The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
All other sections in this Literature Study Guide are owned and copyrighted by BookRags, Inc.
BOOK II: From the Abolition of the Monarchy in Rome to the Union of Italy
I. Change of the Constitution—Limitation
of the Power of the
Magistrate
II. The Tribunate of the Plebs and the Decemvirate
III. The Equalization of the Orders, and the New Aristocracy
IV. Fall of the Etruscan Power—the Celts
V. Subjugation of the Latins and Campanians by Rome
Vi. Struggle of the Italians against Rome
VII. Struggle Between Pyrrhus and Rome, and Union of Italy
VIII. Law—Religion—Military System—Economic Condition—Nationality
IX. Art and Science
BOOK III: From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek States
I. Carthage
II. The War between Rome and Carthage Concerning Sicily
III. The Extension of Italy to Its Natural Boundaries
IV. Hamilcar and Hannibal
V. The War under Hannibal to the Battle of Cannae
Vi. The War under Hannibal from Cannae to Zama
VII. The West from the Peace
of Hannibal to the Close
of the Third Period
VIII. The Eastern States and the Second Macedonian War
IX. The War with Antiochus of Asia
X. The Third Macedonian War
XI. The Government and the Governed
XII. The Management of Land and of Capital
XIII. Faith and Manners
XIV. Literature and Art
BOOK IV: The Revolution
I. The Subject Countries Down to the Times of the Gracchi
II. The Reform Movement and Tiberius Gracchus
III. The Revolution and Gaius Gracchus
IV. The Rule of the Restoration
V. The Peoples of the North
Vi. The Attempt of Marius
at Revolution and the Attempt
of Drusus at Reform
VII. The Revolt of the Italian
Subjects, and the Sulpician
Revolution
VIII. The East and King Mithradates
IX. Cinna and Sulla
X. The Sullan Constitution
XI. The Commonwealth and Its Economy
XII. Nationality, Religion, and Education
XIII. Literature and Art
BOOK V: The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
I. Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Sertorius
II. Rule of the Sullan Restoration
III. The Fall of the Oligarchy and the Rule of Pompeius
IV. Pompeius and the East
V. The Struggle of Parties during the Absence of Pompeius
Vi. Retirement of Pompeius and Coalition of the Pretenders
VII. The Subjugation of the West
VIII. The Joint Rule of Pompeius and Caesar
IX. Death of Crassus—Rupture between the Joint Rulers
X. Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus
XI. The Old Republic and the New Monarchy
XII. Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art
* * * * *
THE HISTORY OF ROME: BOOK I
The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy
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:
1) 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-.
2) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents, are rendered with a preceding and a following double-dash; thus, —xxxx—. Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as —xxx-xxx—
3) Simple unideographic references to vocalic sounds, single letters, or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic references are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x, or -xxx.
4) (Especially for the complex discussion of alphabetic evolution in Ch. XIV: Measuring and Writing). Ideographic references, meaning pointers to the form of representation itself rather than to its content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-. “id:” stands for “ideograph”, and indicates that the reader should form a picture based on the following “xxxx”; which may be a single symbol, a word, or an attempt at a picture composed of ASCII characters. E. g. —“id:Gamma gamma”— indicates an uppercase Greek gamma-form followed by the form in lowercase. Some such exotic parsing as this is necessary to explain alphabetic development because a single symbol may have been used for a number of sounds in a number of languages, or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different times. Thus, -"id:Gamma gamma” might very well refer to a Phoenician construct that in appearance resembles the form that eventually stabilized as an uppercase Greek “gamma” juxtaposed to one of lowercase. Also, a construct such as —“id:E” indicates a symbol that with ASCII resembles most closely a Roman uppercase “E”, but, in fact, is actually drawn more crudely.
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.
When the first portion of this translation appeared in 1861, it was accompanied by a Preface, for which I was indebted to the kindness of the late Dr. Schmitz, introducing to the English reader the work of an author whose name and merits, though already known to scholars, were far less widely familiar than they are now. After thirty-three years such an introduction is no longer needed, but none the less gratefully do I recall how much the book owed at the outset to Dr. Schmitz’s friendly offices.
The following extracts from my own “Prefatory Note” dated “December 1861” state the circumstances under which I undertook the translation, and give some explanations as to its method and aims:—
“In requesting English scholars to receive with indulgence this first portion of a translation of Dr. Mommsen’s ‘Romische Geschichte,’ I am somewhat in the position of Albinus; who, when appealing to his readers to pardon the imperfections of the Roman History which he had written in indifferent Greek, was met by Cato with the rejoinder that he was not compelled to write at all—that, if the Amphictyonic Council had laid their commands on him, the case would have been different—but that it was quite out of place to ask the indulgence of his readers when his task had been self-imposed. I may state, however, that I did not undertake this task, until I had sought to ascertain whether it was likely to be taken up by any one more qualified to do justice to it. When Dr. Mommsen’s work accidentally came into my hands some years after its first appearance, and revived my interest in studies which I had long laid aside for others more strictly professional, I had little doubt that its merits would have already attracted sufficient attention amidst the learned leisure of Oxford to induce some of her great scholars to clothe it in an English dress. But it appeared on inquiry that, while there was a great desire to see it translated, and the purpose of translating it had been entertained in more quarters than one, the projects had from various causes miscarried. Mr. George Robertson published an excellent translation (to which, so far as it goes, I desire to acknowledge my obligations) of the introductory chapters on the early inhabitants of Italy; but other studies and engagements did not permit him to proceed with it. I accordingly requested and obtained Dr. Mommsen’s permission to translate his work.
“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.
“In executing the translation I have endeavoured to follow the original as closely as is consistent with a due regard to the difference of idiom. Many of our translations from the German are so literal as to reproduce the very order of the German sentence, so that they are, if not altogether unintelligible to the English reader, at least far from readable, while others deviate so entirely from the form of the original as to be no longer translations in the proper sense of the term. I have sought to pursue a middle course between a mere literal translation, which would be repulsive, and a loose paraphrase, which would be in the case of such a work peculiarly unsatisfactory. Those who are most conversant with the difficulties of such a task will probably be the most willing to show forbearance towards the shortcomings of my performance, and in particular towards the too numerous traces of the German idiom, which, on glancing over the sheets, I find it still to retain.
“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.
“I have ventured in various instances to break up the paragraphs of the original and to furnish them with additional marginal headings, and have carried out more fully the notation of the years B.C. on the margin.
“It is due to Dr. Schmitz, who has kindly encouraged me in this undertaking, that I should state that I alone am responsible for the execution of the translation. Whatever may be thought of it in other respects, I venture to hope that it may convey to the English reader a tolerably accurate impression of the contents and general spirit of the book.”
In a new Library edition, which appeared in 1868, I incorporated all the additions and alterations which were introduced in the fourth edition of the German, some of which were of considerable importance; and I took the opportunity of revising the translation, so as to make the rendering more accurate and consistent.
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.
I have had much reason to be gratified by the favour with which my translation has been received on the part alike of Dr. Mommsen himself and of the numerous English scholars who have made it the basis of their references to his work.(1) I trust that in the altered form and new dress, for which the book is indebted to the printers, it may still further meet the convenience of the reader.
September 1894.
1. It has, I believe, been largely in use at Oxford for the last thirty years; but it has not apparently had the good fortune to have come to the knowledge of the writer of an article on “Roman History” published in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1886, which at least makes no mention of its existence, or yet of Mr. Baring-Gould, who in his Tragedy of the Caesars (vol. 1. p. 104f.) has presented Dr. Mommsen’s well-known “character” of Caesar in an independent version. His rendering is often more spirited than accurate. While in several cases important words, clauses, or even sentences, are omitted, in others the meaning is loosely or imperfectly conveyed—e.g. in “Hellenistic”
The Varronian computation by years of the City is retained in the text; the figures on the margin indicate the corresponding year before the birth of Christ.
In calculating the corresponding years, the year 1 of the City has been assumed as identical with the year 753 B.C., and with Olymp. 6, 4; although, if we take into account the circumstance that the Roman solar year began with the 1st day of March, and the Greek with the 1st day of July, the year 1 of the City would, according to more exact calculation, correspond to the last ten months of 753 and the first two months of 752 B.C., and to the last four months of Ol. 6, 3 and the first eight of Ol. 6, 4.
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)
Kiepert’s map will give a clearer idea of the military consolidation of Italy than can be conveyed by any description.
1. I have deemed it, in general, sufficient to give the value of the Roman money approximately in round numbers, assuming for that purpose 100 sesterces as equivalent to 1 pound sterling.—Tr.
BOOK I: The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy
I. Introduction
II. The Earliest Migrations into Italy
III. The Settlements of the Latins
IV. The Beginnings of Rome
V. The Original Constitution of Rome
Vi. The Non-Burgesses and the Reformed Constitution
VII. The Hegemony of Rome in Latium
VIII. The Umbro-Sabellian Stocks—Beginnings of the Samnites
IX. The Etruscans
X. The Hellenes in Italy—Maritime
Supremacy of the Tuscans
and Carthaginians
XI. Law and Justice
XII. Religion
XIII. Agriculture, Trade, and Commerce
XIV. Measuring and Writing
XV. Art
The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy
—Ta palaiotera saphos men eurein dia chronou pleithos adunata ein ek de tekmeirion on epi makrotaton skopounti moi pisteusai xumbainei ou megala nomizo genesthai oute kata tous polemous oute es ta alla.—
Thucydides.
Introduction
The Mediterranean Sea with its various branches, penetrating far into the great Continent, forms the largest gulf of the ocean, and, alternately narrowed by islands or projections of the land and expanding to considerable breadth, at once separates and connects the three divisions of the Old World. The shores of this inland sea were in ancient times peopled by various nations belonging in an ethnographical and philological point of view to different races, but constituting in their historical aspect one whole. This historic whole has been usually, but not very appropriately, entitled the history of the ancient world. It is in reality the history of civilization among the Mediterranean nations; and, as it passes before us in its successive stages, it presents four great phases of development—the history of the Coptic or Egyptian stock dwelling on the southern shore, the history of the Aramaean or Syrian nation which occupied the east coast and extended into the interior of Asia as far as the Euphrates and Tigris, and the histories of the twin-peoples, the Hellenes and Italians, who received as their heritage the countries on the European shore. Each of these histories was in its earlier stages connected with other regions and with other cycles of historical evolution; but each soon entered on its own distinctive career. The surrounding nations of alien or even of kindred extraction—the Berbers and Negroes of Africa, the Arabs, Persians, and Indians of Asia, the Celts and Germans of Europe—came into manifold contact with the peoples inhabiting the borders of the Mediterranean, but they neither imparted unto them nor received from them any influences exercising decisive effect on their respective destinies. So far, therefore, as cycles of culture admit of demarcation at all, the cycle which has its culminating points
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.
The Italian peninsula resembles the Grecian in the temperate climate and wholesome air that prevail on the hills of moderate height, and on the whole, also, in the valleys and plains. In development of coast it is inferior; it wants, in particular, the island-studded sea which made the Hellenes a seafaring nation. Italy on the other hand excels its neighbour in the rich alluvial plains and the fertile and grassy mountain-slopes, which are requisite for agriculture and the rearing of cattle. Like Greece, it is a noble land which calls forth and rewards the energies of man, opening up alike for restless adventure the way to distant lands and for quiet exertion modes of peaceful gain at home.
But, while the Grecian peninsula is turned towards the east, the Italian is turned towards the west. As the coasts of Epirus and Acarnania had but a subordinate importance in the case of Hellas, so had the Apulian and Messapian coasts in that of Italy; and, while the regions on which the historical development of Greece has been mainly dependent—Attica and Macedonia—look to the east, Etruria, Latium, and Campania look to the west. In this way the two peninsulas, so close neighbours and almost sisters, stand as it were averted from each other. Although the naked eye can discern from Otranto the Acroceraunian mountains, the Italians and Hellenes came into earlier and closer contact on every other pathway rather than on the nearest across the Adriatic Sea, In their instance, as has happened so often, the historical vocation of the nations was prefigured in the relations of the ground which they occupied; the two great stocks, on which the civilization of the ancient world grew, threw their shadow as well as their seed, the one towards the east, the other towards the west.
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.
1. The dates as hereafter inserted in the text are years of the City (A.U.C.); those in the margin give the corresponding years B.C.
The Earliest Migrations into Italy
We have no information, not even a tradition, concerning the first migration of the human race into Italy. It was the universal belief of antiquity that in Italy, as well as elsewhere, the first population had sprung from the soil. We leave it to the province of the naturalist to decide the question of the origin of different races, and of the influence of climate in producing their diversities. In a historical point of view it is neither possible, nor is it of any importance, to determine whether the oldest recorded population of a country were autochthones or immigrants. But it is incumbent on the historical inquirer to bring to light the successive strata of population in the country of which he treats, in order to trace, from as remote an epoch as possible, the gradual progress of civilization to more perfect forms, and the suppression of races less capable of, or less advanced in, culture by nations of higher standing.
Italy is singularly poor in memorials of the primitive period, and presents in this respect a remarkable contrast to other fields of civilization. The results of German archaeological research lead to the conclusion that in England, France, the North of Germany and Scandinavia, before the settlement of the Indo-Germans in those lands, there must have dwelt, or rather roamed, a people, perhaps of Mongolian race, gaining their subsistence by hunting and fishing, making their implements of stone, clay, or bones, adorning themselves with the teeth of animals and with amber, but unacquainted with agriculture and the use of the metals. In India, in like manner, the Indo-Germanic settlers were preceded by a dark-coloured population less susceptible of culture. But in Italy we neither meet with fragments of a supplanted nation, such as the Finns and Lapps in the Celto-Germanic domain and the black tribes in the Indian mountains; nor have any remains of an extinct primitive people been hitherto pointed out there, such as appear to be revealed in the peculiarly-formed skeletons, the places of assembling, and the burial mounds of what is called the stone-period of Germanic antiquity. Nothing has hitherto been brought to light to warrant the supposition that mankind existed in Italy at a period anterior to the knowledge of agriculture and of the smelting of the metals; and if the human race ever within the bounds of Italy really occupied the level of that primitive stage of culture which we are accustomed to call the savage state, every trace of such a fact has disappeared.
Individual tribes, or in other words, races or stocks, are the constituent elements of the earliest history. Among the stocks which in later times we meet with in Italy, the immigration of some, of the Hellenes for instance, and the denationalization of others, such as the Bruttians and the inhabitants of the Sabine territory, are historically attested. Setting aside both these classes, there remain a number of stocks whose wanderings can no longer be traced by means of historical testimony, but only by a priori inference, and whose nationality cannot be shown to have undergone any radical change from external causes. To establish the national individuality of these is the first aim of our inquiry. In such an inquiry, had we nothing to fall back upon but the chaotic mass of names of tribes and the confusion of what professes to be historical tradition, the task might well be abandoned as hopeless. The conventionally received tradition, which assumes the name of history, is composed of a few serviceable notices by civilized travellers, and a mass of mostly worthless legends, which have usually been combined with little discrimination of the true character either of legend or of history. But there is another source of tradition to which we may resort, and which yields information fragmentary but authentic; we mean the indigenous languages of the stocks settled in Italy from time immemorial. These languages, which have grown with the growth of the peoples themselves, have had the stamp of their process of growth impressed upon them too deeply to be wholly effaced by subsequent civilization. One only of the Italian languages is known to us completely; but the remains which have been preserved of several of the others are sufficient to afford a basis for historical inquiry regarding the existence, and the degrees, of family relationship among the several languages and peoples.
In this way philological research teaches us to distinguish three primitive Italian stocks, the Iapygian, the Etruscan, and that which we shall call the Italian. The last is divided into two main branches,—the Latin branch, and that to which the dialects of the Umbri, Marsi, Volsci, and Samnites belong.
As to the Iapygian stock, we have but little information. At the south-eastern extremity of Italy, in the Messapian or Calabrian peninsula, inscriptions in a peculiar extinct language(1) have been found in considerable numbers; undoubtedly remains of the dialect of the Iapygians, who are very distinctly pronounced by tradition also to have been different from the Latin and Samnite stocks. Statements deserving of credit and numerous indications lead to the conclusion that the same language and the same stock were indigenous also in Apulia. What we at present know of this people suffices to show clearly that they were distinct from the other Italians, but does not suffice to determine what position
The middle of the peninsula was inhabited, as far back as trustworthy tradition reaches, by two peoples or rather two branches of the same people, whose position in the Indo-Germanic family admits of being determined with greater precision than that of the Iapygian nation. We may with propriety call this people the Italian, since upon it rests the historical significance of the peninsula. It is divided into the two branch-stocks of the Latins and the Umbrians; the latter including their southern offshoots, the Marsians and Samnites, and the colonies sent forth by the Samnites in historical times. The philological analysis of the idioms of these stocks has shown that they together constitute a link in the Indo-Germanic chain of languages, and that the epoch in which they still formed an unity is a comparatively late one. In their system of sounds there appears the peculiar spirant -f, in the use of which they agree with the Etruscans, but decidedly differ from all Hellenic and Helleno-barbaric races as well as from the Sanscrit itself. The aspirates, again, which are retained by the Greeks throughout, and the harsher of them also by the Etruscans, were originally foreign to the Italians, and are represented among them by one of their elements—either by the media, or by the breathing alone -f or -h. The finer spirants, -s, -w, -j, which the Greeks dispense with as much as possible, have been retained in the Italian languages almost unimpaired, and have been in some instances still further developed. The throwing back of the accent and the consequent destruction of terminations are common to the Italians with some Greek stocks and with the Etruscans; but among the Italians this was done to a greater extent than among the former, and to a lesser extent than among the latter. The excessive disorder of the terminations in the Umbrian certainly had no foundation in the original spirit of the language, but was a corruption of later date, which appeared in a similar although weaker tendency also at Rome. Accordingly in the Italian languages short vowels are regularly dropped in the final sound, long ones frequently: the concluding consonants, on the other hand, have been tenaciously retained in the Latin and still more so in the Samnite; while the Umbrian drops even these. In connection with this we find that the middle voice has left but slight traces in the Italian languages, and a peculiar passive formed by the addition of -r takes its place; and further that the majority of the tenses are formed by composition with the roots -es and -fu, while the richer terminational system of the Greeks along with the augment enables them in great part to dispense with auxiliary verbs. While the Italian languages, like the Aeolic dialect, gave up the dual, they retained universally the ablative which the Greeks lost, and in great part also the locative. The rigorous logic of the Italians appears to have taken offence at the splitting of the idea of plurality into that of duality and of multitude; while they have continued with much precision to express the relations of words by inflections. A feature peculiarly Italian, and unknown even to the Sanscrit, is the mode of imparting a substantive character to the verb by gerunds and supines,—a process carried out more completely here than in any other language.
These examples selected from a great abundance of analogous phenomena suffice to establish the individuality of the Italian stock as distinguished from the other members of the Indo-Germanic family, and at the same time show it to be linguistically the nearest relative, as it is geographically the next neighbour, of the Greek. The Greek and the Italian are brothers; the Celt, the German, and the Slavonian are their cousins. The essential unity of all the Italian as of all the Greek dialects and stocks must have dawned early and clearly on the consciousness of the two great nations themselves; for we find in the Roman language a very ancient word of enigmatical origin, -Graius-or -Graicus-, which is applied to every Greek, and in like manner amongst the Greeks the analogous appellation —Opikos— which is applied to all the Latin and Samnite stocks known to the Greeks in earlier times, but never to the Iapygians or Etruscans.
Among the languages of the Italian stock, again, the Latin stands in marked contrast with the Umbro-Samnite dialects. It is true that of these only two, the Umbrian and the Samnite or Oscan, are in some degree known to us, and these even in a manner extremely defective and uncertain. Of the rest some, such as the Marsian and the Volscian, have reached us in fragments too scanty to enable us to form any conception of their individual peculiarities or to classify the varieties of dialect themselves with certainty and precision, while others, like the Sabine, have, with the exception of a few traces preserved as dialectic peculiarities in provincial Latin, completely disappeared. A conjoint view, however, of the facts of language and of history leaves no doubt that all these dialects belonged to the Umbro-Samnite branch of the great Italian stock, and that this branch, although much more closely related to Latin than to Greek, was very decidedly distinct from the Latin. In the pronoun and other cases frequently the Samnite and Umbrian used -p where the Roman used -q, as -pis- for -quis-; just as languages otherwise closely related are found to differ; for instance, -p is peculiar to the Celtic in Brittany and Wales, -k to the Gaelic and Erse. Among the vowel sounds the diphthongs in Latin, and in the northern dialects generally, appear very much destroyed, whereas in the southern Italian dialects they have suffered little; and connected with this is the fact, that in composition the Roman weakens the radical vowel otherwise so strictly preserved,—a modification which does not take place in the kindred group of languages. The genitive of words in -a is in this group as among the Greeks -as, among the Romans in the matured language -ae; that of words in -us is in the Samnite -eis, in the Umbrian -es, among the Romans -ei; the locative disappeared more
Each of these linguistic phenomena is the result and the attestation of an historical event. With perfect certainty they guide us to the conclusion, that from the common cradle of peoples and languages there issued a stock which embraced in common the ancestors of the Greeks and the Italians; that from this, at a subsequent period, the Italians branched off; and that these again divided into the western and eastern stocks, while at a still later date the eastern became subdivided into Umbrians and Oscans.
When and where these separations took place, language of course cannot tell; and scarce may adventurous thought attempt to grope its conjectural way along the course of those revolutions, the earliest of which undoubtedly took place long before that migration which brought the ancestors of the Italians across the Apennines. On the other hand the comparison of languages, when conducted with accuracy and caution, may give us an approximate idea of the degree of culture which the people had reached when these separations took place, and so furnish us with the beginnings of history, which is nothing but the development of civilization. For language, especially in the period of its formation, is the true image and organ of the degree of civilization attained; its archives preserve evidence of the great revolutions in arts and in manners, and from its records the future will not fail to draw information as to those times regarding which the voice of direct tradition is dumb.
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,
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.
No less do we find extending back into those times the fundamental ideas on which the development of all Indo-Germanic states ultimately rests; the relative position of husband and wife, the arrangement in clans, the priesthood of the father of the household and the absence of a special sacerdotal class as well as of all distinctions of caste in general, slavery as a legitimate institution, the days of publicly dispensing justice at the new and full moon. On the other hand the positive organization of the body politic, the decision of the questions between regal sovereignty and the sovereignty of the community, between the hereditary privilege of royal and noble houses and the unconditional legal equality of the citizens, belong altogether to a later age.
Even the elements of science and religion show traces of a community of origin. The numbers are the same up to one hundred (Sanscrit -satam-, -ekasatam-, Latin -centum-, Greek —e-katon—, Gothic -hund-); and the moon receives her name in all languages from the fact that men measure time by her (-mensis-). The idea of Deity itself (Sanscrit -devas-, Latin -deus-, Greek —theos—), and many of the oldest conceptions of religion and of natural symbolism, belong to the common inheritance of the nations. The conception, for example, of heaven as the father and of earth as the mother of being, the festal expeditions of the gods who proceed from place to place in their own chariots along carefully levelled paths, the shadowy continuation of the soul’s existence after death, are fundamental ideas of the Indian as well as of the Greek and Roman mythologies. Several of the gods of the Ganges coincide even in name with those worshipped on the Ilissus and the Tiber:—thus the Uranus of the Greeks is the Varunas, their Zeus, Jovis pater, Diespiter is the Djaus pita of the Vedas. An unexpected light has been thrown on various enigmatical forms in the Hellenic mythology by recent researches regarding the earlier divinities of India. The hoary mysterious forms of the Erinnyes are no Hellenic invention; they were immigrants along with the oldest settlers from the East. The divine greyhound Sarama, who guards for the Lord of heaven the golden herd of stars and sunbeams and collects for him the nourishing rain-clouds as the cows of heaven to the milking, and who moreover faithfully conducts the pious dead into the world of the blessed, becomes in the hands of the Greeks the son of Sarama, Sarameyas, or Hermeias; and the enigmatical Hellenic story of the stealing of the cattle of Helios, which is beyond doubt connected with the Roman legend about Cacus, is now seen to be a last echo (with the meaning no longer understood) of that old fanciful and significant conception of nature.
The task, however, of determining the degree of culture which the Indo-Germans had attained before the separation of the stocks properly belongs to the general history of the ancient world. It is on the other hand the special task of Italian history to ascertain, so far as it is possible, what was the state of the Graeco-Italian nation when the Hellenes and the Italians parted. Nor is this a superfluous labour; we reach by means of it the stage at which Italian civilization commenced, the starting-point of the national history.
While it is probable that the Indo-Germans led a pastoral life and were acquainted with the cereals, if at all, only in their wild state, all indications point to the conclusion that the Graeco-Italians were a grain-cultivating, perhaps even a vine-cultivating, people. The evidence of this is not simply the knowledge of agriculture itself common to both, for this does not upon the whole warrant the inference of community of origin in the peoples who may exhibit it. An historical connection between the Indo-Germanic agriculture and that of the Chinese, Aramaean, and Egyptian stocks can hardly be disputed; and yet these stocks are either alien to the Indo-Germans, or at any rate became separated from them at a time when agriculture was certainly still unknown. The truth is, that the more advanced races in ancient times were, as at the present day, constantly exchanging the implements and the plants employed in cultivation; and when the annals of China refer the origin of Chinese agriculture to the introduction of five species of grain that took place under a particular king in a particular year, the story undoubtedly depicts correctly, at least in a general way, the relations subsisting in the earliest epochs of civilization. A common knowledge of agriculture, like a common knowledge of the alphabet, of war chariots, of purple, and other implements and ornaments, far more frequently warrants the inference of an ancient intercourse between nations than of their original unity. But as regards the Greeks and Italians, whose mutual relations are comparatively well known, the hypothesis that agriculture as well as writing and coinage first came to Italy by means of the Hellenes may be characterized as wholly inadmissible. On the other hand, the existence of a most intimate connection between the agriculture of the one country and that of the other is attested by their possessing in common all the oldest expressions relating to it; -ager-, —agros—; -aro aratrum-, —aroo arotron—; -ligo-alongside of —lachaino—; -hortus-, —chortos—; -hordeum-, —krithei—; -milium-, —melinei—; -rapa-, —raphanis-; -malva-, —malachei—; -vinum-, —oinos—. It is likewise attested by the agreement of Greek and Italian agriculture in the form of the plough, which appears of the same shape on the old Attic and the old Roman monuments; in the choice of the most ancient kinds of grain, millet, barley, spelt; in the custom of cutting the ears with the sickle and having them trodden out by cattle on the smooth-beaten threshing-floor; lastly, in the mode of preparing the grain -puls-—poltos—, -pinso- —ptisso—, -mola- —mulei—; for baking was of more recent origin, and on that account dough or pap was always used in the Roman ritual instead of bread. That the culture of the vine too in Italy was anterior to the earliest Greek immigration, is shown by the appellation “wine-land” (—Oinotria—), which appears
The distinction between the common inheritance of the nations and their own subsequent acquisitions in manners and in language is still far from having been wrought out in all the variety of its details and gradations. The investigation of languages with this view has scarcely begun, and history still in the main derives its representation of primitive times, not from the rich mine of language, but from what must be called for the most part the rubbish-heap of tradition. For the present, therefore, it must suffice to indicate the differences between the culture of the Indo-Germanic family in its oldest undivided form, and the culture of that epoch when the Graeco-Italians still lived together. The task of discriminating the results of culture which are common to the European members of this family, but foreign to its Asiatic members, from those which the several European groups, such as the Graeco-Italian and the Germano-Slavonic, have wrought out for themselves, can only be accomplished, if at all, after greater progress has been made in linguistic and historical inquiries. But there can be no doubt that, with the Graeco-Italians as with all other nations, agriculture became and in the mind of the people remained the germ and core of their national and of their private life. The house and the fixed hearth, which the husbandman constructs instead of the light hut and shifting fireplace of the shepherd, are represented in the spiritual domain and idealized in the goddess Vesta or —Estia— almost the only divinity not Indo-Germanic yet from the first common to both nations. One of the oldest legends of the Italian stock ascribes to king Italus, or, as the Italians must have pronounced the word, Vitalus or Vitulus, the introduction of the change from a pastoral to an agricultural life, and shrewdly connects with it the original Italian legislation. We have simply another version of the same belief in the legend of the Samnite stock which makes the ox the leader of their primitive colonies, and in the oldest Latin national names which designate the people as reapers (-Siculi-, perhaps also -Sicani-), or as field-labourers (-Opsci-). It is one of the characteristic incongruities which attach to the so-called legend of the origin of Rome, that it represents a pastoral and hunting people as founding a city. Legend and faith, laws and manners, among the Italians as among the Hellenes are throughout associated with agriculture.(7)
Cultivation of the soil cannot be conceived without some measurement of it, however rude. Accordingly, the measures of surface and the mode of setting off boundaries rest, like agriculture itself, on a like basis among both peoples. The Oscan and Umbrian -vorsus-of one hundred square feet corresponds exactly with the Greek —plethron—. The principle of marking off boundaries was also the same. The land-measurer adjusted his position with reference to one of the cardinal points, and proceeded to draw in the first place two lines, one from north to south, and another from east to west, his station being at their point of intersection (-templum-, —temenos— from —temno—); then he drew at certain fixed distances lines parallel to these, and by this process produced a series of rectangular pieces of ground, the corners of which were marked by boundary posts (-termini-, in Sicilian inscriptions -termones-, usually —oroi—). This mode of defining boundaries, which is probably also Etruscan but is hardly of Etruscan origin, we find among the Romans, Umbrians, Samnites, and also in very ancient records of the Tarentine Heracleots, who are as little likely to have borrowed it from the Italians as the Italians from the Tarentines: it is an ancient possession common to all. A peculiar characteristic of the Romans, on the other hand, was their rigid carrying out of the principle of the square; even where the sea or a river formed a natural boundary, they did not accept it, but wound up their allocation of the land with the last complete square.
It is not solely in agriculture, however, that the especially close relationship of the Greeks and Italians appears; it is unmistakably manifest also in the other provinces of man’s earliest activity. The Greek house, as described by Homer, differs little from the model which was always adhered to in Italy. The essential portion, which originally formed the whole interior accommodation of the Latin house, was the -atrium-, that is, the “blackened” chamber, with the household altar, the marriage bed, the table for meals, and the hearth; and precisely similar is the Homeric —megaron—, with its household altar and hearth and smoke-begrimed roof. We cannot say the same of ship-building. The boat with oars was an old common possession of the Indo-Germans; but the advance to the use of sailing vessels can scarcely be considered to have taken place during the Graeco-Italian period, for we find no nautical terms originally common to the Greeks and Italians except such as are also general among the Indo-Germanic family. On the other hand the primitive Italian custom of the husbandmen having common midday meals, the origin of which the myth connects with the introduction of agriculture, is compared by Aristotle with the Cretan Syssitia; and the earliest Romans further agreed with the Cretans and Laconians in taking their meals
It was otherwise in the mental domain. The great problem of man—how to live in conscious harmony with himself, with his neighbour, and with the whole to which he belongs—admits of as many solutions as there are provinces in our Father’s kingdom; and it is in this, and not in the material sphere, that individuals and nations display their divergences of character. The exciting causes which gave rise to this intrinsic contrast must have been in the Graeco-Italian period as yet wanting; it was not until the Hellenes and Italians had separated that that deep-seated diversity of mental character became manifest, the effects of which continue to the present day. The family and the state, religion and art, received in Italy and in Greece respectively a development so peculiar and so thoroughly national, that the common basis, on which in these respects also the two peoples rested, has been so overgrown as to be almost concealed from our view. That Hellenic character, which sacrificed the whole to its individual elements, the nation to the township, and the township to the citizen; which sought its ideal of life in the beautiful and the good, and, but too often, in the enjoyment of idleness; which attained its political development by intensifying the original individuality of the several cantons, and at length produced the internal dissolution of even local authority; which in its view of religion first invested the gods with human attributes, and then denied their existence;
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,
It is the same in religion. In Italy, as in Hellas, there lies at the foundation of the popular faith the same common treasure of symbolic and allegorical views of nature: on this rests that general analogy between the Roman and the Greek world of gods and of spirits, which was to become of so much importance in later stages of development. In many of their particular conceptions also,—in the already mentioned forms of Zeus-Diovis and Hestia-Vesta, in the idea of the holy space (—temenos—, -templum-), in various offerings and ceremonies—the two modes of worship do not by mere accident coincide. Yet in Hellas, as in Italy, they assumed a shape so thoroughly national and peculiar, that but little even of the ancient common inheritance was preserved in a recognizable form, and that little was for the most part misunderstood or not understood at all. It could not be otherwise; for, just as in the peoples themselves the great contrasts, which during the Graeco-Italian period had lain side by side undeveloped, were after their division distinctly evolved, so in their religion also a separation took place between the idea and the image, which had hitherto been but one whole in the soul. Those old tillers of the ground, when the clouds were driving along the sky, probably expressed to themselves the phenomenon by saying that the hound of the gods was driving together the startled cows of the herd. The Greek forgot that the cows were really the clouds, and converted the son of the hound of the gods—a form devised merely for the particular purposes of that conception—into the adroit messenger of the gods ready for every service. When the thunder rolled among the mountains, he saw Zeus brandishing his bolts on Olympus; when the blue sky again smiled upon him, he gazed into the bright eye of Athenaea, the daughter of Zeus; and so powerful over him was the influence of the forms which he had thus created, that he soon saw nothing in them but human beings invested and illumined with the splendour of nature’s power, and freely formed and transformed them according to the laws of beauty. It was in another fashion, but not less strongly, that the deeply implanted religious feeling of the Italian race manifested itself; it held firmly by the idea and did not suffer the form to obscure it. As the Greek, when he sacrificed, raised his eyes to heaven, so the Roman veiled his head; for the prayer of the former was contemplation, that of the latter reflection. Throughout the whole of nature he adored the spiritual and the universal. To everything existing, to the man and to the tree, to the state and to the store-room, was assigned a spirit which came into being with it and perished along with it, the counterpart of the natural phenomenon in the spiritual domain; to the man the male Genius, to the woman the female Juno, to the boundary Terminus, to the forest Silvanus, to the circling year Vertumnus, and so on to every
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.
Thus the two nations in which the civilization of antiquity culminated stand side by side, as different in development as they were in origin identical. The points in which the Hellenes excel the Italians are more universally intelligible and reflect a more brilliant lustre; but the deep feeling in each individual that he was only a part of the community, a rare devotedness and power of self-sacrifice for the common weal, an earnest faith in its own gods, form the rich treasure of the Italian nation. Both nations underwent a one-sided, and therefore each a complete, development; it is only a pitiful narrow-mindedness that will object to the Athenian that he did not know how to mould his state like the Fabii and the Valerii, or to the Roman that he did not learn to carve like Pheidias and to write like Aristophanes. It was in fact the most peculiar and the best feature in the character of the Greek people, that rendered it impossible for them to advance from national to political unity without at the same time exchanging their polity for despotism. The ideal world of beauty was all in all to the Greeks, and compensated them to some extent for what they wanted in reality. Wherever in Hellas a tendency towards national union appeared, it was based not on elements directly political, but on games and art: the contests at Olympia, the poems of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, were the only bonds that held Hellas together. Resolutely, on the other hand, the Italian surrendered his own personal will for the sake of freedom, and learned to obey his father that he might know how to obey the state. Amidst this subjection individual development might be marred, and the germs of fairest promise in man might be arrested in the bud; the Italian gained in their stead a feeling of fatherland and of patriotism such as the Greek never knew, and alone among all the civilized nations of antiquity succeeded in working out national unity in connection with a constitution based on self-government—a national unity, which at last placed in his hands the mastery not only over the divided Hellenic stock, but over the whole known world.
1. Some of the epitaphs may give us an idea of its sound; as -theotoras artahiaihi bennarrihino- and -dasiihonas platorrihi bollihi-.
2. The hypothesis has been put forward of an affinity between the Iapygian language and the modern Albanian; based, however, on points of linguistic comparison that are but little satisfactory in any case, and least of all where a fact of such importance is involved. Should this relationship be confirmed, and should the Albanians on the other hand—a race also Indo-Germanic and on a par with the Hellenic and Italian races—be really a remnant of that Hellene-barbaric nationality traces of which occur throughout all Greece and especially in the northern provinces, the nation that preceded the Hellenes would be demonstrated as identical with that which preceded the Italians. Still the inference would not immediately follow that the Iapygian immigration to Italy had taken place across the Adriatic Sea.
3. Barley, wheat, and spelt were found growing together in a wild state on the right bank of the Euphrates, north-west from Anah (Alph. de Candolle, Geographie botanique raisonnee, ii. p. 934). The growth of barley and wheat in a wild state in Mesopotamia had already been mentioned by the Babylonian historian Berosus (ap. Georg. Syncell. p. 50 Bonn.).
4. Scotch -quern-. Mr. Robertson.
5. If the Latin -vieo-, -vimen-, belong to the same root as our weave (German -weben-) and kindred words, the word must still, when the Greeks and Italians separated, have had the general meaning “to plait,” and it cannot have been until a later period, and probably in different regions independently of each other, that it assumed that of “weaving.” The cultivation of flax, old as it is, does not reach back to this period, for the Indians, though well acquainted with the flax-plant, up to the present day use it only for the preparation of linseed-oil. Hemp probably became known to the Italians at a still later period than flax; at least -cannabis-looks quite like a borrowed word of later date.
6. Thus -aro-, -aratrum- reappear in the old German -aran-(to plough, dialectically -eren-), -erida-, in Slavonian -orati-, -oradlo-, in Lithuanian -arti-, -arimnas-, in Celtic -ar-, -aradar-. Thus alongside of -ligo- stands our rake (German -rechen-), of -hortus- our garden (German -garten-), of -mola- our mill (German -muhle-, Slavonic -mlyn-, Lithuanian -malunas-, Celtic -malin-).
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.
7. Nothing is more significant in this respect than the close connection of agriculture with marriage and the foundation of cities during the earliest epoch of culture. Thus the gods in Italy immediately concerned with marriage are Ceres and (or?) Tellus (Plutarch, Romul. 22; Servius on Aen. iv. 166; Rossbach, Rom. Ehe, 257, 301), in Greece Demeter (Plutarch, Conjug. Praec. init.); in old Greek formulas the procreation of children is called —arotos—(ii. The Family and the State, note); indeed the oldest Roman formof marriage, -confarreatio-, derives its name and its ceremony from the cultivation of corn. The use of the plough in the founding of cities is well known.
8. Among the oldest names of weapons on both sides scarcely any can be shown to be certainly related; -lancea-, although doubtless connected with -logchei-, is, as a Roman word, recent, and perhaps borrowed from the Germans or Spaniards.
9. Even in details this agreement appears; e.g., in the designation of lawful wedlock as “marriage concluded for the obtaining of lawful children” (—gauos epi paidon gneision aroto—, -matrimonium liberorum quaerendorum causa-).
10. Only we must, of course, not forget that like pre-existing conditions lead everywhere to like institutions. For instance, nothing is more certain than that the Roman plebeians were a growth originating within the Roman commonwealth, and yet they everywhere find their counterpart where a body of -metoeci- has arisen alongside of a body of burgesses. As a matter of course, chance also plays in such cases its provoking game.
The Settlements of the Latins
The home of the Indo-Germanic stock lay in the western portion of central Asia; from this it spread partly in a south-eastern direction over India, partly in a northwestern over Europe. It is difficult to determine the primitive seat of the Indo-Germans more precisely: it must, however, at any rate have been inland and remote from the sea, as there is no name for the sea common to the Asiatic and European branches. Many indications point more particularly to the regions of the Euphrates; so that, singularly enough, the primitive seats of the two most important civilized stocks, —the Indo-Germanic and the Aramaean,—almost coincide as regards locality. This circumstance gives support to the hypothesis that these races also were originally connected, although, if there was such a connection, it certainly must have been anterior to all traceable development of culture and language. We cannot define more exactly their original locality, nor are we able to accompany the individual stocks in the course of their migrations. The European branch probably lingered in Persia and Armenia for some considerable time after the departure of the Indians; for, according
The advance of the Umbro-Sabellian stock along the central mountain-ridge of Italy, in a direction from north to south, can still be clearly traced; indeed its last phases belong to purely historical times. Less is known regarding the route which the Latin migration followed. Probably it proceeded in a similar direction along the west coast, long, in all likelihood, before the first Sabellian stocks began to move. The stream only overflows the heights when the lower grounds are already occupied; and only through the supposition that there were Latin stocks already settled on the coast are we able to explain why the Sabellians should have contented themselves with the rougher mountain districts, from which they afterwards issued and intruded, wherever it was possible, between the Latin tribes.
It is well known that a Latin stock inhabited the country from the left bank of the Tiber to the Volscian mountains; but these mountains themselves, which appear to have been neglected on occasion of the first immigration when the plains of Latium and Campania still lay open to the settlers, were, as the Volscian inscriptions show, occupied by a stock more nearly related to the Sabellians than to the Latins. On the other hand, Latins probably dwelt in Campania before the Greek and Samnite immigrations; for the Italian names Novla or Nola (newtown), Campani Capua, Volturnus (from -volvere-, like -Iuturna- from -iuvare-), Opsci (labourers), are demonstrably older than the Samnite invasion, and show that, at the time when Cumae was founded by the Greeks, an Italian and probably Latin stock, the Ausones, were in possession of Campania. The primitive inhabitants of the districts which the Lucani and Bruttii subsequently occupied, the Itali proper (inhabitants of the land of oxen), are associated by the best observers not with the Iapygian, but with
Destinies very dissimilar awaited these different branches. Those settled in Sicily, Magna Graecia, and Campania came into contact with the Greeks at a period when they were unable to offer resistance to their civilization, and were either completely Hellenized, as in the case of Sicily, or at any rate so weakened that they succumbed without marked resistance to the fresh energy of the Sabine tribes. In this way the Siculi, the Itali and Morgetes, and the Ausonians never came to play an active part in the history of the peninsula. It was otherwise with Latium, where no Greek colonies were founded, and the inhabitants after hard struggles were successful in maintaining their ground against the Sabines as well as against their northern neighbours. Let us cast a glance at this district, which was destined more than any other to influence the fortunes of the ancient world.
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
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
No accounts have been preserved of the mode in which the settlements of the Latins took place in the district which has since borne their name; and we are left to gather what we can almost exclusively from a posteriori inference regarding them. Some knowledge may, however, in this way be gained, or at any rate some conjectures that wear an aspect of probability.
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.
These clanships, however, were from the beginning regarded not as independent societies, but as the integral parts of a political community (-civitas-, -populus-). This first presents itself as an aggregate of a number of clan-villages of the same stock, language, and manners, bound to mutual observance of law and mutual legal redress and to united action in aggression and defence. A fixed local centre
These cantons accordingly, having their rendezvous in some stronghold, and including a certain number of clanships, form the primitive political unities with which Italian history begins. At what period, and to what extent, such cantons were formed in Latium, cannot be determined with precision; nor is it a matter of special historical interest The isolated Alban range, that natural stronghold of Latium, which offered to settlers the most wholesome air, the freshest springs, and the most secure position, would doubtless be first occupied by the new comers.
Here accordingly, along the narrow plateau above Palazzuola, between the Alban lake (-Lago di Castello-) and the Alban mount (-Monte Cavo-), extended the town of Alba, which was universally regarded as the primitive seat of the Latin stock, and the mother-city of Rome as well as of all the other Old Latin communities; here, too, on the slopes lay the very ancient Latin canton-centres of Lanuvium, Aricia, and Tusculum. Here are found some of those primitive works of masonry, which usually mark the beginnings of civilization and seem to stand as a witness to posterity that in reality Pallas Athena when she does appear, comes into the world full grown. Such is the escarpment of the wall of rock below Alba in the direction of Palazzuola, whereby the place, which is rendered naturally inaccessible by the steep declivities of Monte Cavo on the south, is rendered equally unapproachable on the north, and only the two narrow approaches on the east and west, which are capable of being easily defended, are left open for traffic. Such, above all, is the large subterranean tunnel cut—so that a man can stand upright within it—through the hard wall of lava, 6000 feet thick, by which the waters of the lake formed in the old crater of the Alban Mount were reduced to their present level and a considerable space was gained for tillage on the mountain itself.
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.
All these cantons were in primitive times politically sovereign, and each of them was governed by its prince with the co-operation of the council of elders and the assembly of warriors. Nevertheless the feeling of fellowship based on community of descent and of language not only pervaded the whole of them, but manifested itself in an important religious and political institution—the perpetual league of the collective Latin cantons. The presidency belonged originally, according to the universal Italian as well as Hellenic usage, to that canton within whose bounds lay the meeting-place of the league; in this case it was the canton of Alba, which, as we have said, was generally regarded as the oldest and most eminent of the Latin cantons. The communities entitled to participate in the league were in the beginning thirty—a number which we find occurring with singular frequency as the sum of the constituent parts of a commonwealth in Greece and Italy. What cantons originally made up the number of the thirty old Latin communities or, as with reference to the metropolitan rights of Alba they are also called, the thirty Alban colonies, tradition has not recorded, and we can no longer ascertain. The rendezvous of this union was, like the Pamboeotia and the Panionia among the similar confederacies of the Greeks, the “Latin festival” (-feriae Latinae-), at which, on the “Mount of Alba” (-Mons Albanus-, -Monte Cavo-), upon a day annually appointed by the chief magistrate for the purpose, an ox was offered in sacrifice by the assembled Latin stock to the “Latin god” (-Jupiter Latiaris-). Each community taking part in the ceremony had to contribute to the sacrificial feast its fixed proportion of cattle, milk, and cheese, and to receive in return a portion of the roasted victim. These usages continued down to a late period, and are well known: respecting the more important legal bearings of this association we can do little else than institute conjectures.
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
It is still less in our power to define the range of the privileges of the presiding canton; only we may safely affirm that there is no reason for recognizing in the Alban presidency a real political hegemony over Latium, and that possibly, nay probably, it had no more significance in Latium than the honorary presidency of Elis had in Greece.(6) On the whole it is probable that the extent of this Latin league, and the amount of its jurisdiction, were somewhat unsettled and fluctuating; yet it remained throughout not an accidental aggregate of various communities more or less alien to each other, but the just and necessary expression of the relationship of the Latin stock. The Latin league may not have at all times included all Latin communities, but it never at any rate granted the privilege of membership to any that were not Latin. Its counterpart in Greece was not the Delphic Amphictyony, but the Boeotian or Aetolian confederacy.
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
2. Like -latus- (side) and —platus— (flat); it denotes therefore the flat country in contrast to the Sabine mountain-land, just as Campania, the “plain,” forms the contrast to Samnium. Latus, formerly -stlatus-, has no connection with Latium.
3. A French statist, Dureau de la Malle (-Econ. Pol. des Romains-, ii. 226), compares with the Roman Campagna the district of Limagne in Auvergne, which is likewise a wide, much intersected, and uneven plain, with a superficial soil of decomposed lava and ashes—the remains of extinct volcanoes. The population, at least 2500 to the square league, is one of the densest to be found in purely agricultural districts: property is subdivided to an extraordinary extent. Tillage is carried on almost entirely by manual labour, with spade, hoe, or mattock; only in exceptional cases a light plough is substituted drawn by two cows, the wife of the peasant not unfrequently taking the place of one of them in the yoke. The team serves at once to furnish milk and to till the land. They have two harvests in the year, corn and vegetables; there is no fallow. The average yearly rent for an arpent of arable land is 100 francs. If instead Of such an arrangement this same land were to be divided among six or seven large landholders, and a system of management by stewards and day labourers were to supersede the husbandry of the small proprietors, in a hundred years the Limagne would doubtless be as waste, forsaken, and miserable as the Campagna di Roma is at the present day.
4. In Slavonia, where the patriarchal economy is retained up to the present day, the whole family, often to the number of fifty or even a hundred persons, remains together in the same house under the orders of the house-father (Goszpodar) chosen by the whole family for life. The property of the household, which consists chiefly in cattle, is administered by the house-father; the surplus is distributed according to the family-branches. Private acquisitions by industry and trade remain separate property. Instances of quitting the household occur, in the case even of men, e. g. by marrying into a stranger household (Csaplovies, -Slavonien-, i. 106, 179). —Under such circumstances, which are probably not very widely different from the earliest Roman conditions, the household approximates in character to the community.
5. The Latin festival is expressly called “armistice” (-indutiae-, Macrob. Sat. i. 16; —ekecheipiai—, Dionys. iv. 49); and a war was not allowed to be begun during its continuance (Macrob. l. c.)
6. The assertion often made in ancient and modern times, that Alba once ruled over Latium under the forms of a symmachy, nowhere finds on closer investigation sufficient support. All history begins not with the union, but with the disunion of a nation; and it is very improbable that the problem of the union of Latium, which Rome finally solved after some centuries of conflict, should have been already solved at an earlier period by Alba. It deserves to be remarked too that Rome never asserted in the capacity of heiress of Alba any claims of sovereignty proper over the Latin communities, but contented herself with an honorary presidency; which no doubt, when it became combined with material power, afforded a handle for her pretensions of hegemony. Testimonies, strictly so called, can scarcely be adduced on such a question; and least of all do such passages as Festus -v. praetor-, p. 241, and Dionys. iii. 10, suffice to stamp Alba as a Latin Athens.
The Beginnings of Rome
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.”
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.
Setting aside self-contradictory and unfounded hypotheses, we may sum up in a few words all that can be said respecting the nationality of the component elements of the primitive Roman commonwealth. That the Ramnians were a Latin stock cannot be doubted, for they gave their name to the new Roman commonwealth and therefore must have substantially determined the nationality of the united community. Respecting the origin of the Luceres nothing can be affirmed, except that there is no difficulty in the way of our assigning them, like the Ramnians, to the Latin stock. The second of these communities, on the other hand, is with one consent derived from Sabina; and this view can at least be traced to a tradition preserved in the Titian brotherhood, which represented that priestly college as having been instituted, on occasion of the Tities being admitted into the collective community, for the preservation of their distinctive Sabine ritual. It may be, therefore, that at a period very remote, when the Latin and Sabellian stocks were beyond question far less sharply contrasted in language, manners, and customs than were the Roman and the Samnite of a later age, a Sabellian community entered into a Latin canton-union; and, as in the older and more credible traditions without exception the Tities take precedence of the Ramnians, it is probable that the intruding Tities compelled the older Ramnians to accept the —synoikismos—. A mixture of different nationalities certainly therefore took place; but it hardly exercised an influence greater than the migration, for example, which occurred some centuries afterwards of the Sabine Attus Clauzus or Appius Claudius and his clansmen and clients to Rome. The earlier admission of the Tities among the Ramnians does not entitle us to class the community among mongrel peoples any more than does that subsequent reception of the Claudii among the Romans. With the exception, perhaps, of isolated national institutions handed down in connection with ritual, the existence of Sabellian elements can nowhere be pointed out in Rome; and the Latin language in particular furnishes absolutely no support to any such hypothesis.(4) It would in fact be more than surprising, if the Latin nation should have had its nationality in any sensible degree affected by the insertion of a single community from a stock so very closely related to it; and, besides, it must not be forgotten that at the time when the Tides settled beside the Ramnians, Latin nationality rested on Latium as its basis, and not on Rome. The new tripartite Roman commonwealth was, notwithstanding some incidental elements which were originally Sabellian, just what the community of the Ramnians had previously been—a portion of the Latin nation.
Long, in all probability, before an urban settlement arose on the Tiber, these Ramnians, Tities, and Luceres, at first separate, afterwards united, had their stronghold on the Roman hills, and tilled their fields from the surrounding villages. The “wolf-festival” (Lupercalia) which the gens of the Quinctii celebrated on the Palatine hill, was probably a tradition from these primitive times—a festival of husbandmen and shepherds, which more than any other preserved the homely pastimes of patriarchal simplicity, and, singularly enough, maintained itself longer than all the other heathen festivals in Christian Rome,
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.
Let us notice first of all the earliest boundaries of the Roman territory. Towards the east the towns of Antemnae, Fidenae, Caenina, and Gabii lie in the immediate neighbourhood, some of them not five miles distant from the Servian ring-wall; and the boundary of the canton must have been in the close vicinity of the city gates. On the south we find at a distance of fourteen miles the powerful communities of Tusculum and Alba; and the Roman territory appears not to have extended in this direction beyond the -Fossa Cluilia-, five miles from Rome. In like manner, towards the south-west, the boundary betwixt Rome and Lavinium was at the sixth milestone. While in a landward direction the Roman canton was thus everywhere confined within the narrowest possible limits, from the earliest times, on the other hand, it extended without hindrance on both banks of the Tiber towards the sea. Between Rome and the coast there occurs no locality that is mentioned as an ancient canton-centre, and no trace of any ancient canton-boundary. The legend indeed, which has its definite explanation of the origin of everything, professes to tell us that the Roman possessions on the right bank of the Tiber, the “seven hamlets” (-septem pagi-), and the important salt-works at its mouth, were taken by king Romulus from the Veientes, and that king Ancus fortified on the right bank the -tete de pont-, the “mount of Janus” (-Janiculum-), and founded on the left the Roman Peiraeus, the seaport at the river’s “mouth” (-Ostia-). But in fact we have evidence more trustworthy than that of legend, that the possessions on the Etruscan bank of the Tiber must have belonged to the original territory of Rome; for in this very quarter, at the fourth milestone on the later road to the port, lay the grove of the creative goddess (-Dea Dia-), the primitive chief seat of the Arval festival and Arval brotherhood of Rome. Indeed from time immemorial the clan of the Romilii, once the chief probably of all the Roman clans, was settled in this very quarter; the Janiculum formed a part of the city itself, and Ostia was a burgess colony or, in other words, a suburb.
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
But in connection with this view of the position of Rome as the emporium of Latium another observation suggests itself. At the time when history begins to dawn on us, Rome appears, in contradistinction to the league of the Latin communities, as a compact urban unity. The Latin habit of dwelling in open villages, and of using the common stronghold only for festivals and assemblies or in case of special need, was subjected to restriction at a far earlier period, probably, in the canton of Rome than anywhere else in Latium. The Roman did not cease to manage his farm in person, or to regard it as his proper home; but the unwholesome atmosphere of the Campagna could not but induce him to take up his abode as much as possible on the more airy and salubrious city hills; and by the side of the cultivators of the soil there must have been a numerous non-agricultural population, partly foreigners, partly native, settled there from very early times. This to some extent accounts for the dense population of the old Roman territory,
It is far more important and more practicable to follow out the course of this mercantile and strategical growth of the city of Rome, than to attempt the useless task of chemically analysing the insignificant and but little diversified communities of primitive times. This urban development may still be so far recognized in the traditions regarding the successive circumvallations and fortifications of Rome, the formation of which necessarily kept pace with the growth of the Roman commonwealth in importance as a city.
The town, which in the course of centuries grew up as Rome, in its original form embraced according to trustworthy testimony only the Palatine, or “square Rome” (-Roma quadrata-), as it was called in later times from the irregularly quadrangular form of the Palatine hill. The gates and walls that enclosed this original city remained visible down to the period of the empire: the sites of two of the former, the Porta Romana near S. Giorgio in Velabro, and the Porta Mugionis at the Arch of Titus, are still known to us, and the Palatine ring-wall is described by Tacitus from his own observation at least on the sides looking towards the Aventine and Caelian. Many traces indicate that this was the centre and original seat of the urban settlement. On the Palatine was to be found the sacred symbol of that settlement, the “outfit-vault” (-mundus-) as it was called, in which the first settlers deposited a sufficiency of everything necessary for a household and added a clod of their dear native earth. There, too, was situated the building in which all the curies assembled for religious and other purposes, each at its own hearth (-curiae veteres-).
The “festival of the Seven Mounts” (-septimontium-), again, has preserved the memory of the more extended settlement which gradually formed round the Palatine. Suburbs grew up one after another, each protected by its own separate though weaker circumvallation and joined to the original ring-wall of the Palatine, as in fen districts the outer dikes are joined on to the main dike. The “Seven Rings” were, the Palatine itself; the Cermalus, the slope of the Palatine in the direction of the morass that extended between it and the Capitol towards the river (-velabrum-); the Velia, the ridge which connected the Palatine with the Esquiline, but in subsequent times was almost wholly obliterated by the buildings of the empire; the Fagutal, the Oppius, and the Cispius, the three summits of the Esquiline; lastly, the Sucusa, or Subura, a fortress constructed outside of the earthen rampart which protected the new town on the Carinae, in the depression between the Esquiline and the Quirinal beneath S. Pietro in Vincoli. These additions, manifestly the results of a gradual growth, clearly reveal to a certain extent the earliest history of the Palatine Rome, especially when we compare with them the Servian arrangement of districts which was afterwards formed on the basis of this earliest division.
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
No relation is discoverable between the urban settlements thus gradually formed and the three communities into which from an immemorially early period the Roman commonwealth was in political law divided. As the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres appear to have been communities originally independent, they must have had their settlements originally apart; but they certainly did not dwell in separate circumvallations on the Seven Hills, and all fictions to this effect in ancient or modern times must be consigned by the intelligent inquirer to the same fate with the charming tale of Tarpeia and the battle of the Palatine. On the contrary each of the three tribes of Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres must have been distributed throughout the two regions of the oldest city, the Subura and Palatine, and the suburban region as well: with this may be connected the fact, that afterwards not only in the Suburan and Palatine, but in each of the regions subsequently added to the city, there were three pairs of Argean chapels. The Palatine city of the Seven Mounts may have had a history of its own; no other tradition of it has survived than simply that of its having once existed. But as the leaves of the forest make room for the new growth of spring, although they fall unseen by human eyes, so has this unknown city of the Seven Mounts made room for the Rome of history.
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
All these indications, which even in themselves are of great weight, become more significant when we recollect that the accurately known circuit of the Palatine city of the Seven Mounts excluded the Quirinal, and that afterwards in the Servian Rome, while the first three regions corresponded to the former Palatine city, a fourth region was formed out of the Quirinal along with the neighbouring Viminal. Thus, too, we discover an explanation of the reason why the strong outwork of the Subura was constructed beyond the city wall in the valley between the Esquiline and Quirinal; it was at that point, in fact, that the two territories came into contact, and the Palatine Romans, after having taken possession of the low ground, were under the necessity of constructing a stronghold for protection against those of the Quirinal.
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.
1. A similar change of sound is exhibited in the case of the following formations, all of them of a very ancient kind: -pars—portio-, -Mars- -Mors-, -farreum- ancient form for -horreum-, -Fabii- -Fovii-, -Valerius- -Volesus-, -vacuus- -vacivus-.
2. The —synoikismos— did not necessarily involve an actual settlement together at one spot; but while each resided as formerly on his own land, there was thenceforth only one council-hall and court-house for the whole (Thucyd. ii. 15; Herodot. i. 170).
3. We might even, looking to the Attic —trittus— and the Umbrian -trifo-, raise the question whether a triple division of the community was not a fundamental principle of the Graeco-ltalians: in that case the triple division of the Roman community would not be referable to the amalgamation of several once independent tribes. But, in order to the establishment of a hypothesis so much at variance with tradition, such a threefold division would require to present itself more generally throughout the Graeco-Italian field than seems to be the case, and to appear uniformly everywhere as the ground-scheme. The Umbrians may possibly have adopted the word -tribus- only when they came under the influence of Roman rule; it cannot with certainty be traced in Oscan.
4. Although the older opinion, that Latin is to be viewed as a mixed language made up of Greek and non-Greek elements, has been now abandoned on all sides, judicious inquirers even (e. g. Schwegler, R. G. i. 184, 193) still seek to discover in Latin a mixture of two nearly related Italian dialects. But we ask in vain for the linguistic or historical facts which render such an hypothesis necessary. When a language presents the appearance of being an intermediate link between two others, every philologist knows that the phenomenon may quite as probably depend, and more frequently does depend, on organic development than on external intermixture.
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.
Moreover, the Lupercus of the former college is called in inscriptions (Orelli, 2253) -Lupercus Quinctialis vetus-; and the -praenomen-Kaeso, which was most probably connected with the Lupercal worship (see Rom. Forschungen, i. 17), is found exclusively among the Quinctii and Fabii: the form commonly occurring in authors, -Lupercus Quinctilius- and -Quinctilianus-, is therefore a misnomer, and the college belonged not to the comparatively recent Quinctilii, but to the far older Quinctii. When, again, the Quinctii (Liv. i. 30), or Quinctilii (Dion. iii. 29), are named among the Alban clans, the latter reading is here to be preferred, and the Quinctii are to be regarded rather as an old Roman -gens-.
6. Although the name “Hill of Quirinus” was afterwards ordinarily used to designate the height where the Hill-Romans had their abode, we need not at all on that account regard the name “Quirites” as having been originally reserved for the burgesses on the Quirinal. For, as has been shown, all the earliest indications point, as regards these, to the name -Collini-; while it is indisputably certain that the name Quirites denoted from the first, as well as subsequently, simply the full burgess, and had no connection with the distinction between montani and collini (comp. chap. v. infra). The later designation of the Quirinal rests on the circumstance that, while the -Mars quirinus-, the spear-bearing god of Death, was originally worshipped as well on the Palatine as on the Quirinal—as indeed the oldest inscriptions found at what was afterwards called the Temple of Quirinus designate this divinity simply as Mars,—at a later period for the sake of distinction the god of the Mount-Romans more especially was called Mars, the god of the Hill Romans more especially Quirinus.
When the Quirinal is called -collis agonalis-, “hill of sacrifice,” it is so designated merely as the centre of the religious rites of the Hill-Romans.
7. The evidence alleged for this (comp. e. g. Schwegler, S. G. i. 480) mainly rests on an etymologico-historical hypothesis started by Varro and as usual unanimously echoed by later writers, that the Latin -quiris- and -quirinus- are akin to the name of the Sabine town -Cures-, and that the Quirinal hill accordingly had been peopled from -Cures-. Even if the linguistic affinity of these words were more assured, there would be little warrant for deducing from it such a historical inference. That the old sanctuaries on this eminence (where, besides, there was also a “Collis Latiaris”) were Sabine, has been asserted, but has not been proved. Mars quirinus, Sol, Salus, Flora, Semo Sancus or Deus fidius were doubtless Sabine, but they were also Latin, divinities, formed evidently during the epoch when Latins and Sabines still lived undivided. If a name like that of Semo Sancus (which moreover occurs in connection with the Tiber-island) is especially associated with the sacred places of the Quirinal which afterwards diminished in its importance (comp. the Porta Sanqualis deriving its name therefrom), every unbiassed inquirer will recognize in such a circumstance only a proof of the high antiquity of that worship, not a proof of its derivation from a neighbouring land. In so speaking we do not mean to deny that it is possible that old distinctions of race may have co-operated in producing this state of things; but if such was the case, they have, so far as we are concerned, totally disappeared, and the views current among our contemporaries as to the Sabine element in the constitution of Rome are only fitted seriously to warn us against such baseless speculations leading to no result.
The Original Constitution of Rome
Father and mother, sons and daughters, home and homestead, servants and chattels—such are the natural elements constituting the household in all cases, where polygamy has not obliterated the distinctive position of the mother. But the nations that have been most susceptible of culture have diverged widely from each other in their conception and treatment of the natural distinctions which the household thus presents. By some they have been apprehended and wrought out more profoundly, by others more superficially; by some more under their moral, by others more under their legal aspects. None has equalled the Roman in the simple but inexorable embodiment in law of the principles pointed out by nature herself.
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.
In a legal point of view, however, the family was absolutely guided and governed by the single all-powerful will of the “father of the household” (-pater familias-). In relation to him all in the household were destitute of legal rights—the wife and the child no less than the bullock or the slave. As the virgin became by the free choice of her husband his wedded wife, so it rested with his own free will to rear or not to rear the child which she bore to him. This maxim was not suggested by indifference to the possession of a family; on the contrary, the conviction that the founding of a house and the begetting of children were a moral necessity and a public duty had a deep and earnest hold of the Roman mind. Perhaps the only instance of support accorded on the part of the community in Rome is the enactment that aid should be given to the father who had three children presented to him at a birth; while their ideas regarding exposure are indicated by the prohibition of it so far as concerned all the sons—deformed births excepted—and at least the first daughter. Injurious, however, to the public weal as exposure might appear, the prohibition of it soon changed its form from that of legal punishment into that of religious curse; for the father was, above all, thoroughly and absolutely master in his household. The father of the household not only maintained the strictest discipline over its members, but he had the right and duty of exercising judicial authority over them and of punishing them as he deemed fit in life and limb. The grown-up son might establish a separate household or, as the Romans expressed it, maintain his “own cattle” (-peculium-) assigned to him by his father; but in law all that the son acquired, whether by his own labour or by gift from a stranger, whether in his father’s household or in his own, remained the father’s property. So long as the father lived, the persons legally subject to him could never hold property of their own, and therefore could not alienate unless by him so empowered, or yet bequeath. In this respect wife and child stood quite on the same level with the slave, who was not unfrequently allowed to manage a household of his own, and who was likewise entitled to alienate when commissioned by his master. Indeed a father might convey his son as well as his slave in property to a third person: if the purchaser was a foreigner, the son became his slave; if he was a Roman, the son, while as a Roman he could not become a Roman’s slave, stood at least to his purchaser in a slave’s stead (-in mancipii causa-). The paternal and marital power was subject to a legal restriction, besides the one already mentioned on the right Of exposure, only in so far as some of the worst abuses were visited by legal punishment as well as by religious curse. Thus these penalties fell upon the man who sold his wife or married son; and it was a matter of family usage that in the exercise of domestic jurisdiction the father, and still more the husband, should not pronounce sentence on child or wife without having previously consulted the nearest blood-relatives, his wife’s as well as his own. But the latter arrangement involved no legal diminution of power, for the blood-relatives called in to the domestic judgment had not to judge, but simply to advise the father of the household in judging.
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.
Closely, however, as the power of the master of the household over wife and child approximated to his proprietary power over slaves and cattle, the members of the family were nevertheless separated by a broad line of distinction, not merely in fact but in law, from the family property. The power of the house-master—even apart from the fact that it appeared in operation only within the house—was of a transient, and in some degree of a representative, character. Wife and child did not exist merely for the house-father’s sake in the sense in which property exists only for the proprietor, or in which the subjects of an absolute state exist only for the king; they were the objects indeed of a legal right on his part, but they had at the same time capacities of right of their own; they were not things, but persons. Their rights were dormant in respect of exercise, simply because the unity of the household demanded that it should be governed by a single representative; but when the master of the household died, his sons at once came forward as its masters and now obtained on their own account over the women and children and property the rights hitherto exercised over these by the father. On the other hand the death of the master occasioned no change in the legal position of the slave.
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.”
To these strictly closed unities—the family or household united under the control of a living master, and the clan which originated out of the breaking-up of such households—there further belonged the dependents or “listeners” (-clientes-, from -cluere-). This term denoted not the guests, that is, the members of other similar circles who were temporarily sojourning in another household than their own, and as little the slaves, who were looked upon in law as the property of the household and not as members of it, but those individuals who, while they were not free burgesses of any commonwealth, yet lived within one in a condition of protected freedom. These included refugees who had found a reception
On this Roman household was based the Roman state, as respected both its constituent elements and its form. The community of the Roman people arose out of the junction (in whatever way brought about) of such ancient clanships as the Romilii, Voltinii, Fabii, etc.; the Roman domain comprehended the united lands of those clans.(3) Whoever belonged to one of these clans was a burgess of Rome. Every marriage concluded in the usual forms within this circle was valid as a true Roman marriage, and conferred burgess-rights on the children begotten of it. Whoever was begotten in an illegal marriage, or out of marriage, was excluded from the membership of the community. On this account the Roman burgesses assumed the name of the “father’s children” (-patricii-), inasmuch as they alone in the eye of the law had a father. The clans with all the families that they contained were incorporated with the state just as they stood. The spheres of the household and the clan continued to subsist within the state; but the position which a man held in these
As the clans resting upon a family basis were the constituent elements of the state, so the form of the body-politic was modelled after the family both generally and in detail. The household was provided by nature herself with a head in the person of the father with whom it originated, and with whom it perished. But in the community of the people, which was designed to be imperishable, there was no natural master; not at least in that of Rome, which was composed of free and equal husbandmen and could not boast of a nobility by the grace of God. Accordingly one from its own ranks became its “leader” (-rex-) and lord in the household of the Roman community; as indeed at a later period there were to be found in or near to his dwelling the always blazing hearth and the well-barred store-chamber of the community, the Roman Vestas and the Roman Penates—indications of the visible unity of that supreme household which included all Rome. The regal office began at once and by right, when the position had become vacant and the successor had been designated; but the community did not owe full obedience to the king until he had convoked the assembly of freemen capable of bearing arms and had formally challenged its allegiance. Then he possessed in its entireness that power over the community which belonged to the house-father in his household; and, like him, he ruled for life. He held intercourse with the gods of the community, whom he consulted and appeased (-auspicia publica-), and he nominated all the priests and priestesses. The agreements which he concluded in name of the community with foreigners were binding upon the whole people; although in other instances no member of the community was bound by an agreement with a non-member. His “command” (-imperium-) was all-powerful in peace and in war, on which account “messengers” (-lictores-, from -licere-, to summon) preceded him with axes and rods on all occasions when he appeared
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.
