia.
Preliminaries of Delium
New Difficulties
Sulla Proceeds to Asia
Peace at Dardanus
Sulla against Fimbria
Fimbria's Death
Sulla determined to leave these two legions, whom he did not trust
for the impending war, behind in Asia, where the fearful crisis
left for long its lingering traces in the several cities and
districts. The command of this corps and the governorship of Roman
Asia he committed to his best officer, Lucius Licinius Murena.
The revolutionary measures of Mithradates, such as the liberation
of the slaves and the annulling of debts, were of course cancelled;
a restoration, which in many places could not be carried into effect
without force of arms. The towns of the territory on the eastern
frontier underwent a comprehensive reorganization, and reckoned
from the year 670 as the date of their being constituted. Justice
moreover was exercised, as the victors understood the term.
The most noted adherents of Mithradates and the authors of the
massacre of the Italians were punished with death. The persons
liable to taxes were obliged immediately to pay down in cash according
to valuation the whole arrears of tenths and customs for the last five
years; besides which they had to pay a war-indemnity of 20,000
talents (4,800,000 pounds), for the collection of which Lucius
Lucullus was left behind. These were measures fearful in their rigour
and dreadful in their effects; but when we recall the Ephesian decree
and its execution, we feel inclined to regard them as a comparatively
mild retaliation. That the exactions in other respects were not
unusually oppressive, is shown by the value of the spoil afterwards
carried in triumph, which amounted in precious metal to only about
1,000,000 pounds. The few communities on the other hand that had
remained faithful--particularly the island of Rhodes, the region of
Lycia, Magnesia on the Maeander--were richly rewarded: Rhodes received
back at least a portion of the possessions withdrawn from it after
the war against Perseus.(19) In like manner compensation was made
as far as possible by free charters and special favours to the Chians
for the hardships which they had borne, and to the Ilienses for the
insanely cruel maltreatment inflicted on them by Fimbria on account
of the negotiations into which they had entered with Sulla. Sulla
had already brought the kings of Bithynia and Cappadocia to meet
the Pontic king at Dardanus, and had made them all promise to live
in peace and good neighbourhood; on which occasion, however, the
haughty Mithradates had refused to admit Ariobarzanes who was not
descended of royal blood--the slave, as he called him--to his
presence. Gaius Scribonius Curio was commissioned to superintend
the restoration of the legal order of things in the two kingdoms
evacuated by Mithradates.
The goal was thus attained. After four years of war the Pontic
king was again a client of the Romans, and a single and settled
government was re-established in Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor;
the requirements of interest and honour were satisfied, if not
adequately, yet so far as circumstances would allow; Sulla had not
only brilliantly distinguished himself as a soldier and general, but
had the skill, in his path crossed by a thousand obstacles, to preserve
the difficult mean between bold perseverance and prudent concession.
Almost like Hannibal he had fought and conquered, in order that
with the forces, which the first victory gave him, he might prepare
forthwith for a second and severer struggle. After he had in some
degree compensated his soldiers for the fatigues which they had
undergone by luxurious winter-quarters in the rich west of Asia Minor,
he in the spring of 671 transferred them in 1600 vessels from
Ephesus to the Piraeeus and thence by the land route to Patrae,
where the vessels again lay ready to convey the troops to Brundisium.
His arrival was preceded by a report addressed to the senate
respecting his campaigns in Greece and Asia, the writer of which
appeared to know nothing of his deposition; it was the mute herald
of the impending restoration.
CHAPTER IX
Ferment in Italy
Cinna
Carbo
Sertorius
The name of the man whom the discontented had summoned to the head
of the state, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, had been hitherto scarcely
heard of, except so far as he had borne himself well as an officer
in the Social war. We have less information regarding the
personality and the original designs of Cinna than regarding those
of any other party leader in the Roman revolution. The reason is,
to all appearance, simply that this man, altogether vulgar and
guided by the lowest selfishness, had from the first no ulterior
political plans whatever. It was asserted at his very first
appearance that he had sold himself for a round sum of money to
the new burgesses and the coterie of Marius, and the charge looks
very credible; but even were it false, it remains nevertheless
significant that a suspicion of the sort, such as was never
expressed against Saturninus and Sulpicius, attached to Cinna.
In fact the movement, at the head of which he put himself, has
altogether the appearance of worthlessness both as to motives and
as to aims. It proceeded not so much from a party as from a number
of malcontents without proper political aims or notable support,
who had mainly undertaken to effect the recall of the exiles by
legal or illegal means. Cinna seems to have been admitted into the
conspiracy only by an afterthought and merely because the intrigue,
which in consequence of the restriction of the tribunician powers
needed a consul to bring forward its proposals, saw in him among
the consular candidates for 667 its fittest instrument and so
pushed him forward as consul. Among the leaders appearing in the
second rank of the movement were some abler heads; such was the
tribune of the people Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, who had made himself
a name by his impetuous popular eloquence, and above all Quintus
Sertorius, one of the most talented of Roman officers and a man
in every respect excellent, who since his candidature for the
tribunate of the people had been a personal enemy to Sulla and had
been led by this quarrel into the ranks of the disaffected to which
he did not at all by nature belong. The proconsul Strabo, although
at variance with the government, was yet far from going along
with this faction.
Beyond doubt nothing further would have come of the movement, had
not the senate on the one hand with its usual remissness omitted to
compel the fugitives at least rapidly to quit Italy, and had the
latter on the other hand been, as champions of the emancipation of
the new burgesses, in a position to renew to some extent in their
own favour the revolt of the Italians. Without obstruction they
appeared in Tibur, in Praeneste, in all the important communities
of new burgesses in Latium and Campania, and asked and obtained
everywhere money and men for the furtherance of the common cause.
Thus supported, they made their appearance at the army besieging
Nola, The armies of this period were democratic and revolutionary
in their views, wherever the general did not attach them to himself
by the weight of his personal influence; the speeches of the
fugitive magistrates, some of whom, especially Cinna and Sertorius,
were favourably remembered by the soldiers in connection with the
last campaigns, made a deep impression; the unconstitutional
deposition of the popular consul and the interference of the senate
with the rights of the sovereign people told on the common soldier,
and the gold of the consul or rather of the new burgesses made the
breach of the constitution clear to the officers. The Campanian
army recognized Cinna as consul and swore the oath of fidelity to
him man by man; it became a nucleus for the bands that flocked in
from the new burgesses and even from the allied communities; a
considerable army, though consisting mostly of recruits, soon moved
from Campania towards the capital. Other bands approached it from
the north. On the invitation of Cinna those who had been banished
in the previous year had landed at Telamon on the Etruscan coast.
There were not more than some 500 armed men, for the most part
slaves of the refugees and enlisted Numidian horsemen; but, as
Gaius Marius had in the previous year been willing to fraternize
with the rabble of the capital, so he now ordered the -ergastula-
in which the landholders of this region shut up their field-
labourers during the night to be broken open, and the arms which
he offered to these for the purpose of achieving their freedom were
not despised. Reinforced by these men and the contingents of the
new burgesses, as well as by the exiles who flocked to him with
their partisans from all sides, he soon numbered 6000 men under his
eagles and was able to man forty ships, which took their station
before the mouth of the Tiber and gave chase to the corn-ships
sailing towards Rome. With these he placed himself at the disposal
of the "consul" Cinna. The leaders of the Campanian army
hesitated; the more sagacious, Sertorius in particular, seriously
pointed out the danger of too closely connecting themselves with
a man whose name would necessarily place him at the head of
the movement, and who yet was notoriously incapable of any
statesmanlike action and haunted by an insane thirst for revenge;
but Cinna disregarded these scruples, and confirmed Marius in the
supreme command in Etruria and at sea with proconsular powers.
Thus the storm gathered around the capital, and the government
could no longer delay bringing forward their troops to protect
it.(1) But the forces of Metellus were detained by the Italians
in Samnium and before Nola; Strabo alone was in a position to hasten
to the help of the capital. He appeared and pitched his camp at
the Colline gate: with his numerous and experienced army he might
doubtless have rapidly and totally annihilated the still weak bands
of insurgents; but this seemed to be no part of his design. On the
contrary he allowed Rome to be actually invested by the insurgents.
Cinna with his corps and that of Carbo took post on the right bank
of the Tiber opposite to the Janiculum, Sertorius on the left bank
confronting Pompeius over against the Servian wall. Marius with
his band which had gradually increased to three legions, and in
possession of a number of war-vessels, occupied one place on the
coast after another till at length even Ostia fell into his hands
through treachery, and, by way of prelude as it were to the
approaching reign of terror, was abandoned by the general to
the savage band for massacre and pillage. The capital was placed,
even by the mere obstruction of traffic, in great danger; by command
of the senate the walls and gates were put in a state of defence and
the burgess-levy was ordered to the Janiculum. The inaction of
Strabo excited among all classes alike surprise and indignation.
The suspicion that he was negotiating secretly with Cinna was
natural, but was probably without foundation. A serious conflict
in which he engaged the band of Sertorius, and the support which
he gave to the consul Octavius when Marius had by an understanding
with one of the officers of the garrison penetrated into the
Janiculum, and by which in fact the insurgents were successfully
beaten off again with much loss, showed that he was far from
intending to unite with, or rather to place himself under, the
leaders of the insurgents. It seems rather to have been his design
to sell his assistance in subduing the insurrection to the alarmed
government and citizens of the capital at the price of the
consulship for the next year, and thereby to get the reins
of government into his own hands.
The senate was not, however, inclined to throw itself into the
arms of one usurper in order to escape from another, and sought
help elsewhere. The franchise was by decree of the senate
supplementarily conferred on all the Italian communities involved
in the Social war, which had laid down their arms and had in
consequence thereof forfeited their old alliance.(2) It seemed as
it were their intention officially to demonstrate that Rome in the
war against the Italians had staked her existence for the sake not
of a great object but of her own vanity: in the first momentary
embarrassment, for the purpose of bringing into the field an
additional thousand or two of soldiers, she sacrificed everything
which had been gained at so terribly dear a cost in the Social war.
In fact, troops arrived from the communities who were benefited by
this concession; but instead of the many legions promised, their
contingent on the whole amounted to not more than, at most, ten
thousand men. It would have been of more moment that an agreement
should be come to with the Samnites and Nolans, so that the troops
of the thoroughly trustworthy Metellus might be employed for the
protection of the capital. But the Samnites made demands which
recalled the yoke of Caudium--restitution of the spoil taken from
the Samnites and of their prisoners and deserters, renunciation of
the booty wrested by the Samnites from the Romans, the bestowal of
the franchise on the Samnites themselves as well as on the Romans
who had passed over to them. The senate rejected even in this
emergency terms of peace so disgraceful, but instructed Metellus to
leave behind a small division and to lead in person all the troops
that could at all be dispensed with in southern Italy as quickly as
possible to Rome. He obeyed. But the consequence was, that the
Samnites attacked and defeated Plautius the legate left behind by
Metellus and his weak band; that the garrison of Nola marched out
and set on fire the neighbouring town of Abella in alliance with
Rome; that Cinna and Marius, moreover, granted to the Samnites
everything they asked--what mattered Roman honour to them!--and a
Samnite contingent reinforced the ranks of the insurgents. It was
a severe loss also, when after a combat unfavourable to the troops
of the government Ariminum was occupied by the insurgents and thus
the important communication between Rome and the valley of the Po,
whence men and supplies were expected, was interrupted. Scarcity
and famine set in. The large populous city numerously garrisoned
with troops was but inadequately supplied with provisions; and
Marius in particular took care to cut off its supplies more and
more. He had already blocked up the Tiber by a bridge of ships;
now by the capture of Antium, Lanuvium, Aricia, and other townships
he gained control over the means of land communication still open,
and at the same time appeased temporarily his revenge by causing
all the citizens, wherever resistance was offered, to be put to
the sword with the exception of those who had possibly betrayed
to him the town. Contagious diseases followed on the distress and
committed dreadful ravages among the masses of soldiers densely
crowded round the capital; of Strabo's veteran army 11,000, and of
the troops of Octavius 6000 are said to have fallen victims to
them. Yet the government did not despair; and the sudden death of
Strabo was a fortunate event for it. He died of the pestilence;(3)
the masses, exasperated on many grounds against him, tore his
corpse from the bier and dragged it through the streets.
The remnant of his troops was incorporated by the consul
Octavius with his army.
After the arrival of Metellus and the decease of Strabo the army
of the government was again at least a match for its antagonists,
and was able to array itself for battle against the insurgents at
the Alban Mount. But the minds of the soldiers of the government
were deeply agitated; when Cinna appeared in front of them, they
received him with acclamation as if he were still their general and
consul; Metellus deemed it advisable not to allow the battle to
come on, but to lead back the troops to their camp. The Optimates
themselves wavered, and fell at variance with each other. While
one party, with the honourable but stubborn and shortsighted consul
Octavius at their head, perseveringly opposed all concession,
Metellus more experienced in war and more judicious attempted to
bring about a compromise; but his conference with Cinna excited
the wrath of the extreme men on both sides: Cinna was called by
Marius a weakling, Metellus was called by Octavius a traitor.
The soldiers, unsettled otherwise and not without cause distrusting
the leadership of the untried Octavius, suggested to Metellus that
he should assume the chief command, and, when he refused, began
in crowds to throw away their arms or even to desert to the enemy.
The temper of the burgesses became daily more depressed and
troublesome. On the proclamation of the heralds of Cinna
guaranteeing freedom to the slaves who should desert, these flocked
in troops from the capital to the enemy's camp. But the proposal
that the senate should guarantee freedom to the slaves willing to
enter the army was decidedly resisted by Octavius. The government
could not conceal from itself that it was defeated, and that
nothing remained but to come to terms if possible with the leaders
of the band, as the overpowered traveller comes to terms with
the captain of banditti. Envoys went to Cinna; but, while they
foolishly made difficulties as to recognizing him as consul, and
Cinna in the interval thus prolonged transferred his camp close to
the city-gates, the desertion spread to so great an extent that it
was no longer possible to settle any terms. The senate submitted
itself unconditionally to the outlawed consul, adding only a
request that he would refrain from bloodshed, Cinna promised this,
but refused to ratify his promise by an oath; Marius, who kept by
his side during the negotiations, maintained a sullen silence.
The gates of the capital were opened. The consul marched in with
his legions; but Marius, scoffingly recalling the law of outlawry,
refused to set foot in the city until the law allowed him to do
so and the burgesses hastily assembled in the Forum to pass the
annulling decree. He then entered, and with him the reign of
terror. It was determined not to select individual victims, but
to have all the notable men of the Optimate party put to death and
to confiscate their property. The gates were closed; for five days
and five nights the slaughter continued without interruption; even
afterwards the execution of individuals who had escaped or been
overlooked was of daily occurrence, and for months the bloody
persecution went on throughout Italy. The consul Gnaeus Octavius
was the first victim. True to his often-expressed principle, that
he would rather suffer death than make the smallest concession to
men acting illegally, he refused even now to take flight, and in
his consular robes awaited at the Janiculum the assassin, who was
not slow to appear. Among the slain were Lucius Caesar (consul in
664) the celebrated victor of Acerrae;(4) his brother Gaius, whose
unseasonable ambition had provoked the Sulpician tumult,(5) well
known as an orator and poet and as an amiable companion; Marcus
Antonius (consul in 655), after the death of Lucius Crassus beyond
dispute the first pleader of his time; Publius Crassus (consul
in 657) who had commanded with distinction in the Spanish and in
the Social wars and also during the siege of Rome; and a multitude
of the most considerable men of the government party, among whom
the wealthy were traced out with especial zeal by the greedy
executioners. Peculiarly sad seemed the death of Lucius Merula,
who very much against his own wish had become Cinna's successor,
and who now, when criminally impeached on that account and cited
before the comitia, in order to anticipate the inevitable
condemnation opened his veins, and at the altar of the Supreme
Jupiter whose priest he was, after laying aside the priestly
headband as the religious duty of the dying Flamen required,
breathed his last; and still more the death of Quintus Catulus
(consul in 652), once in better days the associate of the most
glorious victory and triumph of that same Marius who now had no
other answer for the suppliant relatives of his aged colleague
than the monosyllabic order, "He must die."
The Last Days of Marius
Death of Marius
Government of Cinna
Along with the reign of terror came the -tyrannis-. Cinna not
only stood at the head of the state for four years in succession
(667-670) as consul, but he regularly nominated himself and his
colleagues without consulting the people; it seemed as if these
democrats set aside the sovereign popular assembly with intentional
contempt. No other chief of the popular party, before or
afterwards, possessed so perfectly absolute a power in Italy
and in the greater part of the provinces for so long a time almost
undisturbed, as Cinna; but no one can be named, whose government
was so utterly worthless and aimless. The law proposed by
Sulpicius and thereafter by Cinna himself, which promised to
the new burgesses and the freedmen equality of suffrage with the
old burgesses, was naturally revived; and it was formally confirmed
by a decree of the senate as valid in law (670). Censors were
nominated (668) for the purpose of distributing all the Italians,
in accordance with it, into the thirty-five burgess-districts--by a
singular conjuncture, in consequence of a want of qualified
candidates for the censorship the same Philippus, who when consul
in 663 had chiefly occasioned the miscarriage of the plan of Drusus
for bestowing the franchise on the Italians,(8) was now selected
as censor to inscribe them in the burgess-rolls. The reactionary
institutions established by Sulla in 666 were of course overthrown.
Some steps were taken to please the proletariate--for instance,
the restrictions on the distribution of grain introduced some years
ago,(9) were probably now once more removed; the design of Gaius
Gracchus to found a colony at Capua was in reality carried out
in the spring of 671 on the proposal of the tribune of the people,
Marcus Junius Brutus; Lucius Valerius Flaccus the younger
introduced a law as to debt, which reduced every private claim to
the fourth part of its nominal amount and cancelled three fourths
in favour of the debtors. But these measures, the only positive
ones during the whole Cinnan government, were without exception the
dictates of the moment; they were based--and this is perhaps the
most shocking feature in this whole catastrophe--not on a plan
possibly erroneous, but on no political plan at all. The populace
were caressed, and at the same time offended in a very unnecessary
way by a meaningless disregard of the constitutional arrangements
for election. The capitalist party might have furnished a support,
but it was injured in the most sensitive point by the law as to
debt. The true mainstay of the government was--wholly without
any cooperation on its part--the new burgesses; their assistance
was acquiesced in, but nothing was done to regulate the strange
position of the Samnites, who were now nominally Roman citizens,
but evidently regarded their country's independence as practically
the real object and prize of the struggle and remained in arms
to defend it against all and sundry. Illustrious senators were
struck down like mad dogs; but not the smallest step was taken to
reorganize the senate in the interest of the government, or even
permanently to terrify it; so that the government was by no means
sure of its aid. Gaius Gracchus had not understood the fall of the
oligarchy as implying that the new master might conduct himself on
his self-created throne, as legitimate cipher-kings think proper to
do. But this Cinna had been elevated to power not by his will, but
by pure accident; was there any wonder that he remained where the
storm-wave of revolution had washed him up, till a second wave came
to sweep him away again?
The same union of the mightiest plenitude of power with the most
utter impotence and incapacity in those who held it, was apparent
in the warfare waged by the revolutionary government against the
oligarchy--a warfare on which withal its existence primarily
depended. In Italy it ruled with absolute sway. Of the old
burgesses a very large portion were on principle favourable to
democratic views; and the still greater mass of quiet people, while
disapproving the Marian horrors, saw in an oligarchic restoration
simply the commencement of a second reign of terror by the opposite
party. The impression of the outrages of 667 on the nation at
large had been comparatively slight, as they had chiefly affected
the mere aristocracy of the capital; and it was moreover somewhat
effaced by the three years of tolerably peaceful government that
ensued. Lastly the whole mass of the new burgesses--three-fifths
perhaps of the Italians--were decidedly, if not favourable to the
present government, yet opposed to the oligarchy.
The government did not fail to issue decrees against the oligarchic
proconsul. Sulla was deprived by the comitia of his command and of
his other honours and dignities and outlawed, as was also the case
with Metellus, Appius Claudius, and other refugees of note; his
house in Rome was razed, his country estates were laid waste.
But such proceedings did not settle the matter. Had Gaius Marius
lived longer, he would doubtless have marched in person against Sulla
to those fields whither the fevered visions of his death-bed drew him;
the measures which the government took after his death have been
stated already. Lucius Valerius Flaccus the younger,(10) who after
Marius' death was invested with the consulship and the command in
the east (668), was neither soldier nor officer; Gaius Fimbria who
accompanied him was not without ability, but insubordinate; the
army assigned to them was even in numbers three times weaker than
the army of Sulla. Tidings successively arrived, that Flaccus, in
order not to be crushed by Sulla, had marched past him onward to
Asia (668); that Fimbria had set him aside and installed himself
in his room (beg. of 669); that Sulla had concluded peace with
Mithradates (669-670). Hitherto Sulla had been silent so far as
the authorities ruling in the capital were concerned. Now a letter
from him reached the senate, in which he reported the termination
of the war and announced his return to Italy; he stated that he
would respect the rights conferred on the new burgesses, and that,
while penal measures were inevitable, they would light not on the
masses, but on the authors of the mischief. This announcement
frightened Cinna out of his inaction: while he had hitherto taken
no step against Sulla except the placing some men under arms and
collecting a number of vessels in the Adriatic, he now resolved to
cross in all haste to Greece.
Attempts at a Compromise
Death of Cinna
Carbo and the New Burgesses Arm against Sulla
Against this Italian force Sulla had nothing to place in the scale
except his five legions, which, even including some contingents
levied in Macedonia and the Peloponnesus, probably amounted to
scarce 40,000 men. It is true that this army had been, during
its seven years' conflicts in Italy, Greece, and Asia, weaned from
politics, and adhered to its general--who pardoned everything in
his soldiers, debauchery, brutality, even mutiny against their
officers, required nothing but valour and fidelity towards their
general, and set before them the prospect of the most extravagant
rewards in the event of victory--with all that soldierly
enthusiasm, which is the more powerful that the noblest and the
meanest passions often combine to produce it in the same breast.
The soldiers of Sulla voluntarily according to the Roman custom
swore mutual oaths that they would stand firmly by each other, and
each voluntarily brought to the general his savings as a contribution
to the costs of the war. But considerable as was the weight
of this solid and select body of troops in comparison with the
masses of the enemy, Sulla saw very well that Italy could not
be subdued with five legions if it remained united in resolute
resistance. To settle accounts with the popular party and their
incapable autocrats would not have been difficult; but he saw
opposed to him and united with that party the whole mass of those
who desired no oligarchic restoration with its terrors, and above
all the whole body of new burgesses--both those who had been
withheld by the Julian law from taking part in the insurrection,
and those whose revolt a few years before had brought Rome to
the brink of ruin.
His Moderation
In the spring of 671 Sulla landed with his legions in the port
of Brundisium. The senate, on receiving the news, declared the
commonwealth in danger, and committed to the consuls unlimited
powers; but these incapable leaders had not looked before them,
and were surprised by a landing which had nevertheless been
foreseen for years. The army was still at Ariminum, the ports
were not garrisoned, and--what is almost incredible--there was
not a man under arms at all along the whole south-eastern coast.
The consequences were soon apparent Brundisium itself, a considerable
community of new burgesses, at once opened its gates without
resistance to the oligarchic general, and all Messapia and Apulia
followed its example. The army marched through these regions as
through a friendly country, and mindful of its oath uniformly
maintained the strictest discipline. From all sides the scattered
remnant of the Optimate party flocked to the camp of Sulla.
Quintus Metellus came from the mountain ravines of Liguria, whither
he had made his escape from Africa, and resumed, as colleague of
Sulla, the proconsular command committed to him in 667,(12) and
withdrawn from him by the revolution. Marcus Crassus in like
manner appeared from Africa with a small band of armed men. Most
of the Optimates, indeed, came as emigrants of quality with great
pretensions and small desire for fighting, so that they had to
listen to bitter language from Sulla himself regarding the noble
lords who wished to have themselves preserved for the good of the
state and could not even be brought to arm their slaves. It was of
more importance, that deserters already made their appearance from
the democratic camp--for instance, the refined and respected Lucius
Philippus, who was, along with one or two notoriously incapable
persons, the only consular that had come to terms with the
revolutionary government and accepted offices under it He met with
the most gracious reception from Sulla, and obtained the honourable
and easy charge of occupying for him the province of Sardinia.
Quintus Lucretius Ofella and other serviceable officers were
likewise received and at once employed; even Publius Cethegus,
one of the senators banished after the Sulpician -emeute- by Sulla,
obtained pardon and a position in the army.
Pompeius
Still more important than these individual accessions was the gain
of the district of Picenum, which was substantially due to the son
of Strabo, the young Gnaeus Pompeius. The latter, like his father
originally no adherent of the oligarchy, had acknowledged the
revolutionary government and even taken service in Cinna's army;
but in his case the fact was not forgotten, that his father had
borne arms against the revolution; he found himself assailed in
various forms and even threatened with the loss of his very
considerable wealth by an indictment charging him to give up
the booty which was, or was alleged to have been, embezzled by his
father after the capture of Asculum. The protection of the consul
Carbo, who was personally attached to him, still more than the
eloquence of the consular Lucius Philippus and of the young
Quintus Hortensius, averted from him financial ruin; but the
dissatisfaction remained. On the news of Sulla's landing he
went to Picenum, where he had extensive possessions and the best
municipal connections derived from his father and the Social war,
and set up the standard of the Optimate party in Auximum (Osimo).
The district, which was mostly inhabited by old burgesses, joined
him; the young men, many of whom had served with him under his
father, readily ranged themselves under the courageous leader who,
not yet twenty-three years of age, was as much soldier as general,
sprang to the front of his cavalry in combat, and vigorously
assailed the enemy along with them. The corps of Picenian
volunteers soon grew to three legions; divisions under Cloelius,
Gaius Carrinas, Lucius Junius Brutus Damasippus,(13) were
despatched from the capital to put down the Picenian insurrection,
but the extemporized general, dexterously taking advantage of the
dissensions that arose among them, had the skill to evade them or
to beat them in detail and to effect his junction with the main
army of Sulla, apparently in Apulia. Sulla saluted him as
-imperator-, that is, as an officer commanding in his own name
and not subordinate but co-ordinate, and distinguished the youth
by marks of honour such as he showed to none of his noble
clients--presumably not without the collateral design of thereby
administering an indirect rebuke to the lack of energetic character
among his own partisans.
Sulla in Campania Opposed by Norbanus and Scipio
Sulla Gains a Victory over Norbanus at Mount Tifata
Defection of Scipio's Army
Thus the campaign of 672 was begun on both sides with augmented
military resources and increased animosity. The revolution in
particular threw away the scabbard: at the suggestion of Carbo
the Roman comitia outlawed all the senators that should be found
in Sulla's camp. Sulla was silent; he probably thought that
they were pronouncing sentence beforehand on themselves.
Siege of Praeneste
Occupation of Rome
But while the war stood still in Etruria and in Latium, matters
came to a decision in the valley of the Po. There the general of
the democracy, Gaius Norbanus, had hitherto maintained the upper
hand, had attacked Marcus Lucullus the legate of Metellus with
superior force and compelled him to shut himself up in Placentia,
and had at length turned against Metellus in person. He encountered
the latter at Faventia, and immediately made his attack late in
the afternoon with his troops fatigued by their march; the consequence
was a complete defeat and the total breaking up of his corps, of which
only about 1000 men returned to Etruria. On the news of this battle
Lucullus sallied from Placentia, and defeated the division left behind
to oppose him at Fidentia (between Piacenza and Parma). The Lucanian
troops of Albinovanus deserted in a body: their leader made up
for his hesitation at first by inviting the chief officers of
the revolutionary army to banquet with him and causing them to be
put to death; in general every one, who at all could, now concluded
his peace. Ariminum with all its stores and treasures fell into the
power of Metellus; Norbanus embarked for Rhodes; the whole land between
the Alps and Apennines acknowledged the government of the Optimates.
The troops hitherto employed there were enabled to turn to the attack
of Etruria, the last province where their antagonists still kept
the field. When Carbo received this news in the camp at Clusium,
he lost his self-command; although he had still a considerable body
of troops under his orders, he secretly escaped from his headquarters
and embarked for Africa. Part of his abandoned troops followed the
example which their general had set, and went home; part of them were
destroyed by Pompeius: Carrinas gathered together the remainder and
led them to Latium to join the army of Praeneste. There no change
had in the meanwhile taken place; and the final decision drew nigh.
The troops of Carrinas were not numerous enough to shake Sulla's
position; the vanguard of the army of the oligarchic party,
hitherto employed in Etruria, was approaching under Pompeius;
in a few days the net would be drawn tight around the army of
the democrats and the Samnites.
The Samnites and Democrats Attack Rome
Battle at the Colline Gate
Slaughter of the Prisoners
Sieges
Praeneste
Norba
Nola
With this battle the war was, in the main, at an end. The garrison
of Praeneste surrendered, when it learned the issue of the battle
of Rome from the heads of Carrinas and other officers thrown over
the walls. The leaders, the consul Gaius Marius and the son of
Pontius, after having failed in an attempt to escape, fell on each
other's swords. The multitude cherished the hope, in which it
was confirmed by Cethegus, that the victor would even now have
mercy upon them. But the times of mercy were past. The more
unconditionally Sulla had up to the last moment granted full pardon
to those who came over to him, the more inexorable he showed
himself toward the leaders and communities that had held out to
the end. Of the Praenestine prisoners, 12,000 in number, most
of the Romans and individual Praenestines as well as the women
and children were released, but the Roman senators, almost all
the Praenestines and the whole of the Samnites, were disarmed and
cut to pieces; and the rich city was given up to pillage. It was
natural that, after such an occurrence, the cities of new burgesses
which had not yet passed over should continue their resistance with
the utmost obstinacy. In the Latin town of Norba for instance,
when Aemilius Lepidus got into it by treason, the citizens killed
each other and set fire themselves to their town, solely in order
to deprive their executioners of vengeance and of booty. In Lower
Italy Neapolis had already been taken by assault, and Capua had,
as it would seem, been voluntarily surrendered; but Nola was only
evacuated by the Samnites in 674. On his flight from Nola the last
surviving leader of note among the Italians, the consul of the
insurgents in the hopeful year 664, Gaius Papius Mutilus, disowned
by his wife to whom he had stolen in disguise and with whom he had
hoped to find an asylum, fell on his sword in Teanum before the
door of his own house. As to the Samnites, the dictator declared
that Rome would have no rest so long as Samnium existed, and that
the Samnite name must therefore be extirpated from the earth; and,
as he verified these words in terrible fashion on the prisoners
taken before Rome and in Praeneste, so he appears to have also
undertaken a raid for the purpose of laying waste the country,
to have captured Aesernia(16) (674?), and to have converted that
hitherto flourishing and populous region into the desert which it
has since remained. In the same manner Tuder in Umbria was stormed
by Marcus Crassus. A longer resistance was offered in Etruria
by Populonium and above all by the impregnable Volaterrae, which
gathered out of the remains of the beaten party an army of four
legions, and stood a two years' siege conducted first by Sulla
in person and then by the former praetor Gaius Carbo, the brother
of the democratic consul, till at length in the third year after
the battle at the Colline gate (675) the garrison capitulated on
condition of free departure. But in this terrible time neither
military law nor military discipline was regarded; the soldiers
raised a cry of treason and stoned their too compliant general; a
troop of horse sent by the Roman government cut down the garrison
as it withdrew in terms of the capitulation. The victorious army
was distributed throughout Italy, and all the insecure townships
were furnished with strong garrisons: under the iron hand of the
Sullan officers the last palpitations of the revolutionary and
national opposition slowly died away.
The Provinces
Spain
Sertorius Embarks
Sicily
Africa
Second Peace
Capture of Mytilene
General Peace
CHAPTER X
The Restoration
About the time when the first pitched battle was fought between
Romans and Romans, in the night of the 6th July 671, the venerable
temple, which had been erected by the kings, dedicated by the
youthful republic, and spared by the storms of five hundred years--
the temple of the Roman Jupiter in the Capitol--perished in the flames.
It was no augury, but it was an image of the state of the Roman
constitution. This, too, lay in ruins and needed reconstruction.
The revolution was no doubt vanquished, but the victory was far
from implying as a matter of course the restoration of the old
government. The mass of the aristocracy certainly was of opinion
that now, after the death of the two revolutionary consuls, it would
be sufficient to make arrangements for the ordinary supplemental
election and to leave it to the senate to take such steps as should
seem farther requisite for the rewarding of the victorious army, for
the punishment of the most guilty revolutionists, and possibly also
for the prevention of similar outbreaks. But Sulla, in whose hands
the victory had concentrated for the moment all power, formed a
more correct judgment of affairs and of men. The aristocracy of
Rome in its best epoch had not risen above an adherence--partly
noble and partly narrow--to traditional forms; how should the clumsy
collegiate government of this period be in a position to carry out
with energy and thoroughness a comprehensive reform of the state?
And at the present moment, when the last crisis had swept away
almost all the leading men of the senate, the vigour and intelligence
requisite for such an enterprise were less than ever to be found there.
How thoroughly useless was the pure aristocratic blood, and how little
doubt Sulla had as to its worthlessness, is shown by the fact that,
with the exception of Quintus Metellus who was related to him by marriage,
he selected all his instruments out of what was previously the middle
party and the deserters from the democratic camp--such as Lucius
Flaccus, Lucius Philippus, Quintus Ofella, Gnaeus Pompeius.
Sulla was as much in earnest about the re-establishment of the old
constitution as the most vehement aristocratic emigrant; he understood
however, not perhaps to the full extent--for how in that case could
he have put hand to the work at all?--but better at any rate than
his party, the enormous difficulties which attended this work of
restoration. Comprehensive concessions so far as concession was
possible without affecting the essence of oligarchy, and the
establishment of an energetic system of repression and prevention,
were regarded by him as unavoidable; and he saw clearly that the senate
as it stood would refuse or mutilate every concession, and would
parliamentarily ruin every systematic reconstruction. If Sulla had
already after the Sulpician revolution carried out what he deemed
necessary in both respects without asking much of their advice, he
was now determined, under circumstances of far more severe and intense
excitement, to restore the oligarchy--not with the aid, but in spite,
of the oligarchs--by his own hand.
Sulla, however, was not now consul as he had been then, but was
furnished merely with proconsular, that is to say, purely military
power: he needed an authority keeping as near as possible to
constitutional forms, but yet extraordinary, in order to impose his
reform on friends and foes. In a letter to the senate he announced
to them that it seemed to him indispensable that they should place
the regulation of the state in the hands of a single man equipped
with unlimited plenitude of power, and that he deemed himself qualified
to fulfil this difficult task. This proposal, disagreeable as it was
to many, was under the existing circumstances a command. By direction
of the senate its chief, the interrex Lucius Valerius Flaccus the
father, as interim holder of the supreme power, submitted to the
burgesses the proposal that the proconsul Lucius Cornelius Sulla
should receive for the past a supplementary approval of all the
official acts performed by him as consul and proconsul, and should
for the future be empowered to adjudicate without appeal on the life
and property of the burgesses, to deal at his pleasure with the
state-domains, to shift at discretion the boundaries of Rome, of
Italy, and of the state, to dissolve or establish urban communities
in Italy, to dispose of the provinces and dependent states, to confer
the supreme -imperium- instead of the people and to nominate proconsuls
and propraetors, and lastly to regulate the state for the future by
means of new laws; that it should be left to his own judgment to
determine when he had fulfilled his task and might deem it time to
resign this extraordinary magistracy; and, in fine, that during its
continuance it should depend on his pleasure whether the ordinary
supreme magistracy should subsist side by side with his own or should
remain in abeyance. As a matter of course, the proposal was adopted
without opposition (Nov. 672); and now the new master of the state,
who hitherto had as proconsul avoided entering the capital, appeared
for the first time within the walls of Rome. This new office derived
its name from the dictatorship, which had been practically abolished
since the Hannibalic war;(1) but, as besides his armed retinue he was
preceded by twice as many lictors as the dictator of earlier times,
this new "dictatorship for the making of laws and the regulation of
the commonwealth," as its official title ran, was in fact altogether
different from the earlier magistracy which had been limited in point
of duration and of powers, had not excluded appeal to the burgesses,
and had not annulled the ordinary magistracy. It much more resembled
that of the -decemviri legibus scribundis-, who likewise came forward
as an extraordinary government with unlimited fulness of powers
superseding the ordinary magistracy, and practically at least
administered their office as one which was unlimited in point of
time. Or, we should rather say, this new office, with its absolute
power based on a decree of the people and restrained by no set term
or colleague, was no other than the old monarchy, which in fact just
rested on the free engagement of the burgesses to obey one of their
number as absolute lord. It was urged even by contemporaries in
vindication of Sulla that a king is better than a bad constitution,(2)
and presumably the title of dictator was only chosen to indicate
that, as the former dictatorship implied a reassumptionwith various
limitations,(3) so this new dictatorship involved a complete
reassumption, of the regal power. Thus, singularly enough,
the course of Sulla here also coincided with that on which Gaius
Gracchus had entered with so wholly different a design. In this
respect too the conservative party had to borrow from its opponents;
the protector of the oligarchic constitution had himself to
come forward as a tyrant, in order to avert the ever-impending
-tyrannis-. There was not a little of defeat in this last victory
of the oligarchy.
Executions
Sulla had not sought and had not desired the difficult and dreadful
labour of the work of restoration; out, as no other choice was left
to him but either to leave it to utterly incapable hands or to
undertake it in person, he set himself to it with remorseless energy.
First of all a settlement had to be effected in respect to the guilty.
Sulla was personally inclined to pardon. Sanguine as he was in
temperament, he could doubtless break forth into violent rage, and
well might those beware who saw his eye gleam and his cheeks colour;
but the chronic vindictiveness, which characterized Marius in the
embitterment of his old age, was altogether foreign to Sulla's easy
disposition. Not only had he borne himself with comparatively great
moderation after the revolution of 666;(4) even the second revolution,
which had perpetrated so fearful outrages and had affected him in
person so severely, had not disturbed his equilibrium. At the same
time that the executioner was dragging the bodies of his friends
through the streets of the capital, he had sought to save the life of
the blood-stained Fimbria, and, when the latter died by his own hand,
had given orders for his decent burial. On landing in Italy he had
earnestly offered to forgive and to forget, and no one who came to
make his peace had been rejected. Even after the first successes
he had negotiated in this spirit with Lucius Scipio; it was the
revolutionary party, which had not only broken off these negotiations,
but had subsequently, at the last moment before their downfall,
resumed the massacres afresh and more fearfully than ever, and had
in fact conspired with the inveterate foes of their country for the
destruction of the city of Rome. The cup was now full. By virtue
of his new official authority Sulla, immediately after assuming the
regency, outlawed as enemies of their country all the civil and
military officials who had taken an active part in favour of the
revolution after the convention with Scipio (which according to
Sulla's assertion was validly concluded), and such of the other
burgesses as had in any marked manner aided its cause. Whoever
killed one of these outlaws was not only exempt from punishment like
an executioner duly fulfilling his office, but also obtained for the
execution a compensation of 12,000 -denarii- (480 pounds); any one on
the contrary who befriended an outlaw, even the nearest relative, was
liable to the severest punishment. The property of the proscribed
was forfeited to the state like the spoil of an enemy; their children
and grandchildren were excluded from a political career, and yet,
so far as they were of senatorial rank, were bound to undertake their
share of senatorial burdens. The last enactments also applied to the
estates and the descendants of those who had fallen in conflict for
the revolution--penalties which went even beyond those enjoined by
the earliest law in the case of such as had borne arms against their
fatherland. The most terrible feature in this system of terror was
the indefiniteness of the proposed categories, against which there was
immediate remonstrance in the senate, and which Sulla himself sought
to remedy by directing the names of the proscribed to be publicly
posted up and fixing the 1st June 673 as the final term for closing
the lists of proscription.
Proscription-Lists
Much as this bloody roll, swelling from day to day and amounting
at last to 4700 names,(5) excited the just horror of the multitude,
it at any rate checked in some degree the mere caprice of the
executioners. It was not at least to the personal resentment of
the regent that the mass of these victims were sacrificed; his furious
hatred was directed solely against the Marians, the authors of the
hideous massacres of 667 and 672. By his command the tomb of the
victor of Aquae Sextiae was broken open and his ashes were scattered
in the Anio, the monuments of his victories over Africans and Germans
were overthrown, and, as death had snatched himself and his son from
Sulla's vengeance, his adopted nephew Marcus Marius Gratidianus,
who had been twice praetor and was a great favourite with the Roman
burgesses, was executed amid the most cruel tortures at the tomb
of Catulus, who most deserved to be regretted of all the Marian
victims. In other cases also death had already swept away the most
notable of his opponents: of the leaders there survived only Gaius
Norbanus, who laid hands on himself at Rhodes, while the -ecclesia-
was deliberating on his surrender; Lucius Scipio, for whom his
insignificance and probably also his noble birth procured indulgence
and permission to end his days in peace at his retreat in Massilia;
and Quintus Sertorius, who was wandering about as an exile on the
coast of Mauretania. But yet the heads of slaughtered senators were
piled up at the Servilian Basin, at the point where the -Vicus
Jugarius- opened into the Forum, where the dictator had ordered them
to be publicly exposed; and among men of the second and third rank in
particular death reaped a fearful harvest. In addition to those who
were placed on the list for their services in or on behalf of the
revolutionary army with little discrimination, sometimes on account of
money advanced to one of its officers or on account of relations of
hospitality formed with such an one, the retaliation fell specially on
those capitalists who had sat in judgment on the senators and had
speculated in Marian confiscations--the "hoarders"; about 1600 of
the equites, as they were called,(6) were inscribed on the proscription-
list. In like manner the professional accusers, the worst scourge of
the nobility, who made it their trade to bring men of the senatorial
order before the equestrian courts, had now to suffer for it--"how
comes it to pass," an advocate soon after asked, "that they have left
to us the courts, when they were putting to death the accusers and
judges?" The most savage and disgraceful passions raged without
restraint for many months throughout Italy. In the capital a Celtic
band was primarily charged with the executions, and Sullan soldiers
and subaltern officers traversed for the same purpose the different
districts of Italy; but every volunteer was also welcome, and the
rabble high and low pressed forward not only to earn the rewards
of murder, but also to gratify their own vindictive or covetous
dispositions under the mantle of political prosecution. It sometimes
happened that the assassination did not follow, but preceded, the
placing of the name on the list of the proscribed. One example shows
the way in which these executions took place. At Larinum, a town of
new burgesses and favourable to Marian views, one Statius Albius
Oppianicus, who had fled to Sulla's headquarters to avoid a charge
of murder, made his appearance after the victory as commissioner of
the regent, deposed the magistrates of the town, installed himself
and his friends in their room, and caused the person who had
threatened to accuse him, along with his nearest relatives and
friends, to be outlawed and killed. Countless persons--including
not a few decided adherents of the oligarchy--thus fell as the victims
of private hostility or of their own riches: the fearful confusion,
and the culpable indulgence which Sulla displayed in this as in every
instance towards those more closely connected with him, prevented
any punishment even of the ordinary crimes that were perpetrated
amidst the disorder.
Confiscations
For this purpose the governing board had, first of all, to have its
ranks filled up and to be itself placed on a footing of independence.
The numbers of the senators had been fearfully reduced by the recent
crises. Sulla no doubt now gave to those who were exiled by the
equestrian courts liberty to return, for instance to the consular
Publius Rutilius Rufus,(12) who however made no use of the permission,
and to Gaius Cotta the friend of Drusus;(13) but this made only slight
amends for the gaps which the revolutionary and reactionary reigns
of terror had created in the ranks of the senate. Accordingly by
Sulla's directions the senate had its complement extraordinarily made
up by about 300 new senators, whom the assembly of the tribes had
to nominate from among men of equestrian census, and whom they
selected, as may be conceived, chiefly from the younger men of the
senatorial houses on the one hand, and from Sullan officers and
others brought into prominence by the last revolution on the other.
For the future also the mode of admission to the senate was
regulated anew and placed on an essentially different basis.
As the constitution had hitherto stood, men entered the senate
either through the summons of the censors, which was the proper and
ordinary way, or through the holding of one of the three curule
magistracies--the consulship, the praetorship, or the aedileship--
to which since the passing of the Ovinian law a seat and vote in
the senate had been de jure attached.(14) The holding of an inferior
magistracy, of the tribunate or the quaestorship, gave doubtless a
claim de facto to a place in the senate--inasmuch as the censorial
selection especially turned towards the men who had held such
offices--but by no means a reversion de jure. Of these two modes
of admission, Sulla abolished the former by setting aside--at least
practically--the censorship, and altered the latter to the effect
that the right of admission to the senate was attached to the
quaestorship instead of the aedileship, and at the same time
the number of quaestors to be annually nominated was raised to
twenty.(15) The prerogative hitherto legally pertaining to the
censors, although practically no longer exercised in its original
serious sense--of deleting any senator from the roll, with a
statement of the reasons for doing so, at the revisals which
took place every five years (16)--likewise fell into abeyance for
the future; the irremoveable character which had hitherto de facto
belonged to the senators was thus finally fixed by Sulla.
The total number of senators, which hitherto had presumably not
much exceeded the old normal number of 300 and often perhaps had
not even reached it, was by these means considerably augmented,
perhaps on an average doubled(17)--an augmentation which was rendered
necessary by the great increase of the duties of the senate through
the transference to it of the functions of jurymen. As, moreover,
both the extraordinarily admitted senators and the quaestors were
nominated by the -comitia tributa-, the senate, hitherto resting
indirectly on the election of the people,(18) was now based throughout
on direct popular election; and thus made as close an approach to a
representative government as was compatible with the nature of the
oligarchy and the notions of antiquity generally. The senate had in
course of time been converted from a corporation intended merely to
advise the magistrates into a board commanding the magistrates and
self-governing; it was only a consistent advance in the same direction,
when the right of nominating and cancelling senators originally
belonging to the magistrates was withdrawn from them, and the senate
was placed on the same legal basis on which the magistrates' power
itself rested. The extravagant prerogative of the censors to revise
the list of the senate and to erase or add names at pleasure was
in reality incompatible with an organized oligarchic constitution.
As provision was now made for a sufficient regular recruiting of its
ranks by the election of the quaestors, the censorial revisions became
superfluous; and by their abeyance the essential principle at the
bottom of every oligarchy, the irremoveable character and life-tenure
of the members of the ruling order who obtained seat and vote,
was definitively consolidated.
Such was the state of things which Sulla found existing, and which
formed the basis of his new arrangement. Its main principles were,
a complete separation between the political authority which governed
in the burgess-districts and the military authority which governed in
the non-burgess-districts, and an uniform extension of the duration of
the supreme magistracy from one year to two, the first of which was
devoted to civil, and the second to military affairs. Locally the
civil and the military authority had certainly been long separated
by the constitution, and the former ended at the -pomerium-, where
the latter began; but still the same man held the supreme political
and the supreme military power united in his hand. In future the
consul and praetor were to deal with the senate and burgesses, the
proconsul and propraetor were to command the army; but all military
power was cut off by law from the former, and all political action
from the latter. This primarily led to the political separation of
the region of Northern Italy from Italy proper. Hitherto they had
stood doubtless in a national antagonism, inasmuch as Northern Italy
was inhabited chiefly by Ligurians and Celts, Central and Southern
Italy by Italians; but, in a political and administrative point of
view, the whole continental territory of the Roman state from the
Straits to the Alps including the Illyrian possessions--burgess,
Latin, and non-Italian communities without exception--was in the
ordinary course of things under the administration of the supreme
magistrates who were acting in Rome, as in fact her colonial
foundations extended through all this territory. According to Sulla's
arrangement Italy proper, the northern boundary of which was at the
same time changed from the Aesis to the Rubico, was--as a region now
inhabited without exception by Roman citizens--made subject to the
ordinary Roman authorities; and it became one of the fundamental
principles of Roman state-law, that no troops and no commandant
should ordinarily be stationed in this district. The Celtic
country south of the Alps on the other hand, in which a military
command could not be dispensed with on account of the continued
incursions of the Alpine tribes, was constituted a distinct
governorship after the model of the older transmarine commands.(27)
By this plan, in the first instance, a clear and fixed rule was
substituted for the irregular mode of distributing offices hitherto
adopted, a mode which invited all manner of vile manoeuvres and
intrigues; and, secondly, the excesses of magisterial authority were
as far as possible obviated and the influence of the supreme governing
board was materially increased. According to the previous
arrangement the only legal distinction in the empire was that drawn
between the city which was surrounded by the ring-wall, and the
country beyond the -pomerium-; the new arrangement substituted for
the city the new Italy henceforth, as in perpetual peace, withdrawn
from the regular -imperium-,(29) and placed in contrast to it the
continental and transmarine territories, which were, on the other hand,
necessarily placed under military commandants--the provinces as they
were henceforth called. According to the former arrangement the
same man had very frequently remained two, and often more years in
the same office. The new arrangement restricted the magistracies
of the capital as well as the governorships throughout to one year;
and the special enactment that every governor should without fail
leave his province within thirty days after his successor's arrival
there, shows very clearly--particularly if we take along with it the
formerly-mentioned prohibition of the immediate re-election of the
late magistrate to the same or another public office--what the
tendency of these arrangements was. It was the time-honoured maxim
by which the senate had at one time made the monarchy subject to
it, that the limitation of the magistracy in point of function
was favourable to democracy, and its limitation in point of time
favourable to oligarchy. According to the previous arrangement
Gaius Marius had acted at once as head of the senate and as
commander-in-chief of the state; if he had his own unskilfulness
alone to blame for his failure to overthrow the oligarchy by means
of this double official power, care seemed now taken to prevent
some possibly wiser successor from making a better use of the
same lever. According to the previous arrangement the magistrate
immediately nominated by the people might have had a military
position; the Sullan arrangement, on the other hand, reserved
such a position exclusively for those magistrates whom the senate
confirmed in their official authority by prolonging their term
of office. No doubt this prolongation of office had now become
a standing usage; but it still--so far as respects the auspices
and the name, and constitutional form in general--continued to be
treated as an extraordinary extension of their term. This was no
matter of indifference. The burgesses alone could depose the consul
or praetor from his office; the proconsul and propraetor were
nominated and dismissed by the senate, so that by this enactment
the whole military power, on which withal everything ultimately
depended, became formally at least dependent on the senate.
Shelving of the Censorship
Sullan -Quaestiones-
Police Laws
Character of Sulla
Posterity has not justly appreciated either Sulla himself or his work
of reorganization, as indeed it is wont to judge unfairly of persons
who oppose themselves to the current of the times. In fact Sulla
is one of the most marvellous characters--we may even say a unique
phenomenon--in history. Physically and mentally of sanguine
temperament, blue-eyed, fair, of a complexion singularly white but
blushing with every passionate emotion--though otherwise a handsome
man with piercing eyes--he seemed hardly destined to be of more
moment to the state than his ancestors, who since the days of his
great-great-grandfather Publius Cornelius Rufinus (consul in 464, 477),
one of the most distinguished generals and at the same time the
most ostentatious man of the times of Pyrrhus, had remained in second-
rate positions. He desired from life nothing but serene enjoyment.
Reared in the refinement of such cultivated luxury as was at that
time naturalized even in the less wealthy senatorial families of
Rome, he speedily and adroitly possessed himself of all the fulness of
sensuous and intellectual enjoyments which the combination of Hellenic
polish and Roman wealth could secure. He was equally welcome as a
pleasant companion in the aristocratic saloon and as a good comrade
in the tented field; his acquaintances, high and low, found in him a
sympathizing friend and a ready helper in time of need, who gave his
gold with far more pleasure to his embarrassed comrade than to his
wealthy creditor. Passionate was his homage to the wine-cup, still
more passionate to women; even in his later years he was no longer
the regent, when after the business of the day was finished he
took his place at table. A vein of irony--we might perhaps say
of buffoonery--pervaded his whole nature. Even when regent he gave
orders, while conducting the public sale of the property of the
proscribed, that a donation from the spoil should be given to the
author of a wretched panegyric which was handed to him, on condition
that the writer should promise never to sing his praises again.
When he justified before the burgesses the execution of Ofella,
he did so by relating to the people the fable of the countryman and
the lice. He delighted to choose his companions among actors, and
was fond of sitting at wine not only with Quintus Roscius--the Roman
Talma--but also with far inferior players; indeed he was himself not
a bad singer, and even wrote farces for performance within his own
circle. Yet amidst these jovial Bacchanalia he lost neither bodily
nor mental vigour, in the rural leisure of his last years he was
still zealously devoted to the chase, and the circumstance that he
brought the writings of Aristotle from conquered Athens to Rome
attests withal his interest in more serious reading. The specific
type of Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing
of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of
displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of
narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his
humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless of many of his countrymen,
in Greek towns in the Greek dress, or induced his aristocratic
companions to drive their chariots personally at the games.
He retained still less of those half-patriotic, half-selfish hopes,
which in countries of free constitution allure every youth of talent
into the political arena, and which he too like all others probably
at one time felt. In such a life as his was, oscillating between
passionate intoxication and more than sober awaking, illusions are
speedily dissipated. Wishing and striving probably appeared to him
folly in a world which withal was absolutely governed by chance, and
in which, if men were to strive after anything at all, this chance
could be the only aim of their efforts. He followed the general
tendency of the age in addicting himself at once to unbelief and
to superstition. His whimsical credulity was not the plebeian
superstition of Marius, who got a priest to prophesy to him for money
and determined his actions accordingly; still less was it the sullen
belief of the fanatic in destiny; it was that faith in the absurd,
which necessarily makes its appearance in every man who has out and
out ceased to believe in a connected order of things--the superstition
of the fortunate player, who deems himself privileged by fate to throw
on each and every occasion the right number. In practical questions
Sulla understood very well how to satisfy ironically the demands of
religion. When he emptied the treasuries of the Greek temples, he
declared that the man could never fail whose chest was replenished
by the gods themselves. When the Delphic priests reported to him
that they were afraid to send the treasures which he asked, because
the harp of the god emitted a clear sound when they touched it,
he returned the reply that they might now send them all the more
readily, as the god evidently approved his design. Nevertheless
he fondly flattered himself with the idea that he was the chosen
favourite of the gods, and in an altogether special manner of that
goddess, to whom down to his latest years he assigned the pre-
eminence, Aphrodite. In his conversations as well as in his
autobiography he often plumed himself on the intercourse which
the immortals held with him in dreams and omens. He had more right
than most men to be proud of his achievements he was not so, but he
was proud of his uniquely faithful fortune. He was wont to say that
every improvised enterprise turned out better with him than those
which were systematically planned; and one of his strangest whims--
that of regularly stating the number of those who had fallen on his
side in battle as nil--was nothing but the childishness of a child of
fortune. It was but the utterance of his natural disposition, when,
having reached the culminating point of his career and seeing all
his contemporaries at a dizzy depth beneath him, he assumed the
designation of the Fortunate--Sulla Felix--as a formal surname,
and bestowed corresponding appellations on his children,
Nothing lay farther from Sulla than systematic ambition. He had too
much sense to regard, like the average aristocrats of his time, the
inscription of his name in the roll of the consuls as the aim of his
life; he was too indifferent and too little of an ideologue to be
disposed voluntarily to engage in the reform of the rotten structure
of the state. He remained--where birth and culture placed him--in the
circle of genteel society, and passed through the usual routine of
offices; he had no occasion to exert himself, and left such exertion
to the political working bees, of whom there was in truth no lack.
Thus in 647, on the allotment of the quaestorial places, accident
brought him to Africa to the headquarters of Gaius Marius.