This unity of the Roman people, represented in the field of religion by the Roman Diovis, was in the field of law represented by the prince, and therefore his costume was the same as that of the supreme god; the chariot even in the city, where every one else went on foot, the ivory sceptre with the eagle, the vermilion-painted face, the chaplet of oaken leaves in gold, belonged alike to the Roman god and to the Roman king. It would be a great error, however, to regard the Roman constitution on that account as a theocracy: among the Italians the ideas of god and king never faded away into each other, as they did in Egypt and the East. The king was not the god of the people; it were much more correct to designate him as the proprietor of the state. Accordingly the Romans knew nothing of special divine grace granted to a particular family, or of any other sort of mystical charm by which a king should be made of different stuff from other men: noble descent and relationship with earlier rulers were recommendations, but were not necessary conditions; the office might be lawfully filled by any Roman come to years of discretion and sound in body and mind.(4) The king was thus simply an ordinary burgess, whom merit or fortune, and the primary necessity of having one as master in every house, had placed as master over his equals—a husbandman set over husbandmen, a warrior set over warriors. As the son absolutely obeyed his father and yet did not esteem himself inferior, so the burgess submitted to his ruler without precisely accounting him his better. This constituted the moral and practical limitation of the regal power. The king might, it is true, do much that was inconsistent with equity without exactly breaking the law of the land: he might diminish his fellow-combatants’ share of the spoil; he might impose exorbitant task-works or otherwise by his imposts unreasonably encroach upon the property of the burgess; but if he did so, he forgot that his plenary power came not from God, but under God’s consent from the people, whose representative he was; and who was there to protect him, if the people should in return forget the oath of allegiance which they had sworn? The legal limitation, again, of the king’s power lay in the principle that he was entitled only to execute the law, not to alterit. Every deviation from the law had to receive the previous approval of the assembly of the people and the council of elders; if it was not so approved, it was a null and tyrannical act carrying no legal effect. Thus the power of the king in Rome was, both morally and legally, at bottom altogether different from the sovereignty of the present day; and there is no counterpart at all in modern life either to the Roman household or to the Roman state.
The division of the body of burgesses was based on the “wardship,” -curia- (probably related to -curare- = -coerare-, —koiranos—); ten wardships formed the community; every wardship furnished a hundred men to the infantry (hence -mil-es-, like -equ-es-, the thousand-walker), ten horsemen and ten councillors. When communities combined, each of course appeared as a part (-tribus-) of the whole community (-tota-in Umbrian and Oscan), and the original unit became multiplied by the number of such parts. This division had reference primarily to the personal composition of the burgess-body, but it was applied also to the domain so far as the latter was apportioned at all. That the curies had their lands as well as the tribes, admits of the less doubt, since among the few names of the Roman curies that have been handed down to us we find along with some apparently derived from -gentes-, e. g. -Faucia-, others certainly of local origin, e. g. -Veliensis-; each one of them embraced, in this primitive period of joint possession of land, a number of clan-lands, of which we have already spoken.(5)
We find this constitution under its simplest form(6) in the scheme of the Latin or burgess communities that subsequently sprang up under the influence of Rome; these had uniformly the number of a hundred councillors (-centumviri-). But the same normal numbers make their appearance throughout in the earliest tradition regarding the tripartite Rome, which assigns to it thirty curies, three hundred horsemen, three hundred senators, three thousand foot-soldiers.
Nothing is more certain than that this earliest constitutional scheme did not originate in Rome; it was a primitive institution common to all the Latins, and perhaps reached back to a period anterior to the separation of the stocks. The Roman constitutional tradition quite deserving of credit in such matters, while it accounts historically for the other divisions of the burgesses, makes the division into curies alone originate with the origin of the city; and in entire harmony with that view not only does the curial constitution present itself in Rome, but in the recently discovered scheme of the organization of the Latin communities it appears as an essential part of the Latin municipal system.
The essence of this scheme was, and remained, the distribution into curies. The tribes ("parts”) cannot have been an element of essential importance for the simple reason that their occurrence at all was, not less than their number, the result of accident; where there were tribes, they certainly had no other significance than that of preserving the remembrance of an epoch when such “parts” had themselves been wholes.(7) There is no tradition that the individual tribes had special presiding magistrates or special assemblies of their own; and it is highly probable that in the interest of the unity of the commonwealth the tribes which had joined together to form it were
Sternly defined as was the contrast between burgess and non-burgess, the equality of rights within the burgess-body was complete. No people has ever perhaps equalled that of Rome in the inexorable rigour with which it has carried out these principles, the one as fully as the other. The strictness of the Roman distinction between burgesses and non-burgesses is nowhere perhaps brought out with such clearness as in the treatment of the primitive institution of honorary citizenship, which was originally designed to mediate between the two. When a stranger was, by resolution of the community, adopted into the circle of the burgesses, he might surrender his previous citizenship, in which case he passed over wholly into the new community; but he might also combine his former citizenship with that which had just been granted to him. Such was the primitive custom, and such it always remained in Hellas, where in later ages the same person not unfrequently held the freedom of several communities at the same time. But
The maintenance of the state economy devolved, of course, upon the burgesses. The most important function of the burgess was his service in the army; for the burgesses had the right and duty of bearing arms. The burgesses were at the same time the “body of warriors” (-populus-, related to -populari-, to lay waste): in the old litanies it is upon the “spear-armed body of warriors” (-pilumnus poplus-) that the blessing of Mars is invoked; and even the designation with which the king addresses them, that of Quirites,(9) is taken as signifying “warrior.” We have already stated how the army of aggression, the “gathering” (-legio-), was formed. In the tripartite Roman community it consisted of three “hundreds” (-centuriae-) of horsemen (-celeres-, “the swift,” or -flexuntes-, “the wheelers”) under the three leaders-of-division of the horsemen (-tribuni celerum-)(10) and three “thousands” of footmen (-milties-) under the three leaders-of-division of the infantry (-tribuni militum-), the latter were probably from the first the flower of the general levy. To these there may perhaps have been added a number of light-armed men, archers especially, fighting outside of the ranks.(11) The general was regularly the king himself. Besides service in war, other personal burdens might devolve upon the burgesses; such as the obligation of undertaking the king’s commissions in peace and in war,(12) and the task-work of tilling the king’s lands or of constructing public buildings. How heavily in particular the burden of building the walls of the city pressed upon the community, is evidenced by the fact that the ring-walls retained the name of “tasks” (-moenia-). There was no regular direct taxation, nor was there any direct regular expenditure on the part of the state. Taxation was not needed for defraying the burdens of the community, since the state gave no recompense for serving in the army, for task-work, or for public service generally; so far as there was any such recompense at all, it was given to the person who performed the service either by the district primarily concerned in it, or by the person who could not or would not himself serve. The victims needed for the public service of the gods were procured by a tax on actions at law; the defeated party in an ordinary process paid down to the state a cattle-fine (-sacramentum-) proportioned to the value of the object in dispute. There is no mention of any regular presents to the king on the part of the burgesses. On the other hand there flowed into the royal coffers the port-duties,(13) as well as the income from the domains—in particular, the pasture tribute (-scriptura-) from the cattle driven out upon the common pasture, and the quotas of produce (-vectigalia-) which those enjoying the use of the lands of the state had to pay instead of rent. To this was added the produce of cattle-fines and confiscations and the gains of war. In cases of need a contribution (-tributum-) was imposed, which was looked upon, however, as a forced loan and was repaid when the times improved; whether it fell upon the burgesses generally, or only upon the —metoeci—, cannot be determined; the latter supposition is, however, the more probable.
The king managed the finances. The property of the state, however, was not identified with the private property of the king; which, judging from the statements regarding the extensive landed possessions of the last Roman royal house, the Tarquins, must have been considerable. The ground won by arms, in particular, appears to have been constantly regarded as property of the state. Whether and how far the king was restricted by use and wont in the administration of the public property, can no longer be ascertained; only the subsequent course of things shows that the burgesses can never have been consulted regarding it, whereas it was probably the custom to consult the senate in the imposition of the -tributum- and in the distribution of the lands won in war.
The Roman burgesses, however, do not merely come into view as furnishing contributions and rendering service; they also bore a part in the public government. For this purpose all the members of the community (with the exception of the women, and the children still incapable of bearing arms)—in other words, the “spearmen” (-quirites-) as in addressing them they were designated—assembled at the seat of justice, when the king convoked them for the purpose of making a communication (-conventio-, -contio-) or formally bade them meet (-comitia-) for the third week (-in trinum noundinum-), to consult them by curies. He appointed such formal assemblies of the community to be held regularly twice a year, on the 24th of March and the 24th of May, and as often besides as seemed to him necessary. The burgesses, however, were always summoned not to speak, but to hear; not to ask questions, but to answer. No one spoke in the assembly but the king, or he to whom the king saw fit to grant liberty of speech; and the speaking of the burgesses consisted of a simple answer to the question of the king, without discussion, without reasons, without conditions, without breaking up the question even into parts. Nevertheless the Roman burgess-community, like the Germanic and not improbably the primitive Indo-Germanic communities in general, was the real and ultimate basis of the political idea of sovereignty. But in the ordinary course of things this sovereignty was dormant, or only had its expression in the fact that the burgess-body voluntarily bound itself to render allegiance to its president. For that purpose the king, after he had entered on his office, addressed to the assembled curies the question whether they would be true and loyal to him and would according to use and wont acknowledge himself as well as his messengers (-lictores-); a question, which undoubtedly might no more be answered in the negative than the parallel homage in the case of a hereditary monarchy might be refused.
It was in thorough consistency with constitutional principles that the burgesses, just as being the sovereign power, should not on ordinary occasions take part in the course of public business. So long as public action was confined to the carrying into execution of the existing legal arrangements, the power which was, properly speaking, sovereign in the state could not and might not interfere: the laws governed, not the lawgiver. But it was different where a change of the existing legal arrangements or even a mere deviation from them in a particular case was necessary; and here accordingly, under the Roman constitution, the burgesses emerge without exception as actors; so that each act of the sovereign authority is accomplished by the co-operation of the burgesses and the king or -interrex-. As the legal relation between ruler and ruled was itself sanctioned after the manner of a contract by oral question and answer, so every sovereign act of the community was accomplished by means of a question (-rogatio-), which the king addressed to the burgesses, and to which the majority of the curies gave an affirmative answer. In this case their consent might undoubtedly be refused. Among the Romans, therefore, law was not primarily, as we conceive it, a command addressed by the sovereign to the whole members of the community, but primarily a contract concluded between the constitutive powers of the state by address and counter-address.(14) Such a legislative contract was -de jure- requisite in all cases which involved a deviation from the ordinary consistency of the legal system. In the ordinary course of law any one might without restriction give away his property to whom he would, but only upon condition of its immediate transfer: that the property should continue for the time being with the owner, and at his death pass over to another, was a legal impossibility—unless the community should allow it; a permission which in this case the burgesses could grant not only when assembled in their curies, but also when drawn up for battle. This was the origin of testaments. In the ordinary course of law the freeman could not lose or surrender the inalienable blessing of freedom, and therefore one who was subject to no housemaster could not subject himself to another in the place of a son—unless the community should grant him leave to do so. This was the -abrogatio-. In the ordinary course of law burgess-rights could only be acquired by birth and could never be lost—unless the community should confer the patriciate or allow its surrender; neither of which acts, doubtless, could be validly done originally without a decree of the curies. In the ordinary course of law the criminal whose crime deserved death, when once the king or his deputy had pronounced sentence according to judgment and justice, was inexorably executed; for the king could only judge, not pardon—unless the condemned burgess appealed to the mercy of the community and the judge
But by the side of the king and of the burgess-assembly there appears in the earliest constitution of the community a third original power, not destined for acting like the former or for resolving like the latter, and yet co-ordinate with both and within its own rightful sphere placed over both. This was the council of elders or -senatus-. Beyond doubt it had its origin in the clan-constitution: the old tradition that in the original Rome the senate was composed of all the heads of households is correct in state-law to this extent, that each of the clans of the later Rome which had not merely migrated thither at a more recent date referred its origin to one of those household-fathers of the primitive city as its ancestor and patriarch. If, as is probable, there was once in Rome or at any rate in Latium a time when, like the state itself, each of its ultimate constituents, that is to say each clan, had virtually a monarchical organization and was under the rule of an elder—whether raised to that position by the choice of the clansmen or of his predecessor, or in virtue of hereditary succession—the senate of that time was nothing but the collective body of these clan-elders, and accordingly an institution independent of the king and of the burgess-assembly; in contradistinction to
Prerogatives of the Senate. The -Interregnum-
The prerogatives of this council of elders were based on the view that the rule over the community composed of clans rightfully belonged to the collective clan-elders, although in accordance with the monarchical principle of the Romans, which already found so stern an expression in the household, that rule could only be exercised for the time being by one of these elders, namely the king. Every member of the senate accordingly was as such, not in practice but in prerogative, likewise king of the community; and therefore his insignia, though inferior to those of the king, were of a similar character: he wore the red shoe like the king; only that of the king was higher and more handsome than that of the senator. On this ground, moreover, as was already mentioned, the royal power in the Roman community could never be left vacant When the king died, the elders at once took his place and exercised the prerogatives of regal power. According to the immutable principle however that only one can be master at a time, even now it was only one of them that ruled, and such an “interim king” (-interrex-) was distinguished from the king nominated for life simply in respect to the duration, not in respect to the plenitude, of his authority. The duration of the office of -interrex- was fixed for the individual holders at not more than five days; it circulated accordingly among the senators on the footing that, until the royal office was again permanently filled up, the temporary holder at the expiry of that term nominated a successor to himself, likewise for five days, agreeably to the order of succession fixed by lot. There was not, as may readily be conceived, any declaration of allegiance to the -interrex- on the part of the community. Nevertheless the -interrex-was entitled and bound not merely to perform all the official acts otherwise pertaining to the king, but even to nominate a king for life— with the single exception, that this latter right was not vested in the first who held the office, presumably because the first was regarded as defectively appointed inasmuch as he was not nominated by his predecessor. Thus this assembly of elders was the ultimate holder of the ruling power (-imperium-) and the divine protection (-auspicia-) of the Roman commonwealth, and furnished the guarantee for the uninterrupted continuance of that commonwealth and of its monarchical—though not hereditarily monarchical—organization. If therefore this senate subsequently seemed to the Greeks to be an assembly of kings, this was only what was to be expected; it had in fact been such originally.
The Senate and the Resolutions of the Community: -Patrum Auctoritas-
But it was not merely in so far as the idea of a perpetual kingdom found its living expression in this assembly, that it was an essential member of the Roman constitution. The council of elders, indeed, had no title to interfere with the official functions of the king. The latter doubtless, in the event of his being unable personally to lead the army or to decide a legal dispute, took his deputies at all times from the senate; for which reason subsequently the highest posts of command were regularly bestowed on senators alone, and senators were likewise employed by preference as jurymen. But the senate, in its collective capacity, was never consulted in the leading of the army or in the administration of justice; and therefore there was no right of military command and no jurisdiction vested in the senate of the later Rome. On the other hand the council of elders was held as called to the guardianship of the existing constitution against encroachments by the king and the burgesses. On the senate devolved the duty of examining every resolution adopted by the burgesses at the suggestion of the king, and of refusing to confirm it if it seemed to violate existing rights; or, which was the same thing, in all cases where a resolution of the community was constitutionally requisite—as on every alteration of the constitution, on the reception of new burgesses, on the declaration of an aggressive war—the council of elders had a right of veto. This may not indeed be regarded in the light of legislation pertaining jointly to the burgesses and the senate, somewhat in the same way as to the two chambers in the constitutional state of the present day; the senate was not so much law-maker as law-guardian, and could only cancel a decree when the community seemed to have exceeded its competence—to have violated by its decree existing obligations towards the gods or towards foreign states or organic institutions of the community. But still it was a matter of the greatest importance that—to take an example—when the Roman king had proposed a declaration of war and the burgesses had converted it into a decree, and when the satisfaction which the foreign community seemed bound to furnish had been demanded in vain, the Roman envoy invoked the gods as witnesses of the wrong and concluded with the words, “But on these matters we shall consult the elders at home how we may obtain our rights;” it was only when the council of elders had declared its consent, that the war now decreed by the burgesses and approved by the senate was formally declared. Certainly it was neither the design nor the effect of this rule to occasion a constant interference of the senate with the resolutions of the burgesses, and by such guardianship to divest them of their sovereign power; but, as in the event of a vacancy in the supreme office the senate secured the continuance of the constitution, we find it here also as the shield of legal order in opposition even to the supreme power—the community.
With this arrangement was probably connected the apparently very ancient usage, in virtue of which the king previously submitted to the senate the proposals that were to be brought before the burgesses, and caused all its members one after another to give their opinion on the subject. As the senate had the right of cancelling the resolution adopted, it was natural for the king to assure himself beforehand that no opposition was to be apprehended from that quarter; as indeed in general, on the one hand, it was in accordance with Roman habits not to decide matters of importance without having taken counsel with other men, and on the other hand the senate was called, in virtue of its very composition, to act as a state-council to the ruler of the community. It was from this usage of giving counsel, far more than from the prerogatives which we have previously described, that the subsequent extensive powers of the senate were developed; but it was in its origin insignificant and really amounted only to the prerogative of the senators to answer, when they were asked a question. It may have been usual to ask the previous opinion of the senate in affairs of importance which were neither judicial nor military, as, for instance—apart from the proposals to be submitted to the assembly of the people—in the imposition of task-works and taxes, in the summoning of the burgesses to war-service, and in the disposal of the conquered territory; but such a previous consultation, though usual, was not legally necessary. The king convoked the senate when he pleased, and laid before it his questions; no senator might declare his opinion unasked, still less might the senate meet without being summoned, except in the single case of its meeting on occasion of a vacancy to settle the order of succession in the office of -interrex-. That the king was moreover at liberty to call in and consult other men whom he trusted alongside of, and at the same time with, the senators, is in a high degree probable. The advice, accordingly, was not a command; the king might omit to comply with it, while the senate had no other means for giving practical effect to its views except the already-mentioned right of cassation, which was far from being universally applicable. “I have chosen you, not that ye may be my guides, but that ye may do my bidding:” these words, which a later author puts into the mouth of king Romulus, certainly express with substantial correctness the position of the senate in this respect.
Let us now sum up the results. Sovereignty, as conceived by the Romans, was inherent in the community of burgesses; but the burgess-body was never entitled to act alone, and was only entitled to co-operate in action, when there was to be a departure from existing rules. By its side stood the assembly of the elders of the community appointed for life, virtually a college of magistrates with regal power, called in the event of a vacancy in the royal office to administer it by means of their own members until it should be once more definitively filled, and entitled to overturn the illegal decrees of the community. The royal power itself was, as Sallust says, at once absolute and limited by the laws (-imperium legitimum-); absolute, in so far as the king’s command, whether righteous or not, must in the first instance be unconditionally obeyed; limited, in so far as a command contravening established usage and not sanctioned by the true sovereign—the people—carried no permanent legal consequences. The oldest constitution of Rome was thus in some measure constitutional monarchy inverted. In that form of government the king is regarded as the possessor and vehicle of the plenary power of the state, and accordingly acts of grace, for example, proceed solely from him, while the administration of the state belongs to the representatives of the people and to the executive responsible to them. In the Roman constitution the community of the people exercised very much the same functions as belong to the king in England: the right of pardon, which in England is a prerogative of the crown, was in Rome a prerogative of the community; while all government was vested in the president of the state.
If, in conclusion, we inquire as to the relation of the state itself to its individual members, we find the Roman polity equally remote from the laxity of a mere defensive combination and from the modern idea of an absolute omnipotence of the state. The community doubtless exercised power over the person of the burgess in the imposition of public burdens, and in the punishment of offences and crimes; but any special law inflicting, or threatening to inflict, punishment on an individual on account of acts not universally recognized as penal always appeared to the Romans, even when there was no flaw in point of form, an arbitrary and unjust proceeding. Far more restricted still was the power of the community in respect of the rights of property and the rights of family which were coincident, rather than merely connected, with these; in Rome the household was not absolutely annihilated and the community aggrandized at its expense, as was the case in the police organization of Lycurgus. It was one of the most undeniable as well as one of the most remarkable principles of the primitive constitution of Rome, that the state might imprison or hang the burgess, but might not take away from him his son or his field or even lay permanent taxation on him. In these and similar things
These were the principles on which the community of Rome governed itself—a free people, understanding the duty of obedience, clearly disowning all mystical priestly delusion, absolutely equal in the eye of the law and one with another, bearing the sharply-defined impress of a nationality of their own, while at the same time (as will be afterwards shown) they wisely as well as magnanimously opened their gates wide for intercourse with other lands. This constitution was neither manufactured nor borrowed; it grew up amidst and along with the Roman people. It was based, of course, upon the earlier constitutions—the Italian, the Graeco-Italian, and the Indo-Germanic; but a long succession of phases of political development must have intervened between such constitutions as the poems of Homer and the Germania of Tacitus delineate and the oldest organization of the Roman community. In the acclamation of the Hellenic and in the shield-striking of the Germanic assemblies there was involved an expression of the sovereign power of the community; but a wide interval separated forms such as these from the organized jurisdiction and the regulated declaration of opinion of the Latin assembly of curies. It is possible, moreover, that as the Roman kings certainly borrowed the purple mantle and the ivory sceptre from the Greeks (not from the Etruscans), the twelve lictors also and various other external arrangements were introduced from abroad. But that the development of the Roman constitutional law belonged decidedly to Rome or, at any rate, to Latium, and that the borrowed elements in it are but small and unimportant, is clearly demonstrated by the fact that all its ideas are uniformly expressed by words of Latin coinage. This constitution practically established for all time the fundamental conceptions of the Roman state; for, as long as there existed a Roman community, in spite of changes of form it was always held that the magistrate had absolute command, that the council of elders was the highest authority in the state, and that every exceptional resolution required the sanction of the sovereign or, in other words, of the community of the people.
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).
2. The following epitaph, although belonging to a much later period, is not unworthy to have a place here. It is the stone that speaks:—
-Hospes, quod deico, paullum est. Asta ac pellige. Heic est sepulcrum haud pulcrum pulcrai feminae, Nomen parentes nominarunt Claudiam, Suom mareitum corde dilexit sovo, Gnatos duos creavit, horunc alterum In terra linquit, alium sub terra locat; Sermone lepido, tum autem incessu commodo, Domum servavit, lanam fecit. Dixi. Abei.-
(Corp. Inscr. Lat. 1007.)
Still more characteristic, perhaps, is the introduction of wool-spinning among purely moral qualities; which is no very unusual occurrence in Roman epitaphs. Orelli, 4639: -optima et pulcherrima, lanifica pia pudica frugi casta domiseda-. Orelli, 4861: -modestia probitate pudicitia obsequio lanificio diligentia fide par similisque cetereis probeis femina fuit-. Epitaph of Turia, i. 30: domestica bona pudicitiae, opsequi, comitatis, facilitatis, lanificiis [tuis adsiduitatis, religionis] sine superstitione, ornatus non conspiciendi, cultus modici.
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
6. Even in Rome, where the simple constitution of ten curies otherwise early disappeared, we still discover one practical application of it, and that singularly enough in the very same formality which we have other reasons for regarding as the oldest of all those that are mentioned in our legal traditions, the -confarreatio-. It seems scarcely doubtful that the ten witnesses in that ceremony had the same relation to the constitution of ten curies the thirty lictors had to the constitution of thirty curies.
7. This is implied in their very name. The “part” (-tribus-) is, as jurists know, simply that which has once been or may hereafter come to be a whole, and so has no real standing of its own in the present.
8. I. II. Primitive Races of Italy
9. -Quiris-, -quiritis-, or -quirinus- is interpreted by the ancients as “lance-bearer,” from -quiris- or -curis- = lance and -ire-, and so far in their view agrees with -samnis-, -samnitis-and -sabinus-, which also among the ancients was derived from —saunion—, spear. This etymology, which associates the word with -arquites-, -milites-, -pedites-, -equites-, -velites- —those respectively who go with the bow, in bodies of a thousand, on foot, on horseback, without armour in their mere over-garment—may be incorrect, but it is bound up with the Roman conception of a burgess. So too Juno quiritis, (Mars) quirinus, Janus quirinus, are conceived as divinities that hurl the spear; and, employed in reference to men, -quiris- is the warrior, that is, the full burgess. With this view the -usus loquendi- coincides. Where the locality was to be referred to, “Quirites” was never used, but always “Rome” and “Romans” (-urbs Roma-, -populus-, -civis-, -ager Romanus-), because the term -quiris- had as little of a local meaning as -civis- or -miles-. For the same reason these designations could not be combined; they did not say -civis quiris-, because both denoted, though from different points of view, the same legal conception. On the other hand the solemn announcement of the funeral of a burgess ran in the words “this warrior has departed in death” (-ollus quiris leto datus-); and in like manner the king addressed the assembled community by this name, and, when he sat in judgment, gave sentence according to the law of the warrior-freemen (-ex iure quiritium-, quite similar to the later -ex iure civili-). The phrase -populus Romanus-, -quirites- (-populus Romanus quiritium-is not sufficiently attested), thus means “the community and the individual burgesses,” and therefore in an old formula (Liv. i. 32) to the -populus Romanus- are opposed the -prisci Latini-, to the -quirites- the -homines prisci Latini- (Becker, Handb. ii. 20 seq.)
In the face of these facts nothing but ignorance of language and of history can still adhere to the idea that the Roman community was once confronted by a Quirite community of a similar kind, and that after their incorporation the name of the newly received community supplanted in ritual and legal phraseology that of the receiver.—Comp. iv. The Hill-Romans On The Quirinal, note.
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-
Of these-the only statements which are extant regarding the -tribuni celerum- —the last mentioned not only proceeds from late and quite untrustworthy authorities, but is inconsistent with the meaning of the term, which can only signify “divisional leaders of horsemen,” and above all the master of the horse of the republican period, who was nominated only on extraordinary occasions and was in later times no longer nominated at all, cannot possibly have been identical with the magistracy that was required for the annual festival of the 19th March and was consequently a standing office. Laying aside, as we necessarily must, the account of Pomponius, which has evidently arisen solely out of the anecdote of Brutus dressed up with ever-increasing ignorance as history, we reach the simple result that the -tribuni celerum- entirely correspond in number and character to the -tribuni militum-, and that they were the leaders-of-division of the horsemen, consequently quite distinct from the -magister equitum-.
11. This is indicated by the evidently very old forms -velites-and -arquites-and by the subsequent organization of the legion.
12. I. V. The King
13. I. IV. The Tibur and Its Traffic
14. -Lex- ("that which binds,” related to -legare-, “to bind to something”) denotes, as is well known, a contract in general, along, however, with the connotation of a contract whose terms the proposer dictates and the other party simply accepts or declines; as was usually the case, e. g. with public -licitationes-. In the -lex publica populi Romani- the proposer was the king, the acceptor the people; the limited co-operation of the latter was thus significantly indicated in the very language.
The Non-Burgesses and the Reformed Constitution
The history of every nation, and of Italy more especially, is a —synoikismos— on a great scale. Rome, in the earliest form in which we have any knowledge of it, was already triune, and similar incorporations only ceased when the spirit of Roman vigour had wholly died away. Apart from that primitive process of amalgamation of the Ramnes, Titles, and Luceres, of which hardly anything beyond the bare fact is known, the earliest act of incorporation of this sort was that by which the Hill-burgesses became merged in the Palatine Rome. The organization
This amalgamation of two substantially similar commonwealths produced rather an increase in the size than a change in the intrinsic character of the existing community. A second process of incorporation, which was carried out far more gradually and had far deeper effects, may be traced back, so far as the first steps in it are concerned, to this epoch; we refer to the amalgamation of the burgesses and the —metoeci—. At all times there existed side by side with the
In matters of marriage and inheritance, equality of rights with the burgesses was far sooner conceded to foreigners(3) than to those who were strictly non-free and belonged to no community; but the latter could not well be prohibited from contracting marriages in their own circle and from forming the legal relations arising out of marriage—those of marital and paternal power, of -agnatio- and -gentilitas- of heritage and of tutelage—after the model of the corresponding relations among the burgesses.
Similar consequences to some extent were produced by the exercise of the -ius hospitii-, in so far as by virtue of it foreigners settled permanently in Rome and established a domestic position there. In this respect the most liberal principles must have prevailed in Rome from primitive times. The Roman law knew no distinctions of quality in inheritance and no locking up of estates. It allowed on the one hand to every man capable of making a disposition the entirely unlimited disposal of his property during his lifetime; and on the other hand, so far as we know, to every one who was at all entitled to have dealings with Roman burgesses, even to the foreigner and the client, the unlimited right of acquiring moveable, and (from the time when immoveables could be held as private property at all) within certain limits also immoveable, estate in Rome. Rome was in fact a commercial city, which was indebted for the commencement of its importance to international commerce, and which with a noble liberality granted the privilege of settlement to every child of an unequal marriage, to every manumitted slave, and to every stranger who surrendering his rights in his native land emigrated to Rome.
At first, therefore, the burgesses were in reality the protectors, the non-burgesses were the protected; but in Rome as in all communities which freely admit settlement but do not throw open the rights of citizenship, it soon became a matter of increasing difficulty to harmonize this relation -de jure- with the actual state of things. The flourishing of commerce, the full equality of private rights guaranteed to all Latins by the Latin league (including even the acquisition of landed property), the greater frequency of manumissions as prosperity increased, necessarily occasioned even in peace a disproportionate increase of the number of —metoeci—. That number was further augmented by the greater part of the population of the neighbouring towns subdued by force of arms and incorporated with Rome; which, whether it removed to the city or remained in its old home now reduced to the rank of a village, ordinarily exchanged its native burgess-rights for those of a Roman —metoikos—. Moreover the burdens of war fell exclusively on the old burgesses and were constantly thinning the ranks of their patrician descendants, while the —metoeci— shared in the results of victory without having to pay for it with their blood.
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
Nevertheless the number of the —metoeci— was of necessity constantly on the increase and liable to no diminution, while that of the burgesses was at the utmost perhaps not decreasing; and in consequence the —metoeci— necessarily acquired by imperceptible degrees another and a freer position. The non-burgesses were no longer merely emancipated slaves or strangers needing protection; their ranks included the former burgesses of the Latin communities vanquished in war, and more especially the Latin settlers who lived in Rome not by the favour of the king or of any other burgess, but by federal right. Legally unrestricted in the acquiring of property, they gained money and estate in their new home, and bequeathed, like the burgesses, their homesteads to their children and children’s children. The vexatious relation of dependence on particular burgess-households became gradually relaxed. If the liberated slave or the immigrant stranger still held an entirely isolated position in the state, such was no longer the case with his children, still less with his grandchildren, and this very circumstance of itself rendered their relations to the patron of less moment. While in earlier times the client was exclusively left dependent for legal protection on the intervention of the patron, the more the state became consolidated and the importance of the clanships and households in consequence diminished, the more frequently must the individual client have obtained justice and redress of injury, even without the intervention of his patron, from the king. A great number of the non-burgesses, particularly the members of the dissolved Latin communities, had, as we have already said, probably from the outset not any place as clients of the royal or other great clans, and obeyed the king nearly in the same manner as did the burgesses. The king, whose sovereignty over the burgesses was in truth ultimately dependent on the good-will of those obeying, must have welcomed the means of forming out of his own -proteges- essentially dependent on him a body bound to him by closer ties.
Thus there grew up by the side of the burgesses a second community in Rome: out of the clients arose the Plebs. This change of name is significant. In law there was no difference between the client and the plebeian, the “dependent” and the “man of the multitude;” but in fact there was a very important one, for the former term brought into prominence the relation of dependence on a member of the politically privileged class; the latter suggested merely the want of political rights. As the feeling of special dependence diminished, that of political inferiority forced itself on the thoughts of the free —metoeci—; and it was only the sovereignty of the king ruling equally over all that prevented the outbreak of political conflict between the privileged and the non-privileged classes.
The first step, however, towards the amalgamation of the two portions of the people scarcely took place in the revolutionary way which their antagonism appeared to foreshadow. The reform of the constitution, which bears the name of king Servius Tullius, is indeed, as to its historical origin, involved in the same darkness with all the events of a period respecting which we learn whatever we know not by means of historical tradition, but solely by means of inference from the institutions of later times. But its character testifies that it cannot have been a change demanded by the plebeians, for the new constitution assigned to them duties alone, and not rights. It must rather have owed its origin either to the wisdom of one of the Roman kings, or to the urgency of the burgesses that they should be delivered from exclusive liability to burdens, and that the non-burgesses should be made to share on the one hand in taxation—that is, in the obligation to make advances to the state (the -tributum-)—and rendering task-work, and on the other hand in the levy. Both were comprehended in the Servian constitution, but they hardly took place at the same time. The bringing in of the non-burgesses presumably arose out of the economic burdens; these were early extended to such as were “possessed of means” (-locupletes-) or “settled people” (-adsidui-, freeholders), and only those wholly without means, the “children-producers” (-proletarii-, -capite censi-) remained free from them. Thereupon followed the politically more important step of bringing in the non-burgesses to military duty. This was thenceforth laid not upon the burgesses as such, but upon the possessors of land, the -tribules-, whether they might be burgesses or mere —metoeci—; service in the army was changed from a personal burden into a burden on property. The details of the arrangement were as follow.
Every freeholder from the eighteenth to the sixtieth year of his age, including children in the household of freeholder fathers, without distinction of birth, was under obligation of service, so that even the manumitted slave had to serve, if in an exceptional case he had come into possession of landed property. The Latins also possessing land—others from without were not allowed to acquire Roman soil—were called in to service, so far as they had, as was beyond doubt the case with most of them, taken up their abode on Roman territory. The body of men liable to serve was distributed, according to the size of their portions of land, into those bound to full service or the possessors of a full hide,(6) who were obliged to appear in complete armour and in so far formed pre-eminently the war army (-classis-), and the four following ranks of smaller landholders—the possessors respectively of three fourths, of a half, of a quarter, or of an eighth of a whole farm—from whom was required fulfilment of service, but not equipment in complete armour, and they thus had a position below the full rate (-infra classem-). As the land happened to be at that time apportioned, almost the half of the farms were full hides, while each of the classes possessing respectively three-fourths, the half, and the quarter of a hide, amounted to scarcely an eighth of the freeholders, and those again holding an eighth of a hide amounted to fully an eighth. It was accordingly laid down as a rule that in the case of the infantry the levy should be in the proportion of eighty holders of a full hide, twenty from each of the three next ranks, and twenty-eight from the last.
The cavalry was similarly dealt with. The number of divisions in it was tripled, and the only difference in this case was that the six divisions already existing with the old names (-Tities-, -Ramnes-, -Luceres- -primi- and -secundi-) were left to the patricians, while the twelve new divisions were formed chiefly from the non-burgesses. The reason for this difference is probably to be sought in the fact that at that period the infantry were formed anew for each campaign and discharged on their return home, whereas the cavalry with their horses were on military grounds kept together also in time of peace, and held their regular drills, which continued to subsist as festivals of the Roman equites down to the latest times.(7) Accordingly the squadrons once constituted were allowed, even under this reform, to keep their ancient names. In order to make the cavalry accessible to every burgess, the unmarried women and orphans under age, so far as they had possession of land, were bound instead of personal service to provide the horses for particular troopers (each trooper had two of them), and to furnish them with fodder. On the whole there was one horseman to nine foot-soldiers; but in actual service the horsemen were used more sparingly.
The non-freeholders (-adcensi-, people standing at the side of the list of those owing military service) had to supply the army with workmen and musicians as well as with a number of substitutes who marched with the army unarmed (-velati-), and, when vacancies occurred in the field, took their places in the ranks equipped with the weapons of the sick or of the fallen.
To facilitate the levying of the infantry, the city was distributed into four “parts” (-tribus-); by which the old triple division was superseded, at least so far as concerned its local significance. These were the Palatine, which comprehended the height of that name along with the Velia; the Suburan, to which the street so named, the Carinae, and the Caelian belonged; the Esquiline; and the Colline, formed by the Quirinal and Viminal, the “hills” as contrasted with the “mounts” of the Capitol and Palatine. We have already spoken of the formation of these regions(8) and shown how they originated out of the ancient double city of the Palatine and the Quirinal. By what process it came to pass that every freeholder burgess belonged to one of those city-districts, we cannot tell; but this was now the case; and that the four regions were nearly on an equality in point of numbers, is evident from their being equally drawn upon in the levy. This division, which had primary reference to the soil alone and applied only inferentially to those who possessed it, was merely for administrative purposes, and in particular never had any religious significance attached to it; for the fact that in each of the city-districts there were six chapels of the enigmatical Argei no more confers upon them the character of ritual districts than the erection of an altar to the Lares in each street implies such a character in the streets.
Each of these four levy-districts had to furnish approximately the fourth part not only of the force as a whole, but of each of its military subdivisions, so that each legion and each century numbered an equal proportion of conscripts from each region, in order to merge all distinctions of a gentile and local nature in the one common levy of the community and, especially through the powerful levelling influence of the military spirit, to blend the —metoeci— and the burgesses into one people.
In a military point of view, the male population capable of bearing arms was divided into a first and second levy, the former of which, the “juniors” from the commencement of the eighteenth to the completion of the forty-sixth year, were especially employed for service in the field, while the “seniors” guarded the walls at home. The military unit came to be in the infantry the now doubled legion(9)—a phalanx, arranged and armed completely in the old Doric style, of 6000 men who, six file deep, formed
This new organization of the army was accompanied by a more careful supervision of landed property on the part of the state. It was now either ordained for the first time or, if not, at any rate defined more carefully, that a land-register should be established, in which the several proprietors of land should have their fields with all their appurtenances, servitudes, slaves, beasts of draught and of burden, duly recorded. Every act of alienation, which did not take place publicly and before witnesses, was declared null; and a revision of the register of landed property, which was at the same time the levy-roll, was directed to be made every fourth year. The -mancipatio- and the -census- thus arose out of the Servian military organization.
It is evident at a glance that this whole institution was from the outset of a military nature. In the whole detailed scheme we do not encounter a single feature suggestive of any destination of the centuries to other than purely military purposes; and this alone must, with every one accustomed to consider such matters, form a sufficient reason for pronouncing its application to political objects a later innovation. If, as is probable, in the earliest period every one who had passed his sixtieth year was excluded from the centuries, this has no meaning, so far as they were intended from the first to form a representation of the burgess-community similar to and parallel with the curies. Although, however, the organization of the centuries was introduced merely to enlarge the military resources of the burgesses by the inclusion of the —metoeci— and, in so far, there is no greater error than to exhibit the Servian organization as the introduction of a timocracy in Rome—yet the new obligation imposed upon the inhabitants to bear arms exercised in its consequences a material influence on their political position. He who is obliged to become a soldier must also, so long as the state is not rotten, have it in his power to become an officer; beyond question plebeians also could now be nominated in Rome as centurions and as military tribunes. Although, moreover, the institution of the centuries was not intended to curtail the political privileges exclusively possessed by the burgesses as hitherto represented in the curies, yet it was inevitable that those rights, which the burgesses hitherto had exercised not as the assembly of curies, but as the burgess-levy, should pass over to the new centuries of burgesses and —metoeci—. Henceforward, accordingly, it was the centuries whose consent the king had to ask before beginning an aggressive war.(11) It is important, on account of the subsequent course of development, to note these first steps towards the centuries taking part in public affairs; but the centuries came to acquire such rights at first more in the way of natural sequence than of direct design, and subsequently to the Servian reform, as before, the assembly of the curies was regarded as the proper burgess-community, whose homage bound the whole people in allegiance to the king. By the side of these new landowning full-burgesses stood the domiciled foreigners from the allied Latium, as participating in the public burdens, tribute and task-works (hence -municipes-); while the burgesses not domiciled, who were beyond the pale of the tribes, and had not the right to serve in war and vote, came into view only as “owing tribute” (-aerarii-).
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
1. I. V. Dependents of the Household
2. -Habuit plebem in clientelas principium descriptam-. Cicero, de Rep. ii. 9.
3. I. III. The Latin League
4. The enactments of the Twelve Tables respecting -usus- show clearly that they found the civil marriage already in existence. In like manner the high antiquity of the civil marriage is clearly evident from the fact that it, equally with the religious marriage, necessarily involved the marital power (v. The House-father and His Household), and only differed from the religious marriage as respected the manner in which that power was acquired. The religious marriage itself was held as the proprietary and legally necessary form of acquiring a wife; whereas, in the case of civil marriage, one of the general forms of acquiring property used on other occasions—delivery on the part of a person entitled to give away, or prescription—was requisite in order to lay the foundation of a valid marital power.
5. I. V. The House-father and His Household.
6. -Hufe-, hide, as much as can be properly tilled with one plough, called in Scotland a plough-gate.
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).
8. I. IV. Oldest Settlements In the Palatine and Suburan Regions
9. I. V. Burdens of the Burgesses
10. -velites-, see v. Burdens of the Burgesses, note
11. I. V. Rights of the Burgesses
12. Even about 480, allotments of land of seven -jugera- appeared to those that received them small (Val. Max. iii. 3, 5; Colum. i, praef. 14; i. 3, ii; Plin. H. N. xviii. 3, 18: fourteen -jugera-, Victor, 33; Plutarch, Apophth. Reg. et Imp. p. 235 Dubner, in accordance with which Plutarch, Crass. 2, is to be corrected).
A comparison of the Germanic proportions gives the same result. The -jugerum- and the -morgen- [nearly 5/8 of an English acre], both originally measures rather of labour than of surface, may be looked upon as originally identical. As the German hide consisted ordinarily of 30, but not unfrequently of 20 or 40 -morgen-, and the homestead frequently, at least among the Anglo-Saxons, amounted to a tenth of the hide, it will appear, taking into account the diversity of climate and the size of the Roman -heredium- of 2 -jugera-, that the hypothesis of a Roman hide of 20 -jugera- is not unsuitable to the circumstances of the case. It is to be regretted certainly that on this very point tradition leaves us without precise information.
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.
The Hegemony of Rome in Latium
The brave and impassioned Italian race doubtless never lacked feuds among themselves and with their neighbours: as the country flourished and civilization advanced, feuds must have become gradually changed into war and raids for pillage into conquest, and political powers must have begun to assume shape. No Italian Homer, however, has preserved for us a picture of these earliest frays and plundering excursions, in which the character of nations is moulded and expressed like the mind of the man in the sports and enterprises of the boy; nor does historical tradition enable us to form a judgment, with even approximate accuracy, as to the outward development of power and the comparative resources of the several Latin cantons. It is only in the case of Rome, at the utmost, that we can trace in some degree the extension of its power and of its territory. The earliest demonstrable boundaries of the united Roman community have been already stated;(1) in the landward direction they were on an average just about five miles distant from the capital of the canton, and it was only toward the coast that they extended as far as the mouth of the Tiber (-Ostia-), at a distance of somewhat more than fourteen miles from Rome. “The new city,” says Strabo, in his description of the primitive Rome, “was surrounded by larger and smaller tribes, some of whom dwelt in independent villages and were not subordinate to any national union.” It seems to have been at the expense of these neighbours of kindred lineage in the first instance that the earliest extensions of the Roman territory took place.
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
It is not improbable, although wholly a matter of conjecture, that, at the same period when Rome was establishing herself on the Anio and on the Alban hills, Praeneste, which appears at a later date as mistress of eight neighbouring townships, Tibur, and others of the Latin communities were similarly occupied in enlarging their territory and laying the foundations of their subsequent far from inconsiderable power.
We feel the want of accurate information as to the legal character and legal effects of these early Latin conquests, still more than we miss the records of the wars in which they were won. Upon the whole it is not to be doubted that they were treated in accordance with the system of incorporation, out of which the tripartite community of Rome had arisen; excepting that the cantons who were compelled by arms to enter the combination did not, like the primitive three, preserve some sort of relative independence as separate regions in the new united community, but became so entirely merged in the general whole as to be no longer traced.(4) However far the power of a Latin canton might extend, in the earliest times it tolerated no political centre except the proper capital; and still less founded independent settlements, such as the Phoenicians and the Greeks established, thereby creating in their colonies clients for the time being and future rivals to the mother city. In this respect, the treatment which Ostia experienced from Rome deserves special notice: the Romans could not and did not wish to prevent the rise -de facto- of a town at that spot, but they allowed the place no political independence, and accordingly they did not bestow on those who settled
This centralizing process, by which several small communities became absorbed in a larger one, of course was far from being an idea specially Roman. Not only did the development of Latium and of the Sabellian stocks hinge upon the distinction between national centralization and cantonal independence; the case was the same with the development of the Hellenes. Rome in Latium and Athens in Attica arose out of a like amalgamation of many cantons into one state; and the wise Thales suggested a similar fusion to the hard-pressed league of the Ionic cities as the only means of saving their nationality. But Rome adhered to this principle of unity with more consistency, earnestness, and success than any other Italian canton; and just as the prominent position of Athens in Hellas was the effect of her early centralization, so Rome was indebted for her greatness solely to the same system, in her case far more energetically applied,
While the conquests of Rome in Latium may be mainly regarded as direct extensions of her territory and people presenting the same general features, a further and special significance attached to the conquest of Alba. It was not merely the problematical size and presumed riches of Alba that led tradition to assign a prominence so peculiar to its capture. Alba was regarded as the metropolis of the Latin confederacy, and had the right of presiding among the thirty communities that belonged to it. The destruction of Alba, of course, no more dissolved the league itself than the destruction of Thebes dissolved the Boeotian confederacy;(7) but, in entire consistency with the strict application of the -ius privatum- which was characteristic of the Latin laws of war, Rome now claimed the presidency of the league as the heir-at-law of Alba. What sort of crises, if any, preceded or followed the acknowledgment of this claim, we cannot tell. Upon the whole the hegemony of Rome over Latium appears to have been speedily and generally recognized, although particular communities, such as Labici and above all Gabii, may for a time have declined to own it. Even at that time Rome was probably a maritime power in contrast to the Latin “land,” a city in contrast to the Latin villages, and a single state in contrast to the Latin confederacy; even at that time it was only in conjunction with and by means of Rome that the Latins could defend their coasts against Carthaginians, Hellenes, and Etruscans, and maintain and extend their landward frontier in opposition to their restless neighbours of the Sabellian stock. Whether the accession to her material resources which Rome obtained by the subjugation of Alba was greater than the increase of her power obtained by the capture of Antemnae or Collatia, cannot be ascertained: it is quite possible that it was not by the conquest of Alba that Rome was first constituted the most powerful community in Latium; she may have been so long before; but she did gain in consequence of that event the presidency at the Latin festival, which became the basis of the future hegemony of the Roman community over the whole Latin confederacy. It is important to indicate as definitely as possible the nature of a relation so influential.
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
In constitution and administration the several communities not only remained independent and sovereign, so far as the federal obligations did not interfere, but, what was of more importance, the league of the thirty communities as such retained its autonomy in contradistinction to Rome. When we are assured that the position of Alba towards the federal communities was a position superior to that of Rome, and that on the fall of Alba these communities attained autonomy, this may well have been the case, in so far as Alba was essentially a member of the league, while Rome from the first had rather the position of a separate state confronting the league than of a member included in it; but, just as the states of the confederation of the Rhine were formally sovereign, while those of the German empire had a master, the presidency of Alba may have been in reality an honorary right(9) like that of the German emperors, and the protectorate of Rome from the first a supremacy like that of Napoleon. In fact Alba appears to have exercised the right of presiding in the federal council, while Rome allowed the Latin deputies to hold their consultations by themselves under the guidance, as it appears, of a president selected from their own number, and contented herself with the honorary presidency at the federal festival where sacrifice was offered for Rome and Latium, and with the erection of a second federal sanctuary in Rome—the temple of Diana on the Aventine—so that thenceforth sacrifice was offered both on Roman soil for Rome and Latium, and on Latin soil for Latium and Rome. With equal deference to the interests of the league the Romans in the treaty with Latium bound themselves not to enter into a separate alliance with any Latin community—a stipulation which very clearly reveals the apprehensions entertained, doubtless not without reason, by the confederacy with reference to the powerful community taking the lead. The position of Rome not within, but alongside of Latium, is most clearly apparent in the arrangements for warfare. The fighting force of the league was composed, as the later mode of making the levy incontrovertibly shows, of two masses of equal strength, a Roman and a Latin. The supreme command lay once for all with the Roman generals; year by year the Latin contingent had to appear before the gates of Rome, and there saluted the elected commander by acclamation as its general, after the Romans commissioned by the Latin federal council to take the auspices
Extension of the Roman Territory after the Fall of Alba—Hernici—Rutulli and Volscii
The steps by which after the fall of Alba Rome—now mistress of a territory comparatively considerable, and presumably the leading power in the Latin confederacy—extended still further her direct and indirect dominion, can no longer be traced. There was no lack of feuds with the Etruscans and with the Veientes in particular, chiefly respecting the possession of Fidenae; but it does not appear that the Romans were successful in acquiring permanent mastery over that Etruscan outpost, which was situated on the Latin bank of the river not much more than five miles from Rome, or in dislodging the Veientes from that formidable basis of offensive operations. On the other hand they maintained apparently undisputed possession of the Janiculum and of both banks of the mouth of the Tiber. As regards the Sabines and Aequi Rome appears in a more advantageous position; the connection which afterwards became so intimate with the more distant Hernici must have had at least its beginning under the monarchy, and the united Latins and Hernici enclosed on two sides and held in check their eastern neighbours. But on the south frontier the territory of the Rutuli and still more that of the Volsci were scenes of perpetual war. The earliest extension of the Latin land took place in this direction, and it is here that we first encounter those communities founded by Rome and Latium on the enemy’s soil and constituted as autonomous members of the Latin confederacy—the Latin colonies, as they were called—the oldest of which appear to reach back to the regal period. How far, however, the territory reduced under the power of the Romans extended at the close of the monarchy, can by no means be determined. Of feuds with the neighbouring Latin and Volscian communities the Roman annals of the regal period recount more than enough; but only a few detached notices, such as that
While the Latin stock was thus tending towards union under the leadership of Rome and was at the same time extending its territory on the east and south, Rome itself, by the favour of fortune and the energy of its citizens, had been converted from a stirring commercial and rural town into the powerful capital of a flourishing country. The remodelling of the Roman military system and the political reform of which it contained the germ, known to us by the name of the Servian constitution, stand in intimate connection with this internal change in the character of the Roman community. But externally also the character of the city cannot but have changed with the influx of ampler resources, with the rising requirements of its position, and with the extension of its political horizon. The amalgamation of the adjoining community on the Quirinal with that on the Palatine must have been already accomplished when the Servian reform, as it is called, took place; and after this reform had united and consolidated the military strength of the community, the burgesses could no longer rest content with entrenching the several hills, as one after another they were filled with buildings, and with possibly also keeping the island in the Tiber and the height on the opposite bank occupied so that they might command the course of the river. The capital of Latium required another and more complete system of defence; they proceeded to construct the Servian wall. The new continuous city-wall began at the river below the Aventine, and included that hill, on which there have been brought to light recently (1855) at two different places, the one on the western slope towards the river, the other on the opposite eastern slope, colossal remains of those primitive fortifications—portions of wall as high as the walls of Alatri and Ferentino, built of large square hewn blocks of tufo in courses of unequal height—emerging as it were from the tomb to testify to the might of an epoch, whose buildings subsist imperishably in these walls of rock, and whose intellectual achievements will continue
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
The names of the men, at whose bidding these great buildings of the city arose, are almost as completely lost in oblivion as those of the leaders in the earliest battles and victories of Rome. Tradition indeed assigns the different works to different kings—the senate-house to Tullus Hostilius, the Janiculum and the wooden bridge to Ancus Marcius, the great Cloaca, the Circus, and the temple of Jupiter to the elder Tarquinius, the temple of Diana and the ring-wall to Servius Tullius. Some of these statements may perhaps be correct; and it is apparently not the result of accident that the building of the new ring-wall is associated both as to date and author with the new organization of the army, which in fact bore special reference to the regular defence of the city walls. But upon the whole we must be content to learn from this tradition—what is indeed evident of itself—that this second creation of Rome stood in intimate connection with the commencement of her hegemony over Latium and with the remodelling of her burgess-army, and that, while it originated in one and the same great conception, its execution was not the work either of a single man or of a single generation. It is impossible to doubt that Hellenic influences exercised a powerful effect on this remodelling of the Roman community, but it is equally impossible to demonstrate the mode or the degree of their operation. It has already been observed that the Servian military constitution is essentially of an Hellenic type;(17) and it will be afterwards shown that the games of the Circus were organized on an Hellenic model. The new -regia-with the city hearth was quite a Greek —prytaneion—, and the round temple of Vesta, looking towards the east and not so much as consecrated by the augurs, was constructed in no respect according to Italian, but wholly in accordance with Hellenic, ritual. With these facts before us, the statement of tradition appears not at all incredible that the Ionian confederacy in Asia Minor to some extent served as a model for the Romano-Latin league, and that the new federal sanctuary on the Aventine was for that reason constructed in imitation of the Artemision at Ephesus.
1. I. IV. Earliest Limits of the Roman Territory
2. The formulae of accursing for Gabii and Fidenae are quite as characteristic (Macrob. Sat. iii. 9). It cannot, however, be proved and is extremely improbable that, as respects these towns, there was an actual historical accursing of the ground on which they were built, such as really took place at Veii, Carthage, and Fregellae. It may be conjectured that old accursing formularies were applied to those two hated towns, and were considered by later antiquaries as historical documents.
3. But there seems to be no good ground for the doubt recently expressed in a quarter deserving of respect as to the destruction of Alba having really been the act of Rome. It is true, indeed, that the account of the destruction of Alba is in its details a series of improbabilities and impossibilities; but that is true of every historical fact inwoven into legend. To the question as to the attitude of the rest of Latium towards the struggle between Rome and Alba, we are unable to give an answer; but the question itself rests on a false assumption, for it is not proved that the constitution of the Latin league absolutely prohibited a separate war between two Latin communities (I. III. The Latin League). Still less is the fact that a number of Alban families were received into the burgess-union of Rome inconsistent with the destruction of Alba by the Romans. Why may there not have been a Roman party in Alba just as there was in Capua? The circumstance, however, of Rome claiming to be in a religious and political point of view the heir-at-law of Alba may be regarded as decisive of the matter; for such a claim could not be based on the migration of individual clans to Rome, but could only be based, as it actually was, on the conquest of the town.
4. I. Vi. Amalgamation of the Palatine and Quirinal Cities
5. Hence was developed the conception, in political law, of the maritime colony or colony of burgesses (-colonia civium Romanorum-), that is, of a community separate in fact, but not independent or possessing a will of its own in law; a community which merged in the capital as the -peculium- of the son merged in the property of the father, and which as a standing garrison was exempt from serving in the legion.
6. To this the enactment of the Twelve Tables undoubtedly has reference: -Nex[i mancipiique] forti sanatique idem ius esto-, that is, in dealings of private law the “sound” and the “recovered” shall be on a footing of equality. The Latin allies cannot be here referred to, because their legal position was defined by federal treaties, and the law of the Twelve Tables treated only of the law of Rome. The -sanates- were the -Latini prisci cives Romani-, or in other words, the communities of Latium compelled by the Romans to enter the plebeiate.
7. The community of Bovillae appears even to have been formed out of part of the Alban domain, and to have been admitted in room of Alba among the autonomous Latin towns. Its Alban origin is attested by its having been the seat of worship for the Julian gens and by the name -Albani Longani Bovillenses- (Orelli-Henzen, 119, 2252, 6019); its autonomy by Dionysius, v. 61, and Cicero, pro Plancio, 9, 23.
8. I. III. The Latin League
9. I. III. The Latin League
10. Both names, although afterwards employed as local names (-capitolium- being applied to the summit of the stronghold-hill that lay next to the river, -arx- to that next to the Quirinal), were originally appellatives, corresponding exactly to the Greek —akra— and —koruphei— every Latin town had its -capitolium-as well as Rome. The local name of the Roman stronghold-hill was -mons Tarpeius-.
11. The enactment -ne quis patricius in arce aut capitolio habitaret-probably prohibited only the conversion of the ground into private property, not the construction of dwelling-houses. Comp. Becker, Top. p. 386.
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.
14. The “Seven-hill-city” in the proper and religious sense was and continued to be the narrower Old-Rome of the Palatine (iv. The Palatine City). Certainly the Servian Rome also regarded itself, at least as early as the time of Cicero (comp. e. g. Cic. ad Att. vi. 5, 2; Plutarch, Q. Rom. 69), as “Seven-hill-city,” probably because the festival of the Septimontium, which was celebrated with great zeal even under the Empire, began to be regarded as a festival for the city generally; but there was hardly any definite agreement reached as to which of the heights embraced by the Servian ring-wall belonged to the “seven.” The enumeration of the Seven Mounts familiar to us, viz. Palatine, Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, Viminal, Quirinal, Capitoline, is not given by any ancient author. It is put together from the traditional narrative of the gradual rise of the city (Jordan, Topographie, ii. 206 seq.), and the Janiculum is passed over in it, simply because otherwise the number would come out as eight. The earliest authority that enumerates the Seven Mounts (-montes-) of Rome is the description of the city from the age of Constantine the Great. It names as such the Palatine, Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, Tarpeian, Vatican, and Janiculum,—where the Quirinal and Viminal are, evidently as -colles-, omitted, and in their stead two “-montes-” are introduced from the right bank of the Tiber, including even the Vatican which lay outside of the Servian wall. Other still later lists are given by Servius (ad Aen. vi. 783), the Berne Scholia to Virgil’s Georgics (ii. 535), and Lydus (de Mens. p. 118, Bekker).
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.
16. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium
17. I. Vi. Time and Occasion of the Reform
The Umbro-Sabellian Stocks—Beginnings of the Samnites
The migration of the Umbrian stocks appears to have begun at a period later than that of the Latins. Like the Latin, it moved in a southerly direction, but it kept more in the centre of the peninsula and towards the east coast. It is painful to speak of it; for our information regarding it comes to us like the sound of bells from a town that has been sunk in the sea. The Umbrian people extended according to Herodotus as far as the Alps, and it is not improbable that in very ancient times they occupied the whole of Northern Italy, to the point where the
In consequence, as may be presumed, of this pressure exerted upon them from the north, the Umbrians advanced towards the south, keeping in general upon the heights, because they found the plains already occupied by Latin stocks, but beyond doubt frequently making inroads and encroachments on the territory of the kindred race, and intermingling with them the more readily, that the distinction in language and habits could not have been at all so marked then as we find it afterwards. To the class of such inroads belongs the tradition of the irruption of the Reatini and Sabines into Latium and their conflicts with the Romans; similar phenomena were probably repeated all along the west coast. Upon the whole the Sabines maintained their footing in the mountains, as in the district bordering on Latium which has since been called by their name, and so too in the Volscian land, presumably because the Latin population did not extend thither or was there less dense; while on the other hand the well-peopled plains were better able to offer resistance to the invaders, although they were not in all cases able or desirous to prevent isolated bands from gaining a footing, such as the Tities and afterwards the Claudii in Rome.(2) In this way the stocks here became variously mingled, a state of things which serves to explain the numerous relations that subsisted between the Volscians and Latins, and how it happened that their district, as well as Sabina, afterwards became so early and speedily Latinized.
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
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
1. In the alphabet the -"id:r” especially deserves notice, being of the Latin (-"id:R”) and not of the Etruscan form (-"id:D"), and also the -"id:z” (—“id:XI"); it can only be derived from the primitive Latin, and must very faithfully represent it. The language likewise has close affinity with the oldest Latin; -Marci Acarcelini he cupa-, that is, -Marcius Acarcelinius heic cubat-: -Menerva A. Cotena La. f...zenatuo sentem..dedet cuando..cuncaptum-, that is, -Minervae A(ulus?) Cotena La(rtis) f(ilius) de senatus sententia dedit quando (perhaps=olim) conceptum-. At the same time with these and similar inscriptions there have been found some others in a different character and language, undoubtedly Etruscan.
2. I. IV. Tities, Luceres
The Etruscans
The Etruscan people, or Ras,(1) as they called themselves, present a most striking contrast to the Latin and Sabellian Italians as well as to the Greeks. They were distinguished from these nations by their very bodily structure: instead of the slender and symmetrical proportions of the Greeks and Italians, the sculptures of the Etruscans exhibit only short sturdy figures with large head and thick arms. Their manners and customs also, so far as we are acquainted with them, point to a deep and original diversity from the Graeco-Italian stocks. The religion of the Tuscans in particular, presenting a gloomy fantastic character and delighting in the mystical handling of numbers and in wild and horrible speculations and practices, is equally remote from the clear rationalism of the Romans and the genial image-worship of the Hellenes. The conclusion which these facts suggest is confirmed by the most important and authoritative evidence of nationality, the evidence of language. The remains of the Etruscan tongue which have reached us, numerous as they are and presenting as they do various data to aid in deciphering it, occupy a position of isolation so complete, that not only has no one hitherto succeeded in interpreting these remains, but no one has been able even to determine precisely the place of Etruscan in the classification of languages. Two periods in the development of the language may be clearly distinguished. In the older period the vocalization of the language was completely carried out, and the collision of two consonants was almost without exception avoided.(2) By throwing off the vocal and consonantal terminations, and by the weakening or rejection of the vowels, this soft and melodious language was gradually changed in character, and became intolerably harsh and rugged.(3) They changed for example -ramu*af-into -ram*a-, Tarquinius into -Tarchnaf-, Minerva into -Menrva-, Menelaos, Polydeukes, Alexandros, into -Menle-, -Pultuke-, -Elchsentre-. The indistinct and rugged nature of their pronunciation is shown most clearly by the fact that at a very early period the Etruscans made no distinction of -o from -u, -b from -p, -c from -g, -d from -t. At the same time the accent was, as in Latin and in the more rugged Greek dialects, uniformly thrown back upon the initial syllable. The aspirate consonants were treated in a similar fashion; while the Italians rejected them with the exception of the aspirated -b or the -f, and the Greeks, reversing the case, rejected this sound and retained the others —theta, —phi, —chi, the Etruscans allowed the softest and most pleasing of them, the —phi, to drop entirely except in words borrowed from other languages, but made use of the other three to an extraordinary extent, even where they had no proper place; Thetis
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
It is equally difficult to determine from what quarter the Etruscans migrated into Italy; nor is much lost through our inability to answer the question, for this migration belonged at any rate to the infancy of the people, and their historical development began and ended in Italy. No question, however, has been handled with greater zeal than this, in accordance with the principle which induces antiquaries especially to inquire into what is neither capable of being known nor worth the knowing—to inquire “who was Hecuba’s mother,” as the emperor Tiberius professed to do. As the oldest and most important Etruscan towns lay far inland—in fact we find not a single Etruscan town of any note immediately on the coast except Populonia, which we know for certain was not one of the old twelve cities— and the movement of the Etruscans in historical times was from north to south, it seems probable that they migrated into the peninsula by land. Indeed the low stage of civilization, in which we find them at first, would ill accord with the hypothesis of immigration by sea. Nations even in the earliest times crossed a strait as they would a stream; but to land on the west coast of Italy was a very different matter. We must therefore seek for the earlier home of the Etruscans to the west or north of Italy. It is not wholly improbable that the Etruscans may have come into Italy over the Raetian Alps; for the oldest traceable settlers in the Grisons and Tyrol, the Raeti, spoke Etruscan down to historical times, and their name sounds similar to that of the Ras. These may no doubt have been a remnant of the Etruscan settlements on the Po; but it is at least quite as likely that they may have been a portion of the people which remained behind in its earlier abode.
In glaring contradiction to this simple and natural view stands the story that the Etruscans were Lydians who had emigrated from Asia. It is very ancient: it occurs even in Herodotus; and it reappears in later writers with innumerable changes and additions, although several intelligent inquirers, such as Dionysius, emphatically declared their disbelief in it, and pointed to the fact that there was not the slightest apparent similarity between the Lydians and Etruscans in religion, laws, manners, or language. It is possible that an isolated band of pirates from Asia Minor may have reached Etruria, and that their adventure may have given rise to such tales; but more probably the whole story rests on a mere verbal mistake. The Italian Etruscans or the -Turs-ennae- (for this appears to be the original form and the basis of the Greek —Turs-einnoi—, —Turreinoi—, of the Umbrian -Turs-ci-, and of the two Roman forms -Tusci-, -Etrusci-) nearly coincide in name with the Lydian people of the —Torreiboi— or perhaps also —Turr-einoi—, so named from the town —Turra—, This manifestly accidental resemblance in name seems to be in reality the only foundation for that hypothesis—not rendered more trustworthy by its great antiquity—and for all the pile of crude historical speculations that has been reared upon it. By connecting the ancient maritime commerce of the Etruscans with the piracy of the Lydians, and then by confounding (Thucydides is the first who has demonstrably done so) the Torrhebian pirates, whether rightly or wrongly, with the bucaneering Pelasgians who roamed and plundered on every sea, there has been produced one of the most mischievous complications of historical tradition. The term Tyrrhenians denotes sometimes the Lydian Torrhebi—as is the case in the earliest sources, such as the Homeric hymns; sometimes under the form Tyrrheno-Pelasgians or simply that of Tyrrhenians, the Pelasgian nation; sometimes, in fine, the Italian Etruscans, although the latter never came into lasting contact with the Pelasgians or Torrhebians, or were at all connected with them by common descent.
It is, on the other hand, a matter of historical interest to determine what were the oldest traceable abodes of the Etruscans, and what were their further movements when they issued thence. Various circumstances attest that before the great Celtic invasion they dwelt in the district to the north of the Po, being conterminous on the east along the Adige with the Veneti of Illyrian (Albanian?) descent, on the west with the Ligurians. This is proved in particular by the already-mentioned rugged Etruscan dialect, which was still spoken in the time of Livy by the inhabitants of the Raetian Alps, and by the fact that Mantua remained Tuscan down to a late period. To the south of
Far more important in an historical point of view was the great settlement of the Tuscans in the land which still bears their name. Although Ligurians or Umbrians were probably at one time(5) settled there, the traces of them have been almost wholly effaced by the Etruscan occupation and civilization. In this region, which extends along the coast from Pisae to Tarquinii and is shut in on the east by the Apennines, the Etruscan nationality found its permanent abode and maintained itself with great tenacity down to the time of the empire. The northern boundary of the proper Tuscan territory was formed by the Arnus; the region north from the Arnus as far as the mouth of the Macra and the Apennines was a debateable border land in the possession sometimes of Ligurians, sometimes of Etruscans, and for this reason larger settlements were not successful there. The southern boundary was probably formed at first by the Ciminian Forest, a chain of hills south of Viterbo, and at a later period by the Tiber. We have already(6) noticed the fact that the territory between the Ciminian range and the Tiber with the towns of Sutrium, Nepete, Falerii, Veii, and Caere appears not to have been taken possession of by the Etruscans till a period considerably later than the more northern districts, possibly not earlier than in the second century of Rome, and that the original Italian population must have maintained its ground in this region, especially in Falerii, although in a relation of dependence.
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
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 cause of this comparatively passive attitude of Etruria towards the neighbouring land of Latium is probably to be sought partly in the struggles of the Etruscans with the Celts on the Po, which presumably the Celts did not cross until after the expulsion of the kings from Rome, and partly in the tendency of the Etruscan people towards seafaring and the acquisition of supremacy on the sea and seaboard—a tendency decidedly exhibited in their settlements in Campania, and of which we shall speak more fully in the next chapter.
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
1. -Ras-ennac-, with the gentile termination mentioned below.
2. To this period belong e. g. inscriptions on the clay vases of
umaramlisia(—“id:theta")ipurenaie(&mdash
;“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-.
4. Such as Maecenas, Porsena, Vivenna, Caecina, Spurinna. The vowel in the penult is originally long, but in consequence of the throwing back of the accent upon the initial syllable is frequently shortened and even rejected. Thus we find Porse(n)na as well as Porsena, and Ceicne as well as Caecina.
5. I. VIII. Umbro-Sabellian Migration
6. I. VIII. Their Political Development
7. I. VIII. Their Political Development
8. I. IV. Oldest Settlements in the Palatine and Suburan Regions
The Hellenes in Italy—Maritime Supremacy of the Tuscans and Carthaginians
In the history of the nations of antiquity a gradual dawn ushered in the day; and in their case too the dawn was in the east. While the Italian peninsula still lay enveloped in the dim twilight of morning, the regions of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean had already emerged into the full light of a varied and richly developed civilization. It falls to the lot of most nations in the early stages of their development to be taught and trained by some rival sister-nation; and such was destined to be in an eminent degree the lot of the peoples of Italy. The circumstances of its geographical position, however, prevented this influence from being brought to bear upon the peninsula by land. No trace is to be found of any resort in early times to the difficult route by land between Italy and Greece. There were in all probability from time immemorial tracks for purposes of traffic, leading from Italy to the lands beyond the Alps; the oldest route of the amber trade from the Baltic joined the Mediterranean at the mouth of the Po—on which account the delta of the Po appears in Greek legend as the home of amber—and this route was joined by another leading across the peninsula over the Apennines to Pisae; but from these regions no elements of civilization could come to the Italians. It was the seafaring nations of the east that brought to Italy whatever foreign culture reached it in early times.
The oldest civilized nation on the shores of the Mediterranean, the Egyptians, were not a seafaring people, and therefore exercised no influence on Italy. But the same may be with almost equal truth affirmed of the Phoenicians. It is true that, issuing from their narrow home on the extreme eastern verge of the Mediterranean, they were the first of all known races to venture forth in floating houses on the bosom of the deep, at first for the purpose of fishing and dredging, but soon also for the prosecution of trade. They were the first to open up maritime commerce; and at an incredibly early period they traversed the Mediterranean even to its furthest extremity in the west. Maritime stations of the Phoenicians appear on almost all its coasts earlier than those of the Hellenes: in Hellas itself, in Crete and Cyprus, in Egypt, Libya, and Spain, and likewise on the western Italian main. Thucydides tells us that all around Sicily, before the Greeks came thither or at least before they had established themselves there in any considerable numbers, the Phoenicians had set up their factories on the headlands and islets, not with a view to gain territory, but for the sake of trading with the natives. But it was otherwise in the case of continental Italy. No sure proof has hitherto been given of the existence
To all appearance, therefore, the Hellenic mariners were the first among the inhabitants of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to navigate the coasts of Italy. Of the important questions however as to the region from which, and as to the period at which, the Greek seafarers came thither, only the former admits of being answered with some degree of precision and fulness. The Aeolian and Ionian coast of Asia Minor was the region where Hellenic maritime traffic first became developed on a large scale, and whence issued the Greeks who explored the interior of the Black Sea on the one hand and the coasts of Italy on the other. The name of the Ionian Sea, which was retained by the waters intervening between
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
It appears, however, to be quite impossible to fix the dates of this series of events with even approximate accuracy. The founding of the Achaean city of Sybaris in 33, and that of the Dorian city Tarentum in 46, are probably the most ancient dates in Italian history, the correctness, or at least approximation to correctness, of which may be looked upon as established. But how far beyond that epoch the sending forth of the earlier Ionian colonies reached back, is quite as uncertain as is the age which gave birth to the poems of Hesiod or even of Homer. If Herodotus is correct in the period which he assigns to Homer, the Greeks were still unacquainted with Italy a century before the foundation of Rome. The date thus assigned however, like all other statements respecting the Homeric age, is matter not of testimony, but of inference; and any one who carefully weighs the history of the Italian alphabets as well as the remarkable fact that the Italians had become acquainted with the Greek people before the name “Hellenes” had emerged for the race, and the Italians borrowed their designation for the Hellenes from the stock of the -Grai- or -Graeci- that early fell into abeyance in Hellas,(1) will be inclined to carry back the earliest intercourse of the Italians with the Greeks to an age considerably mere remote.
The history of the Italian and Sicilian Greeks forms no part of the history of Italy; the Hellenic colonists of the west always retained the closest connection with their original home and participated in the national festivals and privileges of Hellenes. But it is of importance even as bearing on Italy, that we should indicate the diversities of character that prevailed in the Greek settlements there, and at least exhibit some of the leading features which enabled the Greek colonization to exercise so varied an influence on Italy.
Of all the Greek settlements, that which retained most thoroughly its distinctive character and was least affected by influences from without was the settlement which gave birth to the league of the Achaean cities, composed of the towns of Siris, Pandosia, Metabus or Metapontum, Sybaris with its offsets Posidonia and Laus, Croton, Caulonia, Temesa, Terina, and Pyxus. These colonists, taken as a whole, belonged to a Greek stock which steadfastly adhered to its own peculiar dialect, having closest affinity with the Doric, and for long retained no less steadfastly the old national Hellenic mode of writing, instead of adopting the more recent alphabet which had elsewhere come into general use; and which preserved its own nationality, as distinguished alike from the barbarians and from other Greeks, by the firm bond of a federal constitution. The language of Polybius regarding the Achaean symmachy in the Peloponnesus may be applied also to these Italian Achaeans; “Not only did they live in federal and friendly communion, but they made use of like laws, like weights, measures, and coins, as well as of the same magistrates, councillors, and judges.”
This league of the Achaean cities was strictly a colonization. The cities had no harbours—Croton alone had a paltry roadstead—and they had no commerce of their own; the Sybarite prided himself on growing gray between the bridges of his lagoon-city, and Milesians and Etruscans bought and sold for him. These Achaean Greeks, however, were not merely in possession of a narrow belt along the coast, but ruled from sea to sea in the “land of wine” and “of oxen” (—Oinotria—, —Italia—) or the “great Hellas;” the native agricultural population was compelled to farm their lands and to pay to them tribute in the character of clients or even of serfs. Sybaris—in its time the largest city in Italy—exercised dominion over four barbarian tribes and five-and-twenty townships, and was able to found Laus and Posidonia on the other sea. The exceedingly fertile low grounds of the Crathis and Bradanus yielded a superabundant produce to the Sybarites and Metapontines—it was there perhaps that grain was first cultivated for exportation. The height of prosperity which these states in an incredibly short time attained is strikingly attested by the only surviving works of art of these Italian Achaeans, their coins of chaste antiquely beautiful workmanship—the earliest monuments of art and writing in Italy which we possess, as it can be shown that they had already begun to be coined in 174. These coins show that the Achaeans of the west did not simply participate in the noble development of plastic art that was at this very time taking place in the motherland, but were even superior in technical skill. For, while the silver pieces which were in use about that time in Greece proper and among the Dorians in Italy were thick, often stamped only on
Nevertheless this rapid bloom bore no fruit. Even Greeks speedily lost all elasticity of body and of mind in a life of indolence, in which their energies were never tried either by vigorous resistance on the part of the natives or by hard labour of their own. None of the brilliant names in Greek art or literature shed glory on the Italian Achaeans, while Sicily could claim ever so many of them, and even in Italy the Chalcidian Rhegium could produce its Ibycus and the Doric Tarentum its Archytas. With this people, among whom the spit was for ever turning on the hearth, nothing flourished from the outset but boxing. The rigid aristocracy which early gained the helm in the several communities, and which found in case of need a sure reserve of support in the federal power, prevented the rise of tyrants; but the danger to be apprehended was that the government of the best might be converted into a government of the few, especially if the privileged families in the different communities should combine to assist each other in carrying out their designs. Such was the predominant aim in the combination of mutually pledged “friends” which bore the name of Pythagoras. It enjoined the principle that the ruling class should be “honoured like gods,” and that the subject class should be “held in subservience like beasts,” and by such theory and practice provoked a formidable reaction, which terminated in the annihilation of the Pythagorean “friends” and the renewal of the ancient federal constitution. But frantic party feuds, insurrections en masse of the slaves, social abuses of all sorts, attempts to supply in practice an impracticable state-philosophy, in short, all the evils of demoralized civilization never ceased to rage in the Achaean communities, till under the accumulated pressure their political power utterly broke down.
It is no matter of wonder therefore that the Achaeans settled in Italy exercised less influence on its civilization than the other Greek settlements. An agricultural people, they had less occasion than those engaged in commerce to extend their influence beyond their political bounds. Within their own dominions they enslaved the native population and crushed the germs of their national development as Italians, while they refused to open up to them by means of complete Hellenization a new career. In this way the Greek characteristics, which were able elsewhere to retain a vigorous vitality notwithstanding all political misfortunes, disappeared more rapidly, more completely, and more ingloriously in Sybaris and Metapontum, in Croton and Posidonia, than in any other region; and the bilingual mongrel peoples, that arose in subsequent times out of the remains of the native Italians and Achaeans and the more recent immigrants of Sabellian descent, never attained any real prosperity. This catastrophe, however, belongs in point of time to the succeeding period.
The settlements of the other Greeks were of a different character, and exercised a very different effect upon Italy. They by no means despised agriculture and the acquisition of territory; it was not the wont of the Hellenes, at least when they had reached their full vigour, to rest content after the manner of the Phoenicians with a fortified factory in the midst of a barbarian land. But all their cities were founded primarily and especially for the sake of trade, and accordingly, altogether differing from those of the Achaeans, they were uniformly established beside the best harbours and lading-places. These cities were very various in their origin and in the occasion and period of their respective foundations; but there subsisted between them a certain fellowship, as in the common use by all of these towns of certain modern forms of the alphabet,(2) and in the very Dorism of their language, which made its way at an early date even into those towns that, like Cumae for example,(3) originally spoke the soft Ionic dialect. These settlements were of very various degrees of importance in their bearing on the development of Italy: it is sufficient at present to mention those which exercised a decided influence over the destinies of the Italian races, the Doric Tarentum and the Ionic Cumae.
Of all the Hellenic settlements in Italy, Tarentum was destined to play the most brilliant part. The excellent harbour, the only good one on the whole southern coast, rendered the city the natural emporium for the traffic of the south of Italy, and for some portion even of the commerce of the Adriatic. The rich fisheries of its gulf, the production and manufacture of its excellent wool, and the dyeing of it with the purple juice of the Tarentine -murex-, which rivalled that of Tyre—both branches of industry introduced there from Miletus in Asia Minor—employed thousands of hands, and added to the carrying trade a traffic of export. The coins struck at Tarentum in greater quantity than anywhere else in Grecian Italy, and struck pretty numerously even in gold, furnish to us a significant attestation of the lively and widely extended commerce of the Tarentines. At this epoch, when Tarentum was still contending with Sybaris for the first place among the Greek cities of Lower Italy, its extensive commercial connections must have been already forming; but the Tarentines seem never to have steadily and successfully directed their efforts to a substantial extension of their territory after the manner of the Achaean cities.
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
It cannot be doubted, on the other hand, that the west coast of Italy northward of Vesuvius was frequented in very early times by the Hellenes, and that there were Hellenic factories on its promontories and islands. Probably the earliest evidence of such voyages is the localizing of the legend of Odysseus on the coasts of the Tyrrhene Sea.(4) When men discovered the isles of Aeolus in the Lipari islands, when they pointed out at the Lacinian cape the isle of Calypso, at the cape of Misenum that of the Sirens, at the cape of Circeii that of Circe, when they recognized in the steep promontory of Terracina the towering burial-mound of Elpenor, when the Laestrygones were provided with haunts near Caieta and Formiae, when the two sons of Ulysses and Circe, Agrius, that is the “wild,” and Latinus, were made to rule over the Tyrrhenians in the “inmost recess of the holy islands,” or, according to a more recent version, Latinus was called the son of Ulysses and Circe, and Auson the son of Ulysses and Calypso—we recognize in these legends ancient sailors’ tales of the seafarers of Ionia, who thought of their native home as they traversed the Tyrrhene Sea. The same noble vividness of feeling, which pervades the Ionic poem of the voyages of Odysseus, is discernible in this fresh localization of the same legend at Cumae itself and throughout the regions frequented by the Cumaean mariners.
Other traces of these very ancient voyages are to be found in the Greek name of the island Aethalia (Ilva, Elba), which appears to have been (after Aenaria) one of the places earliest occupied by Greeks, perhaps also in that of the seaport Telamon in Etruria; and further in the two townships on the Caerite coast, Pyrgi (near S. Severa) and Alsium (near Palo), the Greek origin of which is indicated beyond possibility of mistake not only by their names, but also by the peculiar architecture of the walls of Pyrgi, which differs essentially in character from that of the walls of Caere and the Etruscan cities generally. Aethalia, the “fire-island,” with its rich mines of copper and especially of iron, probably sustained the chief part in this commerce, and there in all likelihood the foreigners had their central settlement and seat of traffic with the natives; the more especially as they could not have found the means of smelting the ores on the small and not well-wooded island without intercourse with the mainland. The silver mines of Populonia also on the headland opposite to Elba were perhaps already known to the Greeks and wrought by them.
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.
Legend itself contrasts in a significant manner the Latin with the “wild Tyrrhenian,” and the peaceful beach at the mouth of the Tiber with the inhospitable shore of the Volsci. This cannot mean that Greek colonization was tolerated in some of the provinces of Central Italy, but not permitted in others. Northward of Vesuvius there existed no independent Greek community at all in historical times; if Pyrgi once was such, it must have already reverted, before the period at which our tradition begins, into the hands of the Italians or in other words of the Caerites. But in southern Etruria, in Latium, and likewise on the east coast, peaceful intercourse with the foreign merchants was protected and encouraged; and such was not the case elsewhere. The position of Caere was especially remarkable. “The Caerites,” says Strabo, “were held in much repute among the Hellenes for their bravery and integrity, and because, powerful though they were, they abstained from robbery.” It is not piracy that is thus referred to, for in this the merchant of Caere must have indulged like every other. But Caere was a sort of free port for Phoenicians as well as Greeks. We have already mentioned the Phoenician station—subsequently called Punicum—and the two Hellenic stations of Pyrgi and Alsium.(5) It was these ports that the Caerites refrained from robbing, and it was beyond doubt through this tolerant attitude that Caere, which possessed but a wretched roadstead and had no mines in its neighbourhood, early attained so great prosperity and acquired, in reference to the earliest Greek commerce, an importance even greater than the cities of the Italians destined by nature as emporia at the mouths of the Tiber and Po. The cities we have just named are those which appear as holding primitive religious intercourse with Greece. The first of all barbarians to present gifts to the Olympian Zeus was the Tuscan king Arimnus, perhaps a ruler of Ariminum. Spina and Caere had their special treasuries in the temple of the Delphic Apollo, like other communities that had regular dealings with the shrine; and the sanctuary at Delphi, as well as the Cumaean oracle, is interwoven with the earliest traditions of Caere and of Rome. These cities, where the Italians held peaceful sway and carried on friendly traffic with the foreign merchant, became preeminently wealthy and powerful, and were genuine marts not only for Hellenic merchandise, but also for the germs of Hellenic civilization.
Matters stood on a different footing with the “wild Tyrrhenians.” The same causes, which in the province of Latium, and in the districts on the right bank of the Tiber and along the lower course of the Po that were perhaps rather subject to Etruscan supremacy than strictly Etruscan, had led to the emancipation of the natives from the maritime power of the foreigner, led in Etruria proper to the development of piracy and maritime ascendency, in consequence possibly of the difference of national character disposing the people to violence and pillage, or it may be for other reasons with which we are not acquainted. The Etruscans were not content with dislodging the Greeks from Aethalia and Populonia; even the individual trader was apparently not tolerated by them, and soon Etruscan privateers roamed over the sea far and wide, and rendered the name of the Tyrrhenians a terror to the Greeks. It was not without reason that the Greeks reckoned the grapnel as an Etruscan invention, and called the western sea of Italy the sea of the Tuscans. The rapidity with which these wild corsairs multiplied and the violence of their proceedings in the Tyrrhene Sea in particular, are very clearly shown by their establishment on the Latin and Campanian coasts. The Latins indeed maintained their ground in Latium proper, and the Greeks at Vesuvius; but between them and by their side the Etruscans held sway in Antium and in Surrentum. The Volscians became clients of the Etruscans; their forests contributed the keels for the Etruscan galleys; and seeing that the piracy of the Antiates was only terminated by the Roman occupation, it is easy to understand why the coast of the southern Volscians bore among Greek mariners the name of the Laestrygones. The high promontory of Sorrento with the cliff of Capri which is still more precipitous but destitute of any harbour—a station thoroughly adapted for corsairs on the watch, commanding a prospect of the Tyrrhene Sea between the bays of Naples and Salerno—was early occupied by the Etruscans. They are affirmed even to have founded a “league of twelve towns” of their own in Campania, and communities speaking Etruscan still existed in its inland districts in times quite historical. These settlements were probably indirect results of the maritime dominion of the Etruscans in the Campanian sea, and of their rivalry with the Cumaeans at Vesuvius.
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
While in Italy the Etruscans and, although in a lesser degree, the Latins thus stood opposed to the Hellenes, warding them off and partly treating them as enemies, this antagonism to some extent necessarily affected the rivalry which then above all dominated the commerce and navigation of the Mediterranean—the rivalry between the Phoenicians and Hellenes. This is not the place to set forth in detail how, during the regal period of Rome, these two great nations contended for supremacy on all the shores of the Mediterranean, in Greece even and Asia Minor, in Crete and Cyprus, on the African, Spanish, and Celtic coasts. This struggle did not take place directly on Italian soil, but its effects were deeply and permanently felt in Italy. The fresh energies and more universal endowments of the younger competitor had at first the advantage everywhere. Not only did the Hellenes rid themselves of the Phoenician factories in their own European and Asiatic homes, but they dislodged the Phoenicians also from Crete and Cyprus, gained a footing in Egypt and Cyrene, and possessed themselves of Lower Italy and the larger eastern half of the island of Sicily. On all hands the small trading stations of the Phoenicians gave way before the more energetic colonization of the Greeks. Selinus (126) and Agrigentum (174) were founded in western Sicily; the more remote western sea was traversed, Massilia was built on the Celtic coast (about 150), and the shores of Spain were explored, by the bold Phocaeans from Asia Minor. But about the middle of the second century the progress of Hellenic colonization was suddenly arrested; and there is no doubt that the cause of this arrest was the contemporary rapid
Perhaps the element in this reaction which exercised the most momentous influence in the sequel was the close relation into which the weaker Phoenicians entered with the natives of Sicily and Italy in order to resist the Hellenes. When the Cnidians and Rhodians made an attempt about 175 to establish themselves at Lilybaeum, the centre of the Phoenician settlements in Sicily, they were expelled by the natives—the Elymi of Segeste—in concert with the Phoenicians. When the Phocaeans settled about 217 at Alalia (Aleria) in Corsica opposite to Caere, there appeared for the purpose of expelling them a combined fleet of Etruscans and Carthaginians, numbering a hundred and twenty sail; and although in the naval battle that ensued—one of the earliest known in history-the fleet of the Phocaeans, which was only half as strong, claimed the victory, the Carthaginians and Etruscans gained the object which they had in view in the attack; the Phocaeans abandoned Corsica, and preferred to settle at Hyde (Velia) on the less exposed coast of Lucania. A treaty between Etruria and Carthage not only established regulations regarding the import of goods and the giving due effect to rights, but included also an alliance-in-arms (—summachia—), the serious import of which is shown by that very battle of Alalia. It is a significant indication of the position of the Caerites, that they stoned the Phocaean captives in the market at Caere and then sent an embassy to the Delphic Apollo to atone for the crime.
Latium did not join in these hostilities against the Hellenes; on the contrary, we find friendly relations subsisting in very ancient times between the Romans and the Phocaeans in Velia as well as in Massilia, and the Ardeates are even said to have founded in concert with the Zacynthians a colony in Spain, the later Saguntum. Much less, however, did the Latins range themselves on the side of the Hellenes: the neutrality of their position in this respect is attested by the close relations maintained between Caere and Rome, as well as by the traces of ancient intercourse between the Latins and the Carthaginians. It was through the medium of the Hellenes that the Cannanite race became known to the Romans, for, as we have already seen,(7) they always designated it by its Greek name; but the fact that they did not borrow from the Greeks either the name for the city of Carthage(8) or the national name of the -Afri-,(9) and the circumstance that among the earlier Romans Tyrian wares were designated by the adjective -Sarranus-,(10) which in like manner precludes the idea of Greek intervention, demonstrate—what the treaties of a later period concur in proving—the direct commercial intercourse anciently subsisting between Latium and Carthage.
The combined power of the Italians and Phoenicians actually succeeded in substantially retaining the western half of the Mediterranean in their hands. The northwestern portion of Sicily, with the important ports of Soluntum and Panormus on the north coast, and Motya at the point which looks towards Africa, remained in the direct or indirect possession of the Carthaginians. About the age of Cyrus and Croesus, just when the wise Bias was endeavouring to induce the Ionians to emigrate in a body from Asia Minor and settle in Sardinia (about 200), the Carthaginian general Malchus anticipated them, and subdued a considerable portion of that important island by force of arms; half a century later, the whole coast of Sardinia appears in the undisputed possession of the Carthaginian community. Corsica on the other hand, with the towns of Alalia and Nicaea, fell to the Etruscans, and the natives paid to these tribute of the products of their poor island, pitch, wax, and honey. In the Adriatic sea, moreover, the allied Etruscans and Carthaginians ruled, as in the waters to the west of Sicily and Sardinia. The Greeks, indeed, did not give up the struggle. Those Rhodians and Cnidians, who had been driven out of Lilybaeum, established themselves on the islands between Sicily and Italy and founded there the town of Lipara (175). Massilia flourished in spite of its isolation, and soon monopolized the trade of the region from Nice to the Pyrenees. At the Pyrenees themselves Rhoda (now Rosas) was established as an offset from Lipara, and it is affirmed that Zacynthians settled in Saguntum, and even that Greek dynasts ruled at Tingis (Tangiers) in Mauretania. But the Hellenes no longer gained ground; after the foundation of Agrigentum they did
Thus Italy was—if but indirectly—indebted to the Phoenicians for the exemption of at least her central and northern provinces from colonization, and for the counter-development of a national maritime power there, especially in Etruria. But there are not wanting indications that the Phoenicians already found it worth while to manifest that jealousy which is usually associated with naval domination, if not in reference to their Latin allies, at any rate in reference to their Etruscan confederates, whose naval power was greater. The statement as to the Carthaginians having prohibited the sending forth of an Etruscan colony to the Canary islands, whether true or false, reveals the existence of a rivalry of interests in the matter.
1. Whether the name of Graeci was originally associated with the interior of Epirus and the region of Dodona, or pertained rather to the Aetolians who perhaps earlier reached the western sea, may be left an open question; it must at a remote period have belonged to a prominent stock or aggregate of stocks of Greece proper and have passed over from these to the nation as a whole. In the Eoai of Hesiod it appears as the older collective name for the nation, although it is manifest that it is intentionally thrust aside and subordinated to that of Hellenes. The latter does not occur in Homer, but, in addition to Hesiod, it is found in Archilochus about the year 50, and it may very well have come into use considerably earlier (Duncker, Gesch. d. Alt. iii. 18, 556). Already before this period, therefore, the Italians were so widely acquainted with the Greeks that that name, which early fell into abeyance in Hellas, was retained by them as a collective name for the Greek nation, even when the latter itself adopted other modes of self-designation. It was withal only natural that foreigners should have attained to an earlier and clearer consciousness of the fact that the Hellenic stocks belonged to one race than the latter themselves, and that hence the collective designation should have become more definitely fixed among the former than with the latter—not the less, that it was not taken directly from the well-known Hellenes who dwelt the nearest to them. It is difficult to see how we can reconcile with this fact the statement that a century before the foundation of Rome Italy was still quite unknown to the Greeks of Asia Minor. We shall speak of the alphabet below; its history yields entirely similar results. It may perhaps be characterized as a rash step to reject the statement of Herodotus respecting the age of Homer on the strength of such considerations; but is there no rashness in following implicitly the guidance of tradition in questions of this kind?
2. Thus the three old Oriental forms of the —“id:i” (—“id:S"), —“id:l” (—“id:/\”) and —“id:r” (—“id:P"), for which as apt to be confounded with the forms of the —“id:s”, —“id:g”, and —“id:p” the signs —“id:I”) —“id:L” —“id:R”) were early proposed to be substituted, remained either in exclusive or in very preponderant use among the Achaean colonies, while the other Greeks of Italy and Sicily without distinction of race used exclusively or at any rate chiefly the more recent forms.
3. E. g. the inscription on an earthen vase of Cumae runs thus:——Tataies emi lequthos Fos d’ an me klephsei thuphlos estai—.
4. Among Greek writers this Tyrrhene legend of Odysseus makes its earliest appearance in the Theogony of Hesiod, in one of its more recent sections, and thereafter in authors of the period shortly before Alexander, Ephorus (from whom the so-called Scymnus drew his materials), and the writer known as Scylax. The first of these sources belongs to an age when Italy was still regarded by the Greeks as a group of islands, and is certainly therefore very old; so that the origin of these legends may, on the whole, be confidently placed in the regal period of Rome.
5. I. X. Phoenicians in Italy, I. X. Relations of the Western Italians to the Greeks
6. I. X. Relations of Italy with Other Lands
7. I. X. Phoenicians in Italy
8. The Phoenician name was Karthada; the Greek, Karchedon; the Roman, Cartago.
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.
Law and Justice
History, as such, cannot reproduce the life of a people in the infinite variety of its details; it must be content with exhibiting the development of that life as a whole. The doings and dealings, the thoughts and imaginings of the individual, however strongly they may reflect the characteristics of the national mind, form no part of history. Nevertheless it seems necessary to make some attempt to indicate—only in the most general outlines—the features of individual life in the case of those earlier ages which are, so far as history is concerned, all but
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.
All jurisdiction was vested in the community or, in other words, in the king, who administered justice or “command” (-ius-) on the “days of utterance” (-dies fasti-) at the “judgment platform” (-tribunal-) in the place of public assembly, sitting on the “chariot-seat” (-sella curulis-);(1) by his side stood his “messengers” (-lictores-), and before him the person accused or the “parties” (-rei-). No doubt in the case of slaves the decision lay primarily with the master, and in the case of women with the father, husband, or nearest male relative;(2) but slaves and
Judicial procedure took the form of a public or a private process, according as the king interposed of his own motion or only when appealed to by the injured party. The former course was taken only in cases which involved a breach of the public peace. First of all, therefore, it was applicable in the case of public treason or communion with the public enemy (-proditio-), and in that of violent rebellion against the magistracy (-perduellio-). But the public peace was also broken by the foul murderer (-parricida-), the sodomite, the violator of a maiden’s or matron’s chastity, the incendiary, the false witness, by those, moreover, who with evil spells conjured away the harvest, or who without due title cut the corn by night in the field entrusted to the protection of the gods and of the people; all of these were therefore dealt with as though they had been guilty of high treason. The king opened and conducted the process, and pronounced sentence after conferring with the senators whom he had called in to advise with him. He was at liberty, however, after he had initiated the process, to commit the further handling and the adjudication of the matter to deputies who were, as a rule, taken from the senate. The later extraordinary deputies, the two men for adjudicating on rebellion (-duoviri perduellionis-) and the later standing deputies the “trackers of murder” (-quaestores parricidii-) whose primary duty was to search out and arrest murderers,
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.
Under what circumstances during this epoch theft was regarded as at all expiable, and what in such an event the person injured was entitled to demand from the thief, cannot be ascertained. But the injured party with reason demanded heavier compensation from a thief caught in the very act than from one detected afterwards, since the feeling of exasperation which had to be appeased was more vehement in the case of the former than in that of the latter. If the theft appeared incapable of expiation, or if the thief was not in a position to pay the value demanded by the injured party and approved by the judge, he was by the judge assigned as a bondsman to the person from whom he had stolen.
In cases of damage (-iniuria-) to person or to property, where the injury was not of a very serious description, the aggrieved party was probably obliged unconditionally to accept compensation; if, on the other hand, any member was lost in consequence of it, the maimed person could demand eye for eye and tooth for tooth.
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 concluded between the state and a burgess, particularly the obligation given by those who became sureties for a payment to the state (-praevides-, -praedes-), were valid without further formality. On the other hand, contracts between private persons under ordinary circumstances gave no claim for legal aid on the part of the state. The only protection of the creditor was the debtor’s word of honour which was held in high esteem after the wont of merchants, and possibly also, in those frequent cases where an oath had been added, the fear of the gods who avenged perjury. The only contracts legally actionable were those of betrothal (the effect of which was that the father, in the event of his failing to give the promised bride, had to furnish satisfaction and compensation), of purchase (-mancipatio-), and of loan (-nexum-). A purchase was held to be legally concluded when the seller delivered the article purchased into the hand of the buyer (-mancipare-) and the buyer at the same time paid to the seller the stipulated price in presence of witnesses. This was done, after copper superseded sheep and cattle as the regular standard of value, by weighing out the stipulated quantity of copper in a balance adjusted by a neutral person.(4) These conditions having been complied with, the seller had to answer for his being the owner, and in addition seller and purchaser had to fulfil every stipulation specially agreed on; the party failing to do so made reparation to the other, just as if he had deprived him of the article in question. But a purchase only founded an action in the event of its being a transaction for ready money: a purchase on credit neither gave nor took away the right of property, and constituted no ground of action. A loan was negotiated in a similar way; the creditor weighed over to the debtor in presence of witnesses the stipulated quantity of copper under the obligation (-nexum-) of repayment. In addition to the capital the debtor had to pay interest, which under ordinary circumstances probably amounted to ten per cent per annum.(5) The repayment of the loan took place, when the time came, with similar forms.
If a debtor to the state did not fulfil his obligations, he was without further ceremony sold with all that he had; the simple demand on the part of the state was sufficient to establish the debt. If on the other hand a private person informed the king of any violation of his property (-vindiciae-) or if repayment of the loan received did not duly take place, the procedure depended on whether the facts relating to the cause needed to be established, which was ordinarily the case with actions as to property, or were already clearly apparent, which in the case of actions as to loans could easily be accomplished according to the current rules of law by means of the witnesses.
Protection was in like manner provided for the estate of persons not capable of bearing arms and therefore not capable of protecting their own property, such as minors and lunatics, and above all for that of women; in these cases the nearest heirs were called to undertake the guardianship.
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 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)
The emancipation of a son encountered greater difficulties than that of a slave; for while the relation of master to slave was accidental and therefore capable of being dissolved at will, the father could never cease to be father. Accordingly in later times the son was obliged, in order to get free from the father, first to enter into slavery and then to be set free out of this latter state; but in the period now before us no emancipation of sons can have as yet existed.
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.
Exceptions from these general rules were created by special state-treaties, which secured certain rights to the members of foreign communities within the Roman state. In particular, the perpetual league between Rome and Latium declared all contracts between Romans and Latins to be valid in law, and at the same time instituted in their case an accelerated civil process before sworn “recoverers” (-reciperatores-). As, contrary to Roman usage, which in other instances committed the decision to a single judge, these always sat in plural number and that number uneven, they are probably to be conceived as a court for the cognizance of commercial dealings, composed of arbiters from both nations and an umpire. They sat in judgment at the place where the contract was entered into, and were obliged to have the process terminated at latest in ten days. The forms, under which the dealings between Romans and Latins were conducted, were of course the general forms which regulated the mutual dealings of patricians and plebeians; for the -mancipatio- and the -nexum- were originally not at all formal acts, but the significant expression of legal ideas which held a sway at least as extensive as the range of the Latin language.
Dealings with countries strictly foreign were carried on in a different fashion and by means of other forms. In very early times treaties as to commerce and legal redress must have been entered into with the Caerites and other friendly peoples, and must have formed the basis of the international private law (-ius gentium-), which gradually became developed in Rome alongside of the law of the land. An indication of the formation of such a law is found in the remarkable -mutuum-, “the exchange” (from -mutare- like -dividuus-)—a form of loan, which was not based like the -nexum-upon a binding declaration of the debtor expressly emitted before witnesses, but upon the mere transit of the money from one hand
We have derived our outline of these institutions mainly from the earliest record of the Roman common law prepared about half a century after the abolition of the monarchy; and their existence in the regal period, while doubtful perhaps as to particular points of detail, cannot be doubted in the main. Surveying them as a whole, we recognize the law of a far-advanced agricultural and mercantile city, marked alike by its liberality and its consistency. In its case the conventional language of symbols, such as e. g. the Germanic laws exhibit, has already quite disappeared. There is no doubt that such a symbolic language must have existed at one time among the Italians. Remarkable instances of it are to be found in the form of searching a house, wherein the searcher must, according to the Roman as well as the Germanic custom, appear without upper garment merely in his shirt; and especially in the primitive Latin formula for declaring war, in which we meet with two symbols occurring at least also among the Celts and the Germans—the “pure herb” (-herba pura-, Franconian -chrene chruda-) as a symbol of the native soil, and the singed bloody staff as a sign of commencing war. But with a few exceptions, in which reasons of religion protected the ancient usages—to which class the -confarreatio-as well as the declaration of war by the college of Fetiales belonged—the Roman law, as we know it, uniformly and on principle rejects the symbol, and requires in all cases neither more nor less than the full and pure expression of will. The delivery of an article, the summons to bear witness, the conclusion of marriage, were complete as soon as the parties had in an intelligible manner declared their purpose; it was usual, indeed, to deliver the article into the hand of the new owner, to pull the person summoned as a witness by the ear, to veil the bride’s head and to lead her in solemn procession to her husband’s house; but all these primitive practices were already, under the oldest national law of the Romans, customs legally
1. This “chariot-seat”—philologically no other explanation can well be given (comp. Servius ad Aen. i. 16)—is most simply explained by supposing that the king alone was entitled to ride in a chariot within the city (v. The King)—whence originated the privilege subsequently accorded to the chief magistrate on solemn occasions—and that originally, so long as there was no elevated tribunal, he gave judgment, at the comitium or wherever else he wished, from the chariot-seat.
2. I. V. The Housefather and His Household
3. The story of the death of king Tatius, as given by Plutarch (Rom. 23, 24), viz. that kinsmen of Tatius had killed envoys from Laurentum; that Tatius had refused the complaint of the kinsmen of the slain for redress; that they then put Tatius to death; that Romulus acquitted the murderers of Tatius, on the ground that murder had been expiated by murder; but that, in consequence of the penal judgments of the gods that simultaneously fell upon Rome and Laurentum, the perpetrators of both murders were in the sequel subjected to righteous punishment—this story looks quite like a historical version of the abolition of blood-revenge, just as the introduction of the -provocatio- lies at the foundation of the myth of the Horatii. The versions of the same story that occur elsewhere certainly present considerable variations, but they seem to be confused or dressed up.
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.
6. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium
7. I. Vi. Dependents and Guests.
8. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium
9. I. Vi. Class of —Metoeci— Subsisting by the Side of the Community
Religion
The Roman world of gods, as we have already indicated,(1) was a higher counterpart, an ideal reflection, of the earthly Rome, in which the little and the great were alike repeated with painstaking exactness. The state and the clan, the individual phenomenon of nature as well as the individual mental operation, every man, every place and object, every act even falling within the sphere of Roman law, reappeared in the Roman world of gods; and, as earthly things come and go in perpetual flux, the circle of the gods underwent a corresponding fluctuation. The tutelary spirit, which presided over the individual act, lasted no longer than that act itself: the tutelary spirit of the individual man lived and died with the man; and eternal duration belonged to divinities of this sort only in so far as similar acts and similarly constituted men and therefore spirits of a similar kind were ever coming into existence afresh. As the Roman gods ruled over the Roman community, so every foreign community was presided over by its own gods; but sharp as was the distinction between the burgess and non-burgess, between the Roman and the foreign god, both foreign men and foreign divinities could be admitted by resolution of the community to the freedom of Rome, and when the citizens of a conquered city were transported to Rome, the gods of that city were also invited to take up their new abode there.
We obtain information regarding the original cycle of the gods, as it stood in Rome previous to any contact with the Greeks, from the list of the public and duly named festival-days (-feriae publicae-) of the Roman community, which is preserved in its calendar and is beyond all question the oldest document which has reached us from Roman antiquity. The first place in it is occupied by the gods Jupiter and Mars along with the duplicate of the latter, Quirinus. To Jupiter all the days of full moon (-idus-) are sacred, besides all the wine-festivals and various other days to be mentioned afterwards; the 21st May (-agonalia-) is dedicated to his counterpart, the “bad Jovis” (-Ve-diovis-). To Mars belongs the new-year of the 1st March, and generally the great warrior-festival in this month which derived its very name from the god; this festival, introduced by the horse-racing (-equirria-) on the 27th February, had during March its principal solemnities on the days of the shield-forging (-equirria- or -Mamuralia-, March 14), of the armed dance at the Comitium (-quinquatrus-, March 19), and of the consecration of trumpets (-tubilustrium-, March 23). As, when a war was to be waged, it began
Of not less importance—as was to be expected in the case of the port of Latium—were the mariner-festivals of the divinities of the sea (-Neptunalia-, July 23), of the harbour (-Portunalia-, August 17), and of the Tiber stream (-Volturnalia-, August 27).
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.
Domestic and family life in general were represented by the festival of the goddess of the house and of the spirits of the storechamber, Vesta and the Penates (-Vestalia-, June 9); the festival of the goddess of birth(2) (-Matralia-, June 11); the festival of the blessing of children, dedicated to Liber and Libera (-Liberalia-, March 17), the festival of departed spirits (-Feralia-, February 21), and the three days’ ghost-celebration (-Lemuria- May 9, 11, 13); while those having reference to civil relations were the two—otherwise to us somewhat obscure—festivals of the king’s flight (-Regifugium-, February 24) and of the people’s flight (-Poplifugia-, July 5), of which at least the last day was devoted to Jupiter, and the festival of the Seven Mounts (-Agonia- or -Septimontium-, December 11). A special day (-agonia-, January 9) was also consecrated to Janus, the god of beginning. The real nature of some other days—that of Furrina (July 25), and that of the Larentalia devoted to Jupiter and Acca Larentia, perhaps a feast of the Lares (December 23)—is no longer known.
This table is complete for the immoveable public festivals; and—although by the side of these standing festal days there certainly occurred from the earliest times changeable and occasional festivals—this document, in what it says as well as in what it omits, opens up to us an insight into a primitive age otherwise almost wholly lost to us. The union of the Old Roman community and the Hill-Romans had indeed already taken place when this table of festivals was formed, for we find in it Quirinus alongside of Mars; but, when this festival-list was drawn up, the Capitoline temple was not yet in existence, for Juno and Minerva are absent; nor was the temple of Diana erected on the Aventine; nor was any notion of worship borrowed from the Greeks.
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
It is no part of our present task to consider the Roman deities in detail; but it is important, even in an historical point of view, to call attention to the peculiar character at once of shallowness and of fervour that marked the Roman faith. Abstraction and personification lay at the root of the Roman as well as of the Hellenic mythology: the Hellenic as well as the Roman god was originally suggested by some natural phenomenon or some mental conception, and to the Roman just as to the Greek every divinity appeared a person. This is evident from their apprehending the individual gods as male or female; from their style of appeal to an unknown deity,—“Be thou god or goddess, man or woman;” and from the deeply cherished belief that the name of the proper tutelary spirit of the community ought to remain for ever unpronounced, lest an enemy should come to learn it and calling the god by his name should entice him beyond the bounds. A remnant of this strongly sensuous mode of apprehension clung to Mars in particular, the oldest and most national form of divinity in Italy. But while abstraction, which lies at the foundation of every religion, elsewhere endeavoured to rise to wider and more enlarged conceptions and to penetrate ever more deeply into the essence of things, the forms of the Roman faith remained at, or sank to, a singularly low level of conception and of insight. While in the case of the Greek every influential motive speedily expanded into a group of forms and gathered around it a circle of legends and ideas, in the case of the Roman the fundamental thought remained stationary in its original naked rigidity. The religion of Rome had nothing of its own presenting even a remote resemblance to the religion of Apollo investing earthly morality with a halo of glory, to the divine intoxication of Dionysus, or to the Chthonian and mystical worships with their profound and hidden meanings. It had indeed its “bad god” (-Ve-diovis-), its
The national Roman theology sought on all hands to form distinct conceptions of important phenomena and qualities, to express them in its terminology, and to classify them systematically—in the first instance, according to that division of persons and things which also formed the basis of private law—that it might thus be able in due fashion to invoke the gods individually or by classes, and to point out (-indigitare-) to the multitude the modes of appropriate invocation. Of such notions, the products of outward abstraction—of the homeliest simplicity, sometimes venerable, sometimes ridiculous—Roman theology was in substance made up. Conceptions such as sowing (-saeturnus-) and field-labour (-ops-) ground (-tellus-) and boundary-stone (-terminus-), were among the oldest and most sacred of Roman divinities. Perhaps the most peculiar of all the forms of deity in Rome, and probably the only one for whose worship there was devised an effigy peculiarly Italian, was the double-headed lanus; and yet it was simply suggestive of the idea so characteristic of the scrupulous spirit of Roman religion, that at the commencement of every act the “spirit of opening” should first be invoked, while it above all betokened the deep conviction that it was as indispensable to combine the Roman gods in sets as it was necessary that the more personal gods of the Hellenes should stand singly and apart.(4) Of all the worships of Rome that which perhaps had the deepest hold was the worship of the tutelary spirits that presided in and over the household and the storechamber: these were in public worship Vesta and the Penates, in family worship the gods of forest and field, the Silvani, and above all the gods of the household in its strict sense, the Lases or Lares, to whom their share of the family meal was regularly assigned, and before whom it was, even in the time of Cato the Elder, the first duty of the father of the household on returning home to perform his devotions. In the ranking of the gods, however, these spirits of the house and of the field occupied the lowest rather than the highest place; it was—and it could not be otherwise with a religion which renounced all attempts to idealize—not the broadest and most general, but the simplest and most individual abstraction, in which the pious heart found most nourishment.
This indifference to ideal elements in the Roman religion was accompanied by a practical and utilitarian tendency, as is clearly enough apparent in the table of festivals which has been already explained. Increase of substance and of prosperity by husbandry and the rearing of flocks and herds, by seafaring and commerce—this was what the Roman desired from his gods; and it very well accords with this view, that the god of good faith (-deus fidius-), the goddess of chance and good luck (-fors fortuna-), and the god of traffic (-mercurius-), all originating out of their daily dealings, although not occurring in that ancient table of festivals, appear very early as adored far and near by the Romans. Strict frugality and mercantile speculation were rooted in the Roman character too deeply not to find their thorough reflection in its divine counterpart.
Respecting the world of spirits little can be said. The departed souls of mortal men, the “good” (-manes-) continued to exist as shades haunting the spot where the body reposed (-dii inferi-), and received meat and drink from the survivors. But they dwelt in the depths beneath, and there was no bridge that led from the lower world either to men ruling on earth or upward to the gods above. The hero-worship of the Greeks was wholly foreign to the Romans, and the late origin and poor invention of the legend as to the foundation of Rome are shown by the thoroughly unRoman transformation of king Romulus into the god Quirinus. Numa, the oldest and most venerable name in Roman tradition, never received the honours of a god in Rome as Theseus did in Athens.
The most ancient priesthoods in the community bore reference to Mars; especially the priest of the god of the community, nominated for life, “the kindler of Mars” (-flamen Martialis-) as he was designated from presenting burnt-offerings, and the twelve “leapers” (-salii-), a band of young men who in March performed the war-dance in honour of Mars and accompanied it by song. We have already explained(5) how the amalgamation of the Hill-community with that of the Palatine gave rise to the duplication of the Roman Mars, and thereby to the introduction of a second priest of Mars—the -flamen Quirinalis- —and a second guild of dancers—the -salii collini-.
To these were added other public worships (some of which probably had an origin far earlier than that of Rome), for which either single priests were appointed—as those of Carmentis, of Volcanus, of the god of the harbour and the river—or the celebration of which was committed to particular colleges or clans in name of the people. Such a college was probably that of the twelve “field-brethren” (-fratres arvales-) who invoked the “creative goddess” (-dea dia-) in May to bless the growth of the seed; although it is very doubtful whether they already
To this earliest worship of the Roman community new rites were gradually added. The most important of these worships had reference to the city as newly united and virtually founded afresh by the construction of the great wall and stronghold. In it the highest and best lovis of the Capitol—that is, the genius of the Roman people—was placed at the head of all the Roman divinities, and his “kindler” thenceforth appointed, the -flamen Dialis-, formed in conjunction with the two priests of Mars the sacred triad of high-priests. Contemporaneously began the -cultus- of the new single city-hearth—Vesta—and the kindred -cultus- of the Penates of the community.(7) Six chaste virgins, daughters as it were of the household of the Roman people, attended to that pious service, and had to maintain the wholesome fire of the common hearth always blazing as an example(8) and an omen to the burgesses. This worship, half-domestic, half-public, was the most sacred of all in Rome, and it accordingly was the latest of all the heathen worships there to give way before the ban of Christianity. The Aventine, moreover, was assigned to Diana as the representative of the Latin confederacy,(9) but for that very reason no special Roman priesthood was appointed for her; and the community gradually became accustomed to render definite homage to numerous other deified abstractions by means of general festivals or by representative priesthoods specially destined for their service; in particular instances—such as those of the goddess of flowers (-Flora-) and of fruits (-Pomona-)—it appointed also special -flamines-, so that the number of these was at length fifteen. But among them they carefully distinguished those three “great kindlers” (-flamines maiores-), who down to the latest times could only be taken from the ranks of the old burgesses, just as the old incorporations of the Palatine and Quirinal -Salii-always asserted precedence over all the other colleges of priests. Thus the necessary and stated observances due to the gods of the community were entrusted once for all by the state to fixed colleges or regular ministers; and the expense of sacrifices, which was presumably not inconsiderable, was covered partly by the assignation of certain lands to particular temples, partly by the fines.(10)
It cannot be doubted that the public worship of the other Latin, and presumably also of the Sabellian, communities was essentially similar in character. At any rate it can be shown that the Flamines, Salii, Luperci, and Vestales were institutions not special to Rome, but general among the Latins, and at least the first three colleges appear to have been formed in the kindred communities independently of the Roman model.
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.
There was thus enough of priesthood and of priests in Rome. Those, however, who had business with a god resorted to the god, and not to the priest. Every suppliant and inquirer addressed himself directly to the divinity—the community of course by the king as its mouthpiece, just as the -curia- by the -curio- and the -equites-by their colonels; no intervention of a priest was allowed to conceal or to obscure this original and simple relation. But it was no easy matter to hold converse with a god. The god had his own way of speaking, which was intelligible only to the man acquainted with it; but one who did rightly understand it knew not only how to ascertain, but also how to manage, the will of the god, and even in case of need to overreach or to constrain him. It was natural, therefore, that the worshipper of the god should regularly consult such men of skill and listen to their advice; and thence arose the corporations or colleges of men specially skilled in religious lore, a thoroughly national Italian institution, which had a far more important influence on political development than the individual priests and priesthoods. These colleges have been often, but erroneously, confounded with the priesthoods. The priesthoods were charged with the worship of a specific divinity; the skilled colleges, on the other hand, were charged with the preservation of traditional rules regarding those more general religious observances, the proper fulfilment of which implied a certain amount of knowledge and rendered it necessary that the state in its own interest should provide for the faithful transmission of that knowledge. These close corporations supplying their own vacancies, of course from the ranks of the burgesses, became in this way the depositaries of skilled arts and sciences.
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)
The six “bird-carriers” (-augures-) were skilled in interpreting the language of the gods from the flight of birds; an art which was prosecuted with great earnestness and reduced to a quasi-scientific system. The six “bridge-builders” (-Pontifices-) derived their name from their function, as sacred as it was politically important, of conducting the building and demolition of the bridge over the Tiber. They were the Roman engineers, who understood the mystery of measures and numbers; whence there devolved upon them also the duty of managing the calendar of the state, of proclaiming to the people the time of new and full moon and the days of festivals, and of seeing that every religious and every judicial act took place on the right day. As they had thus an especial supervision of all religious observances, it was to them in case of need—on occasion of marriage, testament, and -adrogatio- —that the preliminary question was addressed, whether the business proposed did not in any respect offend against divine law; and it was they who fixed and promulgated the general exoteric precepts of ritual, which were known under the name of the “royal laws.” Thus they acquired (although not probably to the full extent till after the abolition of the monarchy) the general oversight of Roman worship and of whatever was connected with it—and what was there that was not so connected? They themselves described the sum of their knowledge as “the science of things divine and human.” In fact the rudiments of spiritual and temporal jurisprudence as well as of historical recording proceeded from this college. For all writing of history was associated with the calendar and the book of annals; and, as from the organization of the Roman courts of law no tradition could originate in these courts themselves, it was necessary that the knowledge of legal principles and procedure should be traditionally preserved in the college of the Pontifices, which alone was competent to give an opinion respecting court-days and questions of religious law.
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.
Character of the -Cultus-
The Latin worship was grounded essentially on man’s enjoyment of earthly pleasures, and only in a subordinate degree on his fear of the wild forces of nature; it consisted pre-eminently therefore in expressions of joy, in lays and songs, in games and dances, and above all in banquets. In Italy, as everywhere among agricultural tribes whose ordinary food consists of vegetables, the slaughter of cattle was at once a household feast and an act of worship: a pig was the most acceptable offering to the gods, just because it was the usual roast for a feast. But all extravagance of expense as well as all excess of rejoicing was inconsistent with the solid character of the Romans. Frugality in relation to the gods was one of the most prominent traits of the primitive Latin worship; and the free play of imagination was repressed with iron severity by the moral self-discipline which the nation maintained. In consequence the Latins remained strangers to the excesses which grow out of unrestrained indulgence. At the very core of the Latin religion there lay that profound moral impulse which leads men to bring earthly guilt and earthly punishment into relation with the world of the gods, and to view the former as a crime against the gods, and the latter as its expiation. The execution of the criminal condemned to death was as much an expiatory sacrifice offered to the divinity as was the killing of an enemy in just war; the thief who by night stole the fruits of the field paid the penalty to Ceres on the gallows just as the enemy paid it to mother earth and the good spirits on the field of battle. The profound and fearful idea of substitution also meets us here: when the gods of the community were angry and nobody could be laid hold of as definitely guilty, they might be appeased
The same distinctive character was manifest, moreover, in the domain of its practical use. The practical gain which accrued to the Roman community from their religion was a code of moral law gradually developed by the priests, and the -Pontifices- in particular, which on the one hand supplied the place of police regulations at a time when the state was still far from providing any direct police-guardianship for its citizens, and on the other hand brought to the bar of the gods and visited with divine penalties the breach of moral obligations. To the regulations of the former class belonged the religious inculcation of a due observance of holidays and of a cultivation of the fields and vineyards according to the rules of good husbandry—which we shall have occasion to notice more fully in the sequel—as well as the worship of the heath or of the Lares which was connected with considerations of sanitary police,(13) and above all the practice of burning the bodies of the dead, adopted among the Romans at a singularly early period, far earlier than among the Greeks—a practice implying a rational conception of life and of death, which was foreign to primitive times and is even foreign to ourselves at the present day. It must be reckoned no small achievement that the national religion of the Latins was able to carry out these and similar improvements. But the civilizing effect of this law was still more important. If a husband sold his wife, or a father sold his married son; if a child struck his father, or a daughter-in-law her father-in-law; if a patron violated his obligation to keep faith with his guest or dependent; if an unjust neighbour displaced a boundary-stone, or the thief laid hands by night on the grain entrusted to the common good faith; the burden of the curse of the gods lay thenceforth on the head of the offender. Not that the person thus accursed (-sacer-) was outlawed; such an outlawry, inconsistent in its nature with all civil order, was only an exceptional occurrence—an aggravation of the religious curse in Rome at the time of the quarrels between the orders. It was not the province of the individual burgess, or even of
But religion performed no higher service in Latium than the furtherance of civil order and morality by such means as these. In this field Hellas had an unspeakable advantage over Latium; it owed to its religion not merely its whole intellectual development, but also its national union, so far as such an union was attained at all; the oracles and festivals of the gods, Delphi and Olympia, and the Muses, daughters of faith, were the centres round which revolved all that was great in Hellenic life and all in it that was the common heritage of the nation. And yet even here Latium had, as compared with Hellas, its own advantages. The Latin religion, reduced as it was to the level of ordinary perception, was completely intelligible to every one and accessible in common to all; and therefore the Roman community preserved the equality of its citizens, while Hellas, where religion rose to the level of the highest thought, had from the earliest times to endure all the blessing and curse of an aristocracy of intellect. The Latin religion like every other had its origin in the effort of faith to fathom the infinite; it is only to a superficial view, which is deceived as to the depth of the stream because it is clear, that its transparent spirit-world can appear to be shallow. This fervid faith disappeared with the progress of time as necessarily as the dew of morning disappears before the rising sun, and thus the Latin religion came subsequently to wither; but the Latins preserved their simplicity of belief longer than most peoples and longer especially than the Greeks. As colours are effects of light and at the same time dim it, so art and science are not merely the creations but also the destroyers of faith; and, much as this process at once of development and of destruction is swayed by necessity, by the same law of nature certain results have been reserved to the epoch of early simplicity—results which subsequent epochs make vain endeavours to attain. The mighty intellectual development of the Hellenes,
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
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.
With our very unsatisfactory knowledge we cannot grasp the intrinsic contrast subsisting between the Etruscan conceptions of deity and the Italian; but it is clear that the most prominent among the Etruscan gods were the malignant and the mischievous; as indeed their worship was cruel, and included in particular the sacrifice of their captives; thus at Caere they slaughtered the Phocaean, and at Traquinii the Roman, prisoners. Instead of a tranquil world of departed “good spirits” ruling peacefully in the realms beneath, such as the Latins had conceived, the Etruscan religion presented a veritable hell, in which the poor souls were doomed to be tortured by mallets and serpents, and to which they were conveyed by the conductor of the dead, a savage semi-brutal figure of an old man with wings and a large hammer—a figure which afterwards served in the gladiatorial games at Rome as a model for the costume of the man who removed the corpses of the slain from the arena. So fixed was the association of torture with this condition of the shades, that there was even provided a redemption from it, which after certain mysterious offerings transferred the poor soul to the society of the gods above. It is remarkable that, in order to people their lower world, the Etruscans early borrowed from the Greeks their gloomiest notions, such as the doctrine of Acheron and Charon, which play an important part in the Etruscan discipline.
But the Etruscan occupied himself above all in the interpretation of signs and portents. The Romans heard the voice of the gods in nature; but their bird-seer understood only the signs in their simplicity, and knew only in general whether the occurrence boded good or ill. Disturbances of the ordinary course of nature were regarded by him as boding evil, and put a stop to the business in hand, as when for example a storm of thunder and lightning dispersed the comitia; and he probably sought to get rid of them, as, for example, in the case of monstrous births, which were put to death as speedily as possible. But beyond
The Etruscan religion occupied a higher level than the Roman, in so far as it developed at least the rudiments of what was wholly wanting among the Romans—a speculation veiled under religious forms. Over the world and its gods there ruled the veiled gods (-Dii involuti-), consulted by the Etruscan Jupiter himself; that world moreover was finite, and, as it had come into being, so was it again to pass away after the expiry of a definite period of time, whose sections were the -saecula-. Respecting the intellectual value which may once have belonged to this Etruscan cosmogony and philosophy, it is difficult to form a judgment; they appear however to have been from the very first characterized by a dull fatalism and an insipid play upon number.
1. I. II. Religion
2. This was, to all appearance, the original nature of the “morning-mother” or -Mater matuta-; in connection with which we may recall the circumstance that, as the names Lucius and especially -Manius- show, the morning hour was reckoned as lucky for birth. -Mater matuta-probably became a goddess of sea and harbour only at a later epoch under the influence of the myth of Leucothea; the fact that the goddess was chiefly worshipped by women tells against the view that she was originally a harbour-goddess.
3. From -Maurs-, which is the oldest form handed down by tradition, there have been developed by different treatment of the -u -Mars-, -Mavors-, -Mors-; the transition to -o (similar to -Paula-, -Pola-, and the like) appears also in the double form Mar-Mor (comp. -Ma-murius-) alongside of -Mar-Mor- and -Ma-Mers-.
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.
5. I. IV. Tities and Luceres
6. I. Vi. Amalgamation of the Palatine and Quirinal Cities
7. I. VII. Servian Wall
8. I. III. Latium
9. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium
10. I. V. Burdens of the Burgesses, I. XI. Crimes
11. The clearest evidence of this is the fact, that in the communities organized on the Latin scheme augurs and Pontifices occur everywhere (e. g. Cic. de Lege Agr. ii. 35, 96, and numerous inscriptions), as does likewise the -pater patratus- of the Fetiales in Laurentum (Orelli, 2276), but the other colleges do not. The former, therefore, stand on the same footing with the constitution of ten curies and the Flamines, Salii, and Luperci, as very ancient heirlooms of the Latin stock; whereas the Duoviri -sacris faciundis-, and the other colleges, like the thirty curies and the Servian tribes and centuries, originated in, and remained therefore confined to, Rome. But in the case of the second college—the pontifices—the influence of Rome probably led to the introduction of that name into the general Latin scheme instead of some earlier—perhaps more than one—designation; or—a hypothesis which philologically has much in its favour— -pons- originally signified not “bridge,” but “way” generally, and -pontifex- therefore meant “constructor of ways.”
The statements regarding the original number of the augurs in particular vary. The view that it was necessary for the number to be an odd one is refuted by Cicero (de Lege Agr. ii. 35, 96); and Livy (x. 6) does not say so, but only states that the number of Roman augurs had to be divisible by three, and so must have had an odd number as its basis. According to Livy (l. c.) the number was six down to the Ogulnian law, and the same is virtually affirmed by Cicero (de Rep. ii. 9, 14) when he represents Romulus as instituting four, and Numa two, augural stalls. On the number of the pontifices comp. Staatsrecht, ii. 20.
12. It is only an unreflecting misconception that can discover in this usage a reminiscence of ancient human sacrifices.
13. I. XII. Nature of the Roman Gods
14. I. XII. Priests
15. -Sors- from -serere-, to place in row. The -sortes- were probably small wooden tablets arranged upon a string, which when thrown formed figures of various kinds; an arrangement which puts one in mind of the Runic characters.
16. I. X. Hellenes and Latins
17. I. VII. Servian Wall
18. I. II. Indo-Germanic Culture
19. I. IV. Tities and Luceres
Agriculture, Trade, and Commerce
Agriculture and commerce are so intimately bound up with the constitution and the external history of states, that the former must frequently be noticed in the course of describing the latter. We shall here endeavour to supplement the detached notices which we have already given, by exhibiting a summary view of Italian and particularly of Roman economics.
It has been already observed(1) that the transition from a pastoral to an agricultural economy preceded the immigration of the Italians into the peninsula. Agriculture continued to be the main support of all the communities in Italy, of the Sabellians and Etruscans no less than of the Latins. There were no purely pastoral tribes in Italy during historical times, although of course the various races everywhere combined pastoral husbandry, to a greater or less extent according to the nature of the locality, with the cultivation of the soil. The beautiful custom of commencing the formation of new cities by tracing a furrow with the plough along the line of the future ring-wall shows how deeply rooted was the feeling that every commonwealth is dependent on agriculture. In the case of Rome in particular—and it is only in its case that we can speak of agrarian relations with any sort of certainty—the Servian reform shows very clearly not only that the agricultural class originally preponderated in the state, but also that an effort was made permanently to maintain the collective body of freeholders as the pith and marrow of the community. When in the course of time a large portion of the landed property in Rome had passed into the hands of non-burgesses and thus the rights and duties of burgesses were no longer bound up with freehold property, the reformed constitution obviated this incongruous state of things, and the perils which it threatened, not merely temporarily but permanently, by treating the members of the community without reference to their political position once for all according to their freeholding, and imposing the common burden of war-service on the freeholders—a step which in the natural course of things could not but be followed by the concession of public rights.
We have already indicated(2) that in the earliest times the arable land was cultivated in common, probably by the several clans; each clan tilled its own land, and thereafter distributed the produce among the several households belonging to it. There exists indeed an intimate connection between the system of joint tillage and the clan form of society, and even subsequently in Rome joint residence and joint management were of very frequent occurrence in the case of co-proprietors.(3) Even the traditions of Roman law furnish the information that wealth consisted at first in cattle and the usufruct of the soil, and that it was not till later that land came to be distributed among the burgesses as their own special property.(4) Better evidence that such was the case is afforded by the earliest designation of wealth as “cattle-stock” or “slave-and-cattle-stock” (-pecunia-, -familia pecuniaque-), and of the separate possessions of the children of the household and of slaves as “small cattle” (-peculium-) also by the earliest form of acquiring property through laying hold of it with the hand (-mancipatio-), which was only appropriate to the case of moveable articles;(5) and above all by the earliest measure of “land of one’s own” (-heredium-, from -herus-lord), consisting of two -jugera-(about an acre and a quarter), which can only have applied to garden-ground, and not to the hide.(6) When and how the distribution of the arable land took place, can no longer be ascertained. This much only is certain, that the oldest form of
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 culture of the olive was of later introduction, and certainly was first brought to Italy by the Greeks.(10) The olive is said to have been first planted on the shores of the western Mediterranean towards the close of the second century of the city; and this view accords with the fact that the olive-branch and the olive occupy in the Roman ritual a place very subordinate to the juice of the vine. The esteem in which both noble trees were held by the Romans is shown by the vine and the olive-tree which were planted in the middle of the Forum, not far from the Curtian lake.
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.
It is far more difficult to perceive how matters stood with landed property on a larger scale. The fact that such larger properties existed to no inconsiderable extent, cannot be doubted from the early development of the -equites-, and may be easily explained partly by the distribution of the clan-lands, which of itself could not but call into existence a class of larger landowners in consequence of the necessary inequality in the numbers of the persons belonging to the several clans and participating in the distribution, and partly by the abundant influx of mercantile capital to Rome. But farming on a large scale in the proper sense, implying a considerable establishment of slaves, such as we afterwards meet with at Rome, cannot be supposed
Ground under pasture was not affected by the distribution of the land. The state, and not the clanship, was regarded as the owner of the common pastures. It made use of them in part for its own flocks and herds, which were intended for sacrifice and other purposes and were always kept up by means of the cattle-fines; and it gave to the possessors of cattle the privilege of driving them out upon the common pasture for a moderate payment (-scriptura-). The right of pasturage on the public domains may have originally borne some relation -de facto- to the possession of
While agriculture was the chief and most extensively prosecuted occupation in Rome, other branches of industry did not fail to accompany it, as might be expected from the early development of urban life in that emporium of the Latins. In fact eight guilds of craftsmen were numbered among the institutions of king Numa, that is, among the institutions that had existed in Rome from time immemorial. These were the flute-blowers, the goldsmiths, the coppersmiths, the carpenters, the fullers, the dyers, the potters, and the shoemakers—a list which would substantially exhaust the class of tradesmen working to order on account of others in the very early times, when the baking of bread and the professional art of healing were not yet known and wool was spun into clothing by the women of the household themselves. It is remarkable that there appears no special guild of workers in iron. This affords a fresh confirmation of the fact that the manufacture of iron was of comparatively late introduction in Latium; and on this account in matters of ritual down to the latest times copper alone might be used, e.g. for the sacred plough and the shear-knife of the priests. These bodies of craftsmen must have been of great importance in early times for the urban life of Rome and for its position towards the Latin land—an importance not to be measured by the depressed condition of Roman handicraft in later times, when it was injuriously affected by the multitude of artisan-slaves working for their master or on his account, and by the increased import of articles of luxury. The oldest lays of Rome celebrated not only the mighty war-god Mamers, but also the skilled armourer Mamurius, who understood the art of forging for his fellow-burgesses shields similar to the divine model shield that had fallen from heaven; Volcanus the god of fire and of the forge already appears in the primitive list of Roman festivals.(15) Thus in the earliest Rome, as everywhere, the arts of forging and of wielding the ploughshare and the sword went hand in hand, and there was nothing of that arrogant contempt for handicrafts which we afterwards meet with there. After the Servian organization, however, imposed the duty of serving in the army exclusively
Italian commerce must, it is obvious, have been limited in the earliest epoch to the mutual dealings of the Italians themselves. Fairs (-mercatus-), which must be distinguished from the usual weekly markets (-nundinae-) were of great antiquity in Latium. Probably they were at first associated with international gatherings and festivals, and so perhaps were connected in Rome with the festival at the federal temple on the Aventine; the Latins, who came for this purpose to Rome every year on the 13th August, may have embraced at the same time the opportunity of transacting their business in Rome and of purchasing what they needed there. A similar and perhaps still greater importance belonged in the case of Etruria to the annual general assembly at the temple of Voltumna (perhaps near Montefiascone) in the territory of Volsinii; it served at the same time as a fair and was regularly frequented by Roman traders. But the most important of all the Italian fairs was that which was held at Soracte in the grove of Feronia, a situation than which none could be found more favourable for the exchange of commodities among the three great nations. That high isolated mountain, which appears to have been set down by nature herself in the midst of the plain of the Tiber as a goal for the traveller, lay on the boundary which separated the Etruscan and Sabine lands (to the latter of which it appears mostly to have belonged), and it was likewise easily accessible from Latium and Umbria. Roman merchants regularly made their appearance there, and the wrongs of which they complained gave rise to many a quarrel with the Sabines.
Beyond doubt dealings of barter and traffic were carried on at these fairs long before the first Greek or Phoenician vessel entered the western sea. When bad harvests had occurred, different districts supplied each other at these fairs with grain; there, too, they exchanged cattle, slaves, metals, and whatever other articles were deemed needful or desirable in those primitive times. Oxen and sheep formed the oldest medium of exchange, ten sheep being reckoned equivalent to one ox. The recognition of these objects as universal legal representatives of value or in other words as money, as well as the scale of proportion between the large and smaller cattle, may be traced back—as the recurrence of both especially among the Germans shows—not merely to the Graeco-Italian period, but beyond this even to the epoch of a purely pastoral economy.(16) In Italy, where metal in considerable quantity was everywhere required especially for agricultural purposes and for armour, but few of its provinces themselves produced the requisite metals, copper (-aes-) very early made its appearance alongside of cattle as a second medium of exchange; and so the Latins, who were poor in copper, designated valuation itself as “coppering” (-aestimatio-). This establishment of copper as a general equivalent recognized throughout the whole peninsula, as well as the simplest numeral signs of Italian invention to be mentioned more particularly below(17) and the Italian duodecimal system, may be regarded as traces of this earliest international intercourse of the Italian peoples while they still had the peninsula to themselves.