The untried man-of-fashion from the capital was not very well received
by the rough boorish general and his experienced staff. Provoked
by this reception Sulla, fearless and skilful as he was, rapidly
made himself master of the profession of arms, and in his daring
expedition to Mauretania first displayed that peculiar combination
of audacity and cunning with reference to which his contemporaries
said of him that he was half lion half fox, and that the fox in him
was more dangerous than the lion. To the young, highborn, brilliant
officer, who was confessedly the real means of ending the vexatious
Numidian war, the most splendid career now lay open; he took part
also in the Cimbrian war, and manifested his singular talent for
organization in the management of the difficult task of providing
supplies; yet even now the pleasures of life in the capital had far
more attraction for him than war or even politics. During his
praetorship, which office he held in 661 after having failed in a
previous candidature, it once more chanced that in his province,
the least important of all, the first victory over king Mithradates
and the first treaty with the mighty Arsacids, as well as their first
humiliation, occurred. The Civil war followed. It was Sulla
mainly, who decided the first act of it--the Italian insurrection--
in favour of Rome, and thus won for himself the consulship by his
sword; it was he, moreover, who when consul suppressed with
energetic rapidity the Sulpician revolt. Fortune seemed to make
it her business to eclipse the old hero Marius by means of this
younger officer. The capture of Jugurtha, the vanquishing of
Mithradates, both of which Marius had striven for in vain, were
accomplished in subordinate positions by Sulla: in the Social war,
in which Marius lost his renown as a general and was deposed,
Sulla established his military repute and rose to the consulship;
the revolution of 666, which was at the same time and above all a
personal conflict between the two generals, ended with the outlawry
and flight of Marius. Almost without desiring it, Sulla had
become the most famous general of his time and the shield of the
oligarchy. New and more formidable crises ensued--the Mithradatic war,
the Cinnan revolution; the star of Sulla continued always in the
ascendant. Like the captain who seeks not to quench the flames of
his burning ship but continues to fire on the enemy, Sulla, while
the revolution was raging in Italy, persevered unshaken in Asia
till the public foe was subdued. So soon as he had done with that
foe, he crushed anarchy and saved the capital from the firebrands of
the desperate Samnites and revolutionists. The moment of his return
home was for Sulla an overpowering one in joy and in pain: he himself
relates in his memoirs that during his first night in Rome he had
not been able to close an eye, and we may well believe it.
But still his task was not at an end; his star was destined to
rise still higher. Absolute autocrat as was ever any king, and
yet constantly abiding on the ground of formal right, he bridled
the ultra-reactionary party, annihilated the Gracchan constitution
which had for forty years limited the oligarchy, and compelled first
the powers of the capitalists and of the urban proletariate which
had entered into rivalry with the oligarchy, and ultimately the
arrogance of the sword which had grown up in the bosom of his own
staff, to yield once more to the law which he strengthened afresh.
He established the oligarchy on a more independent footing than ever,
placed the magisterial power as a ministering instrument in its
hands, committed to it the legislation, the courts, the supreme
military and financial power, and furnished it with a sort of
bodyguard in the liberated slaves and with a sort of army in the
settled military colonists. Lastly, when the work was finished,
the creator gave way to his own creation; the absolute autocrat
became of his own accord once more a simple senator. In all this
long military and political career Sulla never lost a battle, was
never compelled to retrace a single step, and, led astray neither
by friends nor by foes, brought his work to the goal which he had
himself proposed. He had reason, indeed, to thank his star.
The capricious goddess of fortune seemed in his case for once to
have exchanged caprice for steadfastness, and to have taken a
pleasure in loading her favourite with successes and honours--
whether he desired them or not. But history must be more just
towards him than he was towards himself, and must place him in a
higher rank than that of the mere favourites of fortune.
But, such as he was, this Don Juan of politics was a man of one
mould. His whole life attests the internal equilibrium of his
nature; in the most diverse situations Sulla remained unchangeably
the same. It was the same temper, which after the brilliant
successes in Africa made him seek once more the idleness of the
capital, and after the full possession of absolute power made him
find rest and refreshment in his Cuman villa. In his mouth the
saying, that public affairs were a burden which he threw off so
soon as he might and could, was no mere phrase. After his resignation
he remained entirely like himself, without peevishness and without
affectation, glad to be rid of public affairs and yet interfering
now and then when opportunity offered. Hunting and fishing and
the composition of his memoirs occupied his leisure hours; by way
of interlude he arranged, at the request of the discordant citizens,
the internal affairs of the neighbouring colony of Puteoli as
confidently and speedily as he had formerly arranged those of
the capital. His last action on his sickbed had reference to the
collection of a contribution for the rebuilding of the Capitoline
temple, of which he was not allowed to witness the completion.
Death of Sulla
Little more than a year after his retirement, in the sixtieth year
of his life, while yet vigorous in body and mind, he was overtaken by
death; after a brief confinement to a sick-bed--he was writing at his
autobiography two days even before his death--the rupture of a blood-
vessel(55) carried him off (676). His faithful fortune did not
desert him even in death. He could have no wish to be drawn once
more into the disagreeable vortex of party struggles, and to be
obliged to lead his old warriors once more against a new revolution;
yet such was the state of matters at his death in Spain and in
Italy, that he could hardly have been spared this task had his life
been prolonged. Even now when it was suggested that he should have a
public funeral in the capital, numerous voices there, which had been
silent in his lifetime, were raised against the last honour which it
was proposed to show to the tyrant. But his memory was still too
fresh and the dread of his old soldiers too vivid: it was resolved
that the body should be conveyed to the capital and that the obsequies
should be celebrated there.
His Funeral
CHAPTER XI
The Prospect
Italian Revenues
Provincial Revenues
Taxes
Customs
Costs of Collection
Requisitions
Local Burdens
Further the local public burdens are not to be left out of view.
They must have been, comparatively, very considerable;(13) for the
costs of administration, the keeping of the public buildings in
repair, and generally all civil expenses were borne by the local
budget, and the Roman government simply undertook to defray the
military expenses from their coffers. But even of this military
budget considerable items were devolved on the communities--such as
the expense of making and maintaining the non-Italian military
roads, the costs of the fleets in the non-Italian seas, nay even
in great part the outlays for the army, inasmuch as the forces of
the client-states as well as those of the subjects were regularly
liable to serve at the expense of their communities within their
province, and began to be employed with increasing frequency even
beyond it--Thracians in Africa, Africans in Italy, arid so on--at
the discretion of the Romans.(14) If the provinces only and not
Italy paid direct taxes to the government, this was equitable in
a financial, if not in a political, aspect so long as Italy alone
bore the burdens and expense of the military system; but from the
time that this system was abandoned, the provincials were, in a
financial point of view, decidedly overburdened.
Extortions
If we sum up, the income which Rome drew from the provinces was
not properly a taxation of the subjects in the sense which we now
attach to that expression, but rather in the main a revenue that
may be compared with the Attic tributes, by means of which the
leading state defrayed the expense of the military system which
it maintained. This explains the surprisingly small amount of the
gross as well as of the net proceeds. There exists a statement,
according to which the income of Rome, exclusive, it may be
presumed, of the Italian revenues and of the grain delivered in
kind to Italy by the -decumani- up to 691 amounted to not more
than 200 millions of sesterces (2,000,000 pounds); that is, but
two-thirds of the sum which the king of Egypt drew from his country
annually. The proportion can only seem strange at the first
glance. The Ptolemies turned to account the valley of the Nile as
great, plantation-owners, and drew immense sums from their monopoly
of the commercial intercourse with the east; the Roman treasury was
not much more than the joint military chest of the communities
united under Rome's protection. The net produce was probably still
less in proportion. The only provinces yielding a considerable
surplus were perhaps Sicily, where the Carthaginian system of
taxation prevailed, and more especially Asia from the time that
Gaius Gracchus, in order to provide for his largesses of corn, had
carried out the confiscation of the soil and a general domanial
taxation there. According to manifold testimonies the finances of
the Roman state were essentially dependent on the revenues of Asia.
The assertion sounds quite credible that the other provinces on an
average cost nearly as much as they brought in; in fact those which
required a considerable garrison, such as the two Spains,
Transalpine Gaul, and Macedonia, probably often cost more than they
yielded. On the whole certainly the Roman treasury in ordinary
times possessed a surplus, which enabled them amply to defray the
expense of the buildings of the state and city, and to accumulate a
reserve-fund; but even the figures appearing for these objects,
when compared with the wide domain of the Roman rule, attest the
small amount of the net proceeds of the Roman taxes. In a certain
sense therefore the old principle equally honourable and judicious--
that the political hegemony should not be treated as a privilege
yielding profit--still governed the financial administration of the
provinces as it had governed that of Rome in Italy. What the Roman
community levied from its transmarine subjects was, as a rule, re-
expended for the military security of the transmarine possessions;
and if these Roman imposts fell more heavily on those who paid them
than the earlier taxation, in so far as they were in great part
expended abroad, the substitution, on the other hand, of a single
ruler and a centralized military administration for the many petty
rulers and armies involved a very considerable financial saving.
It is true, however, that this principle of a previous better age
came from the very first to be infringed and mutilated by the
numerous exceptions which were allowed to prevail. The ground-
tenth levied by Hiero and Carthage in Sicily went far beyond the
amount of an annual war-contributioa With justice moreover Scipio
Aemilianus says in Cicero, that it was unbecoming for the Roman
burgess-body to be at the same time the ruler and the tax-gatherer
of the nations. The appropriation of the customs-dues was not
compatible with the principle of disinterested hegemony, and the
high rates of the customs as well as the vexatious mode of levying
them were not fitted to allay the sense of the injustice thereby
inflicted. Even as early probably as this period the name of
publican became synonymous among the eastern peoples with that of
rogue and robber: no burden contributed so much as this to make the
Roman name offensive and odious especially in the east. But when
Gaius Gracchus and those who called themselves the "popular party"
in Rome came to the helm, political sovereignty was declared in
plain terms to be a right which entitled every one who shared in
it to a number of bushels of corn, the hegemony was converted into
a direct ownership of the soil, and the most complete system of
making the most of that ownership was not only introduced but
with shameless candour legally justified and proclaimed. It was
certainly not a mere accident, that the hardest lot in this respect
fell precisely to the two least warlike provinces, Sicily and Asia.
All these facts taken together certainly lead to the inference that
the position of the Roman finances at this epoch was on the whole
favourable. Only we may not in a financial point of view overlook
the fact that, while the government during the two earlier thirds
of this period executed splendid and magnificent buildings, it
neglected to make other outlays at least as necessary. We have
already indicated how unsatisfactory were its military provisions;
the frontier countries and even the valley of the Po(21) were
pillaged by barbarians, and bands of robbers made havoc in the
interior even of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Italy. The fleet even was
totally neglected; there was hardly any longer a Roman vessel of
war; and the war-vessels, which the subject cities were required to
build and maintain, were not sufficient, so that Rome was not only
absolutely unable to carry on a naval war, but was not even in a
position to check the trade of piracy. In Rome itself a number of
the most necessary improvements were left untouched, and the river-
buildings in particular were singularly neglected. The capital
still possessed no other bridge over the Tiber than the primitive
wooden gangway, which led over the Tiber island to the Janiculum;
the Tiber was still allowed to lay the streets every year under
water, and to demolish houses and in fact not unfrequently whole
districts, without anything being done to strengthen the banks;
mighty as was the growth of transmarine commerce, the roadstead
of Ostia--already by nature bad--was allowed to become more and
more sanded up. A government, which under the most favourable
circumstances and in an epoch of forty years of peace abroad and
at home neglected such duties, might easily allow taxes to fall
into abeyance and yet obtain an annual surplus of income over
expenditure and a considerable reserve; but such a financial
administration by no means deserves commendation for its mere
semblance of brilliant results, but rather merits the same censure--
in respect of laxity, want of unity in management, mistaken
flattery of the people--as falls to be brought in every other
sphere of political life against the senatorial government
of this epoch.
Private Economics
Agriculture
Trades
Ostia
Puteoli
Capitalist Oligarchy
It was otherwise in the east. Here, where the number of the states
coining money from olden times and the quantity of native coin in
circulation were very considerable, the -denarius- did not make its
way into wider acceptance, although it was perhaps declared a legal
tender. On the contrary either the previous monetary standard
continued in use, as in Macedonia for instance, which still as
a province--although partially adding the names of the Roman
magistrates to that of the country--struck its Attic -tetradrachmae-
and certainly employed in substance no other money; or a peculiar
money-standard corresponding to the circumstances was introduced
under Roman authority, as on the institution of the province of Asia,
when a new -stater-, the -cistophorus- as it was called, was prescribed
by the Roman government and was thenceforth struck by the district-
capitals there under Roman superintendence. This essential diversity
between the Occidental and Oriental systems of currency came to be
of the greatest historical importance: the Romanizing of the subject
lands found one of its mightiest levers in the adoption of Roman money,
and it was not through mere accident that what we have designated at
this epoch as the field of the -denarius- became afterwards the Latin,
while the field of the -drachma- became afterwards the Greek, half
of the empire. Still at the present day the former field substantially
represents the sum of Romanic culture, whereas the latter has
severed itself from European civilization.
But the real focus in which the brilliance of this genteel life was
concentrated was the table. Extravagant prices--as much as 100,000
sesterces (1000 pounds)--were paid for an exquisite cook. Houses
were constructed with special reference to this object, and the
villas in particular along the coast were provided with salt-water
tanks of their own, in order that they might furnish marine fishes
and oysters at any time fresh to the table. A dinner was already
described as poor, at which the fowls were served up to the guests
entire and not merely the choice portions, and at which the guests
were expected to eat of the several dishes and not simply to taste
them. They procured at a great expense foreign delicacies and
Greek wine, which had to be sent round at least once at every
respectable repast. At banquets above all the Romans displayed
their hosts of slaves ministering to luxury, their bands of
musicians, their dancing-girls, their elegant furniture, their
carpets glittering with gold or pictorially embroidered, their
purple hangings, their antique bronzes, their rich silver plate.
Against such displays the sumptuary laws were primarily directed,
which were issued more frequently (593, 639, 665, 673) and in
greater detail than ever; a number of delicacies and wines were
therein totally prohibited, for others a maximum in weight and
price was fixed; the quantity of silver plate was likewise
restricted by law, and lastly general maximum rates were prescribed
for the expenses of ordinary and festal meals; these, for example,
were fixed in 593 at 10 and 100 sesterces (2 shillings and 1 pound)
in 673 at 30 and 300 sesterces (6 shillings and 3 pounds)
respectively. Unfortunately truth requires us to add that, of all
the Romans of rank, not more than three--and these not including
the legislators themselves--are said to have complied with these
imposing laws; and in the case of these three it was the law of the
Stoa, and not that of the state, that curtailed the bill of fare.
CHAPTER XII
Latinism
Mixture of Peoples
National Decomposition
This national decomposition is, like the whole age, far from
pleasing, but also like that age significant and momentous.
The circle of peoples, which we are accustomed to call the ancient
world, advances from an outward union under the authority of Rome
to an inward union under the sway of the modern culture resting
essentially on Hellenic elements. Over the ruins of peoples of the
second rank the great historical compromise between the two ruling
nations is silently completed; the Greek and Latin nationalities
conclude mutual peace. The Greeks renounce exclusive claims for
their language in the field of culture, as do the Romans for theirs
in the field of politics; in instruction Latin is allowed to stand
on a footing of equality--restricted, it is true, and imperfect--
with Greek; on the other hand Sulla first allows foreign ambassadors
to speak Greek before the Roman senate without an interpreter.
The time heralds its approach, when the Roman commonwealth will
pass into a bilingual state and the true heir of the throne and
the ideas of Alexander the Great will arise in the west, at once
a Roman and a Greek.
Religion
Greek Philosophy
Leading Schools
Newer Academy
Epicurus and Zeno
The historical version of the myths came far too rudely into
collision with the popular faith, when it declared the gods
directly to be men; Carneades called even their existence in
question, and Epicurus denied to them at least any influence on
the destinies of men. Between these systems and the Roman religion
no alliance was possible; they were proscribed and remained so.
Even in the writings of Cicero it is declared the duty of a citizen
to resist Euhemerism as prejudicial to religious worship; and if the
Academic and the Epicurean appear in his dialogues, the former has
to plead the excuse that, while as a philosopher he is a disciple
of Carneades, as a citizen and -pontifex- he is an orthodox
confessor of the Capitoline Jupiter, and the Epicurean has even
ultimately to surrender and be converted. No one of these three
systems became in any proper sense popular. The plain intelligible
character of Euhemerism exerted doubtless a certain power of
attraction over the Romans, and in particular produced only too
deep an effect on the conventional history of Rome with its at
once childish and senile conversion of fable into history; but it
remained without material influence on the Roman religion, because
the latter from the first dealt only in allegory and not in fable,
and it was not possible in Rome as in Hellas to write biographies
of Zeus the first, second, and third. The modern sophistry could
only succeed where, as in Athens, clever volubility was indigenous,
and where, moreover, the long series of philosophical systems that
had come and gone had accumulated huge piles of intellectual
rubbish. Against the Epicurean quietism, in fine, everything
revolted that was sound and honest in the Roman character so
thoroughly addressing itself to action. Yet it found more
partisans than Euhemerism and the sophistic school, and this was
probably the reason why the police continued to wage war against
it longest and most seriously. But this Roman Epicureanism was not
so much a philosophic system as a sort of philosophic mask, under
which--very much against the design of its strictly moral founder--
thoughtless sensual enjoyment disguised itself for good society;
one of the earliest adherents of this sect, for instance, Titus
Albucius, figures in the poems of Lucilius as the prototype of
a Roman Hellenizing to bad purpose.
Roman Stoa
State-Religion
Priestly Colleges
With this care on the part of the conservatives for the pure
national religion, it was of course quite compatible that the
circles of the highest rank should openly make a jest of it.
The practical side of the Roman priesthood was the priestly cuisine;
the augural and pontifical banquets were as it were the official
gala-days in the life of a Roman epicure, and several of them
formed epochs in the history of gastronomy: the banquet on the
accession of the augur Quintus Hortensius for instance brought
roast peacocks into vogue. Religion was also found very useful
in giving greater zest to scandal. It was a favourite recreation
of the youth of quality to disfigure or mutilate the images of the
gods in the streets by night.(15) Ordinary love affairs had for
long been common, and intrigues with married women began to become
so; but an amour with a Vestal virgin was as piquant as the
intrigues with nuns and the cloister-adventures in the world of
the Decamerone. The scandalous affair of 640 seq. is well known,
in which three Vestals, daughters of the noblest families, and their
paramours, young men likewise of the best houses, were brought to
trial for unchastity first before the pontifical college, and then,
when it sought to hush up the matter, before an extraordinary court
instituted by special decree of the people, and were all condemned
to death. Such scandals, it is true, sedate people could not
approve; but there was no objection to men finding positive
religion to be a folly in their familiar circle; the augurs might,
when one saw another performing his functions, smile in each
other's face without detriment to their religious duties. We learn
to look favourably on the modest hypocrisy of kindred tendencies,
when we compare with it the coarse shamelessness of the Roman
priests and Levites. The official religion was quite candidly
treated as a hollow framework, now serviceable only for political
machinists; in this respect with its numerous recesses and trapdoors
it might and did serve either party, as it happened. Most of
all certainly the oligarchy recognized its palladium in the state-
religion, and particularly in the augural discipline; but the
opposite party also made no resistance in point of principle to
an institute, which had now merely a semblance of life; they rather
regarded it, on the whole, as a bulwark which might pass from the
possession of the enemy into their own.
Secret Worships
But the unallowed and secret worships were naturally still more
popular. As early as Cato's time the Chaldean horoscope-caster had
begun to come into competition with the Etruscan -haruspex- and the
Marsian bird-seer;(16) star-gazing and astrology were soon as much
at home in Italy as in their dreamy native land. In 615 the Roman
-praetor peregrinus- directed all the Chaldeans to evacuate Rome
and Italy within ten days. The same fate at the same time befel
the Jews, who had admitted Italian proselytes to their sabbath.
In like manner Scipio had to clear the camp before Numantia from
soothsayers and pious impostors of every sort. Some forty years
afterwards (657) it was even found necessary to prohibit human
sacrifices. The wild worship of the Cappadocian Ma, or, as the
Romans called her, Bellona, to whom the priests in their festal
processions shed their own blood as a sacrifice, and the gloomy
Egyptian worships began to make their appearance; the former
Cappadocian goddess appeared in a dream to Sulla, and of the later
Roman communities of Isis and Osiris the oldest traced their origin
to the Sullan period. Men had become perplexed not merely as to
the old faith, but as to their very selves; the fearful crises of a
fifty years' revolution, the instinctive feeling that the civil war
was still far from being at an end, increased the anxious suspense,
the gloomy perplexity of the multitude. Restlessly the wandering
imagination climbed every height and fathomed every abyss, where it
fancied that it might discover new prospects or new light amidst
the fatalities impending, might gain fresh hopes in the desperate
struggle against destiny, or perhaps might find merely fresh
alarms. A portentous mysticism found in the general distraction--
political, economic, moral, religious--the soil which was adapted
for it, and grew with alarming rapidity; it was as if gigantic
trees had grown by night out of the earth, none knew whence
or whither, and this very marvellous rapidity of growth
worked new wonders and seized like an epidemic on all minds
not thoroughly fortified.
Education
Now the case was altered. Just as the naive popular faith was
superseded by an enlightened Stoic supernaturalism, so in education
alongside of the simple popular instruction a special training, an
exclusive -humanitas-, developed itself and eradicated the last
remnants of the old social equality. It will not be superfluous
to cast a glance at the aspect assumed by the new instruction of
the young, both the Greek and the higher Latin.
Greek Instruction
Latin Instruction
Public Readings of Classical Works
But by its side there sprang up also a higher Latin instruction.
We have shown in the previous epoch how Latin elementary instruction
raised its character; how the place of the Twelve Tables was taken
by the Latin Odyssey as a sort of improved primer, and the Roman
boy was now trained to the knowledge and delivery of his mother-tongue
by means of this translation, as the Greek by means of the original:
how noted teachers of the Greek language and literature, Andronicus,
Ennius, and others, who already probably taught not children properly
so called, but boys growing up to maturity and young men, did not
disdain to give instruction in the mother-tongue along with the Greek.
These were the first steps towards a higher Latin instruction, but
they did not as yet form such an instruction itself. Instruction
in a language cannot go beyond the elementary stage, so long as it
lacks a literature. It was not until there were not merely Latin
schoolbooks but a Latin literature, and this literature already
somewhat rounded-off in the works of the classics of the sixth century,
that the mother-tongue and the native literature truly entered into
the circle of the elements of higher culture; and the emancipation
from the Greek schoolmasters was now not slow to follow. Stirred up
by the Homeric prelections of Crates, cultivated Romans began to read
the recitative works of their own literature, the Punic War of Naevius,
the Annals of Ennius, and subsequently also the Poems of Lucilius first
to a select circle, and then in public on set days and in presence of
a great concourse, and occasionally also to treat them critically after
the precedent of the Homeric grammarians. These literary prelections,
which cultivated -dilettanti- (-litterati-) held gratuitously, were not
formally a part of juvenile instruction, but were yet an essential means
of introducing the youth to the understanding and the discussion of
the classic Latin literature.
Rhetorical Exercises
But about his time began also the scholastic higher instruction
in Latin, separated as well from elementary Latin as from Greek
instruction, and imparted in special establishments by paid
masters, ordinarily manumitted slaves. That its spirit and method
were throughout borrowed from the exercises in the Greek literature
and language, was a matter of course; and the scholars also consisted,
as at these exercises, of youths, and not of boys. This Latin
instruction was soon divided like the Greek into two courses;
in so far as the Latin literature was first the subject of
scientific lectures, and then a technical introduction was given
to the preparation of panegyrics, public, and forensic orations.
The first Roman school of literature was opened about Stilo's time
by Marcus Saevius Nicanor Postumus, the first separate school for
Latin rhetoric about 660 by Lucius Plotius Gallus; but ordinarily
instructions in rhetoric were also given in the Latin schools of
literature. This new Latin school-instruction was of the most
comprehensive importance. The introduction to the knowledge of
Latin literature and Latin oratory, such as had formerly been
imparted by connoisseurs and masters of high position, had
preserved a certain independence in relation to the Greeks.
The judges of language and the masters of oratory were doubtless
under the influence of Hellenism, but not absolutely under that of
the Greek school-grammar and school-rhetoric; the latter in particular
was decidedly an object of dread. The pride as well as the sound
common sense of the Romans demurred to the Greek assertion that
the ability to speak of things, which the orator understood and felt,
intelligibly and attractively to his peers in the mother-tongue
could be learned in the school by school-rules. To the solid
practical advocate the procedure of the Greek rhetoricians, so
totally estranged from life, could not but appear worse for the
beginner than no preparation at all; to the man of thorough culture
and matured by the experience of life, the Greek rhetoric seemed
shallow and repulsive; while the man of serious conservative views
did not fail to observe the close affinity between a professionally
developed rhetoric and the trade of the demagogue. Accordingly
the Scipionic circle had shown the most bitter hostility to the
rhetoricians, and, if Greek declamations before paid masters were
tolerated doubtless primarily as exercises in speaking Greek, Greek
rhetoric did not thereby find its way either into Latin oratory or
into Latin oratorical instruction. But in the new Latin rhetorical
schools the Roman youths were trained as men and public orators by
discussing in pairs rhetorical themes; they accused Ulysses, who
was found beside the corpse of Ajax with the latter's bloody sword,
of the murder of his comrade in arms, or upheld his innocence; they
charged Orestes with the murder of his mother, or undertook to
defend him; or perhaps they helped Hannibal with a supplementary
good advice as to the question whether he would do better to comply
with the invitation to Rome, or to remain in Carthage, or to take
flight. It was natural that the Catonian opposition should once
more bestir itself against these offensive and pernicious conflicts
of words. The censors of 662 issued a warning to teachers and
parents not to allow the young men to spend the whole day in
exercises, whereof their ancestors had known nothing; and the man,
from whom this warning came, was no less than the first forensic
orator of his age, Lucius Licinius Crassus. Of course the
Cassandra spoke in vain; declamatory exercises in Latin on the
current themes of the Greek schools became a permanent ingredient
in the education of Roman youth, and contributed their part to
educate the very boys as forensic and political players and to
stifle in the bud all earnest and true eloquence.
CHAPTER XIII
Literary Reaction
Scipionic Circle
Tragedy
Pacuvius
Let us first glance at the Roman dramatic literature and the stage
itself. Tragedy has now for the first time her specialists; the
tragic poets of this epoch do not, like those of the preceding,
cultivate comedy and epos side by side. The appreciation of this
branch of art among the writing and reading circles was evidently
on the increase, but tragic poetry itself hardly improved. We now
meet with the national tragedy (-praetexta-), the creation of
Naevius, only in the hands of Pacuvius to be mentioned immediately--
an after-growth of the Ennian epoch. Among the probably numerous
poets who imitated Greek tragedies two alone acquired a
considerable name. Marcus Pacuvius from Brundisium (535-c. 625)
who in his earlier years earned his livelihood in Rome by painting
and only composed tragedies when advanced in life, belongs as
respects both his years and his style to the sixth rather than
the seventh century, although his poetical activity falls within
the latter. He composed on the whole after the manner of his
countryman, uncle, and master Ennius. Polishing more carefully and
aspiring to a higher strain than his predecessor, he was regarded
by favourable critics of art afterwards as a model of artistic
poetry and of rich style: in the fragments, however, that have
reached us proofs are not wanting to justify the censure of the
poet's language by Cicero and the censure of his taste by Lucilius;
his language appears more rugged than that of his predecessor, his
style of composition pompous and punctilious.(1) There are traces
that he like Ennius attached more value to philosophy than to
religion; but he did not at any rate, like the latter, prefer
dramas chiming in with neological views and preaching sensuous
passion or modern enlightenment, and drew without distinction from
Sophocles or from Euripides--of that poetry with a decided special
aim, which almost stamps Ennius with genius, there can have been
no vein in the younger poet.
Accius
Greek Comedy
Terence
Far greater activity and far more important results are apparent
in the field of comedy. At the very commencement of this period
a remarkable reaction set in against the sort of comedy hitherto
prevalent and popular. Its representative Terentius (558-595) is
one of the most interesting phenomena, in a historical point of
view, in Roman literature. Born in Phoenician Africa, brought in
early youth as a slave to Rome and there introduced to the Greek
culture of the day, he seemed from the very first destined for the
vocation of giving back to the new Attic comedy that cosmopolitan
character, which in its adaptation to the Roman public under the
rough hands of Naevius, Plautus, and their associates it had in
some measure lost. Even in the selection and employment of models
the contrast is apparent between him and that predecessor whom
alone we can now compare with him. Plautus chooses his pieces from
the whole range of the newer Attic comedy, and by no means disdains
the livelier and more popular comedians, such as Philemon; Terence
keeps almost exclusively to Menander, the most elegant, polished,
and chaste of all the poets of the newer comedy. The method of
working up several Greek pieces into one Latin is retained by
Terence, because in fact from the state of the case it could not be
avoided by the Roman editors; but it is handled with incomparably
more skill and carefulness. The Plautine dialogue beyond doubt
departed very frequently from its models; Terence boasts of the
verbal adherence of his imitations to the originals, by which
however we are not to understand a verbal translation in our sense.
The not unfrequently coarse, but always effective laying on of
Roman local tints over the Greek ground-work, which Plautus was
fond of, is completely and designedly banished from Terence;
not an allusion puts one in mind of Rome, not a proverb, hardly
a reminiscence;(2) even the Latin titles are replaced by Greek.
The same distinction shows itself in the artistic treatment. First
of all the players receive back their appropriate masks, and greater
care is observed as to the scenic arrangements, so that it is no
longer the case, as with Plautus, that everything needs to take
place on the street, whether belonging to it or not. Plautus ties
and unties the dramatic knot carelessly and loosely, but his plot
is droll and often striking; Terence, far less effective, keeps
everywhere account of probability, not unfrequently at the cost of
suspense, and wages emphatic war against the certainly somewhat
flat and insipid standing expedients of his predecessors, e. g.
against allegoric dreams.(3) Plautus paints his characters with
broad strokes, often after a stock-model, always with a view to
the gross effect from a distance and on the whole; Terence handles
the psychological development with a careful and often excellent
miniature-painting, as in the -Adelphi- for instance, where the
two old men--the easy bachelor enjoying life in town, and the sadly
harassed not at all refined country-landlord--form a masterly
contrast. The springs of action and the language of Plautus are
drawn from the tavern, those of Terence from the household of the
good citizen. The lazy Plautine hostelry, the very unconstrained
but very charming damsels with the hosts duly corresponding,
the sabre-rattling troopers, the menial world painted with an
altogether peculiar humour, whose heaven is the cellar, and whose
fate is the lash, have disappeared in Terence or at any rate
undergone improvement. In Plautus we find ourselves, on the whole,
among incipient or thorough rogues, in Terence again, as a rule,
among none but honest men; if occasionally a -leno- is plundered or
a young man taken to the brothel, it is done with a moral intent,
possibly out of brotherly love or to deter the boy from frequenting
improper haunts. The Plautine pieces are pervaded by the significant
antagonism of the tavern to the house; everywhere wives are
visited with abuse, to the delight of all husbands temporarily
emancipated and not quite sure of an amiable salutation at home.
The comedies of Terence are pervaded by a conception not more
moral, but doubtless more becoming, of the feminine nature and of
married life. As a rule, they end with a virtuous marriage, or,
if possible, with two--just as it was the glory of Menander that
he compensated for every seduction by a marriage. The eulogies of
a bachelor life, which are so frequent in Menander, are repeated by
his Roman remodeller only with characteristic shyness,(4) whereas
the lover in his agony, the tender husband at the -accouchement-,
the loving sister by the death-bed in the -Eunuchus- and the
-Andria- are very gracefully delineated; in the -Hecyra- there even
appears at the close as a delivering angel a virtuous courtesan,
likewise a genuine Menandrian figure, which the Roman public, it is
true, very properly hissed. In Plautus the fathers throughout only
exist for the purpose of being jeered and swindled by their sons;
with Terence in the -Heauton Timorumenos- the lost son is reformed
by his father's wisdom, and, as in general he is full of excellent
instructions as to education, so the point of the best of his
pieces, the -Adelphi-, turns on finding the right mean between the
too liberal training of the uncle and the too rigid training of the
father. Plautus writes for the great multitude and gives utterance
to profane and sarcastic speeches, so far as the censorship of the
stage at all allowed; Terence on the contrary describes it as his
aim to please the good and, like Menander, to offend nobody.
Plautus is fond of vigorous, often noisy dialogue, and his pieces
require a lively play of gesture in the actors; Terence confines
himself to "quiet conversation." The language of Plautus abounds in
burlesque turns and verbal witticisms, in alliterations, in comic
coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations of words, pithy
expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek. Terence
knows nothing of such caprices; his dialogue moves on with the
purest symmetry, and its points are elegant epigrammatic and
sententious turns. The comedy of Terence is not to be called an
improvement, as compared with that of Plautus, either in a poetical
or in a moral point of view. Originality cannot be affirmed of
either, but, if possible, there is less of it in Terence; and
the dubious praise of more correct copying is at least outweighed
by the circumstance that, while the younger poet reproduced the
agreeableness, he knew not how to reproduce the merriment of
Menander, so that the comedies of Plautus imitated from Menander,
such as the -Stichus-, the -Cistellaria-, the -Bacchides-, probably
preserve far more of the flowing charm of the original than the
comedies of the "-dimidiatus Menander-." And, while the aesthetic
critic cannot recognize an improvement in the transition from the
coarse to the dull, as little can the moralist in the transition
from the obscenity and indifference of Plautus to the accommodating
morality of Terence. But in point of language an improvement
certainly took place. Elegance of language was the pride of the
poet, and it was owing above all to its inimitable charm that the
most refined judges of art in aftertimes, such as Cicero, Caesar,
and Quinctilian, assigned the palm to him among all the Roman poets
of the republican age. In so far it is perhaps justifiable to date
a new era in Roman literature--the real essence of which lay not
in the development of Latin poetry, but in the development of
the Latin language--from the comedies of Terence as the first
artistically pure imitation of Hellenic works of art. The modern
comedy made its way amidst the most determined literary warfare.
The Plautine style of composing had taken root among the Roman
bourgeoisie; the comedies of Terence encountered the liveliest
opposition from the public, which found their "insipid language,"
their "feeble style," intolerable. The, apparently, pretty
sensitive poet replied in his prologues--which properly were not
intended for any such purpose--with counter-criticisms full of
defensive and offensive polemics; and appealed from the multitude,
which had twice run off from his -Hecyra- to witness a band of
gladiators and rope-dancers, to the cultivated circles of the
genteel world. He declared that he only aspired to the approval
of the "good"; in which doubtless there was not wanting a hint,
that it was not at all seemly to undervalue works of art which
had obtained the approval of the "few." He acquiesced in or even
favoured the report, that persons of quality aided him in composing
with their counsel or even with their cooperation.(5) In reality
he carried his point; even in literature the oligarchy prevailed,
and the artistic comedy of the exclusives supplanted the comedy
of the people: we find that about 620 the pieces of Plautus
disappeared from the set of stock plays. This is the more
significant, because after the early death of Terence no man of
conspicuous talent at all further occupied this field. Respecting
the comedies of Turpilius (651 at an advanced age) and other stop-
gaps wholly or almost wholly forgotten, a connoisseur already at
the close of this period gave it as his opinion, that the new
comedies were even much worse than the bad new pennies.(6)
National Comedy
Afranius
Atellanae
Dramatic Arrangements
Satura
Lucilius
Historical Composition
Polybius
Roman Chroniclers
Sciences
In scientific literature the collection of juristic opinions by
Marcus Brutus, which was published about the year 600, presents
a remarkable attempt to transplant to Rome the method usual among
the Greeks of handling professional subjects by means of dialogue,
and to give to his treatise an artistic semi-dramatic form by a
machinery of conversation in which the persons, time, and place
were distinctly specified. But the later men of science, such
as Stilo the philologist and Scaevola the jurist, laid aside
this method, more poetical than practical, both in the sciences
of general culture and in the special professional sciences.
The increasing value of science as such, and the preponderance
of a material interest in it at Rome, are clearly reflected in this
rapid rejection of the fetters of artistic form. We have already
spoken(32) in detail of the sciences of general liberal culture,
grammar or rather philology, rhetoric and philosophy, in so far
as these now became essential elements of the usual Roman training
and thereby first began to be dissociated from the professional
sciences properly so called.
Philology
Stilo
Rhetoric
Philosophy
Professional Sciences
Jurisprudence
In the professional sciences there was but little activity.
Well as the Romans understood how to farm and how to calculate,
physical and mathematical research gained no hold among them.
The consequences of neglecting theory appeared practically in
the low state of medical knowledge and of a portion of the military
sciences. Of all the professional sciences jurisprudence alone was
flourishing. We cannot trace its internal development with
chronological accuracy. On the whole ritual law fell more and
more into the shade, and at the end of this period stood nearly
in the same position as the canon law at the present day. The finer
and more profound conception of law, on the other hand, which
substitutes for outward criteria the motive springs of action
within--such as the development of the ideas of offences arising
from intention and from carelessness respectively, and of
possession entitled to temporary protection--was not yet in
existence at the time of the Twelve Tables, but was so in the age
of Cicero, and probably owed its elaboration substantially to the
present epoch. The reaction of political relations on the development
of law has been already indicated on several occasions; it was
not always advantageous. By the institution of the tribunal of the
-Centumviri- to deal with inheritance,(38) for instance, there was
introduced in the law of property a college of jurymen, which, like
the criminal authorities, instead of simply applying the law placed
itself above it and with its so-called equity undermined the legal
institutions; one consequence of which among others was the
irrational principle, that any one, whom a relative had passed over
in his testament, was at liberty to propose that the testament
should be annulled by the court, and the court decided according
to its discretion.
Finally, music and dancing passed over in like manner from Hellas
to Rome, solely in order to be there applied to the enhancement of
decorative luxury. Such foreign arts were certainly not new in
Rome; the state had from olden time allowed Etruscan flute-players
and dancers to appear at its festivals, and the freedmen and
the lowest class of the Roman people had previously followed
this trade. But it was a novelty that Greek dances and musical
performances should form the regular accompaniment of a genteel
banquet. Another novelty was a dancing-school, such as Scipio
Aemilianus full of indignation describes in one of his speeches,
in which upwards of five hundred boys and girls--the dregs of the
people and the children of magistrates and of dignitaries mixed up
together--received instruction from a ballet-master in far from
decorous castanet-dances, in corresponding songs, and in the use of
the proscribed Greek stringed instruments. It was a novelty too--
not so much that a consular and -pontifex maximus- like Publius
Scaevola (consul in 621) should catch the balls in the circus as
nimbly as he solved the most complicated questions of law at home--
as that young Romans of rank should display their jockey-arts
before all the people at the festal games of Sulla. The government
occasionally attempted to check such practices; as for instance in
639, when all musical instruments, with the exception of the simple
flute indigenous in Latium, were prohibited by the censors.
But Rome was no Sparta; the lax government by such prohibitions
rather drew attention to the evils than attempted to remedy them
by a sharp and consistent application of the laws.
Chapter I
Or, as Diodorus (p. 522) states it, 22 cubits (1 Greek cubit = 1 1/2
feet), while Livy (ap. Oros. iv. 22) and Appian (Pun. 95), who seem
to have had before them another less accurate passage of Polybius,
state the breadth of the walls at 30 feet. The triple wall of
Appian--as to which a false idea has hitherto been diffused by
Floras (i. 31)--denotes the outer wall, and the front and back walls
of the casemates. That this coincidence is not accidental, and that
we have here in reality the remains of the famed walls of Carthage
before us, will be evident to every one: the objections of Davis
(Carthage and her Remains, p. 370 et seq.) only show how little
even the utmost zeal can adduce in opposition to the main results
of Beule. Only we must maintain that all the ancient authorities
give the statements of which we are now speaking with reference not
to the citadel-wall, but to the city-wall on the landward side, of
which the wall along the south side of the citadel-hill was an
integral part (Oros. iv. 22). In accordance with this view, the
excavations at the citadel-hill on the east, north, and west, have
shown no traces of fortifications, whereas on the south side they
have brought to light the very remains of this great wall. There is
no reason for regarding these as the remains of a separate
fortification of the citadel distinct from the city wall; it may
be presumed that further excavations at a corresponding depth--the
foundation of the city wall discovered at the Byrsa lies fifty-six
feet beneath the present surface--will bring to light like, or at
any rate analogous, foundations along the whole landward side,
although it is probable that at the point where the walled suburb of
Magalia rested on the main wall the fortification was either weaker
from the first or was early neglected. The length of the wall as a
whole cannot be stated with precision; but it must have been very
considerable, for three hundred elephants were stabled there, and
the stores for their fodder and perhaps other spaces also as well as
the gates are to be taken into account. It is easy to conceive how
the inner city, within the walls of which the Byrsa was included,
should, especially by way of contrast to the suburb of Magalia which
had its separate circumvallation, be sometimes itself called Byrsa
(App. Pun. 117; Nepos, ap. Serv. Aen. i. 368).
12. Oros. iv. 22. Fully 2000 paces, or--as Polybius must have
said--16 stadia, are=about 3000 metres. The citadel-hill, on which
the church of St. Louis now stands, measures at the top about 1400,
half-way up about 2600, metres in circumference (Beule, p. 22); for
the circumference at the base that estimate will very well suffice.
18. This road was known already by the author of the pseudo-
Aristotelian treatise De Mirabilibus as a commercial route between
the Adriatic and Black seas, viz. As that along which the wine jars
from Corcyra met halfway those from Thasos and Lesbos. Even now
it runs substantially in the same direction from Durazzo, cutting
through the mountains of Bagora (Candavian chain) near the lake
of Ochrida (Lychnitis), by way of Monastir to Salonica.
25. The question whether Greece did or did not become a Roman
province in 608, virtually runs into a dispute about words. It is
certain that the Greek communities throughout remained "free" (C. I.
Gr. 1543, 15; Caesar, B. C. iii. 5; Appian, Mithr. 58; Zonar. ix.
31). But it is no less certain that Greece was then "taken possession
of" by the Romans (Tac. Ann. xiv. 21; 1 Maccab. viii. 9, 10); that
thenceforth each community paid a fixed tribute to Rome (Pausan. vii.
16, 6; comp. Cic. De Prov. Cons. 3, 5), the little island of Gyarus,
for instance, paying 150 --drachmae-- annually (Strabo, x. 485);
that the "rods and axes" of the Roman governor thenceforth ruled
in Greece (Polyb. xxxviii. l. c.; comp. Cic. Verr. l. i. 21, 55),
and that he thenceforth exercised the superintendence over the
constitutions of the cities (C. I. Gr. 1543), as well as in certain
cases the criminal jurisdiction (C. I. Gr. 1543; Plut. Cim. 2), just
as the senate had hitherto done; and that, lastly, the Macedonian
provincial era was also in use in Greece. Between these facts there
is no inconsistency, or at any rate none further than is involved
in the position of the free cities generally, which are spoken of
sometimes as if excluded from the province (e. g. Sueton. Cats., 25;
Colum. xi. 3, 26), sometimes as assigned to it (e. g. Joseph. Ant.
Jud. xiv. 4, 4). The Roman domanial possessions in Greece were,
no doubt, restricted to the territory of Corinth and possibly some
portions of Euboea (C. I. Gr. 5879), and there were no subjects
in the strict sense there at all; yet if we look to the relations
practically subsisting between the Greek communities and the
Macedonian governor, Greece may be reckoned as included in the
province of Macedonia in the same manner as Massilia in the province
of Narbo or Dyrrhachium in that of Macedonia. We find even cases
that go much further: Cisalpine Gaul consisted after 665 of mere
burgess or Latin communities and was yet made a province by Sulla,
and in the time of Caesar we meet with regions which consisted
exclusively of burgess-communities and yet by no means ceased to
be provinces. In these cases the fundamental idea of the Roman
-provinicia- comes out very clearly; it was primarily nothing but
a "command," and all the administrative and judicial functions of
the commandant were originally collateral duties and corollaries
of his military position.
32. In the same testament the king gave to his city Pergamus
"freedom," that is the --demokratia--, urban self-government.
According to the tenor of a remarkable document that has recently
been found there (Staatsrecht, iii(3). p. 726) after the testament
was opened, but before its confirmation by the Romans, the Demos thus
constituted resolved to confer urban burgess-rights on the classes
of the population hitherto excluded from them, especially on the
-paroeci- entered in the census and on the soldiers dwelling in town
and country, including the Macedonians, in order thus to bring
about a good understanding among the whole population. Evidently
the burgesses, in confronting the Romans with this comprehensive
reconciliation as an accomplished fact, desired, before the Roman
rule was properly introduced, to prepare themselves against it
and to take away from the foreign rulers the possibility of using
the differences of rights within the population for breaking up
its municipal freedom.
Chapter II
7. It was asserted even then, that the human race in that quarter
was pre-eminently fitted for slavery by its especial power of
endurance. Plautus (Trin. 542) commends the Syrians: -genus quod
patientissitmum est hominum-.
8. III. XII. Rural Slaves ff., III. XII. Culture of Oil and Wine,
and Rearing of Cattle
11. The hybrid Greek name for the workhouse (-ergastulum-, from
--ergaszomai--, after the analogy of -stabulum-, -operculum-) is
an indication that this mode of management came to the Romans from
a region where the Greek language was used, but at a period when
a thorough Hellenic culture was not yet attained.
12. III. VI. Guerilla War in Sicily
34. This fact, hitherto only partially known from Cicero (De L. Agr.
ii. 31. 82; comp. Liv. xlii. 2, 19), is now more fully established
by the fragments of Licinianus, p. 4. The two accounts are to be
combined to this effect, that Lentulus ejected the possessors in
consideration of a compensatory sum fixed by him, but accomplished
nothing with real landowners, as he was not entitled to dispossess
them and they would not consent to sell.
Chapter III
14. Thus the statement of Appian (Hisp. 78) that six years' service
entitled a man to demand his discharge, may perhaps be reconciled with
the better known statement of Polybius (vi. 19), respecting which
Marquardt (Handbuch, vi. 381) has formed a correct judgment. The time,
at which the two alterations were introduced, cannot be determined
further, than that the first was probably in existence as early as 603
(Nitzsch, Gracchen, p. 231), and the second certainly as early as the
time of Polybius. That Gracchus reduced the number of the legal years of
service, seems to follow from Asconius in Cornel, p. 68; comp. Plutarch,
Ti. Gracch. 16; Dio, Fr. 83, 7, Bekk.
17. IV. II. Exclusion of the Senators from the Equestrian Centuries
21. That he, and not Tiberius, was the author of this law, now appears
from Fronto in the letters to Verus, init. Comp. Gracchus ap. Gell. xi.
10; Cic. de. Rep. iii. 29, and Verr. iii. 6, 12; Vellei. ii. 6.
24. This and the law -ne quis iudicio circumveniatur- may
have been identical.
Chapter IV
The plain of eastern Cilicia remained down to the war against Tigranes
attached to the Syrian empire (Appian, Syr. 48); the districts to
the north of the Taurus formerly reckoned as belonging to Cilicia--
Cappadocian Cilicia, as it was called, and Cataonia--belonged to
Cappadocia, the former from the time of the breaking up of the kingdom
of Attalus (Justin, xxxvii. 1; see above, IV. I. War against Aristonicus),
the latter probably even from the time of the peace with Antiochus.
11. The following table exhibits the genealogy of the Numidian princes:--
Massinissa
516-605
(238-149)
------------------------------------------------------
Micipsa Gulussa Mastanabal
d. 636 d. bef. 636 d. bef. 636
(118) (118) (118)
---------------------------- ------- ---------------------
Adherbal Hiempsal I Micipsa Massiva Gauda Jugurtha
d. 642 d. c. 637 (Diod. d. 643 d.bef. 666 d. 650
(112) (117) p. 607) (111) (88) (104)
----------- -------
Hiempsal II Oxyntas
------
Juba I
-------
Juba II
14. The locality has not been discovered. The earlier supposition
that Thelepte (near Feriana, to the northward of Capsa) was meant, is
arbitrary; and the identification with a locality still at the present
day named Thala to the east of Capsa is not duly made out.
Chapter V
4. Aquae was not a colony, as Livy says (Ep. 61), but a -castellum-
(Strabo, iv. 180; Velleius, i. 15; Madvig, Opusc. i. 303). The same
holds true of Italica (p. 214), and of many other places--Vindonissa,
for instance, never was in law anything else than a Celtic village,
but was withal a fortified Roman camp, and a township of very
considerable importance.
5. III. VII. Measures Adopted to Check the Immigrations of
the Transalpine Gauls
10. II. IV. the Celts Assail the Etruscans in Northern Italy
11. "The Helvetii dwelt," Tacitus says (Germ. 28), "between the
Hercynian Forest (i. e. here probably the Rauhe Alp), the Rhine, and
the Main; the Boii farther on." Posidonius also (ap. Strab. vii. 293)
states that the Boii, at the time when they repulsed the Cimbri,
inhabited the Hercynian Forest, i. e. the mountains from the Rauhe
Alp to the Bohmerwald The circumstance that Caesar transplants them
"beyond the Rhine" (B. G. i. 5) is by no means inconsistent with this,
for, as he there speaks from the Helvetian point of view, he may very
well mean the country to the north-east of the lake of Constance; which
quite accords with the fact, that Strabo (vii. 292) describes the former
Boian country as bordering on the lake of Constance, except that he is
not quite accurate in naming along with them the Vindelici as dwelling
by the lake of Constance, for the latter only established themselves
there after the Boii had evacuated these districts. From these seats
of theirs the Boii were dispossessed by the Marcomani and other
Germanic tribes even before the time of Posidonius, consequently
before 650; detached portions of them in Caesar's time roamed about
in Carinthia (B. G. i. 5), and came thence to the Helvetii and into
western Gaul; another swarm found new settlements on the Plattensee,
where it was annihilated by the Getae; but the district--the "Boian
desert," as it was called--preserved the name of this the most harassed
of all the Celtic peoples (III. VII. Colonizing of The Region South
of The Po, note).
12. They are called in the Triumphal Fasti -Galli Karni-; and in Victor
-Ligures Taurisci- (for such should be the reading instead of the
received -Ligures et Caurisci-).
15. As, according to Frontinus (ii. 43), Velleius and Eutropius, the
tribe conquered by Minucius was the Scordisci, it can only be through
an error on the part of Florus that he mentions the Hebrus (the Maritza)
instead of the Margus (Morava).
16. This annihilation of the Scordisci, while the Maedi and Dardani
were admitted to treaty, is reported by Appian (Illyr. 5), and in fact
thence forth the Scordisci disappear from this region. If the final
subjugation took place in the 32nd year --apo teis proteis es Keltous
peiras--, it would seem that this must be understood of a thirty-two
years' war between the Romans and the Scordisci, the commencement of
which presumably falls not long after the constituting of the province
of Macedonia (608) and of which the incidents in arms above recorded,
636-647, are a part. It is obvious from Appian's narrative that the
conquest ensued shortly before the outbreak of the Italian civil wars,
and so probably at the latest in 663. It falls between 650 and 656,
if a triumph followed it, for the triumphal list before and after is
complete; it is possible however that for some reason there was no
triumph. The victor is not further known; perhaps it was no other than
the consul of the year 671; since the latter may well have been late
in attaining the consulate in consequence of the Cinnan-Marian troubles.
17. The account that large tracts on the coasts of the North Sea
had been torn away by inundations, and that this had occasioned the
migration of the Cimbri in a body (Strabo, vii. 293), does not indeed
appear to us fabulous, as it seemed to those who recorded it; but
whether it was based on tradition or on conjecture, cannot be decided.
20. The usual hypothesis, that the Tougeni and Tigorini had advanced
at the same time with the Cimbri into Gaul, cannot be supported by
Strabo (vii. 293), and is little in harmony with the separate part acted
by the Helvetii. Our traditional accounts of this war are, besides, so
fragmentary that, just as in the case of the Samnite wars, a connected
historical narration can only lay claim to approximate accuracy.
22. IV. IV. The Proletariate and Equestrian Order under the Restoration
23. The deposition from office of the proconsul Caepio, with which was
combined the confiscation of his property (Liv. Ep. 67), was probably
pronounced by the assembly of the people immediately after the battle
of Arausio (6th October 649). That some time elapsed between the
deposition and his proper downfall, is clearly shown by the proposal
made in 650, and aimed at Caepio, that deposition from office should
involve the forfeiture of a seat in the senate (Asconius in Cornel,
p. 78). The fragments of Licinianus (p. 10; -Cn. Manilius ob eandem
causam quam et Caepio L. Saturnini rogatione e civitate est cito [?]
eiectus-; which clears up the allusion in Cic. de Or. ii. 28, 125) now
inform us that a law proposed by Lucius Appuleius Saturninus brought
about this catastrophe. This is evidently no other than the Appuleian
law as to the -minuta maiestas- of the Roman state (Cic. de Or. ii.
25, 107; 49, 201), or, as its tenor was already formerly explained
(ii. p. 143 of the first edition [of the German]), the proposal of
Saturninus for the appointment of an extraordinary commission to
investigate the treasons that had taken place during the Cimbrian
troubles. The commission of inquiry as to the gold of Tolosa
(Cic. de N. D. iii. 30, 74) arose in quite a similar way out of
the Appuleian law, as the special courts of inquiry--further mentioned
in that passage--as to a scandalous bribery of judges out of the Mucian
law of 613, as to the occurrences with the Vestals out of the Peducaean
law of 641, and as to the Jugurthine war out of the Mamilian law of 644.
A comparison of these cases also shows that in such special
commissions--different in this respect from the ordinary ones--even
punishments affecting life and limb might be and were inflicted. If
elsewhere the tribune of the people, Gaius Norbanus, is named as the
person who set agoing the proceedings against Caepio and was afterwards
brought to trial for doing so (Cic. de Or. ii. 40, 167; 48, 199; 49, 200;
Or. Part. 30, 105, et al.), this is not inconsistent with the view
given above; for the proposal proceeded as usual from several tribunes
of the people (ad Herenn. i. 14, 24; Cic. de Or. ii. 47, 197), and,
as Saturninus was already dead when the aristocratic party was in a
position to think of retaliation, they fastened on his colleague.
As to the period of this second and final condemnation of Caepio,
the usual very inconsiderate hypothesis, which places it in 659,
ten years after the battle of Arausio, has been already rejected.
It rests simply on the fact that Crassus when consul, consequently
in 659, spoke in favour of Caepio (Cic. Brut. 44, 162); which, however,
he manifestly did not as his advocate, but on the occasion when
Norbanus was brought to account by Publius Sulpicius Rufus for his
conduct toward Caepio in 659. Formerly the year 650 was assumed for
this second accusation; now that we know that it originated from a
proposal of Saturninus, we can only hesitate between 651, when he was
tribune of the people for the first time (Plutarch, Mar. 14; Oros,
v. 17; App. i. 28; Diodor. p. 608, 631), and 654, when he held that
office a second time. There are not materials for deciding the point
with entire certainty, but the great preponderance of probability is
in favour of the former year; partly because it was nearer to the
disastrous events in Gaul, partly because in the tolerably full
accounts of the second tribunate of Saturninus there is no mention
of Quintus Caepio the father and the acts of violence directed against
him. The circumstance, that the sums paid back to the treasury in
consequence of the verdicts as to the embezzlement of the Tolosan
booty were claimed by Saturninus in his second tribunate for his
schemes of colonization (De Viris Ill. 73, 5, and thereon Orelli,
Ind. Legg. p. 137), is not in itself decisive, and may, moreover,
have been easily transferred by mistake from the first African to
the second general agrarian law of Saturninus.