We have already indicated generally the nature of the influence exercised by transmarine commerce on the Italians who continued independent. The Sabellian stocks remained almost wholly unaffected by it. They were in possession of but a small and inhospitable belt of coast, and received whatever reached them from foreign nations—the alphabet for instance—only through the medium of the Tuscans or Latins; a circumstance which accounts for their want of urban development. The intercourse of Tarentum with the Apulians and Messapians appears to have been at this epoch still unimportant. It was otherwise along the west coast. In Campania the Greeks and Italians dwelt peacefully side by side, and in Latium, and still more in Etruria, an extensive and regular exchange of commodities took place. What were the earliest articles of import, may be inferred partly from the objects found in the primitive tombs, particularly those at Caere, partly from indications preserved in the language and institutions of the Romans, partly and chiefly from the stimulus given to Italian industry; for of course they bought foreign manufactures for a considerable time before they began to imitate them. We cannot determine how far the development of handicrafts had advanced before
It thus appears that Italy in very ancient times derived its articles of luxury, just as imperial Rome did, from the East, before it attempted to manufacture for itself after the models which it imported. In exchange it had nothing to offer except its raw produce, consisting especially of its copper, silver, and iron, but including also slaves and timber for shipbuilding, amber from the Baltic, and, in the event of bad harvests occurring abroad, its grain. From this state of things as to the commodities in demand and the equivalents to be offered in return, we have already explained why Italian traffic assumed in Latium a form so differing from that which it presented in Etruria. The Latins, who were deficient in all the chief articles of export, could carry on only a passive traffic, and were obliged even in the earliest times to procure the copper of which they had need from the Etruscans in exchange for cattle or slaves—we have already mentioned the very ancient practice of selling the latter on the right bank of the Tiber.(23) On the other hand the Tuscan balance of trade must have been necessarily favourable in Caere as in Populonia, in Capua as in Spina. Hence the rapid development of prosperity in these regions and their powerful commercial position; whereas Latium remained preeminently an agricultural country. The same contrast recurs
A distinction not less remarkable between the commerce of the Latins and that of the Etruscans appears in their respective routes or lines of traffic. As to the earliest commerce of the Etruscans in the Adriatic we can hardly do more than express the conjecture that it was directed from Spina and Atria chiefly to Corcyra. We have already mentioned(24) that the western Etruscans ventured boldly into the eastern seas, and trafficked not merely with Sicily, but also with Greece proper. An ancient intercourse with Attica is indicated by the Attic clay vases, which are so numerous in the more recent Etruscan tombs, and had been perhaps even at this time introduced for other purposes than the already-mentioned decoration of tombs, while conversely Tyrrhenian bronze candlesticks and gold cups were articles early in request in Attica. Still more definitely is such an intercourse indicated by the coins. The silver pieces of Populonia were struck after the pattern of a very old silver piece stamped on one side with the Gorgoneion, on the other merely presenting an incuse square, which has been found at Athens and on the old amber-route in
Latin commerce assumed a different direction. Rarely as we have opportunity of instituting comparisons between the Romans and the Etruscans as regards the reception of Hellenic elements, the cases in which such comparisons can be instituted exhibit the two nations as completely independent of each other. This is most clearly apparent in the case of the alphabet. The Greek alphabet brought to the Etruscans from the Chalcidico-Doric colonies in Sicily or Campania varies not immaterially from that which the Latins derived from the same quarter, so that, although both peoples have drawn from the same source, they have done so at different times and different places. The same phenomenon appears in particular words: the Roman Pollux and the Tuscan Pultuke are independent corruptions of the Greek Polydeukes; the Tuscan Utuze or Uthuze is formed from Odysseus, the Roman Ulixes is an exact reproduction of the form of the name usual in Sicily; in like manner the Tuscan Aivas corresponds to the old Greek form of this name, the Roman Aiax to a secondary form that was probably also Sicilian; the Roman Aperta or Apello and the Samnite Appellun have sprung from the Doric Apellon, the Tuscan Apulu from Apollon. Thus the language and writing of Latium indicate that the direction of Latin commerce was exclusively towards the Cumaeans and Siceliots. Every other trace which has survived from so remote an age leads to the same conclusion: such as, the coin of Posidonia found in Latium; the purchase of grain, when a failure of the harvest occurred in Rome, from the Volscians, Cumaeans, and Siceliots (and, as was natural, from the Etruscans as well); above all, the relations subsisting between the Latin and Sicilian monetary systems. As the local Dorico-Chalcidian designation of silver coin —nomos—, and the Sicilian measure —eimina—, were transferred with the same meaning to Latium as -nummus- and -hemina-, so conversely the Italian designations of weight, -libra-, -triens-, -quadrans-, -sextans-, -uncia-, which arose in Latium for the measurement of the copper which was used by weight instead of
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
2. I. III. Clan Villages, I. V. The Community
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
6. Since this assertion still continues to be disputed, we shall let the numbers speak for themselves. The Roman writers on agriculture of the later republic and the imperial period reckon on an average five -modii- of wheat as sufficient to sow a -jugerum-, and the produce as fivefold. The produce of a -heredium- accordingly (even when, without taking into view the space occupied by the dwelling-house and farm-yard, we regard it as entirely arable land, and make no account of years of fallow) amounts to fifty, or deducting the seed forty, modii. For an adult hard-working slave Cato (c. 56) reckons fifty-one -modii-of wheat as the annual consumption. These data enable any one to answer for himself the question whether a Roman family could or could not subsist on the produce of a -heredium-. The attempted proof to the contrary is based on the ground that the slave of later times subsisted more exclusively on corn than the free farmer of the earlier epoch, and that the assumption of a fivefold return is one too low for this earlier epoch; both assumptions are probably correct, but for both there is a limit. Doubtless the subsidiary produce yielded by the arable land itself and by the common pasture, such as figs, vegetables, milk, flesh (especially as derived from the old and zealously pursued rearing of swine), and the like, are specially to be taken into account for the older period; but the older Roman pastoral husbandry, though not unimportant, was withal of subordinate importance, and the chief subsistence of the people was always notoriously grain. We may, moreover, on account of the thoroughness of the earlier cultivation obtain a very considerable increase, especially of the gross produce—and beyond doubt the farmers of this period drew a larger produce from their lands than the great landholders of the later republic and the empire obtained (iii. Latium); but moderation must be exercised in forming such estimates, because we have to deal with a question of averages and with a mode of husbandry conducted neither methodically nor with large capital. The assumption of a tenfold instead of a fivefold return will be the utmost limit, and yet it is far from sufficing. In no case can the enormous deficit, which is left even according to those estimates between the produce of the -heredium- and the requirements of the household, be covered by mere superiority of cultivation. In fact the counter-proof can only be regarded as successful, when it shall have produced a methodical calculation based on rural economics, according to which among a population chiefly subsisting on vegetables the produce of a piece of land of an acre and a quarter proves sufficient on an average for the subsistence of a family.
It is indeed asserted that instances occur even in historical times of colonies founded with allotments of two -jugera-; but the only instance of the kind (Liv. iv. 47) is that of the colony of Labici in the year 336—an instance, which will certainly not be reckoned (by such scholars as are worth the arguing with) to belong to the class of traditions that are trustworthy in their historical details, and which is beset by other very serious difficulties (see book ii. ch. 5, note). It is no doubt true that in the non-colonial assignation of land to the burgesses collectively (-adsignatio viritana-) sometimes only a few -jugera- were granted (as e. g. Liv. viii. ii, 21). In these cases however it was the intention not to create new farms with the allotments, but rather, as a rule, to add to the existing farms new parcels from the conquered lands (comp. C. I. L. i. p. 88). At any rate, any supposition is better than a hypothesis which requires us to believe as it were in a miraculous multiplication of the food of the Roman household. The Roman farmers were far less modest in their requirements than their historiographers; they themselves conceived that they could not subsist even on allotments of seven -jugera- or a produce of one hundred and forty -modii-.
7. I. Vi. Time and Occasion of the Reform
8. Perhaps the latest, although probably not the last, attempt to prove that a Latin farmer’s family might have subsisted on two -jugera- of land, finds its chief support in the argument that Varro (de R. R. i. 44, i) reckons the seed requisite for the -jugerum-at five -modii- of wheat but ten -modii- of spelt, and estimates the produce as corresponding to this, whence it is inferred that the cultivation of spelt yielded a produce, if not double, at least considerably higher than that of wheat. But the converse is more correct, and the nominally higher quantity sown and reaped is simply to be explained by the fact that the Romans garnered and sowed the wheat already shelled, but the spelt still in the husk (Pliny, H. N. xviii. 7, 61), which in this case was not separated from the fruit by threshing. For the same reason spelt is at the present day sown twice as thickly as wheat, and gives a produce twice as great by measure, but less after deduction of the husks. According to Wurtemberg estimates furnished to me by G. Hanssen, the average produce of the Wurtemberg -morgen- is reckoned in the case of wheat (with a sowing of 1/4 to 1/2 -scheffel-) at 3 -scheffel- of the medium weight of 275 Ibs. (= 825 Ibs.); in the case of spelt (with a sowing of 1/2 to 1 1/2 -scheffel-) at least 7 -scheffel- of the medium weight of 150 lbs. ( = 1050 Ibs.), which are reduced by shelling to about 4 -scheffel-. Thus spelt compared with wheat yields in the gross more than double, with equally good soil perhaps triple the crop, but—by specific weight—before the shelling not much above, after shelling (as “kernel”) less than, the half. It was not by mistake,
9. I. II. Agriculture
10. -Oleum- and -oliva- are derived from —elaion—, —elaia—, and -amurca- (oil-less) from —amorgei—.
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.
12. I. XI. Property
13. I. Vi. Class of —Metoeci— Subsisting by the Side of the Community
14. I. XI. Guardianship
15. I. XII. Oldest Table of Roman Festivals
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.
It is well known that the term denoting cattle was transferred to denote money both among the Latins (-pecunia-) and among the Germans (English fee).
17. I. XIV. Decimal System
18. There has lately been found at Praeneste a silver mixing-jug, with a Phoenician and a hieroglyphic inscription (Mon. dell Inst. x. plate 32), which directly proves that such Egyptian wares as come to light in Italy have found their way thither through the medium of the Phoenicians.
19. comp. I. XIII. Culture of the Olive
20. -Velum- is certainly of Latin origin; so is -malus-, especially as that term denotes not merely the mast, but the tree in general: -antenna- likewise may come from —ana— (-anhelare-, -antestari-), and -tendere- = -supertensa-. Of Greek origin, on the other hand, are -gubenare-, to steer (—kubernan—); -ancora-, anchor (—agkura—); -prora-, ship’s bow (—prora—); -aplustre-, ship’s stern (—aphlaston—); -anquina-, the rope fastening the yards (—agkoina—); -nausea-, sea-sickness (—nausia—). The four chief winds of the ancients- -aquilo-, the “eagle-wind,” the north-easterly Tramontana; -voltumus- (of uncertain derivation, perhaps the “vulture-wind"), the south-easterly; -auster- the “scorching” southwest wind, the Sirocco; -favonius-, the “favourable” north-west wind blowing from the Tyrrhene Sea—have indigenous names bearing no reference to navigation; but all the other Latin names for winds are Greek (such as -eurus-, -notus-), or translations from the Greek (e.g. -solanus- = —apelioteis—, -Africus- = —lips—).
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.
22. I. XI. Character of the Roman Law
23. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium
24. I. X. Etruscan Commerce
25. I. XI. Clients and Foreigners, I. XIII. Commerce, in Latium Passive, in Etruria Active
26. I. X. Greek Cities Near Vesuvius
27. If we leave out of view -Sarranus-, -Afer-, and other local designations (I. X. Phoenicians and Italians in Opposition to the Hellenes), the Latin language appears not to possess a single word immediately derived in early times from the Phoenician. The very few words from Phoenician roots which occur in it, such as -arrabo-or -arra- and perhaps also -murra-, -nardus-, and the like, are plainly borrowed proximately from the Greek, which has a considerable number of such words of Oriental extraction as indications of its primitive intercourse with the Aramaeans. That —elephas— and -ebur- should have come from the same Phoenician original with or without the addition of the article, and thus have been each formed independently, is a linguistic impossibility, as the Phoenician article is in reality -ha-, and is not so employed; besides the Oriental primitive word has not as yet been found. The same holds true of the enigmatical word -thesaurus-; whether it may have been originally Greek or borrowed by the Greeks from the Phoenician or Persian, it is at any rate, as a Latin word, derived from the Greek, as the very retaining of its aspiration proves (xii. Foreign Worships).
28. Quintus Claudius, in a law issued shortly before 534, prohibited the senators from having sea-going vessels holding more than 300 -amphorae- (1 amph. = nearly 6 gallons): -id satis habitum ad fructus ex agris vectandos; quaestus omnis patribus indecorus visus- (Liv. xxi. 63). It was thus an ancient usage, and was still permitted, that the senators should possess sea-going vessels for the transport of the produce of their estates: on the other hand, transmarine mercantile speculation (-quaestus-, traffic, fitting-out of vessels, &c.) on their part was prohibited. It is a curious fact that the ancient Greeks as well as the Romans expressed the tonnage of their sea-going ships constantly in amphorae; the reason evidently being, that Greece as well as Italy exported wine at a comparatively early period, and on a larger scale than any other bulky article.
Measuring and Writing
The art of measuring brings the world into subjection to man; the art of writing prevents his knowledge from perishing along with himself; together they make man—what nature has not made him—all-powerful and eternal. It is the privilege and duty of history to trace the course of national progress along these paths also.
Measurement necessarily presupposes the development of the several ideas of units of time, of space, and of weight, and of a whole consisting of equal parts, or in other words of number and of a numeral system. The most obvious bases presented by nature for this purpose are, in reference to time, the periodic returns of the sun and moon, or the day and the month; in reference to space, the length of the human foot, which is more easily applied in measuring than the arm; in reference to gravity, the burden which a man is able to poise (-librare-) on his hand while he holds his arm stretched out, or the “weight” (-libra-). As a basis for the notion of a whole made up of equal parts, nothing so readily suggests itself as the hand with its five, or the hands with their ten, fingers; upon this rests the decimal system. We have already observed that these elements of all numeration and measuring reach back not merely beyond the separation of the Greek and Latin stocks, but even to the most remote primeval times. The antiquity in particular of the measurement of time by the moon is demonstrated by language;(1) even the mode of reckoning the days that elapse between the several phases of the moon, not forward from the phase on which it had entered last, but backward from that which was next to be expected, is at least older than the separation of the Greeks and Latins.
The most definite evidence of the antiquity and original exclusive use of the decimal system among the Indo-Germans is furnished by the well-known agreement of all Indo-Germanic languages in respect to the numerals as far as a hundred inclusive.(2) In the case of Italy the decimal system pervaded all the earliest arrangements: it may be sufficient to recall the number ten so usual in the case of witnesses, securities, envoys, and magistrates, the legal equivalence of one ox and ten sheep, the partition of the canton into ten curies and the pervading application generally of the decurial system, the -limitatio-, the tenth in offerings and in agriculture, decimation, and the praenomen -Decimus-. Among the applications of this most ancient decimal system in the sphere of measuring and of writing, the remarkable Italian ciphers claim a primary place. When the Greeks and Italians separated, there were still evidently no conventional signs of number. On the other hand we find the three oldest and most indispensable numerals, one, five, and ten, represented by three signs—I, V or /\, X, manifestly imitations of the outstretched finger, and the open hand single and double—which were not derived either from the Hellenes or the Phoenicians, but were common to the Romans, Sabellians, and Etruscans. They were the first steps towards the formation of a national Italian writing, and at the same time evidences of the liveliness of that earlier inland intercourse among the Italians which preceded their transmarine commerce.(3) Which of the Italian stocks invented, and which of them borrowed, these signs, can of course no longer be ascertained. Other traces of the pure decimal system occur but sparingly in this field; among them are the -versus-, the Sabellian measure of surface of 100 square feet,(4) and the Roman year of 10 months.
Otherwise generally in the case of those Italian measures, which were not connected with Greek standards and were probably developed by the Italians before they came into contact with the Greeks, there prevailed the partition of the “whole” (-as-) into twelve “units” (-unciae-). The very earliest Latin priesthoods, the colleges of the Salii and Arvales,(5) as well as the leagues of the Etruscan cities, were organized on the basis of the number twelve. The same number predominated in the Roman system of weights and in the measures of length, where the pound (-libra-) and the foot (-pes-) were usually subdivided into twelve parts; the unit of the Roman measures of surface was the “driving” (-actus-) of 120 square feet, a combination of the decimal and duodecimal systems.(6) Similar arrangements as to the measures of capacity may have passed into oblivion.
If we inquire into the basis of the duodecimal system and consider how it can have happened that, in addition to ten, twelve should have been so early and universally singled out from the equal series of numbers, we shall probably be able to find no other source to which it can be referred than a comparison of the solar and lunar periods. Still more than the double hand of ten fingers did the solar cycle of nearly twelve lunar periods first suggest to man the profound conception of an unit composed of equal units, and thereby originate the idea of a system of numbers, the first step towards mathematical thought. The consistent duodecimal development of this idea appears to have belonged to the Italian nation, and to have preceded the first contact with the Greeks.
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
In like manner the Roman calendar—and probably that of the Italians generally—began with an independent development of its own, but subsequently came under the influence of the Greeks. In the division of time the returns of sunrise and sunset, and of the new and full moon, most directly arrest the attention of man; and accordingly the day and the month, determined not by cyclic calculation but by direct observation, were long the exclusive measures of time. Down to a late age sunrise and sunset were proclaimed in the Roman market-place by the public crier, and in like manner it may be presumed that in earlier times, at each of the four phases of the moon, the number of days that would elapse from that phase until the next was proclaimed by the priests. The mode of reckoning therefore in Latium—and the like mode, it may be presumed, was in use not merely among the Sabellians, but also among the Etruscans—was by days, which, as already mentioned, were counted not forward from the phase that had last occurred, but backward from that which was next expected; by lunar weeks, which varied in length between 7 and 8 days, the average length being 7 3/8; and by lunar months which in like manner were sometimes of 29, sometimes of 30 days, the average duration of the synodical month being 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes. For some time the day continued to be among the Italians the smallest, and the month the largest, division of time. It was not until afterwards that they began to distribute day and night respectively into four portions, and it was much later still when they began to employ the division into hours; which explains why even stocks otherwise closely related differed in their mode of fixing the commencement of day, the Romans placing it at midnight, the Sabellians and the Etruscans at noon. No calendar of the year had, at least when the Greeks separated from the Italians, as yet been organized, for the names for the year and its divisions in the two languages have been formed quite independently of each other. Nevertheless the Italians appear to have already in the pre-Hellenic period advanced, if not to the arrangement of a fixed calendar, at any rate to the institution of two larger units of time. The simplifying of the reckoning according to lunar months by the application of the decimal system, which was usual among the Romans, and the designation of a term of ten months as a “ring”
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
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.
The art of expressing sounds by written signs was of later origin than the art of measurement. The Italians did not any more than the Hellenes develop such an art of themselves, although we may discover attempts at such a development in the Italian numeral signs,(10) and possibly also in the primitive Italian custom—formed independently of Hellenic influence—of drawing lots by means of wooden tablets. The difficulty which must have attended the first individualizing of sounds—occurring as they do in so great a variety of combinations—is best demonstrated by the fact that a single alphabet propagated from people to people and from generation to generation has sufficed, and still suffices, for the whole of Aramaic, Indian, Graeco-Roman, and modern civilization; and this most important product of the human intellect was the joint creation of the Aramaeans and the Indo-Germans. The Semitic family of languages, in which the vowel has a subordinate character
—Ta teis ge leitheis pharmak orthosas monos
Aphona kai phonounta, sullabas te theis,
Ezeupon anthropoisi grammat eidenai.—
This Aramaeo-Hellenic alphabet was accordingly brought to the Italians through the medium, doubtless, of the Italian Hellenes; not, however, through the agricultural colonies of Magna Graecia, but through the merchants possibly of Cumae or Tarentum, by whom it would be brought in the first instance to the very ancient emporia of international traffic in Latium and Etruria—to Rome and Caere. The alphabet received by the Italians was by no means the oldest Hellenic one; it had already experienced several modifications, particularly the addition of the three letters —“id:xi”, —“id:phi”, —“id:chi” and the alteration of the signs for —“id:iota”, —“id:gamma”, —“id:lambda".(11) We have already observed(12) that the Etruscan and Latin alphabets were not derived the one from the other, but both directly from the Greek; in fact the Greek alphabet came to Etruria in a form materially different from that which reached Latium. The Etruscan alphabet has a double sign -s (sigma -"id:s” and san -"id:sh”) and only a single -k,(13) and of the -r only the older form -"id:P”; the Latin has, so far as we know, only a single -s, but a double sign for -k (kappa -"id:k” and koppa -"id:q”) and of the -r almost solely the more recent form -"id:R”. The oldest Etruscan writing shows no knowledge of lines, and winds like the coiling of a snake; the more recent employs parallel broken-off lines from right to left: the Latin writing, as far as our monuments reach back, exhibits only the latter form of parallel lines, which originally perhaps may have run at pleasure from left to right or from right to left, but subsequently ran among the Romans in the former, and among the Faliscans in the latter direction. The model alphabet brought to Etruria must notwithstanding its comparatively remodelled character reach back to an epoch very ancient, though not positively to be determined; for, as the two sibilants sigma and san were always used by the Etruscans as different sounds side by side, the Greek alphabet which came to Etruria must doubtless still have possessed both of them in this way as living signs of sound; but among all the monuments of the Greek language known to us not one presents sigma and san in simultaneous use.
The Latin alphabet certainly, as we know it, bears on the whole a more recent character; and it is not improbable that the Latins did not simply receive the alphabet once for all, as was the case in Etruria, but in consequence of their lively intercourse with their Greek neighbours kept pace for a considerable period with the alphabet in use among these, and followed its variations. We find, for instance, that the forms -"id:/\/\/”, -"id:P",(14) and -"id:Sigma” were not unknown to the Romans, but were superseded in common use by the later forms -"id:/\/\”, -"id:R”, and -"id:S” —a circumstance which can only be explained by supposing that the Latins employed for a considerable period the Greek alphabet as such in writing either their mother-tongue or Greek. It is dangerous therefore to draw from the more recent character of the Greek alphabet which we meet with in Rome, as compared with the older character of that brought to Etruria, the inference that writing was practised earlier in Etruria than in Rome.
The powerful impression produced by the acquisition of the treasure of letters on those who received them, and the vividness with which they realized the power that slumbered in those humble signs, are illustrated by a remarkable vase from a sepulchral chamber of Caere built before the invention of the arch, which exhibits the old Greek model alphabet as it came to Etruria, and also an Etruscan syllabarium formed from it, which may be compared to that of Palamedes—evidently a sacred relic of the introduction and acclimatization of alphabetic writing in Etruria.
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,
The history of Italian writing thus furnishes in the first place a confirmation of the weak and indirect influence exercised by the Hellenic character over the Sabellians as compared with the more western peoples. The fact that the former received their alphabet from the Etruscans and not from the Romans is probably to be explained by supposing that they already possessed it before they entered upon their migration along the ridge of the Apennines, and that therefore the Sabines as well as Samnites carried it along with them from the mother-land to their new abodes. On the other hand this history of writing contains a salutary warning against the adoption of the hypothesis,
Lastly it is a significant fact, that among all the Italian stocks the development of the Greek alphabet primarily consisted in a process of corruption. Thus the -mediae- disappeared in the whole of the Etruscan dialects, while the Umbrians lost -"id:gamma” and -"id:d”, the Samnites -"id:d”, and the Romans -"id:gamma”; and among the latter -"id:d” also threatened to amalgamate with -"id:r”. In like manner among the Etruscans -"id:o” and -"id:u” early coalesced, and even among the Latins we meet with a tendency to the same corruption. Nearly the converse occurred in the case of the sibilants; for while the Etruscan retained the three signs -"id:z”, -"id:s”, -"id:sh”, and the Umbrian rejected the last but developed two new sibilants in its room, the Samnite and the Faliscan confined themselves like the Greek to -"id:s” and -"id:z”, and the Roman of later times even to -"id:s” alone. It is plain that the more delicate distinctions of sound were duly felt by the introducers of the alphabet, men of culture and masters of two languages; but after the national writing Became wholly detached from the Hellenic mother-alphabet, the -mediae- and their -tenues- gradually came to coincide, and the sibilants and vowels were thrown into disorder—transpositions or rather destructions of sound, of which the first in particular is entirely foreign to the Greek. The destruction of the forms of flexion and derivation went hand in hand with this corruption of sounds. The cause of this barbarization was thus, upon the whole, simply the necessary process of corruption which is continuously eating away every language, where its progress is not stemmed by literature and reason; only in this case indications of what has elsewhere passed away without leaving a trace have been preserved in the writing of sounds. The circumstance that this barbarizing process affected the Etruscans more strongly than any other of the Italian stocks adds to the numerous proofs of their inferior capacity for culture. The fact on the other hand that, among the Italians, the Umbrians apparently were the most affected by a similar corruption of language, the Romans less so, the southern Sabellians least of all, probably finds its explanation, at least in part, in the more lively intercourse maintained by the former with the Etruscans, and by the latter with the Greeks.
1. I. II. Indo-Germanic Culture
2. I. II. Indo-Germanic Culture
3. I. XII. Inland Commerce of the Italians
4. I. II. Agriculture
5. I. XII. Priests
6. Originally both the -actus-, “riving,” and its still more frequently occurring duplicate, the -jugerum-, “yoking,” were, like the German “morgen,” not measures of surface, but measures of labour; the latter denoting the day’s work, the former the half-day’s work, with reference to the sharp division of the day especially in Italy by the ploughman’s rest at noon.
7. I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic and Latino-Sicilian Commerce
8. I. XII. Nature of the Roman Gods
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.
10. I. XIV. Decimal System
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
All these technical improvements are of a like nature and from a historical point of view of like value, in so far as each of them arose at a definite time and at a definite place and thereafter took its own mode of diffusion and found its special development. The excellent investigation of Kirchhoff (-Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets-), which has thrown a clear light on the previously so obscure history of the Hellenic alphabet, and has also furnished essential data for the earliest relations between the Hellenes and Italians—establishing, in particular, incontrovertibly the previously uncertain home of the Etruscan alphabet—is affected by a certain one-sidedness in so far as it lays proportionally too great stress on a single one of these proposals. If systems are here to be distinguished at all, we may not divide the alphabets into two classes according to the value of the —“id:X” as —“id:zeta” or as —“id:chi”, but we shall have to distinguish the alphabet of 23 from that of 25 or 26 letters, and perhaps further in this latter case to distinguish the Ionic of Asia Minor, from which the later common alphabet proceeded, from the common Greek of earlier times. In dealing, however, with the different proposals for the modification of the alphabet the several districts followed an essentially eclectic course, so that one was received here and another there; and it is just in this respect that the history of the Greek alphabet is so instructive, because it shows how particular groups of the Greek lands exchanged improvements in handicraft and art, while others exhibited no such reciprocity. As to Italy in particular we have already called attention to the remarkable contrast between the Achaean agricultural towns and the Chalcidic and Doric colonies of a more mercantile character (x. Iono-Dorian Towns); in the former the primitive forms were throughout retained, in the latter the improved forms were adopted, even those which coming from different quarters were somewhat inconsistent, such as the —“id:C” —“id:gamma” alongside of the —“id:\/” —“id:l”. The Italian alphabets proceed, as Kirchhoff has shown, wholly from the alphabet of the Italian Greeks and in fact from the Chalcidico-Doric; but that the Etruscans and Latins received their alphabet not the one from the other but both directly from the Greeks, is placed beyond doubt especially by the different form of the —“id:r”. For, while of the four modifications of the alphabet above described which concern the Italian Greeks (the fifth was confined to Asia Minor) the first three were already carried out before the alphabet passed to the Etruscans and Latins, the differentiation of —“id:p” and —“id:r” had not yet taken place when it came to Etruria, but on the other hand had at least begun when the Latins received it; for which reason the Etruscans do not at all know the form -"id:R” for -"id:r”, whereas among the Faliscans and the Latins, with the single exception of the Dressel vase (xiv. Note 14 ), the younger form is met with exclusively.
12. I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic and Latino-Sicilian Commerce
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.
14. The golden bracelet of Praeneste recently brought to light (Mitth. der rom. Inst. 1887), far the oldest of the intelligible monuments of the Latin language and Latin writing, shows the older form of the -"id:m”; the enigmatic clay vase from the Quirinal (published by Dressel in the Annali dell Instituto, 1880) shows the older form of the -"id:r”.
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.
16. This is the inscription of the bracelet of Praeneste which has been mentioned at xiv, note 14. On the other hand even on the Ficoroni cista -"id:C” has the later form of -"id:K”.
17. Thus -"id:C” represents -Gaius-; -"id:Cn” -Gnaeus-; while -"id:K” stands for -Kaeso-. With the more recent abbreviations of course this is not the case; in these -"id:gamma” is represented not by -"id:C”, but by -"id:G” (-Gal- -Galeria-), —“id:kappa”, as a rule, by -"id:C” (-C- -centum- -cos- -consul; -col -Collina-), or before -"id:a” by -"id:K” (-Kar- -karmetalia-; -Merk- -merkatus-). For they expressed for a time the sound —k before the vowels -e -i -o and before all consonants by -"id:C”, before -a on the other hand by -"id:K”, before -u by the old sign of the koppa -"id:Q”.
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.
19. Just as the old Saxon -writan- signifies properly to tear, thence to write.
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.
20. -Ratio Tuscanica,: cavum aedium Tuscanicum.-
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
23. I. XII. Nature of the Roman Gods
24. I. XII. Pontifices
Art
Poetry is impassioned language, and its modulation is melody. While in this sense no people is without poetry and music, some nations have received a pre-eminent endowment of poetic gifts. The Italian nation, however, was not and is not one of these. The Italian is deficient in the passion of the heart, in the longing to idealize what is human and to confer humanity on what is lifeless, which form the very essence of poetic art. His acuteness of perception and his graceful versatility enabled him to excel in irony and in the vein of tale-telling which we find in Horace and Boccaccio, in the humorous pleasantries of love and song which are presented in Catullus and in the good popular songs of Naples, above all in the lower comedy and in farce. Italian soil gave birth in ancient times to burlesque tragedy, and in modern times to mock-heroic poetry. In rhetoric and histrionic art especially no other
From the defectiveness of our traditional information it is not possible to trace the development of artistic ideas among the several groups of nations in Italy; and in particular we are no longer in a position to speak of the poetry of Italy; we can only speak of that of Latium. Latin poetry, like that of every other nation, began in the lyrical form, or, to speak more correctly, sprang out of those primitive festal rejoicings, in which dance, music, and song were still inseparably blended. It is remarkable, however, that in the most ancient religious usages dancing, and next to dancing instrumental music, were far more prominent than song. In the great procession, with which the Roman festival of victory was opened, the chief place, next to the images of the gods and the champions, was assigned to the dancers grave and merry. The grave dancers were arranged in three groups of men, youths, and boys, all clad in red tunics with copper belts, with swords and short lances, the men being moreover furnished with helmets, and generally in full armed attire. The merry dancers were divided into two companies—“the sheep” in sheep-skins with a party-coloured over-garment, and “the goats” naked down to the waist, with a buck’s skin thrown over them. In like manner the “leapers” (-salii-) were perhaps the most ancient and sacred of all the priesthoods,(1) and dancers (-ludii-, -ludiones-) were indispensable in all public processions, and particularly at funeral solemnities; so that dancing became even in ancient times a common trade. But, wherever the dancers made their appearance, there appeared also the musicians
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.
-Enos, Lases, iuvate!
Ne velue rue, Marmar, sins incurrere in pleores!
Satur fu, fere Mars! limen sali! sta! berber!
Semunis alternei advocapit conctos!
Enos, Marmar, iuvato!
Triumpe!-
Which may be thus interpreted:
To the gods:
-Nos, Lares, iuvate!
Ne veluem (= malam luem) ruem (= ruinam), Mamers,
sinas incurrere in plures!
Satur esto, fere Mars!
To the individual brethren:
In limen insili! sta! verbera (limen?)!
To all the brethren:
Semones alterni advocate cunctos!
To the god:
Nos, Mamers, iuvato!
To the individual brethren:
Tripudia!-(4)
The Latin of this chant and of kindred fragments of the Salian songs, which were regarded even by the philologues of the Augustan age as the oldest documents of their mother-tongue, is related to the Latin of the Twelve Tables somewhat as the language of the Nibelungen is related to the language of Luther; and we may perhaps compare these venerable litanies, as respects both language and contents, with the Indian Vedas.
Lyrical panegyrics and lampoons belonged to a later epoch. We might infer from the national character of the Italians that satirical songs must have abounded in Latium in ancient times, even if their prevalence had not been attested by the very ancient measures of police directed against them. But the panegyrical chants became of more importance. When a burgess was borne to burial, the bier was followed by a female relative or friend, who, accompanied by a piper, sang his dirge (-nenia-). In like manner at banquets boys, who according to the fashion of those days attended their fathers even at feasts out of their own houses, sang by turns songs in praise of their ancestors, sometimes to the pipe, sometimes simply reciting them without accompaniment (-assa voce canere-). The custom of men singing in succession at banquets was presumably borrowed from the Greeks, and that not till a later age. We know no further particulars of these ancestral lays; but it is self-evident that they must have attempted description and narration and thus have developed, along with and out of the lyrical element, the features of epic poetry.
Other elements of poetry were called into action in the primitive popular carnival, the comic dance or -satura-,(5) which beyond doubt reached back to a period anterior to the separation of the stocks. On such occasions song would never be wanting; and the circumstances under which such pastimes were exhibited, chiefly at public festivals and marriages, as well as the mainly practical shape which they certainly assumed, naturally suggested that several dancers, or sets of dancers, should take up reciprocal parts; so that the singing thus came to be associated with a species of acting, which of course was chiefly of a comical and often of a licentious character. In this way there arose not merely alternative chants, such as afterwards went by the name of Fescennine songs, but also the elements of a popular comedy—which were in this instance planted in a soil admirably adapted for their growth, as an acute sense of the outward and the comic, and a delight in gesticulation and masquerade have ever been leading traits of Italian character.
No remains have been preserved of these -incunabula- of the Roman epos and drama. That the ancestral lays were traditional is self-evident, and is abundantly demonstrated by the fact that they were regularly recited by children; but even in the time of Cato the Elder they had completely passed into oblivion. The comedies again, if it be allowable so to name them, were at this period and long afterwards altogether improvised. Consequently nothing of this popular poetry and popular melody could be handed down but the measure, the accompaniment of music and choral dancing, and perhaps the masks.
Whether what we call metre existed in the earlier times is doubtful; the litany of the Arval Brethren scarcely accommodates itself to an outwardly fixed metrical system, and presents to us rather the appearance of an animated recitation. On the other hand we find in subsequent times a very ancient rhythm, the so-called Saturnian(6) or Faunian metre, which is foreign to the Greeks, and may be conjectured to have arisen contemporaneously with the oldest Latin popular poetry. The following poem, belonging, it is true, to a far later age, may give an idea of it:—
Parens timens heic vovit—voto hoc soluto ___ Decuma facta poloucta—leibereis lubentis ____ _____ Donu danunt__hercolei—maxsume—mereto _____ Semol te orant se voti—crebro con__demnes.
__—’__—’__—’__^/ __—’__—’__—’_^
That which, misfortune dreading—sharply to afflict him, An anxious parent vowed here,—when his wish was granted, A sacred tenth for banquet—gladly give his children to Hercules a tribute—most of all deserving; And now they thee beseech, that—often thou wouldst hear them.
Panegyrics as well as comic songs appear to have been uniformly sung in Saturnian metre, of course to the pipe, and presumably in such a way that the -caesura- in particular in each line was strongly marked; and in alternate singing the second singer probably took up the verse at this point. The Saturnian measure is, like every other occurring in Roman and Greek antiquity, based on quantity; but of all the antique metres perhaps it is the least thoroughly elaborated, for besides many other liberties it allows itself the greatest license in omitting the short syllables, and it is at the same time the most imperfect in construction, for these iambic and trochaic half-lines opposed to each other were but little fitted to develop a rhythmical structure adequate for the purposes of the higher poetry.
The fundamental elements of the national music and choral dancing in Latium, which must likewise have been established during this period, are buried for us in oblivion; except that the Latin pipe is reported to have been a short and slender instrument, provided with only four holes, and originally, as the name shows, made out of the light thighbone of some animal.
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.
If our information respecting the earliest indigenous culture and art of Latium is so scanty, it may easily be conceived that our knowledge will be still scantier regarding the earliest impulses imparted in this respect to the Romans from without. In a certain sense we may include under this head their becoming acquainted with foreign languages, particularly the Greek. To this latter language, of course, the Latins generally were strangers, as was shown by their enactment in respect to the Sibylline oracles;(7) but an acquaintance with it must have been not at all uncommon in the case of merchants. The same may be affirmed of the knowledge of reading and writing, closely connected as it was with the knowledge of Greek.(8) The culture of the ancient world, however, was not based either on the knowledge of foreign languages or on elementary technical accomplishments. An influence more important than any thus imparted was exercised over the development of Latium by the elements of the fine arts, which were already in very early times received from the Hellenes. For it was the Hellenes alone, and not the Phoenicians or the Etruscans, that in this respect exercised an influence on the Italians. We nowhere find among the latter any stimulus of the fine arts which can be referred to Carthage or Caere, and the Phoenician and Etruscan forms of civilization may be in general perhaps classed with those that are hybrid, and for that reason not further productive.(9) But the influence of Greece did not fail to bear fruit. The Greek seven-stringed lyre, the “strings” (-fides-, from —sphidei—, gut; also -barbitus-, —barbitos—), was not like the pipe indigenous in Latium, and was always regarded there as an instrument of foreign origin; but the early period at which it gained a
Such was the nature of the Roman festival of victory or city-festival; and the other public festivities of Rome may be conceived to have been of a similar character, although less ample in point of resources. At the celebration of a public funeral dancers regularly bore a part, and along with them, if there was to be any further exhibition, horse-racers; in that case the burgesses were specially invited beforehand to the funeral by the public crier.
But this city-festival, so intimately bound up with the manners and exercises of the Romans, coincides in all essentials with the Hellenic national festivals: more especially in the fundamental idea of combining a religious solemnity and a competition in warlike sports; in the selection of the several exercises, which at the Olympic festival, according to Pindar’s testimony, consisted from the first in running, wrestling, boxing, chariot-racing, and throwing the spear and stone; in the nature of the prize of victory, which in Rome as well as in the Greek national festivals was a chaplet, and in the one case as well as in the other was assigned not to the charioteer, but to the owner of the team; and lastly in introducing the feats and rewards of general patriotism in connection with the general national festival. This agreement cannot have been accidental, but must have been either a remnant of the primitive connection between the peoples, or a result of the earliest international intercourse; and the probabilities preponderate in favour of the latter hypothesis. The city-festival, in the form in which we are acquainted with it, was not one of the oldest institutions of Rome, for the Circus itself was only laid out in the later regal period;(12) and just as the reform of the constitution then took place under Greek influence,(13) the city-festival may have been at the same time so far transformed as to combine Greek races with, and eventually to a certain extent to substitute them for, an older mode of amusement—the “leap” (-triumpus-,(14)), and possibly swinging, which was a primitive Italian custom and long continued in use at the festival on the Alban mount. Moreover, while there is some trace of the use of the war-chariot in actual warfare in Hellas, no such trace exists in Latium. Lastly, the Greek term —stadion— (Doric —spadion—) was at a very early period transferred to the Latin language, retaining its signification, as -spatium-; and there exists even an express statement that the Romans derived their horse and chariot races from the people of Thurii, although, it is true, another account derives them from Etruria. It thus appears that, in addition to the impulses imparted by the Hellenes in music and poetry, the Romans were indebted to them for the fruitful idea of gymnastic competitions.
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.
In such circumstances it is the more remarkable that these germs either did not spring up at all, or were soon arrested in their growth. The bodily training of the Latin youth continued to be solid and substantial, but far removed from the idea of artistic culture for the body, such as was the aim of Hellenic gymnastics. The public games of the Hellenes when introduced into Italy, changed not so much their formal rules as their essential character. While they were intended to be competitions of burgesses and beyond doubt were so at first in Rome, they became contests of professional riders and professional boxers, and, while the proof of free and Hellenic descent formed the first condition for participating in the Greek festal games, those of Rome soon passed into the hands of freedmen and foreigners and even of persons not free at all. Consequently the circle of fellow-competitors became converted into a public of spectators, and the chaplet of the victorious champion, which has been with justice called the badge of Hellas, was afterwards hardly ever mentioned in Latium.
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.
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
Regarding the development of the fine arts among the Etruscans and Sabellians our knowledge is little better than none.(16) We can only notice the fact that in Etruria the dancers (-histri-, -histriones-) and the pipe-players (-subulones-) early made a trade of their art, probably earlier even than in Rome, and exhibited themselves in public not only at home, but also in Rome for small remuneration and less honour. It is a circumstance more remarkable that at the Etruscan national festival, in the exhibition of which the whole twelve cities were represented by a federal priest, games were given like those of the Roman city-festival; we are, however, no longer in a position to answer the question which it suggests, how far the Etruscans were more successful than the Latins in attaining a national form of fine art beyond that of the individual communities. On the other hand a foundation probably was laid in Etruria, even in early times, for that insipid accumulation of learned lumber, particularly of a theological and astrological nature, by virtue of which afterwards, when amidst the general decay antiquarian dilettantism began to flourish, the Tuscans
The elements of architecture were, as has been already indicated, a primitive common possession of the stocks. The dwelling-house constitutes the first attempt of structural art; and it was the same among Greeks and Italians. Built of wood, and covered with a pointed roof of straw or shingles it formed a square dwelling-chamber, which let out the smoke and let in the light by an opening in the roof corresponding with a hole for carrying off the rain in the ground (-cavum aedium-). Under this “black roof” (-atrium-) the meals were prepared and consumed; there the household gods were worshipped, and the marriage bed and the bier were set out; there the husband received his guests, and the wife sat spinning amid the circle of her maidens. The house had no porch, unless we take as such the uncovered space between the house door and the street, which obtained its name -vestibulum-, i. e. dressing-place, from the circumstance that the Romans were in the habit of going about within doors in their tunics, and only wrapped the toga around them when they went abroad. There was, moreover, no division of apartments except that sleeping and store closets might be provided around the dwelling-room; and still less were there stairs, or stories placed one above another.
Whether, or to what extent, a national Italian architecture arose o ut of these beginnings can scarcely be determined, for in this field Greek influence, even in the earliest times, had a very powerful effect and almost wholly overgrew such national attempts as possibly had preceded it. The very oldest Italian architecture with which we are acquainted is not much less under the influence of that of Greece than the architecture of the Augustan age. The primitive tombs of Caere and Alsium, and probably the oldest one also
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.”
On the other hand, among the Italians—not among the Sabellian stocks merely, but even among the Latins—native sculpture and design were at this period only coming into existence. The most considerable works of art appear to have been executed abroad. We have just mentioned the statues of clay alleged to have been executed in Veii; and very recent excavations have shown that works in bronze made in Etruria, and furnished with Etruscan inscriptions, circulated in Praeneste at least, if not generally throughout Latium. The statue of Diana in the Romano-Latin federal temple on the Aventine, which was considered the oldest statue of a divinity in Rome,(21) exactly resembled the Massiliot statue of the Ephesian Artemis, and was perhaps manufactured in Velia or Massilia. The guilds, which from ancient times existed in Rome, of potters, coppersmiths, and goldsmiths,(22) are almost the only proofs of the existence of native sculpture and design there; respecting the position of their art it is no longer possible to gain any clear idea.
Artistic Relations and Endowments of the Etruscans and Italians
If we endeavour to obtain historical results from the archives of the tradition and practice of primitive art, it is in the first place manifest that Italian art, like the Italian measures and Italian writing, developed itself not under Phoenician, but exclusively under Hellenic influence. There is not a single one of the aspects of Italian art which has not found its definite model in the art of ancient Greece; and,
To the further question, from what Greek stock the Etruscans in the first instance received their art-models, a categorical answer cannot be given; yet relations of a remarkable kind subsist between the Etruscan and the oldest Attic art. The three forms of art, which were practised in Etruria at least in after times very extensively, but in Greece only to an extent very limited, tomb-painting, mirror-designing, and graving on stone, have been hitherto met with on Grecian soil only in Athens and Aegina. The Tuscan temple does not correspond exactly either to the Doric or to the Ionic; but in the more important points of distinction, in the course of columns carried round the -cella-, as well as in the placing of a separate pedestal under each particular column, the Etruscan style follows the more recent Ionic; and it is this same Iono-Attic style of building still pervaded by a Doric element, which in its general design stands nearest of all the Greek styles to the Tuscan. In the case of Latium there is an almost total absence of any certain traces of intercourse bearing on the history of art. If it was—as is indeed almost self-evident—the general relations of traffic and intercourse that determined also the introduction of models in art, it may be assumed with certainty that the Campanian and Sicilian Hellenes were the instructors of Latium in art, as in the alphabet; and the analogy between the Aventine Diana and the Ephesian Artemis is at least not inconsistent with such an hypothesis. Of course the older Etruscan art also served as a model for Latium. As to the Sabellian tribes, if Greek architectural and plastic art reached them at all, it must, like the Greek alphabet, have come to them only through the medium of the more western Italian stocks.
If, in conclusion, we are to form a judgment respecting the artistic endowments of the different Italian nations, we already at this stage perceive—what becomes indeed far more obvious in the later stages of the history of art—that while the Etruscans attained to the practice of art at an earlier period and produced more massive and rich workmanship, their works are inferior to those of the Latins and Sabellians in appropriateness and utility no less than in spirit and beauty. This certainly is apparent, in the case of our present epoch, only in architecture. The polygonal wall-masonry, as appropriate to its object as it was beautiful, was frequent in Latium and in the inland country behind it; while in Etruria it was rare, and not even the walls of Caere are constructed of polygonal blocks. Even in the religious prominence—remarkable also as respects the history of art—assigned to the arch(23) and to the bridge(24) in Latium, we may be allowed to perceive, as it were, an anticipation of the future aqueducts and consular highways of Rome. On the other hand, the Etruscans repeated, and at the same time corrupted, the ornamental architecture of the Greeks: for while they transferred the laws established for building in stone to architecture in wood, they displayed no thorough skill of adaptation, and by the lowness of their roof and the wide intervals between their columns gave to their temples, to use the language of an ancient architect, a “heavy, mean, straggling, and clumsy appearance.” The Latins found in the rich stores of Greek art but very little that was congenial to their thoroughly realistic tastes; but what they did adopt they appropriated truly and heartily as their own, and in the development of the polygonal wall-architecture perhaps excelled their instructors. Etruscan art is a remarkable evidence of accomplishments mechanically acquired and mechanically retained, but it is, as little as the Chinese, an evidence even of genial receptivity. As scholars have long since desisted from the attempt to derive Greek art from that of the Etruscans, so they must, with whatever reluctance, make up their minds to transfer the Etruscans from the first to the lowest place in the history of Italian art.
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
6. The name probably denotes nothing but “the chant-measure,” inasmuch as the -satura- was originally the chant sung at the carnival (ii. Art). The god of sowing, -Saeturnus- or -Saiturnus-, afterwards -Saturnus-, received his name from the same root; his feast, the Saturnalia, was certainly a sort of carnival, and it is possible that the farces were originally exhibited chiefly at this feast. But there are no proofs of a relation between the Satura and the Saturnalia, and it may be presumed that the immediate association of the -versus saturnius- with the god Saturn, and the lengthening of the first syllable in connection with that view, belong only to later times.
7. I. XII. Foreign Worships
8. I. XIV. Introduction of Hellenic Alphabets into Italy
9. The statement that “formerly the Roman boys were trained in Etruscan culture, as they were in later times in Greek” (Liv. ix. 36), is quite irreconcilable with the original character of the Roman training of youth, and it is not easy to see what the Roman boys could have learned in Etruria. Even the most zealous modern partizans of Tages-worship will not maintain that the study of the Etruscan language played such a part in Rome then as the learning of French does now with us; that a non-Etruscan should understand anything of the art of the Etruscan -haruspices- was considered, even by those who availed themselves of that art, to be a disgrace or rather an impossibility (Muller, Etr. ii. 4). Perhaps the statement was concocted by the Etruscizing antiquaries of the last age of the republic out of stories of the older annals, aiming at a causal explanation of facts, such as that which makes Mucius Scaevola learn Etruscan when a child for the sake of his conversation with Porsena (Dionysius, v. 28; Plutarch, Poplicola, 17; comp. Dionysius, iii. 70). But there was at any rate an epoch when the dominion of Rome over Italy demanded a certain knowledge of the language of the country on the part of Romans of rank.
10. The employment of the lyre in ritual is attested by Cicero de Orat. iii. 51, 197; Tusc. iv. 2, 4; Dionysius, vii. 72; Appian, Pun. 66; and the inscription in Orelli, 2448, comp. 1803. It was likewise used at the -neniae- (Varro ap. Nonium, v. -nenia-and -praeficae-). But playing on the lyre remained none the less unbecoming (Scipio ap. Macrob. Sat. ii. 10, et al.). The prohibition of music in 639 exempted only the “Latin player on the pipe along with the singer,” not the player on the lyre, and the guests at meals sang only to the pipe (Cato in Cic. Tusc. i. 2, 3; iv. 2, 3; Varro ap. Nonium, v. -assa voce-; Horace, Carm. iv. 15, 30). Quintilian, who asserts the reverse (Inst. i. 10, 20), has inaccurately transferred to private banquets what Cicero (de Orat. iii. 51) states in reference to the feasts of the gods.
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).
12. I. VII. Servian Wall
13. I. Vi. Time and Occasion of the Reform
14. I. II. Religion
15. -Vates- probably denoted in the first instance the “leader of the singing” (for so the -vates- of the Salii must be understood) and thereafter in its older usage approximated to the Greek —propheiteis—; it was a word be longing to religious ritual, and even when subsequently used of the poet, always retained the accessory idea of a divinely-inspired singer—the priest of the Muses.
16. We shall show in due time that the Atellanae and Fescenninae belonged not to Campanian and Etruscan, but to Latin art.
17. Literally “word-crisping,” in allusion to the -calamistri Maecenatis-.
18. I. III. Alba
19. Of this character were the Servian walls. They consisted partly of a strengthening of the hill-slopes by facing them with lining-walls as much as 4 metres thick, partly—in the intervals, above all on the Viminal and Quirinal, where from the Esquiline to the Colline gate there was an absence of natural defence—of an earthen mound, which was finished off on the outside by a similar lining-wall. On these lining-walls rested the breastwork. A trench, according to trustworthy statements of the ancients 30 feet deep and 100 feet broad, stretched along in front of the wall, for which the earth was taken from this same trench.—The breastwork has nowhere been preserved; of the lining-walls extensive remains have recently been brought to light. The blocks of tufo composing them are hewn in longish rectangles, on an average of 60 centimetres (= 2 Roman feet) in height and breadth, while the length varies from 70 centimetres to 3 metres, and they are, without application of mortar, laid together in several rows, alternately with the long and with the narrow side outermost.
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,
20. -Ratio Tuscanica,: cavum aedium Tuscanicum.-
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
23. I. XII. Nature of the Roman Gods
24. I. XII. Pontifices
* * * * *
THE HISTORY OF ROME: BOOK II
From the Abolition of the Monarchy in Rome to the Union of Italy
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:
1) 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-.
2) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents, are rendered with a preceding and a following double-dash; thus, —xxxx—. Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as —xxx-xxx—
3) Simple unideographic references to vocalic sounds, single letters, or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic references are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x, or -xxx.
4) Ideographic references, referring to signs of representation rather than to content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-. “id:” stands for “ideograph”, and indicates that the reader should form a picture based on the following “xxxx”; which may be a single symbol, a word, or an attempt at a picture composed of ASCII characters. For example, —“id:Gamma gamma”— indicates an uppercase Greek gamma-form followed by the form in lowercase. Some such exotic parsing as this is necessary to explain alphabetic development because a single symbol may have been used for a number of sounds in a number of languages, or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different times. Thus, -"id:Gamma gamma” might very well refer to a Phoenician construct that in appearance resembles the form that eventually stabilized as an uppercase Greek “gamma” juxtaposed to one of lowercase. Also, a construct such as —“id:E” indicates a symbol that with ASCII resembles most closely a Roman uppercase “E”, but, in fact, is actually drawn more crudely.
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.
Book ii: From the Abolition of the
Monarchy in Rome to the Union
of
Italy
I. Change of the Constitution—Limitation
of the Power of the
Magistrate
II. The Tribunate of the Plebs and the Decemvirate
III. The Equalization of the Orders, and the New Aristocracy
IV. Fall of the Etruscan Power—the Celts
V. Subjugation of the Latins and Campanians by Rome
Vi. Struggle of the Italians against Rome
VII. Struggle Between Pyrrhus and Rome, and Union of Italy
VIII. Law—Religion—Military System—Economic Condition—Nationality
IX. Art and Science
From the Abolition of the Monarchy in Rome to the Union of Italy
—dei ouk ekpleittein ton suggraphea terateuomenon dia teis iotopias tous entugchanontas.—
Polybius.
Change of the Constitution—
Limitation of the Power of the Magistrate
The strict conception of the unity and omnipotence of the state in all matters pertaining to it, which was the central principle of the Italian constitutions, placed in the hands of the single president nominated for life a formidable power, which was felt doubtless by the enemies of the land, but was not less heavily felt by its citizens. Abuse and oppression could not fail to ensue, and, as a necessary consequence, efforts were made to lessen that power. It was, however, the grand distinction of the endeavours after reform and the revolutions in Rome, that there was no attempt either to impose limitations on the community as such or even to deprive it of corresponding organs of expression—that there never was any endeavour to assert the so-called natural rights of the individual in contradistinction to the community—that, on the contrary, the attack was wholly directed against the form in which the community was represented. From the times of the Tarquins down to those of the Gracchi the cry of the party of progress in Rome was not for limitation of the power of the state, but for limitation of the power of the magistrates: nor amidst that cry was the truth ever forgotten, that the people ought not to govern, but to be governed.
This struggle was carried on within the burgess-body. Side by side with it another movement developed itself—the cry of the non-burgesses for equality of political privileges. Under this head are included the agitations of the plebeians, the Latins, the Italians, and the freedmen, all of whom—whether they may have borne the name of burgesses, as did the plebeians and the freedmen, or not, as was the case with the Latins and Italians—were destitute of, and desired, political equality.
A third distinction was one of a still more general nature; the distinction between the wealthy and the poor, especially such as had been dispossessed or were endangered in possession. The legal and political relations of Rome led to the rise of a numerous class of farmers—partly small proprietors who were dependent on the mercy of the capitalist, partly small temporary lessees who were dependent on the mercy of the landlord—and in many instances deprived individuals as well as whole communities of the lands which they held, without affecting their personal freedom. By these means the agricultural proletariate became at an early period so powerful as to have a material influence on the destinies of the community. The urban proletariate did not acquire political importance till a much later epoch.
On these distinctions hinged the internal history of Rome, and, as may be presumed, not less the history—totally lost to us—of the other Italian communities. The political movement within the fully-privileged burgess-body, the warfare between the excluded and excluding classes, and the social conflicts between the possessors and the non-possessors of land—variously as they crossed and interlaced, and singular as were the alliances they often produced —were nevertheless essentially and fundamentally distinct.
Abolition of the Life-Presidency of the Community
As the Servian reform, which placed the —metoikos— on a footing of equality in a military point of view with the burgess, appears to have originated from considerations of an administrative nature rather than from any political party-tendency, we may assume that the first of the movements which led to internal crises and changes of the constitution was that which sought to limit the magistracy. The earliest achievement of this, the most ancient opposition in Rome, consisted in the abolition of the life-tenure of the presidency of the community; in other words, in the abolition of the monarchy. How necessarily this was the result of the natural development of things, is most strikingly demonstrated by the fact, that the same change of constitution took place in an analogous manner through the whole circuit of the Italo-Grecian world. Not only in Rome, but likewise among the other Latins as well as among the Sabellians, Etruscans, and Apulians—and generally, in all the Italian communities, just as in those of Greece—we find the rulers for life of an earlier epoch superseded in after times by annual magistrates. In the case of the Lucanian canton there is evidence that it had a democratic government in time of peace, and it was only in the event of war that the magistrates appointed a king, that is, an official similar to the Roman dictator. The Sabellian civic communities, such as those of Capua and Pompeii, in like manner were in later times governed by a “community-manager” (-medix tuticus-) changed from year to year, and we may assume that similar institutions existed among
Expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome
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.
This is all that can be looked upon as historically certain in reference to this important event.(2) It is conceivable that in a great community with extensive dominion like the Roman the royal power, particularly if it had been in the same family for several generations, would be more capable of resistance, and the struggle would thus be keener, than in the smaller states; but there is no certain indication of any interference
Powers of the Consuls
If we are left in ignorance of the historical connections of this important event, we are fortunately in possession of clearer light as to the nature of the change which was made in the constitution. The royal power was by no means abolished, as is shown by the very fact that, when a vacancy occurred afterwards as before, an “interim king” (-interrex-) was nominated. The one life-king was simply replaced by two year-kings, who called themselves generals (-praetores-), or judges (-iudices-), or merely colleagues (consules).(3) The principles of collegiate tenure and of annual duration are those which distinguish the republic from the monarchy, and they first meet us here.
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
As regards the termination of their tenure of office, the earlier -interregnum- of five days furnished a legal precedent. The ordinary presidents of the community were bound not to remain in office longer than a year reckoned from the day of their entering on their functions;(4) and they ceased -de jure- to be magistrates upon the expiry of the year, just as the interrex on the expiry of the five days. Through this set termination of the supreme office the practical irresponsibility of the king was lost in the case of the consul. It is true that the king was always in the Roman commonwealth subject, and not superior, to the law; but, as according to the Roman view the supreme judge could not be prosecuted at his own bar, the king might doubtless have committed a crime, but there was for him no tribunal and no punishment. The consul, again, if he had committed murder or treason, was protected by his office, but only so long as it lasted; on his retirement he was liable to the ordinary penal jurisdiction like any other burgess.
To these leading changes, affecting the principles of the constitution, other restrictions were added of a subordinate and more external character, some of which nevertheless produced a deep effect The privilege of the king to have his fields tilled by task-work of the burgesses, and the special relation of clientship in which the —metoeci— as a body must have stood to the king, ceased of themselves with the life tenure of the office.
Right of Appeal
Hitherto in criminal processes as well as in fines and corporal punishments it had been the province of the king not only to investigate and decide the cause, but also to decide whether the person found guilty should or should not be allowed to appeal for pardon. The Valerian law now (in 245) enacted that the consul must allow the appeal of the condemned, where sentence of capital or corporal punishment had been pronounced otherwise than by martial law—a regulation which by a later law (of uncertain date, but passed before 303) was extended to heavy fines. In token of this right of appeal, when the consul appeared in the capacity of judge and not of general, the consular lictors laid aside the axes which they had previously carried by virtue of the penal jurisdiction belonging to their master. The law however threatened the magistrate, who did not allow due course to the -provocatio-, with no other penalty than infamy—which, as matters then stood, was essentially nothing but a moral stain, and at the utmost only had the effect of disqualifying the infamous person from giving testimony. Here too the course followed was based on the same view, that it was in law impossible to diminish the old regal powers, and that the checks imposed upon the holder of the supreme authority in consequence of the revolution had, strictly viewed, only a practical and moral value. When therefore the consul acted within the old regal jurisdiction, he might in so acting perpetrate an injustice, but he committed no crime and consequently was not amenable for what he did to the penal judge.
A limitation similar in its tendency took place in the civil jurisdiction; for probably there was taken from the consuls at the very outset the right of deciding at their discretion a legal dispute between private persons.
Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers
The remodelling of the criminal as of civil procedure stood in connection with a general arrangement respecting the transference of magisterial power to deputies or successors. While the king had been absolutely at liberty to nominate deputies but had never been compelled to do so, the consuls exercised the right of delegating power in an essentially different way. No doubt the rule that, if the supreme magistrate left the city, he had to appoint a warden there for the administration of justice,(5) remained in force also for the consuls, and the collegiate arrangement was not even extended to such delegation; on the contrary this appointment was laid on the consul who was the last to leave the city. But the right of delegation for the time when the consuls remained in the city was probably restricted, upon the very introduction of this office, by providing that delegation should be prescribed to the consul for definite cases, but should be prohibited for all cases in which it was not so prescribed. According to this principle, as we have said, the whole judicial system was organized. The consul could certainly exercise criminal jurisdiction also as to a capital process in the way of submitting his sentence to the community and having it thereupon confirmed or rejected; but he never, so far as we see, exercised this right, perhaps was soon not allowed to exercise it, and possibly pronounced a criminal judgment only in the case of appeal to the community being for any reason excluded. Direct conflict between the supreme magistrate of the community and the community itself was avoided, and the criminal procedure was organized really in such a way, that the supreme magistracy remained only in theory competent, but always acted through deputies who were necessary though appointed by himself. These were the two—not standing—pronouncers-of-judgment for revolt and high treason (-duoviri perduellionis-) and the two standing trackers of murder, the -quaestores parricidii-. Something similar may perhaps have occurred in the regal period, where the king had himself represented in such processes;(6) but the standing character of the latter institution, and the collegiate principle carried out in both, belong at any rate to the republic. The latter arrangement became of great importance also, in so far that thereby for the first time alongside of the two standing supreme magistrates were placed two assistants, whom each supreme magistrate nominated at his entrance on office, and who in due course also went out with him on his leaving it—whose position thus, like the supreme magistracy itself, was organized according to the principles of a standing office, of a collegiate form, and of an annual tenure. This was not indeed as yet the inferior magistracy itself, at least not in the sense which the republic associated with the magisterial position, inasmuch as the commissioners did not emanate from the choice of the community; but it doubtless became the starting-point for the institution of subordinate magistrates, which was afterwards developed in so manifold ways.
In a similar way the decision in civil procedure was withdrawn from the supreme magistracy, inasmuch as the right of the king to transfer an individual process for decision to a deputy was converted into the duty of the consul, after settling the legitimate title of the party and the object of the suit, to refer the disposal of it to a private man to be selected by him and furnished by him with instructions.
In like manner there was left to the consuls the important administration of the state-treasure and of the state-archives; nevertheless probably at once, or at least very early, there were associated with them standing assistants in that duty, namely, those quaestors who, doubtless, had in exercising this function absolutely to obey them, but without whose previous knowledge and co-operation the consuls could not act.
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.
This double restriction of the consular right of delegation subsisted for the government of the city, and primarily for the administration of justice and of the state-chest. As commander-in-chief, on the other hand, the consul retained the right of handing over all or any of the duties devolving on him. This diversity in the treatment of civil and military delegation explains why in the government of the Roman community proper no delegated magisterial authority (-pro magistrate-) was possible, nor were purely urban magistrates ever represented by non-magistrates; and why, on the other hand, military deputies (-pro consuls-, -pro praetore-, -pro quaestore-) were excluded from all action within the community proper.
Nominating a Successor
The right of nominating a successor had not been possessed by the king, but only by the interrex.(7) The consul was in this respect placed on a like footing with the latter; nevertheless, in the event of his not having exercised the power, the interrex stepped in as before, and the necessary continuity of the office subsisted still undiminished under the republican government. The right of nomination, however, was materially restricted in favour of the burgesses, as the consul was bound to procure the assent of the burgesses for the successors designated by him, and, in the sequel, to nominate only those whom the community designated to him. Through this binding right of proposal the nomination of the ordinary supreme magistrates doubtless in a certain sense passed substantially into the hands of the community; practically, however, there still existed a very considerable distinction between that right of proposal and the right of formal nomination. The consul conducting the election was by no means a mere returning officer; he could still, e. g. by virtue of his old royal prerogative
Change in the Nomination of Priests
The nomination of the priests, which had been a prerogative of the kings,(8) was not transferred to the consuls; but the colleges of priests filled up the vacancies in their own ranks, while the Vestals and single priests were nominated by the pontifical college, on which devolved also the exercise of the paternal jurisdiction, so to speak, of the community over the priestesses of Vesta. With a view to the performance of these acts, which could only be properly performed by a single individual, the college probably about this period first nominated a president, the -Pontifex maximus-. This separation of the supreme authority in things sacred from the civil power—while the already-mentioned “king for sacrifice” had neither the civil nor the sacred powers of the king, but simply the title, conferred upon him —and the semi-magisterial position of the new high priest, so decidedly contrasting with the character which otherwise marked the priesthood in Rome, form one of the most significant and important peculiarities of this state-revolution, the aim of which was to impose limits on the powers of the magistrates mainly in the interest of the aristocracy.
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
These limitations, however, of the plenary power and of the insignia of the magistracy applied in the main only to the ordinary presidency of the community. In extraordinary cases, alongside of, and in a certain sense instead of, the two presidents chosen by the community there emerged a single one, the master of the army (-magister populi-) usually designated as the -dictator-. In the choice of dictator the community exercised no influence at all, but it proceeded solely from the free resolve of one of the consuls for the time being, whose action neither his colleague
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.
Centuries and Curies
The community thus acquired by the change of constitution rights of the greatest importance: the right of annually designating its presidents, and that of deciding in the last instance regarding the life or death of the burgess. But the body which acquired these rights could not possibly be the community as it had been hitherto constituted—the patriciate which had practically become an order of nobility. The strength of the nation lay in the “multitude” (-plebs-) which already comprehended in large numbers people of note and of wealth. The exclusion of this multitude from the public assembly, although it bore part of the public burdens, might be tolerated as long as that public assembly itself had no very material share in the working of the state machine, and as long as the royal power by the very fact of its high and free position remained almost equally formidable to the burgesses and to the —metoeci— and thereby maintained equality of legal redress in the nation. But when the community itself was called regularly to elect and to decide, and the president was practically reduced from its master to its commissioner for a set term, this relation could no longer be maintained as it stood; least of all when the state had to be remodelled on the morrow of a revolution, which could only have been carried out by the co-operation of the patricians and the —metoeci—. An extension of that community was inevitable; and it was accomplished in the most comprehensive manner, inasmuch as the collective plebeiate, that is, all the non-burgesses who were neither slaves nor citizens of extraneous communities living at Rome under the -ius hospitii-, were admitted into the burgess-body. The curiate assembly of the old burgesses, which hitherto had been legally and practically the first authority in the state, was almost totally deprived of its constitutional prerogatives. It was to retain its previous powers only in acts purely formal or in those which affected clan-relations —such as the vow of allegiance to be taken to the consul or to the dictator when they entered on office just as previously to the king,(9) and the legal dispensations requisite for an -arrogatio- or a testament—but it was not in future to perform any act of a properly political character. Soon even the plebeians were admitted to the right of voting also in the curies, and by that step the old burgess-body lost the right of meeting and of resolving at all. The curial organization was virtually rooted out, in so far as it was based on the clan-organization and this latter was to be found in its purity exclusively among the old burgesses. When the plebeians were admitted into the curies, they were certainly also allowed to constitute themselves -de jure- as—what in the earlier period they could only have been -de facto-(10)—families and clans; but it is distinctly recorded by tradition and in itself also very conceivable, that only a portion of the plebeians proceeded so far as to constitute -gentes-, and thus the new curiate assembly, in opposition to its original character, included numerous members who belonged to no clan.
All the political prerogatives of the public assembly—as well the decision on appeals in criminal causes, which indeed were essentially political processes, as the nomination of magistrates and the adoption or rejection of laws—were transferred to, or were now acquired by, the assembled levy of those bound to military service; so that the centuries now received the rights, as they had previously borne the burdens, of citizens. In this way the small initial movements made by the Servian constitution—such as, in particular, the handing over to the army the right of assenting to the declaration of an aggressive war(11)—attained such a development that the curies were completely and for ever cast into the shade by the assembly of the centuries, and people became accustomed to regard the latter as the sovereign people. In this assembly debate took place merely when the presiding magistrate chose himself to speak or bade others do so; of course in cases of appeal both parties had to be heard. A simple majority of the centuries was decisive.
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.
But, although by the abolition of the monarchy the constitutional rights of the patrician senate were increased rather than diminished, there yet took place—and that, according to tradition, immediately on the abolition of the monarchy—so far as regards other affairs which fell to be discussed in the senate and admitted of a freer treatment, an enlargement of that body, which brought into it plebeians also, and which in its consequences led to a complete remodelling of the whole. From the earliest times the senate had acted also, although not solely or especially, as a state-council; and, while probably even in the time of the kings it was not regarded as unconstitutional for non-senators in this case to take part in the assembly,(12) it was now arranged that for such discussions there should be associated with the patrician senate (-patres-) a number of non-patricians “added to the roll” (-conscripti-). This did not at all put them on a footing of equality; the plebeians in the senate did not become senators, but remained members of the equestrian order, were not designated -patres-but were even now -conscripti-, and had no right to the badge of senatorial dignity, the red shoe.(13) Moreover, they not only remained absolutely excluded from the exercise of the magisterial prerogatives belonging to the senate (-auctoritas-), but were obliged, even where the question had reference merely to an advice (-consilium-), to rest content with the privilege of being present in silence while the question was put to the patricians in turn, and of only indicating their opinion by adding to the numbers when the division was taken—voting with the feet (-pedibus in sententiam ire-, -pedarii-) as the proud nobility expressed it. Nevertheless, the plebeians found their way through the new constitution not merely to the Forum, but also to the senate-house, and the first and most difficult step towards equality of rights was taken in this quarter also.
Otherwise there was no material change in the arrangements affecting the senate. Among the patrician members a distinction of rank soon came to be recognized, especially in putting the vote: those who were proximately designated for the supreme magistracy, or who had already administered it, were entered on the list and were called upon to vote before the rest; and the position of the first of them, the foreman of the senate (-princeps senatus-) soon became a highly coveted place of honour. The consul in office, on the other hand, no more ranked as a member of senate than did the king, and therefore in taking the votes did not include his own. The selection of the members—both of the narrower patrician senate and of those merely added to the roll—fell to be made by the consuls just as formerly by the kings; but the nature of the case implied that, while the king had still perhaps some measure of regard to the representation of the several clans in the senate, this consideration was of no account so far as concerned
Conservative Character of the Revolution
We thus see that in the Roman commonwealth, even on the conversion of the monarchy into a republic, the old was as far as possible retained. So far as a revolution in a state can be conservative at all, this one was so; not one of the constituent elements of the commonwealth was really overthrown by it. This circumstance indicates the character of the whole movement. The expulsion of the Tarquins was not, as the pitiful and deeply falsified accounts of it represent, the work of a people carried away by sympathy and enthusiasm for liberty, but the work of two great political parties already engaged in conflict, and clearly aware that their conflict would steadily continue—the old burgesses and the —metoeci— —who, like the English Whigs and Tories in 1688, were for a moment united by the common danger which threatened to convert the commonwealth into the arbitrary government of a despot, and differed again as soon as the danger was over. The old burgesses could not get rid of the monarchy without the cooperation of the new burgesses; but the new burgesses were far from being sufficiently strong to wrest the power out of the hands of the former at one blow. Compromises of this sort are necessarily limited to the smallest measure of mutual concessions obtained by tedious bargaining; and they leave the future to decide which of the constituent elements shall eventually preponderate, and whether they will work harmoniously together or counteract one another. To look therefore merely to the direct innovations, possibly to the mere change in the duration of the supreme magistracy, is altogether to mistake the broad import of the first Roman revolution: its indirect effects were by far the most important, and vaster doubtless than even its authors anticipated.