The fact that afterwards, when Norbanus was impeached, his impeachment
proceeded on the very ground of the law which he had taken part in
suggesting, was an ironical incident common in the Roman political
procedure of this period (Cic. Brut. 89, 305) and should not mislead
us into the belief that the Appuleian law was, like the later
Cornelian, a general law of high treason.
24. The view here presented rests in the main on the comparatively
trustworthy account in the Epitome of Livy (where we should read
-reversi in Gallium in Vellocassis se Teutonis coniunxerunt) and in
Obsequens; to the disregard of authorities of lesser weight, which
make the Teutones appear by the side of the Cimbri at an earlier date,
some of them, such as Appian, Celt. 13, even as early as the battle of
Noreia. With these we connect the notices in Caesar (B. G. i. 33; ii.
4, 29); as the invasion of the Roman province and of Italy by the Cimbri
can only mean the expedition of 652.
Chapter VI
11. IV. IV. Rival Demagogism of the Senate. The Livian Laws
Chapter VII
7. These figures are taken from the numbers of the census of 639 and
684; there were in the former year 394, 336 burgesses capable of bearing
arms, in the latter 910,000 (according to Phlegon Fr. 12 Mull., which
statement Clinton and his copyists erroneously refer to the census of
668; according to Liv. Ep. 98 the number was--by the correct reading--
900,000 persons). The only figures known between these two--those of
the census of 668, which according to Hieronymus gave 463,000 persons--
probably turned out so low only because the census took place amidst
the crisis of the revolution. As an increase of the population of Italy
is not conceivable in the period from 639 to 684, and even the Sullan
assignations of land can at the most have but filled the gaps which the
war had made, the surplus of fully 500,000 men capable of bearing arms
may be referred with certainty to the reception of the allies which had
taken place in the interval. But it is possible, and even probable,
that in these fateful years the total amount of the Italian population
may have retrograded rather than advanced: if we reckon the total
deficit at 100,000 men capable of bearing arms, which seems not
excessive, there were at the time of the Social War in Italy three non-
burgesses for two burgesses.
12. Even from our scanty information, the best part of which is
given by Diodorus, p. 538 and Strabo, v. 4, 2, this is very distinctly
apparent; for example, the latter expressly says that the burgess-body
chose the magistrates. That the senate of Italia was meant to be formed
in another manner and to have different powers from that of Rome,
has been asserted, but has not been proved. Of course in its first
composition care would be taken to have a representation in some degree
uniform of the insurgent cities; but that the senators were to be
regularly deputed by the communities, is nowhere stated. As little
does the commission given to the senate to draw up a constitution exclude
its promulgation by the magistrates and ratification by the assembly
of the people.
13. The bullets found at Asculum show that the Gauls were very
numerousalso in the army of Strabo.
14. We still have a decree of the Roman senate of 22 May 676, which
grants honours and advantages on their discharge to three Greek ship-
captains of Carystus, Clazomenae, and Miletus for faithful services
renderedsince the commencement of the Italian war (664). Of the same
nature is the account of Memnon, that two triremes were summoned from
Heraclea on the Black Sea for the Italian war, and that they returned
in the eleventh year with rich honorary gifts.
16. The Julian law must have been passed in the last months of 664,
for during the good season of the year Caesar was in the field;
the Plautian was probably passed, as was ordinarily the rule with
tribunician proposals, immediately after the tribunes entered on office,
consequently in Dec. 664 or Jan. 665.
17. Leaden bullets with the name of the legion which threw them, and
sometimes with curses against the "runaway slaves"--and accordingly
Roman--or with the inscription "hit the Picentes" or "hit Pompeius"--
the former Roman, the latter Italian--are even now sometimes found,
belonging to that period, in the region of Ascoli.
18. The rare -denarii- with -Safinim- and -G. Mutil- in Oscan
characters must belong to this period; for, as long as the designation
-Italia- was retained by the insurgents, no single canton could, as a
sovereign power, coin money with its own name.
20. Licinianus (p. 15) under the year 667 says: -dediticiis omnibus
[ci]vita[s] data; qui polliciti mult[a] milia militum vix XV... cohortes
miserunt-; a statement in which Livy's account (Epit. 80): -Italicis
populis a senatu civitas data est- reappears in a somewhat more precise
shape. The -dediticii- were according to Roman state-law those
-peregrini liberi- (Gaius i. 13-15, 25, Ulp. xx. 14, xxii. 2) who
had become subject to the Romans and had not been admitted to alliance.
They not merely retain life, liberty, and property, but may be formed
into communities with a constitution of their own. --Apolides--,
-nullius certae civitatis cives- (Ulp. xx. 14; comp. Dig. xlviii. 19, 17,
i), were only the freedmen placed by legal fiction on the same footing
with the -dediticii qui dediticiorum numero sunt-, only by erroneous
usage and rarely by the better authors called directly -dediticii-; (Gai.
i. 12, Ulp. i. 14, Paul. iv. 12, 6) as well as the kindred -liberti
Latini Iuniani-. But the -dediticii-nevertheless were destitute of
rights as respected the Roman state, in so far as by Roman state-law
every -deditio- was necessarily unconditional (Polyb, xxi. 1; comp. xx.
9, 10, xxxvi. 2) and all the privileges expressly or tacitly conceded to
them were conceded only -precario- and therefore revocable at pleasure
(Appian, Hisp. 44); so that the Roman state, what ever it might
immediately or afterwards decree regarding its -dediticii-, could never
perpetrate as respected them a violation of rights. This destitution of
rights only ceased on the conclusion of a treaty of alliance (Liv.
xxxiv. 57). Accordingly -deditio- and -foedus- appear in constitutional
law as contrasted terms excluding each other (Liv. iv. 30, xxviii. 34;
Cod. Theod. vii. 13, 16 and Gothofr. thereon), and of precisely the same
nature is the distinction current among the jurists between the -quasi-
dediticii- and the -quasi Latini-, for the Latins are just the
-foederati- in an eminent sense (Cic. pro Balb. 24, 54).
According to the older constitutional law there were, with the exception
of the not numerous communities that were declared to have forfeited
their treaties in consequence of the Hannibalic war (p. 24), no Italian
-dediticii-; in the Plautian law of 664-5 the description: -qui
foederatis civitatibus adscripti fuerunt- (Cic. pro Arch. 4, 7)
still included in substance all Italians. But as the -dediticii-
who received the franchise supplementary in 667 cannot reasonably
be understood as embracing merely the Bruttii and Picentes, we may
assume that all the insurgents, so far as they had laid down their
arms and had not acquired the franchise under the Plautio-Papirian
law were treated as -dediticii-, or--which is the same thing--
that their treaties cancelled as a matter of course by the insurrection
(hence -qui foederati fuerunt- in the passage of Cicero cited) were
not legally renewed to them on their surrender.
27. IV. II. Death of Gracchus, IV. III. Attack on The Transmarine
Colonization. Downfall of Gracchus, IV. VI. Saturninus Assailed
Chapter VIII
10. A decree of the senate of the year 638 recently found in the
village Aresti to the south of Synnada (Viereck, -Sermo Graecus quo
senatus Romanus usus sit-, p. 51) confirms all the regulations made
by the king up to his death and thus shows that Great Phrygia after
the death of the father was not merely taken from the son, as Appian
also states, but was thereby brought directly under Roman allegiance.
12. Retribution came upon the authors of the arrest and surrender
of Aquillius twenty-five years afterwards, when after Mithradates'
death his son Pharnaces handed them over to the Romans.
14. We must recollect that after the outbreak of the Social War
the legion had at least not more than half the number of men which it
had previously, as it was no longer accompanied by Italian contingents.
15. The chronology of these events is, like all their details,
enveloped in an obscurity which investigation is able to dispel,
at most, only partially. That the battle of Chaeronea took place,
if not on the same day as the storming of Athens (Pausan, i. 20),
at any rate soon afterwards, perhaps in March 668, is tolerably certain.
That the succeeding Thessalian and the second Boeotian campaign took
up not merely the remainder of 668 but also the whole of 669, is in
itself probable and is rendered still more so by the fact that Sulla's
enterprises in Asia are not sufficient to fill more than a single
campaign. Licinianus also appears to indicate that Sulla returned to
Athens for the winter of 668-669 and there took in hand the work of
investigation and punishment; after which he relates the battle of
Orchomenus. The crossing of Sulla to Asia has accordingly been
placed not in 669, but in 670.
Chapter IX
7. IV. V. In Illyria
10. Lucius Valerius Flaccus, whom the Fasti name as consul in 668,
was not the consul of 654, but a younger man of the same name,
perhaps son of the preceding. For, first, the law which prohibited
re-election to the consulship remained legally in full force from
c. 603 (IV. II. Attempts at Reform) to 673, and it is not probable
that what was done in the case of Scipio Aemilianus and Marius was
done also for Flaccus. Secondly, there is no mention anywhere, when
either Flaccus is named, of a double consulship, not even where it
was necessary as in Cic. pro Flacc. 32, 77. Thirdly, the Lucius
Valerius Flaccus who was active in Rome in 669 as -princeps
senatus- and consequently of consular rank (Liv. 83), cannot have
been the consul of 668, for the latter had already at that time
departed for Asia and was probably already dead. The consul of
654, censor in 657, is the person whom Cicero (ad Att. viii. 3, 6)
mentions among the consulars present in Rome in 667; he was in 669
beyond doubt the oldest of the old censors living and thus fitted
to be -princeps senatus-; he was also the -interrex- and the
-magister equitum- of 672. On the other hand, the consul of 668,
who Perished at Nicomedia (p. 47), was the father of the Lucius
Flaccus defended by Cicero (pro Flacc. 25, 61, comp. 23, 55. 32, 77).
13. We can only suppose this to be the Brutus referred to, since
Marcus Brutus the father of the so-called Liberator was tribune of
the people in 671, and therefore could not command in the field.
16. Hardly any other name can well be concealed under the corrupt
reading in Liv. 89 -miam in Samnio-; comp. Strabo, v. 3, 10.
Chapter X
2. -Satius est uti regibus quam uti malis legibus- (Ad Herenn. ii.
36).
3. II. I. The Dictator, II. II. The Valerio-Horatian Laws, II. III.
Limitation of the Dictatorship
7. II. VII. Latins. To this was added the peculiar aggravation that,
while in other instances the right of the Latins, like that of
the -peregrini-, implied membership in a definite Latin or foreign
community, in this case--just as with the later freedmen of Latin
and deditician rights (comp. IV. VII. The Bestowal of the Franchise and
Its Limitations. n.)--it was without any such right of urban membership.
The consequence was, that these Latins were destitute of the privileges
attaching to an urban constitution, and, strictly speaking, could not
even make a testament, since no one could execute a testament otherwise
than according to the law of his town; they could doubtless, however,
acquire under Roman testaments, and among the living could hold dealings
with each other and with Romans or Latins in the forms of Roman law.
11. IV. III. Insignia of the Equites. Tradition has not indeed
informed us by whom that law was issued, which rendered it necessary
that the earlier privilege should be renewed by the Roscian theatre-law
of 687 (Becker-Friedlander, iv, 531); but under the circumstances
the author of that law was undoubtedly Sulla.
15. How many quaestors had been hitherto chosen annually, is not
known. In 487 the number stood at eight--two urban, two military,
and four naval, quaestors (II. VII. Quaestors of the Fleet,
II. VII. Intermediate Fuctionaries); to which there fell to be added
the quaestors employed in the provinces (III. III. Provincial Praetors).
For the naval quaestors at Ostia, Cales, and so forth were by no means
discontinued, and the military quaestors could not be employed
elsewhere, since in that case the consul, when he appeared as
commander-in-chief, would have been without a quaestor. Now, as
down to Sulla's time there were nine provinces, and moreover two
quaestors were sent to Sicily, he may possibly have found as many
as eighteen quaestors in existence. But as the number of the
supreme magistrates of this period was considerably less than that
of their functions (p. 120), and the difficulty thus arising was
constantly remedied by extension of the term of office and other
expedients, and as generally the tendency of the Roman government
was to limit as much as possible the number of magistrates, there
may have been more quaestorial functions than quaestors, and it may
be even that at this period no quaestor at all was sent to small
provinces such as Cilicia. Certainly however there were, already
before Sulla's time, more than eight quaestors.
The case is much the same with the advancement of the frontier;
we know that formerly the Aesis, and in Caesar's time the Rubico,
separated the Celtic land from Italy, but we do not know when the
boundary was shifted. From the circumstance indeed, that Marcus
Terentius Varro Lucullus as propraetor undertook a regulation of
the frontier in the district between the Aesis and Rubico (Orelli,
Inscr. 570), it has been inferred that that must still have been
provincial land at least in the year after Lucullus' praetorship 679,
since the propraetor had nothing to do on Italian soil. But it was
only within the -pomerium- that every prolonged -imperium- ceased of
itself; in Italy, on the other hand, such a prolonged -imperium- was
even under Sulla's arrangement--though not regularly existing--at
any rate allowable, and the office held by Lucullus was in any case
an extraordinary one. But we are able moreover to show when and
how Lucullus held such an office in this quarter. He was already
before the Sullan reorganization in 672 active as commanding
officer in this very district (p, 87), and was probably, just like
Pompeius, furnished by Sulla with propraetorian powers; in this
character he must have regulated the boundary in question in 672
or 673 (comp. Appian, i. 95). No inference therefore may be drawn
from this inscription as to the legal position of North Italy, and
least of all for the time after Sulla's dictatorship. On the other
hand a remarkable hint is contained in the statement, that Sulla
advanced the Roman -pomerium- (Seneca, de brev. vitae, 14; Dio,
xliii. 50); which distinction was by Roman state-law only accorded
to one who had advanced the bounds not of the empire, but of the
city--that is, the bounds of Italy (i. 128).
28. As two quaestors were sent to Sicily, and one to each of the
other provinces, and as moreover the two urban quaestors, the two
attached to the consuls in conducting war, and the four quaestors
of the fleet continued to subsist, nineteen magistrates were
annually required for this office. The department of the twentieth
quaestor cannot be ascertained.
29. The Italian confederacy was much older (II. VII. Italy and
The Italians); but it was a league of states, not, like the Sullan
Italy, a state-domain marked off as an unit within the Roman empire.
31. II. III. Combination of The Plebian Aristocracy and The Farmers
against The Nobility
Chapter XI
13. For example, in Judaea the town of Joppa paid 26,075 -modii-
of corn, the other Jews the tenth sheaf, to the native princes; to
which fell to be added the temple-tribute and the Sidonian payment
destined for the Romans. In Sicily too, in addition to the Roman
tenth, a very considerable local taxation was raised from property.
26. IV. V. Conflicts with the Ligurians. With this may be connected
the remark of the Roman agriculturist, Saserna, who lived after Cato
and before Varro (ap. Colum. i. 1, 5), that the culture of the vine
and olive was constantly moving farther to the north.--The decree of
the senate as to the translation of the treatise of Mago (IV. II.
The Italian Farmers) belongs also to this class of measures.
28. IV. VIII. Thrace and Macedonia Occupied by the Pontic Armies.
36. IV. VIII. Orders Issued from Ephesus for A General Massacre
37. IV. VIII. Thrace and Macedonia Occupied by the Pontic Armies.
46. III. III. Autonomy, III. VII. the State of Culture in Spain,
III. XII. Coins and Moneys
47. III. XII. Coins and Moneys
49. In the house, which Sulla inhabited when a young man, he paid
for the ground-floor a rent of 3000 sesterces, and the tenant of
the upper story a rent of 2000 sesterces (Plutarch, Sull. 1);
which, capitalized at two-thirds of the usual interest on capital,
yields nearly the above amount. This was a cheap dwelling. That a
rent of 6000 sesterces (60 pounds) in the capital is called a high
one in the case of the year 629 (Vell. ii. 10) must have been due
to special circumstances.
Chapter XII
10. IV. VI. Collision between the Senate and Equites in the
Administration of the Provinces; IV. IX. Siege of Praeneste
17. Cicero says that he treated his learned slave Dionysius more
respectfully than Scipio treated Panaetius, and in the same sense
it is said in Lucilius:--
Chapter XIII
9. I. XV. Masks
10. With these names there has been associated from ancient times
a series of errors. The utter mistake of Greek reporters, that
these farces were played at Rome in the Oscan language, is now with
justice universally rejected; but it is, on a closer consideration,
little short of impossible to bring these pieces, which are laid in
the midst of Latin town and country life, into relation with the
national Oscan character at all. The appellation of "Atellan play"
is to be explained in another way. The Latin farce with its fixed
characters and standing jests needed a permanent scenery: the fool-
world everywhere seeks for itself a local habitation. Of course
under the Roman stage-police none of the Roman communities, or of
the Latin communities allied with Rome, could be taken for this
purpose, although it was allowable to transfer the -togatae- to
these. But Atella, which, although destroyed de jure along with
Capua in 543 (III. VI. Capua Capitulates, III. VI. In Italy),
continued practically to subsist as a village inhabited by Roman
farmers, was adapted in every respect for the purpose. This conjecture
is changed into certainty by our observing that several of these farces
are laid in other communities within the domain of the Latin tongue,
which existed no longer at all, or no longer at any rate in the eye
of the law-such as the -Campani- of Pomponius and perhaps also his
-Adelphi- and his -Quinquatria- in Capua, and the -Milites Pometinenses-
of Novius in Suessa Pometia--while no existing community was subjected
to similar maltreatment. The real home of these pieces was
therefore Latium, their poetical stage was the Latinized Oscan
land; with the Oscan nation they have no connection. The statement
that a piece of Naevius (d. after 550) was for want of proper
actors performed by "Atellan players" and was therefore called
-personata- (Festus, s. v.), proves nothing against this view:
the appellation "Atellan players" comes to stand here proleptically,
and we might even conjecture from this passage that they were
formerly termed "masked players" (-personati-).
13. It deserves attention that the Greek farce was not only
especially at home in Lower Italy, but that several of its
pieces (e. g. among those of Sopater, the "Lentile-Porridge,"
the "Wooers of Bacchis," the "Valet of Mystakos," the "Bookworms,"
the "Physiologist") strikingly remind us of the Atellanae.
This composition of farces must have reached down to the time
at which the Greeks in and around Neapolis formed a circle
enclosed within the Latin-speaking Campania; for one of these
writers of farces, Blaesus of Capreae, bears even a Roman name
and wrote a farce "Saturnus."
16. Hitherto the person providing the play had been obliged to fit
up the stage and scenic apparatus out of the round sum assigned to
him or at his own expense, and probably much money would not often
be expended on these. But in 580 the censors made the erection of
the stage for the games of the praetors and aediles a matter of
special contract (Liv. xli. 27); the circumstance that the stage-
apparatus was now no longer erected merely for a single performance
must have led to a perceptible improvement of it.
18. The scenery of Pulcher must have been regularly painted, since
the birds are said to have attempted to perch on the tiles (Plin.
H. N. xxxv. 4, 23; Val. Max. ii. 4, 6). Hitherto the machinery for
thunder had consisted in the shaking of nails and stones in a
copper kettle; Pulcher first produced a better thunder by rolling
stones, which was thenceforth named "Claudian thunder" (Festus,
v. Claudiana, p. 57).
19. Among the few minor poems preserved from this epoch there
occurs the following epigram on this illustrious actor:--
The author of this epigram, Greek in its tone and inspired by Greek
enthusiasm for art, was no less a man than the conqueror of the
Cimbri, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, consul in 652.
39. Cato's book probably bore the title -De iuris disciplina-
(Gell. xiii. 20), that of Brutus the title -De iure civili- (Cic.
pro Cluent. 51, 141; De Orat. ii. 55, 223); that they were
essentially collections of opinions, is shown by Cicero (De Orat.
ii. 33, 142).
40. IV. VI. Collision between the Senate and Equites in the
Administration of the Provinces, pp. 84, 205
End of Book IV
* * * * *
THE HISTORY OF ROME: BOOK V
Preparer's Notes
2) Except for Greek, all literally cited non-English words that do not
refer to texts cited as academic references, words that in the source
manuscript appear italicized, are rendered with a single preceding,
and a single following dash; thus, -xxxx-.
8) Dr. Mommsen has given his dates in terms of Roman usage, A.U.C.;
that is, from the founding of Rome, conventionally taken to be 753 B. C.
To the end of each volume is appended a table of conversion between
the two systems.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
BOOK FIFTH
Goethe.
CHAPTER I
The Opposition
Jurists
Aristocrats Friendly to Reform
Democrats
When Sulla died in the year 676, the oligarchy which he had
restored ruled with absolute sway over the Roman state; but,
as it had been established by force, it still needed force
to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and open foes.
It was opposed not by any single party with objects clearly
expressed and under leaders distinctly acknowledged, but by a mass
of multifarious elements, ranging themselves doubtless
under the general name of the popular party, but in reality opposing
the Sullan organization of the commonwealth on very various grounds
and with very different designs. There were the men of positive
law who neither mingled in nor understood politics, but who detested
the arbitrary procedure of Sulla in dealing with the lives
and property of the burgesses. Even during Sulla's lifetime,
when all other opposition was silent, the strict jurists resisted
the regent; the Cornelian laws, for example, which deprived various
Italian communities of the Roman franchise, were treated
in judicial decisions as null and void; and in like manner the courts
held that, where a burgess had been made a prisoner of war and sold
into slavery during the revolution, his franchise was not forfeited.
There was, further, the remnant of the old liberal minority
in the senate, which in former times had laboured to effect
a compromise with the reform party and the Italians, and was now
in a similar spirit inclined to modify the rigidly oligarchic
constitution of Sulla by concessions to the Populares.
There were, moreover, the Populares strictly so called,
the honestly credulous narrow-minded radicals, who staked property
and life for the current watchwords of the party-programme,
only to discover with painful surprise after the victory
that they had been fighting not for a reality, but for a phrase.
Their special aim was to re-establish the tribunician power, which Sulla
had not abolished but had divested of its most essential prerogatives,
and which exercised over the multitude a charm all the more mysterious,
because the institution had no obvious practical use and was
in fact an empty phantom--the mere name of tribune of the people,
more than a thousand years later, revolutionized Rome.
Transpadanes
Freedmen
Capitalists
Proletarians of the Capital
The Dispossessed
The Proscribed and Their Adherents
To all these sections of the opposition there was added the whole
body of men of ruined fortunes. All the rabble high and low,
whose means and substance had been spent in refined or in vulgar
debauchery; the aristocratic lords, who had no farther mark
of quality than their debts; the Sullan troopers whom the regent's
fiat could transform into landholders but not into husbandmen,
and who, after squandering the first inheritance of the proscribed,
were longing to succeed to a second--all these waited only
the unfolding of the banner which invited them to fight against
the existing order of things, whatever else might be inscribed on it.
From a like necessity all the aspiring men of talent, in search
of popularity, attached themselves to the opposition; not only
those to whom the strictly closed circle of the Optimates denied
admission or at least opportunities for rapid promotion,
and who therefore attempted to force their way into the phalanx
and to break through the laws of oligarchic exclusiveness and seniority
by means of popular favour, but also the more dangerous men,
whose ambition aimed at something higher than helping to determine
the destinies of the world within the sphere of collegiate intrigues.
On the advocates' platform in particular--the only field of legal
opposition left open by Sulla--even in the regent's lifetime
such aspirants waged lively war against the restoration with the weapons
of formal jurisprudence and combative oratory: for instance,
the adroit speaker Marcus Tullius Cicero (born 3rd January 648),
son of a landholder of Arpinum, speedily made himself a name
by the mingled caution and boldness of his opposition to the dictator.
Such efforts were not of much importance, if the opponent desired
nothing farther than by their means to procure for himself a curule
chair, and then to sit in it in contentment for the rest of his life.
No doubt, if this chair should not satisfy a popular man
and Gaius Gracchus should find a successor, a struggle for life
or death was inevitable; but for the present at least no name could
be mentioned, the bearer of which had proposed to himself
any such lofty aim.
Such was the sort of opposition with which the oligarchic government
instituted by Sulla had to contend, when it had, earlier than
Sulla himself probably expected, been thrown by his death
on its own resources. The task was in itself far from easy, and it
was rendered more difficult by the other social and political evils
of this age--especially by the extraordinary double difficulty
of keeping the military chiefs in the provinces in subjection
to the supreme civil magistracy, and of dealing with the masses
of the Italian and extra-Italian populace accumulating in the capital,
and of the slaves living there to a great extent in de facto freedom,
without having troops at disposal. The senate was placed
as it were, in a fortress exposed and threatened on all sides,
and serious conflicts could not fail to ensue. But the means
of resistance organized by Sulla were considerable and lasting;
and although the majority of the nation was manifestly disinclined
to the government which Sulla had installed, and even animated
by hostile feelings towards it, that government might very well
maintain itself for a long time in its stronghold against
the distracted and confused mass of an opposition which was not agreed
either as to end or means, and, having no head, was broken up
into a hundred fragments. Only it was necessary that it should
be determined to maintain its position, and should bring
at least a spark of that energy, which had built the fortress,
to its defence; for in the case of a garrison which will not
defend itself, the greatest master of fortification constructs
his walls and moats in vain.
Want of Leaders
Coterie-Systems
Phillipus
Metellus, Catulus, the Luculli
Of the older generation the civil wars had left not a single man
of repute except the old shrewd and eloquent Lucius Philippus (consul
in 663), who, formerly of popular leanings,(5) thereafter leader
of the capitalist party against the senate,(6) and closely associated
with the Marians,(7) and lastly passing over to the victorious
oligarchy in sufficient time to earn thanks and commendation,(8)
had managed to escape between the parties. Among the men
of the following generation the most notable chiefs of the pure
aristocracy were Quintus Metellus Pius (consul in 674), Sulla's
comrade in dangers and victories; Quintus Lutatius Catulus, consul
in the year of Sulla's death, 676, the son of the victor of Vercellae;
and two younger officers, the brothers Lucius and Marcus Lucullus,
of whom the former had fought with distinction under Sulla
in Asia, the latter in Italy; not to mention Optimates like Quintus
Hortensius (640-704), who had importance only as a pleader,
or men like Decimus Junius Brutus (consul in 677), Mamercus
Aemilius Lepidus Livianus (consul in 677), and other such nullities,
whose best quality was a euphonious aristocratic name.
But even those four men rose little above the average calibre
of the Optimates of this age. Catulus was like his father a man of
refined culture and an honest aristocrat, but of moderate talents
and, in particular, no soldier. Metellus was not merely estimable
in his personal character, but an able and experienced officer;
and it was not so much on account of his close relations as a kinsman
and colleague with the regent as because of his recognized ability
that he was sent in 675, after resigning the consulship, to Spain,
where the Lusitanians and the Roman emigrants under Quintus
Sertorius were bestirring themselves afresh. The two Luculli
were also capable officers--particularly the elder, who combined
very respectable military talents with thorough literary culture
and leanings to authorship, and appeared honourable also as a man.
But, as statesmen, even these better aristocrats were not much less
remiss and shortsighted than the average senators of the time.
In presence of an outward foe the more eminent among them, doubtless,
proved themselves useful and brave; but no one of them evinced
the desire or the skill to solve the problems of politics proper,
and to guide the vessel of the state through the stormy sea of intrigues
and factions as a true pilot. Their political wisdom was limited
to a sincere belief in the oligarchy as the sole means of salvation,
and to a cordial hatred and courageous execration of demagogism
as well as of every individual authority which sought to emancipate
itself. Their petty ambition was contented with little.
The stories told of Metellus in Spain--that he not only allowed
himself to be delighted with the far from harmonious lyre
of the Spanish occasional poets, but even wherever he went had himself
received like a god with libations of wine and odours of incense,
and at table had his head crowned by descending Victories amidst
theatrical thunder with the golden laurel of the conqueror--
are no better attested than most historical anecdotes; but even
such gossip reflects the degenerate ambition of the generations
of Epigoni. Even the better men were content when they had gained
not power and influence, but the consulship and a triumph
and a place of honour in the senate; and at the very time
when with right ambition they would have just begun to be truly useful
to their country and their party, they retired from the political stage
to be lost in princely luxury. Men like Metellus and Lucius Lucullus
were, even as generals, not more attentive to the enlargement
of the Roman dominion by fresh conquests of kings and peoples than
to the enlargement of the endless game, poultry, and dessert lists
of Roman gastronomy by new delicacies from Africa and Asia Minor,
and they wasted the best part of their lives in more or less ingenious
idleness. The traditional aptitude and the individual self-denial,
on which all oligarchic government is based, were lost
in the decayed and artificially restored Roman aristocracy of this age;
in its judgment universally the spirit of clique was accounted
as patriotism, vanity as ambition, and narrow-mindedness as consistency.
Had the Sullan constitution passed into the guardianship of men
such as have sat in the Roman College of Cardinals or the Venetian
Council of Ten, we cannot tell whether the opposition would have been able
to shake it so soon; with such defenders every attack involved,
at all events, a serious peril.
Pompeius
Crassus
Lepidus
But even before the democrats moved in the capital, the democratic
emigrants had again bestirred themselves in Spain. The soul
of this movement was Quintus Sertorius. This excellent man,
a native of Nursia in the Sabine land, was from the first
of a tender and even soft organization--as his almost enthusiastic love
for his mother, Raia, shows--and at the same time of the most chivalrous
bravery, as was proved by the honourable scars which he brought
home from the Cimbrian, Spanish, and Italian wars. Although wholly
untrained as an orator, he excited the admiration of learned
advocates by the natural flow and the striking self-possession
of his address. His remarkable military and statesmanly talent
had found opportunity of shining by contrast, more particularly
in the revolutionary war which the democrats so wretchedly and stupidly
mismanaged; he was confessedly the only democratic officer
who knew how to prepare and to conduct war, and the only democratic
statesman who opposed the insensate and furious doings of his party
with statesmanlike energy. His Spanish soldiers called him the new
Hannibal, and not merely because he had, like that hero, lost
an eye in war. He in reality reminds us of the great Phoenician
by his equally cunning and courageous strategy, by his rare talent
of organizing war by means of war, by his adroitness in attracting
foreign nations to his interest and making them serviceable to his ends,
by his prudence in success and misfortune, by the quickness
of his ingenuity in turning to good account his victories
and averting the consequences of his defeats. It may be doubted
whether any Roman statesman of the earlier period, or of the present,
can be compared in point of versatile talent to Sertorius.
After Sulla's generals had compelled him to quit Spain,(15)
he had led a restless life of adventure along the Spanish and African
coasts, sometimes in league, sometimes at war, with the Cilician
pirates who haunted these seas, and with the chieftains
of the roving tribes of Libya. The victorious Roman restoration had
pursued him even thither: when he was besieging Tingis (Tangiers),
a corps under Pacciaecus from Roman Africa had come to the help
of the prince of the town; but Pacciaecus was totally defeated,
and Tingis was taken by Sertorius. On the report of such achievements
by the Roman refugee spreading abroad, the Lusitanians, who,
notwithstanding their pretended submission to the Roman supremacy,
practically maintained their independence, and annually fought
with the governors of Further Spain, sent envoys to Sertorius
in Africa, to invite him to join them, and to commit to him
the command of their militia.
Sertorius, who twenty years before had served under Titus Didius
in Spain and knew the resources of the land, resolved to comply
with the invitation, and, leaving behind a small detachment
on the Mauretanian coast, embarked for Spain (about 674).
The straits separating Spain and Africa were occupied by a Roman
squadron commanded by Cotta; to steal through it was impossible;
so Sertorius fought his way through and succeeded in reaching
the Lusitanians. There were not more than twenty Lusitanian
communities that placed themselves under his orders; and even
of "Romans" he mustered only 2600 men, a considerable part
of whom were deserters from the army of Pacciaecus or Africans
armed after the Roman style. Sertorius saw that everything depended on
his associating with the loose guerilla-bands a strong nucleus
of troops possessing Roman organization and discipline: for this end
he reinforced the band which he had brought with him by levying
4000 infantry and 700 cavalry, and with this one legion
and the swarms of Spanish volunteers advanced against the Romans.
The command in Further Spain was held by Lucius Fufidius,
who through his absolute devotion to Sulla--well tried amidst
the proscriptions--had risen from a subaltern to be propraetor;
he was totally defeated on the Baetis; 2000 Romans covered the field
of battle. Messengers in all haste summoned the governor
of the adjoining province of the Ebro, Marcus Domitius Calvinus,
to check the farther advance of the Sertorians; and there soon appeared
(675) also the experienced general Quintus Metellus, sent by Sulla
to relieve the incapable Fufidius in southern Spain. But they did
not succeed in mastering the revolt. In the Ebro province
not only was the army of Calvinus destroyed and he himself slain
by the lieutenant of Sertorius, the quaestor Lucius Hirtuleius,
but Lucius Manlius, the governor of Transalpine Gaul, who had crossed
the Pyrenees with three legions to the help of his colleague,
was totally defeated by the same brave leader. With difficulty
Manlius escaped with a few men to Ilerda (Lerida) and thence
to his province, losing on the march his whole baggage through
a sudden attack of the Aquitanian tribes. In Further Spain Metellus
penetrated into the Lusitanian territory; but Sertorius succeeded
during the siege of Longobriga (not far from the mouth
of the Tagus) in alluring a division under Aquinus into an ambush,
and thereby compelling Metellus himself to raise the siege
and to evacuate the Lusitanian territory. Sertorius followed him,
defeated on the Anas (Guadiana) the corps of Thorius, and inflicted
vast damage by guerilla warfare on the army of the commander-in-
chief himself. Metellus, a methodical and somewhat clumsy
tactician, was in despair as to this opponent, who obstinately
declined a decisive battle, but cut off his supplies
and communications and constantly hovered round him on all sides.
Organizations of Sertorius
Amidst this state of matters the sudden death of Sulla took place
(676). So long as the man lived, at whose voice a trained
and trustworthy army of veterans was ready any moment to rise,
the oligarchy might tolerate the almost (as it seemed)
definite abandonment of the Spanish provinces to the emigrants,
and the election of the leader of the opposition at home to be supreme
magistrate, at all events as transient misfortunes; and in their
shortsighted way, yet not wholly without reason, might cherish
confidence either that the opposition would not venture to proceed
to open conflict, or that, if it did venture, he who had twice
saved the oligarchy would set it up a third time. Now the state
of things was changed. The democratic Hotspurs in the capital,
long impatient of the endless delay and inflamed by the brilliant news
from Spain, urged that a blow should be struck; and Lepidus,
with whom the decision for the moment lay, entered into the proposal
with all the zeal of a renegade and with his own characteristic
frivolity. For a moment it seemed as if the torch which kindled
the funeral pile of the regent would also kindle civil war;
but the influence of Pompeius and the temper of the Sullan veterans
induced the opposition to let the obsequies of the regent
pass over in peace.
Insurrection of Lepidus
All this took place under the eyes of the government The consul
Catulus as well as the more judicious Optimates urged an immediate
decisive interference and suppression of the revolt in the bud;
the indolent majority, however, could not make up their minds to begin
the struggle, but tried to deceive themselves as long as possible
by a system of compromises and concessions. Lepidus also on his
part at first entered into it. The suggestion, which proposed
a restoration of the prerogatives taken away from the tribunes
of the people, he as well as his colleague Catulus repelled.
On the other hand, the Gracchan distribution of grain
was to a limited extent re-established. According to it not all
(as according to the Sempronian law) but only a definite number--
presumably 40,000--of the poorer burgesses appear to have received
the earlier largesses, as Gracchus had fixed them, of five -modii-
monthly at the price of 6 1/3 -asses- (3 pence)--a regulation
which occasioned to the treasury an annual net loss of at least
40,000 pounds.(19) The opposition, naturally as little satisfied
as it was decidedly emboldened by this partial concession, displayed
all the more rudeness and violence in the capital; and in Etruria,
the true centre of all insurrections of the Italian proletariate,
civil war already broke out, the dispossessed Faesulans resumed
possession of their lost estates by force of arms, and several
of the veterans settled there by Sulla perished in the tumult.
The senate on learning what had occurred resolved to send the two consuls
thither, in order to raise troops and suppress the insurrection.(20)
It was impossible to adopt a more irrational course. The senate,
in presence of the insurrection, evinced its pusillanimity
and its fears by the re-establishment of the corn-law; in order
to be relieved from a street-riot, it furnished the notorious
head of the insurrection with an army; and, when the two consuls
were bound by the most solemn oath which could be contrived not to turn
the arms entrusted to them against each other, it must have required
the superhuman obduracy of oligarchic consciences to think of erecting
such a bulwark against the impending insurrection. Of course Lepidus
armed in Etruria not for the senate, but for the insurrection--
sarcastically declaring that the oath which he had taken bound him
only for the current year. The senate put the oracular machinery
in motion to induce him to return, and committed to him the conduct
of the impending consular elections; but Lepidus evaded compliance,
and, while messengers passed to and fro and the official year drew
to an end amidst proposals of accommodation, his force swelled to an army.
When at length, in the beginning of the following year (677),
the definite order of the senate was issued to Lepidus to return
without delay, the proconsul haughtily refused obedience,
and demanded in his turn the renewal of the former tribunician power,
the reinstatement of those who had been forcibly ejected
from their civic rights and their property, and, besides this,
his own re-election as consul for the current year or, in other words,
the -tyrannis- in legal form.
Thus war was declared. The senatorial party could reckon, in addition to
the Sullan veterans whose civil existence was threatened by Lepidus,
upon the army assembled by the proconsul Catulus; and so, in compliance
with the urgent warnings of the more sagacious, particularly of Philippus,
Catulus was entrusted by the senate with the defence of the capital
and the repelling of the main force of the democratic party stationed
in Etruria. At the same time Gnaeus Pompeius was despatched with another
corps to wrest from his former protege the valley of the Po, which was held
by Lepidus' lieutenant, Marcus Brutus. While Pompeius speedily
accomplished his commission and shut up the enemy's general closely
in Mutina, Lepidus appeared before the capital in order to conquer
it for the revolution as Marius had formerly done by storm.
The right bank of the Tiber fell wholly into his power, and he was able
even to cross the river. The decisive battle was fought
on the Campus Martius, close under the walls of the city.
But Catulus conquered; and Lepidus was compelled to retreat to Etruria,
while another division, under his son Scipio, threw itself
into the fortress of Alba. Thereupon the rising was substantially
atan end. Mutina surrendered to Pompeius; and Brutus was,
notwithstanding the safe-conduct promised to him, subsequently
put to death by order of that general. Alba too was, after a long siege,
reduced by famine, and the leader there was likewise executed.
Lepidus, pressed on two sides by Catulus and Pompeius, fought another
engagement on the coast of Etruria in order merely to procure
the means of retreat, and then embarked at the port of Cosa for Sardinia
from which point he hoped to cut off the supplies of the capital,
and to obtain communication with the Spanish insurgents.
But the governor of the island opposed to him a vigorous resistance;
and he himself died, not long after his landing, of consumption (677),
whereupon the war in Sardinia came to an end. A part of his soldiers
dispersed; with the flower of the insurrectionary army
and with a well-filled chest the late praetor, Marcus Perpenna,
proceeded to Liguria, and thence to Spain to join the Sertorians.
The oligarchy was thus victorious over Lepidus; but it found itself
compelled by the dangerous turn of the Sertorian war to concessions,
which violated the letter as well as the spirit of the Sullan
constitution. It was absolutely necessary to send a strong
army and an able general to Spain; and Pompeius indicated,
very plainly, that he desired, or rather demanded, this commission.
The pretension was bold. It was already bad enough that they
had allowed this secret opponent again to attain an extraordinary
command in the pressure of the Lepidian revolution; but it was far
more hazardous, in disregard of all the rules instituted by Sulla
for the magisterial hierarchy, to invest a man who had hitherto
filled no civil office with one of the most important ordinary
provincial governorships, under circumstances in which the observance
of the legal term of a year was not to be thought of.
The oligarchy had thus, even apart from the respect due to their
general Metellus, good reason to oppose with all earnestness
this new attempt of the ambitious youth to perpetuate his exceptional
position. But this was not easy. In the first place, they had
not a single man fitted for the difficult post of general in Spain.
Neither of the consuls of the year showed any desire to measure
himself against Sertorius; and what Lucius Philippus said in a full
meeting of the senate had to be admitted as too true--that, among
all the senators of note, not one was able and willing to command
in a serious war. Yet they might, perhaps, have got over this,
and after the manner of oligarchs, when they had no capable candidate,
have filled the place with some sort of makeshift, if Pompeius had
merely desired the command and had not demanded it at the head
of an army. He had already lent a deaf ear to the injunctions
of Catulus that he should dismiss the army; it was at least doubtful
whether those of the senate would find a better reception,
and the consequences of a breach no one could calculate--
the scale of aristocracy might very easily mount up, if the sword
of a well-known general were thrown into the opposite scale.
So the majority resolved on concession. Not from the people,
which constitutionally ought to have been consulted in a case
where a private man was to be invested with the supreme magisterial
power, but from the senate, Pompeius received proconsular authority
and the chief command in Hither Spain; and, forty days after he had
received it, crossed the Alps in the summer of 677.
Pompeius in Gaul
Pompeius Defeated
Victories of Metellus
For five years the Sertorian war thus continued, and still
there seemed no prospect of its termination. The state suffered
from it beyond description. The flower of the Italian youth perished
amid the exhausting fatigues of these campaigns. The public treasury
was not only deprived of the Spanish revenues, but had annually
to send to Spain for the pay and maintenance of the Spanish armies
very considerable sums, which the government hardly knew how
to raise. Spain was devastated and impoverished, and the Roman
civilization, which unfolded so fair a promise there, received
a severe shock; as was naturally to be expected in the case
ofan insurrectionary war waged with so much bitterness,
and but too often occasioning the destruction of whole communities.
Even the towns which adhered to the dominant party in Rome had countless
hardships to endure; those situated on the coast had to be provided
with necessaries by the Roman fleet, and the situation of the faithful
communities in the interior was almost desperate. Gaul suffered
hardly less, partly from the requisitions for contingents
of infantry and cavalry, for grain and money, partly
from the oppressive burden of the winter-quarters, which rose
to an intolerable degree in consequence of the bad harvest of 680;
almost all the local treasuries were compelled to betake themselves
to the Roman bankers, and to burden themselves with a crushing load
of debt. Generals and soldiers carried on the war with reluctance.
The generals had encountered an opponent far superior in talent,
a tough and protracted resistance, a warfare of very serious perils
and of successes difficult to be attained and far from brilliant;
it was asserted that Pompeius was scheming to get himself recalled
from Spain and entrusted with a more desirable command somewhere
else. The soldiers, too, found little satisfaction in a campaign
in which not only was there nothing to be got save hard blows
and worthless booty, but their very pay was doled out to them
with extreme irregularity. Pompeius reported to the senate, at the end
of 679, that the pay was two years in arrear, and that the army
was threatening to break up. The Roman government might certainly
have obviated a considerable portion of these evils, if they could have
prevailed on themselves to carry on the Spanish war with less
remissness, to say nothing of better will. In the main, however,
it was neither their fault nor the fault of their generals
that a genius so superior as that of Sertorius was able to carry on
this petty warfare year after year, despite of all numerical
and military superiority, on ground so thoroughly favourable
to insurrectionary and piratical warfare. So little could its end
be foreseen, that the Sertorian insurrection seemed rather
as if it would become intermingled with other contemporary revolts
and thereby add to its dangerous character. Just at that time
the Romans were contending on every sea with piratical fleets,
in Italy with the revolted slaves, in Macedonia with the tribes
on the lower Danube; and in the east Mithradates, partly induced
by the successes of the Spanish insurrection, resolved once more
to try the fortune of arms. That Sertorius had formed connections
with the Italian and Macedonian enemies of Rome, cannot be distinctly
affirmed, although he certainly was in constant intercourse
with the Marians in Italy. With the pirates, on the other hand,
he had previously formed an avowed league, and with the Pontic king--
with whom he had long maintained relations through the medium
of the Roman emigrants staying at his court--he now concluded
a formal treaty of alliance, in which Sertorius ceded to the king
the client-states of Asia Minor, but not the Roman province of Asia,
and promised, moreover, to send him an officer qualified to lead
his troops, and a number of soldiers, while the king, in turn,
bound himself to transmit to Sertorius forty ships and 3000 talents
(720,000 pounds). The wise politicians in the capital were already
recalling the time when Italy found itself threatened by Philip
from the east and by Hannibal from the west; they conceived
that the new Hannibal, just like his predecessor, after having
by himself subdued Spain, could easily arrive with the forces
of Spain in Italy sooner than Pompeius, in order that,
like the Phoenician formerly, he might summon the Etruscans
and Samnites to arms against Rome.
Assassination of Sertorius
CHAPTER II
External Relations
Dalmato-Macedonian Expeditions
Piracy
Organization of Piracy
Asiatic Relations
Tigranes and the New Great-Kingdom of Armenia
Cappadocia Armenian
Mithradates
On the other side, too, there was no desire for war. Tigranes
had no reason to wish it, when Rome even without war abandoned
to him all its allies. Mithradates, who was no mere sultan and had
enjoyed opportunity enough, amidst good and bad fortune, of gaining
experience regarding friends and foes, knew very well that in a second
Roman war he would very probably stand quite as much alone
as in the first, and that he could follow no more prudent course
than to keep quiet and to strengthen his kingdom in the interior.
That he was in earnest with his peaceful declarations, he had
sufficiently proved in the conference with Murena.(9) He continued
to avoid everything which would compel the Roman government
to abandon its passive attitude.
Apprehensions of Rome
But as the first Mithradatic war had arisen without any of the partie
properly desiring it, so now there grew out of the opposition
of interests mutual suspicion, and out of this suspicion
mutual preparations for defence; and these, by their very gravity,
ultimately led to an open breach. That distrust of her own readiness
to fight and preparation for fighting, which had for long governed
the policy of Rome--a distrust, which the want of standing armies
and the far from exemplary character of the collegiate rule
render sufficiently intelligible--made it, as it were, an axiom
of her policy to pursue every war not merely to the vanquishing,
but to the annihilation of her opponent; in this point of view
the Romans were from the outset as little content with the peace
of Sulla, as they had formerly been with the terms which Scipio
Africanus had granted to the Carthaginians. The apprehension often
expressed that a second attack by the Pontic king was imminent,
was in some measure justified by the singular resemblance between
the present circumstances and those which existed twelve years before.
Once more a dangerous civil war coincided with serious armaments
of Mithradates; once more the Thracians overran Macedonia,
and piratical fleets covered the Mediterranean; emissaries were coming
and going--as formerly between Mithradates and the Italians--
so now between the Roman emigrants in Spain and those at the court
of Sinope. As early as the beginning of 677 it was declared
in the senate that the king was only waiting for the opportunity
of falling upon Roman Asia during the Italian civil war;
the Roman armies in Asia and Cilicia were reinforced
to meet possible emergencies.
Apprehensions of Mithradates
Bithynia Roman
Cyrene a Roman Province
Outbreak of the Mithradatic War
Preparations of Mithradates
Roman Preparations
On the Roman side there was selected for the conduct of the war
in the first rank the consul of 680, Lucius Lucullus, who as governor
of Asia and Cilicia was placed at the head of the four legions
stationed in Asia Minor and of a fifth brought by him from Italy,
and was directed to penetrate with this army, amounting to 30,000
infantry and 1600 cavalry, through Phrygia into the kingdom
of Pontus. His colleague Marcus Cotta proceeded with the fleet
and another Roman corps to the Propontis, to cover Asia and Bithynia.
Lastly, a general arming of the coasts and particularly
of the Thracian coast more immediately threatened by the Pontic fleet,
was enjoined; and the task of clearing all the seas and coasts
from the pirates and their Pontic allies was, by extraordinary decree,
entrusted to a single magistrate, the choice falling on the praetor
Marcus Antonius, the son of the man who thirty years before had
first chastised the Cilician corsairs.(12) Moreover, the senate
placed at the disposal of Lucullus a sum of 72,000,000 sesterces
(700,000 pounds), in order to build a fleet; which, however,
Lucullus declined. From all this we see that the Roman government
recognized the root of the evil in the neglect of their marine,
and showed earnestness in the matter at least so far as
their decrees reached.
Maritime War
Mithradates Driven Back to Pontus
Victory of Cabira
The Roman troops overran all Pontus and Lesser Armenia, and as
far as Trapezus the flat country submitted without resistance
to the conqueror. The commanders of the royal treasure-houses also
surrendered after more or less delay, and delivered up their stores
of money. The king ordered that the women of the royal harem--his
sisters, his numerous wives and concubines--as it was not possible
to secure their flight, should all be put to death by one of his
eunuchs at Pharnacea (Kerasunt). The towns alone offered
obstinate resistance. It is true that the few in the interior--
Cabira, Amasia, Eupatoria--were soon in the power of the Romans;
but the larger maritime towns, Amisus and Sinope in Pontus,
Amastris in Paphlagonia, Tius and the Pontic Heraclea in Bithynia,
defended themselves with desperation, partly animated by attachment
to the king and to their free Hellenic constitution which he had
protected, partly overawed by the bands of corsairs whom the king
had called to his aid. Sinope and Heraclea even sent forth vessels
against the Romans; and the squadron of Sinope seized a Roman
flotilla which was bringing corn from the Tauric peninsula
for the army of Lucullus. Heraclea did not succumb till after
a two years' siege, when the Roman fleet had cut off the city
from intercourse with the Greek towns on the Tauric peninsula and treason
had broken out in the ranks of the garrison. When Amisus was reduced
to extremities, the garrison set fire to the town, and under cover
of the flames took to their ships. In Sinope, where the daring
pirate-captain Seleucus and the royal eunuch Bacchides conducted
the defence, the garrison plundered the houses before it withdrew,
and set on fire the ships which it could not take along with it;
it is said that, although the greater portion of the defenders
were enabled to embark, 8000 corsairs were there put to death
by Lucullus. These sieges of towns lasted for two whole years
and more after the battle of Cabira (682-684); Lucullus prosecuted
them in great part by means of his lieutenants, while he himself
regulated the affairs of the province of Asia, which demanded
and obtained a thorough reform.
Difficulties to Be Encountered
All the Armenian Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans
But while the troublesome temper of the government and of the soldier
thus threatened the victorious general with recall and mutiny,
he himself continued like a desperate gambler to increase
his stake and his risk. He did not indeed march against the Parthians
but when Tigranes showed himself neither ready to make peace
nor disposed, as Lucullus wished, to risk a second pitched
battle, Lucullus resolved to advance from Tigranocerta, through
the difficult mountain-country along the eastern shore of the lake
of Van, into the valley of the eastern Euphrates (or the Arsanias,
now Myrad-Chai), and thence into that of the Araxes, where,
on the northern slope of Ararat, lay Artaxata the capital of Armenia
proper, with the hereditary castle and the harem of the king.
He hoped, by threatening the king's hereditary residence,
to compel him to fight either on the way or at any rate before
Artaxata. It was inevitably necessary to leave behind a division
at Tigranocerta; and, as the marching army could not possibly be
further reduced, no course was left but to weaken the position
in Pontus and to summon troops thence to Tigranocerta. The main
difficulty, however, was the shortness of the Armenian summer,
so inconvenient for military enterprises. On the tableland
of Armenia, which lies 5000 feet and more above the level of the sea,
the corn at Erzeroum only germinates in the beginning of June,
and the winter sets in with the harvest in September; Artaxata
had to be reached and the campaign had to be ended in four
months at the utmost.
So the spring of 687 came on. The reunion of the army in Nisibis,
the idleness of winter-quarters, the frequent absence of the general,
had meanwhile increased the insubordination of the troops;
not only did they vehemently demand to be led back, but it was already
tolerably evident that, if the general refused to lead them home,
they would break up of themselves. The supplies were scanty;
Fannius and Triarius, in their distress, sent the most urgent
entreaties to the general to furnish aid. With a heavy heart
Lucullus resolved to yield to necessity, to give up Nisibis
and Tigranocerta, and, renouncing all the brilliant hopes of his
Armenian expedition, to return to the right bank of the Euphrates.
Fannius was relieved; but in Pontus the help was too late.
Triarius, not strong enough to fight with Mithradates, had taken
up a strong position at Gaziura (Turksal on the Iris, to the west
of Tokat), while the baggage was left behind at Dadasa.
But when Mithradates laid siege to the latter place, the Roman soldiers,
apprehensive for their property, compelled their leader to leave
his secure position, and to give battle to the king between Gaziura
and Ziela (Zilleh) on the Scotian heights.
Along with this defeat came the outbreak of the military conspiracy.
At this very time news arrived from Rome that the people had resolved
to grant a discharge to the soldiers whose legal term of service had
expired, to wit, to the Fimbrians, and to entrust the chief command
in Pontus and Bithynia to one of the consuls of the current year:
the successor of Lucullus, the consul Manius Acilius Glabrio,
had already landed in Asia Minor. The disbanding of the bravest
and most turbulent legions and the recall of the commander-in-chief,
in connection with the impression produced by the defeat of Ziela,
dissolved all the bonds of authority in the army just when the general
had most urgent need of their aid. Near Talaura in Lesser Armenia
he confronted the Pontic troops, at whose head Tigranes' son-in-law,
Mithradates of Media, had already engaged the Romans successfully
in a cavalry conflict; the main force of the great-king was advancing
to the same point from Armenia. Lucullus sent to Quintus Marcius
the new governor of Cilicia, who had just arrived on the way
to his province with three legions in Lycaonia, to obtain help from him;
Marcius declared that his soldiers refused to march to Armenia.
He sent to Glabrio with the request that he would take up the supreme
command committed to him by the people; Glabrio showed still less
inclination to undertake this task, which had now become so difficult
and hazardous. Lucullus, compelled to retain the command,
with the view of not being obliged to fight at Talaura against
the Armenian and the Pontic armies conjoined, ordered a movement
against the advancing Armenians.
The soldiers obeyed the order to march; but, when they reached
the point where the routes to Armenia and Cappadocia diverged,
the bulk of the army took the latter, and proceeded to the province
of Asia. There the Fimbrians demanded their immediate discharge;
and although they desisted from this at the urgent entreaty
of the commander-in-chief and the other corps, they yet persevered
in their purpose of disbanding if the winter should come on without
an enemy confronting them; which accordingly was the case.
Mithradates not only occupied once more almost his whole kingdom,
but his cavalry ranged over all Cappadocia and as far as Bithynia;
king Ariobarzanes sought help equally in vain from Quintus Marcius,
from Lucullus, and from Glabrio. It was a strange, almost
incredible issue for a war conducted in a manner so glorious.
If we look merely to military achievements, hardly any other Roman
general accomplished so much with so trifling means as Lucullus;
the talent and the fortune of Sulla seemed to have devolved on this
his disciple. That under the circumstances the Roman army should
have returned from Armenia to Asia Minor uninjured, is a military
miracle which, so far as we can judge, far excels the retreat
of Xenophon; and, although mainly doubtless to be explained
by the solidity of the Roman, and the inefficiency of the Oriental,
system of war, it at all events secures to the leader of this expedition
an honourable name in the foremost rank of men of military
capacity. If the name of Lucullus is not usually included among these,
it is to all appearance simply owing to the fact that no narrative
of his campaigns which is in a military point of view even tolerable
has come down to us, and to the circumstance that in everything
and particularly in war, nothing is taken into account
but the final result; and this, in reality, was equivalent
to a complete defeat. Through the last unfortunate turn of things,
and principally through the mutiny of the soldiers, all the results
of an eight years' war had been lost; in the winter of 687-688
the Romans again stood exactly at the same spot
as in the winter of 679-680.
The maritime war against the pirates, which began at the same time
with the continental war and was all along most closely connected
with it, yielded no better results. It has been already mentioned
(20) that the senate in 680 adopted the judicious resolution
to entrust the task of clearing the seas from the corsairs
to a single admiral in supreme command, the praetor Marcus Antonius.
But at the very outset they had made an utter mistake in the choice
of the leader; or rather those, who had carried this measure
so appropriate in itself, had not taken into account that in the senate
all personal questions were decided by the influence of Cethegus(21)
and similar coterie-considerations. They had moreover
neglected to furnish the admiral of their choice with money
and ships in a manner befitting his comprehensive task,
so that with his enormous requisitions he was almost as burdensome
to the provincials whom he befriended as were the corsairs.
Cretan War
Servile Disturbances
Just at that time the pirates commanded not merely the Sicilian
waters, but even the port of Syracuse;(26) with the help of their
boats Spartacus proposed to throw a corps into Sicily, where the slaves
only waited an impulse to break out a third time. The march to Rhegium
was accomplished; but the corsairs, perhaps terrified by the coastguards
established in Sicily by the praetor Gaius Verres, perhaps also bribed
by the Romans, took from Spartacus the stipulated hire without performing
the service for which it was given. Crassus meanwhile had followed
the robber-army nearly as far as the mouth, of the Crathis,
and, like Scipio before Numantia, ordered his soldiers,
seeing that they did not fight as they ought, to construct
an entrenched wall of the length of thirty-five miles,
which shut off the Bruttian peninsula from the rest of Italy,(27)
intercepted the insurgent army on the return from Rhegium,
and cut off its supplies. But in a dark winter night Spartacus
broke through the lines of the enemy, and in the spring of 683(28)
was once more in Lucania. The laborious work had thus been in vain.
Crassus began to despair of accomplishing his task and demanded
that the senate should for his support recall to Italy the armies
stationed in Macedonia under Marcus Lucullus and in Hither Spain
under Gnaeus Pompeius.
This extreme step however was not needed; the disunion and the arrogance
of the robber-bands sufficed again to frustrate their successes.
Once more the Celts and Germans broke off from the league of which
the Thracian was the head and soul, in order that, under leaders
of their own nation Gannicus and Castus, they might separately
fall victims to the sword of the Romans. Once, at the Lucanian
lake the opportune appearance of Spartacus saved them,
and thereupon they pitched their camp near to his; nevertheless
Crassus succeeded in giving employment to Spartacus by means
of the cavalry, and meanwhile surrounded the Celtic bands and compelled
them to a separate engagement, in which the whole body--numbering
it is said 12,300 combatants--fell fighting bravely all on the spot
and with their wounds in front. Spartacus then attempted to throw
himself with his division into the mountains round Petelia (near
Strongoli in Calabria), and signally defeated the Roman vanguard,
which followed his retreat But this victory proved more injurious
to the victor than to the vanquished. Intoxicated by success,
the robbers refused to retreat farther, and compelled their general
to lead them through Lucania towards Apulia to face the last decisive
struggle. Before the battle Spartacus stabbed his horse:
as in prosperity and adversity he had faithfully kept by his men,
he now by that act showed them that the issue for him and for all
was victory or death. In the battle also he fought with the courage
of a lion; two centurions fell by his hand; wounded and on his knees
he still wielded his spear against the advancing foes.
Thus the great robber-captain and with him the best of his comrades
died the death of free men and of honourable soldiers (683).
After the dearly-bought victory the troops who had achieved it,
and those of Pompeius that had meanwhile after conquering the Sertorians
arrived from Spain, instituted throughout Apulia and Lucania a manhunt,
such as there had never been before, to crush out the last sparks
of the mighty conflagration. Although in the southern districts,
where for instance the little town of Tempsa was seized in 683
by a gang of robbers, and in Etruria, which was severely affected
by Sulla's evictions, there was by no means as yet a real public
tranquillity, peace was officially considered as re-established
in Italy. At least the disgracefully lost eagles were recovered--
after the victory over the Celts alone five of them were brought
in; and along the road from Capua to Rome the six thousand crosses
bearing captured slaves testified to the re-establishment of order,
and to the renewed victory of acknowledged law over its living
property that had rebelled.
Let us look back on the events which fill up the ten years
of the Sullan restoration. No one of the movements, external
or internal, which occurred during this period--neither the insurrection
of Lepidus, nor the enterprises of the Spanish emigrants, nor the wars
in Thrace and Macedonia and in Asia Minor, nor the risings
of the pirates and the slaves--constituted of itself a mighty danger
necessarily affecting the vital sinews of the nation; and yet
the state had in all these struggles well-nigh fought for its
very existence. The reason was that the tasks were everywhere
left unperformed, so long as they might still have been performed
with ease; the neglect of the simplest precautionary measures produced
the most dreadful mischiefs and misfortunes, and transformed
dependent classes and impotent kings into antagonists on a footing
of equality. The democracy and the servile insurrection
were doubtless subdued; but such as the victories were, the victor
was neither inwardly elevated nor outwardly strengthened by them.
It was no credit to Rome, that the two most celebrated generals
of the government party had during a struggle of eight years marked
by more defeats than victories failed to master the insurgent chief
Sertorius and his Spanish guerillas, and that it was only
the dagger of his friends that decided the Sertorian war in favour
of the legitimate government. As to the slaves, it was far less
an honour to have conquered them than a disgrace to have confronted
them in equal strife for years. Little more than a century had
elapsed since the Hannibalic war; it must have brought a blush
to the cheek of the honourable Roman, when he reflected
on the fearfully rapid decline of the nation since that great age.
Then the Italian slaves stood like a wall against the veterans
of Hannibal; now the Italian militia were scattered like chaff before
the bludgeons of their runaway serfs. Then every plain captain
acted in case of need as general, and fought often without success,
but always with honour; now it was difficult to find among
all the officers of rank a leader of even ordinary efficiency.
Then the government preferred to take the last farmer from the plough
rather than forgo the acquisition of Spain and Greece; now they were
on the eve of again abandoning both regions long since acquired,
merely that they might be able to defend themselves against
the insurgent slaves at home. Spartacus too as well as Hannibal
had traversed Italy with an army from the Po to the Sicilian straits,
beaten both consuls, and threatened Rome with blockade;
the enterprise which had needed the greatest general of antiquity
to conduct it against the Rome of former days could be undertaken
against the Rome of the present by a daring captain of banditti.
Was there any wonder that no fresh life sprang out of such victories
over insurgents and robber-chiefs?
CHAPTER III
There was no lack, indeed, of men who had in view the re-establishment
of the Gracchan constitution, or of projects to attain piecemeal
in the way of constitutional reform what Lepidus and Sertorius
had attempted by the path of revolution. The government
had already under the pressure of the agitation of Lepidus
immediately after the death of Sulla consented to a limited revival
of the largesses of grain (676); and it did, moreover,
what it could to satisfy the proletariate of the capital in regard
to this vital question. When, notwithstanding those distributions,
the high price of grain occasioned chiefly by piracy produced
so oppressive a dearth in Rome as to lead to a violent tumult
in the streets in 679, extraordinary purchases of Sicilian grain
on account of the government relieved for the time the most severe
distress; and a corn-law brought in by the consuls of 681 regulated
for the future the purchases of Sicilian grain and furnished
the government, although at the expense of the provincials,
with better means of obviating similar evils. But the less material
points of difference also--the restoration of the tribunician power
in its old compass, and the setting aside of the senatorial tribunals--
ceased not to form subjects of popular agitation; and in their
case the government offered more decided resistance. The dispute
regarding the tribunician magistracy was opened as early as 678,
immediately after the defeat of Lepidus, by the tribune of the people
Lucius Sicinius, perhaps a descendant of the man of the same
name who had first filled this office more than four hundred years
before; but it failed before the resistance offered to it
by the active consul Gaius Curio. In 680 Lucius Quinctius resumed
the agitation, but was induced by the authority of the consul Lucius
Lucullus to desist from his purpose. The matter was taken up
in the following year with greater zeal by Gaius Licinius Macer, who--
in a way characteristic of the period--carried his literary studies
into public life, and, just as he had read in the Annals,
counselled the burgesses to refuse the conscription.
But with all this no progress was made. There was scandal
and outcry enough, but no real result was attained by this exposure
of the government according to and beyond its deserts. The material
power still lay, so long as there was no military interference,
in the hands of the burgesses of the capital; and the "people"
that thronged the streets of Rome and made magistrates and laws
in the Forum, was in fact nowise better than the governing senate.
The government no doubt had to come to terms with the multitude,
where its own immediate interest was at stake; this was the reason
for the renewal of the Sempronian corn-law. But it was not
to be imagined that this populace would have displayed earnestness
on behalf of an idea or even of a judicious reform. What Demosthenes
said of his Athenians was justly applied to the Romans
of this period--the people were very zealous for action, so long
as they stood round the platform and listened to proposals of reforms;
but when they went home, no one thought further of what he had
heard in the market-place. However those democratic agitators might
stir the fire, it was to no purpose, for the inflammable material
was wanting. The government knew this, and allowed no sort
of concession to be wrung from it on important questions
of principle; at the utmost it consented (about 682) to grant
amnesty to a portion of those who had become exiles with Lepidus.
Any concessions that did take place, came not so much from the pressure
of the democracy as from the attempts at mediation of the moderate
aristocracy. But of the two laws which the single still surviving
leader of this section Gaius Cotta carried in his consulate of 679,
that which concerned the tribunals was again set aside
in the very next year; and the second, which abolished the Sullan
enactment that those who had held the tribunate should be disqualified
for undertaking other magistracies, but allowed the other limitations
to continue, merely--like every half-measure--excited the displeasure
of both parties.
The party of conservatives friendly to reform which lost
its most notable head by the early death of Cotta occurring soon
after (about 681) dwindled away more and more--crushed between
the extremes, which were becoming daily more marked. But of these
the party of the government, wretched and remiss as it was,
necessarily retained the advantage in presence of the equally
wretched and equally remiss opposition.
The democrats and Pompeius, however, were not the sole parties
to the league. Marcus Crassus was in a similar situation
with Pompeius. Although a Sullan like the latter, his politics
were quite as in the case of Pompeius preeminently of a personal kind,
and by no means those of the ruling oligarchy; and he too was now
in Italy at the head of a large and victorious army, with which
he had just suppressed the rising of the slaves. He had to choose
whether he would ally himself with the oligarchy against the coalition,
or enter that coalition: he chose the latter, which was doubtless
the safer course. With his colossal wealth and his influence
on the clubs of the capital he was in any case a valuable
ally; but under the prevailing circumstances it was an incalculable
gain, when the only army, with which the senate could have met
the troops of Pompeius, joined the attacking force. The democrats
moreover, who were probably somewhat uneasy at their alliance
with that too powerful general, were not displeased to see
a counterpoise and perhaps a future rival associated with him
in the person of Marcus Crassus.
Thus in the summer of 683 the first coalition took place between
the democracy on the one hand, and the two Sullan generals Gnaeus
Pompeius and Marcus Crassus on the other. The generals adopted
the party-programme of the democracy; and they were promised
immediately in return the consulship for the coming year, while
Pompeius was to have also a triumph and the desired allotments
of land for his soldiers, and Crassus as the conqueror of Spartacus
at least the honour of a solemn entrance into the capital.
They now went to work in all earnest to set aside the Sullan
institutions. First of all the tribunician magistracy regained
its earlier authority. Pompeius himself as consul introduced the law
which gave back to the tribunes of the people their time-honoured
prerogatives, and in particular the initiative of legislation--
a singular gift indeed from the hand of a man who had done more than
any one living to wrest from the community its ancient privileges.
Again the multitude of the capital was fed from the state-chest,
in other words by the provinces;(6) again the tribunician authority
gave to every demagogue a legal license to overturn the arrangements
of the state; again the moneyed nobility, as farmers of the revenue
and possessed of the judicial control over the governors, raised their
heads alongside of the government as powerfully as ever; again the senate
trembled before the verdict of jurymen of the equestrian order and before
the censorial censure. The system of Sulla, which had based the monopoly
of power by the nobility on the political annihilation of the mercantile
aristocracy and of demagogism, was thus completely overthrown.
Leaving out of view some subordinate enactments, the abolition
of which was not overtaken till afterwards, such as the restoration
of the right of self-completion to the priestly colleges,(7) nothing
of the general ordinances of Sulla survived except, on the one hand,
the concessions which he himself found it necessary to make
to the opposition, such as the recognition of the Roman franchise
of all the Italians, and, on the other hand, enactments without
any marked partisan tendency, and with which therefore even judicious
democrats found no fault--such as, among others, the restriction
of the freedmen, the regulation of the functional spheres
of the magistrates, and the material alterations in criminal law.
The coalition was more agreed regarding these questions
of principle than with respect to the personal questions which such
a political revolution raised. As might be expected, the democrats
were not content with the general recognition of their programme;
but they too now demanded a restoration in their sense--revival
of the commemoration of their dead, punishment of the murderers,
recall of the proscribed from exile, removal of the political
disqualification that lay on their children, restoration
of the estates confiscated by Sulla, indemnification at the expense
of the heirs and assistants of the dictator. These were certainly
the logical consequences which ensued from a pure victory
of the democracy; but the victory of the coalition of 683 was very far
from being such. The democracy gave to it their name and their
programme, but it was the officers who had joined the movement,
and above all Pompeius, that gave to it power and completion; and these
could never yield their consent to a reaction which would not only
have shaken the existing state of things to its foundations,
but would have ultimately turned against themselves--men still had
a lively recollection who the men were whose blood Pompeius had shed,
and how Crassus had laid the foundation of his enormous fortune.
It was natural therefore, but at the same time significant
of the weakness of the democracy, that the coalition of 683 took
not the slightest step towards procuring for the democrats revenge
or even rehabilitation. The supplementary collection of all
the purchase money still outstanding for confiscated estates
bought by auction, or even remitted to the purchasers by Sulla--
for which the censor Lentulus provided in a special law--
can hardly be regarded as an exception; for though not a few Sullans
were thereby severely affected in their personal interests,
yet the measure itself was essentially a confirmation
of the confiscations undertaken by Sulla.
The work of Sulla was thus destroyed; but what the future order
of things was to be, was a question raised rather than decided by
that destruction. The coalition, kept together solely by the common
object of setting aside the work of restoration, dissolved
of itself, if not formally, at any rate in reality, when that object
was attained; while the question, to what quarter the preponderance
of power was in the first instance to fall, seemed approaching
an equally speedy and violent solution. The armies of Pompeius
and Crassus still lay before the gates of the city. The former had
indeed promised to disband his soldiers after his triumph (last day
of Dec. 683); but he had at first omitted to do so, in order to let
the revolution in the state be completed without hindrance
under the pressure which the Spanish army in front of the capital
exercised over the city and the senate--a course, which in like manner
applied to the army of Crassus. This reason now existed
no longer; but still the dissolution of the armies was postponed.
In the turn taken by matters it looked as if one of the two generals
allied with the democracy would seize the military dictatorship
and place oligarchs and democrats in the same chains. And this one
could only be Pompeius. From the first Crassus had played
a subordinate part in the coalition; he had been obliged to propose
himself, and owed even his election to the consulship mainly
to the proud intercession of Pompeius. Far the stronger, Pompeius
was evidently master of the situation; if he availed himself of it,
it seemed as if he could not but become what the instinct
of the multitude even now designated him--the absolute ruler
of the mightiest state in the civilized world. Already the whole mass
of the servile crowded around the future monarch. Already his weaker
opponents were seeking their last resource in a new coalition;
Crassus, full of old and recent jealousy towards the younger rival
who so thoroughly outstripped him, made approaches to the senate
and attempted by unprecedented largesses to attach to himself
the multitude of the capital--as if the oligarchy which Crassus himself
had helped to break down, and the ever ungrateful multitude,
would have been able to afford any protection whatever against
the veterans of the Spanish army. For a moment it seemed as if
the armies of Pompeius and Crassus would come to blows before
the gates of the capital.
Retirement of Pompeius
The retirement of the man, to whom as things stood the first place
belonged, from the political stage reproduced in the first instance
nearly the same position of parties, which we found in the Gracchan
and Marian epochs. Sulla had merely strengthened the senatorial
government, not created it; so, after the bulwarks erected by Sulla
had fallen, the government nevertheless remained primarily
with the senate, although, no doubt, the constitution with which
it governed--in the main the restored Gracchan constitution--
was pervaded by a spirit hostile to the oligarchy. The democracy
had effected the re-establishment of the Gracchan constitution;
but without a new Gracchus it was a body without a head,
and that neither Pompeius nor Crassus could be permanently such a head,
was in itself clear and had been made still clearer by the recent
events. So the democratic opposition, for want of a leader
who could have directly taken the helm, had to content itself
for the time being with hampering and annoying the government
at every step. Between the oligarchy, however, and the democracy
there rose into new consideration the capitalist party,
which in the recent crisis had made common cause with the latter,
but which the oligarchs now zealously endeavoured to draw over
to their side, so as to acquire in it a counterpoise to the democracy.
Thus courted on both sides the moneyed lords did not neglect to turn
their advantageous position to profit, and to have the only one
of their former privileges which they had not yet regained--the fourteen
benches reserved for the equestrian order in the theatre--now (687)
restored to them by decree of the people. On the whole, without
abruptly breaking with the democracy, they again drew closer
to the government. The very relations of the senate to Crassus
and his clients point in this direction; but a better understanding
between the senate and the moneyed aristocracy seems to have been
chiefly brought about by the fact, that in 686 the senate withdrew
from Lucius Lucullus the ablest of the senatorial officers,
at the instance of the capitalists whom he had sorely annoyed,
the dministration of the province of Asia so important
for their purposes.(8)
Reappearance of Pompeius
But now the burgesses were to invest any private man at their
pleasure not merely with the extraordinary authority of the supreme
magistracy, but also with a sphere of office definitely settled
by them. That the senate had to choose this man from the ranks
of the consulars, was a mitigation only in form; for the selection
was left to it simply because there was really no choice,
and in presence of the vehemently excited multitude the senate
could entrust the chief command of the seas and coasts to no other
save Pompeius alone. But more dangerous still than this negation
in principle of the senatorial control was its practical abolition
by the institution of an office of almost unlimited military
and financial powers. While the office of general was formerly
restricted to a term of one year, to a definite province,
and to military and financial resources strictly measured out,
the new extraordinary office had from the outset a duration
of three years secured to it--which of course did not exclude
a farther prolongation; had the greater portion of all the provinces,
and even Italy itself which was formerly free from military
jurisdiction, subordinated to it; had the soldiers, ships,
treasures of the state placed almost without restriction
at its disposal. Even the primitive fundamental principle
in the state-law of the Roman republic, which we have just mentioned--
that the highest military and civil authority could not be conferred
without the co-operation of the burgesses--was infringed in favour
of the new commander-in-chief. Inasmuch as the law conferred beforehand
on the twenty-five adjutants whom he was to nominate praetorian
rank and praetorian prerogatives,(10) the highest office
of republican Rome became subordinate to a newly created office,
for which it was left to the future to find the fitting name,
but which in reality even now involved in it the monarchy.
It was a total revolution in the existing order of things,
for which the foundation was laid in this project of law.
The Vote
With high-strung hopes men saw the two generals Pompeius and Glabrio
depart for their places of destination. The price of grain
had fallen immediately after the passing of the Gabinian laws
to the ordinary rates--an evidence of the hopes attached to the grand
expedition and its glorious leader. These hopes were, as we shall
have afterwards to relate, not merely fulfilled, but surpassed:
in three months the clearing of the seas was completed.
Since the Hannibalic war the Roman government had displayed
no such energy in external action; as compared with the lax
and incapable administration of the oligarchy, the democratic--
military opposition had most brilliantly made good its title
to grasp and wield the reins of the state. The equally unpatriotic
and unskilful attempts of the consul Piso to put paltry obstacles
in the way of the arrangements of Pompeius for the suppression of piracy
in Narbonese Gaul only increased the exasperation of the burgesses
against the oligarchy and their enthusiasm for Pompeius; it was nothing
but the personal intervention of the latter, that prevented the assembly
of the people from summarily removing the consul from his office.
CHAPTER IV
We have already seen how wretched was the state of the affairs
of Rome by land and sea in the east, when at the commencement of 687
Pompeius, with an almost unlimited plenitude of power, undertook
the conduct of the war against the pirates. He began by dividing
the immense field committed to him into thirteen districts
and assigning each of these districts to one of his lieutenants,
for the purpose of equipping ships and men there, of searching
the coasts, and of capturing piratical vessels or chasing them
into the meshes of a colleague. He himself went with the best part
of the ships of war that were available--among which on this occasion
also those of Rhodes were distinguished--early in the year to sea,
and swept in the first place the Sicilian, African, and Sardinian
waters, with a view especially to re-establish the supply of grain
from these provinces to Italy. His lieutenants meanwhile addressed
themselves to the clearing of the Spanish and Gallic coasts.
It was on this occasion that the consul Gaius Piso attempted
from Rome to prevent the levies which Marcus Pomponius, the legate
of Pompeius, instituted by virtue of the Gabinian law in the province
of Narbo--an imprudent proceeding, to check which, and at the same
time to keep the just indignation of the multitude against
the consul within legal bounds, Pompeius temporarily reappeared
in Rome.(1) When at the end of forty days the navigation had been
everywhere set free in the western basin of the Mediterranean,
Pompeius proceeded with sixty of his best vessels to the eastern
seas, and first of all to the original and main seat of piracy,
the Lycian and Cilician waters. On the news of the approach
of the Roman fleet the piratical barks everywhere disappeared
from the open sea; and not only so, but even the strong Lycian fortresses
of Anticragus and Cragus surrendered without offering serious
resistance. The well-calculated moderation of Pompeius helped
even more than fear to open the gates of these scarcely accessible
marine strongholds. His predecessors had ordered every captured
freebooter to be nailed to the cross; without hesitation he gave
quarter to all, and treated in particular the common rowers found
in the captured piratical vessels with unusual indulgence.
The bold Cilician sea-kings alone ventured on an attempt to maintain
at least their own waters by arms against the Romans; after having
placed their children and wives and their rich treasures for
security in the mountain-fortresses of the Taurus, they awaited
the Roman fleet at the western frontier of Cilicia, in the offing
of Coracesium. But here the ships of Pompeius, well manned and well
provided with all implements of war, achieved a complete victory.
Without farther hindrance he landed and began to storm and break up
the mountain-castles of the corsairs, while he continued to offer
to themselves freedom and life as the price of submission. Soon
the great multitude desisted from the continuance of a hopeless war
in their strongholds and mountains, and consented to surrender.
Forty-nine days after Pompeius had appeared in the eastern seas,
Cilicia was subdued and the war at an end.
The rapid suppression of piracy was a great relief, but not a grand
achievement; with the resources of the Roman state, which had been
called forth in lavish measure, the corsairs could as little cope
as the combined gangs of thieves in a great city can cope
with a well-organized police. It was a naive proceeding to celebrate
such a razzia as a victory. But when compared with the prolonged
continuance and the vast and daily increasing extent of the evil,
it was natural that the surprisingly rapid subjugation
of the dreaded pirates should make a most powerful impression
on the public; and the more so, that this was the first trial of rule
centralized in a single hand, and the parties were eagerly waiting
to see whether that hand would understand the art of ruling better
than the collegiate body had done. Nearly 400 ships and boats,
including 90 war vessels properly so called, were either taken
by Pompeius or surrendered to him; in all about 1300 piratical vessels
are said to have been destroyed; besides which the richly-filled
arsenals and magazines of the buccaneers were burnt.
Of the pirates about 10,000 perished; upwards of 20,000 fell alive
into the hands of the victor; while Publius Clodius the admiral
of the Roman army stationed in Cilicia, and a multitude of other
individuals carried off by the pirates, some of them long believed
at home to be dead, obtained once more their freedom through
Pompeius. In the summer of 687, three months after the beginning
of the campaign, commerce resumed its wonted course and instead
of the former famine abundance prevailed in Italy.
Invasion of Pontus
Retreat of Mithradates
Battle at Nicopolis
The two armies lay close to each other. During the rest at noon
the Roman army set out without the enemy observing the movement,
made a circuit, and occupied the heights, which lay in front
and commanded a defile to be passed by the enemy, on the southern bank
of the river Lycus (Jeschil-Irmak) not far from the modern Enderes,
at the point where Nicopolis was afterwards built. The following
morning the Pontic troops broke up in their usual manner,
and, supposing that the enemy was as hitherto behind them, after,
accomplishing the day's march they pitched their camp
in the very valley whose encircling heights the Romans had occupied.
Suddenly in the silence of the night there sounded all around them
the dreaded battle-cry of the legions, and missiles from all sides
poured on the Asiatic host, in which soldiers and camp-followers,
chariots, horses, and camels jostled each other; and amidst
the dense throng, notwithstanding the darkness, not a missile
failed to take effect. When the Romans had expended their darts,
they charged down from the heights on the masses which had now become
visible by the light of the newly-risen moon, and which were
abandoned to them almost defenceless; those that did not fall
by the steel of the enemy were trodden down in the fearful pressure
under the hoofs and wheels. It was the last battle-field
on which the gray-haired king fought with the Romans. With three
attendants--two of his horsemen, and a concubine who was accustomed
to follow him in male attire and to fight bravely by his side--
he made his escape thence to the fortress of Sinoria, whither
a portion of his trusty followers found their way to him. He divided
among them his treasures preserved there, 6000 talents of gold
(1,400,000 pounds); furnished them and himself with poison;
and hastened with the band that was left to him up the Euphrates
to unite with his ally, the great-king of Armenia.
This hope likewise was vain; the alliance, on the faith of which
Mithradates took the route for Armenia, already by that time
existed no longer. During the conflicts between Mithradates
and Pompeius just narrated, the king of the Parthians, yielding
to the urgency of the Romans and above all of the exiled Armenian prince,
had invaded the kingdom of Tigranes by force of arms, and had
compelled him to withdraw into the inaccessible mountains.
The invading army began even the siege of the capital Artaxata;
but, on its becoming protracted, king Phraates took his departure
with the greater portion of his troops; whereupon Tigranes overpowered
the Parthian corps left behind and the Armenian emigrants led
by his son, and re-established his dominion throughout the kingdom
Naturally, however, the king was under such circumstances little
inclined to fight with the freshly-victorious Romans, and least
of all to sacrifice himself for Mithradates; whom he trusted less
than ever, since information had reached him that his rebellious son
intended to betake himself to his grandfather. So he entered into
negotiations with the Romans for a separate peace; but he did not wait
for the conclusion of the treaty to break off the alliance
which linked him to Mithradates. The latter, when he had arrived
at the frontier of Armenia, was doomed to learn that the great-king
Tigranes had set a price of 100 talents (24,000 pounds)
on his head, had arrested his envoys, and had delivered them
to the Romans. King Mithradates saw his kingdom in the hands
of the enemy, and his allies on the point of coming to an agreement
with them; it was not possible to continue the war; he might deem
himself fortunate, if he succeeded in effecting his escape along
the eastern and northern shores of the Black Sea, in perhaps
dislodging his son Machares--who had revolted and entered into
connection with the Romans(6)--once more from the Bosporan kingdom,
and in finding on the Maeotis a fresh soil for fresh projects.
So he turned northward. When the king in his flight had crossed
the Phasis, the ancient boundary of Asia Minor, Pompeius for the time
discontinued his pursuit; but instead of returning to the region
of the sources of the Euphrates, he turned aside into the region
of the Araxes to settle matters with Tigranes.
Pompeius at Artaxata
Peace with Tigranes
But the new field, on which the Romans here set foot, raised up
for them new conflicts. The brave peoples of the middle and eastern
Caucasus saw with indignation the remote Occidentals encamping
on their territory. There--in the fertile and well-watered tableland
of the modern Georgia--dwelt the Iberians, a brave, well-organized,
agricultural nation, whose clan-cantons under their patriarchs
cultivated the soil according to the system of common possession,
without any separate ownership of the individual cultivators. Army
and people were one; the people were headed partly by the ruler-
clans--out of which the eldest always presided over the whole
Iberian nation as king, and the next eldest as judge and leader
of the army--partly by special families of priests, on whom chiefly
devolved the duty of preserving a knowledge of the treaties
concluded with other peoples and of watching over their observance.
The mass of the non-freemen were regarded as serfs of the king.
Their eastern neighbours, the Albanians or Alans, who were settled
on the lower Kur as far as the Caspian Sea, were in a far lower
stage of culture. Chiefly a pastoral people they tended, on foot
or on horseback, their numerous herds in the luxuriant meadows
of the modern Shirvan; their few tilled fields were still cultivated
with the old wooden plough without iron share. Coined money
was unknown, and they did not count beyond a hundred. Each of their
tribes, twenty-six in all, had its own chief and spoke its distinct
dialect. Far superior in number to the Iberians, the Albanians
could not at all cope with them in bravery. The mode of fighting
was on the whole the same with both nations; they fought chiefly
with arrows and light javelins, which they frequently after the Indian
fashion discharged from their lurking-places in the woods
behind the trunks of trees, or hurled down from the tops of trees
on the foe; the Albanians had also numerous horsemen partly mailed
after the Medo-Armenian manner with heavy cuirasses and greaves.
Both nations lived on their lands and pastures in a complete
independence preserved from time immemorial. Nature itself
as it were, seems to have raised the Caucasus between Europe and Asia
as a rampart against the tide of national movements; there the arms
of Cyrus and of Alexander had formerly found their limit;
now the brave garrison of this partition-wall set themselves
to defend it also against the Romans.
For several days the Roman army had to march in the glowing heat
through this almost waterless flat country, without encountering
the enemy; it was only on the left bank of the Abas (probably
the river elsewhere named Alazonius, now Alasan) that the force
of the Albanians under the leadership of Coses, brother of the king
Oroizes, was drawn up against the Romans; they are said to have
amounted, including the contingent which had arrived
from the inhabitants of the Transcaucasian steppes, to 60,000 infantry
and 12,000 cavalry. Yet they would hardly have risked the battle,
unless they had supposed that they had merely to fight with
the Roman cavalry; but the cavalry had only been placed in front,
and, on its retiring, the masses of Roman infantry showed themselves
from their concealment behind. After a short conflict the army
of the barbarians was driven into the woods, which Pompeius
gave orders to invest and set on fire. The Albanians thereupon
consented to make peace; and, following the example of the more
powerful peoples, all the tribes settled between the Kur and the Caspian
concluded a treaty with the Roman general. The Albanians,
Iberians, and generally the peoples settled to the south along,
and at the foot of, the Caucasus, thus entered at least for the moment
into a relation of dependence on Rome. When, on the other hand,
the peoples between the Phasis and the Maeotis--Colchians, Soani,
Heniochi, Zygi, Achaeans, even the remote Bastarnae--were inscribed
in the long list of the nations subdued by Pompeius, the notion
of subjugation was evidently employed in a manner very far from exact.
The Caucasus once more verified its significance in the history
of the world; the Roman conquest, like the Persian and the Hellenic,
found its limit there.
Death of Mithadates
After the country and the army had abandoned the king, the capital
Panticapaeum at length opened its gates to the insurgents
and delivered over to them the old king enclosed in his palace.
From the high wall of his castle the latter besought his son at least
to grant him life and not imbrue his hands in his father's blood;
but the request came ill from the lips of a man whose own hands
were stained with the blood of his mother and with the recently-shed
blood of his innocent son Xiphares; and in heartless severity
and inhumanity Pharnaces even outstripped his father. Seeing therefore
he had now to die, the sultan resolved at least to die as he had
lived; his wives, his concubines and his daughters, including
the youthful brides of the kings of Egypt and Cyprus, had all to suffer
the bitterness of death and drain the poisoned cup, before he too
took it, and then, when the draught did not take effect quickly
enough, presented his neck for the fatal stroke to a Celtic
mercenary Betuitus. So died in 691 Mithradates Eupator,
in the sixty-eighth year of his life and the fifty-seventh of his reign,
twenty-six years after he had for the first time taken the field
against the Romans. The dead body, which king Pharnaces sent
as a voucher of his merits and of his loyalty to Pompeius, was by order
of the latter laid in the royal sepulchre of Sinope.
State of Syria
Arabian Princes
Robber-Chiefs
Jews
In the south of Syria, on the other hand, the race of the Jews
seemed as though it would about this time consolidate itself
into a political power. Through the devout and bold defence
of the primitive Jewish national worship, which was imperilled
by the levelling Hellenism of the Syrian kings, the family
of the Hasmonaeans or the Makkabi had not only attained to their
hereditary principality and gradually to kingly honours;(10)
but these princely high-priests had also spread their conquests
to the north, east, and south. When the brave Jannaeus Alexander
died (675), the Jewish kingdom stretched towards the south over
the whole Philistian territory as far as the frontier of Egypt, towards
the south-east as far as that of the Nabataean kingdom of Petra,
from which Jannaeus had wrested considerable tracts on the right
bank of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, towards the north over Samaria
and Decapolis up to the lake of Gennesareth; here he was already
making arrangements to occupy Ptolemais (Acco) and victoriously
to repel the aggressions of the Ityraeans. The coast obeyed the Jews
from Mount Carmel as far as Rhinocorura, including the important
Gaza--Ascalon alone was still free; so that the territory
of the Jews, once almost cut off from the sea, could now be enumerated
among the asylums of piracy. Now that the Armenian invasion, just
as it approached the borders of Judaea, was averted from that land
by the intervention of Lucullus,(11) the gifted rulers
of the Hasmonaean house would probably have carried their arms still
farther, had not the development of the power of that remarkable
conquering priestly state been nipped in the bud by internal divisions.
Pharisees
Sadducees
This was the case first of all with the Nabataeans. This remarkable
nation has often been confounded with its eastern neighbours,
the wandering Arabs, but it is more closely related to the Aramaean
branch than to the proper children of Ishmael. This Aramaean or,
according to the designation of the Occidentals, Syrian stock
must have in very early times sent forth from its most ancient
settlements about Babylon a colony, probably for the sake of trade,
to the northern end of the Arabian gulf; these were the Nabataeans
on the Sinaitic peninsula, between the gulf of Suez and Aila,
and in the region of Petra (Wadi Mousa). In their ports
the wares of the Mediterranean were exchanged for those of India;
the great southern caravan-route, which ran from Gaza to the mouth
of the Euphrates and the Persian gulf, passed through the capital
of the Nabataeans--Petra--whose still magnificent rock-palaces
and rock-tombs furnish clearer evidence of the Nabataean civilization
than does an almost extinct tradition. The leaders of the Pharisees,
to whom after the manner of priests the victory of their faction
seemed not too dearly bought at the price of the independence
and integrity of their country, solicited Aretas the king
of the Nabataeans for aid against Aristobulus, in return for which
they promised to give back to him all the conquests wrested
from him by Jannaeus. Thereupon Aretas had advanced with, it was
said, 50,000 men into Judaea and, reinforced by the adherents
of the Pharisees, he kept king Aristobulus besieged in his capital.
Syrian Cities
Annexation of Syria
To create order amidst this chaos did not require either brilliance
of conception or a mighty display of force, but it required a clear
insight into the interests of Rome and of her subjects, and vigour
and consistency in establishing and maintaining the institutions
recognized as necessary. The policy of the senate in support
of legitimacy had sufficiently degraded itself; the general,
whom the opposition had brought into power, was not to be guided
by dynastic considerations, but had only to see that the Syrian kingdom
should not be withdrawn from the clientship of Rome in future either
by the quarrels of pretenders or by the Covetousness of neighbours.
But to secure this end there was only one course; that the Roman
community should send a satrap to grasp with a vigorous hand
the reins of government, which had long since practically slipped
from the hands of the kings of the ruling house more even through
their own fault than through outward misfortunes. This course Pompeius
took. Antiochus the Asiatic, on requesting to be acknowledged
as the hereditary ruler of Syria, received the answer that Pompeius
would not give back the sovereignty to a king who knew neither how
to maintain nor how to govern his kingdom, even at the request
of his subjects, much less against their distinctly expressed wishes.
With this letter of the Roman proconsul the house of Seleucus
was ejected from the throne which it had occupied for two hundred
and fifty years. Antiochus soon after lost his life through
the artifice of the emir Sampsiceramus, as whose client he played
the ruler in Antioch; thenceforth there is no further mention of these
mock-kings and their pretensions.
Far more fraught with momentous effects than these new relations
of the Romans to the Armenians, Iberians, Bosporans, and Nabataeans
was the proximity into which through the occupation of Syria they
were brought with the Parthian state. Complaisant as had been
the demeanour of Roman diplomacy towards Phraates while the Pontic
and Armenian states still subsisted, willingly as both Lucullus
and Pompeius had then conceded to him the possession of the regions
beyond the Euphrates,(19) the new neighbour now sternly took up
his position by the side of the Arsacids; and Phraates, if the royal
art of forgetting his own faults allowed him, might well recall now
the warning words of Mithradates that the Parthian by his alliance
with the Occidentals against the kingdoms of kindred race paved
the way first for their destruction and then for his own.
Romans and Parthians in league had brought Armenia to ruin;
when it was overthrown, Rome true to her old policy now reversed
the parts and favoured the humbled foe at the expense
of the powerful ally. The singular preference, which the father
Tigranes experienced from Pompeius as contrasted with his son
the ally and son-in-law of the Parthian king, was already
part of this policy; it was a direct offence, when soon afterwards
by the orders of Pompeius the younger Tigranes and his family
were arrested and were not released even on Phraates interceding
with the friendly general for his daughter and his son-in-law.
But Pompeius paused not here. The province of Corduene,
to which both Phraates and Tigranes laid claim, was at the command
of Pompeius occupied by Roman troops for the latter, and the Parthians
who were found in possession were driven beyond the frontier
and pursued even as far as Arbela in Adiabene, without the government
of Ctesiphon having even been previously heard (689).
Far the most suspicious circumstance however was, that the Romans
seemed not at all inclined to respect the boundary of the Euphrates
fixed by treaty. On several occasions Roman divisions
destined from Armenia for Syria marched across Mesopotamia;
the Arab emir Abgarus of Osrhoene was received under singularly
favourable conditions into Roman protection; nay, Oruros, situated
in Upper Mesopotamia somewhere between Nisibis and the Tigris 220
miles eastward from the Commagenian passage of the Euphrates,
was designated as the eastern limit of the Roman dominion--
presumably their indirect dominion, inasmuch as the larger
and more fertile northern half of Mesopotamia had been assigned
by the Romans in like manner with Corduene to the Armenian empire.
The boundary between Romans and Parthians thus became the great
Syro-Mesopotamian desert instead of the Euphrates; and this too
seemed only provisional. To the Parthian envoys, who came to insist
on the maintenance of the agreements--which certainly, as it would
seem, were only concluded orally--respecting the Euphrates
boundary, Pompeius gave the ambiguous reply that the territory
of Rome extended as far as her rights. The remarkable intercourse
between the Roman commander-in-chief and the Parthian satraps
of the region of Media and even of the distant province Elymais
(between Susiana, Media, and Persia, in the modern Luristan) seemed
a commentary on this speech.(20) The viceroys of this latter
mountainous, warlike, and remote land had always exerted themselves
to acquire a position independent of the great-king; it was
the more offensive and menacing to the Parthian government,
when Pompeius accepted the proffered homage of this dynast.
Not less significant was the fact that the title of "king of kings,"
which had been hitherto conceded to the Parthian king by the Romans
in official intercourse, was now all at once exchanged by them
for the simple title of king. This was even more a threat than
a violation of etiquette. Since Rome had entered on the heritage
of the Seleucids, it seemed almost as if the Romans had a mind to revert
at a convenient moment to those old times, when all Iran and Turan
were ruled from Antioch, and there was as yet no Parthian empire
but merely a Parthian satrapy. The court of Ctesiphon would thus
have had reason enough for going to war with Rome; it seemed
the prelude to its doing so, when in 690 it declared war on Armenia
on account of the question of the frontier. But Phraates had not
the courage to come to an open rupture with the Romans at a time
when the dreaded general with his strong army was on the borders
of the Parthian empire. When Pompeius sent commissioners to settle
amicably the dispute between Parthia and Armenia, Phraates yielded
to the Roman mediation forced upon him and acquiesced in their
award, which assigned to the Armenians Corduene and northern
Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards his daughter with her son and her
husband adorned the triumph of the Roman general. Even the Parthians
trembled before the superior power of Rome; and, if they had not,
like the inhabitants of Pontus and Armenia, succumbed to the Roman
arms, the reason seemed only to be that they had not ventured
to stand the conflict.
Feudatory Kings
Cappadocia
Commagene
Galatia
Priestly Princes
Urban Communities
The Romans failed not to see that with the task of representing
Hellenism and protecting and extending the domain of Alexander
in the east there devolved on them the primary duty of elevating
the urban system; for, while cities are everywhere the pillars
of civilization, the antagonism between Orientals and Occidentals
was especially and most sharply embodied in the contrast between
the Oriental, military-despotic, feudal hierarchy and the Helleno-
Italic urban commonwealth prosecuting trade and commerce. Lucullus
and Pompeius, however little they in other respects aimed at
the reduction of things to one level in the east, and however much
the latter was disposed in questions of detail to censure and alter
the arrangements of his predecessor, were yet completely agreed
in the principle of promoting as far as they could an urban life in Asia
Minor and Syria. Cyzicus, on whose vigorous resistance the first
violence of the last war had spent itself, received from Lucullus
a considerable extension of its domain. The Pontic Heraclea,
energetically as it had resisted the Romans, yet recovered
its territory and its harbours; and the barbarous fury of Cotta against
the unhappy city met with the sharpest censure in the senate.
Lucullus had deeply and sincerely regretted that fate had refused
him the happiness of rescuing Sinope and Amisus from devastation
by the Pontic soldiery and his own: he did at least what he could
to restore them, extended considerably their territories, peopled them
afresh--partly with the old inhabitants, who at his invitation
returned in troops to their beloved homes, partly with new settlers
of Hellenic descent--and provided for the reconstruction
of the buildings destroyed. Pompeius acted in the same spirit
and on a greater scale. Already after the subjugation of the pirates
he had, instead of following the example of his predecessors
and crucifying his prisoners, whose number exceeded 20,000, settled
them partly in the desolated cities of the Plain Cilicia,
such as Mallus, Adana, Epiphaneia, and especially in Soli,
which thenceforth bore the name of Pompeius' city (Pompeiupolis),
partly at Dyme in Achaia, and even at Tarentum. This colonizing
by means of pirates met with manifold censure,(22) as it seemed
in some measure to set a premium on crime; in reality it was,
politically and morally, well justified, for, as things then stood,
piracy was something different from robbery and the prisoners
might fairly be treated according to martial law.
But Pompeius made it his business above all to promote urban life
in the new Roman provinces. We have already observed how poorly
provided with towns the Pontic empire was:(23) most districts
of Cappadocia even a century after this had no towns, but merely
mountain fortresses as a refuge for the agricultural population
in war; the whole east of Asia Minor, apart from the sparse Greek
colonies on the coasts, must have been at this time in a similar
plight. The number of towns newly established by Pompeius in these
provinces is, including the Cilician settlements, stated at thirty-
nine, several of which attained great prosperity. The most notable
of these townships in the former kingdom of Pontus were Nicopolis,
the "city of victory," founded on the spot where Mithradates
sustained the last decisive defeat(24)--the fairest memorial
of a general rich in similar trophies; Megalopolis, named from Pompeius'
surname, on the frontier of Cappadocia and Lesser Armenia,
the subsequent Sebasteia (now Siwas); Ziela, where the Romans fought
the unfortunate battle,(25) a township which had arisen round
the temple of Anaitis there and hitherto had belonged to its high-
priest, and to which Pompeius now gave the form and privileges
of a city; Diopolis, formerly Cabira, afterwards Neocaesarea (Niksar),
likewise one of the battle-fields of the late war; Magnopolis
or Pompeiupolis, the restored Eupatoria at the confluence of the Lycus
and the Iris, originally built by Mithradates, but again destroyed
by him on account of the defection of the city to the Romans;(26)
Neapolis, formerly Phazemon, between Amasia and the Halys. Most
of the towns thus established were formed not by bringing
colonists from a distance, but by the suppression of villages
and the collection of their inhabitants within the new ring-wall;
only in Nicopolis Pompeius settled the invalids and veterans of his army,
who preferred to establish a home for themselves there at once
rather than afterwards in Italy. But at other places also
there arose on the suggestion of the regent new centres of Hellenic
civilization. In Paphlagonia a third Pompeiupolis marked the spot
where the army of Mithradates in 666 achieved the great victory
over the Bithynians.(27) In Cappadocia, which perhaps had suffered
more than any other province by the war, the royal residence Mazaca
(afterwards Caesarea, now Kaisarieh) and seven other townships
were re-established by Pompeius and received urban institutions.
In Cilicia and Coelesyria there were enumerated twenty towns laid
out by Pompeius. In the districts ceded by the Jews, Gadara
in the Decapolis rose from its ruins at the command of Pompeius,
and the city of Seleucis was founded. By far the greatest portion
of the domain-land at his disposal on the Asiatic continent must have
been applied by Pompeius for his new settlements; whereas in Crete,
about which Pompeius troubled himself little or not at all,
the Roman domanial possessions seem to have continued tolerably extensive.
Aggregate Results
The unprejudiced judge will not agree either with those exaggerations
or with these disparagements. Lucullus and Pompeius, in subduing
and regulating Asia, showed themselves to be, not heroes
and state-creators, but sagacious and energetic army-leaders
and governors. As general Lucullus displayed no common talents
and a self-confidence bordering on rashness, while Pompeius displayed
military judgment and a rare self-restraint; for hardly
has any general with such forces and a position so wholly free
ever acted so cautiously as Pompeius in the east. The most brilliant
undertakings, as it were, offered themselves to him on all sides;
he was free to start for the Cimmerian Bosporus and for the Red
Sea; he had opportunity of declaring war against the Parthians;
the revolted provinces of Egypt invited him to dethrone king
Ptolemaeus who was not recognized by the Romans, and to carry
out the testament of Alexander; but Pompeius marched neither
to Panticapaeum nor to Petra, neither to Ctesiphon nor to Alexandria;
throughout he gathered only those fruits which of themselves fell
to his hand. In like manner he fought all his battles by sea
and land with a crushing superiority of force. Had this moderation
proceeded from the strict observance of the instructions given
to him, as Pompeius was wont to profess, or even from a perception
that the conquests of Rome must somewhere find a limit and that
fresh accessions of territory were not advantageous to the state,
it would deserve a higher praise than history confers on the most
talented officer; but constituted as Pompeius was, his self-
restraint was beyond doubt solely the result of his peculiar want
of decision and of initiative--defects, indeed, which were in his
case far more useful to the state than the opposite excellences
of his predecessor. Certainly very grave errors were perpetrated
both by Lucullus and by Pompeius. Lucullus reaped their fruits himself,
when his imprudent conduct wrested from him all the results
of his victories; Pompeius left it to his successors to bear
the consequences of his false policy towards the Parthians. He might
either have made war on the Parthians, if he had had the courage
to do so, or have maintained peace with them and recognized,
as he had promised, the Euphrates as boundary; he was too timid
for the former course, too vain for the latter, and so he resorted
to the silly perfidy of rendering the good neighbourhood,
which the court of Ctesiphon desired and on its part practised,
impossible through the most unbounded aggressions, and yet allowing
the enemy to choose of themselves the time for rupture and retaliation.
As administrator of Asia Lucullus acquired a more than princely
wealth; and Pompeius also received as reward for its organization
large sums in cash and still more considerable promissory notes
from the king of Cappadocia, from the rich city of Antioch,
and from other lords and communities. But such exactions had become
almost a customary tax; and both generals showed themselves at any rate
to be not altogether venal in questions of greater importance,
and, if possible, got themselves paid by the party whose interests
coincided with those of Rome. Looking to the state of the times,
this does not prevent us from characterizing the administration
of both as comparatively commendable and conducted primarily
in the interest of Rome, secondarily in that of the provincials.
Cyprus Annexed
CHAPTER V
The Struggle of Parties During the Absence of Pompeius.
With the passing of the Gabinian law the parties in the capital
changed positions. From the time that the elected general
of the democracy held in his hand the sword, his party,
or what was reckoned such, had the preponderance in the capital.
The nobility doubtless still stood in compact array, and still
as before there issued from the comitial machinery none but consuls,
who according to the expression of the democrats were already
designated to the consulate in their cradles; to command the elections
andbreak down the influence of the old families over them was beyond
the power even of the holders of power. But unfortunately the consulate,
at the very moment when they had got the length of virtually excluding
the "new men" from it, began itself to grow pale before the newly-
risen star of the exceptional military power. The aristocracy felt
this, though they did not exactly confess it; they gave themselves
up as lost. Except Quintus Catulus, who with honourable firmness
persevered at his far from pleasant post as champion of a vanquished
party down to his death (694), no Optimate could be named
from the highest ranks of the nobility, who would have sustained
the interests of the aristocracy with courage and steadfastness.
Their very men of most talent and fame, such as Quintus Metellus
Pius and Lucius Lucullus, practically abdicated and retired,
so far as they could at all do so with propriety, to their villas,
in order to forget as much as possible the Forum and the senate-house
amidst their gardens and libraries, their aviaries and fish-ponds.
Still more, of course, was this the case with the younger generation
of the aristocracy, which was either wholly absorbed in luxury
and literature or turning towards the rising sun.
Cato
Democratic Attacks
Transpadanes
Freedmen
The mode in which the democracy dealt with the ancient criminal
jurisdiction of the comitia was characteristic. It had not been
properly abolished by Sulla, but practically the jury-commissions
on high treason and murder had superseded it,(5) and no rational
man could think of seriously re-establishing the old procedure
which long before Sulla had been thoroughly unpractical.
But as the idea of the sovereignty of the people appeared to require
a recognition at least in principle of the penal jurisdiction
of the burgesses, the tribune of the people Titus Labienus in 691
brought the old man, who thirty-eight years before had slain or was
alleged to have slain the tribune of the people Lucius Saturninus,(6)
before the same high court of criminal jurisdiction, by virtue of which,
if the annals reported truly, king Tullus had procured the acquittal
of the Horatius who had killed his sister. The accused was one
Gaius Rabirius, who, if he had not killed Saturninus,
had at least paraded with his cut-off head at the tables
of men of rank, and who moreover was notorious among the Apulian
landholders for his kidnapping and his bloody deeds. The object,
if not of the accuser himself, at any rate of the more sagacious men
who backed him, was not at all to make this pitiful wretch
die the death of the cross; they were not unwilling to acquiesce,
when first the form of the impeachment was materially modified
by the senate, and then the assembly of the people called to pronounce
sentence on the guilty was dissolved under some sort of pretext
by the opposite party--so that the whole procedure was set aside.
At all events by this process the two palladia of Roman freedom,
the right of the citizens to appeal and the inviolability of the tribunes
of the people, were once more established as practical rights,
and the legal basis on which the democracy rested was adjusted afresh.
Personal Attacks
Lastly, they did not hesitate now to name once more in public
the long-proscribed names of the heroes and martyrs of the democracy,
and to celebrate their memory. We have already mentioned how
Saturninus was rehabilitated by the process directed against
his murderer. But a different sound withal had the name of Gaius
Marius, at the mention of which all hearts once had throbbed;
and it happened that the man, to whom Italy owed her deliverance
from the northern barbarians, was at the same time the uncle
of the present leader of the democracy. Loudly had the multitude
rejoiced, when in 686 Gaius Caesar ventured in spite of
the prohibitions publicly to show the honoured features of the hero
in the Forum at the interment of the widow of Marius. But when,
three years afterwards (689), the emblems of victory, which Marius
had caused to be erected in the Capitol and Sulla had ordered to be
thrown down, one morning unexpectedly glittered afresh in gold
and marble at the old spot, the veterans from the African and Cimbrian
wars crowded, with tears in their eyes, around the statue of their
beloved general; and in presence of the rejoicing masses the senate
did not venture to seize the trophies which the same bold hand had
renewed in defiance of the laws.
But all these doings and disputes, however much noise they made,
were, politically considered, of but very subordinate importance.
The oligarchy was vanquished; the democracy had attained the helm.
That underlings of various grades should hasten to inflict
an additional kick on the prostrate foe; that the democrats also
should have their basis in law and their worship of principles;
that their doctrinaires should not rest till the whole privileges
of the community were in all particulars restored, and should
in that respect occasionally make themselves ridiculous,
as legitimists are wont to do--all this was just as much
to be expected as it was matter of indifference. Taken as a whole,
the agitation was aimless; and we discern in it the perplexity
of its authors to find an object for their activity, for it
turned almost wholly on things already essentially settled
or on subordinate matters.
Catalina
The late praetor Lucius Catilina, and the quaestor Gnaeus Piso,
were distinguished among their fellows not merely by their genteel
birth and their superior rank. They had broken down the bridge
completely behind them, and impressed their accomplices by their
dissoluteness quite as much as by their talents. Catilina especially
was one of the most wicked men in that wicked age. His villanies
belong to the records of crime, not to history; but his very outward
appearance--the pale countenance, the wild glance, the gait by turns
sluggish and hurried--betrayed his dismal past. He possessed in a high
degree the qualities which are required in the leader of such a band--
the faculty of enjoying all pleasures and of bearing all privations,
courage, military talent, knowledge of men, the energy of a felon,
and that horrible mastery of vice, which knows how to bring the weak
to fall and how to train the fallen to crime.
So runs the account that has come down to us, which evidently gives
the version current in the government circles, and the credibility
of which in detail must, in the absence of any means of checking
it, be left an open question. As to the main matter--the participation
of Caesar and Crassus--the testimony of their political opponents
certainly cannot be regarded as sufficient evidence of it. But their
notorious action at this epoch corresponds with striking exactness
to the secret action which this report ascribes to them. The attempt
of Crassus, who in this year was censor, officially to enrol
the Transpadanes in the burgess-list(9) was of itself directly
a revolutionary enterprise. It is still more remarkable,
that Crassus on the same occasion made preparations to enrol
Egypt and Cyprus in the list of Roman domains,(10) and that Caesar
about the same time (689 or 690) got a proposal submitted
by some tribunes to the burgesses to send him to Egypt,
in order to reinstate king Ptolemaeus whom the Alexandrians
had expelled. These machinations suspiciously coincide
with the charges raised by their antagonists. Certainty cannot be
attained on the point; but there is a great probability that Crassus
and Caesar had projected a plan to possess themselves of the military
dictatorship during the absence of Pompeius; that Egypt was selected
as the basis of this democratic military power; and that, in fine,
the insurrectionary attempt of 689 had been contrived to realize
these projects, and Catilina and Piso had thus been tools in the hands
of Crassus and Caesar.
Consular Elections
Cicero Elected instead of Catalina
The party put forth all its energies for the struggle
of the election. Crassus and Caesar staked their money--whether their
own or borrowed--and their connections to procure the consulship
for Catilina and Antonius; the comrades of Catilina strained every
nerve to bring to the helm the man who promised them the magistracies
and priesthoods, the palaces and country-estates of their opponents,
and above all deliverance from their debts, and who, they knew,
would keep his word. The aristocracy was in great perplexity,
chiefly because it was not able even to start counter-candidates.
That such a candidate risked his head, was obvious; and the times
were past when the post of danger allured the burgess--now even
ambition was hushed in presence of fear. Accordingly the nobility
contented themselves with making a feeble attempt to check
electioneering intrigues by issuing a new law respecting
the purchase of votes--which, however, was thwarted by the veto
of a tribune of the people--and with turning over their votes
to a candidate who, although not acceptable to them, was at least
inoffensive. This was Marcus Cicero, notoriously a political
trimmer,(14) accustomed to flirt at times with the democrats,
at times with Pompeius, at times from a somewhat greater distance
with the aristocracy, and to lend his services as an advocate to every
influential man under impeachment without distinction of person
or party (he numbered even Catilina among his clients); belonging
properly to no party or--which was much the same--to the party
of material interests, which was dominant in the courts
and was pleased with the eloquent pleader and the courtly and witty
companion. He had connections enough in the capital and the country
towns to have a chance alongside of the candidates proposed
by the democracy; and as the nobility, although with reluctance,
and the Pompeians voted for him, he was elected by a great
majority. The two candidates of the democracy obtained almost
the same number of votes; but a few more fell to Antonius, whose family
was of more consideration than that of his fellow-candidate.