The New Community
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.
One consequence of this amalgamation of the patricians and plebeians in a new corporation of Roman burgesses was the conversion of the old burgesses into a clan-nobility, which was incapable of receiving additions or even of filling up its own ranks, since the nobles no longer possessed the right of passing decrees in common assembly and the adoption of new families into the nobility by decree of the community appeared still less admissible. Under the kings the ranks of the Roman nobility had not been thus closed, and the admission of new clans was no very rare occurrence: now this genuine characteristic of patricianism made its appearance as the sure herald of the speedy loss of its political privileges and of its exclusive estimation in the community. The exclusion of the plebeians from all public magistracies and public priesthoods—while they were admissible to the position of officers and senators—and the maintenance, with perverse obstinacy, of the legal impossibility of marriage between old burgesses and plebeians, further impressed on the patriciate from the outset the stamp of an exclusive and wrongly privileged aristocracy.
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
Law and Edict
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.
Civil and Military Authority
It was at this period, finally, that the provinces of civil and military authority were separated. In the former the law ruled, in the latter the axe: the former was governed by the constitutional checks of the right of appeal and of regulated delegation; in the latter the general held an absolute sway like the king.(15) It was an established principle, that the general and the army as such should not under ordinary circumstances enter the city proper. That organic and permanently operative enactments could only be made under the authority of the civil power, was implied in the spirit, if not in the letter, of the constitution. Instances indeed occasionally occurred where the general, disregarding this principle, convoked his forces in the camp as a burgess assembly, nor was a decree passed under such circumstances legally void; but custom disapproved of such a proceeding, and it soon fell into disuse as though it had been forbidden. The distinction between Quirites and soldiers became more and more deeply rooted in the minds of the burgesses.
Government of the Patriciate
Time however was required for the development of these consequences of the new republicanism; vividly as posterity felt its effects, the revolution probably appeared to the contemporary world at first in a different light. The non-burgesses indeed gained by it burgess-rights, and the new burgess-body acquired in the -comitia centuriata- comprehensive prerogatives; but the right of rejection on the part of the patrician senate, which in firm and serried ranks confronted the -comitia- as if it were an Upper House, legally hampered their freedom of movement precisely in the most important matters, and although not in a position to thwart the serious will of the collective body, could yet practically delay and cripple it. If the nobility in giving up their claim to be the sole embodiment of the community did not seem to have lost much, they had in other respects decidedly gained. The king, it is true, was a patrician as well as the consul, and the right of nominating the members of the senate belonged to the latter as to the former; but while his exceptional position raised the former no less above the patricians than above the plebeians, and while cases might easily occur in which he would be obliged to lean upon the support of the multitude even against the nobility, the consul—ruling for a brief term, but before and after that term simply one of the nobility, and obeying to-morrow the noble fellow-burgess whom he had commanded to-day—by no means occupied a position aloof from his order, and the spirit of the noble in him must have been far more powerful than that of the magistrate. Indeed, if at any time by way of exception a patrician disinclined to the rule of the nobility was called to the government, his official authority was paralyzed partly by the priestly colleges, which were pervaded by an intense aristocratic spirit, partly by his colleague, and was easily suspended by the dictatorship; and, what was of still more moment, he wanted the first element of political power, time. The president of a commonwealth, whatever plenary authority may be conceded to him, will never gain possession of political power, if he does not continue for some considerable time at the head of affairs; for a necessary condition of every dominion is duration. Consequently the senate appointed for life inevitably acquired—and that by virtue chiefly of its title to advise the magistrate in all points, so that we speak not of the narrower patrician, but of the enlarged patricio-plebeian, senate—so great an influence as contrasted with the annual rulers, that their legal relations became precisely inverted; the senate substantially assumed to itself the powers of government, and the former ruler sank into a president acting as its chairman and executing its decrees. In the case of every proposal to be submitted to the community for acceptance or rejection the practice of previously consulting the whole senate and obtaining its approval, while
The consequences followed as a matter of course. The first and most essential condition of all aristocratic government is, that the plenary power of the state be vested not in an individual but in a corporation. Now a preponderantly aristocratic corporation, the senate, had appropriated to itself the government, and at the same time the executive power not only remained in the hands of the nobility, but was also entirely subject to the governing corporation. It is true that a considerable number of men not belonging to the nobility sat in the senate; but as they were incapable of holding magistracies or even of taking part in the debates, and thus were excluded from all practical share in the government, they necessarily played a subordinate part in the senate, and were moreover kept in pecuniary dependence on the corporation through the economically important privilege of using the public pasture. The gradually recognized right of the patrician consuls to revise and modify the senatorial list at least every fourth year, ineffective as presumably it was over against the nobility, might very well be employed in their interest, and an obnoxious plebeian might by means of it be kept out of the senate or even be removed from its ranks.
The Plebeian Opposition
It is therefore quite true that the immediate effect of the revolution was to establish the aristocratic government. It is not, however, the whole truth. While the majority of contemporaries probably thought that the revolution had brought upon the plebeians only a more rigid despotism, we who come afterwards discern in that very revolution the germs of young liberty. What the patricians gained was gained at the expense not of the community, but of the magistrate’s power. It is true that the community gained only a few narrowly restricted rights, which were far less practical and palpable than the acquisitions of the nobility, and which not one in a thousand probably had the wisdom to value; but they formed a pledge and earnest of the future. Hitherto the —metoeci— had been politically nothing, the old burgesses had been everything; now that the former were embraced in the community, the old burgesses were overcome; for, however much might still be wanting to full civil equality, it is the first breach, not the occupation of the last post, that decides the fall of the fortress. With justice therefore the Roman community dated its political existence from the beginning of the consulate.
While however the republican revolution may, notwithstanding the aristocratic rule which in the first instance it established, be justly called a victory of the former —metoeci— or the -plebs-, the revolution even in this respect bore by no means the character which we are accustomed in the present day to designate as democratic. Pure personal merit without the support of birth and wealth could perhaps gain influence and consideration more easily under the regal government than under that of the patriciate. Then admission to the patriciate was not in law foreclosed; now the highest object of plebeian ambition was to be admitted into the dumb appendage of the senate. The nature of the case implied that the governing aristocratic order, so far as it admitted plebeians at all, would grant the right of occupying seats in the senate not absolutely to the best men, but chiefly to the heads of the wealthy and notable plebeian families; and the families thus admitted jealously guarded the possession of the senatorial stalls. While a complete legal equality therefore had subsisted within the old burgess-body, the new burgess-body or former —metoeci— came to be in this way divided from the first into a number of privileged families and a multitude kept in a position of inferiority. But the power of the community now according to the centuriate organization came into the hands of that class which since the Servian reform of the army and of taxation had borne mainly the burdens of the state, namely the freeholders, and indeed not so much into the hands of the great proprietors or into those of the small cottagers, as into those of the intermediate class of farmers—an arrangement in which the seniors were still so far privileged that, although less numerous, they had as
1. I. IX. The Tarquins
2. The well-known fable for the most part refutes itself. To a considerable extent it has been concocted for the explanation of surnames (-Brutus-, -Poplicola-, -Scaevola-). But even its apparently historical ingredients are found on closer examination to have been invented. Of this character is the statement that Brutus was captain of the horsemen (-tribunus celerum-) and in that capacity proposed the decree of the people as to the banishment of the Tarquins; for, according to the Roman constitution, it is quite impossible that a mere officer should have had the right to convoke the curies. The whole of this statement has evidently been invented with the view of furnishing a legal basis for the Roman republic; and very ill invented it is, for in its case the -tribunus celerum- is confounded with the entirely different -magister equitum- (V. Burdens Of The Burgesses f.), and then the right of convoking the centuries which pertained to the latter by virtue of his praetorian rank is made to apply to the assembly of the curies.
3. -Consules- are those who “leap or dance together,” as -praesul- is one who “leaps before,” -exsul-, one who “leaps out” (—o ekpeson—), -insula-, a “leap into,” primarily applied to a mass of rock fallen into the sea.
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
7. I. V. Prerogatives of the Senate
8. I. V. The King
9. I. V. The King
10. I. Vi. Dependents and Guests
11. I. Vi. Political Effects of the Servian Military Organization
12. I. V. The Senate as State Council
13. I. V. Prerogatives of the Senate
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).
15. It may not be superfluous to remark, that the -iudicium legitimum-, as well as that -quod imperio continetur-, rested on the imperium of the directing magistrate, and the distinction only consisted in the circumstance that the -imperium- was in the former case limited by the -lex-, while in the latter it was free.
16. II. I. Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers
The Tribunate of the Plebs and the Decemvirate
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
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.
Rising Power of the Capitalists
The reduction of the port-dues, although upon the whole a popular measure, chiefly benefited the great merchant. But a much greater accession to the power of capital was supplied by the indirect system of finance-administration. It is difficult to say what were the remote causes that gave rise to it: but, while its origin may probably be referred to the regal period, after the introduction of the consulate the importance of the intervention of private agency must have been greatly increased, partly by the rapid succession of magistrates in Rome, partly by the extension of the financial action of the treasury to such matters as the purchase and sale of grain and salt; and thus the foundation must have been laid for that system of farming the finances, the development of which became so momentous and so pernicious for the Roman commonwealth. The state gradually put all its indirect revenues and all its more complicated payments and transactions into the hands of middlemen, who gave or received a round sum and then managed the matter for their own benefit. Of course only considerable capitalists and, as the state looked strictly to tangible security, in the main only large landholders, could enter into such engagements: and thus there grew up a class of tax-farmers and contractors, who, in the rapid growth of their wealth, in their power over the state to which they appeared to be servants, and in the absurd and sterile basis of their moneyed dominion, quite admit of comparison with the speculators on the stock exchange of the present day.
Public Land
The concentrated aspect assumed by the administration of finance showed itself first and most palpably in the treatment of the public lands, which tended almost directly to accomplish the material and moral annihilation of the middle classes. The use of the public pasture and of the state-domains generally was from its very nature a privilege of burgesses; formal law excluded the plebeian from the joint use of the common pasture. As however, apart from the conversion of the public land into private property or its assignation, Roman law knew no fixed rights of usufruct on the part of individual burgesses to be respected like those of property, it depended solely on the pleasure of the king, so long as the public land remained such, to grant and to define its joint enjoyment; and it is not to be doubted that he frequently made use of his right, or at least his power, as to this matter in favour of plebeians. But on the introduction of the republic the principle was again strictly insisted on, that the use of the common pasture belonged in law merely to the burgess of best right, or in other words to the patrician; and, though the senate still as before allowed exceptions in favour of the wealthy plebeian houses represented in it, the small plebeian landholders and the day-labourers, who stood most in need of the common pasture, had its joint enjoyment injuriously withheld from them. Moreover there had hitherto been paid for the cattle driven out on the common pasture a grazing-tax, which was moderate enough to make the right of using that pasture still be regarded as a privilege, and yet yielded no inconsiderable revenue to the public purse. The patrician quaestors were now remiss and indulgent in levying it, and gradually allowed it to fall into desuetude. Hitherto, particularly when new domains were acquired by conquest, allocations of land had been regularly arranged, in which all the poorer burgesses and —metoeci— were provided for; it was only the land which was not suitable for agriculture that was annexed to the common pasture. The ruling class did not venture wholly to give up such assignations, and still less to propose them merely in favour of the rich; but they became fewer and scantier, and were replaced by the pernicious system of occupation-that is to say, the cession of domain-lands, not in property or under formal lease for a definite term, but in special usufruct until further notice, to the first occupant and his heirs-at-law, so that the state was at any time entitled to resume them, and the occupier had to pay the tenth sheaf, or in oil and wine the fifth part of the produce, to the exchequer. This was simply the -precarium- already described(2) applied to the state-domains, and may have been already in use as to the public land at an earlier period, particularly as a temporary arrangement until its assignation should be carried out. Now, however, not only did this occupation-tenure
Relations of the Social Question to the Question between Orders
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.
But this state of things prevented the political position of the aristocracy from being permanently tenable. Had it possessed the self-control to govern justly and to protect the middle class—as individual consuls from its ranks endeavoured, but from the reduced position of the magistracy were unable effectually, to do—it might have long maintained itself in sole possession of the offices of state. Had it been willing to admit the wealthy and respectable plebeians to full equality of rights—possibly by connecting the acquisition of the patriciate with admission into the senate—both might long have governed and speculated with impunity. But neither of these courses was adopted; the narrowness of mind and short-sightedness, which are the proper and inalienable privileges of all genuine patricianism, were true to their character also in Rome, and rent the powerful commonwealth asunder in useless, aimless, and inglorious strife.
Secession to the Sacred Mount
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
Plebian Tribunes and Plebian Aediles
In addition to temporary enactments, particularly for remedying the most urgent distress occasioned by debt, and for providing for a number of the rural population by the founding of various colonies, the dictator carried in constitutional form a law, which he moreover —doubtless in order to secure amnesty to the burgesses for the breach of their military oath—caused every individual member of the community to swear to, and then had it deposited in a temple under the charge and custody of two magistrates specially appointed from the plebs for the purpose,
Intercession
The power of the tribunes, therefore, primarily involved the right of putting a stop to administration and to judicial action at their pleasure, of enabling a person bound to military service to withhold himself from the levy with impunity, of preventing or cancelling the raising of an action and legal execution against the debtor, the initiation of a criminal process and the arrest of the accused while the investigation was pending, and other powers of the same sort. That this legal help might not be frustrated by the absence of the helpers, it was further ordained that the tribune should not spend a night out of the city, and that his door must stand open day and night. Moreover, it lay in the power of the tribunate of the people through a single word of a single tribune to restrain the adoption of a resolution by the community, which otherwise by virtue of its sovereign right might have without ceremony recalled the privileges conferred by it on the plebs.
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
This procedure certainly savoured of violence rather than of justice, especially when it was adopted against a non-plebeian, as must in fact have been ordinarily the case. It was not to be reconciled either with the letter or the spirit of the constitution that a patrician should be called to account by authorities who presided not over the body of burgesses, but over an association formed within it, and that he should be compelled to appeal, not to the burgesses, but to this very association. This was originally without question Lynch justice; but the self-help was doubtless carried into effect from early times in form of law, and was after the legal recognition of the tribunate of the plebs regarded as lawfully admissible.
In point of intention this new jurisdiction of the tribunes and the aediles, and the appellate decision of the plebeian assembly therein originating, were beyond doubt just as much bound to the laws as the jurisdiction of the consuls and quaestors and the judgment of the centuries on appeal; the legal conceptions of crime against the community(5) and of offences against order(6) were transferred from the community and its magistrates to the plebs and its champions. But these conceptions were themselves so little fixed, and their statutory definition was so difficult and indeed impossible, that the administration of justice under these categories from its very nature bore almost inevitably the stamp of arbitrariness. And now when the very idea of right had become obscured amidst the struggles of the orders, and when the legal party—leaders on both sides were furnished with a co-ordinate jurisdiction, this jurisdiction must have more and more approximated to a mere arbitrary police. It affected in particular the magistrate. Hitherto the latter according to Roman state law, so long as he was a magistrate, was amenable to no jurisdiction at all, and, although after demitting his office he might have been legally made responsible for each of his acts, the exercise of this right lay withal in the hands of the members of his own order and ultimately of the collective community, to which these likewise belonged.
In civil jurisdiction the plebeian institutions interfered only so far, that in the processes affecting freedom, which were so important for the plebs, the nomination of jurymen was withdrawn from the consuls, and the decisions in such cases were pronounced by the “ten-men-judges” destined specially for that purpose (-iudices-, -decemviri-, afterwards -decemviri litibus iudicandis-).
Legislation
With this co-ordinate jurisdiction there was further associated a co-ordinate initiative in legislation. The right of assembling the members and of procuring decrees on their part already pertained to the tribunes, in so far as no association at all can be conceived without such a right. But it was conferred upon them, in a marked way, by legally securing that the autonomous right of the plebs to assemble and pass resolutions should not be interfered with on the part of the magistrates of the community or, in fact, of the community itself. At all events it was the necessary preliminary to the legal recognition of the plebs generally, that the tribunes could not be hindered from having their successors elected by the assembly of the plebs and from procuring the confirmation of their criminal sentences by the same body; and this right accordingly was further specially guaranteed to them by the Icilian law (262), which threatened with severe punishment any one who should interrupt the tribune while speaking, or should bid the assembly disperse. It is evident that under such circumstances the tribune could not well be prevented from taking a vote on other proposals than the choice of his successor and the confirmation of his sentences. Such “resolves of the multitude” (-plebi scita-) were not indeed strictly valid decrees of the people; on the contrary, they were at first little more than are the resolutions of our modern public meetings; but, as the distinction between the comitia of the people and the councils of the multitude was of a formal nature rather than aught else, the validity of these resolves as autonomous determinations of the community was at once claimed at least on the part of the plebeians, and the Icilian law for instance was immediately carried in this way. Thus was the tribune of the people appointed as a shield and protection for the individual, and as leader and manager for all, provided with unlimited judicial power in criminal proceedings, that in this way he might give emphasis to his command, and lastly even pronounced to be in his person inviolable (-sacrosanctus-), inasmuch as whoever laid hands upon him or his servant was not merely regarded as incurring the vengeance of the gods, but was also among men accounted as if, after legally proven crime, deserving of death.
Relation of the Tribune to the Consul
The tribunes of the multitude (-tribuni plebis-) arose out of the military tribunes and derived from them their name; but constitutionally they had no further relation to them. On the contrary, in respect of powers the tribunes of the plebs stood on a level with the consuls. The appeal from the consul to the tribune, and the tribune’s right of intercession in opposition to the consul, were, as has been already said, precisely of the same nature with the appeal from consul to consul and the intercession of the one consul in opposition to the other; and both cases were simply applications of the general principle of law that, where two equal authorities differ, the veto prevails over the command. Moreover the original number (which indeed was soon augmented), and the annual duration of the magistracy, which in the case of the tribunes changed its occupants on the 10th of December, were common to the tribunes and the consuls. They shared also the peculiar collegiate arrangement, which placed the full powers of the office in the hands of each individual consul and of each individual tribune, and, when collisions occurred within the college, did not count the votes, but gave the Nay precedence over the Yea; for which reason, when a tribune forbade, the veto of the individual was sufficient notwithstanding the opposition of his colleagues, while on the other hand, when he brought an accusation, he could be thwarted by any one of those colleagues. Both consuls and tribunes had full and co-ordinate criminal jurisdiction, although the former exercised it indirectly, and the latter directly; as the two quaestors were attached to the former, the two aediles were associated with the latter.(7) The consuls were necessarily patricians, the tribunes necessarily plebeians. The former had the ampler power, the latter the more unlimited, for the consul submitted to the prohibition and the judgment of the tribunes, but the tribune did not submit himself to the consul. Thus the tribunician power was a copy of the consular; but it was none the less a contrast to it. The power of the consuls was essentially positive, that of the tribunes essentially negative. The consuls alone were magistrates of the Roman people, not the tribunes; for the former were elected by the whole burgesses, the latter only by the plebeian association. In token of this the consul appeared in public with the apparel and retinue pertaining to state-officials; the tribunes sat on a stool instead of the “chariot seat,” and lacked the official attendants, the purple border, and generally all the insignia of magistracy: even in the senate the tribune had neither presidency nor so much as a seat. Thus in this remarkable institution absolute prohibition was in the most stern and abrupt fashion opposed to absolute command; the quarrel was settled by legally recognizing and regulating the discord between rich and poor.
Political Value of the Tribunate
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
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
The best-known incident in these conflicts of the orders is the history of Gnaeus Marcius, a brave aristocrat, who derived his surname from the storming of Corioli. Indignant at the refusal of the centuries to entrust to him the consulate in the year 263, he is reported to have proposed, according to one version, the suspension of the sales of corn from the state-stores, till the hungry people should give up the tribunate; according to another version, the direct abolition of the tribunate itself. Impeached by the tribunes so that his life was in peril, it is said that he left the city, but only to return at the head of a Volscian army; that when he was on the point of conquering the city of his fathers for the public foe, the earnest appeal of his mother touched his conscience; and that thus he expiated his first treason by a second, and both by death. How much of this is true cannot be determined; but the story, over which the naive misrepresentations of the Roman annalists have shed a patriotic glory, affords a glimpse of the deep moral and political disgrace
Agrarian Law of Spurius Cassius
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
A further attempt was made to get rid of the tribunician power by securing to the plebeians equality of rights in a more regular and more effectual way. The tribune of the people, Gaius Terentilius Arsa, proposed in 292 the nomination of a commission of five men to prepare a general code of law by which the consuls should in future be bound in exercising their judicial powers. But the senate refused to sanction this proposal, and ten years elapsed ere it was carried into effect—years of vehement strife between the orders, and variously agitated moreover by wars and internal troubles. With equal obstinacy the party of the nobles hindered the concession of the law in the senate, and the plebs nominated again and again the same men as tribunes. Attempts were made to obviate the attack by other concessions. In the year 297 an increase of the tribunes from four to ten was sanctioned—a very dubious gain; and in the following year, by an Icilian -plebiscitum- which was admitted among the sworn privileges of the plebs, the Aventine, which had hitherto been a temple-grove and uninhabited, was distributed among the poorer burgesses as sites for buildings in heritable occupancy. The plebs took what was offered to them, but never ceased to insist in their demand for a legal code. At length, in the year 300, a compromise was effected; the senate in substance gave way. The preparation of a legal code was resolved upon; for that purpose, as an extraordinary measure, the centuries were to choose ten men who were at the same time to act as supreme magistrates in room of the consuls (-decemviri consulari imperio legibus scribundls-), and to this office not merely patricians, but plebeians also might be elected. These were here for the first time designated as eligible, though only for an extraordinary office. This was a great step in the progress towards full political equality; and it was not too dearly purchased, when the tribunate of the people as well as the right of appeal were suspended while the decemvirate lasted, and the decemvirs were simply bound not to infringe the sworn liberties of the community. Previously however an embassy was sent to Greece to bring home the laws of Solon and other Greek laws; and it was only on its return that the decemvirs were chosen for the year 303. Although they were at liberty to elect plebeians, the choice fell on patricians alone—so powerful was the nobility still—and it was only when a second election became necessary for 304, that some plebeians were chosen—the first non-patrician magistrates that the Roman community had.
Taking a connected view of these measures, we can scarcely attribute to them any other design than that of substituting for tribunician intercession a limitation of the consular powers by written law. On both sides there must have been a conviction that things could not remain as they were, and the perpetuation of anarchy, while it ruined the commonwealth, was in reality of no benefit to any one. People in earnest could not but discern that the interference of the tribunes in administration and their action as prosecutors had an absolutely pernicious effect; and the only real gain which the tribunate brought to the plebeians was the protection which it afforded against a partial administration of justice, by operating as a sort of court of cassation to check the caprice of the magistrate. Beyond doubt, when the plebeians desired a written code, the patricians replied that in that event the legal protection of tribunes would be superfluous; and upon this there appears to have been concession by both sides. Perhaps there was never anything definitely expressed as to what was to be done after the drawing up of the code; but that the plebs definitely renounced the tribunate is not to be doubted, since it was brought by the decemvirate into such a position that it could not get back the tribunate otherwise than by illegal means. The promise given to the plebs that its sworn liberties should not be touched, may be referred to the rights of the plebeians independent of the tribunate, such as the -provocatio- and the possession of the Aventine. The intention seems to have been that the decemvirs should, on their retiring, propose to the people to re-elect the consuls who should now judge no longer according to their arbitrary pleasure but according to written law.
Legislation of the Twelve Tables
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.
Fall of the Decemvirs
The end of the decemvirate is involved in much obscurity. It only remained—so runs the story—for the decemvirs to publish the last two tables, and then to give place to the ordinary magistracy. But they delayed to do so: under the pretext that the laws were not yet ready, they themselves prolonged their magistracy after the expiry of their official year—which was so far possible, as under Roman constitutional law the magistracy called in an extraordinary way to the revision of the constitution could not become legally bound by the term set for its ending. The moderate section of the aristocracy, with the Valerii and Horatii at their head, are said to have attempted in the senate to compel the abdication of the decemvirate; but the head of the decemvirs Appius Claudius, originally a rigid aristocrat, but now changing into a demagogue and a tyrant, gained the ascendancy in the senate, and the people submitted. The levy of two armies was accomplished without opposition, and war was begun against the Volscians as well as against the Sabines. Thereupon the former tribune of the people, Lucius Siccius Dentatus, the bravest man in Rome, who had fought in a hundred and twenty battles and had forty-five honourable scars to show, was found dead in front of the camp, foully murdered, as it was said, at the instigation of the decemvirs. A revolution was fermenting in men’s minds; and its outbreak was hastened by the unjust sentence pronounced
So runs the story as recorded by the pen of the Roman aristocrats; but, even leaving out of view the accessory circumstances, the great crisis out of which the Twelve Tables arose cannot possibly have ended in such romantic adventures, and in political issues so incomprehensible. The decemvirate was, after the abolition of the monarchy and the institution of the tribunate of the people, the third great victory of the plebs; and the exasperation of the opposite party against the institution and against its head Appius Claudius is sufficiently intelligible. The plebeians had through its means secured the right of eligibility to the highest magistracy of the community and a general code of law; and it was not they that had reason to rebel against the new magistracy, and
The Valerio-Horatian Laws
The compromise, as was natural, proved very favourable to the plebeians, and again imposed severely felt restrictions on the power of the nobility. As a matter of course the tribunate of the people was restored, the code of law wrung from the aristocracy was definitively retained, and the consuls were obliged to judge according to it. Through the code indeed the tribes lost their usurped jurisdiction in capital causes; but the tribunes got it back, as a way was found by which it was possible for them to transact business as to such cases with the centuries. Besides they retained, in the right to award fines without limitation and to submit this sentence to the -comitia tributa-, a sufficient means of putting an end to the civic existence of a patrician opponent. Further, it was on the proposition of the consuls decreed by the centuries that in future every magistrate—and therefore the dictator among the rest—should be bound at his nomination to allow the right of appeal: any one who should nominate a magistrate on other terms was to expiate the offence with his life. In other respects the dictator retained his former powers; and in particular his official acts could not, like those of the consuls, be cancelled by a tribune.
The plenitude of the consular power was further restricted in so far as the administration of the military chest was committed to two paymasters (-quaestores-) chosen by the community, who were nominated for the first time in 307. The nomination as well of the two new paymasters for war as of the two administering the city-chest now passed over to the community; the consul retained merely the conduct of the election instead of the election itself. The assembly in which the paymasters were elected was that of the whole patricio-plebeian freeholders, and voted by districts; an arrangement which likewise involved a concession to the plebeian farmers, who had far more command of these assemblies than of the centuriate -comitia-.
A concession of still greater consequence was that which allowed the tribunes to share in the discussions of the senate. To admit the tribunes to the hall where the senate sat, appeared to that body beneath its dignity; so a bench was placed for them at the door that they might from that spot follow its proceedings. The tribunician right of intercession had extended also to the decrees of the senate as a collective body, after the latter had become not merely a deliberative but a decretory board, which probably occurred at first in the case of a -plebiscitum- that was meant to be binding for the whole community;(12) it was natural that there should thenceforth be conceded to the tribunes a certain participation in the discussions of the senate-house. In order also to secure the decrees of the senate— with the validity of which indeed that of the most important -plebiscita- was bound up—from being tampered with or forged, it was enacted that in future they should be deposited not merely under charge of the patrician -quaestores urbani- in the temple of Saturn, but also under that of the plebian aediles in the temple of Ceres. Thus this struggle, which was begun in order to get rid of the tribunician power, terminated in the renewed and now definitive sanctioning of its right to annul not only particular acts of administration on the appeal of the person aggrieved, but also any resolution of the constituent powers of the state at pleasure. The persons of the tribunes, and the uninterrupted maintenance of the college at its full number, were once more secured by the most sacred oaths and by every element of reverence that religion could present, and not less by the most formal laws. No attempt to abolish this magistracy was ever from this time forward made in Rome.
1. II. I. Right of Appeal
2. I. XIII. Landed proprietors
3. I. Vi. Character of the Roman Law
4. II. I. Collegiate Arrangement
5. I. XI. Property
6. I. XI. Punishment of Offenses against Order
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.
8. I. Vi. Levy Districts
9. I. III. Clan-Villages
10. II. II. Secession to the Sacred mount
11. II. II. Intercession
12. II. II. Legislation
The Equalization of the Orders, and the New Aristocracy
The tribunician movements appear to have mainly originated in social rather than political discontent, and there is good reason to suppose that some of the wealthy plebeians admitted to the senate were no less opposed to these movements than the patricians. For they too benefited by the privileges against which the agitation was mainly directed; and although in other respects they found themselves treated as inferior, it probably seemed to them by no means an appropriate time for asserting their claim to participate in the magistracies, when the exclusive financial power of the whole senate was assailed. This explains why during the first fifty years of the republic no step was taken aiming directly at the political equalization of the orders.
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.
Such a crisis in the position of parties occurred after the fall of the decemvirate. It had now become perfectly clear that the tribunate of the plebs could never be set aside; the plebeian aristocracy could not do better than seize this powerful lever and employ it for the removal of the political disabilities of their order.
Throwing Open of Marriage and of Magistracies—
Military Tribunes with Consular Powers
Nothing shows so clearly the defencelessness of the clan-nobility when opposed to the united plebs, as the fact that the fundamental principle of the exclusive party—the invalidity of marriage between patricians and plebeians—fell at the first blow scarcely four years after the decemviral revolution. In the year 309 it was enacted by the Canuleian plebiscite, that a marriage between a patrician and a plebeian should be valid as a true Roman marriage, and that the children begotten of such a marriage should follow the rank of the father. At the same time it was further carried that, in place of consuls, military tribunes—of these there were at that time, before the division of the army into legions, six, and the number of these magistrates was adjusted accordingly-with consular powers(1) and consular duration of office should be elected by the centuries. The proximate cause was of a military nature, as the various wars required a greater number of generals in chief command than the consular constitution allowed; but the change came to be of essential importance for the conflicts of the orders, and it may be that that military object was rather the pretext than the reason for this arrangement. According to the ancient law every burgess or —metoikos— liable to service might attain the post of an officer,(2) and in virtue of that principle the supreme magistracy, after having been temporarily opened up to the plebeians in the decemvirate, was now after a more comprehensive fashion rendered equally accessible to all freeborn burgesses. The question naturally occurs, what interest the aristocracy could have—now that it was under the necessity of abandoning its exclusive possession of the supreme magistracy and of yielding in the matter—in refusing to the plebeians the title, and conceding to them the consulate under this singular form?(3) But, in the first place, there were associated with the holding of the supreme magistracy various honorary rights, partly personal, partly hereditary; thus the honour of a triumph was regarded as legally dependent on the occupancy of the supreme magistracy, and was never given to an officer who had not administered the latter office in person; and the descendants of a curule magistrate were at liberty to set up the image of such an ancestor in the family hall and to exhibit it in public on fitting occasions, while this was not allowed in the case of other ancestors.(4) It is as easy to be explained as it is difficult to be vindicated, that the governing aristocratic order should have allowed the government itself to be wrested from their hands far sooner than the honorary rights associated with it, especially such as were hereditary; and therefore, when it was obliged to share the former with the plebeians, it gave to the actual supreme magistrate the legal standing not of the holder of a curule chair, but of a simple staff-officer, whose distinction was one purely personal. Of greater political importance,
Opposition of the Patriciate
But notwithstanding these vexatious disabilities the privileges of the clans, so far as they had a political value, were legally superseded by the new institution; and, had the Roman nobility been worthy of its name, it must now have given up the struggle. But it did not. Though a rational and legal resistance was thenceforth impossible, spiteful opposition still found a wide field of petty expedients, of chicanery and intrigue; and, far from honourable or politically prudent as such resistance was, it was still in a certain sense fruitful of results. It certainly procured at length for the commons concessions which could not easily have been wrung from the united Roman aristocracy; but it also prolonged civil war for another century and enabled the nobility, in defiance of those laws, practically to retain the government in their exclusive possession for several generations longer.
Their Expedients
The expedients of which the nobility availed themselves were as various as political paltriness could suggest. Instead of deciding at once the question as to the admission or exclusion of the plebeians at the elections, they conceded what they were compelled to concede only with reference to the elections immediately impending. The vain struggle was thus annually renewed whether patrician consuls or military tribunes from both orders with consular powers should be nominated; and among the weapons of the aristocracy this mode of conquering an opponent by wearying and annoying him proved by no means the least effective.
Subdivision of the Magistracy—
Censorship
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
The nobility, in spite of the most obstinate resistance, only sustained loss after loss; and their exasperation increased as their power decreased. Attempts were doubtless still made directly to assail the rights secured by agreement to the commons; but such attempts were not so much the well-calculated manoeuvres of party as the acts of an impotent thirst for vengeance. Such in particular was the process against Maelius as reported by the tradition—certainly not very trustworthy—that has come down to us. Spurius Maelius, a wealthy plebeian, during a severe dearth (315) sold corn at such prices as to put to shame and annoy the patrician store-president (-praefectus annonae-) Gaius Minucius. The latter accused him of aspiring to kingly power; with what amount of reason we cannot decide, but it is scarcely credible that a man who had not even filled the tribunate should have seriously thought of sovereignty. Nevertheless the authorities took up the matter in earnest, and the cry of “King” always produced on the multitude in Rome an effect similar to that of the cry of “Pope” on the masses in England. Titus Quinctius Capitolinus, who was for the sixth time consul, nominated Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who was eighty years of age, as dictator without appeal, in open violation of the solemnly sworn laws.(5) Maelius, summoned before him, seemed disposed to disregard the summons; and the dictator’s master of the horse, Gaius Servilius Ahala, slew him with his own hand. The house of the murdered man was pulled down, the corn from his granaries was distributed gratuitously to the people, and those who threatened to avenge his death were secretly made away with. This disgraceful judicial murder—a disgrace even more to the credulous and blind people than to the malignant party of young patricians—passed unpunished; but if that party had hoped by such means to undermine the right of appeal, it violated the laws and shed innocent blood in vain.
Intrigues of the Nobility
Electioneering intrigues and priestly trickery proved in the hands of the nobility more efficient than any other weapons. The extent to which the former must have prevailed is best seen in the fact that in 322 it appeared necessary to issue a special law against electioneering practices, which of course was of little avail. When the voters could not be influenced by corruption or threatening, the presiding magistrates stretched their powers—admitting, for example, so many plebeian candidates that the votes of the opposition were thrown away amongst them, or omitting from the list of candidates those whom the majority were disposed to choose. If in spite of all this an obnoxious election was carried, the priests were consulted whether no vitiating circumstance had occurred in the auspices or other religious ceremonies on the occasion; and some such flaw they seldom failed to discover. Taking no thought as to the consequences and unmindful of the wise example of their ancestors, the people allowed the principle to be established that the opinion of the skilled colleges of priests as to omens of birds, portents, and the like was legally binding on the magistrate, and thus put it into their power to cancel any state-act—whether the consecration of a temple or any other act of administration, whether law or election—on the ground of religious informality. In this way it became possible that, although the eligibility of plebeians had been established by law already in 333 for the quaestorship and thenceforward continued to be legally recognized, it was only in 345 that the first plebeian attained the quaestorship; in like manner patricians almost exclusively held the military tribunate with consular powers down to 354. It was apparent that the legal abolition of the privileges of the nobles had by no means really and practically placed the plebeian aristocracy on a footing of equality with the clan-nobility. Many causes contributed to this result: the tenacious opposition of the nobility far more easily allowed itself to be theoretically superseded in a moment of excitement, than to be permanently kept down in the annually recurring elections; but the main cause was the inward disunion between the chiefs of the plebeian aristocracy and the mass of the farmers. The middle class, whose votes were decisive in the comitia, did not feel itself specially called on to advance the interests of genteel non-patricians, so long as its own demands were disregarded by the plebeian no less than by the patrician aristocracy.
The Suffering Farmers
During these political struggles social questions had lain on the whole dormant, or were discussed at any rate with less energy. After the plebeian aristocracy had gained possession of the tribunate for its own ends, no serious notice was taken either of the question of the domains or of a reform in the system of credit; although there was no lack either of newly acquired lands or of impoverished or decaying
While the attempts at reformation were thus arrested in the bud, the social disorders became still more crying; for on the one hand the domain-possessions were ever extending in consequence of successful wars, and on the other hand debt and impoverishment were ever spreading more widely among the farmers, particularly from the effects of the severe war with Veii (348-358) and of the burning of the capital in the Gallic invasion (364). It is true that, when in the Veientine war it became necessary to prolong the term of service of the soldiers and to keep them under arms not—as hitherto at the utmost—only during summer, but also throughout the winter, and when the farmers, foreseeing their utter economic ruin, were on the point
Combination of the Plebian Aristocracy and the Farmers
against the
Nobility—
Licinio-Sextian Laws
Under such circumstances, when the plebeian aristocracy saw itself practically excluded by the opposition of the nobility and the indifference of the commons from equality of political rights, and the suffering farmers were powerless as opposed to the close aristocracy, it was natural that they should help each other by a compromise. With this view the tribunes of the people, Gaius Licinius and Lucius Sextius, submitted to the commons proposals to the following effect: first, to abolish the consular tribunate; secondly, to lay it down as a rule that at least one of the consuls should be a plebeian; thirdly, to open up to the plebeians admission to one of the three great colleges of priests—that of the custodiers of oracles, whose number was to be increased to ten (-duoviri-, afterwards -decemviri sacris faciundis-(6)); fourthly, as respected the domains, to allow no burgess to maintain upon the common pasture more than a hundred oxen and five hundred sheep, or to hold more than five hundred -jugera- (about 300 acres) of the domain lands left free for occupation; fifthly, to oblige the landlords to employ in the labours of the field a number of free labourers proportioned to that of their rural slaves; and lastly, to procure alleviation for debtors by deduction of the interest which had been paid from the capital, and by the arrangement of set terms for the payment of arrears.
The tendency of these enactments is obvious. They were designed to deprive the nobles of their exclusive possession of the curule magistracies and of the hereditary distinctions of nobility therewith associated; which, it was characteristically conceived, could only be accomplished by the legal exclusion of the nobles from the place of second consul. They were designed, as a consequence, to emancipate the plebeian members of the senate from the subordinate position which they occupied as silent by-sitters,(7) in so far as those of them at least who had filled
Political Abolition of the Patriciate
With the election of the first non-patrician consul—the choice fell on one of the authors of this reform, the late tribune of the people, Lucius Sextius Lateranus—the clan-aristocracy ceased both in fact and in law to be numbered among the political institutions of Rome. When after the final passing of these laws the former champion of the clans, Marcus Furius Camillus, founded a sanctuary of Concord at the foot of the Capitol—upon an elevated platform, where the senate was wont frequently to meet, above the old meeting-place of the burgesses, the Comitium—we gladly cherish the belief that he recognized in the legislation thus completed the close of a dissension only too long continued. The religious consecration of the new concord of the community was the last public act of the old warrior and statesman, and a worthy termination of his long and glorious career. He was not wholly mistaken; the more judicious portion of the clans evidently from this time forward looked upon their exclusive political privileges as lost, and were content to share the government with the plebeian aristocracy. In the majority, however, the patrician spirit proved true to its incorrigible character. On the strength of the privilege which the champions of legitimacy have at all times claimed of obeying the laws only
Praetorship—
Curule Aedileship—
Complete Opening Up of Magistracies and Priesthoods
In like manner the aristocracy simply injured itself by the attempt which it made, on the passing of the Licinian laws, to save at least some remnant of its ancient privileges by means of a system of political clipping and paring. Under the pretext that the nobility were exclusively cognizant of law, the administration of justice was detached from the consulate when the latter had to be thrown open to the plebeians; and for this purpose there was nominated a special third consul, or, as he was commonly called, a praetor. In like manner the supervision of the market and the judicial police-duties connected with it, as well as the celebration of the city-festival, were assigned to two newly nominated aediles, who—by way of distinction from the plebeian aediles—were named from their standing jurisdiction “aediles of the judgment seat” (-aediles curules-). But the curule aedileship became immediately so far accessible to the plebeians, that it was held by patricians and plebeians alternately. Moreover the dictatorship was thrown open to plebeians in 398, as the mastership of the horse had already been in the year before the Licinian laws (386); both the censorships were thrown open in 403, and the praetorship in 417; and about the same time (415) the nobility were by law excluded from one of the censorships, as they had previously been from one of the consulships. It was to no purpose that once more a patrician augur detected secret flaws, hidden from the eyes of the uninitiated, in the election of a plebeian dictator (427), and that the patrician censor did not up to the close of our present period (474) permit his colleague to present the solemn sacrifice with which the census closed; such chicanery served merely to show the ill humour of patricianism. Of as little avail were the complaints which the patrician presidents of the senate would not fail to raise regarding the participation of the plebeians in its debates; it became a settled rule that no longer the patrician members, but those who had attained to one of the three supreme ordinary magistracies—the consulship, praetorship, and curule aedileship —should be summoned to give their opinion in this order and without distinction of class, while the senators who had held none of these offices still even now took part merely in the division. The right, in fine, of the patrician senate to reject
The clans retained, as may naturally be conceived, their religious privileges longer. Indeed, several of these, which were destitute of political importance, were never interfered with, such as their exclusive eligibility to the offices of the three supreme -flamines-and that of -rex sacrorum- as well as to the membership of the colleges of Salii. On the other hand the two colleges of Pontifices and of augurs, with which a considerable influence over the courts and the comitia were associated, were too important to remain in the exclusive possession of the patricians. The Ogulnian law of 454 accordingly threw these also open to plebeians, by increasing the number both of the pontifices and of the augurs from six to nine, and equally distributing the stalls in the two colleges between patricians and plebeians.
Equivalence of Law and Plebiscitum
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 Later Patricianism
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 Social Distress, and the Attempt to Relieve It
Nevertheless one object of the compromise concluded by the two portions of the plebs in 387, the abolition of the patriciate, had in all material points been completely attained. The question next arises, how far the same can be affirmed of the two positive objects aimed at in the compromise?—whether the new order of things in reality checked social distress and established political equality? The two were intimately connected; for, if economic embarrassments ruined the middle class and broke up the burgesses into a minority of rich men and a suffering proletariate, such a state of things would at once annihilate civil equality and in reality destroy the republican commonwealth. The preservation and increase of the middle class, and in particular of the farmers, formed therefore for every patriotic statesman of Rome a problem not merely important, but the most important of all. The plebeians, moreover, recently called to take part in the government, greatly indebted as they were for their new political rights to the proletariate which was suffering and expecting help at their hands, were politically and morally under special obligation to attempt its relief by means of government measures, so far as relief was by such means at all attainable.
The Licinian Agrarian Laws
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.
Laws Imposing Taxes—
Laws of Credit
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
It is plain that all these expedients might perhaps in some respects mitigate, but could not remove, the existing economic disorders. The continuance of the distress is shown by the appointment of a bank-commission to regulate the relations of credit and to provide advances from the state-chest in 402, by the fixing of legal payment by instalments in 407, and above all by the dangerous popular insurrection about 467, when the people, unable to obtain new facilities for the payment of debts, marched out to the Janiculum, and nothing but a seasonable attack by external enemies, and the concessions contained in the Hortensian law,(10) restored peace to the community. It is, however, very unjust to reproach these earnest attempts to check the impoverishment of the middle class with their inadequacy. The belief that it is useless to
Influence of the Extension of the Roman Dominion in Elevating the Farmer-Class
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
Lastly civic equality was in a certain sense undoubtedly attained or rather restored by the reform of 387, and the development of its legitimate consequences. As formerly, when the patricians still in fact formed the burgesses, these had stood upon a footing of absolute equality in rights and duties, so now in the enlarged burgess-body there existed in the eye of the law no arbitrary distinctions. The gradations to which differences of age, sagacity, cultivation, and wealth necessarily give rise in civil society, naturally also pervaded the sphere of public life; but the spirit animating the burgesses and the policy of the government uniformly operated so as to render these differences as little conspicuous as possible. The whole system of Rome tended to train up her burgesses on an average as sound and capable, but not to bring into prominence the gifts of genius. The growth of culture among the Romans did not at all keep pace with the development of the power of their community, and it was instinctively repressed rather than promoted by those in power. That there should be rich and poor, could not be prevented; but (as in a genuine community of farmers) the farmer as well as the day-labourer personally guided the plough, and even for the rich the good economic rule held good that they should live with uniform frugality and above all should hoard no unproductive capital at home—excepting the salt-cellar and the sacrificial ladle, no silver articles were at this period seen in any Roman house. Nor was this of little moment. In the mighty successes which the Roman community externally achieved during the century from the last Veientine down to the Pyrrhic war we perceive that the patriciate has now given place to the farmers; that the fall of the highborn Fabian would have been not more and not less lamented by the whole community than the fall of the plebeian Decian was lamented alike by plebeians and patricians; that the consulate did not of itself fall even to the wealthiest aristocrat; and that a poor husbandman from Sabina, Manius Curius, could conquer king Pyrrhus in the field of battle and chase him out of Italy, without ceasing to be a simple Sabine farmer and to cultivate in person his own bread-corn.
New Aristocracy
In regard however to this imposing republican equality we must not overlook the fact that it was to a considerable extent only formal, and that an aristocracy of a very decided stamp grew out of it or rather was contained in it from the very first. The non-patrician families of wealth and consideration had long ago separated from the plebs, and leagued themselves with the patriciate in the participation of senatorial rights and in the prosecution of a policy distinct from that of the plebs and very often counteracting it. The Licinian laws abrogated the legal distinctions within the ranks of the aristocracy, and changed the character of the barrier which excluded the plebeian from the government,
New Opposition
Every aristocratic government of itself calls forth a corresponding opposition party; and as the formal equalization of the orders only modified the aristocracy, and the new ruling order not only succeeded the old patriciate but engrafted itself on it and intimately coalesced with it, the opposition also continued to exist and in all respects pursued a similar course. As it was now no longer the plebeian burgesses as such, but the common people, that were treated as inferior, the new opposition professed from the first to be the representative of the lower classes and particularly of the small farmers; and as the new aristocracy attached itself to the patriciate, so the first movements of this new opposition were interwoven with the final struggles against the privileges of the patricians. The first names in the series of these new Roman popular leaders were Manius Curius (consul 464, 479, 480; censor 481) and Gaius Fabricius (consul 472, 476, 481; censor 479); both of them men without ancestral lineage and without wealth, both summoned—in opposition to the aristocratic principle of restricting re-election to the highest office of the state—thrice by the votes of the burgesses to the chief magistracy, both, as tribunes, consuls, and censors, opponents of patrician privileges and defenders of the small farmer-class against the incipient arrogance of the leading houses. The future parties were already marked out; but the interests of party were still suspended on both sides in presence of the interests of the commonweal. The patrician Appius Claudius and the farmer Manius Curius—vehement in their personal antagonism—jointly by wise counsel and vigorous action conquered king Pyrrhus; and while Gaius Fabricius as censor inflicted penalties on Publius Cornelius Rufinus for his aristocratic sentiments and aristocratic habits, this did not prevent him from supporting the claim of Rufinus to a second consulate on account of his recognized ability as a general. The breach was already formed; but the adversaries still shook hands across it.
The New Government
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 burgesses in their ordinary assemblies continued as hitherto to be the highest authority in the commonwealth and the legal sovereign. But it was settled by law that—apart from the matters committed once for all to the decision of the centuries, such as the election of consuls and censors—voting by districts should be just as valid as voting by centuries: a regulation introduced as regards the patricio-plebeian assembly by the Valerio-Horatian law of 305(12) and extended by the Publilian law of 415, but enacted as regards the plebeian separate assembly by the Hortensian law about 467.(13) We have already noticed that the same individuals, on the whole, were entitled to vote in both assemblies, but that—apart from the exclusion of the patricians from the plebeian separate assembly—in the general assembly of the districts all entitled to vote were on a footing of equality, while in the centuriate comitia the working of the suffrage was graduated with reference to the means of the voters, and in so far, therefore, the change was certainly a levelling and democratic innovation. It was a circumstance of far greater importance that, towards the end of this period, the primitive freehold basis of the right of suffrage began for the first time to be called in question. Appius Claudius, the boldest innovator known in Roman history, in his censorship in 442 without consulting the senate or people so adjusted the burgess-roll, that a man who had no land was received into whatever tribe he chose and then according to his means into the corresponding century. But this alteration was too far in advance of the spirit of the age to obtain full acceptance. One of the immediate successors of Appius, Quintus Fabius Rullianus, the famous conqueror of the Samnites, undertook in his censorship of 450 not to set it aside entirely, but to confine it within such limits that the real power in the burgess-assemblies should continue to be vested in the holders of land and of wealth. He assigned those who had no land collectively to the four city tribes, which were now made to rank not as the first but as the last. The rural tribes, on the other hand, the number of which gradually increased between 367 and 513 from seventeen to thirty-one—thus
Increasing Powers of the Burgesses
The powers of the comitia exhibited during this period a tendency to enlarge their range, but in a manner very gradual. The increase in the number of magistrates to be elected by the people falls, to some extent, under this head; it is an especially significant fact that from 392 the military tribunes of one legion, and from 443 four tribunes in each of the first four legions respectively, were nominated no longer by the general, but by the burgesses. During this period the burgesses did not on the whole interfere in administration; only their right of declaring war was, as was reasonable, emphatically maintained, and held to extend also to cases in which a prolonged armistice concluded instead of a peace expired and what was not in law but in fact a new war began (327). In other instances a question of administration was hardly submitted to the people except when the governing authorities fell into collision and one of them referred the matter to the people—as when the leaders of the moderate party among the nobility, Lucius Valerius and Marcus Horatius, in 305, and the first plebeian dictator, Gaius Marcius Rutilus, in 398, were not allowed by the senate to receive the triumphs they had earned; when the consuls of 459 could not agree as to their respective provinces of jurisdiction; and when the senate, in 364, resolved to give up to the Gauls an ambassador who had forgotten his duty, and a consular tribune carried the matter to the community. This was the first occasion on which a decree of the senate was annulled by the people; and heavily the community atoned for it. Sometimes in difficult
Decreasing Importance of the Burgess-Body
But notwithstanding these enlargements of the powers of the burgess-assemblies, their practical influence on state affairs began, particularly towards the close of this period, to wane. First of all, the extension of the bounds of Rome deprived her primary assembly of its true basis. As an assembly of the freeholders of the community, it formerly might very well meet in sufficiently full numbers, and might very well know its own wishes, even without discussion; but the Roman burgess-body had now become less a civic community than a state. The fact that those dwelling together voted also with each other, no doubt, introduced into the Roman comitia, at least when the voting was by tribes, a sort of inward connection and into the voting now and then energy and independence; but under ordinary circumstances the composition of the comitia and their decision were left dependent on the person who presided or on accident, or were committed to the hands of the burgesses domiciled in the capital. It is, therefore, quite easy to understand how the assemblies of the burgesses, which had great practical importance during the first two centuries of the republic, gradually became a mere instrument in the hands of the presiding magistrate, and in truth a very dangerous instrument, because the magistrates called to preside were so numerous, and every resolution of the community was regarded as the ultimate legal expression of the will of the people. But the enlargement of the constitutional rights of the burgesses was not of much moment, inasmuch as these were less than formerly capable of a will and action of their own, and there was as yet no demagogism, in the proper sense of that term, in Rome. Had any such demagogic spirit existed, it would have attempted not to extend the powers of the burgesses, but to remove the restrictions on political debate in their presence; whereas throughout this whole period there was undeviating acquiescence in the old maxims, that the magistrate alone could convoke the burgesses, and that he was entitled to exclude all debate and all proposal of amendments. At the time this incipient breaking up of the constitution made itself felt chiefly in the circumstance that the primary assemblies assumed an essentially passive attitude, and did not on the whole interfere in government either to help or to hinder it.
The Magistrates. Partition and Weakening of the Consular Powers
As regards the power of the magistrates, its diminution, although not the direct design of the struggles between the old and new burgesses, was doubtless one of their most important results. At the beginning of the struggle between the orders or, in other words, of the strife for the possession of the consular power, the consulate was still the one and indivisible, essentially regal, magistracy; and the consul, like the king in former times, still had the appointment of all subordinate functionaries left to his own free choice. At the termination of that contest its most important functions —jurisdiction, street-police, election of senators and equites, the census and financial administration —were separated from the consulship and transferred to magistrates, who like the consul were nominated by the community and occupied a position far more co-ordinate than subordinate. The consulate, formerly the single ordinary magistracy of the state, was now no longer even absolutely the first. In the new arrangement as to the ranking and usual order of succession of the public offices the consulate stood indeed above the praetorship, aedileship, and quaestorship, but beneath the censorship, which—in addition to the most important financial duties —was charged with the adjustment of the rolls of burgesses, equites, and senators, and thereby wielded a wholly arbitrary moral control over the entire community and every individual burgess, the humblest as well as the most prominent. The conception of limited magisterial power or special function, which seemed to the original Roman state-law irreconcilable with the conception of supreme office, gradually gained a footing and mutilated and destroyed the earlier idea of the one and indivisible -imperium-. A first step was already taken in this direction by the institution of the standing collateral offices, particularly the quaestorship;(14) it was completely carried out by the Licinian laws (387), which prescribed the functions of the three supreme magistrates, and assigned administration and the conduct of war to the two first, and the management of justice to the third. But the change did not stop here. The consuls, although they were in law wholly and everywhere co-ordinate, naturally from the earliest times divided between them in practice the different departments of duty (-provinciae-). Originally this was done simply by mutual concert, or in default of it by casting lots; but by degrees the other constituent authorities in the commonwealth interfered with this practical definition of functions. It became usual for the senate to define annually the spheres of duty; and, while it did not directly distribute them among the co-ordinate magistrates, it exercised decided influence on the personal distribution by advice and request. In an extreme case the senate doubtless obtained a decree of the community, definitively to
Limitation of the Dictatorship
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.
Restriction as to the Accumulation and the Reoccupation of Offices
Lastly, further seriously felt restrictions of the magistracy were involved in the prohibition issued in 412 against the accumulation of the ordinary curule offices, and in the enactment of the same date, that the same person should not again administer the same office under ordinary circumstances before an interval of ten years had elapsed, as well as in the subsequent regulation that the office which practically was the highest, the censorship, should not be held a second time at all (489). But the government was still strong enough not to be afraid of its instruments or to desist purposely on that account from employing those who were the most serviceable. Brave officers were very frequently released from these rules,(16) and cases still occurred like those of Quintus Fabius Rullianus, who was five times consul in twenty-eight years, and of Marcus Valerius Corvus (384-483) who, after he had filled six consulships, the first in his twenty-third, the last in his seventy-second year, and had been throughout three generations the protector of his countrymen and the terror of the foe, descended to the grave at the age of a hundred.
The Tribunate of the People as an Instrument of Government
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.
While in jurisdiction they stood from the beginning on an equality with the consuls and in the early stages of the conflicts between the orders acquired like the consuls the right of initiating legislation, they now received—we know not exactly when, but presumably at or soon after the final equalization of the orders—a position of equality with the consuls as confronting the practically governing authority, the senate. Hitherto they had been present at the proceedings of the senate, sitting on a bench at the door; now they obtained, like the other magistrates and by their side, a place in the senate itself and the right to interpose their word in its discussions. If they were precluded from the right of voting, this was simply an application of the general principle of Roman state-law, that those only should give counsel who were not called to act; in accordance with which the whole of the acting magistrates possessed during their year of office only a seat, not a vote, in the council of the state.(17) But concession did not rest here. The tribunes received the distinctive prerogative of supreme magistracy, which among the ordinary magistrates belonged only to the consuls and praetors besides—the right of convoking the senate, of consulting it, and of procuring decrees from it.(18) This was only as it should be; the heads of the plebeian aristocracy
The Senate. Its Composition
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.
But the right of the magistrates to constitute the senate according to their judgment was decidedly restricted by the Ovinian law, which was passed about the middle of this period, probably soon after the Licinian laws. That law at once conferred a seat and vote in the senate provisionally on every one who had been curule aedile, praetor, or consul, and bound the next censors either formally to inscribe these expectants in the senatorial roll, or at any rate to exclude them from the roll only for such reasons as sufficed for the rejection of an actual senator. The number of those, however, who had been magistrates was far from sufficing to keep the senate up to the normal number of three hundred; and below that point it could not be allowed to fall, especially as the list of senators was at the same time that of jurymen. Considerable room was thus always left for the exercise of the censorial right of election; but those senators who were chosen not in consequence of having held office, but by selection on the part of the censor—frequently burgesses who had filled a non-curule public office, or distinguished themselves by personal valour, who had killed an enemy in battle or saved the life of a burgess—took part in voting, but not in debate.(24) The main body of the senate, and that portion of it into whose hands government and administration were concentrated, was thus according to the Ovinian law substantially based no longer on the arbitrary will of a magistrate, but indirectly on election by the people. The Roman state in this way made some approach to, although it did not reach, the great institution of modern times, representative popular government, while the aggregate of the non-debating senators furnished—what it is so necessary and yet so difficult to get in governing corporations—a compact mass of members capable of forming and entitled to pronounce an opinion, but voting in silence.
Powers of the Senate
The powers of the senate underwent scarcely any change in form. The senate carefully avoided giving a handle to opposition or to ambition by unpopular changes, or manifest violations, of the constitution; it permitted, though it did nor promote, the enlargement in a democratic direction of the power of the burgesses. But while the burgesses acquired the semblance, the senate acquired the substance of power —a decisive influence over legislation and the official elections, and the whole control of the state.
Its Influence in Legislation
Every new project of law was subjected to a preliminary deliberation in the senate, and scarcely ever did a magistrate venture to lay a proposal before the community without or in opposition to the senate’s opinion. If he did so, the senate had—in the intercessory powers of the magistrates and the annulling powers of the priests—an ample set of means at hand to nip in the bud, or subsequently to get rid of, obnoxious proposals; and in case of extremity it had in its hands as the supreme administrative authority not only the executing, but the power of refusing to execute, the decrees of the community. The senate further with tacit consent of the community claimed the right in urgent cases of absolving from the laws, under the reservation that the community should ratify the proceeding—a reservation which from the first was of little moment, and became by degrees so entirely a form that in later times they did not even take the trouble to propose the ratifying decree.
Influence on the Elections
As to the elections, they passed, so far as they depended on the magistrates and were of political importance, practically into the hands of the senate. In this way it acquired, as has been mentioned already,(25) the right to appoint the dictator. Great regard had certainly to be shown to the community; the right of bestowing the public magistracies could not be withdrawn from it; but, as has likewise been already observed, care was taken that this election of magistrates should not be constructed into the conferring of definite functions, especially of the posts of supreme command when war was imminent. Moreover the newly introduced idea of special functions on the one hand, and on the other the right practically conceded to the senate of dispensation from the laws, gave to it an important share in official appointments. Of the influence which the senate exercised in settling the official spheres of the consuls in particular, we have already spoken.(26) One of the most important applications of the dispensing right was the dispensation of the magistrate from the legal term of his tenure of office—a dispensation which, as contrary to the fundamental laws of the community, might not according to Roman state-law be granted in the precincts of the city proper, but beyond these was at least so far valid that the consul or praetor, whose term was prolonged,
Senatorial Government
Finally as regards administration, war, peace and alliances, the founding of colonies, the assignation of lands, building, in fact every matter of permanent and general importance, and in particular the whole system of finance, depended absolutely on the senate. It was the senate which annually issued general instructions to the magistrates, settling their spheres of duty and limiting the troops and moneys to be placed at the disposal of each; and recourse was had to its counsel in every case of importance. The keepers of the state-chest could make no payment to any magistrate with the exception of the consul, or to any private person, unless authorized by a previous decree of the senate. In the management, however, of current affairs and in the details of judicial and military administration the supreme governing corporation did not interfere; the Roman aristocracy had too much political judgment and tact to desire to convert the control of the commonwealth into a guardianship over the individual official, or to turn the instrument into a machine.
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
1. The hypothesis that legally the full -imperium- belonged to the patrician, and only the military -imperium- to the plebeian, consular tribunes, not only provokes various questions to which there is no answer—as to the course followed, for example, in the event of the election falling, as was by law quite possible, wholly on plebeians —but specially conflicts with the fundamental principle of Roman constitutional law, that the -imperium-, that is to say, the right of commanding the burgess in name of the community, was functionally indivisible and capable of no other limitation at all than a territorial one. There was a province of urban law and a province of military law, in the latter of which the -provocatio- and other
2. I. Vi. Political Effects of the Servian Military Organization
3. The defence, that the aristocracy clung to the exclusion of the plebeians from religious prejudice, mistakes the fundamental character of the Roman religion, and imports into antiquity the modern distinction between church and state. The admittance of a non-burgess to a religious ceremony of the citizens could not indeed but appear sinful to the orthodox Roman; but even the most rigid orthodoxy never doubted that admittance to civic communion, which absolutely and solely depended on the state, involved also full religious equality. All such scruples of conscience, the honesty of which in themselves we do not mean to doubt, were precluded, when once they granted to the plebeians -en masse- at the right time the patriciate. This only may perhaps be alleged by way of excuse for the nobility, that after it had neglected the right moment for this purpose at the abolition of the monarchy, it was no longer in a position subsequently of itself to retrieve the neglect (ii. I. The New Community).
4. Whether this distinction between these “curule houses” and the other families embraced within the patriciate was ever of serious political importance, cannot with certainty be either affirmed or denied; and as little do we know whether at this epoch there really was any considerable number of patrician families that were not yet curule.
5. II. II. The Valerio-Horatian Laws
6. I. XII. Foreign Worships
7. II. I. Senate,
8. II. I. Senate, ii. III. Opposition of the Patriciate
9. II. II. Legislation of the Twelve Tables
10. II. III. Equivalence Law and Plebiscitum
11. The statements as to the poverty of the consulars of this period, which play so great a part in the moral anecdote-books of a later age, mainly rest on a misunderstanding on the one hand of the old frugal economy—which might very well consist with considerable prosperity —and on the other hand of the beautiful old custom of burying men who had deserved well of the state from the proceeds of penny collections —which was far from being a pauper burial. The method also of explaining surnames by etymological guess-work, which has imported so many absurdities into Roman history, has furnished its quota to this belief (-Serranus-).
12. II. II. The Valerio-Horatian Laws
13. II. III. Equivalence Law and Plebiscitum
14. II. I. Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers
15. II. III. Increasing Powers of the Burgesses
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).
17. II. I. Senate
18. Hence despatches intended for the senate were addressed to Consuls, Praetors, Tribunes of the Plebs, and Senate (Cicero, ad Fam. xv. 2, et al.)
19. I. V. The Senate
20. II. I. Senate
21. II. III. Censorship
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.”
23. II. III. The Burgess-Body. Its Composition
24. II. III. Complete Opening Up of Magistracies and Priesthoods
25. II. III. Restrictions as to the Accumulation and the Reoccupation of Offices
26. II. III. Partition and Weakening of Consular Powers
Fall of the Etruscan Power-the Celts
In the previous chapters we have presented an outline of the development of the Roman constitution during the first two centuries of the republic; we now recur to the commencement of that epoch for the purpose of tracing the external history of Rome and of Italy. About the time of the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome the Etruscan power had reached its height. The Tuscans, and the Carthaginians who were in close alliance with them, possessed undisputed supremacy on the Tyrrhene Sea. Although Massilia amidst continual and severe struggles maintained her independence, the seaports of Campania and of the Volscian land, and after the battle of Alalia Corsica also,(1) were in the possession of the Etruscans. In Sardinia the sons of the Carthaginian general Mago laid the foundation of the greatness both of their house and of their city by the complete conquest of the island (about 260); and in Sicily, while the Hellenic colonies were occupied with their internal feuds, the Phoenicians retained possession of the western half without material opposition. The vessels of the Etruscans were no less dominant in the Adriatic; and their pirates were dreaded even in the more eastern waters.
Subjugation of Latium by Etruria
By land also their power seemed to be on the increase. To acquire possession of Latium was of the most decisive importance to Etruria, which was separated by the Latins alone from the Volscian towns that were dependent on it and from its possessions in Campania. Hitherto the firm bulwark of the Roman power had sufficiently protected Latium, and had successfully maintained against Etruria the frontier line of the Tiber. But now, when the whole Tuscan league, taking advantage of the confusion and the weakness of the Roman state after the expulsion of the Tarquins, renewed its attack more energetically than before under the king Lars Porsena of Clusium, it no longer encountered the wonted resistance. Rome surrendered, and in the peace (assigned to 247) not only ceded all her possessions on the right bank of the Tiber to the adjacent Tuscan communities and thus abandoned her exclusive command of the river, but also delivered to the conqueror all her weapons of war and promised to make use of iron thenceforth only for the ploughshare. It seemed as if the union of Italy under Tuscan supremacy was not far distant.
Etruscans Driven Back from Latium—
Fall of the Etrusco-Carthaginian Maritime Supremacy—
Victories of Salamis and Himera, and Their Effects
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.
Soon the Hellenic nation was forced to engage in a still more comprehensive and still more decisive conflict with the barbarians both of the west and of the east. It was about the time of the Persian wars. The relation in which the Tyrians stood to the great king led Carthage also to follow in the wake of Persian policy —there exists a credible tradition even as to an alliance between the Carthaginians and Xerxes—and, along with the Carthaginians, the Etruscans. It was one of the grandest of political combinations which simultaneously directed the Asiatic hosts against Greece, and the Phoenician hosts against Sicily, to extirpate at a blow liberty and civilization from the face of the earth. The victory remained with the Hellenes. The battle of Salamis (274) saved and avenged Hellas proper; and on the same day—so runs the story—the
The immediate effect of the humiliation of Carthage was the fall of the maritime supremacy of her Etruscan allies. Anaxilas, ruler of Rhegium and Zancle, had already closed the Sicilian straits against their privateers by means of a standing fleet (about 272); soon afterwards (280) the Cumaeans and Hiero of Syracuse achieved a decisive victory near Cumae over the Tyrrhene fleet, to which the Carthaginians vainly attempted to render aid. This is the victory which Pindar celebrates in his first Pythian ode; and there is still extant an Etruscan helmet, which Hiero sent to Olympia, with the inscription: “Hiaron son of Deinomenes and the Syrakosians to Zeus, Tyrrhane spoil from Kyma."(2)
Maritime Supremacy of the Tarentines and Syracusans—
Dionysius of Syracuse
While these extraordinary successes against the Carthaginians and Etruscans placed Syracuse at the head of the Greek cities in Sicily, the Doric Tarentum rose to undisputed pre-eminence among the Italian Hellenes, after the Achaean Sybaris had fallen about the time of the expulsion of the kings from Rome (243). The terrible defeat of the Tarentines by the Iapygians (280), the most severe disaster which a Greek army had hitherto sustained, served only, like the Persian invasion of Hellas, to unshackle the whole might of the national spirit in the development of an energetic democracy. Thenceforth the Carthaginians and the Etruscans were no longer paramount in the Italian waters; the Tarentines predominated in the Adriatic and Ionic, the Massiliots and Syracusans in the Tyrrhene, seas. The latter in particular restricted more and more the range of Etruscan piracy. After the victory at Cumae, Hiero had occupied the island of Aenaria (Ischia), and by that means interrupted the communication between the Campanian and the northern Etruscans. About the year 302, with a view thoroughly to check Tuscan piracy, Syracuse sent forth a special expedition, which ravaged the island of Corsica and the Etruscan coast and occupied the island of Aethalia (Elba). Although Etrusco-Carthaginian piracy was not wholly repressed—Antium, for example, having apparently continued a haunt of privateering down to the beginning of the fifth century of Rome—the powerful Syracuse formed a strong bulwark against the allied
The Romans Opposed to the Etruscans in Veii
This rapid collapse of the Etruscan maritime power would be inexplicable but for the circumstance that, at the very time when the Sicilian Greeks were attacking them by sea, the Etruscans found themselves assailed with the severest blows oil every side by land. About the time of the battles of Salamis, Himera, and Cumae a furious war raged for many years, according to the accounts of the Roman annals, between Rome and Veii (271-280). The Romans suffered in its course severe defeats. Tradition especially preserved the memory of the catastrophe of the Fabii (277), who had in consequence of internal commotions voluntarily banished themselves from the capital(4) and had undertaken the defence of the frontier against Etruria, and who were slain to the last man capable of bearing arms at the brook Cremera. But the armistice for 400 months, which in room of a peace terminated the war, was so far favourable to the Romans that it at least restored the -status quo- of the regal period; the Etruscans gave up Fidenae and the district won by them on the right bank of the Tiber. We cannot ascertain how far this Romano-Etruscan war was connected directly with the war between the Hellenes and the Persians, and with that between the Sicilians and Carthaginians; but whether the Romans were or were not allies of the victors of Salamis and of Himera, there was at any rate a coincidence of interests as well as of results.