This accident frustrated the election of Catilina and saved Rome
from a second Cinna. A little before this Piso had--it was said
at the instigation of his political and personal enemy Pompeius--
been put to death in Spain by his native escort.(15) With the consul
Antonius alone nothing could be done; Cicero broke the loose bond
which attached him to the conspiracy, even before they entered
on their offices, inasmuch as he renounced his legal privilege
of having the consular provinces determined by lot, and handed over
to his deeply-embarrassed colleague the lucrative governorship
of Macedonia. The essential preliminary conditions of this project
also had therefore miscarried.
But this attempt totally missed its aim. The multitude, finding
it more agreeable to have their corn measured out to them
under the shade of Roman porticoes from the public magazines
than to cultivate it for themselves in the sweat of their brow,
received even the proposal in itself with complete indifference.
They soon came also to feel that Pompeius would never acquiesce
in such a resolution offensive to him in every respect, and that matters
could not stand well with a party which in its painful alarm
condescended to offers so extravagant. Under such circumstances
it was not difficult for the government to frustrate the proposal;
the new consul Cicero perceived the opportunity of exhibiting
here too his talent for giving a finishing stroke to the beaten party;
even before the tribunes who stood ready exercised their veto,
the author himself withdrew his proposal (1 Jan. 691).
The democracy had gained nothing but the unpleasant lesson,
that the great multitude out of love or fear still continued
to adhere to Pompeius, and that every proposal was certain
to fail which the public perceived to be directed against him.
But meanwhile the civil war had begun. On the 27th Oct. Gaius
Manlius had planted at Faesulae the eagle round which the army
of the insurrection was to flock--it was one of the Marian eagles
from the Cimbrian war--and he had summoned the robbers
from the mountains as well as the country people to join him.
His proclamations, following the old traditions of the popular
party, demanded liberation from the oppressive load of debt
and a modification of the procedure in insolvency, which, if the amount
of the debt actually exceeded the estate, certainly still involved
in law the forfeiture of the debtor's freedom. It seemed as though
the rabble of the capital, in coming forward as if it were
the legitimate successor of the old plebeian farmers and fighting
its battles under the glorious eagles of the Cimbrian war, wished
to cast a stain not only on the present but on the past of Rome.
This rising, however, remained isolated; at the other places
of rendezvous the conspiracy did not go beyond the collection of arms
and the institution of secret conferences, as resolute leaders
were everywhere wanting. This was fortunate for the government;
for, although the impending civil war had been for a considerable time
openly announced, its own irresolution and the clumsiness
of the rusty machinery of administration had not allowed it to make
any military preparations whatever. It was only now that the general
levy was called out, and superior officers were ordered to the several
regions of Italy that each might suppress the insurrection
in his own district; while at the same time the gladiatorial slaves
were ejected from the capital, and patrols were ordered on account
of the apprehension of incendiarism.
But it was a dreadful deed, and all the more dreadful that it
appeared to a whole people great and praiseworthy. Never perhaps
has a commonwealth more lamentably declared itself bankrupt,
than did Rome through this resolution--adopted in cold blood
by the majority of the government and approved by public opinion--
to put to death in all haste a few political prisoners, who were
no doubt culpable according to the laws, but had not forfeited life;
because, forsooth, the security of the prisons was not to be
trusted, and there was no sufficient police. It was the humorous
trait seldom wanting to a historical tragedy, that this act
of the most brutal tyranny had to be carried out by the most unstable
and timid of all Roman statesmen, and that the "first democratic
consul" was selected to destroy the palladium of the ancient
freedom of the Roman commonwealth, the right of -provocatio-.
The anarchist plot had thus been suppressed in the capital as in Italy
with bloody violence; people were still reminded of it merely
by the criminal processes which in the Etruscan country towns
and in the capital thinned the ranks of those affiliated to the beaten
party, and by the large accessions to the robber-bands of Italy--
one of which, for instance, formed out of the remains of the armies
of Spartacus and Catilina, was destroyed by a military force in 694
in the territory of Thurii. But it is important to keep in view
that the blow fell by no means merely on the anarchists proper,
who had conspired to set the capital on fire and had fought
at Pistoria, but on the whole democratic party. That this party,
and in particular Crassus and Caesar, had a hand in the game
on the present occasion as well as in the plot of 688,
may be regarded--not in a juristic, but in a historical, point of view--
as an ascertained fact. The circumstance, indeed, that Catulus
and the other heads of the senatorial party accused the leader
of the democrats of complicity in the anarchist plot,
and that the latter as senator spoke and voted against the brutal
judicial murder contemplated by the oligarchy, could only be urged
by partisan sophistry as any valid proof of his participation
in the plans of Catilina. But a series of other facts is of more weight.
According to express and irrefragable testimonies it was especially
Crassus and Caesar that supported the candidature of Catilina
for the consulship. When Caesar in 690 brought the executioners
of Sulla before the commission for murder(20) he allowed the rest
to be condemned, but the most guilty and infamous of all, Catilina,
to be acquitted. In the revelations of the 3rd of December,
it is true, Cicero did not include among the names of the conspirators
of whom he had information those of the two influential men;
but it is notorious that the informers denounced not merely those
against whom subsequently investigation was directed, but "many innocent"
persons besides, whom the consul Cicero thought proper to erase
from the list; and in later years, when he had no reason to disguise
the truth, he expressly named Caesar among the accomplices. An indirect
but very intelligible inculpation is implied also in the circumstance,
that of the four persons arrested on the 3rd of December the two least
dangerous, Statilius and Gabinius, were handed over to be guarded
by the senators Caesar and Crassus; it was manifestly intended that these
should either, if they allowed them to escape, be compromised in the view
of public opinion as accessories, or, if they really detained them,
be compromised in the view of their fellow-conspirators as renegades.
For five years Pompeius stood at the head of his armies and fleets
in the east; for five years the democracy at home conspired
to overthrow him. The result was discouraging. With unspeakable
exertions they had not merely attained nothing, but had suffered
morally as well as materially enormous loss. Even the coalition
of 683 could not but be for democrats of pure water a scandal,
although the democracy at that time only coalesced with two
distinguished men of the opposite party and bound these
to its programme.
But now the democratic party had made common cause with a band
of murderers and bankrupts, who were almost all likewise deserters
from the camp of the aristocracy; and had at least for the time
being accepted their programme, that is to say, the terrorism
of Cinna. The party of material interests, one of the chief elements
of the coalition of 683, was thereby estranged from the democracy,
and driven into the arms of the Optimates in the first instance,
or of any power at all which would and could give protection against
anarchy. Even the multitude of the capital, who, although having
no objection to a street-riot, found it inconvenient to have
their houses set on fire over their heads, became in some measure
alarmed. It is remarkable that in this very year (691) the full
re-establishment of the Sempronian corn-largesses took place,
and was effected by the senate on the proposal of Cato. The league
of the democratic leaders with anarchy had obviously created a breach
between the former and the burgesses of the city; and the oligarchy
sought, not without at least momentary success, to enlarge
this chasm and to draw over the masses to their side. Lastly,
Gnaeus Pompeius had been partly warned, partly exasperated,
by all these cabals; after all that had occurred, and after the democracy
had itself virtually torn asunder the ties which connected it
with Pompeius, it could no longer with propriety make the request--
which in 684 had had a certain amount of reason on its side--
that he should not himself destroy with the sword the democratic power
which he had raised, and which had raised him.
Thus the democracy was disgraced and weakened; but above all it had
become ridiculous through the merciless exposure of its perplexity
and weakness. Where the humiliation of the overthrown government
and similar matters of little moment were concerned, it was great
and potent; but every one of its attempts to attain a real
political success had proved a downright failure. Its relation
to Pompeius was as false as pitiful. While it was loading him
with panegyrics and demonstrations of homage, it was concocting
against him one intrigue after another; and one after another,
like soap-bubbles, they burst of themselves. The general of the east
and of the seas, far from standing on his defence against them,
appeared not even to observe all the busy agitation, and to obtain
his victories over the democracy as Herakles gained his over
the Pygmies, without being himself aware of it. The attempt to kindle
civil war had miserably failed; if the anarchist section
had at least displayed some energy, the pure democracy, while knowing
doubtless how to hire conspirators, had not known how to lead
them or to save them or to die with them. Even the old languid
oligarchy, strengthened by the masses passing over to it
from the ranks of the democracy and above all by the--in this affair
unmistakeable--identity of its interests and those of Pompeius,
had been enabled to suppress this attempt at revolution and thereby
to achieve yet a last victory over the democracy. Meanwhile king
Mithradates was dead, Asia Minor and Syria were regulated,
and the return of Pompeius to Italy might be every moment expected.
The decision was not far off; but was there in fact still room
to speak of a decision between the general who returned more famous
and mightier than ever, and the democracy humbled beyond parallel
and utterly powerless? Crassus prepared to embark his family
and his gold and to seek an asylum somewhere in the east;
and even so elastic and so energetic a nature as that of Caesar seemed
on the point of giving up the game as lost. In this year (691)
occurred his candidature for the place of -pontifex maximus-;(22)
when he left his dwelling on the morning of the election,
he declared that, if he should fail in this also, he would
never again cross the threshold of his house.
CHAPTER VI
Pompeius had seized the right moment, when he undertook his mission
to the east; he seemed desirous to go forward. In the autumn
of 691, Quintus Metellus Nepos arrived from the camp of Pompeius
in the capital, and came forward as a candidate for the tribuneship,
with the express design of employing that position to procure
for Pompeius the consulship for the year 693 and more immediately,
by special decree of the people, the conduct of the war against
Catilina. The excitement in Rome was great. It was not
to be doubted that Nepos was acting under the direct or indirect
commission of Pompeius; the desire of Pompeius to appear in Italy
as general at the head of his Asiatic legions, and to administer
simultaneously the supreme military and the supreme civil power
there, was conceived to be a farther step on the way to the throne,
and the mission of Nepos a semi-official proclamation of the monarchy.
Everything turned on the attitude which the two great political parties
should assume towards these overtures; their future position
and the future of the nation depended on this. But the reception
which Nepos met with was itself in its turn determined
by the then existing relation of the parties to Pompeius, which was
of a very peculiar kind. Pompeius had gone to the east as general
of the democracy. He had reason enough to be discontented
with Caesar and his adherents, but no open rupture had taken place.
It is probable that Pompeius, who was at a great distance and occupied
with other things, and who besides was wholly destitute of the gift
of calculating his political bearings, by no means saw through,
at least at that time, the extent and mutual connection
of the democratic intrigues contrived against him; perhaps even
in his haughty and shortsighted manner he had a certain pride
in ignoring these underground proceedings. Then there came the fact,
which with a character of the type of Pompeius had much weight,
that the democracy never lost sight of outward respect for the great man,
and even now (691) unsolicited (as he preferred it so) had granted
to him by a special decree of the people unprecedented honours
and decorations.(1) But, even if all this had not been the case,
it lay in Pompeius' own well-understood interest to continue
his adherence, at least outwardly, to the popular party; democracy
and monarchy stand so closely related that Pompeius, in aspiring
to the crown, could scarcely do otherwise than call himself, as hitherto,
the champion of popular rights. While personal and political
reasons, therefore, co-operated to keep Pompeius and the leaders
of the democracy, despite of all that had taken place, in their
previous connection, nothing was done on the opposite side to fill
up the chasm which separated him since his desertion to the camp
of the democracy from his Sullan partisans. His personal quarrel
with Metellus and Lucullus transferred itself to their extensive
and influential coteries. A paltry opposition of the senate--
but, to a character of so paltry a mould, all the more exasperating
by reason of its very paltriness--had attended him through his whole
career as a general. He felt it keenly, that the senate had not taken
the smallest step to honour the extraordinary man according to
his desert, that is, by extraordinary means. Lastly, it is not
to be forgotten, that the aristocracy was just then intoxicated
by its recent victory and the democracy deeply humbled,
and that the aristocracy was led by the pedantically stiff
and half-witless Cato, and the democracy by the supple master
of intrigue, Caesar.
Such was the state of parties amidst which the emissary sent
by Pompeius appeared. The aristocracy not only regarded the proposals
which he announced in favour of Pompeius as a declaration of war
against the existing constitution, but treated them openly as such,
and took not the slightest pains to conceal their alarm and their
indignation. With the express design of combating these proposals,
Marcus Cato had himself elected as tribune of the people
along with Nepos, and abruptly repelled the repeated attempts of Pompeius
to approach him personally. Nepos naturally after this found himself
under no inducement to spare the aristocracy, but attached himself
the more readily to the democrats, when these, pliant as ever,
submitted to what was inevitable and chose freely to concede
the office of general in Italy as well as the consulate
rather than let the concession be wrung from them by force of arms.
The cordial understanding soon showed itself. Nepos publicly accepted
(Dec. 691) the democratic view of the executions recently decreed
by the majority of the senate, as unconstitutional judicial murders;
and that his lord and master looked on them in no other light,
was shown by his significant silence respecting the voluminous
vindication of them which Cicero had sent to him. On the other
hand, the first act with which Caesar began his praetorship
was to call Quintus Catulus to account for the moneys alleged
to have been embezzled by him at the rebuilding of the Capitoline temple,
and to transfer the completion of the temple to Pompeius. This was
a masterstroke. Catulus had already been building at the temple
for fifteen years, and seemed very much disposed to die as he had lived
superintendent of the Capitoline buildings; an attack on this abuse
of a public commission--an abuse covered only by the reputation
of the noble commissioner--was in reality entirely justified
and in a high degree popular. But when the prospect was simultaneously
opened up to Pompeius of being allowed to delete the name of Catulus
and engrave his own on this proudest spot of the first city
of the globe, there was offered to him the very thing which most
of all delighted him and did no harm to the democracy--abundant
but empty honour; while at the same time the aristocracy, which could
not possibly allow its best man to fall, was brought into the most
disagreeable collision with Pompeius.
Retirement of Pompeius
Pompeius had every reason to be content with the turn which things
had taken. The way to the throne now lay necessarily through civil
war; and he owed it to Cato's incorrigible perversity that he could
begin this war with good reason. After the illegal condemnation
of the adherents of Catilina, after the unparalleled acts of violence
against the tribune of the people Metellus, Pompeius might wage war
at once as defender of the two palladia of Roman public freedom--
the right of appeal and the inviolability of the tribunate
of the people--against the aristocracy, and as champion of the party
of order against the Catilinarian band. It seemed almost impossible
that Pompeius should neglect this opportunity and with his eyes
open put himself a second time into the painful position, in which
the dismissal of his army in 684 had placed him, and from which
only the Gabinian law had released him. But near as seemed
the opportunity of placing the white chaplet around his brow,
and much as his own soul longed after it, when the question of action
presented itself, his heart and his hand once more failed him.
This man, altogether ordinary in every respect excepting only
his pretensions, would doubtless gladly have placed himself beyond
the law, if only he could have done so without forsaking legal ground.
His very lingering in Asia betrayed a misgiving of this sort.
He might, had he wished, have very well arrived in January 692
with his fleet and army at the port of Brundisium, and have received
Nepos there. His tarrying the whole winter of 691-692 in Asia had
proximately the injurious consequence, that the aristocracy,
which of course accelerated the campaign against Catilina as it best
could, had meanwhile got rid of his bands, and had thus set aside
the most feasible pretext for keeping together the Asiatic legions
in Italy. For a man of the type of Pompeius, who for want of faith
in himself and in his star timidly clung in public life to formal
right, and with whom the pretext was nearly of as much importance
as the motive, this circumstance was of serious weight. He probably
said to himself, moreover, that, even if he dismissed his army,
he did not let it wholly out of his hand, and could in case
of need still raise a force ready for battle sooner at any rate
than any other party-chief; that the democracy was waiting
in submissive attitude for his signal, and that he could deal
with the refractory senate even without soldiers; and such further
considerations as suggested themselves, in which there was exactly
enough of truth to make them appear plausible to one who wished
to deceive himself. Once more the very peculiar temperament
of Pompeius naturally turned the scale. He was one of those men
who are capable it may be of a crime, but not of insubordination;
in a good as in a bad sense, he was thoroughly a soldier. Men of mark
respect the law as a moral necessity, ordinary men as a traditional
everyday rule; for this very reason military discipline, in which
more than anywhere else law takes the form of habit, fetters every
man not entirely self-reliant as with a magic spell. It has often
been observed that the soldier, even where he has determined
to refuse obedience to those set over him, involuntarily
when that obedience is demanded resumes his place in the ranks.
It was this feeling that made Lafayette and Dumouriez hesitate
at the last moment before the breach of faith and break down;
and to this too Pompeius succumbed.
In the autumn of 692 Pompeius embarked for Italy. While in the capital
all was being prepared for receiving the new monarch, news came
that Pompeius, when barely landed at Brundisium, had broken up
his legions and with a small escort had entered on his journey
to the capital. If it is a piece of good fortune to gain a crown
without trouble, fortune never did more for mortal than it did
for Pompeius; but on those who lack courage the gods lavish every
favour and every gift in vain.
The parties breathed freely. For the second time Pompeius had
abdicated; his already-vanquished competitors might once more begin
the race--in which doubtless the strangest thing was, that Pompeius
was again a rival runner. In January 693 he came to Rome.
His position was an awkward one and vacillated with so much uncertainty
between the parties, that people gave him the nickname of Gnaeus
Cicero. He had in fact lost favour with all. The anarchists saw
in him an adversary, the democrats an inconvenient friend, Marcus
Crassus a rival, the wealthy class an untrustworthy protector,
the aristocracy a declared foe.(2) He was still indeed the most
powerful man in the state; his military adherents scattered through
all Italy, his influence in the provinces, particularly those
of the east, his military fame, his enormous riches gave him a weight
such as no other possessed; but instead of the enthusiastic
reception on which he had counted, the reception which he met
with was more than cool, and still cooler was the treatment given
to the demands which he presented. He requested for himself,
as he had already caused to be announced by Nepos, a second consulship;
demanding also, of course, a confirmation of the arrangements made
by him in the east and a fulfilment of the promise which he had
given to his soldiers to furnish them with lands. Against these
demands a systematic opposition arose in the senate, the chief
elements of which were furnished by the personal exasperation
of Lucullus and Metellus Creticus, the old resentment of Crassus,
and the conscientious folly of Cato. The desired second consulship
was at once and bluntly refused. The very first request
which the returning general addressed to the senate, that the election
of the consuls for 693 might be put off till after his entry
into the capital, had been rejected; much less was there any likelihood
of obtaining from the senate the necessary dispensation from the law
of Sulla as to re-election.(3) As to the arrangements which
he had made in the eastern provinces, Pompeius naturally asked
their confirmation as a whole; Lucullus carried a proposal
thatevery ordinance should be separately discussed and voted upon,
which opened the door for endless annoyances and a multitude of defeats
in detail. The promise of a grant of land to the soldiers
of the Asiatic army was ratified indeed in general by the senate,
but was at the same time extended to the Cretan legions of Metellus;
and--what was worse--it was not executed, because the public chest
was empty and the senate was not disposed to meddle with the domains
for this purpose. Pompeius, in despair of mastering the persistent
and spiteful opposition of the senate, turned to the burgesses.
But he understood still less how to conduct his movements
on this field. The democratic leaders, although they did not
openly oppose him, had no cause at all to make his interests their own,
and so kept aloof. Pompeius' own instruments--such as the consuls
elected by his influence and partly by his money, Marcus Pupius Piso
for 693 and Lucius Afranius for 694--showed themselves unskilful
and useless. When at length the assignation of land for the veterans
of Pompeius was submitted to the burgesses by the tribune
of the people Lucius Flavius in the form of a general agrarian law,
the proposal, not supported by the democrats, openly combated
by the aristocrats, was left in a minority (beg. of 694). The exalted
general now sued almost humbly for the favour of the masses,
for it was on his instigation that the Italian tolls were abolished
by a law introduced by the praetor Metellus Nepos (694). But he played
the demagogue without skill and without success; his reputation
suffered from it, and he did not obtain what he desired. He had
completely run himself into a noose. One of his opponents summed
up his political position at that time by saying that he had
endeavoured "to conserve by silence his embroidered triumphal
mantle." In fact nothing was left for him but to fret.
Rise of Caesar
But the more the democracy could not but desire to open up
for itself this path, which offered not so much the most favourable
as the only prospect of real successes, the more certainly it
might reckon on the resolute resistance of its political opponents.
Everything depended on whom it found opposed to it in this matter.
The aristocracy isolated was not formidable; but it had just been
rendered evident in the Catilinarian affair that it could certainly
still exert some influence, where it was more or less openly
supported by the men of material interests and by the adherents
of Pompeius. It had several times frustrated Catilina's candidature
for the consulship, and that it would attempt the like against
Caesar was sufficiently certain. But, even though Caesar should
perhaps be chosen in spite of it, his election alone did not suffice.
He needed at least some years of undisturbed working out of Italy,
in order to gain a firm military position; and the nobility
assuredly would leave no means untried to thwart his plans
during this time of preparation. The idea naturally occurred,
whether the aristocracy might not be again successfully isolated
as in 683-684, and an alliance firmly based on mutual advantage might
not be established between the democrats with their ally Crassus
on the one side and Pompeius and the great capitalists on the other.
For Pompeius such a coalition was certainly a political suicide.
His weight hitherto in the state rested on the fact, that he was
the only party-leader who at the same time disposed of legions--
which, though now dissolved, were still in a certain sense
at his disposal. The plan of the democracy was directed
to the very object of depriving him of this preponderance,
and of placing by his side in their own chief a military rival.
Never could he consent to this, and least of all personally help
to a post of supreme command a man like Caesar, who already
as a mere political agitator had given him trouble enough
and had just furnished the most brilliant proofs also of military
capacity in Spain. But on the other hand, in consequence
of the cavilling opposition of the senate and the indifference
of the multitude to Pompeius and Pompeius' wishes, his position,
particularly with reference to his old soldiers, had become so painful
and so humiliating, that people might well expect from his character
to gain him for such a coalition at the price of releasing him
from that disagreeable situation. And as to the so-called
equestrian party, it was to be found on whatever side the power lay;
and as a matter of course it would not let itself be long waited for,
if it saw Pompeius and the democracy combining anew in earnest.
It happened moreover, that on account of Cato's severity--
otherwise very laudable--towards the lessees of the taxes,
the great capitalists were just at this time once more
at vehement variance with the senate.
Caesar Consul
Of course all the proposals were now brought before the burgesses.
Without deviating far from the truth, Caesar could tell
the multitude that the senate had scornfully rejected most rational
and most necessary proposals submitted to it in the most respectful
form, simply because they came from the democratic consul.
When he added that the aristocrats had contrived a plot to procure
the rejection of the proposals, and summoned the burgesses,
and more especially Pompeius himself and his old soldiers, to stand
by him against fraud and force, this too was by no means a mere invention.
The aristocracy, with the obstinate weak creature Bibulus
and the unbending dogmatical fool Cato at their head, in reality
intended to push the matter to open violence. Pompeius, instigated
by Caesar to proclaim his position with reference to the pending
question, declared bluntly, as was not his wont on other occasions,
that if any one should venture to draw the sword, he too would
grasp his, and in that case would not leave the shield at home;
Crassus expressed himself to the same effect The old soldiers
of Pompeius were directed to appear on the day of the vote--
which in fact primarily concerned them--in great numbers,
and with arms under their dress, at the place of voting.
The most important of these steps was the regulating of the future
position of Caesar. Constitutionally it devolved on the senate
to fix the functions of the second consular year of office before
the election of the consuls took place; accordingly it had, in prospect
of the election of Caesar, selected with that view for 696 two
provinces in which the governor should find no other employment
than the construction of roads and other such works of utility.
Of course the matter could not so remain; it was determined among
the confederates, that Caesar should obtain by decree of the people
an extraordinary command formed on the model of the Gabinio-Manilian
laws. Caesar however had publicly declared that he would introduce
no proposal in his own favour; the tribune of the people Publius
Vatinius therefore undertook to submit the proposal to the burgesses,
who naturally gave their unconditional assent. By this means
Caesar obtained the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul and the supreme
command of the three legions which were stationed there
and were already experienced in border warfare under Lucius Afranius,
along with the same rank of propraetor for his adjutants
which those of Pompeius had enjoyed; this office was secured to him
for five years--a longer period than had ever before been assigned
to any general whose appointment was limited to a definite time
at all. The Transpadanes, who for years had in hope of the franchise
been the clients of the democratic party in Rome and of Caesar
in particular,(8) formed the main portion of his province.
His jurisdiction extended south as far as the Arnus and the Rubico,
and included Luca and Ravenna. Subsequently there was added to Caesar's
official district the province of Narbo with the one legion
stationed there--a resolution adopted by the senate on the proposal
of Pompeius, that it might at least not see this command
also pass to Caesar by extraordinary decree of the burgesses.
What was wished was thus attained. As no troops could constitutionally
be stationed in Italy proper,(9) the commander of the legions
of northern Italy and Gaul dominated at the same time Italy and Rome
for the next five years; and he who was master for five years
was master for life. The consulship of Caesar had attained its object.
As a matter of course, the new holders of power did not neglect
withal to keep the multitude in good humour by games and amusements
of all sorts, and they embraced every opportunity of filling their
exchequer; in the case of the king of Egypt, for instance,
the decree of the people, which recognized him as legitimate ruler,(10)
was sold to him by the coalition at a high price, and in like manner
other dynasts and communities acquired charters and privileges
on this occasion.
The more firmly and closely the alliance was thus cemented
between Pompeius and Caesar, the more hopeless grew the cause
of the aristocracy. They felt the sword suspended over their head
and knew Caesar sufficiently to have no doubt that he would,
if necessary, use it without hesitation. "On all sides," wrote
one of them, "we are checkmated; we have already through fear of death
or of banishment despaired of 'freedom'; every one sighs,
no one ventures to speak." More the confederates could not desire.
But though the majority of the aristocracy was in this desirable
frame of mind, there was, of course, no lack of Hotspurs among
this party. Hardly had Caesar laid down the consulship, when some
of the most violent aristocrats, Lucius Domitius and Gaius Memmius,
proposed in a full senate the annulling of the Julian laws.
This indeed was simply a piece of folly, which redounded only
to the benefit of the coalition; for, when Caesar now himself
insisted that the senate should investigate the validity of the laws
assailed, the latter could not but formally recognize their
legality. But, as may readily be conceived, the holders of power
found in this a new call to make an example of some of the most
notable and noisiest of their opponents, and thereby to assure
themselves that the remainder would adhere to that fitting policy
of sighing and silence. At first there had been a hope
that the clause of the agrarian law, which as usual required
all the senators to take an oath to the new law on pain of forfeiting
their political rights, would induce its most vehement opponents
to banish themselves, after the example of Metellus Numidicus,(11)
by refusing the oath. But these did not show themselves
so complaisant; even the rigid Cato submitted to the oath,
and his Sanchos followed him. A second, far from honourable,
attempt to threaten the heads of the aristocracy with criminal
impeachments on account of an alleged plot for the murder of Pompeius,
and so to drive them into exile, was frustrated by the incapacity
of the instruments; the informer, one Vettius, exaggerated
and contradicted himself so grossly, and the tribune Vatinius,
who directed the foul scheme, showed his complicity with that Vettius
so clearly, that it was found advisable to strangle the latter
in prison and to let the whole matter drop. On this occasion however
they had obtained sufficient evidence of the total disorganization
of the aristocracy and the boundless alarm of the genteel lords:
even a man like Lucius Lucullus had thrown himself in person
at Caesar's feet and publicly declared that he found himself compelled
by reason of his great age to withdraw from public life.
Clodius
CHAPTER VII
The Subjugation of the West
By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state
absorbs its neighbours who are in political nonage, and a civilized
people absorbs its neighbours who are in intellectual nonage--
by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much
a law of nature as the law of gravity--the Italian nation (the only
one in antiquity which was able to combine a superior political
development and a superior civilization, though it presented
the latter only in an imperfect and external manner) was entitled
to reduce to subjection the Greek states of the east which were ripe
for destruction, and to dispossess the peoples of lower grades
of culture in the west--Libyans, Iberians, Celts, Germans--by means
of its settlers; just as England with equal right has in Asia reduced
to subjection a civilization of rival standing but politically
impotent, and in America and Australia has marked and ennobled,
and still continues to mark and ennoble, extensive barbarian
countries with the impress of its nationality. The Roman aristocracy
had accomplished the preliminary condition required for this task--
the union of Italy; the task itself it never solved, but always
regarded the extra-Italian conquests either as simply a necessary
evil, or as a fiscal possession virtually beyond the pale
of the state. It is the imperishable glory of the Roman democracy
or monarchy--for the two coincide--to have correctly apprehended
and vigorously realized this its highest destination. What
the irresistible force of circumstances had paved the way for,
through the senate establishing against its will the foundations
of the future Roman dominion in the west as in the east; what thereafter
the Roman emigration to the provinces--which came as a public
calamity, no doubt, but also in the western regions at any rate
as a pioneer of a higher culture--pursued as matter of instinct;
the creator of the Roman democracy, Gaius Gracchus, grasped
and began to carry out with statesmanlike clearness and decision.
The two fundamental ideas of the new policy--to reunite
the territories under the power of Rome, so far as they were Hellenic,
and to colonize them, so far as they were not Hellenic--had already
in the Gracchan age been practically recognized by the annexation
of the kingdom of Attalus and by the Transalpine conquests of Flaccus:
but the prevailing reaction once more arrested their application.
The Roman state remained a chaotic mass of countries without thorough
occupation and without proper limits. Spain and the Graeco-Asiatic
possessions were separated from the mother country by wide
territories, of which barely the borders along the coast
were subject to the Romans; on the north coast of Africa the domains
of Carthage and Cyrene alone were occupied like oases; large tracts
even of the subject territory, especially in Spain, were but nominally
subject to the Romans. Absolutely nothing was done on the part
of the government towards concentrating and rounding off
their dominion, and the decay of the fleet seemed at length
to dissolve the last bond of connection between the distant
possessions. The democracy no doubt attempted, so soon as it
again raised its head, to shape its external policy in the spirit
of Gracchus--Marius in particular cherished such ideas--but as it
did not for any length of time attain the helm, its projects
were left unfulfilled. It was not till the democracy practically took
in hand the government on the overthrow of the Sullan constitution
in 684, that a revolution in this respect occurred. First of all
their sovereignty on the Mediterranean was restored--the most
vital question for a state like that of Rome. Towards the east,
moreover, the boundary of the Euphrates was secured by the annexation
of the provinces of Pontus and Syria. But there still remained beyond
the Alps the task of at once rounding off the Roman territory towards
the north and west, and of gaining a fresh virgin soil there
for Hellenic civilization and for the yet unbroken vigour
of the Italic race.
Caesar in Spain
Gaul
Bounds
Relations to Rome
Incipient Romanizing
Free Gaul
Matters wore a different aspect, when one crossed the Roman frontier.
The great Celtic nation, which in the southern districts already
began to be crushed by the Italian immigration, still moved
to the north of the Cevennes in its time-hallowed freedom.
It is not the first time that we meet it: the Italians had already
fought with the offsets and advanced posts of this vast stock
on the Tiber and on the Po, in the mountains of Castile and Carinthia,
and even in the heart of Asia Minor; but it was here that the main stock
was first assailed at its very core by their attacks. The Celtic race
had on its settlement in central Europe diffused itself chiefly
over the rich river-valleys and the pleasant hill-country
of the present France, including the western districts of Germany
and Switzerland, and from thence had occupied at least the southern
part of England, perhaps even at this time all Great Britain
and Ireland;(10) it formed here more than anywhere else a broad,
geographically compact, mass of peoples. In spite of
the differences in language and manners which naturally
were to be found within this wide territory, a close mutual intercourse,
an innate sense of fellowship, seems to have knit together
the tribes from the Rhone and Garonne to the Rhine and the Thames;
whereas, although these doubtless were in a certain measure locally
connected with the Celts in Spain and in the modern Austria,
the mighty mountain barriers of the Pyrenees and the Alps
on the one hand, and the encroachments of the Romans and the Germans
which also operated here on the other, interrupted the intercourse
and the intrinsic connection of the cognate peoples far otherwise
than the narrow arm of the sea interrupted the relations
of the continental and the British Celts. Unhappily we are not
permitted to trace stage by stage the history of the internal development
of this remarkable people in these its chief seats; we must be content
with presenting at least some outline of its historical culture
and political condition, as it here meets us in the time of Caesar.
Population
Agriculture and the Rearing of Cattle
Urban Life
Intercourse
Commerce
Manufactures
With this regular maritime intercourse between the British
and Gallic coasts, the very close political connection between
the inhabitants on both sides of the Channel is as easily explained
as the flourishing of transmarine commerce and of fisheries.
It was the Celts of Brittany in particular, that brought the tin
of the mines of Cornwall from England and carried it by the river
and land routes of Gaul to Narbo and Massilia. The statement,
that in Caesar's time certain tribes at the mouth of the Rhine subsisted
on fish and birds' eggs, may probably refer to the circumstance
that marine fishing and the collection of the eggs of sea-birds
were prosecuted there on an extensive scale. When we put together
and endeavour to fill up the isolated and scanty statements which have
reached us regarding the Celtic commerce and intercourse, we come
to see why the tolls of the river and maritime ports play a great
part in the budgets of certain cantons, such as those of the Haedui
and the Veneti, and why the chief god of the nation was regarded
by them as the protector of the roads and of commerce, and at
the same time as the inventor of manufactures. Accordingly the Celtic
industry cannot have been wholly undeveloped; indeed the singular
dexterity of the Celts, and their peculiar skill in imitating
any model and executing any instructions, are noticed by Caesar.
In most branches, however, their handicraft does not appear
to have risen above the ordinary level; the manufacture of linen
and woollen stuffs, that subsequently flourished in central
and northern Gaul, was demonstrably called into existence only
by the Romans. The elaboration of metals forms an exception,
and so far as we know the only one. The copper implements
not unfrequently of excellent workmanship and even now malleable,
which are brought to light in the tombs of Gaul, and the carefully
adjusted Arvernian gold coins, are still at the present day
striking witnesses of the skill of the Celtic workers in copper
and gold; and with this the reports of the ancients well accord,
that the Romans learned the art of tinning from the Bituriges
and that of silvering from the Alesini--inventions, the first of which
was naturally suggested by the traffic' in tin, and both of which
were probably made in the period of Celtic freedom.
Mining
Political Organization
Cantonal Constitution
Development of Knighthood
Breaking Up of the Old Cantonal Constitution
Infantry
By the side of these mounted warriors the infantry fell
into the background. In the main it essentially resembled the bands
of Celts, with whom the Romans had fought in Italy and Spain.
The large shield was, as then, the principal weapon of defence;
among the offensive arms, on the other hand, the long thrusting
lance now played the chief part in room of the sword. Where several
cantons waged war in league, they naturally encamped and fought clan
against clan; there is no trace of their giving to the levy of each
canton military organization and forming smaller and more regular
tactical subdivisions. A long train of waggons still dragged
the baggage of the Celtic army; instead of an entrenched camp, such as
the Romans pitched every night, the poor substitute of a barricade
of waggons still sufficed. In the case of certain cantons,
such as the Nervii, the efficiency of their infantry is noticed
as exceptional; it is remarkable that these had no cavalry,
and perhaps were not even a Celtic but an immigrant German tribe.
But in general the Celtic infantry of this period appears
as an unwarlike and unwieldy levy en masse; most of all
in the more southern provinces, where along with barbarism valour
had also disappeared. The Celt, says Caesar, ventures not to face
the German in battle. The Roman general passed a censure
still more severe than this judgment on the Celtic infantry,
seeing that, after having become acquainted with them
in his first campaign, he never again employed them
in connection with Roman infantry.
External Relations
Celts and Iberians
The most violent onset of this great nation fell upon the Celts.
The struggles, in which the Germans probably engaged with the Celts
for the possession of the regions to the east of the Rhine, are
wholly withdrawn from our view. We are only able to perceive,
that about the end of the seventh century of Rome all the land
as far as the Rhine was already lost to the Celts; that the Boii,
who were probably once settled in Bavaria and Bohemia,(26) were homeless
wanderers; and that even the Black Forest formerly possessed
by the Helvetii,(27) if not yet taken possession of by the German tribes
dwelling in the vicinity, was at least waste debateable border-
land, and was presumably even then, what it was afterwards called,
the Helvetian desert The barbarous strategy of the Germans--which
secured them from hostile attacks by laying waste the neighbourhood
for miles--seems to have been applied here on the greatest scale.
The less the Celts, left to themselves, were a match for the Germans,
the more reason had the Romans carefully to watch over the complications
in which the two nations might be involved. Although the movements
thence arising had not up to the present time directly affected
them, they and their most important interests were yet concerned
in the issue of those movements. As may readily be conceived,
the internal demeanour of the Celtic nation had become speedily
and permanently influenced by its outward relations. As in Greece
the Lacedaemonian party combined with Persia against the Athenians,
so the Romans from their first appearance beyond the Alps had found
a support against the Arverni, who were then the ruling power among
the southern Celts, in their rivals for the hegemony, the Haedui:
and with the aid of these new "brothers of the Roman nation" they had
not merely reduced to subjection the Allobroges and a great portion
of the indirect territory of the Arverni, but had also, in the Gaul
that remained free, occasioned by their influence the transference
of the hegemony from the Arverni to these Haedui. But while the Greeks
were threatened with danger to their nationality only from one side,
the Celts found themselves hard pressed simultaneously by two
national foes; and it was natural that they should seek from the one
protection against the other, and that, if the one Celtic party
attached itself to the Romans, their opponents should
on the contrary form alliance with the Germans. This course
was most natural for the Belgae, who were brought by neighbourhood
and manifold intermixture into closer relation to the Germans who had
crossed the Rhine, and moreover, with their less-developed culture,
probably felt themselves at least as much akin to the Suebian
of alien race as to their cultivated Allobrogian or Helvetic
countryman. But the southern Celts also, among whom now
as already mentioned, the considerable canton of the Sequani
(about Besangon) stood at the head of the party hostile to the Romans,
had every reason at this very time to call in the Germans against
the Romans who immediately threatened them; the remiss government
of the senate and the signs of the revolution preparing in Rome,
which had not remained unknown to the Celts, made this very moment
seem suitable for ridding themselves of the Roman influence
and primarily for humbling the Roman clients, the Haedui. A rupture
had taken place between the two cantons respecting the tolls
on the Saone, which separated the territory of the Haedui
from that of the Sequani, and about the year 683 the German prince
Ariovistus with some 15,000 armed men had crossed the Rhine
as condottiere of the Sequani.
The war was prolonged for some years with varying success;
on the whole the results were unfavourable to the Haedui. Their leader
Eporedorix at length called out their whole clients, and marched
forth with an enormous superiority of force against the Germans.
These obstinately refused battle, and kept themselves under cover
of morasses and forests. It was not till the clans, weary
of waiting, began to break up and disperse, that the Germans appeared
in the open field, and then Ariovistus compelled a battle
at Admagetobriga, in which the flower of the cavalry of the Haedui
were left on the field. The Haedui, forced by this defeat
to conclude peace on the terms which the victor proposed, were obliged
to renounce the hegemony, and to consent with their whole adherents
to become clients of the Sequani; they had to bind themselves
to pay tribute to the Sequani or rather to Ariovistus, and to furnish
the children of their principal nobles as hostages; and lastly
they had to swear that they would never demand back these hostages
nor invoke the intervention of the Romans.
Battle at Bibracte
Ariovistus Attacked
And Beaten
It was the more necessary not to delay; Caesar immediately set out
against Ariovistus. A panic seized his troops, especially his officers
when they were to measure their strength with the flower
of the German troops that for fourteen years had not come
under shelter of a roof: it seemed as if the deep decay of Roman moral
and military discipline would assert itself and provoke desertion
and mutiny even in Caesar's camp. But the general, while declaring
that in case of need he would march with the tenth legion alone
against the enemy, knew not merely how to influence these
by such an appeal to honour, but also how to bind the other regiments
to their eagles by warlike emulation, and to inspire the troops
with something of his own energy. Without leaving them time
for reflection, he led them onward in rapid marches, and fortunately
anticipated Ariovistus in the occupation of Vesontio (Besancon),
the capital of the Sequani. A personal conference between the two
generals, which took place at the request of Ariovistus, seemed
as if solely meant to cover an attempt against the person of Caesar;
arms alone could decide between the two oppressors of Gaul. The war
came temporarily to a stand. In lower Alsace somewhere in the region
of Muhlhausen, five miles from the Rhine,(36) the two armies
lay at a little distance from each other, till Ariovistus
with his very superior force succeeded in marching past the Roman camp,
placing himself in its rear, and cutting off the Romans
from their base and their supplies. Caesar attempted to free himself
from his painful situation by a battle; but Ariovistus did not accept it.
Nothing remained for the Roman general but, in spite of
his inferior strength, to imitate the movement of the Germans,
and to recover his communications by making two legions march past
the enemy and take up a position beyond the camp of the Germans,
while four legions remained behind in the former camp. Ariovistus,
when he saw the Romans divided, attempted an assault on their lesser
camp; but the Romans repulsed it. Under the impression made
by this success, the whole Roman army was brought forward
to the attack; and the Germans also placed themselves in battle array,
in a long line, each tribe for itself, the cars of the army
with the baggage and women being placed behind them to render flight
more difficult. The right wing of the Romans, led by Caesar himself,
threw itself rapidly on the enemy, and drove them before it;
the right wing of the Germans was in like manner successful.
The balance still stood equal; but the tactics of the reserve,
which had decided so many other conflicts with barbarians, decided
the conflict with the Germans also in favour of the Romans;
their third line, which Publius Crassus seasonably sent to render help,
restored the battle on the left wing and thereby decided
the victory. The pursuit was continued to the Rhine; only a few,
including the king, succeeded in escaping to the other bank (696).
The consequences of this one campaign were immense; they were felt
for many centuries after. The Rhine had become the boundary
of the Roman empire against the Germans. In Gaul, which was no longer
able to govern itself, the Romans had hitherto ruled on the south
coast, while lately the Germans had attempted to establish themselves
farther up. The recent events had decided that Gaul was to succumb
not merely in part but wholly to the Roman supremacy,
and that the natural boundary presented by the mighty river was also
to become the political boundary. The senate in its better times
had not rested, till the dominion of Rome had reached the natural
bounds of Italy--the Alps and the Mediterranean--and its adjacent
islands. The enlarged empire also needed a similar military
rounding off; but the present government left the matter
to accident, and sought at most to see, not that the frontiers
were capable of defence, but that they should not need to be defended
directly by itself. People felt that now another spirit
and another arm began to guide the destinies of Rome.
Subjugation of Gaul
Belgic Expedition
Caesar did not venture to give battle to the brave enemy six times
as strong; to the north of the Aisne, not far from the modern
Pontavert between Rheims and Laon, he pitched his camp on a plateau
rendered almost unassailable on all sides partly by the river
and by morasses, partly by fosses and redoubts, and contented himself
with thwarting by defensive measures the attempts of the Belgae
to cross the Aisne and thereby to cut him off from his communications.
When he counted on the likelihood that the coalition would speedily
collapse under its own weight, he had reckoned rightly. King Galba
was an honest man, held in universal respect; but he was not equal
to the management of an army of 300,000 men on hostile soil.
No progress was made, and provisions began to fail; discontent
and dissension began to insinuate themselves into the camp
of the confederates. The Bellovaci in particular, equal to
the Suessiones in power, and already dissatisfied that the supreme
command of the confederate army had not fallen to them, could no longer
be detained after news had arrived that the Haedui as allies
of the Romans were making preparations to enter the Bellovacic territory.
They determined to break up and go home; though for honour's sake
all the cantons at the same time bound themselves to hasten
with their united strength to the help of the one first attacked,
the miserable dispersion of the confederacy was but miserably palliated
by such impracticable stipulations. It was a catastrophe
which vividly reminds us of that which occurred almost
on the same spot in 1792; and, just as with the campaign in Champagne,
the defeat was all the more severe that it took place without a battle.
The bad leadership of the retreating army allowed the Roman general
to pursue it as if it were beaten, and to destroy a portion
of the contingents that had remained to the last. But the consequences
of the victory were not confined to this. As Caesar advanced
into the western cantons of the Belgae, one after another
gave themselves up as lost almost without resistance; the powerful
Suessiones (about Soissons), as well as their rivals, the Bellovaci
(about Beauvais) and the Ambiani (about Amiens). The towns opened
their gates when they saw the strange besieging machines,
the towers rolling up to their walls; those who would not submit
to the foreign masters sought a refuge beyond the sea in Britain.
Caesar sent Labienus with all the cavalry to the Rhine, with a view
to hold in check the agitation in the Belgic province, and in case
of need to prevent the Germans from crossing the river; another
of his lieutenants, Quintus Titurius Sabinus, went with three legions
to Normandy, where the main body of the insurgents assembled.
But the powerful and intelligent Veneti were the true centre
of the insurrection; the chief attack by land and sea was directed
against them. Caesar's lieutenant, Decimus Brutus, brought up
the fleet formed partly of the ships of the subject Celtic cantons,
partly of a number of Roman galleys hastily built on the Loire
and manned with rowers from the Narbonese province; Caesar himself
advanced with the flower of his infantry into the territory of the Veneti.
But these were prepared beforehand, and had with equal skill
and resolution availed themselves of the favourable circumstances
which the nature of the ground in Brittany and the possession
of a considerable naval power presented. The country was much
intersected and poorly furnished with grain, the towns
were situated for the most part on cliffs and tongues of land,
and were accessible from the mainland only by shallows which it was
difficult to cross; the provision of supplies and the conducting
of sieges were equally difficult for the army attacking by land,
while the Celts by means of their vessels could furnish the towns
easily with everything needful, and in the event of the worst could
accomplish their evacuation. The legions expended their time
and strength in the sieges of the Venetian townships, only to see
the substantial fruits of victory ultimately carried off in the vessels
of the enemy.
While Caesar was thus forming the Roman domain in the west by force
of arms into a compact whole, he did not neglect to open up
for the newly-conquered country--which was destined in fact to fill up
the wide gap in that domain between Italy and Spain-communications both
with the Italian home and with the Spanish provinces. The communication
between Gaul and Italy had certainly been materially facilitated
by the military road laid out by Pompeius in 677 over Mont Genevre;(40)
but since the whole of Gaul had been subdued by the Romans, there was
need of a route crossing the ridge of the Alps from the valley of the Po,
not in a westerly but in a northerly direction, and furnishing a shorter
communication between Italy and central Gaul. The way which leads over
the Great St. Bernard into the Valais and along the lake of Geneva
had long served the merchant for this purpose; to get this road
into his power, Caesar as early as the autumn of 697 caused Octodurum
(Martigny) to be occupied by Servius Galba, and the inhabitants
of the Valais to be reduced to subjection--a result which was,
of course, merely postponed, not prevented, by the brave resistance
of these mountain-peoples.
Expeditions to Britain
Cassivellaunus
The brave and cautious prince Cassivellaunus, who ruled in what
is now Middlesex and the surrounding district--formerly the terror
of the Celts to the south of the Thames, but now the protector
and champion of the whole nation--had headed the defence of the land.
He soon saw that nothing at all could be done with the Celtic
infantry against the Roman, and that the mass of the general levy--
which it was difficult to feed and difficult to control--was only
a hindrance to the defence; he therefore dismissed it and retained
only the war-chariots, of which he collected 4000, and in which
the warriors, accustomed to leap down from their chariots and fight
on foot, could be employed in a twofold manner like the burgess-
cavalry of the earliest Rome. When Caesar was once more able
to continue his march, he met with no interruption to it;
but the British war-chariots moved always in front and alongside
of the Roman army, induced the evacuation of the country
(which from the absence of towns proved no great difficulty),
prevented the sending out of detachments, and threatened
the communications. The Thames was crossed--apparently
between Kingston and Brentford above London--by the Romans;
they moved forward, but made no real progress; the general achieved
no victory, the soldiers made no booty, and the only actual result,
the submission of the Trinobante in the modern Essex, was less
the effect of a dread of the Romans than of the deep hostility
between this canton and Cassivellaunus. The danger increased
with every onward step, and the attack, which the princes of Kent
by the orders of Cassivellaunus made on the Roman naval camp,
although it was repulsed, was an urgent warning to turn back.
The taking by storm of a great British tree-barricade,
in which a multitude of cattle fell into the hands of the Romans,
furnished a passable conclusion to the aimless advance and a tolerable
pretext for returning. Cassivellaunus was sagacious enough
not to drive the dangerous enemy to extremities, and promised,
as Caesar desired him, to abstain from disturbing the Trinobantes,
to pay tribute and to furnish hostages; nothing was said
of delivering up arms or leaving behind a Roman garrison,
and even those promises were, it may be presumed, so far as
they concerned the future, neither given nor received in earnest.
After receiving the hostages Caesar returned to the naval camp
and thence to Gaul. If he, as it would certainly seem,
had hoped on this occasion to conquer Britain, the scheme
was totally thwarted partly by the wise defensive system
of Cassivellaunus, partly and chiefly by the unserviceableness
of the Italian oared fleet in the waters of the North Sea;
for it is certain that the stipulated tribute was never paid.
But the immediate object--of rousing the islanders out of their haughty
security and inducing them in their own interest no longer to allow
their island to be a rendezvous for continental emigrants--
seems certainly to have been attained; at least no complaints
are afterwards heard as to the bestowal of such protection.
Insurrection
Cicero Attacked
And Suppressed
Accounts had thus been settled with all the tribes that took part
in the rising; the Eburones alone were passed over but not forgotten.
Since Caesar had met with the disaster of Aduatuca, he had worn
mourning and had sworn that he would only lay it aside
when he should have avenged his soldiers, who had not fallen
in honourable war, but had been treacherously murdered.
Helpless and passive the Eburones sat in their huts and looked on
as the neighbouring cantons one after another submitted to the Romans,
till the Roman cavalry from the Treverian territory advanced
through the Ardennes into their land. So little were they prepared
for the attack, that the cavalry had almost seized the king
Ambiorix in his house; with great difficulty, while his attendants
sacrificed themselves on his behalf, he escaped into the neighbouring
thicket. Ten Roman legions soon followed the cavalry.
At the same time a summons was issued to the surrounding tribes
to hunt the outlawed Eburones and pillage their land in concert
with the Roman soldiers; not a few complied with the call, including
even an audacious band of Sugambrian horsemen from the other side
of the Rhine, who for that matter treated the Romans no better than
the Eburones, and had almost by a daring coup de main surprised
the Roman camp at Aduatuca. The fate of the Eburones was dreadful.
However they might hide themselves in forests and morasses,
there were more hunters than game. Many put themselves to death
like the gray-haired prince Catuvolcus; only a few saved life
and liberty, but among these few was the man whom the Romans sought
above all to seize, the prince Ambiorix; with but four horsemen
he escaped over the Rhine. This execution against the canton
which had transgressed above all the rest was followed in the other
districts by processes of high treason against individuals. The season
for clemency was past. At the bidding of the Roman proconsul
the eminent Carnutic knight Acco was beheaded by Roman lictors
(701) and the rule of the -fasces- was thus formally inaugurated.
Opposition was silent; tranquillity everywhere prevailed. Caesar
went as he was wont towards the end of the year (701) over the Alps,
that through the winter he might observe more closely
the daily-increasing complications in the capital.
Second Insurrection
The Carnutes
The Arverni
Vercingetorix
The west from the mouth of the Garonne to that of the Seine
was rapidly infected by the insurrection, and Vercingetorix
was recognized by all the cantons there as commander-in-chief;
where the common council made any difficulty, the multitude compelled
it to join the movement; only a few cantons, such as that
of the Bituriges, required compulsion to join it, and these perhaps
only for appearance' sake. The insurrection found a less favourable
soil in the regions to the east of the upper Loire. Everything
here depended on the Haedui; and these wavered. The patriotic
party was very strong in this canton; but the old antagonism
to the leading of the Arverni counterbalanced their influence--
to the most serious detriment of the insurrection, as the accession
of the eastern cantons, particularly of the Sequani and Helvetii,
was conditional on the accession of the Haedui, and generally
in this part of Gaul the decision rested with them. While the insurgents
were thus labouring partly to induce the cantons that still
hesitated, especially the Haedui, to join them, partly to get
possession of Narbo--one of their leaders, the daring Lucterius,
had already appeared on the Tarn within the limits of the old
province--the Roman commander-in-chief suddenly presented himself
in the depth of winter, unexpected alike by friend and foe,
on this side of the Alps. He quickly made the necessary preparations
to cover the old province, and not only so, but sent also a corps
over the snow-covered Cevennes into the Arvernian territory;
but he could not remain here, where the accession of the Haedui
to the Gallic alliance might any moment cut him off from his army
encamped about Sens and Langres. With all secrecy he went to Vienna,
and thence, attended by only a few horsemen, through the territory
of the Haedui to his troops. The hopes, which had induced
the conspirators to declare themselves, vanished; peace continued
in Italy, and Caesar stood once more at the head of his army.
But what were they to do? It was folly under such circumstances
to let the matter come to the decision of arms; for these had already
decidedly irrevocably. They might as well attempt to shake
the Alps by throwing stones at them as to shake the legions by means
of the Celtic bands, whether these might be congregated in huge
masses or sacrificed in detail canton after canton. Vercingetorix
despaired of defeating the Romans. He adopted a system of warfare
similar to that by which Cassivellaunus had saved the insular
Celts. The Roman infantry was not to be vanquished; but Caesar's
cavalry consisted almost exclusively of the contingent
of the Celtic nobility, and was practically dissolved by the general
revolt. It was possible for the insurrection, which was in fact
essentially composed of the Celtic nobility, to develop such
a superiority in this arm, that it could lay waste the land far
and wide, burn down towns and villages, destroy the magazines,
and endanger the supplies and the communications of the enemy,
without his being able seriously to hinder it. Vercingetorix
accordingly directed all his efforts to the increase of his cavalry,
and of the infantry-archers who were according to the mode of fighting
of that time regularly associated with it. He did not send the immense
and self-obstructing masses of the militia of the line to their homes,
but he did not allow them to face the enemy, and attempted
to impart to them gradually some capacity of intrenching, marching,
and manoeuvring, and some perception that the soldier is not destined
merely for hand-to-hand combat. Learning from the enemy, he adopted
in particular the Roman system of encampment, on which depended
the whole secret of the tactical superiority of the Romans;
for in consequence of it every Roman corps combined all the advantages
of the garrison of a fortress with all the advantages of an offensive
army.(47) It is true that a system completely adapted to Britain
which had few towns and to its rude, resolute, and on the whole
united inhabitants was not absolutely transferable to the rich
regions on the Loire and their indolent inhabitants on the eve
of utter political dissolution. Vercingetorix at least accomplished
this much, that they did not attempt as hitherto to hold every
town with the result of holding none; they agreed to destroy
the townships not capable of defence before attack reached them,
but to defend with all their might the strong fortresses. At the same
time the Arvernian king did what he could to bind to the cause of their
country the cowardly and backward by stern severity, the hesitating
by entreaties and representations, the covetous by gold, the decided
opponents by force, and to compel or allure the rabble high or low
to some manifestation of patriotism.
Even before the winter was at an end, he threw himself on the Boii
settled by Caesar in the territory of the Haedui, with the view
of annihilating these, almost the sole trustworthy allies of Rome,
before Caesar came up. The news of this attack induced Caesar,
leaving behind the baggage and two legions in the winter quarters
of Agedincum (Sens), to march immediately and earlier than he would
doubtless otherwise have done, against the insurgents. He remedied
the sorely-felt want of cavalry and light infantry in some measure
by gradually bringing up German mercenaries, who instead of using
their own small and weak ponies were furnished with Italian
and Spanish horses partly bought, partly procured by requisition
of the officers. Caesar, after having by the way caused Cenabum,
the capital of the Carnutes, which had given the signal for the revolt,
to be pillaged and laid in ashes, moved over the Loire
into the country of the Bituriges. He thereby induced Vercingetorix
to abandon the siege of the town of the Boii, and to resort likewise
to the Bituriges. Here the new mode of warfare was first to be
tried. By order of Vercingetorix more than twenty townships
of the Bituriges perished in the flames on one day; the general
decreed a similar self-devastation as to the neighbour cantons,
so far as they could be reached by the Roman foraging parties.
Avaricum Conquered
Caesar Divides His Army
On the following gloomy and rainy day the Romans scaled the walls,
and, exasperated by the obstinate defence, spared neither age
nor sex in the conquered town. The ample stores, which the Celts had
accumulated in it, were welcome to the starved soldiers of Caesar.
With the capture of Avaricum (spring of 702), a first success
had been achieved over the insurrection, and according to former
experience Caesar might well expect that it would now dissolve,
and that it would only be requisite to deal with the cantons
individually. After he had therefore shown himself with his
whole army in the canton of the Haedui and had by this imposing
demonstration compelled the patriot party in a ferment there
to keep quiet at least for the moment, he divided his army and sent
Labienus back to Agedincum, that in combination with the troops
left there he might at the head of four legions suppress
in the first instance the movement in the territory of the Carnutes
and Senones, who on this occasion once more took the lead;
while he himself with the six remaining legions turned to the south
and prepared to carry the war into the Arvernian mountains, the proper
territory of Vercingetorix.
Labienus moved from Agedincum up the left bank of the Seine with
a view to possess himself of Lutetia (Paris), the town of the Parisii
situated on an island in the Seine, and from this well-secured
position in the heart of the insurgent country to reduce it again
to subjection. But behind Melodunum (Melun), he found his route
barred by the whole army of the insurgents, which had here taken
up a position between unassailable morasses under the leadership
of the aged Camulogenus. Labienus retreated a certain distance,
crossed the Seine at Melodunum, and moved up its right bank
unhindered towards Lutetia; Camulogenus caused this town to be
burnt and the bridges leading to the left bank to be broken down,
and took up a position over against Labienus, in which the latter
could neither bring him to battle nor effect a passage
under the eyes of the hostile army.
The Roman main army in its turn advanced along the Allier down
into the canton of the Arverni. Vercingetorix attempted to prevent
it from crossing to the left bank of the Allier, but Caesar
overreached him and after some days stood before the Arvernian
capital Gergovia.(48) Vercingetorix, however, doubtless even while
he was confronting Caesar on the Allier, had caused sufficient
stores to be collected in Gergovia and a fixed camp provided
with strong stone ramparts to be constructed for his troops in front
of the walls of the town, which was situated on the summit of a pretty
steep hill; and, as he had a sufficient start, he arrived before
Caesar at Gergovia and awaited the attack in the fortified camp
under the wall of the fortress. Caesar with his comparatively
weak army could neither regularly besiege the place nor even
sufficiently blockade it; he pitched his camp below the rising
ground occupied by Vercingetorix, and was compelled to preserve
an attitude as inactive as his opponent. It was almost a victory
for the insurgents, that Caesar's career of advance from triumph
to triumph had been suddenly checked on the Seine as on the Allier.
In fact the consequences of this check for Caesar were almost
equivalent to those of a defeat.
Renewed Insurrection
Rising of the Haedui
Rising of the Belgae
Thus the junction of the two divisions of the army was happily
accomplished. The insurgents meanwhile had consulted as to the farthe
conduct of the war at Bibracte (Autun) the capital of the Haeduil
the soul of these consultations was again Vercingetorix,
to whom the nation was enthusiastically attached after the victory
of Gergovia. Particular interests were not, it is true,
even now silent; the Haedui still in this death-struggle of the nation
asserted their claims to the hegemony, and made a proposal
in the national assembly to substitute a leader of their own
for Vercingetorix. But the national representatives had not merely
declined this and confirmed Vercingetorix in the supreme command,
but had also adopted his plan of war without alteration. It was
substantially the same as that on which he had operated at Avaricum
and at Gergovia. As the base of the new position there was
selected the strong city of the Mandubii, Alesia (Alise Sainte
Reine near Semur in the department Cote d'Or)(49) and another
entrenched camp was constructed under its walls. Immense stores
were here accumulated, and the army was ordered thither
from Gergovia, having its cavalry raised by resolution of the national
assembly to 15,000 horse. Caesar with the whole strength
of his army after it was reunited at Agedincum took the direction
of Besancon, with the view of now approaching the alarmed province
and protecting it from an invasion, for in fact bands of insurgents
had already shown themselves in the territory of the Helvii
on the south slope of the Cevennes. Alesia lay almost on his way;
the cavalry of the Celts, the only arm with which Vercingetorix
chose to operate, attacked him on the route, but to the surprise
of all was worsted by the new German squadrons of Caesar
and the Roman infantry drawn up in support of them.
Attempt at Relief
Conflicts before Alesia
Alesia Capitulates
It was more than a great victory; the fate of Alesia, and indeed
of the Celtic nation, was thereby irrevocably decided. The Celtic
army, utterly disheartened, dispersed at once from the battle-field
and went home. Vercingetorix might perhaps have even now taken
to flight, or at least have saved himself by the last means open
to a free man; he did not do so, but declared in a council of war that,
since he had not succeeded in breaking off the alien yoke,
he was ready to give himself up as a victim and to avert as far as
possible destruction from the nation by bringing it on his own
head. This was done. The Celtic officers delivered their general--
the solemn choice of the whole nation--over to the energy of their
country for such punishment as might be thought fit. Mounted
on his steed and in full armour the king of the Arverni appeared
before the Roman proconsul and rode round his tribunal;
then he surrendered his horse and arms, and sat down in silence
on the steps at Caesar's feet (702).
Vercingetorix Executed
On the Loire
And in Uxellodunum
Gaul Subdued
Thus was Gaul--or, in other words, the land west of the Rhine
and north of the Pyrenees--rendered subject after only eight years
of conflict (696-703) to the Romans. Hardly a year after the full
pacification of the land, at the beginning of 705, the Roman troops
had to be withdrawn over the Alps in consequence of the civil war,
which had now at length broken out in Italy, and there remained
nothing but at the most some weak divisions of recruits in Gaul.
Nevertheless the Celts did not again rise against the foreign yoke;
and, while in all the old provinces of the empire there was
fighting against Caesar, the newly-acquired country alone remained
continuously obedient to its conqueror. Even the Germans
did not during those decisive years repeat their attempts to conquer
new settlements on the left bank of the Rhine. As little did
there occur in Gaul any national insurrection or German invasion
during the crises that followed, although these offered the most
favourable opportunities. If disturbances broke out anywhere,
such as the rising of the Bellovaci against the Romans in 708,
these movements were so isolated and so unconnected with
the complications in Italy, that they were suppressed without material
difficulty by the Roman governors. Certainly this state of peace
was most probably, just as was the peace of Spain for centuries,
purchased by provisionally allowing the regions that were most
remote and most strongly pervaded by national feeling--Brittany,
the districts on the Scheldt, the region of the Pyrenees--
to withdraw themselves de facto in a more or less definite manner
from the Roman allegiance. Nevertheless the building of Caesar--
however scanty the time which he found for it amidst other
and at the moment still more urgent labours, however unfinished
and but provisionally rounded off he may have left it--in substance
stood the test of this fiery trial, as respected both the repelling
of the Germans and the subjugation of the Celts.
Organization
Roman Taxation
All was over with the Celtic nation. Its political dissolution
had been completed by Caesar; its national dissolution was begun
and in course of regular progress. This was no accidental destruction,
such as destiny sometimes prepares even for peoples capable
of development, but a self-incurred and in some measure historically
necessary catastrophe. The very course of the last war proves this,
whether we view it as a whole or in detail. When the establishment
of the foreign rule was in contemplation, only single districts--
mostly, moreover, German or half-German--offered energetic
resistance. When the foreign rule was actually established,
the attempts to shake it off were either undertaken altogether
without judgment, or they were to an undue extent the work
of certain prominent nobles, and were therefore immediately
and entirely brought to an end with the death or capture of an
Indutiomarus, Camulogenus, Vercingetorix, or Correus. The sieges
and guerilla warfare, in which elsewhere the whole moral depth
of national struggles displays itself, were throughout this Celtic
struggle of a peculiarly pitiable character. Every page of Celtic
history confirms the severe saying of one of the few Romans who had
the judgment not to despise the so-called barbarians--that the Celts
boldly challenge danger while future, but lose their courage
before its presence. In the mighty vortex of the world's history,
which inexorably crushes all peoples that are not as hard
and as flexible as steel, such a nation could not permanently maintain
itself; with reason the Celts of the continent suffered the same
fate at the hands of the Romans, as their kinsmen in Ireland suffer
down to our own day at the hands of the Saxons--the fate
of becoming merged as a leaven of future development in a politically
superior nationality. On the eve of parting from this remarkable
nation we may be allowed to call attention to the fact,
that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire
and Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits
which we are accustomed to recognize as marking the Irish.
Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields;
the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation--we may recall
that sword of Caesar hung up in the sacred grove of the Arverni
after the victory of Gergovia, which its alleged former owner viewed
with a smile at the consecrated spot and ordered the sacred property
to be carefully spared; the language full of comparisons and hyperboles,
of allusions and quaint turns; the droll humour--an excellent
example of which was the rule, that if any one interrupted a person
speaking in public, a substantial and very visible hole should be
cut, as a measure of police, in the coat of the disturber
of the peace; the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds
of past ages, and the most decided gifts of rhetoric and poetry;
the curiosity--no trader was allowed to pass, before he had told
in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news--
and the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts,
for which reason in the better regulated cantons travellers
were prohibited on pain of severe punishment from communicating
unauthenticated reports to others than the public magistrates;
the childlike piety, which sees in the priest a father and asks
for his counsel in all things; the unsurpassed fervour of national
feeling, and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen
cling together almost like one family in opposition to strangers;
the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance-leader
that presents himself and to form bands, but at the same time
the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage equally remote
from presumption and from pusillanimity, to perceive the right time
for waiting and for striking a blow, to attain or even barely
to tolerate any organization, any sort of fixed military or political
discipline. It is, and remains, at all times and all places
the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisitive,
credulous, amiable, clever, but--in a political point of view--
thoroughly useless nation; and therefore its fate has been always
and everywhere the same.
But the fact that this great people was ruined by the Transalpine wars
of Caesar, was not the most important result of that grand enterprise;
far more momentous than the negative was the positive result.
It hardly admits of a doubt that, if the rule of the senate
had prolonged its semblance of life for some generations
longer, the migration of peoples, as it is called, would have
occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would have
occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become
naturalized either in Gaul, or on the Danube, or in Africa and
Spain. Inasmuch as the great general and statesman of Rome
with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists
of the Romano-Greek world; inasmuch as with firm hand he established
the new system of aggressive defence down even to its details,
and taught men to protect the frontiers of the empire by rivers
or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian tribes along
the frontier with the view of warding off the more remote,
and to recruit the Roman army by enlistment from the enemy's country;
he gained for the Hellenico-Italian culture the interval necessary
to civilize the west just as it had already civilized the east.
Ordinary men see the fruits of their action; the seed sown by men
of genius germinates slowly. Centuries elapsed before men understood
that Alexander had not merely erected an ephemeral kingdom
in the east, but had carried Hellenism to Asia; centuries again
elapsed before men understood that Caesar had not merely conquered
a new province for the Romans, but had laid the foundation
for the Romanizing of the regions of the west. It was only a late
posterity that perceived the meaning of those expeditions
to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military point of view,
and so barren of immediate result. An immense circle of peoples,
whose existence and condition hitherto were known barely through
the reports--mingling some truth with much fiction--of the mariner
and the trader, was disclosed by this means to the Greek and Roman
world. "Daily," it is said in a Roman writing of May 698,
"the letters and messages from Gaul are announcing names of peoples,
cantons, and regions hitherto unknown to us." This enlargement
of the historical horizon by the expeditions of Caesar beyond
the Alps was as significant an event in the world's history
as the exploring of America by European bands. To the narrow circle
of the Mediterranean states were added the peoples of central
and northern Europe, the dwellers on the Baltic and North seas;
to the old world was added a new one, which thenceforth was influenced
by the old and influenced it in turn. What the Gothic Theodoric
afterwards succeeded in, came very near to being already carried
out by Ariovistus. Had it so happened, our civilization would have
hardly stood in any more intimate relation to the Romano-Greek than
to the Indian and Assyrian culture. That there is a bridge connecting
the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern
history; that Western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe
classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us
a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar;
that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa
attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own
garden--all this is the work of Caesar; and, while the creation
of his great predecessor in the east has been almost wholly reduced
to ruin by the tempests of the Middle Ages, the structure of Caesar
has outlasted those thousands of years which have changed religion
and polity for the human race and even shifted for it the centre
of civilization itself, and it stands erect for what we may
designate as eternity.
Alpine Peoples
North-eastern Italy was still as before(56) left exposed
to the attacks of the Alpine tribes. The strong Roman army
encamped at Aquileia in 695, and the triumph of the governor
of Cisalpine Gaul Lucius Afranius, lead us to infer, that about
this time an expedition to the Alps took place, and it may have been
in consequence of this that we find the Romans soon afterwards
in closer connection with a king of the Noricans. But that even
subsequently Italy was not at all secure on this side, is shown
by the sudden assault of the Alpine barbarians on the flourishing town
of Tergeste in 702, when the Transalpine insurrection had compelled
Caesar to divest upper Italy wholly of troops.
Illyria
Macedonia
Such attacks could not indeed endanger the power of Rome, and a fresh
disgrace had long ago ceased to occasion concern. But just about
this period a people began to acquire political consolidation
beyond the Danube in the wide Dacian steppes--a people which seemed
destined to play a different part in history from that of the Bessi
and the Dentheletae. Among the Getae or Dacians in primeval times
there had been associated with the king of the people a holy man
called Zalmoxis, who, after having explored the ways and wonders
of the gods in distant travel in foreign lands, and having thoroughly
studied in particular the wisdom of the Egyptian priests
and of the Greek Pythagoreans, had returned to his native country
to endhis life as a pious hermit in a cavern of the "holy mountain."
He remained accessible only to the king and his servants, and gave
forth to the king and through him to the people his oracles
with reference to every important undertaking. He was regarded
by his countrymen at first as priest of the supreme god and ultimately
as himself a god, just as it is said of Moses and Aaron that the Lord
had made Aaron the prophet and Moses the god of the prophet.
This had become a permanent institution; there was regularly associated
with the king of the Getae such a god, from whose mouth everything
which the king ordered proceeded or appeared to proceed.
This peculiar constitution, in which the theocratic idea had become
subservient to the apparently absolute power of the king, probably
gave to the kings of the Getae some such position with respect
to their subjects as the caliphs had with respect to the Arabs;
and one result of it was the marvellous religious-political reform
of the nation, which was carried out about this time by the king
of the Getae, Burebistas, and the god Dekaeneos. The people,
which had morally and politically fallen into utter decay through
unexampled drunkenness, was as it were metamorphosed by the new
gospel of temperance and valour; with his bands under the influence,
so to speak, of puritanic discipline and enthusiasm king Burebistas
founded within a few years a mighty kingdom, which extended along
both banks of the Danube and reached southward far into Thrace,
Illyria, and Noricum. No direct contact with the Romans had yet
taken place, and no one could tell what might come out of
this singular state, which reminds us of the early times of Islam;
but this much it needed no prophetic gift to foretell, that proconsuls
like Antonius and Piso were not called to contend with gods.
CHAPTER VIII
Among the democratic chiefs, who from the time of the consulate
of Caesar were recognized officially, so to speak, as the joint
rulers of the commonwealth, as the governing "triumvirs," Pompeius
according to public opinion occupied decidedly the first place.
It was he who was called by the Optimates the "private dictator";
it was before him that Cicero prostrated himself in vain;
against him were directed the sharpest sarcasms in the wall-placards
of Bibulus, and the most envenomed arrows of the talk in the saloons
of the opposition. This was only to be expected. According to
the facts before the public Pompeius was indisputably the first general
of his time; Caesar was a dexterous party-leader and party-orator,
of undeniable talents, but as notoriously of unwarlike and indeed
of effeminate temperament. Such opinions had been long current;
it could not be expected of the rabble of quality that it should
trouble itself about the real state of things and abandon
once established platitudes because of obscure feats of heroism
on the Tagus. Caesar evidently played in the league the mere part
of the adjutant who executed for his chief the work which Flavius,
Afranius, and other less capable instruments had attempted
and not performed. Even his governorship seemed not to alter
this state of things. Afranius had but recently occupied
a very similar position, without thereby acquiring any special
importance; several provinces at once had been of late years
repeatedly placed under one governor, and often far more
than four legions had been united in one hand; as matters
were again quiet beyond the Alps and prince Ariovistus
was recognized by the Romans as a friend and neighbour,
there was no prospect of conducting a war of any moment there.
It was natural to compare the position which Pompeius had obtained
by the Gabinio-Manilian law with that which Caesar had obtained
by the Vatinian; but the comparison did not turn out to Caesar's
advantage. Pompeius ruled over nearly the whole Roman empire;
Caesar over two provinces. Pompeius had the soldiers
and the treasures of the state almost absolutely at his disposal;
Caesar had only the sums assigned to him and an army of 24,000 men.
It was left to Pompeius himself to fix the point of time
for his retirement; Caesar's command was secured to him
for a long period no doubt, but yet only for a limited term.
Pompeius, in fine, had been entrusted with the most important
undertakings by sea and land; Caesar was sent to the north,
to watch over the capital from upper Italy and to take care
that Pompeius should rule it undisturbed.
The Anarchists
On the other hand the rabble of every sort never had better days,
never found a merrier arena. The number of little great men
was legion. Demagogism became quite a trade, which accordingly
did not lack its professional insignia--the threadbare mantle,
the shaggy beard, the long streaming hair, the deep bass voice;
and not seldom it was a trade with golden soil. For the standing
declamations the tried gargles of the theatrical staff
were an article in much request;(1) Greeks and Jews, freedmen
and slaves, were the most regular attenders and the loudest criers
in the public assemblies; frequently, even when it came to a vote,
only a minority of those voting consisted of burgesses constitutionally
entitled to do so. "Next time," it is said in a letter of this period,
"we may expect our lackeys to outvote the emancipation-tax."
The real powers of the day were the compact and armed bands,
the battalions of anarchy raised by adventurers of rank
out of gladiatorial slaves and blackguards. Their possessors
had from the outset been mostly numbered among the popular party;
but since the departure of Caesar, who alone understood how to impress
the democracy, and alone knew how to manage it, all discipline
had departed from them and every partisan practised politics
at his own hand. Even now, no doubt, these men fought with most pleasure
under the banner of freedom; but, strictly speaking, they were neither
of democratic nor of anti-democratic views; they inscribed on the--
in itself indispensable--banner, as it happened, now the name
of the people, anon that of the senate or that of a party-chief;
Clodius for instance fought or professed to fight in succession
for the ruling democracy, for the senate, and for Crassus. The leaders
of these bands kept to their colours only so far as they inexorably
persecuted their personal enemies--as in the case of Clodius
against Cicero and Milo against Clodius--while their partisan
position served them merely as a handle in these personal feuds.
We might as well seek to set a charivari to music as to write the history
of this political witches' revel; nor is it of any moment
to enumerate all the deeds of murder, besiegings of houses,
acts of incendiarism and other scenes of violence within a great capital,
and to reckon up how often the gamut was traversed from hissing
and shouting to spitting on and trampling down opponents,
and thence to throwing stones and drawing swords.
Clodius
The regents dropped hints, that through such opposition the equites
might easily lose their new special places in the theatre,
and the commons their bread-corn; people were therefore somewhat
more guarded perhaps in the expression of their displeasure,
but the feeling remained the same. The lever of material interests
was applied with better success. Caesar's gold flowed in streams.
Men of seeming riches whose finances were in disorder, influential
ladies who were in pecuniary embarrassment, insolvent young nobles,
merchants and bankers in difficulties, either went in person
to Gaul with the view of drawing from the fountain-head, or applied
to Caesar's agents in the capital; and rarely was any man
outwardly respectable--Caesar avoided dealings with vagabonds
who were utterly lost--rejected in either quarter. To this fell
to be added the enormous buildings which Caesar caused to be executed
on his account in the capital--and by which a countless number of men
of all ranks from the consular down to the common porter found
opportunity of profiting--as well as the immense sums expended
for public amusements. Pompeius did the same on a more limited scale;
to him the capital was indebted for the first theatre of stone,
and he celebrated its dedication with a magnificence never seen before.
Of course such distributions reconciled a number of men
who were inclined towards opposition, more especially in the capital,
to the new order of things up to a certain extent; but the marrow
of the opposition was not to be reached by this system of corruption.
Every day more and more clearly showed how deeply the existing
constitution had struck root among the people, and how little,
in particular, the circles more aloof from direct party-agitation,
especially the country towns, were inclined towards monarchy
or even simply ready to let it take its course.
Increasing Importance of the Senate
Helplessness of Pompeius
Egyptian Expedition
These repeated repulses which Pompeius met with in the senate and,
what was worse, had to acquiesce in without retaliation,
were naturally regarded--come from what side they would--by the public
at large as so many victories of the republicans and defeats
of the regents generally; the tide of republican opposition
was accordingly always on the increase. Already the elections for 698
had gone but partially according to the minds of the dynasts; Caesar's
candidates for the praetorship, Publius Vatinius and Gaius Alfius,
had failed, while two decided adherents of the fallen government,
Gnaeus Lentulus Marcellinus and Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus,
had been elected, the former as consul, the latter as praetor.
But for 699 there even appeared as candidate for the consulship
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, whose election it was difficult to prevent
owing to his influence in the capital and his colossal wealth, and who,
it was sufficiently well known, would not be content with a concealed
opposition. The comitia thus rebelled; and the senate chimed in.
It solemnly deliberated over an opinion, which Etruscan soothsayers
of acknowledged wisdom had furnished respecting certain signs
and wonders at its special request. The celestial revelation announced
that through the dissension of the upper classes the whole power
over the army and treasure threatened to pass to one ruler,
and the state to incur loss of freedom--it seemed that the gods
pointed primarily at the proposal of Gaius Messius. The republicans
soon descended from heaven to earth. The law as to the domain of Capua
and the other laws issued by Caesar as consul had been constantly
described by them as null and void, and an opinion had been expressed
in the senate as early as Dec. 697 that it was necessary to cancel
them on account of their informalities. On the 6th April 698
the consular Cicero proposed in a full senate to put the consideration
of the Campanian land distribution in the order of the day
for the 15th May. It was the formal declaration of war;
and it was the more significant, that it came from the mouth
of one of those men who only show their colours when they think
that they can do so with safety. Evidently the aristocracy held
that the moment had come for beginning the struggle not with Pompeius
against Caesar, but against the -tyrannis- generally. What would
further follow might easily be seen. Domitius made no secret
that he intended as consul to propose to the burgesses
the immediate recall of Caesar from Gaul. An aristocratic restoration
was at work; and with the attack on the colony of Capua the nobility
threw down the gauntlet to the regents.
Milo
Killing of Clodius
Milo, endowed with physical courage, with a certain talent for intrigue
and for contracting debt, and above all with an ample amount
of native assurance which had been carefully cultivated,
had made himself a name among the political adventurers
of the time, and was the greatest bully in his trade next to Clodius,
and naturally therefore through rivalry at the most deadly feud
with the latter. As this Achilles of the streets had been acquired
by the regents and with their permission was again playing the ultra-
democrat, the Hector of the streets became as a matter of course
an aristocrat! And the republican opposition, which now would have
concluded an alliance with Catilina in person, had he presented
himself to them, readily acknowledged Milo as their legitimate
champion in all riots. In fact the few successes, which they
carried off in this field of battle, were the work of Milo
and of his well-trained band of gladiators. So Cato and his friends
in return supported the candidature of Milo for the consulship;
even Cicero could not avoid recommending one who had been his enemy's
enemy and his own protector during many years; and as Milo himself
spared neither money nor violence to carry his election,
it seemed secured. For the regents it would have been not only
a new and keenly-felt defeat, but also a real danger; for it was
to be foreseen that the bold partisan would not allow himself
as consul to be reduced to insignificance so easily as Domitius
and other men of the respectable opposition. It happened that Achilles
and Hector accidentally encountered each other not far from the capital
on the Appian Way, and a fray arose between their respective bands,
in which Clodius himself received a sword-cut on the shoulder
and was compelled to take refuge in a neighbouring house.
This had occurred without orders from Milo; but, as the matter
had gone so far and as the storm had now to be encountered at any rate,
the whole crime seemed to Milo more desirable and even less dangerous
than the half; he ordered his men to drag Clodius forth
from his lurking place and to put him to death (13 Jan. 702).
Anarchy in Rome
Dictatorship of Pompeius
But the instigators of these scandalous scenes had overacted
their part. Certainly their lord and master was resolved to employ
this favourable episode in order not merely to set aside Milo,
but also to seize the dictatorship; he wished, however, to receive it
not from a mob of bludgeon-men, but from the senate. Pompeius brought
up troops to put down the anarchy which prevailed in the capital,
and which had in reality become intolerable to everybody;
at the same time he now enjoined what he had hitherto requested,
and the senate complied. It was merely an empty subterfuge,
that on the proposal of Cato and Bibulus the proconsul Pompeius,
retaining his former offices, was nominated as "consul without
colleague" instead of dictator on the 25th of the intercalary
month(12) (702)--a subterfuge, which admitted an appellation labouring
under a double incongruity(13) for the mere purpose of avoiding
one which expressed the simple fact, and which vividly reminds us
of the sagacious resolution of the waning patriciate to concede
to the plebeians not the consulship, but only the consular power.(14)
All these measures were adopted under the pressure of the sword.
In consequence of the declaration of the senate that the country
was in danger, Pompeius called the men capable of service
throughout Italy to arms and made them swear allegiance
for all contingencies; an adequate and trustworthy corps
was temporarily stationed at the Capitol; at every stirring
of opposition Pompeius threatened armed intervention, and during
the proceedings at the trial respecting the murder of Clodius
stationed contrary to all precedent, a guard over the place
of trial itself.
CHAPTER IX
Marcus Crassus had for years been reckoned among the heads
of the "three-headed monster," without any proper title
to be so included. He served as a makeweight to trim the balance
between the real regents Pompeius and Caesar, or, to speak
more accurately, his weight fell into the scale of Caesar
against Pompeius. This part is not a too reputable one;
but Crassus was never hindered by any keen sense of honour
from pursuing his own advantage. He was a merchant and was open
to be dealt with. What was offered to him was not much;
but, when more was not to be got, he accepted it, and sought
to forget the ambition that fretted him, and his chagrin
at occupying a position so near to power and yet so powerless,
amidst his always accumulating piles of gold. But the conference
at Luca changed the state of matters also for him; with the view
of still retaining the preponderance as compared with Pompeius
after concessions so extensive, Caesar gave to his old confederate
Crassus an opportunity of attaining in Syria through the Parthian war
the same position to which Caesar had attained by the Celtic war
in Gaul. It was difficult to say whether these new prospects
proved more attractive to the ardent thirst for gold which had now become
at the age of sixty a second nature and grew only the more intense
with every newly-won million, or to the ambition which had been
long repressed with difficulty in the old man's breast
and now glowed in it with restless fire. He arrived in Syria as early
as the beginning of 700; he had not even waited for the expiry
of his consulship to depart. Full of impatient ardour he seemed desirous
to redeem every minute with the view of making up for what he had lost,
of gathering in the treasures of the east in addition to those
of the west, of achieving the power and glory of a general
as rapidly as Caesar, and with as little trouble as Pompeius.
Far and wide not an enemy showed himself; only hunger and thirst,
and the endless sandy desert, seemed to keep watch at the gates
of the east. At length, after many days of toilsome marching, not far
from the first river which the Roman army had to cross,
the Balissus (Belik), the first horsemen of the enemy were descried.
Abgarus with his Arabs was sent out to reconnoitre; the Parthian
squadrons retired up to and over the river and vanished
in the distance, pursued by Abgarus and his followers. With impatience
the Romans waited for his return and for more exact information.
The general hoped here at length to come upon the constantly
retreating foe; his young and brave son Publius, who had fought
with the greatest distinction in Gaul under Caesar,(5) and had been sent
by the latter at the head of a Celtic squadron of horse to take part
in the Parthian war, was inflamed with a vehement desire
for the fight. When no tidings came, they resolved to advance
at a venture; the signal for starting was given, the Balissus
was crossed, the army after a brief insufficient rest at noon
was led on without delay at a rapid pace. Then suddenly the kettledrums
of the Parthians sounded all around; on every side their silken
gold-embroidered banners were seen waving, and their iron helmets
and coats of mail glittering in the blaze of the hot noonday sun;
and by the side of the vizier stood prince Abgarus with his Bedouins.
The Romans saw too late the net into which they had allowed themselves
to be ensnared. With sure glance the vizier had thoroughly seen
both the danger and the means of meeting it. Nothing could
be accomplished against the Roman infantry of the line
with Oriental infantry; so he had rid himself of it, and by
sending a mass, which was useless in the main field of battle,
under the personal leadership of king Orodes to Armenia,
he had prevented king Artavasdes from allowing the promised
10,000 heavy cavalry to join the army of Crassus, who now painfully
felt the want of them. On the other hand the vizier met the Roman
tactics, unsurpassed of their kind, with a system entirely different.
His army consisted exclusively of cavalry; the line was formed of the
heavy horsemen armed with long thrusting-lances, and protected, man
and horse, by a coat of mail of metallic plates or a leathern doublet
and by similar greaves; the mass of the troops consisted of mounted
archers. As compared with these, the Romans were thoroughly inferior
in the corresponding arms both as to number and excellence. Their
infantry of the line, excellent as they were in close combat, whether
at a short distance with the heavy javelin or in hand-to-hand combat
with the sword, could not compel an army consisting merely of cavalry
to come to an engagement with them; and they found, even when they
did come to a hand-to-hand conflict, an equal if not superior
adversary in the iron-clad hosts of lancers. As compared with an
army like this Parthian one, the Roman army was at a disadvantage
strategically, because the cavalry commanded the communications;
and at a disadvantage tactically, because every weapon of close
combat must succumb to that which is wielded from a distance,
unless the struggle becomes an individual one, man against man.
The concentrated position, on which the whole Roman method of war
was based, increased the danger in presence of such an attack;
the closer the ranks of the Roman column, the more irresistible
certainly was its onset, but the less also could the missiles
fail to hit their mark. Under ordinary circumstances,
where towns have to be defended and difficulties of the ground
have to be considered, such tactics operating merely with cavalry
against infantry could never be completely carried out;
but in the Mesopotamian desert, where the army, almost like a ship
on the high seas, neither encountered an obstacle nor met
with a basis for strategic dispositions during many days' march,
this mode of warfare was irresistible for the very reason
that circumstances allowed it to be developed there in all its purity
and therefore in all its power. There everything combined to put
the foreign infantry at a disadvantage against the native cavalry.
Where the heavy-laden Roman foot-soldier dragged himself toilsomely
through the sand or the steppe, and perished from hunger or still more
from thirst amid the pathless route marked only by water-springs
that were far apart and difficult to find, the Parthian horseman,
accustomed from childhood to sit on his fleet steed or camel,
nay almost to spend his life in the saddle, easily traversed
the desert whose hardships he had long learned how to lighten
or in case of need to endure. There no rain fell to mitigate
the intolerable heat, and to slacken the bowstrings and leathern thongs
of the enemy's archers and slingers; there amidst the deep sand
at many places ordinary ditches and ramparts could hardly be formed
for the camp. Imagination can scarcely conceive a situation
in which all the military advantages were more on the one side,
and all the disadvantages more thoroughly on the other.
Retreat to Carrhae
Of course the Romans did not wait for the morning. The lieutenant-
generals Cassius and Octavius--Crassus himself had completely
lost his judgment--ordered the men still capable of marching
to set out immediately and with the utmost silence (while the whole--
said to amount to 4000--of the wounded and stragglers were left),
with the view of seeking protection within the walls of Carrhae.
The fact that the Parthians, when they returned on the following day,
applied themselves first of all to seek out and massacre
the scattered Romans left behind, and the further fact that the garrison
and inhabitants of Carrhae, early informed of the disaster by fugitives,
had marched forth in all haste to meet the beaten army, saved the remnants
of it from what seemed inevitable destruction.
--pheromin ex oreos
elika neotomon epi melathra
makarian theiran--.
It was, since the times of the Achaemenids, the first serious victory
which the Orientals had achieved over the west; and there was
a deep significance in the fact that, by way of celebrating
this victory, the fairest product of the western world--
Greek tragedy--parodied itself through its degenerate representatives
in that hideous burlesque. The civic spirit of Rome and the genius
of Hellas began simultaneously to accommodate themselves
to the chains of sultanism.
Dictatorship of Pompeius
Covert Attacks by Pompeius on Caesar
It was only after Pompeius had in this way procured for himself
at the beginning of 702 the undivided consulship and an influence
in the capital thoroughly outweighing that of Caesar,
and after all the men capable of arms in Italy had tendered
their military oath to himself personally and in his name,
that he formed the resolution to break as soon as possible
formally with Caesar; and the design became distinctly enough apparent.
That the judicial prosecution which took place after the tumult
on the Appian Way lighted with unsparing severity precisely
on the old democratic partisans of Caesar,(12) might perhaps pass
as a mere awkwardness. That the new law against electioneering intrigues,
which had retrospective effect as far as 684, included also the dubious
proceedings at Caesar's candidature for the consulship,(13)
might likewise be nothing more, although not a few Caesarians thought
that they perceived in it a definite design. But people
could no longer shut their eyes, however willing they might be
to do so, when Pompeius did not select for his colleague
in the consulship his former father-in-law Caesar, as was fitting
in the circumstances of the case and was in many quarters demanded,
but associated with himself a puppet wholly dependent on him
in his new father-in-law Scipio;(14) and still less, when Pompeius
at the same time got the governorship of the two Spains continued
to him for five years more, that is to 709, and a considerable
fixed sum appropriated from the state-chest for the payment of his troops,
not only without stipulating for a like prolongation of command
and a like grant of money to Caesar, but even while labouring
ulteriorly to effect the recall of Caesar before the term
formerly agreed on through the new regulations which were issued
at the same time regarding the holding of the governorships.
These encroachments were unmistakeably calculated to undermine
Caesar's position and eventually to overthrow him. The moment
could not be more favourable. Caesar had conceded so much to Pompeius
at Luca, only because Crassus and his Syrian army would necessarily,
in the event of any rupture with Pompeius, be thrown into Caesar's scale;
for upon Crassus--who since the times of Sulla had been
at the deepest enmity with Pompeius and almost as long politically
and personally allied with Caesar, and who from his peculiar character
at all events, if he could not himself be king of Rome, would have been
content with being the new king's banker--Caesar could always reckon,
and could have no apprehension at all of seeing Crassus confronting him
as an ally of his enemies. The catastrophe of June 701,
by which army and general in Syria perished, was therefore
a terribly severe blow also for Caesar. A few months later
the national insurrection blazed up more violently than ever in Gaul,
just when it had seemed completely subdued, and for the first time
Caesar here encountered an equal opponent in the Arvernian king
Vercingetorix. Once more fate had been working for Pompeius;
Crassus was dead, all Gaul was in revolt, Pompeius was practically
dictator of Rome and master of the senate. What might have happened,
if he had now, instead of remotely intriguing against Caesar,
summarily compelled the burgesses or the senate to recall Caesar
at once from Gaul! But Pompeius never understood how to take advantage
of fortune. He heralded the breach clearly enough; already in 702
his acts left no doubt about it, and in the spring of 703 he openly
expressed his purpose of breaking with Caesar; but he did not
break with him, and allowed the months to slip away unemployed.
Caesar had no choice. He was from the outset and very earnestly
a democrat; the monarchy as he understood it differed more outwardly
than in reality from the Gracchan government of the people;
and he was too magnanimous and too profound a statesman to conceal
his colours and to fight under any other escutcheon than his own.
The immediate advantage no doubt, which this battle-cry brought to him,
was trifling; it was confined mainly to the circumstance
that he was thereby relieved from the inconvenience of directly naming
the kingly office, and so alarming the mass of the lukewarm
and his own adherents by that detested word. The democratic banner
hardly yielded farther positive gain, since the ideals of Gracchus
had been rendered infamous and ridiculous by Clodius;
for where was there now--laying aside perhaps the Transpadanes--
any class of any sort of importance, which would have been induced
by the battle-cries of the democracy to take part in the struggle?
The Republicans
The conclusion of the alliance between Pompeius and the Catonian party
was effected with comparative rapidity. Already during the dictatorship
of Pompeius a remarkable approximation had taken place between them.
The whole behaviour of Pompeius in the Milonian crisis,
his abrupt repulse of the mob that offered him the dictatorship,
his distinct declaration that he would accept this office
only from the senate, his unrelenting severity against disturbers
of the peace of every sort and especially against the ultra-democrats,
the surprising complaisance with which he treated Cato
and those who shared his views, appeared as much calculated to gain
the men of order as they were offensive to the democrat Caesar.
On the other hand Cato and his followers, instead of combating
with their wonted sternness the proposal to confer the dictatorship
on Pompeius, had made it with immaterial alterations of form
their own; Pompeius had received the undivided consulship
primarily from the hands of Bibulus and Cato. While the Catonian party
and Pompeius had thus at least a tacit understanding as early
as the beginning of 702, the alliance might be held as formally
concluded, when at the consular elections for 703 there was elected
not Cato himself indeed, but--along with an insignificant man
belonging to the majority of the senate--one of the most decided
adherents of Cato, Marcus Claudius Marcellus. Marcellus was
no furious zealot and still less a genius, but a steadfast
and strict aristocrat, just the right man to declare war
if war was to be begun with Caesar. As the case stood,
this election, so surprising after the repressive measures
adopted immediately before against the republican opposition,
can hardly have occurred otherwise than with the consent,
or at least under the tacit permission, of the regent of Rome
for the time being. Slowly and clumsily, as was his wont,
but steadily Pompeius moved onward to the rupture.
It was not the intention of Caesar on the other hand to fall out
at this moment with Pompeius. He could not indeed desire seriously
and permanently to share the ruling power with any colleague,
least of all with one of so secondary a sort as was Pompeius;
and beyond doubt he had long resolved after terminating the conquest
of Gaul to take the sole power for himself, and in case of need to extort
it by force of arms. But a man like Caesar, in whom the officer
was thoroughly subordinate to the statesman, could not fail
to perceive that the regulation of the political organism
by force of arms does in its consequences deeply and often permanently
disorganize it; and therefore he could not but seek to solve
the difficulty, if at all possible, by peaceful means or at least
without open civil war. But even if civil war was not to be avoided,
he could not desire to be driven to it at a time, when in Gaul
the rising of Vercingetorix imperilled afresh all that had been obtained
and occupied him without interruption from the winter of 701-702
to the winter of 702-703, and when Pompeius and the constitutional party
opposed to him on principle were dominant in Italy. Accordingly
he sought to preserve the relation with Pompeius and thereby
the peace unbroken, and to attain, if at all possible,
by peaceful means to the consulship for 706 already assured
to him at Luca. If he should then after a conclusive settlement
of Celtic affairs be placed in a regular manner at the head
of the state, he, who was still more decidedly superior
to Pompeius as a statesman than as a general, might well reckon
on outmanoeuvring the latter in the senate-house and in the Forum
without special difficulty. Perhaps it was possible to find out
for his awkward, vacillating, and arrogant rival some sort
of honourable and influential position, in which the latter might be
content to sink into a nullity; the repeated attempts of Caesar
to keep himself related by marriage to Pompeius, may have been
designed to pave the way for such a solution and to bring about
a final settlement of the old quarrel through the succession
of offspring inheriting the blood of both competitors. The republican
opposition would then remain without a leader and therefore
probably quiet, and peace would be preserved. If this should not
be successful, and if there should be, as was certainly possible,
a necessity for ultimately resorting to the decision of arms,
Caesar would then as consul in Rome dispose of the compliant majority
of the senate; and he could impede or perhaps frustrate the coalition
of the Pompeians and the republicans, and conduct the war
far more suitably and more advantageously, than if he now as proconsul
of Gaul gave orders to march against the senate and its general.
Certainly the success of this plan depended on Pompeius being good-
natured enough to let Caesar still obtain the consulship for 706
assured to him at Luca; but, even if it failed, it would be always
of advantage for Caesar to have given practical and repeated
evidence of the most yielding disposition. On the one hand time
would thus be gained for attaining his object meanwhile in Gaul;
on the other hand his opponents would be left with the odium
of initiating the rupture and consequently the civil war--
which was of the utmost moment for Caesar with reference to the majority
of the senate and the party of material interests, and more especially
with reference to his own soldiers.
Now, to attain that object, Caesar's opponents had a very simple means.
According to the existing ordinance as to elections, every candidate
for the consulship was obliged to announce himself personally
to the presiding magistrate, and to cause his name to be inscribed
on the official list of candidates before the election,
that is half a year before entering on office. It had probably
been regarded in the conferences at Luca as a matter of course
that Caesar would be released from this obligation, which was
purely formal and was very often dispensed with; but the decree
to that effect had not yet been issued, and, as Pompeius was now
in possession of the decretive machinery, Caesar depended in this respect
on the good will of his rival. Pompeius incomprehensibly abandoned
of his own accord this completely secure position; with his consen
and during his dictatorship (702) the personal appearance
of Caesar was dispensed with by a tribunician law. When however
soon afterwards the new election-ordinance(16) was issued,
the obligation of candidates personally to enrol themselves
was repeated in general terms, and no sort of exception was added
in favour of those released from it by earlier resolutions
of the people; according to strict form the privilege granted in favour
of Caesar was cancelled by the later general law. Caesar complained,
and the clause was subsequently appended but not confirmed
by special decree of the people, so that this enactment inserted
by mere interpolation in the already promulgated law could only be
looked on de jure as a nullity. Where Pompeius, therefore,
might have simply kept by the law, he had preferred first
to make a spontaneous concession, then to recall it,
and lastly to cloak this recall in a manner most disloyal.
The process began to take shape, but its course was not on that account
more rapid. The majority of the senate, seeing the breach approaching,
allowed no sitting capable of issuing a decree to take place for months;
and other months in their turn were lost over the solemn procrastination
of Pompeius. At length the latter broke the silence and ranged himself,
in a reserved and vacillating fashion as usual but yet plainly enough,
on the side of the constitutional party against his former ally.
He summarily and abruptly rejected the demand of the Caesarians
that their master should be allowed to conjoin the consulship
and the proconsulship; this demand, he added with blunt coarseness,
seemed to him no better than if a son should offer to flog
his father. He approved in principle the proposal of Marcellus,
in so far as he too declared that he would not allow Caesar
directly to attach the consulship to the pro-consulship.
He hinted, however, although without making any binding declaration
on the point, that they would perhaps grant to Caesar admission
to the elections for 706 without requiring his personal announcement,
as well as the continuance of his governorship at the utmost
to the 13th Nov. 705. But in the meantime the incorrigible
procrastinator consented to the postponement of the nomination
of successors to the last day of Feb. 704, which was asked
by the representatives of Caesar, probably on the ground of a clause
of the Pompeio-Licinian law forbidding any discussion in the senate
as to the nomination of successors before the beginning of Caesar's
last year of office.
Counter-Arrangements of Caesar
Declaration of War
The coalition, defeated in the senate, was in the most painful position.
The Catonian section had undertaken to push matters to a rupture
and to carry the senate along with them, and now saw their vessel
stranded after a most vexatious manner on the sandbanks of the indolent
majority. Their leaders had to listen in their conferences
to the bitterest reproaches from Pompeius; he pointed out
emphatically and with entire justice the dangers of the seeming peace;
and, though it depended on himself alone to cut the knot
by rapid action, his allies knew very well that they could never expect
this from him, and that it was for them, as they had promised,
to bring matters to a crisis. After the champions of the constitution
and of senatorial government had already declared the constitutional
rights of the burgesses and of the tribunes of the people
to be meaningless formalities,(22) they now found themselves
driven by necessity to treat the constitutional decision; of the senate
itself in a similar manner and, as the legitimate government
would not let itself be saved with its own consent, to save it
against its will. This was neither new nor accidental; Sulla(23)
and Lucullus(24) had been obliged to carry every energetic
resolution conceived by them in the true interest of the government
with a high hand irrespective of it, just as Cato and his friends
now proposed to do; the machinery of the constitution was in fact
utterly effete, and the senate was now--as the comitia had been
for centuries--nothing but a worn-out wheel slipping constantly
out of its track.
It was rumoured (Oct. 704) that Caesar had moved four legions
from Transalpine into Cisalpine Gaul and stationed them at Placentia.
This transference of troops was of itself within the prerogative
of the governor; Curio moreover palpably showed in the senate
the utter groundlessness of the rumour; and they by a majority
rejected the proposal of the consul Gaius Marcellus to give
Pompeius on the strength of it orders to march against Caesar.
Yet the said consul, in concert with the two consuls elected for 705
who likewise belonged to the Catonian party, proceeded to Pompeius,
and these three men by virtue of their own plenitude of power
requested the general to put himself at the head of the two legions
stationed at Capua, and to call the Italian militia to arms
at his discretion. A more informal authorization for the commencement
of a civil war can hardly be conceived; but people had no longer time
to attend to such secondary matters; Pompeius accepted it.
The military preparations, the levies began; in order personally
to forward them, Pompeius left the capital in December 704.
Curio undertook once more to represent his master in the lion's den.
In three days he made the journey from Ravenna to Rome.
When the new consuls Lucius Lentulus and Gaius Marcellus the younger(25)
assembled the senate for the first time on 1 Jan. 705, he delivered
in a full meeting the letter addressed by the general to the senate.
The tribunes of the people, Marcus Antonius well known
in the chronicle of scandal of the city as the intimate friend
of Curio and his accomplice in all his follies, but at the same time
known from the Egyptian and Gallic campaigns as a brilliant cavalry
officer, and Quintus Cassius, Pompeius' former quaestor,--the two,
who were now in Curio's stead managing the cause of Caesar in Rome--
insisted on the immediate reading of the despatch. The grave
and clear words in which Caesar set forth the imminence of civil war,
the general wish for peace, the arrogance of Pompeius, and his own
yielding disposition, with all the irresistible force of truth;
the proposals for a compromise, of a moderation which doubtless
surprised his own partisans; the distinct declaration that this was
the last time that he should offer his hand for peace--
made the deepest impression. In spite of the dread inspired
by the numerous soldiers of Pompeius who flocked into the capital,
the sentiment of the majority was not doubtful; the consuls could not
venture to let it find expression. Respecting the proposal renewed
by Caesar that both generals might be enjoined to resign their commands
simultaneously, respecting all the projects of accommodation
suggested by his letter, and respecting the proposal made
by Marcus Coelius Rufus and Marcus Calidius that Pompeius
should be urged immediately to depart for Spain, the consuls refused--
as they in the capacity of presiding officers were entitled to do--
to let a vote take place. Even the proposal of one of their
most decided partisans who was simply not so blind to the military
position of affairs as his party, Marcus Marcellus--to defer
the determination till the Italian levy en masse could be under arms
and could protect the senate--was not allowed to be brought to a vote.
Pompeius caused it to be declared through his usual organ,
Quintus Scipio, that he was resolved to take up the cause of the senate
now or never, and that he would let it drop if they longer delayed.
The consul Lentulus said in plain terms that even the decree
of the senate was no longer of consequence, and that, if it
should persevere in its servility, he would act of himself
and with his powerful friends take the farther steps necessary.
Thus overawed, the majority decreed what was commanded--
that Caesar should at a definite and not distant day give up
Transalpine Gaul to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, and Cisalpine Gaul
to Marcus Servilius Nonianus, and should dismiss his army,
failing which he should be esteemed a traitor. When the tribunes
of Caesar's party made use of their right of veto against this resolution,
not only were they, as they at least asserted, threatened
in the senate-house itself by the swords of Pompeian soldiers,
and forced, in order to save their lives, to flee in slaves'
clothing from the capital; but the now sufficiently overawed senate
treated their formally quite constitutional interference
as an attempt at revolution, declared the country in danger,
and in the usual forms called the whole burgesses to take up arms,
and all magistrates faithful to the constitution to place themselves
at the head of the armed (7 Jan. 705).
CHAPTER X
Arms were thus to decide which of the two men who had hitherto
jointly ruled Rome was now to be its first sole ruler. Let us see
what were the comparative resources at the disposal of Caesar
and Pompeius for the waging of the impending war.
Labienus
Titus Labienus had shared with Caesar all the troubles of the dark times
of Catilina(1) as well as all the lustre of the Gallic career of victory,
had regularly held independent command, and frequently led half the army;
as he was the oldest, ablest, and most faithful of Caesar's adjutants,
he was beyond question also highest in position and highest in honour.
As late as in 704 Caesar had entrusted to him the supreme command
in Cisalpine Gaul, in order partly to put this confidential post
into safe hands, partly to forward the views of Labienus in his canvass
for the consulship. But from this very position Labienus entered
into communication with the opposite party, resorted at the beginning
of hostilities in 705 to the headquarters of Pompeius instead of those
of Caesar, and fought through the whole civil strife with unparalleled
bitterness against his old friend and master in war. We are not
sufficiently informed either as to the character of Labienus
or as to the special circumstances of his changing sides;
but in the main his case certainly presents nothing but a further proof
of the fact, that a military chief can reckon far more surely
on his captains than on his marshals. To all appearance Labienus
was one of those persons who combine with military efficiency
utter incapacity as statesmen, and who in consequence, if they
unhappily choose or are compelled to take part in politics, are exposed
to those strange paroxysms of giddiness, of which the history
of Napoleon's marshals supplies so many tragi-comic examples.
He may probably have held himself entitled to rank alongside of Caesar
as the second chief of the democracy; and the rejection of this claim
of his may have sent him over to the camp of his opponents.
His case rendered for the first time apparent the whole gravity
of the evil, that Caesar's treatment of his officers as adjutants
without independence admitted of the rise of no men fitted to undertake
a separate command in his camp, while at the same time he stood
urgently in need of such men amidst the diffusion--which might easily
be foreseen--of the impending struggle through all the provinces
of the wide empire. But this disadvantage was far outweighed
by that unity in the supreme leadership, which was the primary condition
of all success, and a condition only to be preserved at such a cost.
Caesar's Army
This unity of leadership acquired its full power through the efficiency
of its instruments. Here the army comes, first of all, into view.
It still numbered nine legions of infantry or at the most
50,000 men, all of whom however had faced the enemy and two-thirds
had served in all the campaigns against the Celts. The cavalry
consisted of German and Noric mercenaries, whose usefulness
and trustworthiness had been proved in the war against Vercingetorix.
The eight years' warfare, full of varied vicissitudes,
against the Celtic nation--which was brave, although in a military
point of view decidedly inferior to the Italian--had given Caesar
the opportunity of organizing his army as he alone knew
how to organize it. The whole efficiency of the soldier
presupposes physical vigour; in Caesar's levies more regard was had
to the strength and activity of the recruits than to their means
or their morals. But the serviceableness of an army, like that
of any other machine, depends above all on the ease and quickness
of its movements; the soldiers of Caesar attained a perfection
rarely reached and probably never surpassed in their readiness
for immediate departure at any time, and in the rapidity
of their marching. Courage, of course, was valued above everything;
Caesar practised with unrivalled mastery the art of stimulating
martial emulation and the esprit de corps, so that the pre-eminence
accorded to particular soldiers and divisions appeared even to those
who were postponed as the necessary hierarchy of valour.
He weaned his men from fear by not unfrequently--where it could be done
without serious danger--keeping his soldiers in ignorance
of an approaching conflict, and allowing them to encounter
the enemy unexpectedly. But obedience was on a parity with valour.
The soldier was required to do what he was bidden, without asking
the reason or the object; many an aimless fatigue was imposed on him
solely as a training in the difficult art of blind obedience.
The discipline was strict but not harassing; it was exercised
with unrelenting vigour when the soldier was in presence of the enemy;
at other times, especially after victory, the reins were relaxed,
and if an otherwise efficient soldier was then pleased to indulge
in perfumery or to deck himself with elegant arms and the like,
or even if he allowed himself to be guilty of outrages
or irregularities of a very questionable kind, provided only
his military duties were not immediately affected, the foolery
and the crime were allowed to pass, and the general lent a deaf ear
to the complaints of the provincials on such points. Mutiny
on the other hand was never pardoned, either in the instigators,
or even in the guilty corps itself.
While Caesar thus had the one thing which was needful--
unlimited political and military authority and a trustworthy army
ready for the fight--his power extended, comparatively speaking,
over only a very limited space. It was based essentially
on the province of Upper Italy. This region was not merely
the most populous of all the districts of Italy, but also devoted
to the cause of the democracy as its own. The feeling
which prevailed there is shown by the conduct of a division of recruits
from Opitergium (Oderzo in the delegation of Treviso), which not long
after the outbreak of the war in the Illyrian waters, surrounded
on a wretched raft by the war-vessels of the enemy, allowed themselves
to be shot at during the whole day down to sunset without surrendering,
and, such of them as had escaped the missiles, put themselves to death
with their own hands during the following night. It is easy to conceive
what might be expected of such a population. As they had already
granted to Caesar the means of more than doubling his original army,
so after the outbreak of the civil war recruits presented themselves
in great numbers for the ample levies that were immediately instituted.
Italy
In Italy proper, on the other hand, the influence of Caesar was not
even remotely to be compared to that of his opponents. Although
he had the skill by dexterous manoeuvres to put the Catonian party
in the wrong, and had sufficiently commended the rectitude
of his cause to all who wished for a pretext with a good conscience
either to remain neutral, like the majority of the senate,
or to embrace his side, like his soldiers and the Transpadanes,
the mass of the burgesses naturally did not allow themselves to be misled
by these things and, when the commandant of Gaul put his legions
in motion against Rome, they beheld--despite all formal explanations
as to law--in Cato and Pompeius the defenders of the legitimate republic,
in Caesar the democratic usurper. People in general moreover
expected from the nephew of Marius, the son-in-law of Cinna,
the ally of Catilina, a repetition of the Marian and Cinnan horrors,
a realization of the saturnalia of anarchy projected by Catilina;
and though Caesar certainly gained allies through this expectation--
so that the political refugees immediately put themselves in a body
at his disposal, the ruined men saw in him their deliverer,
and the lowest ranks of the rabble in the capital and country towns
were thrown into a ferment on the news of his advance,--these belonged
to the class of friends who are more dangerous than foes.
Provinces
The Coalition
Caesar's Advance
Rome Evacuated
Caesar had to choose whether he would march against Rome, from which
his cavalry at Arretium were already only about 130 miles distant,
or against the legions encamped at Luceria. He chose the latter plan.
The consternation of the opposite party was boundless.
Pompeius received the news of Caesar's advance at Rome; he seemed
at first disposed to defend the capital, but, when the tidings
arrived of Caesar's entrance into the Picenian territory
and of his first successes there, he abandoned Rome and ordered
its evacuation. A panic, augmented by the false report that Caesar's
cavalry had appeared before the gates, came over the world of quality.