The Samnites Opposed to the Etruscans in Campania
The Samnites as well as the Latins threw themselves upon the Etruscans; and hardly had their Campanian settlement been cut off from the motherland in consequence of the battle of Cumae, when it found itself no longer able to resist the assaults of the Sabellian mountain tribes. Capua, the capital, fell in 330; and the Tuscan population there was soon after the conquest extirpated or expelled by the Samnites. It is true that the Campanian Greeks also, isolated and weakened, suffered severely from the same invasion: Cumae itself was conquered by the Sabellians in 334. But the Hellenes maintained their ground at Neapolis especially, perhaps with the aid of the Syracusans, while the Etruscan name in Campania disappeared from history —excepting some detached Etruscan communities, which prolonged a pitiful and forlorn existence there.
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,
Celtic Migrations—
The Celts Assail the Etruscans in Northern Italy
Such is the description which the ancients give us of this nation. Its origin can only be conjectured. Sprung from the same cradle from which the Hellenic, Italian, and Germanic peoples issued,(7) the Celts doubtless like these migrated from their eastern motherland into Europe, where at a very early period they reached the western ocean and established their headquarters in what is now France, crossing to settle in the British isles on the north, and on the south passing the Pyrenees and contending with the Iberian tribes for the possession of the peninsula. This, their first great migration, flowed past the Alps, and it was from the lands to the westward that they first began those movements of smaller masses in the opposite direction—movements which carried them over the Alps and the Haemus and even over the Bosporus, and by means of which they became and for many centuries continued to be the terror of the whole civilized nations of antiquity, till the victories of Caesar and the frontier defence organized by Augustus for ever broke their power.
The native legend of their migrations, which has been preserved to us mainly by Livy, relates the story of these later retrograde movements as follows.(8) The Gallic confederacy, which was headed then as in the time of Caesar by the canton of the Bituriges (around Bourges), sent forth in the days of king Ambiatus two great hosts led by the two nephews of the king. One of these nephews, Sigovesus, crossed the Rhine and advanced in the direction of the Black Forest, while the second, Bellovesus, crossed the Graian Alps
Attack on Etruria by the Romans
Subjected to these simultaneous and, as it were, concerted assaults on the part of very different peoples—the Syracusans, Latins, Samnites, and above all the Celts—the Etruscan nation, that had just acquired so vast and sudden an ascendency in Latium and Campania and on both the Italian seas, underwent a still more rapid and violent collapse. The loss of their maritime supremacy and the subjugation of the Campanian Etruscans belong to the same epoch as the settlement of the Insubres and Cenomani on the Po; and about this same period the Roman burgesses, who had not very many years before been humbled to the utmost and almost reduced to bondage by Porsena, first assumed an attitude of aggression towards Etruria. By the armistice with Veii in 280 Rome had recovered its ground, and the two nations were restored in the main to the state in which they had stood in the time of the kings. When it expired in the year 309, the warfare began afresh; but it took the form of border frays and pillaging
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
The Celts Attack Rome—
Battle on the Allia—
Capture of Rome
For a moment, however, it seemed as if the two peoples, through whose co-operation Etruria saw her very existence put in jeopardy, were about to destroy each other, and the reviving power of Rome was to be trodden under foot by foreign barbarians. This turn of things, so contrary to what might naturally have been expected, the Romans brought upon themselves by their own arrogance and shortsightedness.
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
Fruitlessness of the Celtic Victory
The fearful catastrophe of the defeat and the conflagration, the 18th of July and the rivulet of the Allia, the spot where the sacred objects were buried, and the spot where the surprise of the citadel had been repulsed—all the details of this unparalleled event—were transferred from the recollection of contemporaries to the imagination of posterity; and we can scarcely realize the fact that two thousand years have actually elapsed since those world-renowned geese showed greater vigilance than the sentinels at their posts. And yet —although there was an enactment in Rome that in future, on occasion of a Celtic invasion no legal privilege should give exemption from military service; although dates were reckoned by the years from the conquest of the city; although the event resounded throughout the whole of the then civilized world and found its way even into the Grecian annals—the battle of the Allia and its results can scarcely be numbered among those historical events that are fruitful of consequences. It made no alteration at all in political relations. When the Gauls had marched off again with their gold—which only a legend of late and wretched invention represents the hero Camillus as having recovered for Rome—and when the fugitives had again made their way home,
Further Conquests of Rome in Etruria—
South Etruria Roman
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,
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
But while more or less of an Etruscan character continued to mark these regions, it was confined to isolated remnants and fragments of their earlier power; the Etruscan nation no longer reaped the benefit of such gains as were still acquired there by individuals in peaceful commerce or in maritime war. On the other hand it was probably from these half-free Etruscans that the germs proceeded of such civilization as we subsequently find among the Celts and Alpine peoples in general.(10) The very fact that the Celtic hordes in the plains of Lombardy, to use the language of the so-called Scylax, abandoned their warrior-life and took to permanent settlement, must in part be ascribed to this influence; the rudiments moreover of handicrafts and arts and the alphabet came to the Celts in Lombardy, and in fact to the Alpine peoples as far as the modern Styria, through the medium of the Etruscans.
Etruria Proper at Peace and on the Decline
Thus the Etruscans, after the loss of their possessions in Campania and of the whole district to the north of the Apennines and to the south of the Ciminian Forest, remained restricted to very narrow bounds; their season of power and of aspiration had for ever passed away. The closest reciprocal relations subsisted between this external decline and the internal decay of the nation, the seeds of which indeed were doubtless already deposited at a far earlier period. The Greek authors of this age are full of descriptions of the unbounded luxury of Etruscan life: poets of Lower Italy in the fifth century of the city celebrate the Tyrrhenian wine, and the contemporary historians Timaeus and Theopompus delineate pictures of Etruscan unchastity and of Etruscan banquets, such as fall nothing short of the worst Byzantine or French demoralization. Unattested as may be the details in these accounts, the statement at least appears to be well founded, that the detestable amusement of gladiatorial combats—the gangrene of the later Rome and of the last epoch of antiquity generally—first came into vogue among the Etruscans. At any rate on the whole they leave no doubt as to the deep degeneracy of the nation. It pervaded even its political condition. As far as our scanty information reaches, we find aristocratic tendencies prevailing, in the same way as they did at the same period in Rome, but more harshly and more perniciously. The abolition of royalty, which appears to have been carried out in all the cities of Etruria about the time of the siege of Veii, called into existence in the several cities a patrician government, which experienced but slight restraint from the laxity of the federal bond. That bond but seldom succeeded in combining all the Etruscan cities even for the defence of the land, and the nominal hegemony of Volsinii does not admit of the most remote comparison with the energetic vigour which the leadership of Rome communicated to the Latin nation. The struggle against the exclusive claim put forward by the old burgesses to all public offices and to all public usufructs, which must have destroyed even the Roman state, had not its external successes enabled it in some measure to satisfy the demands of the oppressed proletariate at the expense of foreign nations and to open up other paths to ambition—that struggle against the exclusive rule and (what was specially prominent in Etruria) the priestly monopoly of the clan-nobility—must have ruined Etruria politically, economically, and morally. Enormous wealth, particularly in landed property, became concentrated in the hands of a few nobles, while the masses were impoverished; the social revolutions which thence arose increased the distress which they sought to remedy; and, in consequence of the impotence of the central power, no course at last remained to the distressed aristocrats— e. g. in Arretium in 453, and in Volsinii in 488—but to call in the aid of the Romans, who accordingly put an end to the disorder but at the same time extinguished the remnant of independence. The energies of the nation were broken from the day of Veii and Melpum. Earnest attempts were still once or twice made to escape from the Roman supremacy, but in such instances the stimulus was communicated to the Etruscans from without—from another Italian stock, the Samnites.
1. I. X. Phoenicians and Italians in Opposition to the Hellenes
2. —Fiaron o Deinomeneos kai toi Surakosioi toi Di Turan apo Kumas.—
3. I. X. Home of the Greek Immigrants
4. Hecataeus (after 257 u. c.) and Herodotus also (270-after 345) only know Hatrias as the delta of the Po and the sea that washes its shores (O. Muller, Etrusker, i. p. 140; Geogr. Graeci min. ed. C. Muller, i. p. 23). The appellation of Adriatic sea, in its more extended sense, first occurs in the so-called Scylax about 418 U. C.
5. II. II. Coriolanus
6. -Pleraque Gallia duas res industriosissime persequitur: rem militarem et argute loqui- (Cato, Orig, l. ii. fr. 2. Jordan).
7. It has recently been maintained by expert philologists that there is a closer affinity between the Celts and Italians than there is even between the latter and the Hellenes. In other words they hold that the branch of the great tree, from which the peoples of Indo-Germanic extraction in the west and south of Europe have sprung, divided itself in the first instance into Greeks and Italo-Celts, and that the latter at a considerably later period became subdivided into Italians and Celts. This hypothesis commends itself much to acceptance in a geographical point of view, and the facts which history presents may perhaps be likewise brought into harmony with it, because what has hitherto been regarded as Graeco-Italian civilization may very well have been Graeco-Celto-Italian—in fact we know nothing of the earliest stage of Celtic culture. Linguistic investigation, however, seems not to have made as yet such progress as to warrant the insertion of its results in the primitive history of the peoples.
8. The legend is related by Livy, v. 34, and Justin, xxiv. 4, and Caesar also has had it in view (B. G. vi. 24). But the association of the migration of Bellovesus with the founding of Massilia, by which the former is chronologically fixed down to the middle of the second century of Rome, undoubtedly belongs not to the native legend, which of course did not specify dates, but to later chronologizing research; and it deserves no credit. Isolated incursions and immigrations may have taken place at a very early period; but the great overflowing of northern Italy by the Celts cannot be placed before the age of the decay of the Etruscan power, that is, not before the second half of the third century of the city.
In like manner, after the judicious investigations of Wickham and Cramer, we cannot doubt that the line of march of Bellovesus, like that of Hannibal, lay not over the Cottian Alps (Mont Genevre) and through the territory of the Taurini, but over the Graian Alps (the Little St. Bernard) and through the territory of the Salassi. The name of the mountain is given by Livy doubtless not on the authority of the legend, but on his own conjecture.
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.
9. This is according to the current computation 390 B. C.; but, in fact, the capture of Rome occurred in Ol. 98, 1 = 388 B. C., and has been thrown out of its proper place merely by the confusion of the Roman calendar.
10. I. XIV. Development of Alphabets in Italy
Subjugation of the Latins and Campanians by Rome
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.
Original Equality of Rights between Rome and Latium
The nature of a hegemony implies that it becomes gradually converted into sovereignty by the mere inward force of circumstances; and the Roman hegemony over Latium formed no exception to the rule. It was based upon the essential equality of rights between the Roman state on the one side and the Latin confederacy on the other;(1) but at least in matters of war and in the treatment of the acquisitions thereby made this relation between the single state on the one hand and the league of states on the other virtually involved a hegemony. According to the original constitution of the league not only was the right of making wars and treaties with foreign states—in other words, the full right of political self-determination—reserved in all probability both to Rome and to the individual towns of the Latin league; and when a joint war took place, Rome and Latium probably furnished the like
Encroachments on That Equality of Rights—
As to Wars and Treaties—
As to the Officering of the Army—
As to Acquisitions in War
These stipulations must probably even in the regal period, certainly in the republican epoch, have undergone alteration more and more to the disadvantage of the confederacy and to the further development of the hegemony of Rome. The earliest that fell into abeyance was beyond doubt the right of the confederacy to make wars and treaties with foreigners;(3) the decision of war and treaty passed once for all to Rome. The staff officers for the Latin troops must doubtless in earlier times have been likewise Latins; afterwards for that purpose Roman citizens were taken, if not exclusively, at any rate predominantly.(4) On the other hand, afterwards as formerly, no stronger contingent could be demanded from the Latin confederacy as a whole than was furnished by the Roman community; and the Roman commander-in-chief was likewise bound not to break up the Latin contingents, but to keep the contingent sent by each community as a separate division of the army under the leader whom that community had appointed.(5) The right of the Latin confederacy to an equal share in the moveable spoil and in the conquered land continued to subsist in form; in reality, however, the substantial fruits of war beyond doubt went, even at an early period, to the leading state. Even in the founding of the federal fortresses or the so-called Latin colonies as a rule presumably most, and not unfrequently all, of the colonists were Romans; and although by the transference they were converted from Roman burgesses into members of an allied community, the newly planted township in all probability frequently retained a preponderant—and for the confederacy dangerous—attachment to the real mother-city.
Private Rights
The rights, on the contrary, which were secured by the federal treaties to the individual burgess of one of the allied communities in every city belonging to the league, underwent no restriction. These included, in particular, full equality of rights as to the acquisition of landed property and moveable estate, as to traffic and exchange, marriage and testament, and an unlimited liberty of migration; so that not only was a man who had burgess-rights in a town of the league legally entitled to settle in any other, but whereever he settled, he as a right-sharer (-municeps-) participated in all private and political rights and duties with the exception of eligibility to office, and was even—although in a limited fashion —entitled to vote at least in the -comitia tributa-.(6)
Of some such nature, in all probability, was the relation between the Roman community and the Latin confederacy in the first period of the republic. We cannot, however ascertain what elements are to be referred to earlier stipulations, and what to the revision of the alliance in 261.
With somewhat greater certainty the remodelling of the arrangements of the several communities belonging to the Latin confederacy, after the pattern of the consular constitution in Rome, may be characterized as an innovation and introduced in this connection. For, although the different communities may very well have arrived at the abolition of royalty in itself independently of each other,(7) the identity in the appellation of the new annual kings in the Roman and other commonwealths of Latium, and the comprehensive application of the peculiar principle of collegiateness,(8) evidently point to some external connection. At some time or other after the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome the arrangements of the Latin communities must have been throughout revised in accordance with the scheme of the consular constitution. This adjustment of the Latin constitutions in conformity with that of the leading city may possibly belong only to a later period; but internal probability rather favours the supposition that the Roman nobility, after having effected the abolition of royalty for life at home, suggested a similar change of constitution to the communities of the Latin confederacy, and at length introduced aristocratic government everywhere in Latium— notwithstanding the serious resistance, imperilling the stability of the Romano-Latin league itself, which seems to have been offered on the one hand by the expelled Tarquins, and on the other by the royal clans and by partisans well affected to monarchy in the other communities of Latium. The mighty development of the power of Etruria that occurred at this very time, the constant assaults of the Veientes, and the expedition of Porsena, may have materially contributed to secure the adherence of the Latin nation to the once-established form of union, or, in other words, to the continued recognition of the supremacy of Rome, and disposed them for its sake to acquiesce in a change of constitution for which, beyond doubt, the way had been in many respects prepared even in the bosom of the Latin communities, nay perhaps to submit even to an enlargement of the rights of hegemony.
Extension of Rome and Latium to the East and South
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.
At the Expense of the Aequi and Volsci—
League with the Hernici
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
Crises within the Romano-Latin League
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
Tusculum was even compelled (in 373) to give up its political independence, and to enter into the burgess-union of Rome as a subject community (-civitas sine suffragio-) so that the town retained its walls and an—although limited—self-administration, including magistrates and a burgess-assembly of its own, whereas its burgesses as Romans lacked the right of electing or being elected —the first instance of a whole burgess-body being incorporated as a dependent community with the Roman commonwealth.
Renewal of the Treaties of Alliance
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.
Closing of the Latin Confederation
In manifest connection with this crisis in the relations between Rome and Latium stands the closing of the Latin confederation,(14) which took place about the year 370, although we cannot precisely determine whether it was the effect or, as is more probable, the cause of the revolt of Latium against Rome which we have just described. As the law had hitherto stood, every sovereign city founded by Rome and Latium took its place among the communes entitled to participate in the federal festival and federal diet, whereas every community incorporated with another city and thereby
Fixing of the Limits of Latium
With this closing of the confederacy was connected the geographical settlement of the limits of Latium. So long as the Latin confederacy continued open, the bounds of Latium had advanced with the establishment of new federal cities: but as the later Latin colonies had no share in the Alban festival, they were not regarded geographically as part of Latium. For this reason doubtless Ardea and Circeii were reckoned as belonging to Latium, but not Sutrium or Tarracina.
Isolation of the Later Latin Cities as Respected Private Rights
But not only were the places on which Latin privileges were bestowed after 370 kept aloof from the federal association; they were isolated also from one another as respected private rights. While each of them was allowed to have reciprocity of commercial dealings and probably also of marriage (-commercium et conubium-) with Rome, no such reciprocity was permitted with the other Latin communities. The burgess of Satrium, for example, might possess in full property a piece of ground in Rome, but not in Praeneste; and might have legitimate children with a Roman, but not with a Tiburtine, wife.(18)
Prevention of Special Leagues
If hitherto considerable freedom of movement had been allowed within the confederacy, and for example the six old Latin communities, Aricia, Tusculum, Tibur, Lanuvium, Cora, and Laurentum, and the two new Latin, Ardea and Suessa Pometia, had been permitted to found in common a shrine for the Aricine Diana; it is doubtless not the mere result of accident that we find no further instance in later times of similar separate confederations fraught with danger to the hegemony of Rome.
Revision of the Municipal Constitutions. Police Judges
We may likewise assign to this epoch the further remodelling which the Latin municipal constitutions underwent, and their complete assimilation to the constitution of Rome. If in after times two aediles, intrusted with the police-supervision of markets and highways and the administration of justice in connection therewith, make their appearance side by side with the two praetors as necessary elements of the Latin magistracy, the institution of these urban police functionaries, which evidently took place at the same time and at the instigation of the leading power in all the federal communities, certainly cannot have preceded the establishment of the curule aedileship in Rome, which occurred in 387; probably it took place about that very time. Beyond doubt this arrangement was only one of a series of measures curtailing the liberties and modifying the organization of the federal communities in the interest of aristocratic policy.
Domination of the Romans; Exasperation of the Latins—
Collision between the Romans and the Samnites
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
Conquests of the Samnites in the South of Italy
The Samnite nation, which, at the time of the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, had doubtless already been for a considerable period in possession of the hill-country which rises between the Apulian and Campanian plains and commands them both, had hitherto found its further advance impeded on the one side by the Daunians —the power and prosperity of Arpi fall within this period—on the other by the Greeks and Etruscans. But the fall of the Etruscan power towards the end of the third, and the decline of the Greek colonies in the course of the fourth century, made room for them towards the west and south; and now one Samnite host after another marched down to, and even moved across, the south Italian seas. They first made their appearance in the plain adjoining the bay, with which the name of the Campanians has been associated from the beginning of the fourth century; the Etruscans there were suppressed, and the Greeks were confined within narrower bounds; Capua was wrested from the former (330), Cumae from the latter (334). About the same time, perhaps even earlier, the Lucanians appeared in Magna Graecia: at the beginning of the fourth century they were involved in conflict with the people of Terina and Thurii; and a considerable time before 364 they had established themselves in the Greek Laus. About this period their levy amounted to 30,000 infantry and 4000 cavalry. Towards the end of the fourth century mention first occurs of the separate confederacy of the Bruttii,(19) who had detached themselves from the Lucanians—not, like the other Sabellian stocks, as a colony, but through a quarrel —and had become mixed up with many foreign elements. The Greeks of Lower Italy tried to resist the pressure of the barbarians; the league of the Achaean cities was reconstructed in 361; and it was determined that, if any of the allied
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.
Relations between the Samnites and the Greeks
The Samnite tribes filled a disproportionately large space, while yet they showed no disposition to make it thoroughly their own. The larger Greek cities, Tarentum, Thurii, Croton, Metapontum, Heraclea, Rhegium, and Neapolis, although weakened and often dependent, continued to exist; and the Hellenes were tolerated even in the open country and in the smaller towns, so that Cumae for instance, Posidonia, Laus, and Hipponium, still remained—as the Periplus already mentioned and coins show—Greek cities even under Samnite rule. Mixed populations thus arose; the bi-lingual Bruttii, in particular, included Hellenic as well as Samnite elements and even perhaps remains of the ancient autochthones; in Lucania and Campania also similar mixtures must to a lesser extent have taken place.
Campanian Hellenism
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,
The Samnite Confederacy
The Samnite land, properly so called, alone remained unaffected by these innovations, which, beautiful and natural as they may to some extent have been, powerfully contributed to relax still more the bond of national unity which even from the first was loose. Through the influence of Hellenic habits a deep schism took place in the Samnite stock. The civilized “Philhellenes” of Campania were accustomed to tremble like the Hellenes themselves before the ruder tribes of the mountains, who were continually penetrating into Campania and disturbing the degenerate earlier settlers. Rome was a compact state, having the strength of all Latium at its disposal; its subjects might murmur, but they obeyed. The Samnite stock was dispersed and divided; and, while the confederacy in Samnium proper had preserved unimpaired the manners and valour of their ancestors, they were on that very account completely at variance with the other Samnite tribes and towns.
Submission of Capua to Rome—
Rome and Samnium Come to Terms—
Revolt of the Latins and Campanians against Rome—
Victory of the Romans—
Dissolution of the Latin League—
Colonization of the Land of the Volsci
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.
The consent of the Samnites to treat is explained by the energetic exertions made about this very period by the Tarentines to get quit of their Sabellian neighbours. But the Romans also had good reason for coming to terms as quickly as possible with the Samnites; for the impending transition of the region bordering on the south of Latium into the possession of the Romans converted the ferment that had long existed among the Latins into open insurrection. All the original Latin towns, even the Tusculans who had been received into the burgess-union of Rome, took up arms against Rome, with the single exception of the Laurentes, whereas of the colonies founded beyond the bounds of Latium only the old Volscian towns Velitrae, Antium, and Tarracina adhered to the revolt. We can readily understand how the Capuans, notwithstanding their very recent and voluntarily offered submission to the Romans, should readily embrace the first opportunity of again ridding themselves of the Roman rule and, in spite of the opposition of the optimate party that adhered to the treaty with Rome, should make common cause with the Latin confederacy, whereas the still independent Volscian towns, such as Fundi and Formiae, and the Hernici abstained like the Campanian aristocracy from taking part in this revolt. The position of the Romans was critical; the legions which had crossed the Liris and occupied Campania were cut off by the revolt of the Latins and Volsci from their home, and a victory alone could save them. The decisive battle was fought near Trifanum (between Minturnae, Suessa, and Sinuessa) in 414; the consul Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus achieved a complete victory over the united Latins and Campanians. In the two following years the individual towns, so far as they still offered resistance, were reduced by capitulation or assault, and the whole country was brought into subjection. The effect of the victory was the dissolution of the Latin league. It was transformed from an independent political federation into a mere association for the purpose of a religious festival; the ancient stipulated rights of the confederacy as to a maximum for the levy of troops and a share of the gains of war perished as such along with it, and assumed, where they were recognized in future, the character of acts of grace. Instead of the one treaty between Rome on the one hand and the Latin confederacy on the other, there came at best perpetual alliances between Rome and the several confederate towns. To this footing of treaty there were admitted of the old-Latin places, besides Laurentum, also Tibur and Praeneste, which however were compelled to cede portions of their territory to Rome. Like terms were obtained by the communities of Latin rights founded outside of Latium, so far as they had not taken part in the war. The principle of isolating the communities from each other, which had already been established in regard to the places founded after 370,(21) was thus extended to the whole
Complete Submission of the Volscian and Campanian Provinces
In like manner the dominion of Rome was established and confirmed in the south Volscian and Campanian territories. Fundi, Formiae, Capua, Cumae, and a number of smaller towns became dependent Roman communities with self-administration. To secure the pre-eminently important city of Capua, the breach between the nobility and commons was artfully widened, the communal constitution was revised in the Roman interest, and the administration of the town was controlled by Roman officials annually sent to Campania. The same treatment was measured out some years after to the Volscian Privernum, whose citizens, supported by Vitruvius Vaccus a bold partisan belonging to Fundi, had the honour of fighting the last battle for the freedom of this region; the struggle ended with the storming of the town (425) and the execution of Vaccus in a Roman prison. In order to rear a population devoted to Rome in these regions, they distributed, out of the lands won in war particularly in the Privernate and Falernian territories, so numerous allotments to Roman burgesses, that a few years later (436) they were able to institute there also two new tribes. The establishment of two fortresses as colonies with Latin rights finally secured the newly won land. These were Cales (420) in the middle of the Campanian plain, whence the movements of Teanum and Capua could be observed, and Fregellae (426), which
Inaction of the Samnites
As a matter of course, the Samnites could not behold the threatening progress of the Romans with satisfaction, and they probably put obstacles in its way; nevertheless they neglected to intercept the new career of conquest, while there was still perhaps time to do so, with that energy which the circumstances required. They appear indeed in accordance with their treaty with Rome to have occupied and strongly garrisoned Teanum; for while in earlier times that city sought help against Samnium from Capua and Rome, in the later struggles it appears as the bulwark of the Samnite power on the west. They spread, conquering and destroying, on the upper Liris, but they neglected to establish themselves permanently in that quarter. They destroyed the Volscian town Fregellae—by which they simply facilitated the institution of the Roman colony there which we have just mentioned —and they so terrified two other Volscian towns, Fabrateria (Ceccano) and Luca (site unknown), that these, following the example of Capua, surrendered themselves to the Romans (424). The Samnite confederacy allowed the Roman conquest of Campania to be completed before they in earnest opposed it; and the reason for their doing so is to be sought partly in the contemporary hostilities between the Samnite nation and the Italian Hellenes, but principally in the remiss and distracted policy which the confederacy pursued.
1. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium
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.
3. Dionysius (viii. 15) expressly states, that in the later federal treaties between Rome and Latium the Latin communities were interdicted from calling out their contingents of their own motion and sending them into the field alone.
4. These Latin staff-officers were the twelve -praefecti sociorum-, who subsequently, when the old phalanx had been resolved into the later legions and -alae-, had the charge of the two -alae- of the federal contingents, six to each -ala-, just as the twelve war-tribunes of the Roman army had charge of the two legions, six to each legion. Polybius (vi. 26, 5) states that the consul nominated the former, as he originally nominated the latter. Now, as according to the ancient maxim of law, that every person under obligation of service might become an officer (p. 106), it was legally allowable for the general to appoint a Latin as leader of a Roman, as well as conversely a Roman as leader of a Latin, legion, this led to the practical result that the -tribuni militum- were wholly, and the -praefecti sociorum-at least ordinarily, Romans.
5. These were the -decuriones turmarum- and -praefecti cohortium-(Polyb. vi. 21, 5; Liv. xxv. 14; Sallust. Jug. 69, et al.) Of course, as the Roman consuls were in law and ordinarily also in fact commanders-in-chief, the presidents of the community in the dependent towns also were perhaps throughout, or at least very frequently, placed at the head of the community-contingents (Liv. xxiii. 19; Orelli, Inscr. 7022). Indeed, the usual name given to the Latin magistrates (-praetores-) indicates that they were officers.
6. Such a —metoikos— was not like an actual burgess assigned to a specific voting district once for all, but before each particular vote the district in which the —metoeci— were upon that occasion to vote was fixed by lot. In reality this probably amounted to the concession to the Latins of one vote in the Roman -comitia tributa-. As a place in some tribe was a preliminary condition of the ordinary centuriate suffrage, if the —metoeci— shared in the voting in the assembly of the centuries-which we do not know-a similar allotment must have been fixed for the latter. In the curies they must have taken part like the plebeians.
7. II. I. Abolition of the Life-Presidency of the Community
8. Ordinarily, as is well known, the Latin communities were presided over by two praetors. Besides these there occur in several communities single magistrates, who in that case bear the title of dictator; as in Alba (Orelli-Henzen, Inscr. 2293), Tusculum (p. 445, note 2), Lanuvium (Cicero, pro Mil. 10, 27; 17, 45; Asconius, in Mil. p. 32, Orell.; Orelli, n. 2786, 5157, 6086); Compitum (Orelli, 3324); Nomentum (Orelli, 208, 6138, 7032; comp. Henzen, Bullett. 1858, p. 169); and Aricia (Orelli, n. 1455). To these falls to be added the similar dictator in the -civitas sine suffragio- of Caere (Orelli, n. 3787, 5772; also Garrucci Diss. arch., i. p. 31, although erroneously placed after Sutrium); and further the officials of the like name at Fidenae (Orelli, 112). All these magistracies or priesthoods that originated in magistracies (the dictator of Caere is to be explained
All these Latin magistracies substantially coincide in reality, as well as specially in name, with the arrangement established in Rome by the revolution in a way which is not adequately explained by the mere similarity of the political circumstances underlying them.
9. II. IV. Etruscans Driven Back from Latium
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.
11. To all appearance Velitrae, although situated in the plain, was originally Volscian, and so a Latin colony; Cora, on the other hand, on the Volscian mountains, was originally Latin.
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.
More credit may be given to the traditional statements regarding the years of the foundations than to most of the oldest traditions, seeing that the numbering of the year -ab urbe condita-, common to the Italian cities, has to all appearance preserved, by direct tradition, the year in which the colonies were founded.
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.
As regards the list given by Pliny of thirty-two townships extinct in his time which had formerly participated in the Alban festival, after deduction of seven that also occur in Dionysius (for the Cusuetani of Pliny appear to be the Carventani of Dionysius), there remain twenty-five townships, most of them quite unknown, doubtless made up partly of those seventeen non-voting communities—most of which perhaps were just the oldest subsequently disqualified members of the Alban festal league—partly of a number of other decayed or ejected members of the league, to which latter class above all the ancient presiding township of Alba, also named by Pliny, belonged.
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 ).
16. II. IV. South Etruria Roman
17. II. V. League with the Hernici
18. This restriction of the ancient full reciprocity of Latin rights first occurs in the renewal of the treaty in 416 (Liv. viii. 14); but as the system of isolation, of which it was an essential part, first began in reference to the Latin colonies settled after 370, and was only generalized in 416, it is proper to mention this alteration here.
19. The name itself is very ancient; in fact it is the most ancient indigenous name for the inhabitants of the present Calabria (Antiochus, Fr. 5. Mull.). The well-known derivation is doubtless an invention.
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
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
21. II. V. Isolation of the Later Latin Cities as Respected Private Rights
22. II. V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League
23. II. IV. South Etruria Roman
Struggle of the Italians against Rome
Wars between the Sabellians and Tarentines—
Archidamus—
Alexander the Molossian—
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
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.
Coalition of the Italians against Rome
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.
Outbreak of War between Samnium and Rome—
Pacification of Campania
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
The Sabellian towns to the south of the Volturnus, Nola, Nuceria, Herculaneum, and Pompeii, took part with Samnium in the beginning of the war; but their greatly exposed situation and the machinations of the Romans—who endeavoured to bring over to their side the optimate party in these towns by all the levers of artifice and self-interest, and found a powerful support to their endeavours in the precedent of Capua—induced these towns to declare themselves either in favour of Rome or neutral not long after the fall of Neapolis.
Alliance between the Romans and Lucanians
A still more important success befell the Romans in Lucania. There also the people with true instinct was in favour of joining the Samnites; but, as an alliance with the Samnites involved peace with Tarentum and a large portion of the governing lords of Lucania were not disposed to suspend their profitable pillaging expeditions, the Romans succeeded in concluding an alliance with Lucania—an alliance which was invaluable, because it provided employment for the Tarentines and thus left the whole power of Rome available against Samnium.
War in Samnium—
The Caudine Pass and the Caudine Peace
Thus Samnium stood on all sides unsupported; excepting that some of the eastern mountain districts sent their contingents. In the year 428 the war began within the Samnite land itself: some towns on the Campanian frontier, Rufrae (between Venafrum and Teanum) and Allifae, were occupied by the Romans. In the following years the Roman armies penetrated Samnium, fighting and pillaging, as far as the territory of the Vestini, and even as far as Apulia, where they were received with open arms; everywhere they had very decidedly the advantage. The courage of the Samnites was broken; they sent back the Roman prisoners, and along with them the dead body of the leader of the war party, Brutulus Papius, who had
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?
Victory of the Romans
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.
Luceria was occupied by them and Fregellae surprised and taken by assault (434) before the Romans had reorganized their broken army; the passing of the Satricans(2) over to the Samnites shows what they might have accomplished, had they not allowed their advantage to slip through their hands. But Rome was only momentarily paralyzed, not weakened; full of shame and indignation the Romans raised all the men and means they could, and placed the highly experienced Lucius Papirius Cursor, equally distinguished as a soldier and as a general, at the head of the newly formed army. The army divided; the one-half marched by Sabina and the Adriatic coast to appear before Luceria, the other proceeded to the same destination through Samnium itself, successfully engaging and driving before it the Samnite army. They formed a junction again under the walls of Luceria, the siege of which was prosecuted with the greater zeal, because the Roman equites lay in captivity there; the Apulians, particularly the Arpani, lent the Romans important assistance in the siege, especially by procuring supplies. After the Samnites had given battle for the relief of the town and been defeated, Luceria surrendered to the Romans (435). Papirius enjoyed the double satisfaction of liberating his comrades who had been given up for lost, and of requiting the yoke of Caudium on the Samnite garrison of Luceria. In the next years (435-437) the war was carried on(3) not so much in Samnium itself as in the adjoining districts. In the first place the Romans chastised the allies of the Samnites in the Apulian and Frentanian territories, and concluded new conventions with the Teanenses of Apulia and the Canusini. At the same time Satricum was again reduced to subjection and severely punished for its revolt. Then the war turned to Campania, where the Romans conquered the frontier town towards Samnium, Saticula (perhaps S. Agata de’ Goti) (438). But now the fortune of war seemed disposed once more to turn against them. The Samnites gained over the Nucerians (438), and soon afterwards the Nolans, to their side; on the upper Liris the Sorani of themselves expelled the Roman garrison (439); the Ausonians were preparing
New Fortresses in Apulia and Campania
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.
Intervention of the Tarentines
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
Accession of the Etruscans to the Coalition—
Victory at the Vadimonian Lake
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.
Last Campaigns in Samnium
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
Peace with Samnium
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).
And with Tarentum
Presumably about the same time, and in consequence doubtless of the Samnite peace, peace was also made between Rome and Tarentum. The two cities had not indeed directly opposed each other in the field. The Tarentines had been inactive spectators of the long contest between Rome and Samnium from its beginning to its close, and had only kept up hostilities in league with the Sallentines against the Lucanians who were allies of Rome. In the last years of the Samnite war no doubt they had shown some signs of more energetic action. The position of embarrassment to which the ceaseless attacks of the Lucanians reduced them on the one hand, and on the other hand the feeling ever obtruding itself on them more urgently that the complete subjugation of Samnium would endanger their own independence, induced them, notwithstanding their unpleasant experiences with Alexander, once more to entrust themselves to a -condottiere-. There came at their call the Spartan prince Cleonymus, accompanied by five thousand mercenaries; with whom he united a band equally numerous raised in Italy, as well as the contingents of the Messapians and of the smaller Greek towns, and above all the Tarentine civic army of twenty-two thousand men. At the head of this considerable force he compelled the Lucanians to make peace with Tarentum and to install a government of Samnite tendencies; in return for which Metapontum was abandoned to them. The Samnites were still
Consolidation of the Roman Rule in Central Italy
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
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
Renewed Outbreak of the Samnite-Etruscan War—
Junction of the Troops of the Coalition in Etruria
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
Battle of Sentinum—
Peace with Etruria
Nevertheless it was a hotly contested day. On the right wing of the Romans, where Rullianus with his two legions fought against the Samnite army, the conflict remained long undecided. On the left, which Publius Decius commanded, the Roman cavalry was thrown into confusion by the Gallic war chariots, and the legions also already began to give way. Then the consul called to him Marcus Livius the priest, and bade him devote to the infernal gods both the head of the Roman general and the army of the enemy; and plunging into the thickest throng of the Gauls he sought death and found it. This heroic deed of despair on the part of one so eminent as a man and so beloved as a general was not in vain. The fugitive soldiers rallied; the bravest threw themselves after their leader into the hostile ranks, to avenge him or to die with him; and just at the right moment the consular Lucius Scipio, despatched by Rullianus, appeared with the Roman reserve on the imperilled left wing. The excellent Campanian cavalry, which fell on the flank and rear of the Gauls, turned the scale; the Gauls fled, and at length the Samnites also gave way, their general Egnatius falling at the gate of the camp. Nine thousand Romans strewed the field of battle; but dearly as the victory was purchased, it was worthy of such a sacrifice. The army of the coalition was dissolved, and with it the coalition itself; Umbria remained in the power of the Romans, the Gauls dispersed, the remnant of the Samnites still in compact order retreated homeward through the Abruzzi. Campania, which the Samnites had overrun during the Etruscan war, was after its close re-occupied with little difficulty by the Romans. Etruria sued for peace in the following year (460); Volsinii, Perusia, Arretium, and in general all the towns that had joined the league against Rome, promised a cessation of hostilities for four hundred months.
Last Struggles of Samnium
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
1. It may not be superfluous to mention that our knowledge Archidamus and Alexander is derived from Greek annals, and that the synchronism between these and the Roman is in reference to the present epoch only approximately established. We must beware, therefore, of pursuing too far into detail the unmistakable general connection between the events in the west and those in the east of Italy.
2. These were not the inhabitants of Satricum near Antium (ii. V. League with The Hernici), but those of another Volscian town constituted at that time as a Roman burgess-community without right of voting, near Arpinum.
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.
Struggle between Pyrrhus and Rome, and Union of Italy
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
The Historical Position of Pyrrhus
Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, was himself simply a military adventurer. He was none the less a soldier of fortune that he traced back his pedigree to Aeacus and Achilles, and that, had he been more peacefully disposed, he might have lived and died as “king” of a small mountain tribe under the supremacy of Macedonia or perhaps in isolated independence. He has been compared to Alexander of Macedonia; and certainly the idea of founding a Hellenic empire of the west—which would have had as its core Epirus, Magna Graecia, and Sicily, would have commanded both the Italian seas, and would have reduced Rome and Carthage to the rank of barbarian peoples bordering on the Hellenistic state-system, like the Celts and the Indians—was analogous in greatness and boldness to the idea which led the Macedonian king over the Hellespont. But it was not the mere difference of issue that formed the distinction between the expedition to the east and that to the west. Alexander with his Macedonian army, in which the staff especially was excellent, could fully make head against the great-king; but the king of Epirus, which stood by the side of Macedonia somewhat as Hesse by the side of Prussia, could only raise an army worthy of the name by means of mercenaries and of alliances based on accidental political combinations. Alexander made his appearance in the Persian empire as a conqueror; Pyrrhus appeared in Italy as the general of a coalition of secondary states. Alexander left his hereditary dominions completely secured by the unconditional subjection of Greece, and by the strong army that remained behind under Antipater; Pyrrhus had no security for the integrity of his native dominions but the word of a doubtful neighbour. In the case of both conquerors, if their plans should be crowned with success, their native country would necessarily cease to be the centre
And yet a wondrous charm attaches to the name of the Epirot—a peculiar sympathy, evoked certainly in some degree by his chivalrous and amiable character, but still more by the circumstance that he was the first Greek that met the Romans in battle. With him began those direct relations between Rome and Hellas, on which the whole subsequent development of ancient, and an essential part of modern, civilization are based. The struggle between phalanxes and cohorts, between a mercenary army and a militia, between military monarchy and senatorial government, between individual talent and national vigour —this struggle between Rome and Hellenism was first fought out in the battles between Pyrrhus and the Roman generals; and though the defeated party often afterwards appealed anew to the arbitration of arms, every succeeding day of battle simply confirmed the decision. But while the Greeks were beaten in the battlefield as well as in the senate-hall, their superiority was none the less decided on every other field of rivalry than that of politics; and these very struggles already betokened that the victory of Rome over the Hellenes would be different from her victories over Gauls and Phoenicians, and that the charm of Aphrodite only begins to work when the lance is broken and the helmet and shield are laid aside.
Character and Earlier History of Pyrrhus
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,
Rising of the Italians against Rome—
The Lucanians—
The Etruscans and Celts—
The Samnites—
The Senones Annihilated
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
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,
Breach between Rome and Tarentum
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 barbarians, however, acted with a moderation which, considering their power and the provocation they had received, excites astonishment. It was the interest of Rome to maintain as long as possible the Tarentine neutrality, and the leading men in the senate accordingly rejected the proposal, which a minority had with natural resentment submitted, to declare war at once against the Tarentines. In fact, the continuance of peace on the part of Rome was proffered on the most moderate terms consistent with her honour—the release of the captives, the restoration of Thurii, the surrender of the originators of the attack on the fleet. A Roman embassy proceeded with these proposals to Tarentum (473), while at the same time, to add weight to their words, a Roman army under the consul Lucius Aemilius advanced into Samnium. The Tarentines could, without forfeiting aught of their independence, accept these terms; and considering the little inclination for war in so wealthy a commercial city, the Romans had reason to presume that an accommodation was still possible. But the attempt to preserve peace failed, whether through the opposition of those Tarentines who recognized the necessity of meeting the aggressions of Rome, the sooner the better, by a resort to arms, or merely through the unruliness of the city rabble, which with characteristic Greek naughtiness subjected the person of the envoy to an unworthy insult. The consul now advanced into the Tarentine territory; but instead of immediately commencing hostilities, he offered once more the same terms of peace; and, when this proved in vain, he began to lay waste the fields and country houses, and he defeated the civic militia. The principal persons captured, however, were released without ransom; and the hope was not abandoned that the pressure of war would give to the aristocratic party ascendency in the city and so bring about peace. The reason of this reserve was, that the Romans were unwilling to drive the city into the arms of the Epirot king. His designs on Italy were no longer a secret. A Tarentine embassy had already gone to Pyrrhus and returned without having accomplished its object. The king had demanded more than it had powers to grant. It was necessary that they should come to a decision. That the civic militia knew only how to run away from the Romans, had been made sufficiently clear. There remained only the choice between a peace with Rome, which the Romans still were ready to agree to on equitable terms, and a treaty with Pyrrhus on any condition that the king might think proper; or, in other words, the choice between submission to the supremacy of Rome, and subjection to the —tyrannis— of a Greek soldier.
Pyrrhus Summoned to Italy
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
Pyrrhus and the Coalition
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
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
Battle near Heraclea
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
Attempts at Peace
Pyrrhus offered peace to the Romans. He was too sagacious a soldier not to recognize the precariousness of his footing, and too skilled a statesman not to profit opportunely by the moment which placed him in the most favourable position for the conclusion of peace. He now hoped that under the first impression made by the great battle on the Romans he should be able to secure the freedom of the Greek towns in Italy, and to call into existence between them and Rome a series of states of the second and third order as dependent allies of the new Greek power; for such was the tenor of his demands: the release of all Greek towns—and therefore of the Campanian and Lucanian towns in particular—from allegiance to Rome, and restitution of the territory taken from the Samnites, Daunians, Lucanians, and Bruttians, or in other words especially the surrender of Luceria and Venusia. If a further struggle with Rome could hardly be avoided, it was not desirable at any rate to begin it till the western Hellenes should be united under one ruler, till Sicily should be acquired and perhaps Africa be conquered.
Provided with such instructions, the Thessalian Cineas, the confidential minister of Pyrrhus, went to Rome. That dexterous negotiator, whom his contemporaries compared to Demosthenes so far as a rhetorician might be compared to a statesman and the minister of a sovereign to a popular leader, had orders to display by every means the respect which the victor of Heraclea really felt for his vanquished opponents, to make known the wish of the king to come to Rome in person, to influence men’s minds in the king’s favour by panegyrics which sound so well in the mouth of an enemy, by earnest flatteries, and, as opportunity offered, also by well-timed gifts—in short to try upon the Romans all the arts of cabinet policy, as they had been tested at the courts of Alexandria and Antioch. The senate hesitated; to many it seemed a prudent course to draw back a step and to wait till their dangerous antagonist should have further entangled himself or should be no more. But the grey-haired and blind consular Appius Claudius (censor 442, consul 447, 458), who had long withdrawn from state affairs but had himself conducted at this decisive moment to the senate, breathed the unbroken energy of his own vehement nature with words of fire into the souls of the younger generation. They gave to the message of the king the proud reply, which was first heard on this occasion and became thenceforth a maxim of the state, that Rome never negotiated so long as there were foreign troops on Italian ground; and to make good their words they dismissed the ambassador at once from the city. The object of the mission had failed, and the dexterous diplomatist, instead of producing an effect by his oratorical art, had on the contrary been himself impressed by such manly earnestness after so severe a defeat—he declared at home that every burgess in that city had seemed to him a king; in truth, the courtier had gained a sight of a free people.
Pyrrhus Marches against Rome
Pyrrhus, who during these negotiations had advanced into Campania, immediately on the news of their being broken off marched against Rome, to co-operate with the Etruscans, to shake the allies of Rome, and to threaten the city itself. But the Romans as little allowed themselves to be terrified as cajoled. At the summons of the herald “to enrol in the room of the fallen,” the young men immediately after the battle of Heraclea had pressed forward in crowds to enlist; with the two newly-formed legions and the corps withdrawn from Lucania, Laevinus, stronger than before, followed the march of the king. He protected Capua against him, and frustrated his endeavours to enter into communications with Neapolis. So firm was the attitude of the Romans that, excepting the Greeks of Lower Italy, no allied state of any note dared to break off from the Roman alliance. Then Pyrrhus turned against Rome itself. Through a rich country, whose flourishing condition he beheld with astonishment, he marched against Fregellae which he surprised, forced the passage of the Liris, and reached Anagnia, which is not more than forty miles from Rome. No army crossed his path; but everywhere the towns of Latium closed their gates against him, and with measured step Laevinus followed him from Campania, while the consul Tiberius Coruncanius, who had just concluded a seasonable peace with the Etruscans, brought up a second Roman army from the north, and in Rome itself the reserve was preparing for battle under the dictator Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus. In these circumstances Pyrrhus could accomplish nothing; no course was left to him but to retire. For a time he still remained inactive in Campania in presence of the united armies of the two consuls; but no opportunity occurred of striking an effective blow. When winter came on, the king evacuated the enemy’s territory, and distributed his troops among the friendly towns, taking up his own winter quarters in Tarentum. Thereupon the Romans also desisted from their operations. The army occupied standing quarters near Firmum in Picenum, where by command of the senate the legions defeated on the Siris spent the winter by way of punishment under tents.
Second Year of the War
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,
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.
According to the Greek account of the battle, which seems less one-sided than the Roman account also extant, the Greeks had the disadvantage on the first day, as they did not succeed in deploying their line along the steep and marshy banks of the river where they were compelled to accept battle, or in bringing their cavalry and elephants into action. On the second day, however, Pyrrhus anticipated the Romans in occupying the intersected ground, and thus gained without loss the plain where he could without disturbance draw
Relations of Sicily, Syracuse, and Carthage—
Pyrrhus Invited to Syracuse
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.
League between Rome and Carthage—
Third Year of the War
The immediate effect, indeed, of this union of the Italian and Sicilian Greeks under one control was a closer concert also on the part of their antagonists. Carthage and Rome now converted their old commercial treaties into an offensive and defensive league against Pyrrhus (475), the tenor of which was that, if Pyrrhus invaded Roman or Carthaginian territory, the party which was not attacked should furnish that which was assailed with a contingent on its own territory and should itself defray the expense of the auxiliary troops; that in such an event Carthage should be bound to furnish transports and to assist the Romans also with a war fleet, but the crews of that fleet should not be obliged to fight for the Romans by land; that lastly, both states should pledge themselves not to conclude
Embarkation of Pyrrhus for Sicily—
The War in Italy Flags
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.
Pyrrhus Master of Sicily
The landing of Pyrrhus on the island, which, in spite of the Carthaginian fleet, had taken place without interruption, had changed at once the aspect of matters there. He had immediately relieved Syracuse, had in a short time united under his sway all the free Greek cities, and at the head of the Sicilian confederation had wrested from the Carthaginians nearly their whole possessions. It was with difficulty that the Carthaginians could, by the help of their fleet which
The Sicilian Government of Pyrrhus
The real weakness of the position of Pyrrhus lay in his faulty internal policy. He governed Sicily as he had seen Ptolemy rule in Egypt: he showed no respect to the local constitutions; he placed his confidants as magistrates over the cities whenever, and for as long as, he pleased; he made his courtiers judges instead of the native jurymen; he pronounced arbitrary sentences of confiscation, banishment, or death, even against those who had been most active in promoting his coming thither; he placed garrisons in the towns, and ruled over Sicily not as the leader of a national league, but as a king. In so doing
Departure of Pyrrhus to Italy
To this first and most essential error Pyrrhus added a second; he proceeded with his fleet, not to Lilybaeum, but to Tarentum. It was evident, looking to the very ferment in the minds of the Sicilians, that he ought first of all to have dislodged the Carthaginians wholly from the island, and thereby to have cut off the discontented from their last support, before he turned his attention to Italy; in that quarter there was nothing to be lost, for Tarentum was safe enough for him, and the other allies were of little moment now that they had been abandoned. It is conceivable that his soldierly spirit impelled him to wipe off the stain of his not very honourable departure in the year 476 by a brilliant return, and that his heart bled when he heard the complaints of the Lucanians and Samnites. But problems, such as Pyrrhus had proposed to himself, can only be solved by men of iron nature, who are able to control their feelings of compassion and even their sense of honour; and Pyrrhus was not one of these.
Fall of the Sicilian Kingdom—
Recommencement of the Italian War
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,
Battle near Beneventum—
Pyrrhus Leaves Italy—
Death of Pyrrhus
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).
Last Struggles in Italy—
Capture of Tarentum
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.
Submission of Lower Italy
In the same year, in which Tarentum became Roman, the Samnites, Lucanians, and Bruttians finally submitted. The latter were obliged to cede the half of the lucrative, and for ship-building important, forest of Sila.
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.
Construction of New Fortresses and Roads
For the securing of these immense acquisitions a new series of colonies was instituted: Paestum and Cosa in Lucania (481); Beneventum (486), and Aesernia (about 491) to hold Samnium in check; and, as outposts against the Gauls, Ariminum (486), Firmum in Picenum (about 490), and the burgess colony of Castrum Novum. Preparations were made for the continuation of the great southern highway—which acquired in the fortress of Beneventum a new station intermediate between Capua and Venusia—as far as the seaports of Tarentum and Brundisium, and for the colonization of the latter seaport, which Roman policy had selected as the rival and successor of the Tarentine emporium. The construction of the new fortresses and roads gave rise to some further wars with the small tribes, whose territory was thereby curtailed: with the Picentes (485, 486), a number of whom were transplanted to the district of Salernum; with the Sallentines about Brundisium (487, 488); and with the Umbrian Sassinates (487, 488), who seem to have occupied the territory of Ariminum after the expulsion of the Senones. By these establishments the dominion of Rome was extended over the interior of Lower Italy, and over the whole Italian east coast from the Ionian sea to the Celtic frontier.
Maritime Relations
Before we describe the political organization under which the Italy which was thus united was governed on the part of Rome, it remains that we should glance at the maritime relations that subsisted in the fourth and fifth centuries. At this period Syracuse and Carthage were the main competitors for the dominion of the western waters. On the whole, notwithstanding the great temporary successes which Dionysius (348-389), Agathocles (437-465), and Pyrrhus (476-478) obtained at sea, Carthage had the preponderance and Syracuse sank more and more into a naval power of the second rank. The maritime importance of Etruria was wholly gone;(6) the hitherto Etruscan island of Corsica, if it did not quite pass into the possession, fell under the maritime supremacy, of the Carthaginians. Tarentum, which for a time had played a considerable part, had its power broken by the Roman occupation. The brave Massiliots maintained their ground in their own waters; but they exercised no material influence over the course of events in those of Italy. The other maritime cities hardly came as yet into serious account.
Decline of the Roman Naval Power
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,
We may probably assign to the same period the already mentioned(10) treaty between Rome and Tarentum, respecting the date of which we are only told that it was concluded a considerable time before 472. By it the Romans bound themselves—for what concessions on the part of Tarentum is not stated—not to navigate the waters to the east of the Lacinian promontory; a stipulation by which they were thus wholly excluded from the eastern basin of the Mediterranean.
Roman Fortification of the Coast
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
But with a statesmanlike sagacity, from which the succeeding generations might have drawn a lesson, the leading men of the Roman commonwealth perceived that all these coast fortifications and coast garrisons could not but prove inadequate, unless the war marine of the state were again placed on a footing that should command respect. Some sort of nucleus for this purpose was already furnished on the subjugation of Antium (416) by the serviceable war-galleys which were carried off to the Roman docks; but the enactment at the same time, that the Antiates should abstain from all maritime traffic,(19) is a very clear and distinct indication how weak the Romans then felt themselves at sea, and how completely their maritime policy was still summed up in the occupation of places on the coast. Thereafter, when the Greek cities of southern Italy, Neapolis leading the way in 428, were admitted to the clientship of Rome, the war-vessels, which each of these cities bound itself to furnish as a war contribution under the alliance to the Romans, formed at least a renewed nucleus for a Roman fleet. In 443, moreover, two fleet-masters (-duoviri navales-) were nominated in consequence of a resolution of the burgesses specially passed to that effect, and this Roman naval force co-operated in the Samnite war at the siege of Nuceria.(20) Perhaps even the remarkable mission of a Roman fleet of twenty-five sail to found a colony in Corsica, which Theophrastus mentions in his “History of Plants” written about 446, belongs to this period. But how little was immediately accomplished with all this preparation, is shown by the renewed treaty with Carthage in 448. While the stipulations of the treaty of 406 relating to Italy and Sicily(21) remained unchanged, the Romans were now prohibited not only from the navigation of the eastern waters, but also from that of the Atlantic Ocean which was previously permitted, as well as debarred from holding commercial intercourse with the subjects of Carthage in Sardinia and Africa, and also, in all probability, from effecting a settlement in Corsica;(22) so that only Carthaginian Sicily and Carthage itself remained open to their traffic. We recognize here the jealousy of the dominant maritime power, gradually increasing with the extension of the Roman dominion along the coasts. Carthage compelled
Quaestors of the Fleet—
Variance between Rome and Carthage
A comprehensive measure with that view was the institution of four quaestors of the fleet (-quaestores classici-) in 487: of whom the first was stationed at Ostia the port of Rome; the second, stationed at Cales then the capital of Roman Campania, had to superintend the ports of Campania and Magna Graecia; the third, stationed at Ariminum, superintended the ports on the other side of the Apennines; the district assigned to the fourth is not known. These new standing officials were intended to exercise not the sole, but a conjoint, guardianship of the coasts, and to form a war marine for their protection. The objects of the Roman senate—to recover their independence by sea, to cut off the maritime communications of Tarentum, to close the Adriatic against fleets coming from Epirus, and to emancipate themselves from Carthaginian supremacy—were very obvious. Their already explained relations with Carthage during the last Italian war discover traces of such views. King Pyrrhus indeed compelled the two great cities once more—it was for the last time —to conclude an offensive alliance; but the lukewarmness and faithlessness of that alliance, the attempts of the Carthaginians to establish themselves in Rhegium and Tarentum, and the immediate occupation of Brundisium by the Romans after the termination of the war, show clearly how much their respective interests already came into collision.
Rome and the Greek Naval Powers
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.
The crisis in reference to the supremacy of the Italian waters was approaching; by land the contest was decided. For the first time Italy was united into one state under the sovereignty of the Roman community. What political prerogatives the Roman community on this occasion withdrew from all the other Italian communities and took into its own sole keeping, or in other words, what conception in state-law is to be associated with this sovereignty of Rome, we are nowhere expressly informed, and—a significant circumstance, indicating prudent calculation—there does not even exist any generally current expression for that conception.(24) The only privileges that demonstrably belonged to it were the rights of making war, of concluding treaties, and of coining money. No Italian community could declare war against any foreign state, or even negotiate with it, or coin money for circulation. On the other hand every declaration of war made by the Roman people and every state-treaty resolved upon by it were binding in law on all the other Italian communities, and the silver money of Rome was legally current throughout all Italy. It is probable that the formulated prerogatives of the leading community extended no further. But to these there were necessarily attached rights of sovereignty that practically went far beyond them.
The Full Roman Franchise
The relations, which the Italians sustained to the leading community, exhibited in detail great inequalities. In this point of view, in addition to the full burgesses of Rome, there were three different classes of subjects to be distinguished. The full franchise itself, in the first place, was extended as far as was possible, without wholly abandoning the idea of an urban commonwealth as applied to the Roman commune. The old burgess-domain had hitherto been enlarged chiefly by individual assignation in such a way that southern Etruria as far as towards Caere and Falerii,(25) the districts taken from the Hernici on the Sacco and on the Anio(26) the largest part of the Sabine country(27) and large tracts of the territory formerly Volscian, especially the Pomptine plain(28) were converted into land for Roman farmers, and new burgess-districts were instituted mostly for their inhabitants. The same course had even already been taken with the Falernian district on the Volturnus ceded by Capua.(29) All these burgesses domiciled outside of Rome were without a commonwealth and an
Subject Communities
Among the subject communities the passive burgesses (-cives sine suffragio-) apart from the privilege of electing and being elected, stood on an equality of rights and duties with the full burgesses. Their legal position was regulated by the decrees of the Roman comitia and the rules issued for them by the Roman praetor, which, however, were doubtless based essentially on the previous arrangements. Justice was administered for them by the Roman praetor or his deputies (-praefecti-) annually sent to the individual communities. Those of them in a better position, such as the city of Capua,(31) retained self-administration and along with it the continued use of the native language, and had officials of their own who took charge of the levy and the census. The communities of inferior rights such as Caere(32) were deprived even of self-administration, and this was doubtless the most oppressive among the different forms of subjection. However, as was above remarked, there is already apparent at the close of this period an effort to incorporate these communities, at least so far as they were -de facto- Latinized, among the full burgesses.
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
Non-Latin Allied Communities
Lastly, the relations of the non-Latin allied communities were subject, as a matter of course, to very various rules, just as each particular treaty of alliance had defined them. Several of these perpetual alliances, such as that with the Hernican communities,(35) passed over to a footing of complete equalization with the Latin. Others, in which this was not the case, such as those with Neapolis(36), Nola(37), and Heraclea(38), granted rights comparatively comprehensive; while others, such as the Tarentine and Samnite treaties, may have approximated to despotism.
Dissolution of National Leagues—
Furnishing of Contingents
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.
Aristocratic Remodelling of the Constitutions of the Italian Communities
It was but a wider application of the same expedient, when in each dependent community the constitution was remodelled after the Roman pattern and a government of the wealthy and respectable families was installed, which was naturally more or less keenly opposed to the multitude and was induced by its material interests and by its wish for local power to lean on Roman support. The most remarkable instance of this sort is furnished by the treatment of Capua, which appears to have been from the first treated with suspicious precaution as the only Italian city that could come into possible rivalry with Rome. The Campanian nobility received a privileged jurisdiction, separate places of assembly, and in every respect a distinctive position; indeed they even obtained not inconsiderable pensions —sixteen hundred of them at 450 -stateres- (about 30 pounds) annually—charged on the Campanian exchequer. It was these Campanian equites, whose refusal to take part in the great Latino-Campanian insurrection of 414 mainly contributed to its failure, and whose brave swords decided the day in favour of the Romans at Sentinum in 459;(40) whereas the Campanian infantry at Rhegium was the first body of troops that in the war with Pyrrhus revolted from Rome.(41) Another remarkable instance of the Roman practice of turning to account for their own interest the variances between the orders in the dependent communities by favouring the aristocracy, is furnished by the treatment which Volsinii met with in 489. There, just as in Rome, the old and
Moderation of the Government
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
Italy and the Italians
Lastly, with this military administrative union of the whole peoples dwelling to the south of the Apennines, as far as the Iapygian promontory and the straits of Rhegium, was connected the rise of a new name common to them all—that of “the men of the toga” (-togati-), which was their oldest designation in Roman state law, or that of the “Italians,” which was the appellation originally in use among the Greeks and thence became universally current. The various nations inhabiting those lands were probably first led to feel and own their unity, partly through their common contrast to the Greeks, partly and mainly through their common resistance to the Celts; for, although an Italian community may now and then have made common cause with the Celts against Rome and employed the opportunity to recover independence, yet in the long run sound national feeling necessarily prevailed. As the “Gallic field” down to a late period stood contrasted in law with the Italian, so the “men of the toga” were thus named in contrast to the Celtic “men of the hose” (-braccati-); and it is probable that the repelling of the Celtic invasions played an important diplomatic part as a reason or pretext for centralizing the military resources of Italy in the hands of the Romans. Inasmuch as the Romans on the one hand took the lead in the great national struggle and on the other hand compelled the Etruscans, Latins, Sabellians, Apulians, and Hellenes (within the bounds to be immediately described) alike to fight under their standards, that unity, which hitherto had been undefined and latent rather than expressed, obtained firm consolidation and recognition in state law; and the name -Italia-, which originally and even in the Greek authors of the fifth century—in Aristotle for instance—pertained only to the modern Calabria, was transferred to the whole land of these wearers of the toga.
Earliest Boundaries of the Italian Confederacy
The earliest boundaries of this great armed confederacy led by Rome, or of the new Italy, reached on the western coast as far as the district of Leghorn south of the Arnus,(44) on the east as far as the Aesis north of Ancona. The townships colonized by Italians, lying beyond these limits, such as Sena Gallica and Ariminum beyond the Apennines, and Messana in Sicily, were reckoned geographically as situated out of Italy—even when, like Ariminum, they were members of the confederacy or even, like Sena, were Roman burgess communities. Still less could the Celtic cantons beyond the Apennines be reckoned among the -togati-, although perhaps some of them were already among the clients of Rome.
First Steps towards the Latininzing of Italy—
New Position of Rome as a Great Power
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.
2. II. Vi. Last Struggles of Samnium
3. Near the modern Anglona; not to be confounded with the better known town of the same name in the district of Cosenza.
4. These numbers appear credible. The Roman account assigns, probably in dead and wounded, 15,000 to each side; a later one even specifies 5000 as dead on the Roman, and 20,000 on the Greek side. These accounts may be mentioned here for the purpose of exhibiting, in one of the few instances where it is possible to check the statement, the untrustworthiness—almost without exception—of the reports of numbers, which are swelled by the unscrupulous invention of the annalists with avalanche-like rapidity.
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.
6. II. IV. Victories of Salamis and Himera, and Their Effects
7. II. IV. Fruitlessness of the Celtic Victory
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].
9. II. V. Domination of the Romans; Exasperation of the Latins
10. II. VII. Breach between Rome and Tarentum
11. II. V. Colonization of the Volsci
12. II. V. Colonization of the Volsci
13. II. Vi. New Fortresses in Apulia and Campania
14. II. Vi. Last Struggles of Samnium
15. II. VII. Construction of New Fortresses and Roads
16. II. VII. The Boii
17. II. VII. Construction of New Fortresses and Roads
18. These were Pyrgi, Ostia, Antium, Tarracina, Minturnae, Sinuessa Sena Gallica, and Castrum Novum.
19. This statement is quite as distinct (Liv. viii. 14; -interdictum mari Antiati populo est-) as it is intrinsically credible; for Antium was inhabited not merely by colonists, but also by its former citizens who had been nursed in enmity to Rome (ii. V. Colonizations in The Land Of The Volsci). This view is, no doubt, inconsistent with the Greek accounts, which assert that Alexander the Great (431) and Demetrius Poliorcetes (471) lodged complaints at Rome regarding Antiate pirates. The former statement is of the same stamp, and perhaps from the same source, with that regarding the Roman embassy to Babylon (ii. VII. Relations Between The East and West). It seems more likely that Demetrius Poliorcetes may have tried by edict to put down piracy in the Tyrrhene sea which he had never set eyes upon, and it is not at all inconceivable that the Antiates may have even as Roman citizens, in defiance of the prohibition, continued for a time their old trade in an underhand fashion: much dependence must not however, be placed even on the second story.
20. II. Vi. Last Campaigns in Samnium
21. II. VII. Decline of the Roman Naval Power
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.
23. II. VII. Submission of Lower Italy
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.
25. II. IV. South Etruria Roman
26. II. Vi. Consolidation of the Roman Rule in Central Italy
27. II. Vi. Last Struggles of Samnium
28. II. V. Complete Submission of the Volscian and Campanian Provinces
29. II. V. Complete Submission of the Volscian and Campanian Provinces
30. That Tusculum as it was the first to obtain passive burgess-rights (ii. V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League) was also the first to exchange these for the rights of full burgesses, is probable in itself and presumably it is in the latter and not in the former respect that the town is named by Cicero (pro Mur. 8, 19) -municipium antiquissimum-.
31. II. V. Complete Submission of the Volscian and Campanian Provinces
32. II. IV. South Etruria Roman
33. -V. Cervio A. f. cosol dedicavit- and -lunonei Quiritri sacra. C. Falcilius L. f. consol dedicavit-.
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
We cannot fully determine the extent to which the curtailment of the rights of the more recent Latin towns was carried, as compared with the earlier. If intermarriage, as is not improbable but is in fact anything but definitely established (i. 132; Diodor. p. 590, 62, fr. Vat. p. 130, Dind.), formed a constituent element of the original federal equality of rights, it was, at any rate, no longer conceded to the Latin colonies of more recent origin.
35. II. V. League with the Hernici
36. II. Vi. Pacification of Campania
37. II. Vi. Victory of the Romans
38. II. VII. The War in Italy Flags
39. It is to be regretted that we are unable to give satisfactory information as to the proportional numbers. We may estimate the number of Roman burgesses capable of bearing arms in the later regal period as about 20,000. (I. Vi. Time and Occasion of the Reform) Now from the fall of Alba to the conquest of Veii the immediate territory of Rome received no material extension; in perfect accordance with which we find that from the first institution of the twenty-one tribes about 259, (ii. II. Coriolanus) which involved no, or at any rate no considerable, extension of the Roman bounds, no new tribes were instituted till 367. However abundant allowance we make for increase by the excess of births over deaths, by immigration, and by manumissions, it is absolutely impossible to reconcile with the narrow limits of a territory of hardly 650 square miles the traditional numbers of the census, according to which the number of Roman burgesses capable of bearing arms in the second half of the third century varied between 104,000 and 150,000, and in 362, regarding which a special statement is extant, amounted to 152,573. These numbers must rather stand on a parallel with the 84,700 burgesses of the Servian census; and in general the whole earlier census-lists, carried back to the four lustres of Servius Tullius and furnished with copious numbers, must belong to the class of those apparently documentary traditions which delight in, and betray themselves by the very fact of, such numerical details.
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).
40. II. Vi. Battle of Sentinum
41. II. VII. Commencement of the Conflict in Lower Italy
42. II. VII. Quaestors of the Fleet
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.
44. This earliest boundary is probably indicated by the two small townships -Ad fines-, of which one lay north of Arezzo on the road to Florence, the second on the coast not far from Leghorn. Somewhat further to the south of the latter, the brook and valley of Vada are still called -Fiume della fine-, -Valle della fine- (Targioni Tozzetti, Viaggj, iv. 430).
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-.
Law, Religion, Military System, Economic Condition, Nationality
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.