The senators, who had been informed that every one who should
remain behind in the capital would be treated as an accomplice
of the rebel Caesar, flocked in crowds out at the gates.
The consuls themselves had so totally lost their senses, that they
did not even secure the treasure; when Pompeius called upon them
to fetch it, for which there was sufficient time, they returned
the reply that they would deem it safer, if he should first
occupy Picenum. All was perplexity; consequently a great council of war
was held in Teanum Sidicinum (23 Jan.), at which Pompeius, Labienus,
and both consuls were present. First of all proposals of accommodation
from Caesar were again submitted; even now he declared himself
ready at once to dismiss his army, to hand over his provinces
to the successors nominated, and to become a candidate
in the regular way for the consulship, provided that Pompeius
were to depart for Spain, and Italy were to be disarmed.
The answer was, that if Caesar would immediately return to his province,
they would bind themselves to procure the disarming of Italy
and the departure of Pompeius by a decree of the senate
to be passed in due form in the capital; perhaps this reply
was intended not as a bare artifice to deceive, but as an acceptance
of the proposal of compromise; it was, however, in reality the opposite.
The personal conference which Caesar desired with Pompeius
the latter declined, and could not but decline, that he might not
by the semblance of a new coalition with Caesar provoke still more
the distrust already felt by the constitutional party. Concerning
the management of the war it was agreed in Teanum, that Pompeius
should take the command of the troops stationed at Luceria,
on which notwithstanding their untrustworthiness all hope depended;
that he should advance with these into his own and Labienus'
native country, Picenum; that he should personally call
the general levy there to arms, as he had done some thirty-five
years ago,(16) and should attempt at the head of the faithful
Picentine cohorts and the veterans formerly under Caesar
to set a limit to the advance of the enemy.
Conflicts in Picenum
Corfinium Besieged
And Captured
This was Corfinium, the place of meeting for the levies in the Albensian,
Marsian and Paelignian territories; the body of recruits here assembled,
of nearly 15,000 men, was the contingent of the most warlike
and trustworthy regions of Italy, and the flower of the army
in course of formation for the constitutional party. When Vibullius
arrived here, Caesar was still several days' march behind;
there was nothing to prevent him from immediately starting agreeably
to Pompeius' instructions and conducting the saved Picenian recruits
along with those assembled at Corfinium to join the main army in Apulia.
But the commandant in Corfinium was the designated successor to Caesar
in the governorship of Transalpine Gaul, Lucius Domitius,
one of the most narrow-minded and stubborn of the Roman aristocracy;
and he not only refused to comply with the orders of Pompeius,
but also prevented Vibullius from departing at least with the men
from Picenum for Apulia. So firmly was he persuaded that Pompeius
only delayed from obstinacy and must necessarily come up to his relief,
that he scarcely made any serious preparations for a siege
and did not even gather into Corfinium the bands of recruits
placed in the surrounding towns. Pompeius however did not appear,
and for good reasons; for, while he might perhaps apply
his two untrustworthy legions as a reserved support for the Picenian
general levy, he could not with them alone offer battle to Caesar.
Instead of him after a few days Caesar came (14 Feb.). His troops
had been joined in Picenum by the twelfth, and before Corfinium
by the eighth, legion from beyond the Alps, and, besides these,
three new legions had been formed partly from the Pompeian men
that were taken prisoners or presented themselves voluntarily,
partly from the recruits that were at once levied everywhere;
so that Caesar before Corfinium was already at the head
of an army of 40,000 men, half of whom had seen service. So long as
Domitius hoped for the arrival of Pompeius, he caused the town
to be defended; when the letters of Pompeius had at length undeceived him,
he resolved, not forsooth to persevere at the forlorn post--
by which he would have rendered the greatest service to his party--
nor even to capitulate, but, while the common soldiers
were informed that relief was close at hand, to make his own escape
along with his officers of quality during the next night.
Yet he had not the judgment to carry into effect even this pretty scheme.
The confusion of his behaviour betrayed him. A part of the men
began to mutiny; the Marsian recruits, who held such an infamy
on the part of their general to be impossible, wished to fight
against the mutineers; but they too were obliged reluctantly
to believe the truth of the accusation, whereupon the whole garrison
arrested their staff and handed it, themselves, and the town
over to Caesar (20 Feb.). The corps in Alba, 3000 strong,
and 1500 recruits assembled in Tarracina thereupon laid down
their arms, as soon as Caesar's patrols of horsemen appeared;
a third division in Sulmo of 3500 men had been previously
compelled to surrender.
Dispelled by Caesar
But at the moment this moderation was more dangerous for Caesar
than the renewal of the Cinnan and Catilinarian fury would have been;
it did not convert enemies into friends, and it converted
friends into enemies. Caesar's Catilinarian adherents
were indignant that murder and pillage remained in abeyance;
these audacious and desperate personages, some of whom
were men of talent, might be expected to prove cross and untractable.
The republicans of all shades, on the other hand, were neither
converted nor propitiated by the leniency of the conqueror.
According to the creed of the Catonian party, duty towards
what they called their fatherland absolved them from every
other consideration; even one who owed freedom and life to Caesar
remained entitled and in duty bound to take up arms or at least
to engage in plots against him. The less decided sections
of the constitutional party were no doubt found willing to accept peace
and protection from the new monarch; nevertheless they ceased not
to curse the monarchy and the monarch at heart. The more clearly
the change of the constitution became manifest, the more distinctly
the great majority of the burgesses--both in the capital with its
keener susceptibility of political excitement, and among
the more energetic population of the country and country towns--
awoke to a consciousness of their republican sentiments; so far
the friends of the constitution in Rome reported with truth
to their brethren of kindred views in exile, that at home all classes
and all persons were friendly to Pompeius. The discontented temper
of all these circles was further increased by the moral pressure,
which the more decided and more notable men who shared such views
exercised from their very position as emigrants over the multitude
of the humbler and more lukewarm. The conscience of the honourable man
smote him in regard to his remaining in Italy; the half-aristocrat
fancied that he was ranked among the plebeians, if he did not go
into exile with the Domitii and the Metelli, and even if he took his seat
in the Caesarian senate of nobodies. The victor's special clemency
gave to this silent opposition increased political importance;
seeing that Caesar abstained from terrorism, it seemed as if
his secret opponents could display their disinclination
to his rule without much danger.
Passive Resistance of the Senate to Caesar
Without further concerning himself about the senate and the formalities
of state law, he handed over the temporary administration
of the capital to the praetor Marcus Aemilius Lepidus as city-prefect,
and made the requisite arrangements for the administration
of the provinces that obeyed him and the continuance of the war.
Even amidst the din of the gigantic struggle, and with all
the alluring sound of Caesar's lavish promises, it still made
a deep impression on the multitude of the capital, when they saw
in their free Rome the monarch for the first time wielding
a monarch's power and breaking open the doors of the treasury
by his soldiers. But the times had gone by, when the impressions
and feelings of the multitude determined the course of events;
it was with the legions that the decision lay, and a few
painful feelings more or less were of no farther moment.
Pompeians in Spain
But at this point his opponents also had been active. Lucius Domitius,
who was nominated by the senate in Caesar's stead as governor
of Transalpine Gaul, had proceeded from Corfinium--as soon as
Caesar had released him--along with his attendants and with Pompeius'
confidant Lucius Vibullius Rufus to Massilia, and actually induced
that city to declare for Pompeius and even to refuse a passage
to Caesar's troops. Of the Spanish troops the two least trustworthy
legions were left behind under the command of Varro in the Further
province; while the five best, reinforced by 40,000 Spanish infantry--
partly Celtiberian infantry of the line, partly Lusitanian
and other light troops--and by 5000 Spanish cavalry, under Afranius
and Petreius, had, in accordance with the orders of Pompeius
transmitted by Vibullius, set out to close the Pyrenees
against the enemy.
Caesar Follows
But when Caesar's legions saw in the gray morning the enemy's columns
which had been retiring since midnight, they discerned
with the sure instinct of experienced veterans the strategic importance
of this retreat, which would compel them to follow their antagonists
into distant and impracticable regions filled by hostile troops;
at their own request the general ventured to lead the infantry
also into the river, and although the water reached up
to the shoulders of the men, it was crossed without accident.
It was high time. If the narrow plain, which separated the town
of Ilerda from the mountains enclosing the Ebro were once traversed
and the army of the Pompeians entered the mountains, their retreat
to the Ebro could no longer be prevented. Already they had,
notwithstanding the constant attacks of the enemy's cavalry
which greatly delayed their march, approached within five miles
of the mountains, when they, having been on the march since midnight
and unspeakably exhausted, abandoned their original plan of traversing
the whole plain on the same day, and pitched their camp.
Here the infantry of Caesar overtook them and encamped opposite to them
in the evening and during the night, as the nocturnal march
which the Pompeians had at first contemplated was abandoned from fear
of the night-attacks of the cavalry. On the following day also
both armies remained immoveable, occupied only
in reconnoitering the country.
Early in the morning of the third day Caesar's infantry set out,
that by a movement through the pathless mountains alongside of the road
they might turn the position of the enemy and bar their route
to the Ebro. The object of the strange march, which seemed at first
to turn back towards the camp before Ilerda, was not at once
perceived by the Pompeian officers. When they discerned it,
they sacrificed camp and baggage and advanced by a forced march
along the highway, to gain the crest of the ridge before the Caesarians.
But it was already too late; when they came up, the compact masses
of the enemy were already posted on the highway itself.
a desperate attempt of the Pompeians to discover other routes
to the Ebro over the steep mountains was frustrated by Caesar's cavalry,
which surrounded and cut to pieces the Lusitanian troops sent forth
for that purpose. Had a battle taken place between the Pompeian army--
which had the enemy's cavalry in its rear and their infantry in front,
and was utterly demoralized--and the Caesarians, the issue
was scarcely doubtful, and the opportunity for fighting
several times presented itself; but Caesar made no use of it,
and, not without difficulty, restrained the impatient eagerness
for the combat in his soldiers sure of victory. The Pompeian army
was at any rate strategically lost; Caesar avoided weakening his army
and still further envenoming the bitter feud by useless bloodshed.
On the very day after he had succeeded in cutting off the Pompeians
from the Ebro, the soldiers of the two armies had begun to fraternize
and to negotiate respecting surrender; indeed the terms
asked by the Pompeians, especially as to the sparing of their officers,
had been already conceded by Caesar, when Petreius with his escort
consisting of slaves and Spaniards came upon the negotiators
and caused the Caesarians, on whom he could lay hands,
to be put to death. Caesar nevertheless sent the Pompeians
who had come to his camp back unharmed, and persevered in seeking
a peaceful solution. Ilerda, where the Pompeians had still
a garrison and considerable magazines, became now the point
which they sought to reach; but with the hostile army in front
and the Sicoris between them and the fortress, they marched
without coming nearer to their object. Their cavalry became gradually
so afraid that the infantry had to take them into the centre and legions
had to be set as the rearguard; the procuring of water and forage
became more and more difficult; they had already to kill the beasts
of burden, because they could no longer feed them. At length
the wandering army found itself formally inclosed, with the Sicoris
in its rear and the enemy's force in front, which drew rampart
and trench around it. It attempted to cross the river, but Caesar's
German horsemen and light infantry anticipated it in the occupation
of the opposite bank.
Siege of Massilia
About the same time Massilia also submitted. With rare energy
the Massiliots had not merely sustained a siege, but had also kept
the sea against Caesar; it was their native element, and they might hope
to obtain vigorous support on it from Pompeius, who in fact
had the exclusive command of it. But Caesar's lieutenant, the able
Decimus Brutus, the same who had achieved the first naval victory
in the Atlantic over the Veneti,(19) managed rapidly to equip a fleet;
and in spite of the brave resistance of the enemy's crews--
consisting partly of Albioecian mercenaries of the Massiliots,
partly of slave-herdsmen of Domitius--he vanquished by means of his brave
marines selected from the legions the stronger Massiliot fleet,
and sank or captured the greater part of their ships. When therefore
a small Pompeian squadron under Lucius Nasidius arrived
from the east by way of Sicily and Sardinia in the port of Massilia,
the Massiliots once more renewed their naval armament and sailed forth
along with the ships of Nasidius against Brutus. The engagement
which took place off Tauroeis (La Ciotat to the east of Marseilles)
might probably have had a different result, if the vessels of Nasidius
had fought with the same desperate courage which the Massiliots
displayed on that day; but the flight of the Nasidians
decided the victory in favour of Brutus, and the remains
of the Pompeian fleet fled to Spain. The besieged were completely
driven from the sea. On the landward side, where Gaius Trebonius
conducted the siege, the most resolute resistance was still continued;
but in spite of the frequent sallies of the Albioecian mercenaries
and the skilful expenditure of the immense stores of projectiles
accumulated in the city, the works of the besiegers were at length
advanced up to the walls and one of the towers fell. The Massiliots
declared that they would give up the defence, but desired
to conclude the capitulation with Caesar himself, and entreated
the Roman commander to suspend the siege operations till
Caesar's arrival. Trebonius had express orders from Caesar
to spare the town as far as possible; he granted the armistice desired.
But when the Massiliots made use of it for an artful sally,
in which they completely burnt the one-half of the almost unguarded
Roman works, the struggle of the siege began anew and with increased
exasperation. The vigorous commander of the Romans repaired
with surprising rapidity the destroyed towers and the mound;
soon the Massiliots were once more completely invested.
Massilia Capitulates
While thus in the western provinces the war after various critical
vicissitudes was thoroughly decided at length in favour of Caesar,
Spain and Massilia were subdued, and the chief army of the enemy
was captured to the last man, the decision of arms had also taken place
on the second arena of warfare, on which Caesar had found it necessary
immediately after the conquest of Italy to assume the offensive
Sardinia Occupied
Sicily Occupied
His cavalry, which had gone forward in the evening, actually succeeded
in surprising the corps of Saburra on the Bagradas during the night
and inflicting much damage upon it; and on the news of this victory
Curio hastened the march of the infantry, in order by their means
to complete the defeat Soon they perceived on the last slopes
of the heights that sank towards the Bagradas the corps of Saburra,
which was skirmishing with the Roman horsemen; the legions
coming up helped to drive it completely down into the plain.
But here the combat changed its aspect. Saburra was not,
as they supposed, destitute of support; on the contrary he was
not much more than five miles distant from the Numidian main force.
Already the flower of the Numidian infantry and 2000 Gallic
and Spanish horsemen had arrived on the field of battle
to support Saburra, and the king in person with the bulk of the army
and sixteen elephants was approaching. After the nocturnal march
and the hot conflict there were at the moment not more than 200
of the Roman cavalry together, and these as well as the infantry,
extremely exhausted by fatigue and fighting, were all surrounded,
in the wide plain into which they had allowed themselves to be allured,
by the continually increasing hosts of the enemy. Vainly Curio
endeavoured to engage in close combat; the Libyan horsemen retreated,
as they were wont, so soon as a Roman division advanced,
only to pursue it when it turned. In vain he attempted
to regain the heights; they were occupied and foreclosed
by the enemy's horse. All was lost. The infantry was cut down
to the last man. Of the cavalry a few succeeded in cutting
their way through; Curio too might have probably saved himself,
but he could not bear to appear alone before his master
without the army entrusted to him, and died sword in hand.
Even the force which was collected in the camp before Utica,
and that which guarded the fleet--which might so easily
have escaped to Sicily--surrendered under the impression made
by the fearfully rapid catastrophe on the following day
to Varus (Aug. or Sept. 705).
How far these events of the war in 705 interfered with Pompeius'
general plan for the campaign, and particularly what part, in that plan
was assigned after the loss of Italy to the important military corps
in the west, can only be determined by conjecture. That Pompeius
had the intention of coming by way of Africa and Mauretania
to the aid of his army fighting in Spain, was simply a romantic,
and beyond doubt altogether groundless, rumour circulating
in the camp of Ilerda. It is much more likely that he still kept
by his earlier plan of attacking Caesar from both sides in Transalpine
and Cisalpine Gaul(21) even after the loss of Italy, and meditated
a combined attack at once from Spain and Macedonia. It may be presumed
that the Spanish army was meant to remain on the defensive
at the Pyrenees till the Macedonian army in the course of organization
was likewise ready to march; whereupon both would then have started
simultaneously and effected a junction according to circumstances
either on the Rhone or on the Po, while the fleet, it may be conjectured,
would have attempted at the same time to reconquer Italy proper.
On this supposition apparently Caesar had first prepared himself
to meet an attack on Italy. One of the ablest of his officers,
the tribune of the people Marcus Antonius, commanded there
with propraetorian powers. The southeastern ports--Sipus,
Brundisium, Tarentum--where an attempt at landing was first
to be expected, had received a garrison of three legions. Besides
this Quintus Hortensius, the degenerate son of the well-known orator,
collected a fleet in the Tyrrhene Sea, and Publius Dolabella
a second fleet in the Adriatic, which were to be employed
partly to support the defence, partly to transport the intended
expedition to Greece. In the event of Pompeius attempting
to penetrate by land into Italy, Marcus Licinius Crassus,
the eldest son of the old colleague of Caesar, was to conduct
the defence of Cisalpine Gaul, Gaius the younger brother
of Marcus Antonius that of Illyricum.
Organizations in Macedonia
The Emigrants
If, however, nothing material was done from the east to obstruct Caesar
in the subjugation of the west, efforts at least were made towards
securing political and military consolidation there during the respite
so ignominiously obtained. The great rendezvous of the opponents
of Caesar was Macedonia. Thither Pompeius himself and the mass
of the emigrants from Brundisium resorted; thither came
the other refugees from the west: Marcus Cato from Sicily,
Lucius Domitius from Massilia but more especially a number
of the best officers and soldiers of the broken-up army of Spain,
with its generals Afranius and Varro at their head. In Italy
emigration gradually became among the aristocrats a question
not of honour merely but almost of fashion, and it obtained
a fresh impulse through the unfavourable accounts which arrived
regarding Caesar's position before Ilerda; not a few of the more
lukewarm partisans and the political trimmers went over by degrees,
and even Marcus Cicero at last persuaded himself that he did not
adequately discharge his duty as a citizen by writing a dissertatio
on concord. The senate of emigrants at Thessalonica, where the official
Rome pitched its interim abode, numbered nearly 200 members
including many venerable old men and almost all the consulars.
But emigrants indeed they were. This Roman Coblentz displayed
a pitiful spectacle in the high pretensions and paltry performances
of the genteel world of Rome, their unseasonable reminiscences
and still more unseasonable recriminations, their political
perversities and financial embarrassments. It was a matter
of comparatively slight moment that, while the old structure
was falling to pieces, they were with the most painstaking gravity
watching over every old ornamental scroll and every speck of rust
in the constitution; after all it was simply ridiculous,
when the genteel lords had scruples of conscience as to calling
their deliberative assembly beyond the sacred soil of the city
the senate, and cautiously gave it the title of the "three hundred";(23)
or when they instituted tedious investigations in state law
as to whether and how a curiate law could be legitimately enacted
elsewhere than within the ring-wall of Rome.
The Lukewarm
The Ultras
His Cavalry
Fleet
However this may be, on the 4th Jan. 706(28) Caesar set sail
with six legions greatly thinned by toil and sickness and 600 horsemen
from Brundisium for the coast of Epirus. It was a counterpart
to the foolhardy Britannic expedition; but at least the first throw
was fortunate. The coast was reached in the middle of the Acroceraunian
(Chimara) cliffs, at the little-frequented roadstead of Paleassa
(Paljassa). The transports were seen both from the harbour of Oricum
(creek of Avlona) where a Pompeian squadron of eighteen sail was lying,
and from the headquarters of the hostile fleet at Corcyra;
but in the one quarter they deemed themselves too weak,
in the other they were not ready to sail, so that the first freight
was landed without hindrance. While the vessels at once returned
to bring over the second, Caesar on that same evening scaled
the Acroceraunian mountains. His first successes were as great
as the surprise of his enemies. The Epirot militia nowhere
offered resistance; the important seaport towns of Oricum
and Apollonia along with a number of smaller townships were taken,
and Dyrrhachium, selected by the Pompeians as their chief arsenal
and filled with stores of all sorts, but only feebly garrisoned,
was in the utmost danger.
Antonius and Caesar were no doubt still some four days' march
from each other, separated by Dyrrhachium and the whole army
of the enemy; but Antonius happily effected the perilous march
round about Dyrrhachium through the passes of the Graba Balkan,
and was received by Caesar, who had gone to meet him, on the right bank
of the Apsus. Pompeius, after having vainly attempted to prevent
the junction of the two armies of the enemy and to force the corps
of Antonius to fight by itself, took up a new position at Asparagium
on the river Genusus (Skumbi), which flows parallel to the Apsus
between the latter and the town of Dyrrhachium, and here remained
once more immoveable. Caesar felt himself now strong enough
to give battle; but Pompeius declined it. On the other hand Caesar
succeeded in deceiving his adversary and throwing himself unawares
with his better marching troops, just as at Ilerda, between
the enemy's camp and the fortress of Dyrrhachium on which it rested
as a basis. The chain of the Graba Balkan, which stretching
in a direction from east to west ends on the Adriatic
in the narrow tongue of land at Dyrrhachium, sends off--fourteen miles
to the east of Dyrrhachium--in a south-westerly direction a lateral
branch which likewise turns in the form of a crescent towards the sea,
and the main chain and lateral branch of the mountains enclose
between themselves a small plain extending round a cliff on the seashore.
Pompeius now took up his camp, and, although Caesar's army kept
the land route to Dyrrhachium closed against him, he yet with the aid
of his fleet remained constantly in communication with the town
and was amply and easily provided from it with everything needful;
while among the Caesarians, notwithstanding strong detachments
to the country lying behind, and notwithstanding all the exertions
of the general to bring about an organized system of conveyance
and thereby a regular supply, there was more than scarcity, and flesh,
barley, nay even roots had very frequently to take the place
of the wheat to which they were accustomed.
Pompeius might choose among these plans; no choice was left to Caesar.
After that unfortunate engagement he entered on his retreat to Apollonia.
Pompeius followed. The march from Dyrrhachium to Apollonia
along a difficult road crossed by several rivers was no easy task
for a defeated army pursued by the enemy; but the dexterous leadership
of their general and the indestructible marching energy of the soldiers
compelled Pompeius after four days' pursuit to suspend it as useless.
He had now to decide between the Italian expedition and the march
into the interior. However advisable and attractive the former
might seem, and though various voices were raised in its favour,
he preferred not to abandon the corps of Scipio, the more especially
as he hoped by this march to get the corps of Calvinus into his hands.
Calvinus lay at the moment on the Egnatian road at Heraclea Lyncestis,
between Pompeius and Scipio, and, after Caesar had retreated
to Apollonia, farther distant from the latter than from the great army
of Pompeius; without knowledge, moreover, of the events at Dyrrhachium
and of his hazardous position, since after the successes achieved
at Dyrrhachium the whole country inclined to Pompeius and the messengers
of Caesar were everywhere seized. It was not till the enemy's
main force had approached within a few hours of him that Calvinus
learned from the accounts of the enemy's advanced posts themselves
the state of things. A quick departure in a southerly direction
towards Thessaly withdrew him at the last moment from imminent
destruction; Pompeius had to content himself with having
liberated Scipio from his position of peril. Caesar had meanwhile
arrived unmolested at Apollonia. Immediately after the disaster
of Dyrrhachium he had resolved if possible to transfer the struggle
from the coast away into the interior, with the view of getting beyond
the reach of the enemy's fleet--the ultimate cause of the failure
of his previous exertions. The march to Apollonia had only been intended
to place his wounded in safety and to pay his soldiers there,
where his depots were stationed; as soon as this was done,
he set out for Thessaly, leaving behind garrisons in Apollonia,
Oricum, and Lissus. The corps of Calvinus had also put itself
in motion towards Thessaly; and Caesar could effect a junction
with the reinforcements coming up from Italy, this time by the land-route
through Illyria--two legions under Quintus Cornificius--still more easily
in Thessaly than in Epirus. Ascending by difficult paths in the valley
of the Aous and crossing the mountain-chain which separates Epirus
from Thessaly, he arrived at the Peneius; Calvinus was likewise
directed thither, and the junction of the two armies was thus accomplished
by the shortest route and that which was least exposed to the enemy.
It took place at Aeginium not far from the source of the Peneius.
The first Thessalian town before which the now united army appeared,
Gomphi, closed its gates against it; it was quickly stormed and given up
to pillage, and the other towns of Thessaly terrified by this example
submitted, so soon as Caesar's legions merely appeared before the walls.
Amidst these marches and conflicts, and with the help of the supplies--
albeit not too ample--which the region on the Peneius afforded,
the traces and recollections of the calamitous days through which
they had passed gradually vanished.
The victories of Dyrrhachium had thus borne not much immediate fruit
for the victors. Pompeius with his unwieldy army and his numerous
cavalry had not been able to follow his versatile enemy
into the mountains; Caesar like Calvinus had escaped from pursuit,
and the two stood united and in full security in Thessaly.
Perhaps it would have been the best course, if Pompeius had now
without delay embarked with his main force for Italy, where success
was scarcely doubtful. But in the meantime only a division
of the fleet departed for Sicily and Italy. In the camp of the coalition
the contest with Caesar was looked on as so completely decided
by the battles of Dyrrhachium that it only remained to reap the fruits
of victory, in other words, to seek out and capture the defeated army.
Their former over-cautious reserve was succeeded by an arrogance
still less justified by the circumstances; they gave no heed
to the facts, that they had, strictly speaking, failed in the pursuit,
that they had to hold themselves in readiness to encounter
a completely refreshed and reorganized army in Thessaly,
and that there was no small risk in moving away from the sea,
renouncing the support of the fleet, and following their antagonist
to the battlefield chosen by himself. They were simply resolved
at any price to fight with Caesar, and therefore to get at him
as soon as possible and by the most convenient way. Cato took up
the command in Dyrrhachium, where a garrison was left behind
of eighteen cohorts, and in Corcyra, where 300 ships of war were left;
Pompeius and Scipio proceeded--the former, apparently, following
the Egnatian way as far as Pella and then striking into the great road
to the south, the latter from the Haliacmon through the passes
of Olympus--to the lower Peneius and met at Larisa.
The Armies at Pharsalus
The Battle
Thus the battle of Pharsalus was fought on the 9th August 706,
almost on the same field where a hundred and fifty years before
the Romans had laid the foundation of their dominion in the east.(31)
Pompeius rested his right wing on the Enipeus; Caesar opposite
to him rested his left on the broken ground stretching in front
of the Enipeus; the two other wings were stationed out in the plain,
covered in each case by the cavalry and the light troops.
The intention of Pompeius was to keep his infantry on the defensive,
but with his cavalry to scatter the weak band of horsemen which,
mixed after the German fashion with light infantry, confronted him,
and then to take Caesar's right wing in rear. His infantry
courageously sustained the first charge of that of the enemy,
and the engagement there came to a stand. Labienus likewise dispersed
the enemy's cavalry after a brave but short resistance,
and deployed his force to the left with the view of turning
the infantry. But Caesar, foreseeing the defeat of his cavalry,
had stationed behind it on the threatened flank of his right wing
some 2000 of his best legionaries. As the enemy's horsemen,
driving those of Caesar before them, galloped along and around the line,
they suddenly came upon this select corps advancing intrepidly
against them and, rapidly thrown into confusion by the unexpected
and unusual infantry attack,(32) they galloped at full speed
from the field of battle. The victorious legionaries cut to pieces
the enemy's archers now unprotected, then rushed at the left wing
of the enemy, and began now on their part to turn it. At the same time
Caesar's third division hitherto reserved advanced along
the whole line to the attack. The unexpected defeat of the best arm
of the Pompeian army, as it raised the courage of their opponents,
broke that of the army and above all that of the general. When Pompeius,
who from the outset did not trust his infantry, saw the horsemen
gallop off, he rode back at once from the field of battle to the camp,
without even awaiting the issue of the general attack ordered by Caesar.
His legions began to waver and soon to retire over the brook
into the camp, which was not accomplished without severe loss.
Its Issue
Flight of Pompeius
The day was thus lost and many an able soldier had fallen,
but the army was still substantially intact, and the situation
of Pompeius was far less perilous than that of Caesar after the defeat
of Dyrrhachium. But while Caesar in the vicissitudes of his destiny
had learned that fortune loves to withdraw herself at certain moments
even from her favourites in order to be once more won back
through their perseverance, Pompeius knew fortune hitherto
only as the constant goddess, and despaired of himself and of her
when she withdrew from him; and, while in Caesar's grander nature
despair only developed yet mightier energies, the inferior soul
of Pompeius under similar pressure sank into the infinite abyss
of despondency. As once in the war with Sertorius he had been
on the point of abandoning the office entrusted to him in presence
of his superior opponent and of departing,(33) so now, when he saw
the legions retire over the stream, he threw from him the fatal
general's scarf, and rode off by the nearest route to the sea,
to find means of embarking there. His army discouraged and leaderless--
for Scipio, although recognized by Pompeius as colleague in supreme
command, was yet general-in-chief only in name--hoped to find protection
behind the camp-walls; but Caesar allowed it no rest; the obstinate
resistance of the Roman and Thracian guard of the camp was speedily
overcome, and the mass was compelled to withdraw in disorder
to the heights of Crannon and Scotussa, at the foot of which
the camp was pitched. It attempted by moving forward along these hills
to regain Larisa; but the troops of Caesar, heeding neither
booty nor fatigue and advancing by better paths in the plain,
intercepted the route of the fugitives; in fact, when late
in the evening the Pompeians suspended their march, their pursuers
were able even to draw an entrenched line which precluded
the fugitives from access to the only rivulet to be found
in the neighbourhood. So ended the day of Pharsalus. The enemy's army
was not only defeated, but annihilated; 15,000 of the enemy
lay dead or wounded on the field of battle, while the Caesarians missed
only 200 men; the body which remained together, amounting still
to nearly 20,000 men, laid down their arms on the morning after
the battle only isolated troops, including, it is true, the officers
of most note, sought a refuge in the mountains; of the eleven eagles
of the enemy nine were handed over to Caesar. Caesar,
who on the very day of the battle had reminded the soldiers
that they should not forget the fellow-citizen in the foe,
did not treat the captives as did Bibulus and Labienus;
nevertheless he too found it necessary now to exercise some severity.
The common soldiers were incorporated in the army, fines
or confiscations of property were inflicted on the men of better rank;
the senators and equites of note who were taken, with few exceptions,
suffered death. The time for clemency was past; the longer
the civil war lasted, the more remorseless and implacable it became.
Some time elapsed, before the consequences of the 9th of August 706
could be fully discerned. What admitted of least doubt,
was the passing over to the side of Caesar of all those
who had attached themselves to the party vanquished at Pharsalus
merely as to the more powerful; the defeat was so thoroughly
decisive, that the victor was joined by all who were not willing
or were not obliged to fight for a lost cause. All the kings,
peoples, and cities, which had hitherto been the clients of Pompeius,
now recalled their naval and military contingents and declined
to receive the refugees of the beaten party; such as Egypt, Cyrene,
the communities of Syria, Phoenicia, Cilicia and Asia Minor, Rhodes,
Athens, and generally the whole east. In fact Pharnaces
king of the Bosporus pushed his officiousness so far, that on the news
of the Pharsalian battle he took possession not only of the town
of Phanagoria which several years before had been declared free
by Pompeius, and of the dominions of the Colchian princes confirmed
by him, but even of the kingdom of Little Armenia which Pompeius
had conferred on king Deiotarus. Almost the sole exceptions
to this general submission were the little town of Megara
which allowed itself to be besieged and stormed by the Caesarians,
and Juba king of Numidia, who had for long expected, and after the victory
over Curio expected only with all the greater certainty, that his kingdom
would be annexed by Caesar, and was thus obliged for better or for worse
to abide by the defeated party.
Cato
Pompeius
That the vanquished should withdraw and renounce the new monarchy,
was at least the natural and so far the truest expression of their
desperate position. The mountains and above all the sea had been
in those times ever since the memory of man the asylum not only
of all crime, but also of intolerable misery and of oppressed right;
it was natural for Pompeians and republicans to wage a defiant war
against the monarchy of Caesar, which had ejected them,
in the mountains and on the seas, and especially natural for them
to take up piracy on a greater scale, with more compact organization,
and with more definite aims. Even after the recall of the squadrons
that had come from the east they still possessed a very considerable
fleet of their own, while Caesar was as yet virtually without
vessels of war; and their connection with the Dalmatae who had risen
in their own interest against Caesar,(38) and their control
over the most important seas and seaports, presented the most
advantageous prospects for a naval war, especially on a small scale.
As formerly Sulla's hunting out of the democrats had ended
in the Sertorian insurrection, which was a conflict first waged
by pirates and then by robbers and ultimately became a very serious war,
so possibly, if there was in the Catonian aristocracy or among
the adherents of Pompeius as much spirit and fire as in the Marian
democracy, and if there was found among them a true sea-king,
a commonwealth independent of the monarchy of Caesar and perhaps a match
for it might arise on the still unconquered sea.
Parthian Alliance
Death of Pompeius
Achillas the general of the royal troops and some of the former soldiers
of Pompeius went off in a boat to his vessel; and invited him
to come to the king and, as the water was shallow, to enter their barge.
As he was stepping ashore, the military tribune Lucius Septimius
stabbed him from behind, under the eyes of his wife and son
who were compelled to be spectators of the murder from the deck
of their vessel, without being able to rescue or revenge
(28 Sept. 706). On the same day, on which thirteen years before
he had entered the capital in triumph over Mithradates,(39)
the man, who for a generation had been called the Great and for years
had ruled Rome, died on the desert sands of the inhospitable
Casian shore by the hand of one of his old soldiers. A good officer
but otherwise of mediocre gifts of intellect and of heart,
fate had with superhuman constancy for thirty years allowed him
to solve all brilliant and toilless tasks; had permitted him to pluck
all laurels planted and fostered by others; had brought him
face to face with all the conditions requisite for obtaining
the supreme power--only in order to exhibit in his person an example
of spurious greatness, to which history knows no parallel.
Of all pitiful parts there is none more pitiful than that of passing
for more than one really is; and it is the fate of monarchy
that this misfortune inevitably clings to it, for barely once
in a thousand years does there arise among the people a man
who is a king not merely in name, but in reality. If this disproportion
between semblance and reality has never perhaps been so abruptly marked
as in Pompeius, the fact may well excite grave reflection that it was
precisely he who in a certain sense opened the series of Roman monarchs.
Arrival of Caesar
Insurrection in Alexandria
Caesar in Alexandria
The junction took place without the enemy attempting to hinder it.
Caesar then marched into the Delta, whither the king had retreated,
overthrew, notwithstanding the deeply cut canal in their front,
the Egyptian vanguard at the first onset, and immediately stormed
the Egyptian camp itself. It lay at the foot of a rising ground
between the Nile--from which only a narrow path separated it--
and marshes difficult of access. Caesar caused the camp to be assailed
simultaneously from the front and from the flank on the path
along the Nile; and during this assault ordered a third detachment
to ascend unseen the heights behind the camp. The victory was complete
the camp was taken, and those of the Egyptians who did not fal
beneath the sword of the enemy were drowned in the attempt to escape
to the fleet on the Nile. With one of the boats, which sank
overladen with men, the young king also disappeared in the waters
of his native stream.
Pacificatin of Alexandria
Insubordination of Pharnaces
In Asia Minor there was, at the time of Caesar's departure for Egypt,
no enemy. But Caesar's lieutenant there, the able Gnaeus Domitius
Calvinus, had received orders to take away again from king Pharnaces
what he had without instructions wrested from the allies of Pompeius;
and, as Pharnaces, an obstinate and arrogant despot like his father,
perseveringly refused to evacuate Lesser Armenia, no course remained
but to march against him. Calvinus had been obliged to despatch
to Egypt two out of the three legions left behind with him and formed
out of the Pharsalian prisoners of war; he filled up the gap
by one legion hastily gathered from the Romans domiciled in Pontus
and two legions of Deiotarus exercised after the Roman manner,
and advanced into Lesser Armenia. But the Bosporan army,
tried in numerous conflicts with the dwellers on the Black Sea,
showed itself more efficient than his own.
Caesar entrusted the pursuit of the king, who had gone home by way
of Sinope to Pharnaces' illegitimate brother, the brave Mithradates
of Pergamus, who as a reward for the services rendered by him in Egypt
received the crown of the Bosporan kingdom in room of Pharnaces.
In other respects the affairs of Syria and Asia Minor were peacefully
settled; Caesar's own allies were richly rewarded, those of Pompeius
were in general dismissed with fines or reprimands. Deiotarus alone,
the most powerful of the clients of Pompeius, was again confined
to his narrow hereditary domain, the canton of the Tolistobogii.
In his stead Ariobarzanes king of Cappadocia was invested with
Lesser Armenia, and the tetrarchy of the Trocmi usurped by Deiotarus
was conferred on the new king of the Bosporus, who was descended
by the maternal side from one of the Galatian princely houses
as by the paternal from that of Pontus.
By the side of the new general-in-chief the senate of the "three hundred"
again emerged. It established its seat in Utica, and replenished
its thinned ranks by the admission of the most esteemed
and the wealthiest men of the equestrian order.
Movements in Spain
Battle at Thapsus
Cato in Utica
His Death
Regulation of Africa
CHAPTER XI
The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole domain
of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Caesar, was in his
fifty-sixth year (born 12 July 652?) when the battle at Thapsus,
the last link in a long chain of momentous victories, placed
the decision as to the future of the world in his hands. Few men
have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar--
the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced
by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path
that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one
of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage
to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact
to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years
of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch
were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as
the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed,
had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours,
had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself
initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles
pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as
into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying.
But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even
these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both
his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired.
In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers,
and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity
of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time
were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like
slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another--
was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least
among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body.
His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision
and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders
without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless,
and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously
with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius,
and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived,
he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia
(his father having died early); to his wives and above all
to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection,
which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs.
With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high
and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity,
with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned
any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner
of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely
from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering,
several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave,
even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.
Caesar as a Statesman
He was monarch; but he never played the king. Even when absolute
lord of Rome, he retained the deportment of the party-leader;
perfectly pliant and smooth, easy and charming in conversation,
complaisant towards every one, it seemed as if he wished to be
nothing but the first among his peers. Caesar entirely avoided
the blunder into which so many men otherwise on an equality with him
have fallen, of carrying into politics the military tone of command;
however much occasion his disagreeable relations with the senate
gave for it, he never resorted to outrages such as was that
of the eighteenth Brumaire. Caesar was monarch; but he was never
seized with the giddiness of the tyrant. He is perhaps the only one
among the mighty ones of the earth, who in great matters and little
never acted according to inclination or caprice, but always
without exception according to his duty as ruler, and who,
when he looked back on his life, found doubtless erroneous calculations
to deplore, but no false step of passion to regret. There is nothing
in the history of Caesar's life, which even on a small scale(2)
can be compared with those poetico-sensual ebullitions--such as
the murder of Kleitos or the burning of Persepolis--which the history
of his great predecessor in the east records. He is, in fine,
perhaps the only one of those mighty ones, who has preserved
to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between
the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task
which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all--
the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success,
its natural limits. What was possible he performed, and never left
the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better,
never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils
that were incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken,
he always obeyed. Alexander on the Hypanis, Napoleon at Moscow,
turned back because they were compelled to do so, and were indignant
at destiny for bestowing even on its favourites merely limited successes;
Caesar turned back voluntarily on the Thames and on the Rhine;
and thought of carrying into effect even at the Danube and the Euphrates
not unbounded plans of world-conquest, but merely well-considered
frontier-regulations.
Such was this unique man, whom it seems so easy and yet is so infinitely
difficult to describe. His whole nature is transparent clearness;
and tradition preserves more copious and more vivid information
about him than about any of his peers in the ancient world.
Of such a personage our conceptions may well vary in point
of shallowness or depth, but they cannot be, strictly speaking,
different; to every not utterly perverted inquirer the grand figure
has exhibited the same essential features, and yet no one
has succeeded in reproducing it to the life. The secret lies
in its perfection. In his character as a man as well as in his place
in history, Caesar occupies a position where the great contrasts
of existence meet and balance each other. Of mighty creative power
and yet at the same time of the most penetrating judgment;
no longer a youth and not yet an old man; of the highest energy of will
and the highest capacity of execution; filled with republican ideals
and at the same time born to be a king; a Roman in the deepest essence
of his nature, and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself
as well as in the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic
types of culture--Caesar was the entire and perfect man.
Accordingly we miss in him more than in any other historical personage
what are called characteristic features, which are in reality
nothing else than deviations from the natural course of human development.
What in Caesar passes for such at the first superficial glance is,
when more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity
not of the individual, but of the epoch of culture or of the nation;
his youthful adventures, for instance, were common to him
with all his more gifted contemporaries of like position,
his unpoetical but strongly logical temperament was the temperament
of Romans in general. It formed part also of Caesar's full humanity
that he was in the highest degree influenced by the conditions
of time and place; for there is no abstract humanity--
the living man cannot but occupy a place in a given nationality
and in a definite line of culture. Caesar was a perfect man
just because he more than any other placed himself amidst
the currents of his time, and because he more than any other possessed
the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation--practical aptitude
as a citizen--in perfection: for his Hellenism in fact was only
the Hellenism which had been long intimately blended with the Italian
nationality. But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty,
we may perhaps say the impossibility, of depicting Caesar to the life.
As the artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty,
so the historian, when once in a thousand years he encounters
the perfect, can only be silent regarding it. For normality admits
doubtless of being expressed, but it gives us only the negative notion
of the absence of defect; the secret of nature, whereby
in her most finished manifestations normality and individuality
are combined, is beyond expression. Nothing is left for us
but to deem those fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain
some faint conception of it from the reflected lustre which rests
imperishably on the works that were the creation of this great nature.
These also, it is true, bear the stamp of the time. The Roman hero
himself stood by the side of his youthful Greek predecessor
not merely as an equal, but as a superior; but the world had meanwhile
become old and its youthful lustre had faded. The action of Caesar
was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous marching onward
towards a goal indefinitely remote; he built on, and out of, ruins,
and was content to establish himself as tolerably and as securely
as possible within the ample but yet definite bounds once assigned
to him. With reason therefore the delicate poetic tact
of the nations has not troubled itself about the unpoetical Roman,
and on the other hand has invested the son of Philip with all
the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow hues of legend.
But with equal reason the political life of the nations has during
thousands of years again and again reverted to the lines
which Caesar drew; and the fact, that the peoples to whom the world
belongs still at the present day designate the highest of their monarchs
by his name, conveys a warning deeply significant and, unhappily,
fraught with shame.
The praetor Marcus Caelius Rufus, a good aristocrat and bad payer
of debts, of some talent and much culture, as a vehement
and fluent orator hitherto in the senate and in the Forum
one of the most zealous champions for Caesar, proposed to the people--
without being instructed from any higher quarter to do so--
a law which granted to debtors a respite of six years free of interest,
and then, when he was opposed in this step, proposed a second law
which even cancelled all claims arising out of loans and current
house rents; whereupon the Caesarian senate deposed him from his office.
It was just on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, and the balance
in the great contest seemed to incline to the side of the Pompeians;
Rufus entered into communication with the old senatorian
band-leader Milo, and the two contrived a counter-revolution,
which inscribed on its banner partly the republican constitution,
partly the cancelling of creditors' claims and the manumission of slaves.
Milo left his place of exile Massilia, and called the Pompeians
and the slave-herdsmen to arms in the region of Thurii; Rufus made
arrangements to seize the town of Capua by armed slaves.
But the latter plan was detected before its execution and frustrated
by the Capuan militia; Quintus Pedius, who advanced with a legion
into the territory of Thurii, scattered the band making havoc there;
and the fall of the two leaders put an end to the scandal (706).
Dolabella
Nevertheless there was found in the following year (707) a second fool,
the tribune of the people, Publius Dolabella, who, equally insolvent
but far from being equally gifted with his predecessor,
introduced afresh his law as to creditors' claims and house rents,
and with his colleague Lucius Trebellius began on that point once more--
it was the last time--the demagogic war; there were serious frays
between the armed bands on both sides and various street-riots,
till the commandant of Italy Marcus Antonius ordered the military
to interfere, and soon afterwards Caesar's return from the east
completely put an end to the preposterous proceedings.
Caesar attributed to these brainless attempts to revive the projects
of Catilina so little importance, that he tolerated Dolabella in Italy
and indeed after some time even received him again into favour.
Against a rabble of this sort, which had nothing to do with
any political question at all, but solely with a war against property--
as against gangs of banditti--the mere existence of a strong government
is sufficient; and Caesar was too great and too considerate
to busy himself with the apprehensions which the Italian alarmists
felt regarding these communists of that day, and thereby unduly
to procure a false popularity for his monarchy.
While Caesar thus might leave, and actually left, the late democratic
party to the process of decomposition which had already in its case
advanced almost to the utmost limit, he had on the other hand,
with reference to the former aristocratic party possessing
a far greater vitality, not to bring about its dissolution--
which time alone could accomplish--but to pave the way for
and initiate it by a proper combination of repression and conciliation.
Among minor measures, Caesar, even from a natural sense of propriety,
avoided exasperating the fallen party by empty sarcasm;
he did not triumph over his conquered fellow-burgesses;(3)
he mentioned Pompeius often and always with respect, and caused
his statue overthrown by the people to be re-erected at the senate-
house, when the latter was restored, in its earlier distinguished place.
To political prosecutions after the victory Caesar assigned
the narrowest possible limits. No investigation was instituted
into the various communications which the constitutional party
had held even with nominal Caesarians; Caesar threw the piles of papers
found in the enemy's headquarters at Pharsalus and Thapsus
into the fire unread, and spared himself and the country from political
processes against individuals suspected of high treason. Further,
all the common soldiers who had followed their Roman or provincial
officers into the contest against Caesar came off with impunity.
The sole exception made was in the case of those Roman burgesses,
who had taken service in the army of the Numidian king Juba;
their property was confiscated by way of penalty for their treason.
Even to the officers of the conquered party Caesar had granted
unlimited pardon up to the close of the Spanish campaign of 705;
but he became convinced that in this he had gone too far,
and that the removal at least of the leaders among them was inevitable.
The rule by which he was thenceforth guided was, that every one
who after the capitulation of Ilerda had served as an officer
in the enemy's army or had sat in the opposition-senate, if he survived
the close of the struggle, forfeited his property and his political
rights, and was banished from Italy for life; if he did not survive
the close of the struggle, his property at least fell to the state;
but any one of these, who had formerly accepted pardon from Caesar
and was once more found in the ranks of the enemy, thereby
forfeited his life. These rules were however materially modified
in the execution. The sentence of death was actually executed
only against a very few of the numerous backsliders. In the confiscation
of the property of the fallen not only were the debts attaching
to the several portions of the estate as well as the claims
of the widows for their dowries paid off, as was reasonable.
But a portion of the paternal estate was left also to the children
of the deceased. Lastly not a few of those, who in consequence
of those rules were liable to banishment and confiscation of property,
were at once pardoned entirely or got off with fines, like the African
capitalists who were impressed as members of the senate of Utica.
And even the others almost without exception got their freedom
and property restored to them, if they could only prevail
on themselves to petition Caesar to that effect; on several
who declined to do so, such as the consular Marcus Marcellus,
pardon was even conferred unasked, and ultimately in 710
a general amnesty was issued for all who were still unrecalled.
Amnesty
Caesar's Work
Dictatorship
The position of the new supreme head of the state appears formally,
at least in the first instance, as a dictatorship. Caesar took
it up at first after his return from Spain in 705, but laid it down
again after a few days, and waged the decisive campaign of 706
simply as consul--this was the office his tenure of which was
the primary occasion for the outbreak of the civil war.(7)
but in the autumn of this year after the battle of Pharsalus
he reverted to the dictatorship and had it repeatedly entrusted to him,
at first for an undefined period, but from the 1st January 709
as an annual office, and then in January or February 710(8)
for the duration of his life, so that he in the end expressly dropped
the earlier reservation as to his laying down the office and gave
formal expression to its tenure for life in the new title of -dictator
perpetuus-. This dictatorship, both in its first ephemeral
and in its second enduring tenure, was not that of the old constitution,
but--what was coincident with this merely in the name--the supreme
exceptional office as arranged by Sulla;(9) an office,
the functions of which were fixed, not by the constitutional ordinances
regarding the supreme single magistracy, but by special decree
of the people, to such an effect that the holder received,
in the commission to project laws and to regulate the commonwealth,
an official prerogative de jure unlimited which superseded
the republican partition of powers. Those were merely applications
of this general prerogative to the particular case, when the holder
of power was further entrusted by separate acts with the right
of deciding on war and peace without consulting the senate
and the people, with the independent disposal of armies and finances,
and with the nomination of the provincial governors. Caesar could
accordingly de jure assign to himself even such prerogatives
as lay outside of the proper functions of the magistracy and even
outside of the province of state-powers at all;(10) and it appears
almost as a concession on his part, that he abstained from nominating
the magistrates instead of the Comitia and limited himself to claiming
a binding right of proposal for a proportion of the praetors
and of the lower magistrates; and that he moreover had himself
empowered by special decree of the people for the creation of patricians,
which was not at all allowable according to use and wont.
Men of judgment will not require any proof, either that Caesar
intended to engraft on the commonwealth his supreme power,
and this not merely for a few years or even as a personal office
for an indefinite period somewhat like Sulla's regency,
but as an essential and permanent organ; or that he selected
for the new institution an appropriate and simple designation;
for, if it is a political blunder to create names without substantial
meaning, it is scarcely a less error to set up the substance
of plenary power without a name. Only it is not easy to determine
what definitive formal shape Caesar had in view; partly because
in this period of transition the ephemeral and the permanent buildings
are not clearly discriminated from each other, partly because
the devotion of his clients which already anticipated the nod
of their master loaded him with a multitude--offensive doubtless
to himself--of decrees of confidence and laws conferring honours.
Least of all could the new monarchy attach itself to the consulship,
just on account of the collegiate character that could not well
be separated from this office; Caesar also evidently laboured
to degrade this hitherto supreme magistracy into an empty title,
and subsequently, when he undertook it, he did not hold it
through the whole year, but before the year expired gave it away
to personages of secondary rank. The dictatorship came practically
into prominence most frequently and most definitely, but probably
only because Caesar wished to use it in the significance which it had
of old in the constitutional machinery--as an extraordinary presidency
for surmounting extraordinary crises. On the other hand it was
far from recommending itself as an expression for the new monarchy,
for the magistracy was inherently clothed with an exceptional
and unpopular character, and it could hardly be expected
of the representative of the democracy that he should choose
for its permanent organization that form, which the most gifted champion
of the opposing party had created for his own ends.
The new name of Imperator, on the other hand, appears in every respect
by far more appropriate for the formal expression of the monarchy;
just because it is in this application(13) new, and no definite
outward occasion for its introduction is apparent. The new wine
might not be put into old bottles; here is a new name for the new thing,
and that name most pregnantly sums up what the democratic party
had already expressed in the Gabinian law, only with less precision,
as the function of its chief--the concentration and perpetuation
of official power (-imperium-) in the hands of a popular chief
independent of the senate. We find on Caesar's coins,
especially those of the last period, alongside of the dictatorship
the title of Imperator prevailing, and in Caesar's law
as to political crimes the monarch seems to have been designated
by this name. Accordingly the following times, though not immediately,
connected the monarchy with the name of Imperator. To lend
to this new office at once a democratic and religious sanction,
Caesar probably intended to associate with it once for all
on the one hand the tribunician power, on the other
the supreme pontificate.
But, whatever may have been the definitive title present to his thoughts
the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court
established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp,
insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe
of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes,
but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity
as the proper regal attire, and received, seated on his golden chair
and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate.
The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories,
and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital,
his principal servants marched forth in troops to great distances
so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be
of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city
where he dwelt. Personal interviews with him were rendered
so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience,
that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate
even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons
even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the antechamber.
People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself,
that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose
a monarchical aristocracy, which was in a remarkable manner at once
new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting
into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of royalty,
the nobility by the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted,
although without essential privileges as an order, in the character
of a close aristocratic guild;(19) but as it could receive
no new -gentes-(20) it had dwindled away more and more in the course
of centuries, and in the time of Caesar there were not more than
fifteen or sixteen patrician -gentes- still in existence.
Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right
of creating new patrician -gentes- conferred on the Imperator
by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast
to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate,
which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchical
aristocracy--the charm of antiquity, entire dependence
on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides
the new sovereignty revealed itself.
Legislation
Edicts
But at the same time--as is not only obvious of itself, but is also
distinctly attested--the other maxim also of the oldest state-law
was revived by Caesar himself, and not merely for the first time
by his successors; viz. that what the supreme, or rather sole,
magistrate commands is unconditionally valid so long as he remains
in office, and that, while legislation no doubt belongs only to the king
and the burgesses in concert, the royal edict is equivalent to law
at least till the demission of its author.
While the democratic king thus conceded to the community of the people
at least a formal share in the sovereignty, it was by no means
his intention to divide his authority with what had hitherto been
the governing body, the college of senators. The senate of Caesar
was to be--in a quite different way from the later senate of Augustus--
nothing but a supreme council of state, which he made use
of for advising with him beforehand as to laws, and for the issuing
of the more important administrative ordinances through it,
or at least under its name--for cases in fact occurred where decrees
of senate were issued, of which none of the senators recited
as present at their preparation had any cognizance. There were
no material difficulties of form in reducing the senate to it
original deliberative position, which it had overstepped more de facto
than de jure; but in this case it was necessary to protect himself
from practical resistance, for the Roman senate was as much
the headquarters of the opposition to Caesar as the Attic Areopagus
was of the opposition to Pericles. Chiefly for this reason
the number of senators, which had hitherto amounted at most
to six hundred in its normal condition(21) and had been greatly reduced
by the recent crises, was raised by extraordinary supplement
to nine hundred; and at the same time, to keep it at least
up to this mark, the number of quaestors to be nominated annually,
that is of members annually admitted to the senate, was raised
from twenty to forty.(22) The extraordinary filling up of the senate
was undertaken by the monarch alone. In the case of the ordinary
additions he secured to himself a permanent influence through
the circumstance, that the electoral colleges were bound by law(23)
to give their votes to the first twenty candidates for the quaestorship
who were provided with letters of recommendation from the monarch;
besides, the crown was at liberty to confer the honorary rights
attaching to the quaestorship or to any office superior to it,
and consequently a seat in the senate in particular, by way of exception
even on individuals not qualified. The selection of the extraordinary
members who were added naturally fell in the main on adherents
of the new order of things, and introduced, along with -equites-
of respectable standing, various dubious and plebeian personages
into the proud corporation--former senators who had been erased
from the roll by the censor or in consequence of a judicial sentence,
foreigners from Spain and Gaul who had to some extent to learn
their Latin in the senate, men lately subaltern officers
who had not previously received even the equestrian ring,
sons of freedmen or of such as followed dishonourable trades,
and other elements of a like kind. The exclusive circles
of the nobility, to whom this change in the personal composition
of the senate naturally gave the bitterest offence, saw in it
an intentional depreciation of the very institution itself.
Caesar was not capable of such a self-destructive policy;
he was as determined not to let himself be governed by his council
as he was convinced of the necessity of the institute in itself.
They might more correctly have discerned in this proceeding the intention
of the monarch to take away from the senate its former character
of an exclusive representation of the oligarchic aristocracy,
and to make it once more--what it had been in the regal period--
a state-council representing all classes of persons belonging
to the state through their most intelligent elements, and not necessarily
excluding the man of humble birth or even the foreigner; just as those
earliest kings introduced non-burgesses,(24) Caesar introduced
non-Italians into his senate.
While the rule of the nobility was thus set aside and its existence
undermined, and while the senate in its new form was merely a tool
of the monarch, autocracy was at the same time most strictly
carried out in the administration and government of the state,
and the whole executive was concentrated in the hands of the monarch.
First of all, the Imperator naturally decided in person every question
of any moment. Caesar was able to carry personal government
to an extent which we puny men can hardly conceive, and which
is not to be explained solely from the unparalleled rapidity
and decision of his working, but has moreover its ground
in a more general cause. When we see Caesar, Sulla, Gaius Gracchus,
and Roman statesmen in general displaying throughout an activity
which transcends our notions of human powers of working, the reason lies,
not in any change that human nature has undergone since that time,
but in the change which has taken place since then in the organization
of the household. The Roman house was a machine, in which even
the mental powers of the slaves and freedmen yielded their produce
to the master; a master, who knew how to govern these, worked as it were
with countless minds. It was the beau ideal of bureaucratic
centralization; which our counting-house system strives indeed
zealously to imitate, but remains as far behind its prototype
as the modern power of capital is inferior to the ancient system
of slavery. Caesar knew how to profit by this advantage;
wherever any post demanded special confidence, we see him filling it up
on principle--so far as other considerations at all permit--
with his slaves freedmen, or clients of humble birth. His works
as a whole show what an organizing genius like his could accomplish
with such an instrument; but to the question, how in detail
these marvellous feats were achieved, we have no adequate answer.
Bureaucracy resembles a manufactory also in this respect,
that the work done does not appear as that of the individual
who has worked at it, but as that of the manufactory which stamps it.
This much only is quite clear, that Caesar, in his work had no helper
at all who exerted a personal influence over it or was even so much as
initiated into the whole plan; he was not only the sole master,
but he worked also without skilled associates,
merely with common labourers.
In Matters of Finance
In the Governorships
Of the governorships on the other hand, which, after they had handed
their financial business over to the new imperial tax-receivers,
were still more than they had formerly been essentially military commands,
that of Egypt alone was transferred to the monarch's own retainers.
The country of the Nile, in a peculiar manner geographically isolated
and politically centralized, was better fitted than any other district
to break off permanently under an able leader from the central power,
as the attempts which had repeatedly been made by hard-pressed Italian
party-chiefs to establish themselves there during the recent crisis
sufficiently proved. Probably it was just this consideration
thatinduced Caesar not to declare the land formally a province,
but to leave the harmless Lagids there; and certainly for this reason
the legions stationed in Egypt were not entrusted to a man
belonging to the senate or, in other words, to the former government,
but this command was, just like the posts of tax-receivers,
treated as a menial office.(25) In general however the consideration
had weight with Caesar, that the soldiers of Rome should not,
like those of Oriental kings, be commanded by lackeys. It remained
the rule to entrust the more important governorships to those
who had been consuls, the less important to those who had been praetors;
and once more, instead of the five years' interval prescribed
by the law of 702,(26) the commencement of the governorship probably
was in the ancient fashion annexed directly to the close of the official
functions in the city. On the other hand the distribution
of the provinces among the qualified candidates, which had hitherto
been arranged sometimes by decree of the people or senate,
sometimes by concert among the magistrates or by lot, passed over
to the monarch. And, as the consuls were frequently induced
to abdicate before the end of the year and to make room for after-
elected consuls (-consules suffecti-); as, moreover, the number
of praetors annually nominated was raised from eight to sixteen,
and the nomination of half of them was entrusted to the Imperator
in the same way as that of the half of the quaestors; and, lastly,
as there was reserved to the Imperator the right of nominating,
if not titular consuls, at any rate titular praetors and titular
quaestors: Caesar secured a sufficient number of candidates
acceptable to him for filling up the governorships. Their recall
remained of course left to the discretion of the regent as well as
their nomination; as a rule it was assumed that the consular governor
should not remain more than two years, nor the praetorian
more than one year, in the province.
As the Imperator was thus, for the more general and more important
questions, his own minister; as he controlled the finances
by his servants, and the army by his adjutants; and as the old republican
state-magistracies were again converted into municipal magistracies
of the city of Rome; the autocracy was sufficiently established.
The State-Hierarchy
Regal Jurisdiction
For the usual procedure in criminal and civil causes the former
republican mode of administering justice was substantially retained.
Criminal causes were still disposed of as formerly before the different
jury-commissions competent to deal with the several crimes,
civil causes partly before the court of inheritance or,
as it was commonly called, of the -centumviri-, partly before
the single -iudices-; the superintendence of judicial proceedings
was as formerly conducted in the capital chiefly by the praetors,
in the provinces by the governors. Political crimes too continued
even under the monarchy to be referred to a jury-commission;
the new ordinance, which Caesar issued respecting them, specified
the acts legally punishable with precision and in a liberal spirit
which excluded all prosecution of opinions, and it fixed
as the penalty not death, but banishment. As respects the selection
of the jurymen, whom the senatorial party desired to see chosen
exclusively from the senate and the strict Gracchans exclusively
from the equestrian order, Caesar, faithful to the principle
of reconciling the parties, left the matter on the footing
of the compromise-law of Cotta,(29) but with the modification--
for which the way was probably prepared by the law of Pompeius
of 699(30)-that the -tribuni aerarii- who came from the lower ranks
of the people were set aside; so that there was established a rating
for jurymen of at least 400,000 sesterces (4000 pounds), and senators
and equites now divided the functions of jurymen which had so long
been an apple of discord between them.
The Roman military system of this period was nearly in the same condition
as the Carthaginian at the time of Hannibal. The governing classes
furnished only the officers; the subjects, plebeians and provincials,
formed the army. The general was, financially and militarily,
almost independent of the central government, and, whether
in fortune or misfortune, substantially left to himself
and to the resources of his province. Civic and even national spirit
had vanished from the army, and the esprit de corps was alone
left as a bond of inward union. The army had ceased to be
an instrument of the commonwealth; in a political point of view
it had no will of its own, but it was doubtless able to adopt
that of the master who wielded it; in a military point of view
it sank under the ordinary miserable leaders into a disorganized
useless rabble, but under a right general it attained a military
perfection which the burgess-army could never reach. The class
of officers especially had deeply degenerated. The higher ranks,
senators and equites, grew more and more unused to arms.
While formerly there had been a zealous competition for the posts
of staff officers, now every man of equestrian rank, who chose to serve,
was sure of a military tribuneship, and several of these posts
had even to be filled with men of humbler rank; and any man
of quality at all who still served sought at least to finish
his term of service in Sicily or some other province where
he was sure not to face the enemy. Officers of ordinary bravery
and efficiency were stared at as prodigies; as to Pompeius especially,
his contemporaries practised a military idolatry which in every
respect compromised them. The staff, as a rule, gave the signal
for desertion and for mutiny; in spite of the culpable indulgence
of the commanders proposals for the cashiering of officers of rank
were daily occurrences. We still possess the picture--
drawn not without irony by Caesar's own hand--of the state of matters
at his own headquarters when orders were given to march
against Ariovistus, of the cursing and weeping, and preparing
of testaments, and presenting even of requests for furlough.
In the soldiery not a trace of the better classes could any longer
be discovered. Legally the general obligation to bear arms
still subsisted; but the levy, if resorted to alongside of enlisting,
took place in the most irregular manner; numerous persons
liable to serve were wholly passed over, while those once levied
were retained thirty years and longer beneath the eagles.
The Roman burgess-cavalry now merely vegetated as a sort of mounted
noble guard, whose perfumed cavaliers and exquisite high-bred horses
only played a part in the festivals of the capital; the so-called
burgess-infantry was a troop of mercenaries swept together
from the lowest ranks of the burgess-population; the subjects furnished
the cavalry and the light troops exclusively, and came to be
more and more extensively employed also in the infantry. The posts
of centurions in the legions, on which in the mode of warfare
of that time the efficiency of the divisions essentially depended,
and to which according to the national military constitution the soldier
served his way upward with the pike, were now not merely regularly
conferred according to favour, but were not unfrequently sold
to the highest bidder. In consequence of the bad financial management
of the government and the venality and fraud of the great majority
of the magistrates, the payment of the soldiers was extremely
defective and irregular.
Foreign Mercenaries
Adjutants of the Legion
Impracticableness of Ideal
Financial Administration
The Capital
The good stock of the Latin nation had long since wholly disappeared
from Rome. It is implied in the very nature of the case,
that a capital loses its municipal and even its national stamp
more quickly than any subordinate community. There the upper classes
speedily withdraw from urban public life, in order to find
their home rather in the state as a whole than in a single city;
there are inevitably concentrated the foreign settlers, the fluctuating
population of travellers for pleasure or business, the mass
of the indolent, lazy, criminal, financially and morally bankrupt,
and for that very reason cosmopolitan, rabble. All this preeminently
applied to Rome. The opulent Roman frequently regarded his town-house
merely as a lodging. When the urban municipal offices were converted
into imperial magistracies; when the civic assembly became the assembly
of burgesses of the empire; and when smaller self-governing tribal
or other associations were not tolerated within the capital:
all proper communal life ceased for Rome. From the whole compass
of the widespread empire people flocked to Rome, for speculation,
for debauchery, for intrigue, for training in crime,
or even for the purpose of hiding there from the eye of the law.
These evils arose in some measure necessarily from the very nature
of a capital; others more accidental and perhaps still more grave
were associated with them. There has never perhaps existed a great city
so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome; importation
on the one hand, and domestic manufacture by slaves on the other,
rendered any free industry from the outset impossible there.
The injurious consequences of the radical evil pervading the politics
of antiquity in general--the slave-system--were more conspicuous
in the capital than anywhere else. Nowhere were such masses
of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families
or of wealthy upstarts. Nowhere were the nations of the three
continents mingled as in the slave-population of the capital--
Syrians, Phrygians and other half-Hellenes with Libyans and Moors,
Getae, and Iberians with the daily-increasing influx of Celts
and Germans. The demoralization inseparable from the absence
of freedom, and the terrible inconsistency between formal
and moral right, were far more glaringly apparent in the case
of the half or wholly cultivated--as it were genteel--city-slave than,
in that of the rural serf who tilled the field in chains
like the fettered ox. Still worse than the masses of slaves were those
who had been de jure or simply de facto released from slavery--
a mixture of mendicant rabble and very rich parvenus, no longer slaves
and not yet fully burgesses, economically and even legally dependent
on their master and yet with the pretensions of free men;
and these freedmen made their way above all towards the capital,
where gain of various sorts was to be had and the retail traffic
as well as the minor handicrafts were almost wholly in their hands.
Their influence on the elections is expressly attested;
and that they took a leading part in the street riots, is very evident
from the ordinary signal by means of which these were virtually
proclaimed by the demagogues--the closing of the shops
and places of sale.
The seed sown was bad, and the harvest corresponded. The system
of clubs and bands in the sphere of politics, the worship of Isis
and similar pious extravagances in that of religion, had their root
in this state of things. People were constantly in prospect
of a dearth, and not unfrequently in utter famine. Nowhere was a man
less secure of his life than in the capital; murder professionally
prosecuted by banditti was the single trade peculiar to it;
the alluring of the victim to Rome was the preliminary
to his assassination; no one ventured into the country
in the vicinity of the capital without an armed retinue.
Its outward condition corresponded to this inward disorganization,
and seemed a keen satire on the aristocratic government.
Nothing was done for the regulation of the stream of the Tiber;
excepting that they caused the only bridge, with which they still
made shift,(47) to be constructed of stone at least as far as
the Tiber-island. As little was anything done toward the levelling
of the city of the Seven Hills, except where perhaps the accumulation
of rubbish had effected some improvement. The streets ascended
and descended narrow and angular, and were wretchedly kept; the footpaths
were small and ill paved. The ordinary houses were built of bricks
negligently and to a giddy height, mostly by speculative builders
on account of the small proprietors; by which means the former
became vastly rich, and the latter were reduced to beggary.
Like isolated islands amidst this sea of wretched buildings
were seen the splendid palaces of the rich, which curtailed the space
for the smaller houses just as their owners curtailed the burgess-
rights of smaller men in the state, and beside whose marble pillars
and Greek statues the decaying temples, with their images of the gods
still in great part carved of wood, made a melancholy figure.
A police-supervision of streets, of river-banks, of fires, or of building
was almost unheard of; if the government troubled itself at all
about the inundations, conflagrations, and falls of houses
which were of yearly occurrence, it was only to ask from the state-
theologians their report and advice regarding the true import
of such signs and wonders. If we try to conceive to ourselves
a London with the slave-population of New Orleans, with the police
of Constantinople, with the non-industrial character of the modern Rome,
and agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris in 1848,
we shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory,
the departure of which Cicero and his associates in their
sulky letters deplore.
But, if Caesar accepted with the full consciousness of what he was doing
the fundamental character of the capital such as he found it,
he yet worked energetically at the improvement of the lamentable
and disgraceful state of things prevailing there. Unhappily
the primary evils were the least capable of being eradicated.
Caesar could not abolish slavery with its train of national calamities;
it must remain an open question, whether he would in the course of time
have attempted at least to limit the slave-population in the capital,
as he undertook to do so in another field. As little could Caesar
conjure into existence a free industry in the capital;
yet the great building-operations remedied in some measure
the want of means of support there, and opened up to the proletariate
a source of small but honourable gain. On the other hand Caesar
laboured energetically to diminish the mass of the free proletariate.
The constant influx of persons brought by the corn-largesses
to Rome was, if not wholly stopped,(48) at least very materially
restricted by the conversion of these largesses into a provision
for the poor limited to a fixed number. The ranks of the existing
proletariate were thinned on the one hand by the tribunals
which were instructed to proceed with unrelenting rigour
against the rabble, on the other hand by a comprehensive transmarine
colonization; of the 80,000 colonists whom Caesar sent beyond the seas
in the few years of his government, a very great portion
must have been taken from the lower ranks of the population
of the capital; most of the Corinthian settlers indeed were freedmen.
When in deviation from the previous order of things, which precluded
the freedmen from any urban honorary office, Caesar opened to them
in his colonies the doors of the senate-house, this was doubtless done
in order to gain those of them who were in better positions to favour
the cause of emigration. This emigration, however, must have been
more than a mere temporary arrangement; Caesar, convinced like every
other man of sense that the only true remedy for the misery
of the proletariate consisted in a well-regulated system of colonization,
and placed by the condition of the empire in a position to realize it
to an almost unlimited extent, must have had the design
of permanently continuing the process, and so opening up a constant means
of abating an evil which was constantly reproducing itself.
Measures were further taken to set bounds to the serious fluctuations
in the price of the most important means of subsistence in the markets
of the capital. The newly-organized and liberally-administered
finances of the state furnished the means for this purpose,
and two newly-nominated magistrates, the corn-aediles(49) were charged
with the special supervision of the contractors and of the market
of the capital.
The club system was checked, more effectually than was possible
through prohibitive laws, by the change of the constitution;
inasmuch as with the republic and the republican elections and tribunals
the corruption and violence of the electioneering and judicial
-collegia---and generally the political Saturnalia of the -canaille---
came to an end of themselves. Moreover the combinations called
into existence by the Clodian law were broken up, and the whole system
of association was placed under the superintendence of the governing
authorities. With the exception of the ancient guilds and associations,
of the religious unions of the Jews, and of other specially excepted
categories, for which a simple intimation to the senate seems
to have sufficed, the permission to constitute a permanent society
with fixed times of assembling and standing deposits was made dependent
on a concession to be granted by the senate, and, as a rule,
doubtless only after the consent of the monarch had been obtained.
Street Police
But these noble arrangements were only the first steps towards
a complete remodelling of Rome. Projects were already formed
for a new senate-house, for a new magnificent bazaar, for a theatre
to rival that of Pompeius, for a public Latin and Greek library
after the model of that recently destroyed at Alexandria--
the first institution of the sort in Rome--lastly for a temple of Mars,
which was to surpass all that had hitherto existed in riches and glory.
Still more brilliant was the idea, first, of constructing a canal
through the Pomptine marshes and drawing off their waters
to Tarracina, and secondly, of altering the lower course of the Tiber
and of leading it from the present Ponte Molle, not through
between the Campus Vaticanus and the Campus Martius, but rather
round the Campus Vaticanus and the Janiculum to Ostia,
where the miserable roadstead was to give place to an adequate
artificial harbour. By this gigantic plan on the one hand
the most dangerous enemy of the capital, the malaria of the neighbourhood
would be banished; on the other hand the extremely limited facilities
for building in the capital would be at once enlarged by substituting
the Campus Vaticanus thereby transferred to the left bank of the Tiber
for the Campus Martius, and allowing the latter spacious field
to be applied for public and private edifices; while the capital
would at the same time obtain a safe seaport, the want of which
was so painfully felt. It seemed as if the Imperator would remove
mountains and rivers, and venture to contend with nature herself.
Much however as the city of Rome gained by the new order of things
in commodiousness and magnificence, its political supremacy was,
as we have already said, lost to it irrecoverably through
that very change. The idea that the Roman state should coincide
with the city of Rome had indeed in the course of time become
more and more unnatural and preposterous; but the maxim had been
so intimately blended with the essence of the Roman republic,
that it could not perish before the republic itself. It was only
in the new state of Caesar that it was, with the exception perhaps
of some legal fictions, completely set aside, and the community
of the capital was placed legally on a level with all other
municipalities; indeed Caesar--here as everywhere endeavouring not merely
to regulate the thing, but also to call it officially by the right name--
issued his Italian municipal ordinance, beyond doubt purposely,
at once for the capital and for the other urban communities. We may add
that Rome, just because it was incapable of a living communal character
as a capital, was even essentially inferior to the other municipalities
of the imperial period. The republican Rome was a den of robbers,
but it was at the same time the state; the Rome of the monarchy,
although it began to embellish itself with all the glories
of the three continents and to glitter in gold and marble,
was yet nothing in the state but a royal residence in connection
with a poor-house, or in other words a necessary evil.
Italy
Italian Agriculture
While in the capital the only object aimed at was to get rid
of palpable evils by police ordinances on the greatest scale,
it was a far more difficult task to remedy the deep disorganization
of Italian economics. Its radical misfortunes were those which
we previously noticed in detail--the disappearance of the agricultural,
and the unnatural increase of the mercantile, population--
with which an endless train of other evils was associated.
The reader will not fail to remember what was the state
of Italian agriculture. In spite of the most earnest attempts
to check the annihilation of the small holdings, farm-husbandry
was scarcely any longer the predominant species of economy
during this epoch in any region of Italy proper, with the exception
perhaps of the valleys of the Apennines and Abruzzi. As to
the management of estates, no material difference is perceptible
between the Catonian system formerly set forth(50) and that
described to us by Varro, except that the latter shows the traces
for better and for worse of the progress of city-life on a great scale
in Rome. "Formerly," says Varro, "the barn on the estate was larger
than the manor-house; now it is wont to be the reverse." In the domains
of Tusculum and Tibur, on the shores of Tarracina and Baiae--
where the old Latin and Italian farmers had sown and reaped--
there now rose in barren splendour the villas of the Roman nobles,
some of which covered the space of a moderate-sized town with their
appurtenances of garden-grounds and aqueducts, fresh and salt water ponds
for the preservation and breeding of river and marine fishes,
nurseries of snails and slugs, game-preserves for keeping hares,
rabbits, stags, roes, and wild boars, and aviaries in which even cranes
and peacocks were kept. But the luxury of a great city enriches also
many an industrious hand, and supports more poor than philanthropy
with its expenditure of alms. Those aviaries and fish-ponds
of the grandees were of course, as a rule, a very costly indulgence.
But this system was carried to such an extent and prosecuted
with so much keenness, that e. g. the stock of a pigeon-house
was valued at 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds); a methodical system
of fattening had sprung up, and the manure got from the aviaries
became of importance in agriculture; a single bird-dealer
was able to furnish at once 5000 fieldfares--for they knew how
to rear these also--at three denarii (2 shillings) each, and a single
possessor of a fish-pond 2000 -muraenae-; and the fishes left behind
by Lucius Lucullus brought 40,000 sesterces (400 pounds).
As may readily be conceived, under such circumstances any one
who followed this occupation industriously and intelligently
might obtain very large profits with a comparatively small outlay
of capital. A small bee-breeder of this period sold from his thyme-
garden not larger than an acre in the neighbourhood of Falerii
honey to an average annual amount of at least 10,000 sesterces
(100 pounds). The rivalry of the growers of fruit was carried so far,
that in elegant villas the fruit-chamber lined with marble
was not unfrequently fitted up at the same time as a dining-room,
and sometimes fine fruit acquired by purchase was exhibited there
as of home growth. At this period the cherry from Asia Minor
and other foreign fruit-trees were first planted in the gardens of Italy.
The vegetable gardens, the beds of roses and violets in Latium
and Campania, yielded rich produce, and the "market for dainties"
(-forum cupedinis-) by the side of the Via Sacra, where fruits,
honey, and chaplets were wont to be exposed for sale,
played an important part in the life of the capital. Generally
the management of estates, worked as they were on the planter-system,
had reached in an economic point of view a height scarcely
to be surpassed. The valley of Rieti, the region round the Fucine lake,
the districts on the Liris and Volturnus, and indeed Central Italy
in general, were as respects husbandry in the most flourishing condition;
even certain branches of industry, which were suitable accompaniments
of the management of an estate by means of slaves, were taken up
by intelligent landlords, and, where the circumstances were favourable,
inns, weaving factories, and especially brickworks were constructed
on the estate. The Italian producers of wine and oil in particular
not only supplied the Italian markets, but carried on also
in both articles a considerable business of transmarine exportation.
A homely professional treatise of this period compares Italy
to a great fruit-garden; and the pictures which a contemporary poet
gives of his beautiful native land, where the well-watered meadow,
the luxuriant corn-field, the pleasant vine-covered hill are fringed
by the dark line of the olive-trees--where the "ornament" of the land,
smiling in varied charms, cherishes the loveliest gardens
in its bosom and is itself wreathed round by food-producing trees--
these descriptions, evidently faithful pictures of the landscape
daily presented to the eye of the poet, transplant us
into the most flourishing districts of Tuscany and Terra di Lavoro.
The pastoral husbandry, it is true, which for reasons formerly explained
was always spreading farther especially in the south and south-east
of Italy, was in every respect a retrograde movement; but it too
participated to a certain degree in the general progress of agriculture;
much was done for the improvement of the breeds, e. g. asses for breeding
brought 60,000 sesterces (600 pounds), 100,000 (1000 pounds),
and even 400,000 (4000 pounds). The solid Italian husbandry
obtained at this period, when the general development of intelligence
and abundance of capital rendered it fruitful, far more brilliant results
than ever the old system of small cultivators could have given;
and was carried even already beyond the bounds of Italy,
for the Italian agriculturist turned to account large tracts
in the provinces by rearing cattle and even cultivating corn.
Money-Dealing
Social Disproportion
The Poor
Extravagance
In the world of quality such things did not occur, but at bottom
it was hardly different, and least of all better. In doing nothing
the aristocrat boldly competed with the proletarian; if the latter
lounged on the pavement, the former lay in bed till far on
in the day. Extravagance prevailed here as unbounded as it was
devoid of taste. It was lavished on politics and on the theatre,
of course to the corruption of both; the consular office was purchased
at an incredible price--in the summer of 700 the first voting-division
alone was paid 10,000,000 sesterces (100,000 pounds)--
and all the pleasure of the man of culture in the drama was spoilt
by the insane luxury of decoration. Rents in Rome appear to have been
on an average four times as high as in the country-towns;
a house there was once sold for 15,000,000 sesterces (150,000 pounds).
The house of Marcus Lepidus (consul in 676) which was at the time
of the death of Sulla the finest in Rome, did not rank a generation
afterwards even as the hundredth on the list of Roman palaces.
We have already mentioned the extravagance practised in the matter
of country-houses; we find that 4,000,000 sesterces (40,000 pounds)
were paid for such a house, which was valued chiefly for its fishpond;
and the thoroughly fashionable grandee now needed at least two villas--
one in the Sabine or Alban mountains near the capital, and a second
in the vicinity of the Campanian baths--and in addition if possible
a garden immediately outside of the gates of Rome. Still more irrational
than these villa-palaces were the palatial sepulchres, several of which
still existing at the present day attest what a lofty pile of masonry
the rich Roman needed in order that he might die as became his rank.
Fanciers of horses and dogs too were not wanting; 24,000 sesterces
(240 pounds) was no uncommon price for a showy horse. They indulged
in furniture of fine wood--a table of African cypress-wood
cost 1,000,000 sesterces (10,000 pounds); in dresses of purple stuffs
or transparent gauzes accompanied by an elegant adjustment of their folds
before the mirror--the orator Hortensius is said to have brought
an action of damages against a colleague because he ruffled his dress
in a crowd; in precious stones and pearls, which first at this period
took the place of the far more beautiful and more artistic
ornaments of gold--it was already utter barbarism, when at the triumph
of Pompeius over Mithradates the image of the victor appeared
wrought wholly of pearls, and when the sofas and the shelves
in the dining-hall were silver-mounted and even the kitchen-utensils
were made of silver. In a similar spirit the collectors of this period
took out the artistic medallions from the old silver cups,
to set them anew in vessels of gold. Nor was there any lack
of luxury also in travelling. "When the governor travelled,"
Cicero tells us as to one of the Sicilian governors, "which of course
he did not in winter, but only at the beginning of spring--
not the spring of the calendar but the beginning of the season of roses--
he had himself conveyed, as was the custom with the kings of Bithynia,
in a litter with eight bearers, sitting on a cushion of Maltese gauze
stuffed with rose-leaves, with one garland on his head, and a second
twined round his neck, applying to his nose a little smelling bag
of fine linen, with minute meshes, filled with roses; and thus
he had himself carried even to his bed chamber."
Table Luxury
Debt
Immortality
Friendship
But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus
constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply,
so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface,
overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship.
All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality
it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning
for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally
by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only
to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted
partly in groups, partly en masse at the close--a distinction
which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy,
is said to have introduced. The interchange of letters of courtesy
was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy;
"friendly" letters flew over land and sea between persons who had
neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper
and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter
is addressed to a corporation. In like manner invitations to dinner,
the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested
of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials;
even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions
to his countless "neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability
he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake. Just as
in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy
of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished
from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business
and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes
which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality
came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship,"
which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits
brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.
Women
Depopulation of Italy
Reforms of Caesar
With a view to check the continued absence of the Italians from Italy
and to induce the world of quality and the merchants to establish
their homes in their native land, not only was the term of service
for the soldiers shortened, but men of senatorial rank were
altogether prohibited from taking up their abode out of Italy
except when on public business, while the other Italians
of marriageable age (from the twentieth to the fortieth year)
were enjoined not to be absent from Italy for more than three
consecutive years. In the same spirit Caesar had already,
in his first consulship on founding the colony of Capua kept specially
in view fathers who had several children;(62) and now as Imperator
he proposed extraordinary rewards for the fathers of numerous families,
while he at the same time as supreme judge of the nation
treated divorce and adultery with a rigour according
to Roman ideas unparalleled.
Nor did he even think it beneath his dignity to issue a detailed law
as to luxury--which, among other points, cut down extravagance
in building at least in one of its most irrational forms,
that of sepulchral monuments; restricted the use of purple robes
and pearls to certain times, ages, and classes, and totally prohibited
it in grown-up men; fixed a maximum for the expenditure of the table;
and directly forbade a number of luxurious dishes. Such ordinances
doubtless were not new; but it was a new thing that the "master
of morals" seriously insisted on their observance, superintended
the provision-markets by means of paid overseers, and ordered
that the tables of men of rank should be examined by his officers
and the forbidden dishes on them should be confiscated. It is true
that by such theoretical and practical instructions in moderation
as the new monarchical police gave to the fashionable world,
hardly more could be accomplished than the compelling luxury to retire
somewhat more into concealment; but, if hypocrisy is the homage
which vice pays to virtue, under the circumstances of the times
even a semblance of propriety established by police measures
was a step towards improvement not to be despised.
The Debt Crisis
Usury Laws
While thus the great democrat had the imperishable honour of emancipating
personal freedom in principle from capital, he attempted moreover
to impose a police limit on the excessive power of capital by usury-laws.
He did not affect to disown the democratic antipathy to stipulations
for interest. For Italian money-dealing there was fixed a maximum amount
of the loans at interest to be allowed in the case of the individual
capitalist, which appears to have been proportioned to the Italian
landed estate belonging to each, and perhaps amounted to half its value.
Transgressions of this enactment were, after the fashion of the procedure
prescribed in the republican usury-laws, treated as criminal offence
and sent before a special jury-commission. If these regulations
were successfully carried into effect, every Italian man of business
would be compelled to become at the same time an Italian landholder,
and the class of capitalists subsisting merely on their interest
would disappear wholly from Italy. Indirectly too the no less injurious
category of insolvent landowners who practically managed their estates
merely for their creditors was by this means materially curtailed,
inasmuch as the creditors, if they desired to continue their lending
business, were compelled to buy for themselves. From this very fact
besides it is plain that Caesar wished by no means simply to renew
that naive prohibition of interest by the old popular party,
but on the contrary to allow the taking of interest within certain limits.
It is very probable however that he did not confine himself
to that injunction--which applied merely to Italy--of a maximum amount
of sums to be lent, but also, especially with respect to the provinces,
prescribed maximum rates for interest itself. The enactments--
that it was illegal to take higher interest than 1 per cent per month,
or to take interest on arrears of interest, or in fine to make
a judicial claim for arrears of interest to a greater amount
than a sum equal to the capital--were, probably also after
the Graeco-Egyptian model,(71) first introduced in the Roman empire
by Lucius Lucullus for Asia Minor and retained there by his
better successors; soon afterwards they were transferred
to other provinces by edicts of the governors, and ultimately at least
part of them was provided with the force of law in all provinces
by a decree of the Roman senate of 704. The fact that these Lucullan
enactments afterwards appear in all their compass as imperial law
and have thus become the basis of the Roman and indeed of modern
legislation as to interest, may also perhaps be traced back
to an ordinance of Caesar.
Elevation of Agriculture
Distribution of Land
Provinces
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
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.
Regulation of Burdens
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.
Hellenism
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
State Religion
Worship of 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.
Training of Youth
Sciences of General Culture at This Period
Greek Instruction
Alexandrinism
Latin Instruction
Language
The Vulgarism of Asia Minor
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
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
Literary Effort
Greek Literati in Rome
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 Mime
Laberius
Dramatic Spectacles
Metrical Annals
Lucretius
Lucretius, although his poetical vigour as well as his art was admired
by his cultivated contemporaries, yet remained--of late growth
as he was--a master without scholars. In the Hellenic fashionable
poetry on the other hand there was no lack at least of scholars,
who exerted themselves to emulate the Alexandrian masters.
With true tact the more gifted of the Alexandrian poets
avoided larger works and the pure forms of poetry--the drama,
the epos, the lyric; the most pleasing and successful performances
consisted with them, just as with the new Latin poets, in "short-
winded" tasks, and especially in such as belonged to the domains
bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the wide field
intervening between narrative and song. Multifarious didactic
poems were written. Small half-heroic, half-erotic epics
were great favourites, and especially an erudite sort of love-elegy
peculiar to this autumnal summer of Greek poetry and characteristic
of the philological source whence it sprang, in which the poet
more or less arbitrarily interwove the description of his own feelings,
predominantly sensuous, with epic shreds from the cycle of Greek legend.
Festal lays were diligently and artfully manufactured; in general,
owing to the want of spontaneous poetical invention, the occasional poem
preponderated and especially the epigram, of which the Alexandrians
produced excellent specimens. The poverty of materials and the want
of freshness in language and rhythm, which inevitably cleave
to every literature not national, men sought as much as possible
to conceal under odd themes, far-fetched phrases, rare words,
and artificial versification, and generally under the whole apparatus
of philologico-antiquarian erudition and technical dexterity.
Such was the gospel which was preached to the Roman boys of this period,
and they came in crowds to hear and to practise it; already (about 700)
the love-poems of Euphorion and similar Alexandrian poetry formed
the ordinary reading and the ordinary pieces for declamation
of the cultivated youth.(19) The literary revolution took place;
but it yielded in the first instance with rare exceptions only premature
or unripe fruits. The number of the "new-fashioned poets" was legion,
but poetry was rare and Apollo was compelled, as always when so many
throng towards Parnassus, to make very short work. The long poems never
were worth anything, the short ones seldom. Even in this literary age
the poetry of the day had become a public nuisance; it sometimes
happened that one's friend would send home to him by way of mockery
as a festal present a pile of trashy verses fresh from the bookseller's
shop, whose value was at once betrayed by the elegant binding
and the smooth paper. A real public, in the sense in which national
literature has a public, was wanting to the Roman Alexandrians
as well as to the Hellenic; it was thoroughly the poetry of a clique
or rather cliques, whose members clung closely together,
abused intruders, read and criticised among themselves the new poems,
sometimes also quite after the Alexandrian fashion celebrated
the successful productions in fresh verses, and variously sought
to secure for themselves by clique-praises a spurious and ephemeral
renown. A notable teacher of Latin literature, himself poetically
active in this new direction, Valerius Cato appears to have exercised
a sort of scholastic patronage over the most distinguished men
of this circle and to have pronounced final decision on the relative
value of the poems. As compared with their Greek models,
these Roman poets evince throughout a want of freedom,
sometimes a schoolboy dependence; most of their products
must have been simply the austere fruits of a school poetry
still occupied in learning and by no means yet dismissed as mature.
Inasmuch as in language and in measure they adhered to the Greek patterns
far more closely than ever the national Latin poetry had done,
a greater correctness and consistency in language and metre
were certainly attained; but it was at the expense of the flexibility
and fulness of the national idiom. As respects the subject-matter,
under the influence partly of effeminate models, partly
of an immoral age, amatory themes acquired a surprising preponderance
little conducive to poetry; but the favourite metrical compendia
of the Greeks were also in various cases translated, such as
the astronomical treatise of Aratus by Cicero, and, either at the end
of this or more probably at the commencement of the following period,
the geographical manual of Eratosthenes by Publius Varro of the Aude
and the physico-medicinal manual of Nicander by Aemilius Macer.
It is neither to be wondered at nor regretted that of this countless
host of poets but few names have been preserved to us;
and even these are mostly mentioned merely as curiosities
or as once upon a time great; such as the orator Quintus Hortensius
with his "five hundred thousand lines" of tiresome obscenity,
and the somewhat more frequently mentioned Laevius, whose -Erotopaegnia-
attracted a certain interest only by their complicated measures
and affected phraseology. Even the small epic Smyrna by Gaius
Helvius Cinna (d. 710?), much as it was praised by the clique,
bears both in its subject--the incestuous love of a daughter
for her father--and in the nine years' toil bestowed on it the worst
characteristics of the time.
Catullus
Poems in Prose
Romances
Varros' Models
With this morally polemic tendency and this talent for embodying it
in caustic and picturesque expression, which, as the dress of dialogue
given to the books on Husbandry written in his eightieth year shows,
never forsook him down to extreme old age, Varro most happily
combined an incomparable knowledge of the national manners
and language, which is embodied in the philological writings
of his old age after the manner of a commonplace-book, but displays
itself in his Satires in all its direct fulness and freshness.
Varro was in the best and fullest sense of the term a local antiquarian,
who from the personal observation of many years knew his nation
in its former idiosyncrasy and seclusion as well as in its modern state
of transition and dispersion, and had supplemented and deepened
his direct knowledge of the national manners and national language
by the most comprehensive research in historical and literary archives.
His partial deficiency in rational judgment and learning--
in our sense of the words--was compensated for by his clear
intuition and the poetry which lived within him. He sought
neither after antiquarian notices nor after rare antiquated
or poetical words;(25) but he was himself an old and old-fashioned man
and almost a rustic, the classics of his nation were his favourite
and long-familiar companions; how could it fail that many details
of the manners of his forefathers, which he loved above all
and especially knew, should be narrated in his writings, and that
his discourse should abound with proverbial Greek and Latin phrases,
with good old words preserved in the Sabine conversational language,
with reminiscences of Ennius, Lucilius, and above all of Plautus?
We should not judge as to the prose style of these aesthetic
writings of Varro's earlier period by the standard of his work
on Language written in his old age and probably published
in an unfinished state, in which certainly the clauses
of the sentence are arranged on the thread of the relative
like thrushes on a string; but we have already observed that Varro
rejected on principle the effort after a chaste style and Attic periods,
and his aesthetic essays, while destitute of the mean bombast
and the spurious tinsel of vulgarism, were yet written after an unclassic
and even slovenly fashion, in sentences rather directly joined
on to each other than regularly subdivided. The poetical pieces
inserted on the other hand show not merely that their author
knew how to mould the most varied measures with as much mastery
as any of the fashionable poets, but that he had a right
to include himself among those to whom a god has granted the gift
of "banishing cares from the heart by song and sacred poesy."(26)
the sketches of Varro no more created a school than the didactic poem
of Lucretius; to the more general causes which prevented this
there falls to be added their thoroughly individual stamp,
which was inseparable from the greater age, from the rusticity,
and even from the peculiar erudition of their author. But the grace
and humour of the Menippean satires above all, which seem to have been
in number and importance far superior to Varro's graver works,
captivated his contemporaries as well as those in after times
who had any relish for originality and national spirit; and even we,
who are no longer permitted to read them, may still from the fragments
preserved discern in some measure that the writer "knew how to laugh
and how to jest in moderation." And as the last breath
of the good spirit of the old burgess-times ere it departed,
as the latest fresh growth which the national Latin poetry put forth,
the Satires of Varro deserved that the poet in his poetical testament
should commend these his Menippean children to every one
"who had at heart the prosperity of Rome and of Latium";
and they accordingly retain an honourable place in the literature
as in the history of the Italian people.(27)
Historical Composition
Sisenna
Valerius Antias
Universal History
Nepos
Correspondence
News-Sheet
Speeches
Decline of Political Oratory
His Character
Ciceronianism
Opposition to Ciceronianism
Calvus and His Associates
Cicero's contemporaries however were, as may readily be conceived,
far less involved in this strange idolatry than many of their successors.
The Ciceronian manner ruled no doubt throughout a generation
the Roman advocate-world, just as the far worse manner of Hortensius
had done; but the most considerable men, such as Caesar,
kept themselves always aloof from it, and among the younger
generation there arose in all men of fresh and living talent
the most decided opposition to that hybrid and feeble rhetoric.
They found Cicero's language deficient in precision and chasteness,
his jests deficient in liveliness, his arrangement deficient
in clearness and articulate division, and above all his whole eloquence
wanting in the fire which makes the orator. Instead of the Rhodian
eclectics men began to recur to the genuine Attic orators
especially to Lysias and Demosthenes, and sought to naturalize
a more vigorous and masculine eloquence in Rome. Representatives
of this tendency were, the solemn but stiff Marcus Junius Brutus
(669-712); the two political partisans Marcus Caelius Rufus
(672-706;(35)) and Gaius Scribonius Curio (d. 705(36);)--
both as orators full of spirit and life; Calvus well known
also as a poet (672-706), the literary coryphaeus of this younger
group of orators; and the earnest and conscientious Gaius Asinius Pollio
(678-757). Undeniably there was more taste and more spirit
in this younger oratorical literature than in the Hortensian
and Ciceronian put together; but we are not able to judge how far,
amidst the storms of the revolution which rapidly swept away the whole
of this richly-gifted group with the single exception of Pollio,
those better germs attained development. The time allotted to them
was but too brief. The new monarchy began by making war on freedom
of speech, and soon wholly suppressed the political oration.
Thenceforth the subordinate species of the pure advocate-pleading
was doubtless still retained in literature; but the higher art
and literature of oratory, which thoroughly depend on political
excitement, perished with the latter of necessity and for ever.
Art
Architecture
Arts of Design
Conclusion
3. IV. X. Proscription-Lists
19. Under the year 676 Licinianus states (p. 23, Pertz; p. 42,
Bonn); [Lepidus?] -[le]gem frumentari[am] nullo resistente
l[argi]tus est, ut annon[ae] quinque modi popu[lo da]rentur-.
According to this account, therefore, the law of the consuls of 681
Marcus Terentius Lucullus and Gaius Cassius Varus, which Cicero
mentions (in Verr. iii. 70, 136; v. 21, 52), and to which also
Sallust refers (Hist. iii. 61, 19 Dietsch), did not first reestablish
the five -modii-, but only secured the largesses of grain by
regulating the purchases of Sicilian corn, and perhaps made
various alterations of detail. That the Sempronian law
(IV. III. Alterations on the Constitution By Gaius Gracchus)
allowed every burgess domiciled in Rome to share in the largesses
of grain, is certain. But the later distribution of grain was not
so extensive as this, for, seeing that the monthly corn of
the Roman burgesses amounted to little more than 33,000 -medimni- =
198,000 -modii- (Cic. Verr. iii. 30, 72), only some 40,000
burgesses at that time received grain, whereas the number of
burgesses domiciled in the capital was certainly far more
considerable. This arrangement probably proceeded from
the Octavian law, which introduced instead of the extravagant
Sempronian amount "a moderate largess, tolerable for the state and
necessary for the common people" (Cic. de Off. ii. 21, 72, Brut.
62, 222); and to all appearance it is this very law that is
the -lex frumentaria- mentioned by Licinianus. That Lepidus should have
entered into such a proposal of compromise, accords with his attitude
as regards the restoration of the tribunate. It is likewise in
keeping with the circumstances that the democracy should find itself
not at all satisfied by the regulation, brought about in this way,
of the distribution of grain (Sallust, l. c.). The amount of loss
is calculated on the basis of the grain being worth at least double
(IV. III. Alterations on the Constitution By Gaius Gracchus);
when piracy or other causes drove up the price of grain,
a far more considerable loss must have resulted.
20. From the fragments of the account of Licinianus (p. 44, Bonn)
it is plain that the decree of the senate, -uti Lepidus et Catulus
decretis exercitibus maturrime proficiscerentur- (Sallust, Hist. i.
44 Dietsch), is to be understood not of a despatch of the consuls
before the expiry of their consulship to their proconsular
provinces, for which there would have been no reason, but of their
being sent to Etruria against the revolted Faesulans, just as in
the Catilinarian war the consul Gaius Antonius was despatched to
the same quarter. The statement of Philippus in Sallust (Hist. i.
48, 4) that Lepidus -ob seditionem provinciam cum exercitu adeptus
est-, is entirely in harmony with this view; for the extraordinary
consular command in Etruria was just as much a -provincia- as
the ordinary proconsular command in Narbonese Gaul.
4. IV. I. Cilicia
5. IV. I. Piracy
6. IV. I. Crete
13. IV. VIII. Lucullus and the Fleet on the Asiatic Coast
15. III. V. Attitude of the Romans, III. VI. The African Expedition
of Scipio
17. Cicero (De Imp. Pomp. 9, 23) hardly means any other than one
of the rich temples of the province Elymais, whither the predatory
expeditions of the Syrian and Parthian kings were regularly
directed (Strabo, xvi. 744; Polyb, xxxi. 11. 1 Maccab. 6, etc.),
and probably this as the best known; on no account can
the allusion be to the temple of Comana or any shrine at all in
the kingdom of Pontus.
24. IV. II. The First Sicilian Slave War, IV. IV. Revolts of the Slaves
27. As the line was thirty-five miles long (Sallust, Hist, iv, 19,
Dietsch; Plutarch, Crass. 10), it probably passed not from
Squillace to Pizzo, but more to the north, somewhere near
Castrovillari and Cassano, over the peninsula which is here in
a straight line about twenty-seven miles broad.
28. That Crassus was invested with the supreme command in 682,
follows from the setting aside of the consuls (Plutarch, Crass.
10); that the winter of 682-683 was spent by the two armies at
the Bruttian wall, follows from the "snowy night" (Plut. l. c).
2. V. I. Pompeius
6. V. I. Insurrection of Lepidus
7. V. II. All the Armenian Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans
12. Thus the Sadducees rejected the doctrine of angels and spirits
and the resurrection of the dead. Most of the traditional points
of difference between Pharisees and Sadducees relate to subordinate
questions of ritual, jurisprudence, and the calendar. It is
a characteristic fact, that the victorious Pharisees have introduced
those days, on which they definitively obtained the superiority in
particular controversies or ejected heretical members from
the supreme consistory, into the list of the memorial and festival
days of the nation.
13. V. II. All the Armenian Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans
14. V. II. Beginning of the Armenian War, V. II. All the Armenian
Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans
18. Orosius indeed (vi. 6) and Dio (xxxvii. 15), both of them
doubtless following Livy, make Pompeius get to Petra and occupy
the city or even reach the Red Sea; but that he, on the contrary, soon
after receiving the news of the death of Mithradates, which came to
him on his march towards Jerusalem, returned from Syria to Pontus,
is stated by Plutarch (Pomp. 41, 42) and is confirmed by Floras (i.
39) and Josephus (xiv. 3, 3, 4). If king Aretas figures in
the bulletins among those conquered by Pompeius, this is
sufficiently accounted for by his withdrawal from Jerusalem
at the instigation of Pompeius.
20. This view rests on the narrative of Plutarch (Pomp. 36) which
is supported by Strabo's (xvi. 744) description of the position of
the satrap of Elymais. It is an embellishment of the matter, when
in the lists of the countries and kings conquered by Pompeius Media
and its king Darius are enumerated (Diodorus, Fr, Vat. p. 140;
Appian, Mithr. 117); and from this there has been further concocted
the war of Pompeius with the Medes (Veil. ii. 40; Appian, Mithr.
106, 114) and then even his expedition to Ecbatana (Oros. vi. 5).
A confusion with the fabulous town of the same name on Carmel has
hardly taken place here; it is simply that intolerable
exaggeration--apparently originating in the grandiloquent and
designedly ambiguous bulletins of Pompeius--which has converted his
razzia against the Gaetulians (p. 94) into a march to the west
coast of Africa (Plut. Pomp. 38), his abortive expedition against
the Nabataeans into a conquest of the city of Petra, and his award
as to the boundaries of Armenia into a fixing of the boundary of
the Roman empire beyond Nisibis.
21. The war which this Antiochus is alleged to have waged with
Pompeius (Appian, Mithr. 106, 117) is not very consistent with
the treaty which he concluded with Lucullus (Dio, xxxvi. 4), and his
undisturbed continuance in his sovereignty; presumably it has been
concocted simply from the circumstance, that Antiochus of Commagene
figured among the kings subdued by Pompeius.
22. To this Cicero's reproach presumably points (De Off. iii. 12,
49): -piratas immunes habemus, socios vectigales-; in so far,
namely, as those pirate-colonies probably had the privilege of
immunity conferred on them by Pompeius, while, as is well known,
the provincial communities dependent on Rome were, as a rule,
liable to taxation.
8. Any one who surveys the whole state of the political relations
of this period will need no special proofs to help him to see that
the ultimate object of the democratic machinations in 688 et seq.
was not the overthrow of the senate, but that of Pompeius. Yet
such proofs are not wanting. Sallust states that the Gabinio-
Manilian laws inflicted a mortal blow on the democracy (Cat. 39);
that the conspiracy of 688-689 and the Servilian rogation were
specially directed against Pompeius, is likewise attested (Sallust
Cat. 19; Val. Max. vi. 2, 4; Cic. de Lege Agr. ii. 17, 46).
Besides the attitude of Crassus towards the conspiracy alone shows
sufficiently that it was directed against Pompeius.
9. V. V. Transpadanes
10. Plutarch, Crass. 13; Cicero, de Lege agr. ii. 17, 44. To this
year (689) belongs Cicero's oration -de rege Alexandrino-, which
has been incorrectly assigned to the year 698. In it Cicero
refutes, as the fragments clearly show, the assertion of Crassus,
that Egypt had been rendered Roman property by the testament of
king Alexander. This question of law might and must have been
discussed in 689; but in 698 it had been deprived of its
significance through the Julian law of 695. In 698 moreover
the discussion related not to the question to whom Egypt belonged, but
to the restoration of the king driven out by a revolt, and in this
transaction which is well known to us Crassus played no part.
Lastly, Cicero after the conference of Luca was not at all in
a position seriously to oppose one of the triumvirs.
13. The -Ambrani- (Suet. Caes. 9) are probably not the Ambrones
named along with the Cimbri (Plutarch, Mar. 19), but a slip of
the pen for -Arverni-.
15. His epitaph still extant runs: -Cn. Calpurnius Cn. f. Piso
quaestor fro pr. ex s. c. proviniciam Hispaniam citeriorem optinuit-.
8. V. V. Transpadanes
4. V. I. Pompeius in Gaul
11. The first levy of the Belgic cantons exclusive of the Remi,
that is, of the country between the Seine and the Scheldt and
eastward as far as the vicinity of Rheims and Andernach, from 9000
to 10,000 square miles, is reckoned at about 300,000 men; in
accordance with which, if we regard the proportion of the first
levy to the whole men capable of bearing arms specified for
the Bellovaci as holding good generally, the number of the Belgae
capable of bearing arms would amount to 500,000 and the whole
population accordingly to at least 2,000,000. The Helvetii with
the adjoining peoples numbered before their migration 336,000; if
we assume that they were at that time already dislodged from
the right bank of the Rhine, their territory may be estimated at nearly
1350 square miles. Whether the serfs are included in this, we can
the less determine, as we do not know the form which slavery
assumed amongst the Celts; what Caesar relates (i. 4) as to
the slaves, clients, and debtors of Orgetorix tells rather in favour
of, than against, their being included.
13. "The Gallic oxen especially are of good repute in Italy, for
field labour forsooth; whereas the Ligurian are good for nothing."
(Varro, De R. R. ii. 5, 9). Here, no doubt, Cisalpine Gaul is
referred to, but the cattle-husbandry there doubtless goes back to
the Celtic epoch. Plautus already mentions the "Gallic ponies"
(-Gallici canterii-, Aul. iii. 5. 21). "It is not every race that
is suited for the business of herdsmen; neither the Bastulians nor
the Turdulians" (both in Andalusia) "are fit for it; the Celts are
the best, especially as respects beasts for riding and burden
(-iumenta-)" (Varro, De R. R. ii. 10, 4).
19. From the Celtic words -guerg- = worker and -breth- = judgment.
23. II. IV. The Celts Assail the Etruscans in Northern Italy
25. Caesar's Suebi thus were probably the Chatti; but that
designation certainly belonged in Caesar's time, and even much
later, also to every other German stock which could be described as
a regularly wandering one. Accordingly if, as is not to be
doubted, the "king of the Suebi" in Mela (iii. i) and Pliny (H. N.
ii. 67, 170) was Ariovistus, it by no means therefore follows that
Ariovistus was a Chattan. The Marcomani cannot be demonstrated as
a distinct people before Marbod; it is very possible that the word
up to that point indicates nothing but what it etymologically
signifies--the land, or frontier, guard. When Caesar (i, 51)
mentions Marcomani among the peoples fighting in the army of
Ariovistus, he may in this instance have misunderstood a merely
appellative designation, just as he has decidedly done in
the case of the Suebi.
26. IV. V. The Tribes at the Sources of the Rhine and Along
the Danube
27. IV. V. The Tribes at the Sources of the Rhine and Along
the Danube
31. That we may not deem this course of things incredible, or even
impute to it deeper motives than ignorance and laziness in
statesmen, we shall do well to realize the frivolous tone in which
a distinguished senator like Cicero expresses himself in his
correspondence respecting these important Transalpine affairs.
36. Goler (Caesars gall. Krieg, p. 45, etc.) thinks that he has
found the field of battle at Cernay not far from Muhlhausen, which,
on the whole, agrees with Napoleon's (Precis, p. 35) placing of
the battle-field in the district of Belfort. This hypothesis, although
not certain, suits the circumstances of the case; for the fact that
Caesar required seven days' march for the short space from Besancon
to that point, is explained by his own remark (i. 41) that he had
taken a circuit of fifty miles to avoid the mountain paths; and
the whole description of the pursuit continued as far as the Rhine, and
evidently not lasting for several days but ending on the very day
of the battle, decides--the authority of tradition being equally
balanced--in favour of the view that the battle was fought five,
not fifty, miles from the Rhine. The proposal of Rustow
(-Einleitung zu Caesars Comm-. p. 117) to transfer the field of
battle to the upper Saar rests on a misunderstanding. The corn
expected from the Sequani, Leuci, Lingones was not to come to
the Roman army in the course of their march against Ariovistus, but to
be delivered at Besancon before their departure, and taken by
the troops along with them; as is clearly apparent from the fact that
Caesar, while pointing his troops to those supplies, comforts them
at the same time with the hope of corn to be brought in on
the route. From Besancon Caesar commanded the region of Langres and
Epinal, and, as may be well conceived, preferred to levy his
requisitions there rather than in the exhausted districts from
which he came.
48. This place has been sought on a rising ground which is still
named Gergoie, a league to the south of the Arvernian capital
Nemetum, the modern Clermont; and both the remains of rude
fortress-walls brought to light in excavations there, and
the tradition of the name which is traced in documents up to the tenth
century, leave no room for doubt as to the correctness of this
determination of the locality. Moreover it accords, as with
the other statements of Caesar, so especially with the fact that he
pretty clearly indicates Gergovia as the chief place of the Arverni
(vii. 4). We shall have accordingly to assume, that the Arvernians
after their defeat were compelled to transfer their settlement from
Gergovia to the neighbouring less strong Nemetum.
50. This is usually sought at Capdenac not far from Figeac; Goler
has recently declared himself in favour of Luzech to the west of
Cahors, a site which had been previously suggested.
2. V. VI. Clodius
4. Cato was not yet in Rome when Cicero spoke on 11th March 698 in
favour of Sestius (Pro Sest. 28, 60) and when the discussion took
place in the senate in consequence of the resolutions of Luca
respecting Caesar's legions (Plut. Caes. 21); it is not till
the discussions at the beginning of 699 that we find him once more
busy, and, as he travelled in winter (Plut. Cato Min. 38), he thus
returned to Rome in the end of 698. He cannot therefore, as has
been mistakenly inferred from Asconius (p. 35, 53), have defended
Milo in Feb. 698.
-Quis hoc potest videre, quis potest pati, Nisi impudicus et vorax
et aleo, Mamurram habere quod comata Gallia Habebat ante et ultima
Britannia-? etc.
More innocent than this virulent invective, which was bitterly felt
by Caesar (Suet. Caes. 73), is another nearly contemporary poem of
the same author (xi.) to which we may here refer, because with its
pathetic introduction to an anything but pathetic commission it
very cleverly quizzes the general staff of the new regents--the
Gabiniuses, Antoniuses, and such like, suddenly advanced from
the lowest haunts to headquarters. Let it be remembered that it was
written at a time when Caesar was fighting on the Rhine and on
the Thames, and when the expeditions of Crassus to Parthia and of
Gabinius to Egypt were in preparation. The poet, as if he too
expected one of the vacant posts from one of the regents, gives
to two of his clients their last instructions before departure:
12. In this year the January with 29 and the February with 23 days
were followed by the intercalary month with 28, and then by March.
1. iv. 434
2. Tigranes was still living in February 698 (Cic. pro Sest. 27,
59); on the other hand Artavasdes was already reigning before 700
(Justin, xlii. 2, 4; Plut. Crass. 49).
6. V. VII. Cassivellaunus
1. V. V. Transpadanes
2. V. V. Transpadanes
6. V. IV. The New Relations of the Romans in the East, V. IV. Galatia
15. The decree of the senate was passed on the 7th January; on
the 18th it had been already for several days known in Rome that Caesar
had crossed the boundary (Cic. ad Att. vii. 10; ix. 10, 4);
the messenger needed at the very least three days from Rome to Ravenna.
According to this the setting out of Caesar falls about the 12th
January, which according to the current reduction corresponds to
the Julian 24 Nov. 704.