Modifications in the Laws
Along with these changes a humanizing and modernizing tendency showed itself slowly, but yet clearly enough, in the development of Roman law. Most of the enactmerits of the Twelve Tables, which coincide with the laws of Solon and therefore may with reason be considered as in substance innovations, bear this character; such as the securing the right of free association and the autonomy of the societies that originated under it; the enactment that forbade the ploughing up of boundary-balks; and the mitigation of the punishment of theft, so that a thief not caught in the act might henceforth release himself from the plaintiff’s suit by payment of double compensation. The law of debt was modified in a similar sense, but not till upwards of a century afterwards, by the
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
Changes in Procedure
In civil procedure (which, however, according to the ideas of that period included most of the crimes committed against fellow-citizens) the division of a process into the settlement of the question of law before the magistrate (-ius-), and the decision of the question of fact by a private person nominated by the magistrate (-iudicium-) —a division doubtless customary even in earlier times—was on the abolition of the monarchy prescribed by law;(14) and to that separation the private law of Rome was mainly indebted for its logical clearness and practical precision.(15) In actions regarding property, the decision as to what constituted possession, which hitherto had been left to the arbitrary caprice of the magistrate, was subjected gradually to legal rules; and, alongside of the law of property, a law of possession was developed—another step, by which the magisterial authority lost an important part of its powers. In criminal processes, the tribunal of the people, which hitherto had exercised the prerogative of mercy, became a court of legally secured appeal. If the accused after hearing (-quaestio-) was condemned by the magistrate and appealed to the burgesses, the magistrate proceeded in presence of these to the further hearing (-anquisitio-) and, when he after three times discussing the matter before the community had repeated his decision, in the fourth diet the sentence was confirmed or rejected by the burgesses. Modification was not allowed. A similar republican spirit breathed in the principles, that the house protected the burgess, and that an arrest could only take place out of doors; that imprisonment during investigation was to be avoided; and that it was allowable for every accused and not yet condemned burgess by renouncing his citizenship to withdraw from the consequences of condemnation, so far as they affected not his property but his person-principles, which certainly were not embodied in formal laws and accordingly did not legally bind the prosecuting magistrate,
Religion—
New Gods
We are less able to trace the progress of the religious conceptions of the Romans during this epoch. In general they adhered with simplicity to the simple piety of their ancestors, and kept equally aloof from superstition and from unbelief. How vividly the idea of spiritualizing all earthly objects, on which the Roman religion was based, still prevailed at the close of this epoch, is shown by the new “God of silver” (-Argentinus-), who presumably came into existence only in consequence of the introduction of the silver currency in 485, and who naturally was the son of the older “God of copper” (-Aesculanus-).
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
In the sacerdotal system no comprehensive changes, so far as we know, took place. The more stringent enactments, that were made about 465 regarding the collection of the process-fines destined to defray the cost of public worship, point to an increase in the ritual budget of the state—a necessary result of the increase in the number of its gods and its temples. It has already been mentioned as one of the evil effects of the dissensions between the orders that an illegitimate influence began to be conceded to the colleges of men of lore, and that they were employed for the annulling of political acts(19)—a course by which on the one hand the faith of the people was shaken, and on the other hand the priests were permitted to exercise a very injurious influence on public affairs.
Military System—
Manipular Legion—
Entrenchment of Camp—
Cavalry—
Officers—
Military Discipline—
Training and Classes of Soldiers—
Military Value of the Manipular Legion
A complete revolution occurred during this epoch in the military system. The primitive Graeco-Italian military organization, which was probably based, like the Homeric, on the selection of the most distinguished and effective warriors—who ordinarily fought on horseback—to form a special vanguard, had in the later regal period been superseded by the -legio—the old Dorian phalanx of hoplites, probably eight file deep.(20) This phalanx thenceforth undertook the chief burden of the battle, while the cavalry were stationed on the flanks, and, mounted or dismounted according to circumstances, were chiefly employed as a reserve. From this arrangement there were developed nearly at the same time the phalanx of -sarrissae-in Macedonia and the manipular arrangement in Italy, the former formed by closing and deepening, the latter by breaking up and multiplying, the ranks, in the first instance by the division of the old -legio- of 8400 into two -legiones- of 4200 men each. The old Doric phalanx had been wholly adapted to close combat with the sword and especially with the spear, and only an accessory and subordinate position in the order of battle was assigned to missile weapons. In the manipular legion the thrusting-lance was confined to the third division, and instead of it the first two were furnished with a new and peculiar Italian missile weapon, the -pilum- a square or round piece of wood, four and a half feet long, with a triangular or quadrangular iron point—which had been originally perhaps invented for the defence of the ramparts of the camp, but was soon transferred from the rear to the front ranks, and was hurled by the advancing line into the ranks of the enemy at a distance of from ten to twenty paces. At the same time the sword acquired far greater importance than the short knife of the phalangite could ever have had; for the volley of javelins was intended in the first instance merely to prepare the way for an attack sword in hand. While, moreover, the phalanx had, as if it were a single mighty lance, to be hurled at once upon the enemy, in the new Italian legion the smaller units, which existed also in the phalanx system but were in the order of battle firmly and indissolubly united, were tactically separated from each other. Not merely was the close square divided, as we have said, into two equally strong halves, but each of these was separated in the direction of its depth into the three divisions of the -hastati-, — principes-, and -triarii-, each of a moderate depth probably amounting in ordinary cases to only four files; and was broken up along the front into ten bands (-manipuli-), in such a way that between every two divisions and every two maniples there was left a perceptible interval. It was a mere continuation of the same process of individualizing, by which the collective mode of fighting was discouraged even in the diminished tactical unit and the single combat became prominent, as is evident from the (already mentioned) decisive part played
The excellence of this military organization, which became the primary cause of the superior political position of the Roman community, chiefly depended on the three great military principles of maintaining a reserve, of combining the close and distant modes of fighting, and of combining the offensive and the defensive. The system of a reserve was already foreshadowed in the earlier employment of the cavalry, but it was now completely developed by the partition of the army into three divisions and the reservation of the flower of the veterans for the last and decisive shock. While the Hellenic phalanx had developed the close, and the Oriental squadrons of horse armed with bows and light missile spears the distant, modes of fighting respectively, the Roman combination of the heavy javelin with the sword produced results similar, as has justly been remarked, to those attained in modern warfare by the introduction of bayonet-muskets; the volley of javelins prepared the way for the sword encounter, exactly in the same way as a volley of musketry now precedes a charge with the bayonet. Lastly, the elaborate system of encampment allowed the Romans to combine the advantages of defensive and offensive war and to decline or give battle according to circumstances, and in the latter case to fight under the ramparts of their camp just as under the walls of a fortress—the Roman, says a Roman proverb, conquers by sitting still.
Origin 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
In the national economy agriculture was, and continued to be, the social and political basis both of the Roman community and of the new Italian state. The common assembly and the army consisted of Roman farmers; what as soldiers they had acquired by the sword, they secured as colonists by the plough. The insolvency of the middle class of landholders gave rise to the formidable internal crises of the third and fourth centuries, amidst which it seemed as if the young republic could not but be destroyed. The revival of the Latin farmer-class, which was produced during the fifth century partly by the large assignations of land and incorporations, partly by the fall in the rate of interest and the increase of the Roman population, was at once the effect and the cause of the mighty development of Roman power. The acute soldier’s eye of Pyrrhus justly discerned the cause of the political and military ascendency of the Romans in the flourishing condition of the Roman farms. But the rise also of husbandry on a large scale among the Romans appears to fall within this period. In earlier times indeed there existed landed estates of—at least comparatively—large size; but their management was not farming on a large scale, it was simply a husbandry of numerous small parcels.(24) On the other hand the enactment in the law of 387, not incompatible indeed with the earlier mode of management but yet far more appropriate to the later, viz. that the landholder should be bound to employ along with his slaves a proportional number of free persons,(25) may well be regarded as the oldest trace of the later centralized farming of estates;(26) and it deserves notice that even here at its first emergence it essentially rests on slave-holding. How it arose, must remain an undecided point; possibly the Carthaginian plantations in Sicily served as models to the oldest Roman landholders, and perhaps even the appearance of wheat in husbandry by the side of spelt,(27) which Varro places about the period of the decemvirs, was connected with that altered style of management. Still less can we ascertain how far this method of husbandry had already during this period spread; but the history of the wars with Hannibal leaves no doubt that it cannot yet have become the rule, nor can it have yet absorbed the Italian farmer class. Where it did come into vogue, however, it annihilated the older clientship based on the -precarium-; just as the modern system of large farms has been formed in great part by the suppression of petty holdings and the conversion of hides into farm-fields. It admits of no doubt that the restriction of this agricultural clientship very materially contributed towards the distress of the class of small cultivators.
Inland Intercourse in Italy
Respecting the internal intercourse of the Italians with each other our written authorities are silent; coins alone furnish some information. We have already mentioned(28) that in Italy, with the exception of the Greek cities and of the Etruscan Populonia, there was no coinage during the first three centuries of Rome, and that cattle in the first instance, and subsequently copper by weight, served as the medium of exchange. Within the present epoch occurred the transition on the part of the Italians from the system of barter to that of money; and in their money they were naturally led at first to Greek models. The circumstances of central Italy led however to the adoption of copper instead of silver as the metal for their coinage, and the unit of coinage was primarily based on the previous unit of value, the copper pound; hence they cast their coins instead of stamping them, for no die would have sufficed for pieces so large and heavy. Yet there seems from the first to have been a fixed ratio for the relative value of copper and silver (250:1), and with reference to that ratio the copper coinage seems to have been issued; so that, for example, in Rome the large copper piece, the -as-, was equal in value to a scruple (1/288 of a pound) of silver. It is a circumstance historically more remarkable, that coining in Italy most probably originated in Rome, and in fact with the decemvirs, who found in the Solonian legislation a pattern for the regulation of their coinage; and that from Rome it spread over a number of Latin, Etruscan, Umbrian, and east-Italian communities, —a clear proof of the superior position which Rome from the beginning of the fourth century held in Italy. As all these communities subsisted side by side in formal independence, legally the monetary standard was entirely local, and the territory of every city had its own monetary system. Nevertheless the standards of copper coinage in central and northern Italy may be comprehended in three groups, within which the coins in common intercourse seem to have been treated as homogeneous. These groups are, first, the coins of the cities of Etruria lying north of the Ciminian Forest and those of Umbria; secondly, the coins of Rome and Latium; and lastly, those of the eastern seaboard. We have already observed that the Roman coins held a certain ratio to silver by weight; on the other hand we find those of the east coast of Italy placed in a definite proportional relation to the silver coins which were current from an early period in southern Italy, and the standard of which was adopted by the Italian immigrants, such as the Bruttians, Lucanians, and Nolans, by the Latin colonies in that quarter, such as Cales and Suessa, and even by the Romans themselves for their possessions in Lower Italy. Accordingly the inland traffic of Italy must have been divided into corresponding provinces, which dealt with one another like foreign nations.
In transmarine commerce the relations we have previously described(29) between Sicily and Latium, Etruria and Attica, the Adriatic and Tarentum, continued to subsist during the epoch before us or rather, strictly speaking, belonged to it; for although facts of this class, which as a rule are mentioned without a date, have been placed together for the purpose of presenting a general view under the first period, the statements made apply equally to the present. The clearest evidence in this respect is, of course, that of the coins. As the striking of Etruscan silver money after an Attic standard(30) and the penetrating of Italian and especially of Latin copper into Sicily(31) testify to the two former routes of traffic, so the equivalence, which we have just mentioned, between the silver money of Magna Graecia and the copper coinage of Picenum and Apulia, forms, with numerous other indications, an evidence of the active traffic which the Greeks of Lower Italy, the Tarentines in particular, held with the east Italian seaboard. The commerce again, which was at an earlier period perhaps still more active, between the Latins and the Campanian Greeks seems to have been disturbed by the Sabellian immigration, and to have been of no great moment during the first hundred and fifty years of the republic. The refusal of the Samnites in Capua and Cumae to supply the Romans with grain in the famine of 343 may be regarded as an indication of the altered relations which subsisted between Latium and Campania, till at the commencement of the fifth century the Roman arms restored and gave increased impetus to the old intercourse.
Touching on details, we may be allowed to mention, as one of the few dated facts in the history of Roman commerce, the notice drawn from the annals of Ardea, that in 454 the first barber came from Sicily to Ardea; and to dwell for a moment on the painted pottery which was sent chiefly from Attica, but also from Corcyra and Sicily, to Lucania, Campania, and Etruria, to serve there for the decoration of tombs—a traffic, as to the circumstances of which we are accidentally better informed than as to any other article of transmarine commerce. The commencement of this import trade probably falls about the period of the expulsion of the Tarquins; for the vases of the oldest style, which are of very rare occurrence in Italy, were probably painted in the second half of the third century of the city, while those of the chaste style, occurring in greater numbers, belong to the first half, those of the most finished beauty to the second half, of the fourth century; and the immense quantities of the other vases, often marked by showiness and size but seldom by excellence in workmanship, must be assigned as a whole to the following century. It was from the Hellenes undoubtedly that the Italians derived this custom of embellishing tombs; but while the moderate means and fine discernment of the Greeks confined the practice in their case within narrow limits, it
Capital in Rome
No urban middle class in the proper sense of that term, no body of independent tradesmen and merchants, was ever developed in Rome. The cause of this was—in addition to the disproportionate centralization of capital which occurred at an early period—mainly the employment of slave labour. It was usual in antiquity, and was in fact a necessary consequence of slavery, that the minor trades in towns were very frequently carried on by slaves, whom their master established as artisans or merchants; or by freedmen, in whose case the master not only frequently furnished the capital, but also regularly stipulated for a share, often the half, of the profits. Retail trading and dealing in Rome were undoubtedly constantly on the increase; and there are proofs that
Development of Rome as A Great City
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
A similar indication of the rising importance of urban life in Rome is presented by the great development of the urban police. To this period probably belong in great measure the enactments under which the four aediles divided the city into four police districts, and made provision for the discharge of their equally important and difficult functions—for the efficient repair of the network of drains small and large by which Rome was pervaded, as well as of the public buildings and places; for the proper cleansing and paving of the streets; for obviating the nuisances of ruinous buildings, dangerous animals, or foul smells; for the removing of waggons from the highway except during the hours of evening and night, and generally for the keeping open of the communication; for the uninterrupted supply of the market of the capital with good and cheap grain; for the destruction of unwholesome articles, and the suppression of false weights and measures; and for the special oversight of baths, taverns, and houses of bad fame.
Building—
Impulse Given to It
In respect to buildings the regal period, particularly the epoch of the great conquests, probably accomplished more than the first two centuries of the republic. Structures like the temples on the Capitol and on the Aventine and the great Circus were probably as obnoxious to the frugal fathers of the city as to the burgesses who gave their task-work; and it is remarkable that perhaps the most considerable building of the republican period before the Samnite wars, the temple of Ceres in the Circus, was a work of Spurius Cassius (261) who in more than one respect, sought to lead the commonwealth back to the traditions of the kings. The governing aristocracy moreover repressed private luxury with a rigour such as the rule of the kings, if prolonged, would certainly not have displayed. But at length even the senate was no longer able to resist the superior force of circumstances. It was Appius Claudius who in his epoch-making censorship (442) threw aside the antiquated rustic system of parsimonious hoarding, and taught his fellow-citizens to make a worthy use of the public resources. He began that noble system of public works of general utility, which justifies, if anything can justify, the military successes of Rome even from the point of view of the welfare of the nations, and which even now in its ruins furnishes some idea of the greatness of Rome to thousands on thousands who have never read a page of her history. To him the Roman state was indebted for its great military road, and the city of Rome for its first aqueduct. Following in the steps of Claudius, the Roman senate wove around Italy that network of roads and fortresses, the formation of which has already been described,(39) and without which, as the history of all military states from the Achaemenidae down to the creator of the road over the Simplon shows, no military hegemony can subsist. Following in the steps of Claudius,
Embellishment of the City
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.
Silver Standard of Value
Lastly Rome, as head of the Romano-Italian confederacy, not only entered into the Hellenistic state-system, but also conformed to the Hellenic system of moneys and coins. Up to this time the different communities of northern and central Italy, with few exceptions, had struck only a copper currency; the south Italian towns again universally had a currency of silver; and there were as many legal standards and systems of coinage as there were sovereign communities in Italy. In 485 all these local mints were restricted
Extension of the Latin Nationality
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
Progress of Hellenism in Italy—
Adoption of Greek Habits at the Table
These nationalities were at the same time assailed from another quarter and by an ascendency resting on another basis—by Hellenism. This was the period when Hellenism began to become conscious of its intellectual superiority to the other nations, and to diffuse itself on every side. Italy did not remain unaffected by it. The most remarkable phenomenon of this sort is presented by Apulia, which after the fifth century of Rome gradually laid aside its barbarian dialect and silently became Hellenized. This change was brought about, as in Macedonia and Epirus, not by colonization, but by civilization, which seems to have gone hand in hand with the land commerce of Tarentum; at least that hypothesis is favoured by the facts, that the districts of the Poediculi and Daunii who were on friendly terms with the Tarentines carried out their Hellenization more completely than the Sallentines who lived nearer to Tarentum but were constantly at feud with it, and that the towns that were soonest Graecized, such as Arpi, were not situated on the coast. The stronger influence exerted by Hellenism over Apulia than over any other Italian region is explained partly by its position, partly by the slight development of any national culture of its own, and partly also perhaps by its nationality presenting a character less alien to the Greek stock than that of the rest of Italy.(45) We have already called attention(46) to the fact that the southern Sabellian stocks, although at the outset in concert with the tyrants of Syracuse they crushed and destroyed the Hellenism of Magna Graecia, were at the same time affected by contact and mingling with the Greeks, so that some of them, such as the Bruttians and Nolans, adopted the Greek language by the side of their native
Thus in the intellectual sphere Hellenism made advances quite as incessant as the efforts of the Romans to subject the earth to their sway; and the secondary nationalities, such as the Samnite, Celt, and Etruscan, hard pressed on both sides, were ever losing their inward vigour as well as narrowing their outward bounds.
Rome and the Romans of This Epoch
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:—
-Cornelius Lucius—Scipio Barbatus,
Gnaivod patre prognatus, —fortis vir sapiensque,
Quoius forma virtu—tei parisuma fuit,
Consol censor aidilis—quei fuit apud vos,
Taurasia Cisauna—Samnio cepit,
Subigit omne Loucanum—opsidesque abdoucit.-
_-’_-’_-’_||-’_-’_-’_
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
No doubt, even now Hellenic individual development asserted its claims by the side of that levelling system; and the genius and force which it exhibited bear, no less than the tendency to which it opposed itself, the full stamp of that great age. We can name but a single man in connection with it; but he was, as it were, the incarnation of the idea of progress. Appius Claudius (censor 442; consul 447, 458), the great-great-grandson of the decemvir, was a man of the old nobility and proud of the long line of his ancestors; but yet it was he who set aside the restriction which confined the full franchise of the state to the freeholders,(50) and who broke up the old system of finance.(51) From Appius Claudius date not only the Roman aqueducts and highways, but also Roman jurisprudence, eloquence, poetry, and grammar. The publication of a table of the -legis actiones-, speeches committed to writing and Pythagorean sentences, and even innovations in orthography, are attributed to him. We may not on this account call him absolutely a democrat or include him in that opposition party which found its champion in Manius Curius;(52) in him on the contrary the spirit of the ancient and modern patrician kings predominated —the spirit of the Tarquins and the Caesars, between whom he forms a connecting link in that five hundred years’ interregnum of extraordinary deeds and ordinary men. So long as Appius Claudius took an active part in public life, in his official conduct as well as his general carriage he disregarded laws and customs on all hands with the hardihood and sauciness of an Athenian; till, after having long retired from the political stage, the blind old man, returning as it were from the tomb at the decisive Moment, overcame king Pyrrhus in the senate, and first formally and solemnly proclaimed the complete sovereignty of Rome over Italy.(53) But the gifted man came too early or too late; the gods made him blind on account of his untimely wisdom.
1. I. XI. Punishment of Offenses against Order
2. II. I. Right of Appeal
3. II. III. The Senate, Its Composition
4. II. I. Law and Edict
5. II. III. Censorship, the Magistrates, Partition and Weakening of the Consular Powers
6. II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes
7. I. Vi. Class of —Metoeci— Subsisting by the Side of the Community
8. I. V. The Housefather and His Household, note
9. II. III. Praetorship
10. II. III. Praetorship, ii. V. Revision of the Municipal Constitutions, Police Judges
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-.
12. II. VII. Subject Communities
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.
14. II. I. Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers
15. People are in the habit of praising the Romans as a nation specially privileged in respect to jurisprudence, and of gazing with wonder on their admirable law as a mystical gift of heaven; presumably by way of specially excusing themselves for the worthlessness of their own legal system. A glance at the singularly fluctuating and undeveloped criminal law of the Romans might show the untenableness of ideas so confused even to those who may think the proposition too simple, that a sound people has a sound law, and a morbid people an unsound. Apart from the more general political conditions on which jurisprudence also, and indeed jurisprudence especially, depends, the causes of the excellence of the Roman civil law lie mainly in two features: first, that the plaintiff and defendant were specially obliged to explain and embody in due and binding form the grounds of the demand and of the objection to comply with it; and secondly, that the Romans appointed a permanent machinery for the edictal development of their law, and associated it immediately with practice. By the former the Romans precluded the pettifogging practices of advocates, by the latter they obviated incapable law-making, so far as such things can be prevented at all; and by means of both in conjunction they satisfied, as far as is possible, the two conflicting requirements, that law shall constantly be fixed, and that it shall constantly be in accordance with the spirit of the age.
16. II. II. Relation of the Tribune to the Consul
17. V. V. The Hegemony of Rome over Latium Shaken and Re-established
18. Venus probably first appears in the later sense as Aphrodite on occasion of the dedication of the temple consecrated in this year (Liv. x. 31; Becker, Topographie, p. 472).
19. II. III. Intrigues of the Nobility
20. I. Vi. Organization of the Army
21. II. III. Increasing Powers of the Burgesses
22. I. Vi. the Five Classes
23. According to Roman tradition the Romans originally carried quadrangular shields, after which they borrowed from the Etruscans the round hoplite shield (-clupeus-, —aspis—), and from the Samnites the later square shield (-scutum-, —thureos—), and the javelin (-veru-) (Diodor. Vat. Fr. p. 54; Sallust, Cat. 51, 38; Virgil, Aen. vii. 665; Festus, Ep. v. Samnites, p. 327, Mull.; and the authorities cited in Marquardt, Handb. iii. 2, 241). But it may be regarded as certain that the hoplite shield or, in other words, the tactics of the Doric phalanx were imitated not from the Etruscans, but directly from the Hellenes, As to the -scutum-, that large, cylindrical, convex leather shield must certainly have taken the place of the flat copper -clupeus-, when the phalanx was broken up into maniples; but the undoubted derivation of the word from the Greek casts suspicion on the derivation of the thing itself from the Samnites. From the Greeks the Romans derived also the sling (-funda- from —sphendone—). (like -fides- from —sphion—),(I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences). The pilum was considered by the ancients as quite a Roman invention.
24. I. XIII. Landed Proprietors
25. II. III. Combination of the Plebian Aristocracy and the Farmers against the Nobility
26. Varro (De R. R. i. 2, 9) evidently conceives the author of the Licinian agrarian law as fanning in person his extensive lands; although, we may add, the story may easily have been invented to explain the cognomen (-Stolo-).
27. I. XIII. System of Joint Cultivation
28. I. XIII. Inland Commerce of the Italians
29. I. XIII. Commerce in Latium Passive, in Etruria Active
30. I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic, and Latino-Sicilian Commerce
31. I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic, and Latino-Sicilian Commerce
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.).
34. I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic, and Latino-Sicilian Commerce, ii. II. Rising Power of the Capitalists
35. II. III. The Burgess Body
36. II. III. The Burgess Body
37. II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes
38. II. III. The Burgess Body
39. II. VII. Construction of New Fortresses and Roads
40. We have already mentioned the censorial stigma attached to Publius Cornelius Rufinus (consul 464, 477) for his silver plate.(II. VIII. Police) The strange statement of Fabius (in Strabo, v. p. 228) that the Romans first became given to luxury (—aisthesthae tou plouton—) after the conquest of the Sabines, is evidently only a historical version of the same matter; for the conquest of the Sabines falls in the first consulate of Rufinus.
41. II. V. Colonizations in the Land of the Volsci
42. II. Vi. Last Campaigns in Samnium
43. II. VIII. Inland Intercourse in Italy
44. I. III. Localities of the Oldest Cantons
45. I. II. Iapygians
46. II. V. Campanian Hellenism
47. II. VIII. Transmarine Commerce
48. II. VII. The Full Roman Franchise
49. II. Vi. Battle of Sentinum
50. II. III. The Burgess-Body
51. II. VIII. Impulse Given to It
52. II. III. New Opposition
53. II. VII. Attempts at Peace
Art and Science
The Roman National Festival— The Roman Stage
The growth of art, and of poetic art especially, in antiquity was intimately associated with the development of national festivals. The thanksgiving-festival of the Roman community, which had been already organized in the previous period essentially under Greek influence and in the first instance as an extraordinary festival, —the -ludi maximi- or -Romani-,(1) —acquired during the present epoch a longer duration and greater variety in the amusements. Originally limited to one day, the festival was prolonged by an additional day after the happy termination of each of the three great revolutions of 245, 260, and 387, and thus at the close of this period it had already a duration of four days.(2)
A still more important circumstance was, that, probably on the institution of the curule aedileship (387) which was from the first entrusted with the preparation and oversight of the festival,(3) it lost its extraordinary character and its reference to a special vow made by the general, and took its place in the series of the ordinary annually recurring festivals as the first of all. Nevertheless the government adhered to the practice of allowing the spectacle proper —namely the chariot-race, which was the principal performance—to take place not more than once at the close of the festival. On the other days the multitude were probably left mainly to furnish amusement for themselves, although musicians, dancers, rope-walkers, jugglers, jesters and such like would not fail to make their appearance on the occasion, whether hired or not But about the year 390 an important change occurred, which must have stood in connection with the fixing and prolongation of the festival, that took place perhaps about the same time. A scaffolding of boards was erected at the expense of the state in the Circus for the first three days, and suitable representations were provided on it for the entertainment of the multitude. That matters might not be carried too far however in this way, a fixed sum of 200,000 -asses- (2055 pounds) once for all appropriated from the exchequer for the expenses of the festival; and the sum was not increased up to the period of the Punic wars. The aediles, who had to expend this sum, were obliged to defray any additional amount out of their own pockets; and it is not probable that they at this time contributed often or considerably from their own resources. That the new stage was generally under Greek influence, is proved by its very name (-scaena-, —skene—). It was no doubt at first designed merely for musicians and buffoons of all sorts, amongst whom the dancers to the flute, particularly those then so celebrated from Etruria, were probably the most distinguished; but a public stage had at any rate now arisen in Rome and it soon became open also to the Roman poets.
Ballad Singers, -Satura- —
Censure of Art
There was no want of such poets in Latium. Latin “strolling minstrels” or “ballad-singers” (-grassatores-, -spatiatores-) went from town to town and from house to house, and recited their chants (-saturae-(4)), gesticulating and dancing to the accompaniment of the flute. The measure was of course the only one that then existed, the so-called Saturnian.(5) No distinct plot lay at the basis of the chants, and as little do they appear to have been in the form of dialogue. We must conceive of them as resembling those monotonous —sometimes improvised, sometimes recited—ballads and -tarantelle-, such as one may still hear in the Roman hostelries. Songs of this sort accordingly early came upon the public stage, and certainly formed the first nucleus of the Roman theatre. But not only were these beginnings of the drama in Rome, as everywhere, modest and humble; they were, in a remarkable manner, accounted from the very outset disreputable. The Twelve Tables denounced evil and worthless song-singing, imposing severe penalties not only upon incantations but even on lampoons composed against a fellow-citizen or recited before his door, and forbidding the employment of wailing-women at funerals. But far more severely, than by such legal restrictions, the incipient exercise of art was affected by the moral anathema, which was denounced against these frivolous and paid trades by the narrowminded earnestness of the Roman character. “The trade of a poet,” says Cato, “in former times was not respected; if any one occupied himself with it or was a hanger-on at banquets, he was called an idler.” But now any one who practised dancing, music, or ballad-singing for money was visited with a double stigma, in consequence of the more and more confirmed disapproval of gaining a livelihood by services rendered for remuneration. While accordingly the taking part in the masked farces with stereotyped characters, that formed the usual native amusement,(6) was looked upon as an innocent youthful frolic, the appearing on a public stage for money and without a mask was considered as directly infamous, and the singer and poet were in this respect placed quite on a level with the rope-dancer and the harlequin. Persons of this stamp were regularly pronounced by the censors(7) incapable of serving in the burgess-army and of voting in the burgess-assembly. Moreover, not only was the direction of the stage regarded as pertaining to the province of the city police—a fact significant enough even in itself—but the police was probably, even at this period, invested with arbitrary powers of an extraordinary character against professional stage-artists. Not only did the police magistrates sit in judgment on the performance after its conclusion—on which occasion wine flowed as copiously for those who had acquitted themselves well, as stripes fell to the lot of the bungler—but all the urban magistrates were legally entitled to inflict bodily chastisement and imprisonment on any actor at any
There is no mention of any poetical literature. Neither the masked plays nor the recitations of the stage can have had in the proper sense fixed texts; on the contrary, they were ordinarily improvised by the performers themselves as circumstances required. Of works composed at this period posterity could point to nothing but a sort of Roman “Works and Days”—counsels of a farmer to his son,(9) and the already-mentioned Pythagorean poems of Appius Claudius(10) the first commencement of Roman poetry after the Hellenic type. Nothing of the poems of this epoch has survived but one or two epitaphs in Saturnian measure.(11)
Roman Historical Composition
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
The writing of contemporary history was associated with the register of the magistrates. The register reaching farthest back, which was accessible to the later Roman inquirers and is still indirectly accessible to us, seems to have been derived from the archives of the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter; for it records the names of the annual presidents of the community onward from the consul Marcus Horatius, who consecrated that temple on the 13th Sept. in his year of office, and it also notices the vow which was made on occasion of a severe pestilence under the consuls Publius Servilius and Lucius Aebutius (according to the reckoning now current, 291), that thenceforward a nail should be driven every hundredth year into the wall of the Capitoline temple. Subsequently it was the state officials who were learned in measuring and in writing, or in other words, the pontifices, that kept an official record of the names of the annual chief magistrates, and thus combined an annual, with the earlier monthly, calendar. Both these calendars were afterwards comprehended under the name of Fasti—which strictly belonged only to the list of court-days. This arrangement was probably adopted not long after the abolition of the monarchy; for in fact an official record of the annual magistrates was of urgent practical
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
Family Pedigrees
Besides these official arrangements, meagrely planned and uncertainly handled, for commemorating past times and past events, there can scarcely have existed at this epoch any other records immediately serviceable for Roman history. Of private chronicles we find no trace. The leading houses, however, were careful to draw up genealogical tables, so important in a legal point of view, and to have the family pedigree painted for a perpetual memorial on the walls of the
Roman Early History of Rome
But as the first steps towards writing real history belonged to this period, to it belonged also the first attempts to record, and conventionally distort, the primitive history of Rome. The sources whence it was formed were of course the same as they are everywhere. Isolated names like those of the kings Numa, Ancus, Tullus, to whom the clan-names were probably only assigned subsequently, and isolated facts, such as the conquest of the Latins by king Tarquinius and the expulsion of the Tarquinian royal house, may have continued to live in true general tradition orally transmitted. Further materials were furnished by the traditions of the patrician clans, such as the various tales that relate to the Fabii. Other tales gave a symbolic and historic shape to primitive national institutions, especially setting forth with great vividness the origin of rules of law. The sacredness of the walls was thus illustrated in the tale of the death of Remus, the abolition of blood-revenge in the tale of the end of king Tatius(15), the necessity of the arrangement as to the -pons sublicius- in the legend of Horatius Cocles,(15) the origin of the -provocatio- in the beautiful tale of the Horatii and Curiatii, the origin of manumission and of the burgess-rights of freedmen in the tale of the Tarquinian conspiracy and the slave Vindicius. To the same class belongs the history of the foundation of the city itself, which was designed to connect the origin of Rome with Latium and with Alba, the general metropolis of the Latins. Historical glosses were annexed to the surnames of distinguished Romans; that of Publius Valerius the “servant of the people” (-Poplicola-), for instance, gathered around it a whole group of such anecdotes. Above all, the sacred fig-tree and other spots and notable objects in the city were associated with a great multitude of sextons’ tales of the same nature as those out of which, upwards of a thousand years afterwards, there grew up on the same ground the Mirabilia Urbis. Some attempts to link together these different tales—the adjustment of the series of the seven kings, the setting
The pedigrees of the noble clans were completed in a manner analogous to these -origines- of the community, and were, in the favourite style of heraldry, universally traced back to illustrious ancestors. The Aemilii, for instance, Calpurnii, Pinarii, and Pomponii professed to be descended from the four sons of Numa, Mamercus, Calpus, Pinus, and Pompo; and the Aemilii, yet further, from Mamercus, the son of Pythagoras, who was named the “winning speaker” (—aimulos—)
But, notwithstanding the Hellenic reminiscences that are everywhere apparent, these prehistoric annals of the community and of the leading houses may be designated at least relatively as national, partly because they originated in Rome, partly because they tended primarily to form links of connection not between Rome and Greece, but between Rome and Latium.
Hellenic Early History of Rome
It was Hellenic story and fiction that undertook the task of connecting Rome and Greece. Hellenic legend exhibits throughout an endeavour to keep pace with the gradual extension of geographical knowledge, and to form a dramatized geography by the aid of its numerous stories of voyagers and emigrants. In this, however, it seldom follows a simple course. An account like that of the earliest Greek historical work which mentions Rome, the “Sicilian History” of Antiochus of Syracuse (which ended in 330)—that a man named Sikelos had migrated from Rome to Italia, that is, to the Bruttian peninsula —such an account, simply giving a historical form to the family affinity between the Romans, Siculi, and Bruttians, and free from all Hellenizing colouring, is a rare phenomenon. Greek legend as a whole is pervaded—and the more so, the later its rise—by a tendency to represent the whole barbarian world as having either issued from the Greeks or having been subdued by them; and it early in this sense spun its threads also around the west. For Italy the legends of Herakles and of the Argonauts were of less importance—although Hecataeus (after 257) is already acquainted with the Pillars of Herakles, and carries the Argo from the Black Sea into the Atlantic Ocean, from the latter into the Nile, and thus back to the Mediterranean—than were the homeward voyages connected with the fall of Ilion. With the first dawn of information as to Italy Diomedes begins to wander in the Adriatic, and Odysseus in the Tyrrhene Sea;(18) as indeed the latter localization at least was naturally suggested by the Homeric conception of the legend. Down to the times of Alexander the countries on the Tyrrhene Sea belonged in Hellenic fable to the domain of the legend of Odysseus; Ephorus, who ended his history with the year 414, and the so-called Scylax (about 418) still substantially follow it. Of Trojan voyages the whole earlier poetry has no knowledge; in Homer Aeneas after the fall of Ilion rules over the Trojans that remained at home.
Stesichorus
It was the great remodeller of myths, Stesichorus (122-201) who first in his “Destruction of Ilion” brought Aeneas to the land of the west, that he might poetically enrich the world of fable in the country of his birth and of his adoption, Sicily and Lower Italy, by the contrast of the Trojan heroes with the Hellenic. With him originated the poetical outlines of this fable as thenceforward fixed, especially the group of the hero and his wife, his little son and his aged father bearing the household gods, departing from burning Troy, and the important identification of the Trojans with the Sicilian and Italian autochthones, which is especially apparent in the case of the Trojan trumpeter Misenus who gave his name to the promontory of Misenum.(19) The old poet was guided in this view by the feeling that the barbarians of Italy were less widely removed from the Hellenes than other barbarians
Timaeus
But the person who really completed the conception subsequently current of this Trojan migration was Timaeus of Tauromenium in Sicily, who concluded his historical work with 492. It is he who represents Aeneas as first founding Lavinium with its shrine of the Trojan Penates, and as thereafter founding Rome; he must also have interwoven the Tyrian princess Elisa or Dido with the legend of Aeneas, for with him Dido is the foundress of Carthage, and Rome and Carthage are said by him to have been built in the same year. These alterations were manifestly suggested by certain accounts that had reached Sicily respecting Latin manners and customs, in conjunction with the critical struggle which at the very time and place where Timaeus wrote was preparing between the Romans and the Carthaginians. In the main, however, the story cannot have been derived from Latium, but can only have been the good-for-nothing invention of the old “gossip-monger” himself. Timaeus had heard of the primitive temple of the household gods in Lavinium; but the statement, that these were regarded by the Lavinates as the Penates brought by the followers of Aeneas from Ilion, is as certainly an addition of his own, as the ingenious parallel between the Roman October horse and the Trojan horse, and the exact inventory taken of the sacred objects of Lavinium—there were, our worthy author affirms, heralds’ staves of iron and copper, and an earthen vase of Trojan manufacture! It is true that these same Penates might not at all be seen by any one for centuries afterwards; but Timaeus was one of the historians who upon no matter are so fully informed as upon things unknowable. It
How far the Hellenic play of fable regarding Italian matters, as it in the first instance arose in Sicily, gained admission during this period even in Italy itself, cannot be ascertained with precision. Those links of connection with the Odyssean cycle, which we subsequently meet with in the legends of the foundation of Tusculum, Praeneste, Antium, Ardea, and Cortona, must probably have been already concocted at this period; and even the belief in the descent of the Romans from Trojan men or Trojan women must have been established at the close of this epoch in Rome, for the first demonstrable contact between Rome and the Greek east is the intercession of the senate on behalf of the “kindre” Ilians in 472. That the fable of Aeneas was nevertheless of comparatively recent origin in Italy, is shown by the extremely scanty measure of its localization as compared with the legend of Odysseus; and at any rate the final redaction of these tales, as well as their reconciliation with the legend of the origin of Rome, belongs only to the following age.
While in this way historical composition, or what was so called among the Hellenes, busied itself in its own fashion with the prehistoric times of Italy, it left the contemporary history of Italy almost untouched—a circumstance as significant of the sunken condition of Hellenic history, as it is to be for our sakes regretted. Theopompus of Chios (who ended his work with 418) barely noticed in passing the capture of Rome by the Celts; and Aristotle,(21) Clitarchus,(22) Theophrastus,(23) Heraclides of Pontus (about 450), incidentally mention particular events relating to Rome. It is only with Hieronymus of Cardia, who as the historian of Pyrrhus narrated also his Italian wars, that Greek historiography becomes at the same time an authority for the history of Rome.
Jurisprudence
Among the sciences, that of jurisprudence acquired an invaluable basis through the committing to writing of the laws of the city in the years 303, 304. This code, known under the name of the Twelve Tables, is perhaps the oldest Roman document that deserves the name of a book. The nucleus of the so-called -leges regiae- was probably not much more recent. These were certain precepts chiefly of a ritual nature, which rested upon traditional usage, and were probably promulgated to the general public under the form of royal enactments by the college of pontifices, which was entitled not to legislate but to point out the law. Moreover it may be presumed that from the commencement of this period the more important decrees of the senate at any rate—if not those of the people—were regularly recorded in writing; for already in the earliest conflicts between the orders disputes took place as to their preservation.(24)
Opinions—
Table of Formulae for Actions
While the mass of written legal documents thus increased, the foundations of jurisprudence in the proper sense were also firmly laid. It was necessary that both the magistrates who were annually changed and the jurymen taken from the people should be enabled to resort to men of skill, who were acquainted with the course of law and knew how to suggest a decision accordant with precedents or, in the absence of these, resting on reasonable grounds. The pontifices who were wont to be consulted by the people regarding court-days and on all questions of difficulty and of legal observance relating to the worship of the gods, delivered also, when asked, counsels and opinions on other points of law, and thus developed in the bosom of their college that tradition which formed the basis of Roman private law, more especially the formulae of action proper for each particular case. A table of formulae which embraced all these actions, along with a calendar which specified the court-days, was published to the people about 450 by Appius Claudius or by his clerk, Gnaeus Flavius. This attempt, however, to give formal shape to a science, that as yet hardly recognized itself, stood for a long time completely isolated.
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
Moreover at this epoch began the treatment of the native languages after a rational method. About its commencement the Sabellian as well as the Latin idiom threatened, as we saw,(25) to become barbarous, and the abrasion of endings and the corruption of the vowels and more delicate consonants spread on all hands, just as was the case with the Romanic languages in the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian era. But a reaction set in: the sounds which had coalesced in Oscan, -d and -r, and the sounds which had coalesced in Latin, -g and -k, were again separated, and each was provided with its proper sign; -o and -u, for which from the first the Oscan alphabet had lacked separate signs, and which had been in Latin originally separate but threatened to coalesce, again became distinct, and in Oscan even the -i was resolved into two signs different in sound and in writing; lastly, the writing again came to follow more closely the pronunciation—the -s for instance among the Romans being in many cases replaced by -r. Chronological indications point to the fifth century as the period of this reaction; the Latin -g for instance was not yet in existence about 300 but was so probably about 500; the first of the Papirian clan, who called himself Papirius instead of Papisius, was the consul of 418; the introduction of that -r instead of -s is attributed to Appius Claudius, censor in 442. Beyond doubt the re-introduction of a more delicate and precise pronunciation was connected with the increasing influence of Greek civilization, which is observable at this very period in all departments of Italian life; and, as the silver coins of Capua and Nola are far more perfect than the contemporary asses of Ardea and Rome, writing and language appear also to have been more speedily and fully reduced to rule in the Campanian land than in Latium. How little, notwithstanding the labour bestowed on it, the Roman language and mode of writing had become settled at the close of this epoch, is shown by the inscriptions preserved from the end of the fifth century, in which the greatest arbitrariness prevails, particularly as to the insertion or omission of -m, -d and -s in final sounds and of -n in the body of a word, and as to the distinguishing of the vowels -o -u and -e -i.(26) It is probable that the contemporary Sabellians were in these points further advanced, while the Umbrians were but slightly affected by the regenerating influence of the Hellenes.
Instruction
In consequence of this progress of jurisprudence and grammar, elementary school-instruction also, which in itself had doubtless already emerged earlier, must have undergone a certain improvement. As Homer was the oldest Greek, and the Twelve Tables was the oldest Roman, book, each became in its own land the essential basis of instruction; and the learning by heart the juristico-political catechism was a chief part of Roman juvenile training. Alongside of
Exact Sciences—
Regulation of the Calendar
That the Romans at no time distinguished themselves in the mathematical and mechanical sciences is well known, and is attested, in reference to the present epoch, by almost the only fact which can be adduced under this head with certainty—the regulation of the calendar attempted by the decemvirs. They wished to substitute for the previous calendar based on the old and very imperfect -trieteris-(29) the contemporary Attic calendar of the -octaeteris-, which retained the lunar month of 29 1/2 days but assumed the solar year at 365 1/4 days instead of 368 3/4, and therefore, without making any alteration in the length of the common year of 354 days, intercalated, not as formerly 59 days every 4 years, but 90 days every 8 years. With the same view the improvers of the Roman calendar intended—while otherwise retaining the current calendar—in the two inter-calary years of the four years’ cycle to shorten not the intercalary months, but the two Februaries by 7 days each, and consequently to fix that month in the intercalary years at 22 and 21 days respectively instead of 29 and 28. But want of mathematical precision and theological scruples, especially in reference to the annual festival of Terminus which fell within those very days in February, disarranged the intended reform, so that the Februaries of the intercalary years came to be of 24 and 23 days, and thus the new Roman solar year in reality ran to 366 1/4 days. Some remedy for the practical evils resulting from this was found in the practice by which, setting aside the reckoning by the months or ten months of the calendar (30) as now no longer applicable from the inequality in the length of the months, wherever more accurate specifications were required, they accustomed themselves to reckon by terms of ten months of a solar year of 365 days or by the so-called ten-month year of 304 days. Over and above this, there came early into use in Italy, especially for agricultural purposes, the farmers’ calendar based on the Egyptian solar year of 365 1/4 days by Eudoxus (who flourished 386).
Structural and Plastic Art
A higher idea of what the Italians were able to do in these departments is furnished by their works of structural and plastic art, which are closely associated with the mechanical sciences. Here too we do not find phenomena of real originality; but if the impress of borrowing, which the plastic art of Italy bears throughout, diminishes its artistic interest, there gathers around it a historical interest all the more lively, because on the one hand it preserves the most remarkable evidences of an international intercourse of which other traces have disappeared, and on the other hand, amidst the well-nigh total loss of the history of the non-Roman Italians, art is almost the sole surviving index of the living activity which the different peoples of the peninsula displayed. No novelty is to be reported in this period; but what we have already shown(31) may be illustrated in this period with greater precision and on a broader basis, namely, that the stimulus derived from Greece powerfully affected the Etruscans and Italians on different sides, and called forth among the former a richer and more luxurious, among the latter—where it had any influence at all—a more intelligent and more genuine, art.
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
Something the same may be affirmed as true of various subordinate, but not on that account unimportant, achievements in this field. They do not lay claim to originality or artistic accomplishment; but the firmly-jointed stone slabs of the Roman streets, their indestructible highways, the broad hard ringing tiles, the everlasting mortar of their buildings, proclaim the indestructible solidity and the energetic vigour of the Roman character.
Plastic and Delineative Art
Like architectural art, and, if possible, still more completely, the plastic and delineative arts were not so much matured by Grecian stimulus as developed from Greek seeds on Italian soil. We have already observed(38) that these, although only younger sisters of architecture, began to develop themselves at least in Etruria, even during the Roman regal period; but their principal development in Etruria, and still more in Latium, belongs to the present epoch, as is very evident from the fact that in those districts which the Celts and Samnites wrested from the Etruscans in the course of the fourth century there is scarcely a trace of the practice of Etruscan art. The plastic art of the Tuscans applied itself first and chiefly to works in terra-cotta, in copper, and in gold-materials which were furnished to the artists by the rich strata of clay, the copper mines, and the commercial intercourse of Etruria. The vigour with which moulding in clay was prosecuted is attested
Campanian and Sabellian
On comparing with this the domain of the Italians proper, it appears at first, contrasted with the Etruscan riches, almost poor in art. But on a closer view we cannot fail to perceive that both the Sabellian and the Latin nations must have had far more capacity and aptitude for art than the Etruscans. It is true that in the proper Sabellian territory, in Sabina, in the Abruzzi, in Samnium, there are hardly found any works of art at all, and even coins are wanting. But those Sabellian stocks, which reached the coasts of the Tyrrhene or Ionic seas, not only appropriated Hellenic art externally, like the Etruscans, but more or less completely acclimatized it. Even in Velitrae, where probably alone in the former land of the Volsci their language and peculiar character were afterwards maintained, painted terra-cottas have been found, displaying vigorous and characteristic treatment. In Lower Italy Lucania was to a less degree influenced by Hellenic art; but in Campania and in the land of the Bruttii, Sabellians and Hellenes became completely intermingled not only in language and nationality, but also and especially in art, and the Campanian and Bruttian coins in particular stand so entirely in point of artistic treatment on a level with the contemporary coins of Greece, that the inscription alone serves to distinguish the one from the other.
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
Character of Etruscan Art
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
North Etruscan and South Etruscan Art
But even within Etruria there appears a further remarkable distinction in artistic development between the southern and northern districts. It is South Etruria, particularly in the districts of Caere, Tarquinii, and Volci, that has preserved the great treasures of art which the nation boasted, especially in frescoes, temple decorations, gold ornaments, and painted vases. Northern Etruria is far inferior; no painted tomb, for example, has been found to the north of Chiusi. The most southern Etruscan cities, Veii, Caere, and Tarquinii, were accounted in Roman tradition the primitive and chief seats of Etruscan art; the most northerly town, Volaterrae, with the largest territory of all the Etruscan communities, stood most of all aloof from art While a Greek semi-culture prevailed in South Etruria, Northern Etruria was much more marked by an absence of all culture. The causes of this remarkable contrast may be sought partly in differences of nationality—South Etruria being largely peopled in all probability by non-Etruscan elements(42)—partly in the varying intensity of Hellenic influence, which must have made itself very decidedly felt at Caere in particular. The fact itself admits of no doubt. The more injurious on that account must have been the early subjugation of the southern half of Etruria by the Romans, and the Romanizing—which there began very early—of Etruscan art. What Northern Etruria, confined to its own efforts, was able to produce in the way of art, is shown by the copper coins which essentially belong to it.
Character of Latin Art
Let us now turn from Etruria to glance at Latium. The latter, it is true, created no new art; it was reserved for a far later epoch of culture to develop on the basis of the arch a new architecture different from the Hellenic, and then to unfold in harmony with that architecture a new style of sculpture and painting. Latin art is nowhere original and often insignificant; but the fresh sensibility and the discriminating tact, which appropriate what is good in others, constitute a high artistic merit. Latin art seldom became barbarous, and in its best products it comes quite up to the level of Greek technical execution. We do not mean to deny that the art of Latium, at least in its earlier stages, had a certain dependence on the undoubtedly earlier Etruscan;(43) Varro may be quite right in supposing that, previous to the execution by Greek artists of the clay figures in the temple of Ceres,(44) only “Tuscanic” figures adorned the Roman temples; but that, at all events, it was mainly the direct influence of the Greeks that led Latin art into its proper channel, is self-evident, and is very obviously shown by these very statues as well as by the Latin and Roman coins. Even the application of graving on metal in Etruria solely to the toilet mirror, and in Latium solely to the toilet casket, indicates the diversity of the art-impulses that affected the two lands. It does not appear, however, to have been exactly at Rome that Latin art put forth its freshest vigour; the Roman -asses- and Roman -denarii- are far surpassed in fineness and taste of workmanship by the Latin copper, and the rare Latin silver, coins, and the masterpieces of painting and design belong chiefly to Praeneste, Lanuvium, and Ardea. This accords completely with the realistic and sober spirit of the Roman republic which we have already described—a spirit which can hardly have asserted itself with equal intensity in other parts of Latium. But in the course of the fifth century, and especially in the second half of it, there was a mighty activity in Roman art. This was the epoch, in which the construction of the Roman arches and Roman roads began; in which works of art like the she-wolf of the Capitol originated; and in which a distinguished man of an old Roman patrician clan took up his pencil to embellish a newly constructed temple and thence received the honorary surname of the “Painter.” This was not accident. Every great age lays grasp on all the powers of man; and, rigid as were Roman manners, strict as was Roman police, the impulse received by the Roman burgesses as masters of the peninsula or, to speak more correctly, by Italy united for the first time as one state, became as evident in the stimulus given to Latin and especially to Roman art, as the moral and political decay of the Etruscan nation was evident in the decline of art in Etruria. As the mighty national vigour of Latium subdued the weaker nations, it impressed its imperishable stamp also on bronze and on marble.
1. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences
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-.
There was, moreover, a tradition which referred the origin of the national festival not, as in the common version, to the conquest of the Latins by the first Tarquinius, but to the victory over the Latins at the lake Regillus (Cicero, de Div. i. 26, 55; Dionys. vii. 71). That the important statements preserved in the latter passage from Fabius really relate to the ordinary thanksgiving-festival, and not to any special votive solemnity, is evident from the express allusion to the annual recurrence of the celebration, and from the exact agreement of the sum of the expenses with the statement in the Pseudo-Asconius (p. 142 Or.).
3. II. III. Curule Aedileship
4. I. II. Art
5. I. XV. Metre
6. I. XV. Masks
7. II. VIII. Police f.
8. I. XV. Melody
9. A fragment has been preserved:
-Hiberno pulvere, verno luto, grandia farra Camille metes-
We do not know by what right this was afterwards regarded as the oldest Roman poem (Macrob. Sat. v. 20; Festus, Ep. v. Flaminius, p. 93, M.; Serv. on Virg. Georg, i. 101; Plin. xvii. 2. 14).
10. II. VIII. Appius Claudius
11. II. VIII. Rome and the Romans of This Epoch
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.
15. I. XI. Jurisdiction, second note.
16. They appear to have reckoned three generations to a hundred years and to have rounded off the figures 233 1/3 to 240, just as the epoch between the king’s flight and the burning of the city was rounded off to 120 years (ii. IX. Registers of Magistrates, note). The reason why these precise numbers suggested themselves, is apparent from the similar adjustment (above explained, I. XIV. The Duodecimal System) of the measures of surface.
17. I. XII. Spirits
18. I. X. Relations of the Western Italians to the Greeks
19. The “Trojan colonies” in Sicily, mentioned by Thucydides, the pseudo-Scylax, and others, as well as the designation of Capua as a Trojan foundation in Hecataeus, must also be traced to Stesichorus and his identification of the natives of Italy and Sicily with the Trojans.
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.
21. II. IV. Fruitlessness of the Celtic Victory
22. II. VII. Relations between the East and West
23. II. VII. The Roman Fleet
24. II. II. Political Value of the Tribunates, ii. II. The Valerio-Horatian Laws
25. I. XIV. Corruption of Language and Writing
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.
27. -Litterator- and -grammaticus- are related nearly as elementary teacher and teacher of languages with us; the latter designation belonged by earlier usage only to the teacher of Greek, not to a teacher of the mother-tongue. -Litteratus- is more recent, and denotes not a schoolmaster but a man of culture.
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:—
... -ubi revenisses domum, Cincticulo praecinctus in sella apud magistrum adsideres; Si, librum cum legeres, unam peccavisses syllabam, Fieret corium tam maculosum, quam est nutricis pallium-.
29. I. XIV. The Oldest Italo-Greek Calendar
30. I. XIV. The Oldest Italo-Greek Calendar
31. I. XV. Plastic Art in Italy
32. II. VIII. Building
33. II. VIII. Building
34. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences
35. I. VII. Servian Wall
36. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences
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.
38. I. XV. Plastic Art in Italy
39. II. V. Complete Submission of the Campanian and Volscian Provinces
40. I. XII. Nature of the Roman Gods
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.
42. I. IX. Settlements of the Etruscans in Italy
43. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences
44. I. Vi. Time and Occasion of the Reform
* * * * *
THE HISTORY OF ROME: BOOK III
From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage
and the Greek
States
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:
1) 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-.
2) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents, are rendered with a preceding and a following double-dash; thus, —xxxx—. Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as —xxx-xxx—
3) Simple unideographic references to vocalic sounds, single letters, or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic references are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x, or -xxx.
4) Ideographic references, referring to signs of representation rather than to content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-. “id:” stands for “ideograph”, and indicates that the reader should form a picture based on the following “xxxx”; which may be a single symbol, a word, or an attempt at a picture composed of ASCII characters. For example, —“id:Gamma gamma”— indicates an uppercase Greek gamma-form followed by the form in lowercase. Some such exotic parsing as this is necessary to explain alphabetic development because a single symbol may have been used for a number of sounds in a number of languages, or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different times. Thus, “-id:Gamma gamma” might very well refer to a Phoenician construct that in appearance resembles the form that eventually stabilized as an uppercase Greek “gamma” juxtaposed to one of lowercase. Also, a construct such as —“id:E” indicates a symbol that with ASCII resembles most closely a Roman uppercase “E”, but, in fact, is actually drawn more crudely.
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.
Book iii: From the Union of Italy
to the Subjugation of Carthage
and
the Greek States
I. Carthage
II. The War between Rome and Carthage Concerning Sicily
III. The Extension of Italy to Its Natural Boundaries
IV. Hamilcar and Hannibal
V. The War under Hannibal to the Battle of Cannae
Vi. The War under Hannibal from Cannae to Zama
VII. The West from the Peace
of Hannibal to the Close
of the Third Period
VIII. The Eastern States and the Second Macedonian War
IX. The War with Antiochus of Asia
X. The Third Macedonian War
XI. The Government and the Governed
XII. The Management of Land and of Capital
XIII. Faith and Manners
XIV. Literature and Art
From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage
and the Greek
States
Arduum res gestas scribere.
—Sallust.
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.
Their Intellectual Endowments
The Phoenicians are entitled to be commemorated in history by the side of the Hellenic and Latin nations; but their case affords a fresh proof, and perhaps the strongest proof of all, that the development of national energies in antiquity was of a one-sided character. Those noble and enduring creations in the field of intellect, which owe their origin to the Aramaean race, do not belong primarily to the Phoenicians. While faith and knowledge in a certain sense were the especial property of the Aramaean nations and first reached the Indo-Germans from the east, neither the Phoenician religion nor Phoenician science and art ever, so far as we can see, held an independent rank among those of the Aramaean family. The religious conceptions of the Phoenicians were rude and uncouth, and it seemed as if their worship was meant to foster rather than to restrain lust and cruelty. No trace is discernible, at least in times of clear historical light, of any special influence exercised by their religion over other nations. As little do we find any Phoenician architecture or plastic art at all comparable even to those of Italy, to say nothing of the lands where art was native. The most ancient seat of scientific observation and of its application to practical purposes was Babylon, or at any rate the region of the Euphrates. It was there probably that men first followed the course of the stars; it was there that they first distinguished and expressed in writing the sounds of language; it was there that they began to reflect on time and space and on the powers at work in nature: the earliest traces of astronomy and chronology, of the alphabet, and of weights and measures, point to that region. The Phoenicians doubtless availed themselves of the artistic and highly developed manufactures of Babylon for their industry, of the observation of the stars for their navigation, of the writing of sounds and the adjustment of measures for their commerce, and distributed many an important germ of civilization along with their wares; but it cannot be demonstrated that the alphabet or any other of those ingenious products of the human mind belonged peculiarly to them, and such religious and scientific ideas as they were the means of conveying to the Hellenes were scattered by them more after the fashion of a bird dropping grains than of the husbandman sowing his seed. The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians. In the field of Roman conquest the Iberian and the Celtic languages have disappeared before the Romanic tongue; the Berbers of Africa speak at the present day the same language as they spoke in the times of the Hannos and the Barcides.
Their Political Qualities
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).
This was not the result of cowardice; navigation in unknown waters and with armed vessels requires brave hearts, and that such were to be found among the Phoenicians, they often showed. Still less was it the result of any lack of tenacity and idiosyncrasy of national feeling; on the contrary the Aramaeans defended their nationality with the weapons of intellect as well as with their blood against all the allurements of Greek civilization and all the coercive measures of eastern and western despots, and that with an obstinacy
Carthage
Of all the Phoenician settlements none attained a more rapid and secure prosperity than those which were established by the Tyrians and Sidonians on the south coast of Spain and the north coast of Africa— regions that lay beyond the reach of the arm of the great-king and the dangerous rivalry of the mariners of Greece, and in which the natives held the same relation to the strangers as the Indians in America held to the Europeans. Among the numerous and flourishing Phoenician cities along these shores, the most prominent by far was the “new town,” Karthada or, as the Occidentals called it, Karchedon or Carthago. Although not the earliest settlement of the Phoenicians in this region, and originally perhaps a dependency of the adjoining Utica, the oldest of the Phoenician towns in Libya, it soon outstripped its neighbours and even the motherland through the incomparable advantages of its situation and the energetic activity of its inhabitants. It was situated not far from the (former) mouth of the Bagradas (Mejerda), which flows through the richest corn district of northern Africa, and was placed on a fertile rising ground, still occupied with country houses and covered with groves of olive and orange trees, falling off in a gentle slope towards the plain, and terminating towards the sea in a sea-girt promontory. Lying in the heart of the great North-African roadstead, the Gulf of Tunis, at the very spot where that beautiful basin affords the best anchorage for vessels of larger size, and where drinkable spring water is got close by the shore, the place proved singularly favourable for agriculture and commerce and for the exchange of their respective commodities—so favourable, that not only was the Tyrian settlement in that quarter the first of Phoenician mercantile cities, but even in the Roman period Carthage was no sooner restored than it became the third city in the empire, and even now, under circumstances far from favourable and on a site far less judiciously chosen, there exists and flourishes in that quarter a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants. The prosperity, agricultural, mercantile, and industrial, of a city so situated and so peopled, needs no explanation; but the question requires an answer—in what way did this settlement come to attain a development of political power, such as no other Phoenician city possessed?
Carthage Heads the Western Phoenicians in Opposition to the Hellenes
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.
But with all their disposition to be submissive and cringing, circumstances occurred which compelled these Phoenicians to adopt a more energetic policy. The stream of Hellenic migration was pouring ceaselessly towards the west: it had already dislodged the Phoenicians from Greece proper and Italy, and it was preparing to supplant them also in Sicily, in Spain, and even in Libya itself. The Phoenicians had to make a stand somewhere, if they were not willing to be totally crushed. In this case, where they had to deal with Greek traders and not with the great-king, submission did not suffice to secure the continuance of their commerce and industry on its former footing, liable merely to tax and tribute. Massilia and Cyrene were already founded; the whole east of Sicily was already in the hands of the Greeks; it was full time for the Phoenicians to think of serious resistance. The Carthaginians undertook the task; after long and obstinate wars they set a limit to the advance of the Cyrenaeans, and Hellenism was unable to establish itself to the west of the desert of Tripolis. With Carthaginian aid, moreover, the Phoenician settlers on the western point of Sicily defended themselves against the Greeks, and readily and gladly submitted to the protection of the powerful cognate city.(2) These important successes, which occurred in the second century of Rome, and which saved for the Phoenicians the south-western portion of the Mediterranean, served of themselves to give to the city which had achieved them the hegemony of the nation, and to alter at the same time its political position. Carthage was no longer a mere mercantile city: it aimed at the dominion of Libya and of a part of the Mediterranean, because it could not avoid doing so. It is probable that the custom of employing mercenaries contributed materially to these successes. That custom came into vogue in Greece somewhere about the middle of the fourth century of Rome, but among the Orientals and the Carians more especially it was far older, and it was perhaps the Phoenicians themselves that began it. By the system of foreign recruiting war was converted into a vast pecuniary speculation, which was quite in keeping with the character and habits of the Phoenicians.
The Carthaginian Dominion in Africa
It was probably the reflex influence of these successes abroad, that first led the Carthaginians to change the character of their occupation in Africa from a tenure of hire and sufferance to one of proprietorship and conquest. It appears to have been only about the year 300 of Rome that the Carthaginian merchants got rid of the rent for the soil, which they had hitherto been obliged to pay to the natives. This change enabled them to prosecute a husbandry of their own on a great scale. From the outset the Phoenicians had been desirous to employ their capital as landlords as well as traders, and to practise agriculture on a large scale by means of slaves or hired labourers; a large portion of the Jews in this way served the merchant-princes of Tyre for daily wages. Now the Carthaginians could without restriction extract the produce of the rich Libyan soil by a system akin to that of the modern planters; slaves in chains cultivated the land—we find single citizens possessing as many as twenty thousand of them. Nor was this all. The agricultural villages of the surrounding region—agriculture appears to have been introduced among the Libyans at a very early period, probably anterior to the Phoenician settlement, and presumably from Egypt—were subdued by force of arms, and the free Libyan farmers were transformed into fellahs, who paid to their lords a fourth part of the produce of the soil as tribute, and were subjected to a regular system of recruiting for the formation of a home Carthaginian army. Hostilities were constantly occurring with the roving pastoral tribes (—nomades—) on the borders; but a chain of fortified posts secured the territory enclosed by them, and the Nomades were slowly driven back into the deserts and mountains, or were compelled to recognize Carthaginian supremacy, to pay tribute, and to furnish contingents. About the period of the first Punic war their great town Theveste (Tebessa, at the sources of the Mejerda) was conquered by the Carthaginians. These formed the “towns and tribes (—ethne—) of subjects,” which appear in the Carthaginian state-treaties; the former being the non-free Libyan villages, the latter the subject Nomades.
Libyphoenicians
To this fell to be added the sovereignty of Carthage over the other Phoenicians in Africa, or the so-called Liby-phoenicians. These included, on the one hand, the smaller settlements sent forth from Carthage along the whole northern and part of the north-western coast of Africa—which cannot have been unimportant, for on the Atlantic seaboard alone there were settled at one time 30,000 such colonists —and, on the other hand, the old Phoenician settlements especially numerous along the coast of the present province of Constantine and Beylik of Tunis, such as Hippo afterwards called Regius (Bona), Hadrumetum (Susa), Little Leptis (to the south of Susa)—the second city of the Phoenicians in Africa—Thapsus (in the same quarter), and Great Leptis (Lebda to the
The epoch, at which this transformation of Carthage into the capital of Libya took place, admits the less of being determined, because the change doubtless took place gradually. The author just mentioned names Hanno as the reformer of the nation. If the Hanno is meant who lived at the time of the first war with Rome, he can only be regarded as having completed the new system, the carrying out of which presumably occupied the fourth and fifth centuries of Rome.
The flourishing of Carthage was accompanied by a parallel decline in the great cities of the Phoenician mother-country, in Sidon and especially in Tyre, the prosperity of which was destroyed partly by internal commotions, partly by the pressure of external calamities, particularly of its sieges by Salmanassar in the first, Nebuchodrossor in the second, and Alexander in the fifth century of Rome. The noble families and the old firms of Tyre emigrated for the most part to the secure and flourishing daughter-city, and carried thither their intelligence, their capital, and their traditions. At the time when the Phoenicians came into contact with Rome, Carthage was as decidedly the first of Canaanite cities as Rome was the first of the Latin communities.
Naval Power of Carthage
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
In like manner the Carthaginians already at the end of the second century of Rome established themselves in Sardinia, which was utilized by them precisely in the same way as Libya. While the natives withdrew into the mountainous interior of the island to escape from bondage as agricultural serfs, just as the Numidians in Africa withdrew to the borders of the desert, Phoenician colonies were conducted to Caralis (Cagliari) and other important points, and the fertile districts along the coast were turned to account by the introduction of Libyan cultivators.
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
All these settlements and possessions were important enough in themselves; but they were of still greater moment, inasmuch as they became the pillars of the Carthaginian maritime supremacy. By their possession of the south of Spain, of the Baleares, of Sardinia, of western Sicily and Melita, and by their prevention of Hellenic colonies on the east coast of Spain, in Corsica, and in the region of the Syrtes, the masters of the north coast of Africa rendered their sea a closed one, and monopolized the western straits. In the Tyrrhene and Gallic seas alone the Phoenicians were obliged to admit the rivalry of other nations. This state of things might perhaps be endured, so long as the Etruscans and the Greeks served to counterbalance each other in these waters; with the former, as the less dangerous rivals, Carthage even entered into an alliance against the Greeks. But when, on the fall of the Etruscan power—a fall which, as is usually the case in such forced alliances, Carthage had hardly exerted all her power to avert—and after the miscarriage of the great projects of Alcibiades, Syracuse stood forth as indisputably the first Greek naval power, not only did the rulers of Syracuse naturally begin to aspire to dominion over Sicily and lower Italy and at the same time over the Tyrrhene and Adriatic seas, but the Carthaginians also were compelled to adopt a more energetic policy. The immediate result of the long and obstinate conflicts between them and their equally powerful and infamous antagonist, Dionysius of Syracuse (348-389), was the annihilation or weakening of the intervening Sicilian states—a result which both parties had an interest in accomplishing—and the division of the island between the Syracusans and Carthaginians. The most flourishing cities
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
But the gerusia and the magistrates were subordinate to the corporation of the Hundred and Four (in round numbers the Hundred), or the Judges, the main bulwark of the Carthaginian oligarchy. It had no place in the original constitution of Carthage, but, like the Spartan ephorate, it originated in an aristocratic opposition to the monarchical elements of that constitution. As public offices were purchasable and the number of members forming the supreme board was small, a single Carthaginian family, eminent above all others in wealth and military renown, the clan of Mago,(8) threatened to unite in its own hands the management of the state in peace and war and the administration of justice. This led, nearly about the time of the decemvirs, to an alteration of the constitution and to the appointment of this new board. We
Citizens
The body of citizens in Carthage, though not expressly restricted, as in Sparta, to the attitude of passive bystanders in the business of the state, appears to have had but a very slight amount of practical influence on it In the elections to the gerusia a system of open corruption was the rule; in the nomination of a general the people were consulted, but only after the nomination had really been made by proposal on the part of the gerusia; and other questions only went to the people when the gerusia thought fit or could not otherwise agree. Assemblies of the people with judicial functions were unknown in Carthage. The powerlessness of the citizens probably in the main resulted from their political organization; the Carthaginian mess-associations, which are mentioned in this connection and compared with the Spartan Pheiditia, were probably guilds under oligarchical management. Mention is made even of a distinction between “burgesses of the city” and “manual labourers,” which leads us to infer that the latter held a very inferior position, perhaps beyond the pale of law.
Character of the Government
On a comprehensive view of its several elements, the Carthaginian constitution appears to have been a government of capitalists, such as might naturally arise in a burgess-community which had no middle class of moderate means but consisted on the one hand of an urban rabble without property and living from hand to mouth, and on the other hand of great merchants, planters, and genteel overseers. The system of repairing the fortunes of decayed grandees at the expense of the subjects, by despatching them as tax-assessors and taskwork-overseers to the dependent communities—that infallible token of a rotten urban oligarchy—was not wanting in Carthage; Aristotle describes it as the main cause of the tried durability of the Carthaginian constitution. Up to his time no revolution worth mentioning had taken place in Carthage either from above or from below. The multitude remained without leaders in consequence of the material advantages which the governing oligarchy was able to offer to all ambitious or necessitous men of rank, and was satisfied with the crumbs, which in the form of electoral corruption or otherwise fell to it from the table of the rich. A democratic opposition indeed could not fail with such a government to emerge; but at the time of the first Punic war it was still quite powerless. At a later period, partly under the influence of the defeats which were sustained, its political influence appears on the increase, and that far more rapidly than the influence of the similar party at the same period in Rome; the popular assemblies began to give the ultimate decision in political questions, and broke down the omnipotence of the Carthaginian oligarchy. After the termination of the Hannibalic war it was even enacted, on the proposal of Hannibal, that no member of the council of a Hundred could hold office for two consecutive years; and thereby a complete democracy was introduced, which certainly was under existing circumstances the only means of saving Carthage, if there was still time to do so. This opposition was swayed by a strong patriotic and reforming enthusiasm; but the fact cannot withal be overlooked, that it rested on a corrupt and rotten basis. The body of citizens in Carthage, which is compared by well-informed Greeks to the people of Alexandria, was so disorderly that to that extent it had well deserved to be powerless; and it might well be asked, what good could arise from revolutions, where, as in Carthage, the boys helped to make them.
Capital and Its Power in Carthage
From a financial point of view, Carthage held in every respect the first place among the states of antiquity. At the time of the Peloponnesian war this Phoenician city was, according to the testimony of the first of Greek historians, financially superior to all the Greek states, and its revenues were compared to those of the great-king; Polybius calls it the wealthiest city in the world. The intelligent character of the Carthaginian husbandry—which, as
Science and art in Carthage, as afterwards in Rome, seem to have been mainly dependent on Hellenic influences, but they do not appear to have been neglected. There was a respectable Phoenician literature; and on the conquest of the city there were found rich treasures of art—not created, it is true, in Carthage, but carried off from Sicilian temples—and considerable libraries. But even intellect there was in the service of capital; the prominent features of its literature were chiefly agronomic and geographical treatises, such as the work of Mago already mentioned and the account by the admiral Hanno of his voyage along the west coast of Africa, which was originally deposited publicly in one of the Carthaginian temples, and which is still extant in a translation. Even the general diffusion of certain attainments, and particularly of the knowledge of foreign languages,(9) as to which the Carthage of this epoch probably stood almost on a level with Rome under the empire, forms an evidence of the thoroughly practical turn given to Hellenic culture in Carthage. It is absolutely impossible to form a conception of the mass of capital
Comparison between Carthage and Rome
In Their Economy
Let us now compare the respective resources of Carthage and Rome. Both were agricultural and mercantile cities, and nothing more; art and science had substantially the same altogether subordinate and altogether practical position in both, except that in this respect Carthage had made greater progress than Rome. But in Carthage the moneyed interest preponderated over the landed, in Rome at this time the landed still preponderated over the moneyed; and, while the agriculturists of Carthage were universally large landlords and slave-holders, in the Rome of this period the great mass of the burgesses still tilled their fields in person. The majority of the population in Rome held property, and was therefore conservative; the majority in Carthage held no property, and was therefore accessible to the gold of the rich as well as to the cry of the democrats for reform. In Carthage there already prevailed all that opulence which marks powerful commercial cities, while the manners and police of Rome still maintained at least externally the severity and frugality of the olden times. When the ambassadors of Carthage returned from Rome, they told their colleagues that the relations of intimacy among the Roman senators surpassed all conception; that a single set of silver plate sufficed for the whole senate, and had reappeared in every house to which the envoys had been invited. The sneer is a significant token of the difference in the economic conditions on either side.
In Their Constitution
In both the constitution was aristocratic; the judges governed in Carthage, as did the senate in Rome, and both on the same system of police-control. The strict state of dependence in which the governing board at Carthage held the individual magistrate, and the injunction to the citizens absolutely to refrain from learning the Greek language and to converse with a Greek only through the medium of the public interpreter, originated in the same spirit as the system of government at Rome; but in comparison with the cruel harshness and the absolute precision, bordering on silliness, of this Carthaginian state-tutelage, the Roman system of fining and censure appears mild and reasonable. The Roman senate, which opened its doors to eminent capacity and in the best sense represented the nation, was able also to trust it, and had no need to fear the magistrates. The Carthaginian senate, on the other hand, was based on a jealous control of administration by the government, and represented exclusively the leading families; its essence was mistrust of all above and below it, and therefore it could neither be confident that the people would follow whither it led, nor free from the dread of usurpations on the part of the magistrates. Hence the steady course of Roman policy, which never receded a step in times of misfortune, and never threw away the favours of fortune by negligence or indifference; whereas the Carthaginians desisted from the struggle when a last effort might perhaps have saved all, and, weary or forgetful of their great national duties, allowed the half-completed building to fall to pieces, only to begin it in a few years anew. Hence the capable magistrate in Rome was ordinarily on a good understanding with his government; in Carthage he was frequently at decided feud with his masters at home, and was forced to resist them by unconstitutional means and to make common cause with the opposing party of reform.
In the Treatment of Their Subject
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
In Finance
In a financial point of view the state revenues of Carthage doubtless far surpassed those of Rome; but this advantage was partly neutralized by the facts, that the sources of the Carthaginian revenue—tribute and customs—dried up far sooner (and just when they were most needed) than those of Rome, and that the Carthaginian mode of conducting war was far more costly than the Roman.
In Their Military System
The military resources of the Romans and Carthaginians were very different, yet in many respects not unequally balanced. The citizens of Carthage still at the conquest of the city amounted to 700,000, including women and children,(10) and were probably at least as numerous at the close of the fifth century; in that century they were able in case of need to set on foot a burgess-army of 40,000 hoplites. At the very beginning of the fifth century, Rome had in similar circumstances sent to the field a burgess-army equally strong;(11) after the great extensions of the burgess-domain in the course of that century the number of full burgesses capable of bearing arms must at least have doubled. But far more than in the number of men capable of bearing arms, Rome excelled in the effective condition of the burgess-soldier. Anxious as the Carthaginian government was to induce its citizens to take part in military service, it could neither furnish the artisan and the manufacturer with the bodily vigour of the husbandman, nor overcome the native aversion of the Phoenicians to warfare. In the fifth century there still fought in the Sicilian armies a “sacred band” of 2500 Carthaginians as a guard for the general; in the sixth not a single Carthaginian, officers excepted, was to be met with in the Carthaginian armies, e. g. in that of Spain. The Roman farmers, again, took their places not only in the muster-roll, but also in the field of battle. It was the same with the cognate races of both communities; while the Latins rendered to the Romans no less service than their own burgess-troops, the Liby-phoenicians were as little adapted for war as the Carthaginians, and, as may easily be supposed, still less desirous of it, and so they too disappeared from the armies; the towns bound to furnish contingents presumably redeemed their obligation by a payment of money. In the Spanish army just mentioned, composed of some 15,000 men, only a single troop of cavalry of 450 men consisted, and that but partly, of Liby-phoenicians. The flower of the Carthaginian armies was formed by the Libyan subjects, whose recruits were capable of being trained under able officers into good infantry, and whose light cavalry was unsurpassed in its kind. To these were added the forces of the more or less dependent tribes of Libya and Spain and the famous slingers of the Baleares, who seem to have held an intermediate position between allied contingents and mercenary troops; and finally, in case of need, the hired soldiery enlisted abroad. So far as numbers were concerned, such an army might without difficulty be raised almost to any desired strength; and in the ability of its officers, in acquaintance with arms, and in courage it might be capable of coping with that of Rome. Not only, however, did a dangerously long interval elapse, in the event of mercenaries being required, ere they could be got ready, while the Roman militia was able at any moment to take the
The Carthaginian government could not fail to perceive the defects of this military system, and they certainly sought to remedy them by every available means. They insisted on maintaining full chests and full magazines, that they might at any time be able to equip mercenaries. They bestowed great care on those elements which among the ancients represented the modern artillery—the construction of machines, in which we find the Carthaginians regularly superior to the Siceliots, and the use of elephants, after these had superseded in warfare the earlier war-chariots: in the casemates of Carthage there were stalls for 300 elephants. They could not venture to fortify the dependent cities, and were obliged to submit to the occupation of the towns and villages as well as of the open country by any hostile army that landed in Africa—a thorough contrast to the state of Italy, where most of the subject towns had retained their walls, and a chain of Roman fortresses commanded the whole peninsula. But on the fortification of the capital they expended all the resources of money and of art, and on several occasions nothing but the strength of its walls saved the state; whereas Rome held a political and military position so secure that it never underwent a formal siege. Lastly, the main bulwark of the state was their war-marine, on which they lavished the utmost care. In the building as well as in the management of vessels the Carthaginians excelled the Greeks; it was at Carthage that ships were first built of more than three banks of oars, and the Carthaginian war-vessels, at this period mostly quinqueremes, were ordinarily better sailors than the Greek; the rowers, all of them public slaves, who never stirred from the galleys, were excellently trained, and the captains were expert and fearless. In this respect Carthage was decidedly superior to the Romans, who, with the few ships of their Greek allies and still fewer of their own, were unable even to show themselves in the open sea against the fleet which at that time without a rival ruled the western Mediterranean.
If, in conclusion, we sum up the results of this comparison of the resources of the two great powers, the judgment expressed by a sagacious and impartial Greek is perhaps borne out, that Carthage and Rome were, when the struggle between them began, on the whole equally matched. But we cannot omit to add that, while Carthage had put forth all the efforts of which intellect and wealth were capable to provide herself with artificial means of attack and defence, she was unable in any satisfactory way to make up for the fundamental wants of a land army of her own and of a symmachy resting on a self-supporting basis. That Rome could only be seriously attacked in Italy, and Carthage only in Libya, no one could fail to see; as little could any one fail to perceive that Carthage could not in the long run escape from such an attack. Fleets were not yet in those times of the infancy of navigation a permanent heirloom of nations, but could be fitted out wherever there were trees, iron, and water. It was clear, and had been several times tested in Africa itself, that even powerful maritime states were not able to prevent enemies weaker by sea from landing. When Agathocles had shown the way thither, a Roman general could follow the same course; and while in Italy the entrance of an invading army simply began the war, the same event in Libya put an end to it by converting it into a siege, in which, unless special accidents should intervene, even the most obstinate and heroic courage must finally succumb.
1. II. IV. Victories of Salamis and Himera, and Their Effects
2. I. X. Phoenicians and Italians in Opposition to the Hellenes
3. The most precise description of this important class occurs in the Carthaginian treaty (Polyb. vii. 9), where in contrast to the Uticenses on the one hand, and to the Libyan subjects on the other, they are called —ol Karchedonion uparchoi osoi tois autois nomois chrontai—. Elsewhere they are spoken of as cities allied (—summachides poleis—, Diod. xx. 10) or tributary (Liv. xxxiv. 62; Justin, xxii. 7, 3). Their -conubium- with the Carthaginians is mentioned by Diodorus, xx. 55; the -commercium- is implied in the “like laws.” That the old Phoenician colonies were included among the Liby-phoenicians, is shown by the designation of Hippo as a Liby-phoenician city (Liv. xxv. 40); on the other hand as to the settlements founded from Carthage, for instance, it is said in the Periplus of Hanno: “the Carthaginians resolved that Hanno should sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules and found cities of Liby-phoenicians.” In substance the word “Liby-phoenicians” was used by the Carthaginians not as a national designation, but as a category of state-law. This view is quite consistent with the fact that grammatically the name denotes Phoenicians mingled with Libyans (Liv. xxi. 22, an addition to the text of Polybius); in reality, at least in the institution of very exposed colonies, Libyans were frequently associated with Phoenicians (Diod. xiii. 79; Cic. pro Scauro, 42). The analogy in name and legal position between the Latins of Rome and the Liby-phoenicians of Carthage is unmistakable.
4. The Libyan or Numidian alphabet, by which we mean that which was and is employed by the Berbers in writing their non-Semitic language —one of the innumerable alphabets derived from the primitive Aramaean one—certainly appears to be more closely related in several of its forms to the latter than is the Phoenician alphabet; but it by no means follows from this, that the Libyans derived their writing not from Phoenicians but from earlier immigrants, any more than the partially older forms of the Italian alphabets prohibit us from deriving these from the Greek. We must rather assume that the Libyan alphabet has been derived from the Phoenician at a period of the latter earlier than the time at which the records of the Phoenician language that have reached us were written.
5. II. VII. Decline of the Roman Naval Power
6. II. VII. Decline of the Roman Naval Power
7. II. VII. The Roman Fleet
8. II. IV. Etrusco-Carthaginian Maritime Supremacy
9. The steward on a country estate, although a slave, ought, according to the precept of the Carthaginian agronome Mago (ap. Varro, R. R. i. 17), to be able to read, and ought to possess some culture. In the prologue of the “Poenulus” of Plautus, it is said of the hero of the title:-
-Et is omnes linguas scit; sed dissimulat sciens Se scire; Poenus plane est; quid verbit opus’t-?
10. Doubts have been expressed as to the correctness of this number, and the highest possible number of inhabitants, taking into account the available space, has been reckoned at 250,000. Apart from the uncertainty of such calculations, especially as to a commercial city with houses of six stories, we must remember that the numbering is doubtless to be understood in a political, not in an urban, sense, just like the numbers in the Roman census, and that thus all Carthaginians would be included in it, whether dwelling in the city or its neighbourhood, or resident in its subject territory or in other lands. There would, of course, be a large number of such absentees in the case of Carthage; indeed it is expressly stated that in Gades, for the same reason, the burgess-roll always showed a far higher number than that of the citizens who had their fixed residence there.
11. II. VII. System of Government, note
The War between Rome and Carthage Concerning Sicily
State of Sicily
For upwards of a century the feud between the Carthaginians and the rulers of Syracuse had devastated the fair island of Sicily. On both sides the contest was carried on with the weapons of political proselytism, for, while Carthage kept up communications with the aristocratic-republican opposition in Syracuse, the Syracusan dynasts maintained relations with the national party in the Greek cities that had become tributary to Carthage. On both sides armies of mercenaries
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
Hiero of Syracuse
War between the Syracusans and the Mammertines
It is not becoming in the historian either to excuse the perfidious crime by which the Mamertines seized their power, or to forget that the God of history does not necessarily punish the sins of the fathers to the fourth generation. He who feels it his vocation to judge the sins of others may condemn the human agents; for Sicily it might be a blessing that a warlike power, and one belonging to the island, thus began to be formed in it—a power which was already able to bring eight thousand men into the field, and which was gradually putting itself in a position to take up at the proper time and on its own resources that struggle against the foreigners, to the maintenance of which the Hellenes, becoming more and more unaccustomed to arms notwithstanding their perpetual wars, were no longer equal.
In the first instance, however, things took another turn. A young Syracusan officer, who by his descent from the family of Gelo and his intimate relations of kindred with king Pyrrhus as well as by the distinction with which he had fought in the campaigns of the latter, had attracted the notice of his fellow-citizens as well as of the Syracusan soldiery—Hiero, son of Hierocles—was called by military election to command the army, which was at variance with the citizens (479-480). By his prudent administration, the nobility of his character, and the moderation of his views, he rapidly gained the hearts of the citizens of Syracuse—who had been accustomed to the most scandalous lawlessness in their despots—and of the Sicilian Greeks in general. He rid himself—in a perfidious manner, it is true—of the insubordinate army of mercenaries, revived the citizen-militia, and endeavoured, at first with the title of general, afterwards with that of king, to re-establish the deeply sunken Hellenic power by means of his civic troops and of fresh and more manageable recruits. With the Carthaginians, who in concert with the Greeks had driven king Pyrrhus from the island, there was at that time peace. The immediate foes of the Syracusans were the Mamertines. They were the kinsmen of those hated mercenaries whom the Syracusans had recently extirpated; they had murdered their own
The Mammertines Received into the Italian Confederacy
It was a moment of the deepest significance in the history of the world, when the envoys of the Mamertines appeared in the Roman senate. No one indeed could then anticipate all that was to depend on the crossing of that narrow arm of the sea; but that the decision, however it should go, would involve consequences far other and more important than had attached to any decree hitherto passed by the senate, must have been manifest to every one of the deliberating fathers of the city. Strictly upright men might indeed ask how it was possible to deliberate at all, and how any one could even think of suggesting that the Romans should not only break their alliance with Hiero, but should, just after the Campanians of Rhegium had been punished by them with righteous severity, admit the no less guilty Sicilian accomplices to the alliance and friendship of the state, and thereby rescue them from the punishment which they deserved. Such an outrage on propriety would not only afford their adversaries matter for declamation, but must seriously offend all men of moral feeling. But even the statesman, with whom political morality was no mere phrase, might ask in reply, how Roman burgesses, who had broken their military oath and treacherously murdered the allies of Rome, could be placed on a level with foreigners who had committed an outrage on foreigners, where no one had constituted the Romans judges of the one or avengers of the other? Had the question been only whether the Syracusans or Mamertines should rule in Messana, Rome might certainly have acquiesced
Variance between Rome and Carthage
Carthaginians in Messana
Messana Seized by the Romans
War between the Romans and the Carthaginians and the
Syracusans
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
Peace with Hiero
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
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.
Beginning of the Maritime War
The Romans Build a Fleet
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
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.
Naval Victory at Mylae
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 War on the Coasts of Sicily and Sardinia
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.
They chose, in the first instance, the former plan of operations. In the year after the battle of Mylae (495) the consul Lucius Scipio captured the port of Aleria in Corsica—we still possess the tombstone of the general, which makes mention of this deed—and made Corsica a naval station against Sardinia. An attempt to establish a footing in Ulbia on the northern coast of that island failed, because the fleet wanted troops for landing. In the succeeding year (496) it was repeated with better success, and the open villages along the coast were plundered; but no permanent establishment of the Romans took place. Nor was greater progress made in Sicily. Hamilcar conducted the war with energy and adroitness, not only by force of arms on sea and land, but also by political proselytism. Of the numerous small country towns some every year fell away from the Romans, and had to be laboriously wrested afresh from the Phoenician grasp; while in the coast fortresses the Carthaginians maintained themselves
Attack on Africa
Naval Victory of Ecnomus
Weary of a course of operations without results, and impatient to put an end to the war, the senate resolved to change its system, and to assail Carthage in Africa. In the spring of 498 a fleet of 330 ships of the line set sail for the coast of Libya: at the mouth of the river Himera on the south coast of Sicily it embarked the army for landing, consisting of four legions, under the charge of the two consuls Marcus Atilius Regulus and Lucius Manlius Volso, both experienced generals. The Carthaginian admiral suffered the embarkation of the enemy’s troops to take place; but on continuing their voyage towards Africa the Romans found the Punic fleet drawn up in order of battle off Ecnomus to protect its native land from invasion. Seldom have greater numbers fought at sea than were engaged in the battle that now ensued. The Roman fleet: of 330 sail contained at least 100,000 men in its crews, besides the landing army of about 40,000; the Carthaginian of 350 vessels was manned by at least an equal number; so that well-nigh three hundred thousand men were brought into action on this day to decide the contest between the two mighty civic communities. The Phoenicians were placed in a single widely-extended line, with their left wing resting on the Sicilian coast. The Romans arranged themselves in a triangle, with the ships of the two consuls as admirals at the apex, the first and second squadrons drawn out in oblique line to the right and left, and a third squadron, having the vessels built for the transport of the cavalry in tow, forming the line which closed the triangle. They thus bore down in close order on the enemy. A fourth squadron placed in reserve followed more slowly. The wedge-shaped attack broke without difficulty the Carthaginian line, for its centre, which was first assailed, intentionally gave way, and the battle resolved itself into three separate engagements. While the admirals with
Landing of Regulus in Africa
Notwithstanding its considerable loss, the Carthaginian fleet did not give up the protection of Africa, and with that view returned to the gulf of Carthage, where it expected the descent to take place and purposed to give battle a second time. But the Romans landed, not on the western side of the peninsula which helps to form the gulf, but on the eastern side, where the bay of Clupea presented a spacious harbour affording protection in almost all winds, and the town, situated close by the sea on a shield-shaped eminence rising out of the plain, supplied an excellent defence for the harbour. They disembarked the troops without hindrance from the enemy, and established themselves on the hill; in a short time an entrenched naval camp was constructed, and the land army was at liberty to commence operations. The Roman troops ranged over the country and levied contributions: they were able to send as many as 20,000 slaves to Rome. Through the rarest good fortune the bold scheme had succeeded at the first stroke, and with but slight sacrifices: the end seemed attained. The feeling of confidence that in this respect animated the Romans is evinced by the resolution of the senate to recall to Italy the greater portion of the fleet and half of the army; Marcus Regulus alone remained in Africa with 40 ships, 15,000 infantry, and 500 cavalry. Their confidence, however, was seemingly not overstrained. The Carthaginian army, which
Vain Negotiations for Peace
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
The mighty enthusiasm, which is wont to blaze up nobly among Oriental nations, even the most abased, on the approach of extreme peril—the energy of dire necessity—impelled the Carthaginians to exertions, such as were by no means expected from a nation of shopkeepers. Hamilcar, who had carried on the guerilla war against the Romans in Sicily with so much success, appeared in Libya with the flower of the Sicilian troops, which furnished an admirable nucleus for the newly-levied force. The connections and gold of the Carthaginians, moreover, brought to them excellent Numidian horsemen in troops, and also numerous Greek mercenaries; amongst whom was the celebrated captain Xanthippus of Sparta, whose talent for organization and strategical skill were of great service to his new masters.(6) While the Carthaginians were thus making their preparations in the course of the winter, the Roman general remained inactive at Tunes. Whether it was that he did not anticipate the storm which was gathering over his head, or that a sense of military honour prohibited him from doing what his position demanded—instead of renouncing a siege which he was not in a condition even to attempt, and shutting himself up in the stronghold of Clupea, he remained with a handful of men before the walls of the hostile capital, neglecting even to secure his line of retreat to the naval camp, and neglecting to provide himself with —what above all he wanted, and what might have been so easily obtained through negotiation with the revolted Numidian tribes —a good light cavalry. He thus wantonly brought himself and his army into a plight similar to that which formerly befell Agathocles in his desperate adventurous expedition.
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.
Recommencement of the War in Sicily
After successes so immense the Carthaginians were able to resume their offensive operations, which had long been in abeyance. Hasdrubal son of Hanno landed at Lilybaeum with a strong force, which was enabled, particularly by its enormous number of elephants—amounting to 140 —to keep the field against the Romans: the last battle had shown that it was possible to make up for the want of good infantry to some extent by elephants and cavalry. The Romans also resumed the war in Sicily; the annihilation of their invading army had, as the voluntary evacuation of Clupea shows, at once restored ascendency in the senate to the party which was opposed to the war in Africa and was content with the gradual subjugation of the islands. But for this purpose too there was need of a fleet; and, since that which had conquered at Mylae, at Ecnomus, and at the Hermaean promontory was destroyed, they built a new one. Keels were at once laid down for 220 new vessels of war—they had never hitherto undertaken the building of so many simultaneously—and
In the ensuing year (501) the consuls, instead of pursuing sure advantages in Sicily, preferred to make an expedition to Africa, for the purpose not of landing but of plundering the coast towns. They accomplished their object without opposition; but, after having first run aground in the troublesome, and to their pilots unknown, waters of the Lesser Syrtis, whence they with difficulty got clear again, the fleet encountered a storm between Sicily and Italy, which cost more than 150 ships. On this occasion also the pilots, notwithstanding their representations and entreaties to be allowed to take the course along the coast, were obliged by command of the consuls to steer straight from Panormus across the open sea to Ostia.
Suspension of the Maritime War
Roman Victory at Panormus
Despondency now seized the fathers of the city; they resolved to reduce their war-fleet to sixty sail, and to confine the war by sea to the defence of the coasts, and to the convoy of transports. Fortunately, just at this time, the languishing war in Sicily took a more favourable turn. In the year 502, Thermae, the last point which the Carthaginians held on the north coast, and the important island of Lipara, had fallen into the hands of the Romans, and in the following year (summer of 503) the consul Lucius Caecilius Metellus achieved a brilliant victory over the army of elephants under the walls of Panormus. These animals, which had been imprudently brought forward, were wounded by the light troops of the Romans stationed in the moat of the town; some of them fell into the moat, and others fell back on their own troops, who crowded in wild disorder along with the elephants towards the beach, that they might be picked up by the Phoenician ships. One hundred and twenty elephants were captured, and the Carthaginian army, whose strength depended on these animals, was obliged once more to shut itself up in its fortresses. Eryx soon fell into the hands of the Romans (505), and the Carthaginians retained nothing in the island but Drepana and Lilybaeum. Carthage a second time offered peace; but the victory of Metellus and the exhaustion of the enemy gave to the more energetic party the upper hand in the senate.
Siege of Lilybaeum
Peace was declined, and it was resolved to prosecute in earnest the siege of the two Sicilian cities and for this purpose to send to sea once more a fleet of 200 sail. The siege of Lilybaeum, the first great and regular siege undertaken by Rome, and one of the most obstinate known in history, was opened by the Romans with an important success: they succeeded in introducing their fleet into the harbour of the city, and in blockading it on the side facing the sea. The besiegers, however, were not able to close the sea completely. In spite of their sunken vessels and their palisades, and in spite of the most careful vigilance, dexterous mariners, accurately acquainted with the shallows and channels, maintained with swift-sailing vessels a regular communication between the besieged in the city and the Carthaginian fleet in the harbour of Drepana. In fact after some time a Carthaginian squadron of 50 sail succeeded in running into the harbour, in throwing a large quantity of provisions and a reinforcement of 10,000 men into the city, and in returning unmolested. The besieging land army was not much more fortunate. They began with a regular attack; machines were erected, and in a short time the batteries had demolished six of the towers flanking the walls, so that the breach soon appeared to be practicable. But the able Carthaginian commander Himilco parried this assault by giving orders for the erection of a second wall behind the breach. An attempt of the Romans to enter into an understanding with the garrison was likewise frustrated in proper time. And, after a first sally made for the purpose of burning the Roman set of machines had been repulsed, the Carthaginians succeeded during a stormy night in effecting their object. Upon this the Romans abandoned their preparations for an assault, and contented themselves with blockading the walls by land and water. The prospect of success in this way was indeed very remote, so long as they were unable wholly to preclude the entrance of the enemy’s vessels; and the army of the besiegers was in a condition not much better than that of the besieged in the city, because their supplies were frequently cut off by the numerous and bold light cavalry of the Carthaginians, and their ranks began to be thinned by the diseases indigenous to that unwholesome region. The capture of Lilybaeum, however, was of sufficient importance to induce a patient perseverance in the laborious task, which promised to be crowned in time with the desired success.
Defeat of the Roman Fleet before Drepana
Annililation of the Roman Transport Fleet
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).
Perplexity of the Romans
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
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.
Petty War in Sicily
Hamilcar Barcas
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
A Fleet Built by the Romans
Victory of Catulus at the Island Aegusa
The Roman senate, however, persevered in its inaction; the desponding party for once had the majority there. At length a number of sagacious and high-spirited men determined to save the state even without the interposition of the government, and to put an end to the ruinous Sicilian war. Successful corsair expeditions, if they had not raised the courage of the nation, had aroused energy and hope in a portion
Conclusion of Peace
The Carthaginians first crucified the unfortunate admiral—a step which did not alter the position of affairs—and then dispatched to the Sicilian general unlimited authority to conclude a peace. Hamilcar, who saw his heroic labours of seven years undone by the fault of others, magnanimously submitted to what was inevitable without on that account sacrificing either his military honour, or his nation, or his own designs. Sicily indeed could not be retained, seeing that the Romans had now command of the sea; and it was not to be expected that the Carthaginian government, which had vainly endeavoured to fill its empty treasury by a state-loan in Egypt, would make even any further attempt to vanquish the Roman fleet He therefore surrendered Sicily. The independence and integrity of the Carthaginian state and territory, on the other hand, were expressly recognized in the usual form; Rome binding herself not to enter into a separate alliance with the confederates of Carthage, and Carthage engaging not to enter into separate alliance with the confederates of Rome,—that is, with their respective subject and dependent communities; neither was to commence war, or exercise rights of sovereignty, or undertake recruiting within the other’s dominions.(8) The secondary stipulations included, of course, the gratuitous return of the Roman prisoners of war and the payment of a war contribution; but the demand of Catulus that Hamilcar should deliver up his arms and the Roman deserters was resolutely refused by the Carthaginian, and with success. Catulus desisted from his second request, and allowed the Phoenicians a free departure from Sicily for the moderate ransom of 18 -denarii- (12 shillings) per man.
If the continuance of the war appeared to the Carthaginians undesirable, they had reason to be satisfied with these terms. It may be that the natural wish to bring to Rome peace as well as triumph, the recollection of Regulus and of the many vicissitudes of the war, the consideration that such a patriotic effort as had at last decided the victory could neither be enjoined nor repeated, perhaps even the personal character of Hamilcar, concurred in influencing the Roman general to yield so much as he did. It is certain that there was dissatisfaction with the proposals of peace at Rome, and the assembly of the people, doubtless under the influence of the patriots who had accomplished the equipment of the last fleet, at first refused to ratify it. We do not know with what view this was done, and therefore we are unable to decide whether the opponents of the proposed peace in reality rejected it merely for the purpose of exacting some further concessions from the enemy, or whether, remembering that Regulus had summoned Carthage to surrender her political independence, they were resolved to continue the war till they had gained that end—so that it was no longer a question of peace, but a question of conquest. If the refusal took place with
Thus at length they came to terms. The unconquered general of a vanquished nation descended from the mountains which he had defended so long, and delivered to the new masters of the island the fortresses which the Phoenicians had held in their uninterrupted possession for at least four hundred years, and from whose walls all assaults of the Hellenes had recoiled unsuccessful. The west had peace (513).
Remarks on the Roman Conduct of the War
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.
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
Far more difficult to be overcome were those deficiencies, which could not be remedied without an alteration of the constitution. That the senate, according to the strength of the contending parties within it, should leap from one system of conducting the war to another, and perpetrate errors so incredible as the evacuation of Clupea and the repeated dismantling of the fleet; that the general of one year should lay siege to Sicilian towns, and his successor, instead of compelling them to surrender, should pillage the African coast or think proper to risk a naval battle; and that at any rate the supreme command should by law change hands every year—all these anomalies could not be done away without stirring constitutional questions the solution of which was more difficult than the building of a fleet, but as little could their retention be reconciled with the requirements of such a war. Above all, moreover, neither the senate nor the generals could at once adapt themselves to the new mode of conducting war. The campaign of Regulus is an instance how singularly they adhered to the idea that superiority in tactics decides everything. There are few generals who have had such successes thrown as it were into their lap by fortune: in the year 498 he stood precisely where Scipio stood fifty years later, with this difference, that he had no Hannibal and no experienced army arrayed against him. But the senate withdrew half the army, as soon as they had satisfied themselves of the tactical superiority of the Romans; in blind reliance on that superiority the general remained where he was, to be beaten in strategy, and accepted battle when it was offered to him, to be beaten also in tactics. This was the more remarkable, as Regulus was an able and experienced general of his kind. The rustic method of warfare, by which Etruria and Samnium had been won, was the very cause of the defeat in the plain of Tunes. The principle, quite right in its own province, that every true burgher is fit for
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.
1. II. V. Campanian Hellenism
2. II. VII. Submission of Lower Italy
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.
4. II. VII. Submission of Lower Italy
5. II. VII. Last Struggles in Italy
6. The statement, that the military talent of Xanthippus was the primary means of saving Carthage, is probably coloured; the officers of Carthage can hardly have waited for foreigners to teach them that the light African cavalry could be more appropriately employed on the plain than among hills and forests. From such stories, the echo of the talk of Greek guardrooms, even Polybius is not free. The statement that Xanthippus was put to death by the Carthaginians after the victory, is a fiction; he departed voluntarily, perhaps to enter the Egyptian service.
7. Nothing further is known with certainty as to the end of Regulus; even his mission to Rome—which is sometimes placed in 503, sometimes in 513—is very ill attested. The later Romans, who sought in the fortunes and misfortunes of their forefathers mere materials for school themes, made Regulus the prototype of heroic misfortune as they made Fabricius the prototype of heroic poverty, and put into circulation in his name a number of anecdotes invented by way of due accompaniment—incongruous embellishments, contrasting ill with serious and sober history.
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).
The Extension of Italy to Its Natural Boundaries
Natural Boundaries of Italy
The Italian confederacy as it emerged from the crises of the fifth century—or, in other words, the State of Italy—united the various civic and cantonal communities from the Apennines to the Ionian Sea under the hegemony of Rome. But before the close of the fifth century these limits were already overpassed in both directions, and Italian communities belonging to the confederacy had sprung up beyond the Apennines and beyond the sea. In the north the republic, in revenge for ancient and recent wrongs, had already in 471 annihilated the Celtic Senones; in the south, through the great war from 490 to 513, it had dislodged the Phoenicians from the island of Sicily. In the north there belonged to the combination headed by Rome the Latin town of Ariminum (besides the burgess-settlement of Sena), in the south the community of the Mamertines in Messana, and as both were nationally of Italian origin, so both shared in the common rights and obligations of the Italian confederacy. It was probably the pressure of events at the moment rather than any comprehensive political calculation, that gave rise to these extensions of the confederacy; but it was natural that now at least, after the great successes achieved against Carthage, new and wider views of policy should dawn upon the Roman government—views which even otherwise were obviously enough suggested by the physical features of the peninsula. Alike in a political and in a military point of view Rome was justified in shifting its northern boundary from the low and easily crossed Apennines to the mighty mountain-wall that separates northern from southern Europe, the Alps, and in combining with the sovereignty of Italy the sovereignty of the seas and islands on the west and east of the peninsula; and now, when by the expulsion of the Phoenicians from Sicily the most difficult portion of the task had been already achieved, various circumstances united to facilitate its completion by the Roman government.
Sicily a Dependency of Italy
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,
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
Method of Administration in the Transmarine Possessions
Provincial Praetors
The acquisition of the islands in the western sea of Italy introduced into the state administration of Rome a distinction, which to all appearance originated in mere considerations of convenience and almost accidentally, but nevertheless came to be of the deepest importance for all time following—the distinction between the continental and transmarine forms of administration, or to use the appellations afterwards current, the distinction between Italy and the provinces. Hitherto the two chief magistrates of the community, the consuls, had not had any legally defined sphere of action; on the contrary their official field extended as far as the Roman government itself. Of course, however, in practice they made a division of functions between them, and of course also they were bound in every particular department of their duties by the enactments existing in regard to it; the jurisdiction, for instance, over Roman citizens had in every case to be left to the praetor, and in the Latin and other autonomous communities the existing treaties had to be respected. The four quaestors who had been
Organization of the Provinces
-Commercium-
Property
Autonomy
This difference in the supreme administrative power was the essential distinction between the transmarine and continental possessions. The principles on which Rome had organized the dependent lands in Italy, were in great part transferred also to the extra-Italian possessions. As a matter of course, these communities without exception lost independence in their external relations. As to internal intercourse, no provincial could thenceforth acquire valid property in the province out of the bounds of his own community, or perhaps even conclude a valid marriage. On the other hand the Roman government allowed, at least to the Sicilian towns which they had not to fear, a certain federative organization, and probably even general Siceliot diets with a harmless right of petition and complaint.(6) In monetary arrangements it was not indeed practicable at once to declare the Roman currency to be the only valid tender in the islands; but it seems from the first to have obtained legal circulation, and in like manner, at least as a rule, the right of coining in precious metals seems to have been withdrawn from the cities in Roman Sicily.(7)
Tenths and Customs
Communities Exempted
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
Italy and the Provinces
It is true that this thorough distinction between the communities that furnished contingents and those that paid tribute, or at least did not furnish contingents, was not in law necessarily coincident with the distinction between Italy and the provinces. Transmarine communities might belong to the Italian confederacy; the Mamertines for example were substantially on a level with the Italian Sabellians, and there existed no legal obstacle to the establishment even of new communities with Latin rights in Sicily and Sardinia any more than in the country beyond the Apennines. Communities on the mainland might be deprived of the right of bearing arms and become tributary; this arrangement was already the case with certain Celtic districts on the Po, and was introduced to a considerable extent in after times. But, in reality, the communities that furnished contingents just as decidedly preponderated on the mainland as the tributary communities in the islands; and while Italian settlements were not contemplated on the part of the Romans either in Sicily with its Hellenic civilization or in Sardinia, the Roman government had beyond doubt already determined not only to subdue the barbarian land between the Apennines and the Alps, but also, as their conquests advanced, to establish in it new communities of Italic origin
Events on the Adriatic Coasts
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.
For a direct interference of the Romans in the affairs of the eastern powers there was no immediate need. The Achaean league, the prosperity of which was arrested by the narrow-minded coterie-policy of Aratus, the Aetolian republic of military adventurers, and the decayed Macedonian empire kept each other in check; and the Romans of that time avoided rather than sought transmarine acquisitions. When the Acarnanians, appealing to the ground that they alone of all the
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.
With whole squadrons of their swift-sailing biremes, the veil-known “Liburnian” cutters, the Illyrians waged war by sea and along the coasts against all and sundry. The Greek settlements in these regions, the island-towns of Issa (Lissa) and Pharos (Lesina), the important ports of Epidamnus (Durazzo) and Apollonia (to the north of Avlona on the Aous) of course suffered especially, and were repeatedly beleaguered by the barbarians. Farther to the south, moreover, the corsairs established themselves in Phoenice, the most flourishing town of Epirus; partly voluntarily, partly by constraint, the Epirots and Acarnanians entered into an unnatural symmachy with the foreign freebooters; the coast was insecure even as far as Elis and Messene. In vain the Aetolians and Achaeans collected what ships they had, with a view to check the evil: in a battle on the open sea they were beaten by the pirates and their Greek allies; the corsair fleet was able at length to take possession even of the rich and important island of Corcyra (Corfu). The complaints of Italian mariners, the appeals for aid of their old allies the Apolloniates, and the urgent entreaties of the besieged Issaeans at length compelled the Roman senate to send at least ambassadors to Scodra. The brothers Gaius and Lucius Coruncanius went thither to demand that king Agron should put an end to the disorder. The king answered that according to the national law of the Illyrians piracy was a lawful trade, and that the government had no right to put a stop to privateering; whereupon Lucius Coruncanius replied, that in that case Rome would make it her business to introduce a better law among the Illyrians. For this certainly not very diplomatic reply one
Acquisition of Territory in Illyria
Impression in Greece and Macedonia
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
Macedonia was silent; it was not in a condition to protest in arms, and disdained to do so in words. No resistance was encountered. Nevertheless Rome, by seizing the keys to her neighbour’s house, had converted that neighbour into an adversary who, should he recover his power, or should a favourable opportunity occur, might be expected to know how to break the silence. Had the energetic and prudent king Antigonus Doson lived longer, he would have doubtless taken up the gauntlet which the Romans had flung down, for, when some years afterwards the dynast Demetrius of Pharos withdrew from the hegemony of Rome, prosecuted piracy contrary to the treaty in concert with the Istrians, and subdued the Atintanes whom the Romans had declared independent, Antigonus formed an alliance with him, and the troops of Demetrius fought along with the army of Antigonus at the battle of Sellasia (532). But Antigonus died (in the winter 533-4); and his successor Philip, still a boy, allowed the Consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus to attack the ally of Macedonia, to destroy his capital, and to drive him from his kingdom into exile (535).
Northern Italy
The mainland of Italy proper, south of the Apennines, enjoyed profound peace after the fall of Tarentum: the six days’ war with Falerii (513) was little more than an interlude. But towards the north, between the territory of the confederacy and the natural boundary of Italy—the chain of the Alps—there still extended a wide region which was not subject to the Romans. What was regarded as the boundary of Italy on the Adriatic coast was the river Aesis immediately above Ancona. Beyond this boundary the adjacent properly Gallic territory as far as, and including, Ravenna belonged in a similar way as did Italy proper to the Roman alliance; the Senones, who had formerly settled there, were extirpated in the war of 471-2,(12) and the several townships were connected with Rome, either as burgess-colonies, like Sena Gallica,(13) or as allied towns, whether with Latin rights, like Ariminum,(14) or with Italian rights, like Ravenna. On the wide region beyond Ravenna as far as the Alps non-Italian peoples were settled. South of the Po the strong Celtic tribe of the Boii still held its ground (from Parma to Bologna); alongside of them, the Lingones on the east and the Anares on the west (in the region of Parma)—two smaller Celtic cantons presumably clients of the Boii— peopled the plain. At the western end of the plain the Ligurians began, who, mingled with isolated
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
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
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.
The Celts Conquered by Rome
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.
Romanization of the Entire of Italy
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
1. III. II. Evacuation of Africa
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.
3. III. II. The War on the Coasts of Sicily and Sardinia
4. III. VIII. Changes in Procedure
5. II. I. Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers
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.
8. This is implied in Hiero’s expression (Liv. xxii. 37): that he knew that the Romans made use of none but Roman or Latin infantry and cavalry, and employed “foreigners” at most only among the light-armed troops.
9. This is shown at once by a glance at the map, and also by the remarkable exceptional provision which allowed the Centuripans to buy to any part of Sicily. They needed, as Roman spies, the utmost freedom of movement We may add that Centuripa appears to have been among the first cities that went over to Rome (Diodorus, l. xxiii. p. 501).
10. This distinction between Italy as the Roman mainland or consular sphere on the one hand, and the transmarine territory or praetorial sphere on the other, already appears variously applied in the sixth century. The ritual rule, that certain priests should not leave Rome (Val. Max. i. i, 2), was explained to mean, that they were not allowed to cross the sea (Liv. Ep. 19, xxxvii. 51; Tac. Ann. iii. 58, 71; Cic. Phil. xi. 8, 18; comp. Liv. xxviii. 38, 44, Ep. 59). To this head still more definitely belongs the interpretation which was proposed in 544 to be put upon the old rule, that the consul might nominate the dictator only on “Roman ground”: viz. that “Roman ground” comprehended all Italy (Liv. xxvii. 5). The erection of the Celtic land between the Alps and Apennines into a special province, different from that of the consuls and subject to a separate Standing chief magistrate, was the work of Sulla. Of course no one will Urge as an objection to this view, that already in the sixth century Gallia or Ariminum is very often designated as the “official district” (-provincia-), usually of one of the consuls. -Provincia-, as is well known, was in the older language not—what alone it denoted subsequently—a definite space assigned as a district to a standing chief magistrate, but the department of duty fixed for the individual consul, in the first instance by agreement with his colleague, under concurrence of the senate; and in this sense frequently individual regions in northern Italy, or even North Italy generally, were assigned to individual consuls as -provincia-.
11. A standing Roman commandant of Corcyra is apparently mentioned in Polyb. xxii. 15, 6 (erroneously translated by Liv. xxxviii. ii, comp. xlii. 37), and a similar one in the case of Issa in Liv. xliii. 9. We have, moreover, the analogy of the -praefectus pro legato insularum Baliarum- (Orelli, 732), and of the governor of Pandataria (Inscr. Reg. Neapol. 3528). It appears, accordingly, to have been a rule in the Roman administration to appoint non-senatorial -praefecti- for the more remote islands. But these “deputies” presuppose in the nature of the case a superior magistrate who nominates and superintends them; and this superior magistracy can only have been at this period that of the consuls. Subsequently, after the erection of Macedonia and Gallia Cisalpina into provinces, the superior administration was committed to one of these two governors; the very territory now in question, the nucleus of the subsequent Roman province of Illyricum, belonged, as is well known, in part to Caesar’s district of administration.
12. III. VII. The Senones Annihilated
13. III. VII. Breach between Rome and Tarentum
14. III. VII. Construction of New Fortresses and Roads
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.
Hamilcar and Hannibal
Situation of Carthage after the Peace
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
War Party and Peace Party in Carthage
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
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
Hamilcar Commander-in-Chief
So they left the constitution untouched, and the chiefs of the government in full enjoyment of their exclusive privileges and of the public property. It was merely proposed and carried, that of the two commanders-in-chief, who at the end of the Libyan war were at the head of the Carthaginian troops, Hanno and Hamilcar, the former should be recalled, and the latter should be nominated commander-in-chief for all Africa during an indefinite period. It was arranged that he should hold a position independent of the governing corporations —his antagonists called it an unconstitutional monarchical power, Cato calls it a dictatorship—and that he could only be recalled and placed upon his trial by the popular assembly.(2) Even the choice of a successor was to be vested not in the authorities of the capital, but in the army, that is, in the Carthaginians serving in the array as gerusiasts or officers, who were named in treaties also along with the general; of course the right of confirmation was reserved to the popular assembly at home. Whether this may or may not have been a usurpation, it clearly indicates that the war party regarded and treated the army as its special domain.
The commission which Hamilcar thus received sounded but little liable to exception. Wars with the Numidian tribes on the borders never ceased; only a short time previously the “city of a hundred gates,” Theveste (Tebessa), in the interior had been occupied by the Carthaginians. The task of continuing this border warfare, which was allotted to the new commander-in-chief of Africa, was not in itself of such importance as to prevent the Carthaginian government, which was allowed to do as it liked in its own immediate sphere, from tacitly conniving at the decrees passed in reference to the matter by the popular assembly; and the Romans did not perhaps recognize its significance at all.
Hamilcar’s War Projects
The Army
The Citizens
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,
Hamilcar Proceed to Spain
Spanish Kingdom of the Barcides
The new commander-in-chief of Libya departed from Carthage immediately after the termination of the mercenary war (perhaps in the spring of 518). He apparently meditated an expedition against the free Libyans in the west. His army, which was especially strong in elephants, marched along the coast; by its side sailed the fleet, led by his faithful associate Hasdrubal. Suddenly tidings came that he had crossed the sea at the Pillars of Hercules and had landed in Spain, where he was waging war with the natives—with people who had done him no harm, and without orders from his government, as the Carthaginian authorities complained. They could not complain at any rate that he neglected the affairs of Africa; when the Numidians once more rebelled, his lieutenant Hasdrubal so effectually routed them that for a long period there was tranquillity on the frontier, and several tribes hitherto independent submitted to pay tribute. What he personally did in Spain, we are no longer able to trace in detail. His achievements compelled Cato the elder, who, a generation after Hamilcar’s death, beheld in Spain the still fresh traces of his working, to exclaim, notwithstanding all his hatred of the Carthaginians, that no king was worthy to be named by the side of Hamilcar Barcas. The results still show to us, at least in a general way, what was accomplished by Hamilcar as a soldier and a statesman in the last nine years of his life (518-526)—till in the flower of his age, fighting bravely in the field of battle, he met his death like Scharn-horst just as his plans were beginning to reach maturity—and what during the next eight years (527-534) the heir of his office and of his plans, his son-in-law Hasdrubal, did to prosecute, in the spirit of the master, the work which Hamilcar had begun. Instead of the small entrepot for trade, which, along with the protectorate over Gades, was all that Carthage had hitherto possessed on the Spanish coast, and which she had treated as a dependency of Libya, a Carthaginian kingdom was founded in Spain by the generalship of Hamilcar, and confirmed by the adroit statesmanship of Hasdrubal. The fairest regions of Spain, the southern and eastern coasts,
The Carthaginian Government and the Barcides
So far as Carthage was concerned, the Barcides were allowed to go on. Since the citizens were not asked for regular contributions, but on the contrary some benefit accrued to them and commerce recovered in Spain what it had lost in Sicily and Sardinia, the Spanish war and the Spanish army with its brilliant victories and important successes soon became so popular that it was even possible in particular emergencies, such as after Hamilcar’s fall, to effect the despatch of considerable reinforcements of African troops to Spain; and the governing party, whether well or ill affected, had to maintain silence, or at any rate to content themselves with complaining to each other or to their friends in Rome regarding the demagogic officers and the mob.
The Roman Government and the Barcides
On the part of Rome too nothing took place calculated seriously to alter the course of Spanish affairs. The first and chief cause of the inactivity of the Romans was undoubtedly their very want of acquaintance with the circumstances of the remote peninsula—which was certainly also Hamilcar’s main reason for selecting Spain and not, as might otherwise have been possible, Africa itself for the execution of his plan. The explanations with which the Carthaginian generals met the Roman commissioners sent to Spain to procure information on the spot, and their assurances that all this was done only to provide the means of promptly
Hannibal
Thus the smiles of fortune inaugurated the brilliantly conceived project of Hamilcar. The means of war were acquired—a numerous army accustomed to combat and to conquer, and a constantly replenished exchequer; but, in order that the right moment might be discovered for the struggle and that the right direction might be given to it, there was wanted a leader. The man, whose head and heart had in a desperate emergency and amidst a despairing people paved the way for their deliverance, was no more, when it became possible to carry out his design. Whether his successor Hasdrubal forbore to make the attack because the proper moment seemed to him to have not yet come, or whether, more a statesman than a general, he believed himself unequal to the conduct of the enterprise, we are unable to determine. When, at the beginning of 534, he fell by the hand of an assassin, the Carthaginian officers of the Spanish army summoned to fill his place Hannibal, the eldest son of Hamilcar. He was still a young man—born in 505, and now, therefore, in his twenty-ninth year; but his had already been a life of manifold experience. His first recollections pictured to him his father fighting in a distant land and conquering on Ercte; he had keenly shared that unconquered father’s feelings on the peace of Catulus, on the bitter return home, and throughout the horrors of the Libyan war. While yet a boy, he had followed his father to the camp; and he soon distinguished himself. His light and firmly-knit frame made him an excellent runner and fencer, and a fearless rider at full speed; the privation of sleep did not affect him, and he knew like a soldier how to enjoy or to dispense with
Rupture between Rome and Carthage
Hannibal resolved immediately after his nomination (in the spring of 534) to commence the war. The land of the Celts was still in a ferment, and a war seemed imminent between Rome and Macedonia: he had good reason now to throw off the mask without delay and to carry the war whithersoever he pleased, before the Romans began it at their own convenience with a descent on Africa. His army was soon ready to take the field, and his exchequer was filled by some razzias on a great scale; but the Carthaginian government showed itself far from desirous of despatching the declaration of war to Rome. The place of Hasdrubal, the patriotic national leader, was even more difficult to fill in Carthage than that of Hasdrubal the general in Spain; the peace party had now the ascendency at home, and persecuted the leaders of the war party with political indictments. The rulers who had already cut down and mutilated the plans of Hamilcar were by no means inclined to allow the unknown young man, who now commanded in Spain, to vent his youthful patriotism at the expense of the state; and Hannibal hesitated personally to declare war in open opposition to the legitimate authorities. He tried to provoke the Saguntines to break the peace; but they contented themselves with making a complaint to Rome. Then, when a commission from Rome appeared, he tried to drive it to a declaration of war by treating it rudely; but the commissioners saw how matters stood: they kept silence in Spain, with a view to lodge complaints at Carthage and to report at home that Hannibal was ready to strike and that war was imminent. Thus the time passed away; accounts had already come of the death of Antigonus Doson, who had suddenly died nearly at the same time with Hasdrubal; in Cisalpine Gaul the establishment of fortresses was carried on by the Romans with redoubled rapidity and energy; preparations were made in Rome for putting a speedy end in the course of the next spring to the insurrection in Illyria. Every day was precious; Hannibal formed his resolution. He sent summary intimation to Carthage that the Saguntines were making aggressions on the Torboletes, subjects of Carthage, and he must therefore attack them; and without waiting for a reply he began in the spring of 535 the siege of a town which was in alliance with Rome, or, in other words, war against Rome. We may form some idea of the views and counsels that would prevail in Carthage from the impression produced in certain circles by York’s capitulation. All “respectable men,” it was said, disapproved an attack made “without orders”; there was talk of disavowal, of surrendering the daring officer. But whether it was that dread of the army and of the multitude nearer home outweighed in the Carthaginian council the fear of Rome; or that they perceived the impossibility of retracing such a step once taken; or that the mere -vis inertiae-prevented any definite action, they resolved at length to resolve on nothing and, if not to wage war, to let it nevertheless
Preparations for Attacking Italy
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
Method of Attack
But how could Italy be attacked? He might succeed in reaching the peninsula by sea or by land; but if the project was to be no mere desperate adventure, but a military expedition with a strategic aim, a nearer basis for its operations was requisite than Spain or Africa. Hannibal could not rely for support on a fleet and a fortified harbour, for Rome was now mistress of the sea. As little did the territory of the Italian confederacy present any tenable basis. If in very different times, and in spite of Hellenic sympathies, it had withstood the shock of Pyrrhus, it was not to be expected that it would now fall to pieces on the appearance of the Phoenician general; an invading army would without doubt be crushed between the network of Roman fortresses and the firmly-consolidated confederacy. The land of the Ligurians and Celts alone could be to Hannibal, what Poland was to Napoleon in his very similar Russian campaigns. These
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
So Hannibal collected the troops, destined for the grand army, in Cartagena at the beginning of the favourable season; there were 90,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, of whom about two-thirds were Africans and a third Spaniards. The 37 elephants which they took with them were probably destined rather to make an impression on the Gauls than for serious warfare. Hannibal’s infantry no longer needed, like that led by Xanthippus, to shelter itself behind a screen of elephants, and the general had too much sagacity to employ otherwise than sparingly and with caution that two-edged weapon, which had as often occasioned the defeat of its own as of the enemy’s army. With this force the general set out in the spring of 536 from Cartagena towards the Ebro. He so far informed his soldiers as to the measures which he had taken, particularly as to the connections he had entered into with the Celts and the resources and object of the expedition, that even the common soldier, whose military instincts lengthened war had developed, felt the clear perception and the steady hand of his leader, and followed him with implicit confidence to the unknown and distant land; and the fervid address, in which he laid before them the position of their country and the demands of the Romans, the slavery certainly reserved for their dear native land, and the disgrace of the imputation that they could surrender their beloved general and his staff, kindled a soldierly and patriotic ardour in the hearts of all.
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
Hannibal on 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
Hannibal in Gaul
Scipio at Massilia
Passage of the Rhone
Arrived at the Pyrenees, Hannibal sent home a portion of his troops; a measure which he had resolved on from the first with the view of showing to the soldiers how confident their general was of success, and of checking the feeling that his enterprise was one of those from which there is no return home. With an army of 50,000 infantry and 9000 cavalry, entirely veteran soldiers, he crossed the Pyrenees without difficulty, and then took the coast route by Narbonne and Nimes through the Celtic territory, which was opened to the army partly by the connections previously formed, partly by Carthaginian gold, partly by arms. It was not till it arrived in the end of July at the Rhone opposite Avignon, that a serious resistance appeared to await it. The consul Scipio, who on his voyage to Spain had landed at Massilia (about the end of June), had there been informed that he had come too late and that Hannibal had crossed not only the Ebro but the Pyrenees. On receiving these accounts, which appear to have first opened the eyes of the Romans to the course and the object of Hannibal, the consul had temporarily given up his expedition to Spain, and had resolved in connection with the Celtic tribes of that region, who were under the influence of the Massiliots and thereby under that of Rome, to receive the Phoenicians on the Rhone, and to obstruct their passage of the river and their march into Italy. Fortunately for Hannibal, opposite to the point at which he meant to cross, there lay at the moment only the general levy of the Celts, while the consul himself with his army of 22,000 infantry and 2000 horse was still in Massilia, four days’ march farther down the stream. The messengers of the Gallic levy hastened to inform him. It was the object of Hannibal to convey his army with its numerous cavalry and elephants across the rapid stream under the eyes of the enemy, and before the arrival of Scipio; and he possessed not a single boat. Immediately by his directions all the boats belonging to the numerous navigators of the Rhone in the neighbourhood were bought up at any price, and the deficiency of boats was supplied by rafts made from felled trees; and in fact the whole numerous army could be conveyed over in one day. While this was being done, a strong division under Hanno, son of Bomilcar, proceeded by forced marches up the stream till they reached a suitable
Scipio meanwhile held councils of war in Massilia as to the proper mode of occupying the ferries of the Rhone, and was not induced to move even by the urgent messages that came from the leaders of the Celts. He distrusted their accounts, and he contented himself with detaching a weak Roman cavalry division to reconnoitre on the left bank of the Rhone. This detachment found the whole enemy’s army already transported to that bank, and occupied in bringing over the elephants which alone remained on the right bank of the stream; and, after it had warmly engaged some Carthaginian squadrons in the district of Avignon, merely for the purpose of enabling it to complete its reconnaissance—the first encounter of the Romans and Phoenicians in this war—it hastily returned to report at head-quarters. Scipio now started in the utmost haste with all his troops for Avignon; but, when he arrived there, even the Carthaginian cavalry that had been left behind to cover the passage of the elephants had already taken its departure three days ago, and nothing remained for the consul but to return with weary troops and little credit to Massilia, and to revile the “cowardly flight” of the Punic leader. Thus the Romans had for the third time through pure negligence abandoned their allies and an important line of defence; and not only so, but by passing after this first blunder from mistaken slackness to mistaken haste, and by still attempting without any prospect of success to do what might have been done with so much certainty a few days before, they let the real means of repairing their error pass out of their hands. When once Hannibal was in the Celtic territory on the Roman side of the Rhone, he could no longer be prevented from reaching the Alps; but if Scipio had at the first accounts proceeded with his whole army to Italy—the Po might have been reached by way of Genoa in seven days—and had united with his corps the weak divisions in the valley of the Po, he might have at least prepared a formidable reception for the enemy. But not only did he lose precious time in the march to Avignon, but, capable as otherwise he was, he wanted either the political courage or the military sagacity to change the destination of his corps as the change of circumstances required. He sent the main body under his brother Gnaeus to Spain, and returned himself with a few men to Pisae.
Hannibal’s Passage of the Alps
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
Results
The object was attained, but at a heavy cost. Of the 50,000 veteran infantry and the 9000 cavalry, which the army had numbered at the crossing of the Pyrenees, more than half had been sacrificed in the conflicts, the marches, and the passages of the rivers. Hannibal now, according to his own statement, numbered not more than 20,000 infantry—of whom three-fifths were Libyans and two-fifths Spaniards—and 6000 cavalry, part of them doubtless dismounted: the comparatively small loss of the latter proclaimed the excellence of the Numidian cavalry no less than the consideration of the general in making a sparing use of troops so select. A march of 526 miles or about 33 moderate days’ marching—the continuance and termination of which were disturbed by no special misfortunes on a great scale that could not be anticipated, but were, on the other hand, rendered possible only by incalculable pieces of good fortune and still more incalculable blunders of the enemy, and which yet not only cost such sacrifices, but so fatigued and demoralized the army, that it needed a prolonged rest in order to be again ready for action—is
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.
4. The much-discussed questions of topography, connected with this celebrated expedition, may be regarded as cleared up and substantially solved by the masterly investigations of Messrs. Wickham and Cramer. Respecting the chronological questions, which likewise present difficulties, a few remarks may be exceptionally allowed to have a place here.
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.
The War under Hannibal to the Battle of Cannae
Hannibal and the Italian Celts
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
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 in the Valley of the Po
Conflict on the Ticino
The Armies at Placentia
Scipio, who, with an army considerably smaller and very weak in cavalry, had the difficult task of preventing the advance of the superior force of the enemy and of repressing the movements of insurrection which everywhere were spreading among the Celts, had crossed the Po presumably at Placentia, and marched up the river to meet the enemy, while Hannibal after the capture of Turin marched downwards to relieve the Insubres and Boii. In the plain between the Ticino and the Sesia, not far from Vercelli, the Roman cavalry, which had advanced with the light infantry to make a reconnaissance in force, encountered the Punic cavalry sent out for the like purpose, both led by the generals in person. Scipio accepted battle when offered, notwithstanding the superiority of the enemy; but his light infantry, which was placed in front of the cavalry, dispersed before the charge of the heavy cavalry of the enemy, and while the latter engaged the masses of the Roman horsemen in front, the light Numidian cavalry, after having pushed aside the broken ranks of the enemy’s infantry, took the Roman horsemen in flank and rear. This decided the combat. The loss of the Romans was very considerable. The consul himself, who made up as a soldier for his deficiencies as a general, received a dangerous wound, and owed his safety entirely to the devotion of his son of seventeen, who, courageously dashing into the ranks of the enemy, compelled his squadron to follow him and rescued his father. Scipio, enlightened by this combat as to the strength of the enemy, saw the error which he had committed in posting himself, with a weaker army, in the plain with his back to the river, and resolved to return to the right bank of the Po under the eyes of his antagonist. As the operations became contracted into a narrower space and his illusions regarding Roman invincibility departed, he recovered the use of his considerable military talents, which the adventurous boldness of his youthful opponent’s plans had for a moment paralyzed. While Hannibal was preparing for a pitched battle, Scipio by a rapidly projected and steadily executed march succeeded in reaching the right bank of the river which in an evil hour he had abandoned, and broke down the bridge over the Po behind his army; the Roman detachment of 600 men charged to cover the process of destruction were, however, intercepted and made prisoners. But as the upper course of the river was in the hands of Hannibal, he could not be prevented from marching up the stream, crossing on a bridge of boats, and in a few days confronting the Roman army on the right bank. The latter had taken a position in the plain in front of Placentia; but the mutiny of a Celtic division in the Roman camp, and the Gallic insurrection breaking out afresh all around, compelled the consul to evacuate the plain and to post himself on the hills behind the Trebia.
Battle on the Trebia
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,
Hannibal Master of Northern Italy
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
Military and Political Position of Hannibal
No extraordinary exertions were made in Rome for the campaign of 537. The senate thought, and not unreasonably, that, despite the lost battle, their position was by no means fraught with serious danger. Besides the coast garrisons, which were despatched to Sardinia, Sicily, and Tarentum, and the reinforcements which were sent to Spain, the two new consuls Gaius Flaminius and Gnaeus Servilius obtained only as many men as were necessary to restore the four legions to their full complement; additions were made to the strength of the cavalry alone. The consuls had to protect the northern frontier, and stationed themselves accordingly on the two highways which led from Rome to the north, the western of which at that lime terminated at Arretium, and the eastern at Ariminum; Gaius Flaminius occupied the former, Gnaeus Servilius the latter. There they ordered the troops from the fortresses on the Po to join them, probably by water, and awaited the commencement of the favourable season, when they proposed to occupy in the defensive the passes of the Apennines, and then, taking up the offensive, to descend into the valley of the Po and effect a junction somewhere near Placentia. But Hannibal by no means intended to defend the valley of the Po. He knew Rome better perhaps than the Romans knew it themselves, and was very well aware how decidedly he was the weaker and continued to be so notwithstanding the brilliant battle on the Trebia; he knew too that his ultimate object, the humiliation of Rome, was not to be wrung from the unbending Roman pride either by terror or by surprise, but could only be gained by the actual subjugation of the haughty city. It was clearly apparent that the Italian federation was in political solidity and in military resources infinitely superior to an adversary, who received only precarious and irregular support from home, and who in Italy was dependent for primary aid solely on the vacillating and capricious nation of the Celts; and that the Phoenician foot soldier was, notwithstanding all the pains taken by Hannibal, far inferior in point of tactics to the legionary, had been completely proved by the defensive movements of Scipio and the brilliant retreat of the defeated infantry on the Trebia. From this conviction flowed the two fundamental principles which determined Hannibal’s whole method of operations in Italy—viz., that the war should be carried on, in somewhat adventurous
Hannibal Crosses the Apennines
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.
Flaminius
But the object was attained. Hannibal encamped at Fiesole, while Gaius Flaminius was still waiting at Arezzo until the roads should become passable that he might blockade them. After the Roman defensive position had thus been turned, the best course for the consul, who might perhaps have been strong enough to defend the mountain passes but certainly was unable now to face Hannibal in the open field, would have been to wait till the second army, which had now become completely superfluous at Ariminum, should arrive. He himself, however, judged otherwise. He was a political party leader, raised to distinction by his efforts to limit the power of the senate; indignant at the government in consequence of the aristocratic intrigues concocted against him during his consulship; carried away, through a doubtless justifiable opposition to their beaten track of partisanship, into a scornful defiance of tradition and custom; intoxicated at once by blind love of the common people and equally bitter hatred of the party of the nobles; and, in addition to all this, possessed with the fixed idea that he was a military genius. His campaign against the Insubres of 531, which to unprejudiced judges only showed that good! soldiers often repair the errors of bad generals,(2) was regarded by him and by his adherents as an irrefragable proof that the Romans had only to put Gaius Flaminius at the head of the army in order to make a speedy end of Hannibal. Talk of this sort had procured for him his second consulship, and hopes of this sort had now brought to his camp so great a multitude of unarmed followers eager for spoil, that their number, according to the assurance of sober historians, exceeded that of the legionaries. Hannibal based his plan in part on this circumstance. So far from attacking him, he marched past him, and caused the country all around to be pillaged by the Celts who thoroughly understood plundering, and by his numerous cavalry. The complaints and indignation of the multitude which had to submit to be plundered under the eyes of the hero who had promised to enrich them, and the protestation of the enemy that they did not believe him possessed of either the power or the resolution to undertake anything before the arrival of his colleague, could not but induce such a man to display his genius for strategy, and to give a sharp lesson to his inconsiderate and haughty foe.
Battle on the Trasimene Lake
No plan was ever more successful. In haste, the consul followed the line of march of the enemy, who passed by Arezzo and moved slowly through the rich valley of the Chiana towards Perugia. He overtook him in the district of Cortona, where Hannibal, accurately informed of his antagonist’s march, had had full time to select his field of battle—a narrow defile between two steep mountain walls, closed at its outlet by a high hill, and at its entrance by the Trasimene lake. With the flower of his infantry he barred the outlet; the light troops and the cavalry placed themselves in concealment on either side. The Roman columns advanced without hesitation into the unoccupied pass; the thick morning mist concealed from them the position of the enemy. As the head of the Roman line approached the hill, Hannibal gave the signal for battle; the cavalry, advancing behind the heights, closed the entrance of the pass, and at the same time the mist rolling away revealed the Phoenician arms everywhere along the crests on the right and left. There was no battle; it was a mere rout. Those that remained outside of the defile were driven by the cavalry into the lake. The main body was annihilated in the pass itself almost without resistance, and most of them, including the consul himself, were cut down in the order of march. The head of the Roman column, formed of 6000 infantry, cut their way through the infantry of the enemy, and proved once more the irresistible might of the legions; but, cut off from the rest of the army and without knowledge of its fate, they marched on at random, were surrounded on the following day, on a hill which they had occupied, by a corps of Carthaginian cavalry, and—as the capitulation, which promised them a free retreat, was rejected by Hannibal—were all treated as prisoners of war. 15,000 Romans had fallen, and as many were captured; in other words, the army was annihilated. The slight Carthaginian loss—1500 men—again fell mainly upon the Gauls.(3) And, as if this were not enough, immediately after the battle on the Trasimene lake, the cavalry of the army of Ariminum under Gaius Centenius, 4000 strong, which Gnaeus Servilius had sent forward for the temporary support of his colleague while he himself advanced by slow marches, was likewise surrounded by the Phoenician army, and partly slain, partly made prisoners. All Etruria was lost, and Hannibal might without hindrance march on Rome. The Romans prepared themselves for the worst; they broke down the bridges over the Tiber, and nominated Quintus Fabius Maximus dictator to repair the walls and conduct the defence, for which an army of reserve was formed. At the same time two new legions were summoned under arms in the room of those annihilated, and the fleet, which might become of importance in the event of a siege, was put in order.
Hannibal on the East Coast
Reorganization of the Carthaginian Army
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.
War in Lower Italy
Fabius
He had calculated correctly, when he chose this time for remodelling his infantry. The surprise of his antagonists, who were in constant expectation of an attack on the capital, allowed him at least four weeks of undisturbed leisure for the execution of the unprecedentedly bold experiment of changing completely his military system in the heart of a hostile country and with an army still comparatively small, and of attempting to oppose African legions to the invincible legions of Italy. But his hope that the confederacy would now begin to break up was not fulfilled. In this respect the Etruscans, who had carried on their last wars of independence mainly with Gallic mercenaries, were of less moment; the flower of the confederacy, particularly in a military point of view, consisted—next to the Latins—of the Sabellian communities, and with good reason Hannibal had now come into their neighbourhood. But one town after another closed its gates; not a single Italian community entered into alliance with the Phoenicians. This was a great, in fact an all-important, gain for the Romans. Nevertheless it was felt in the capital that it would be imprudent to put the fidelity of their allies to such a test, without a Roman army to keep the field. The dictator Quintus Fabius combined the two supplementary legions formed in Rome with the army of Ariminum, and when Hannibal marched past the Roman fortress of Luceria towards Arpi, the Roman standards appeared on his right flank at Aeca. Their leader, however, pursued a course different from that of his predecessors. Quintus Fabius was a man advanced in years, of a deliberation and firmness,
March to Capua and Back to Apulia
War in Apulia
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
Fabius and Minucius
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
New War-like Preparations in Rome
Paullus and Varro
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
Consequences of the Battle of Cannae
Prevention of Reinforcements from Spain
This unexampled success appeared at length to mature the great political combination, for the sake of which Hannibal had come to Italy. He had, no doubt, based his plan primarily upon his army; but with accurate knowledge of the power opposed to him he designed that army to be merely the vanguard, in support of which the powers of the west and east were gradually to unite their forces, so as to prepare destruction for the proud city. That support however, which seemed the most secure, namely the sending of reinforcements
Reinforcements from Spain
On the part of Carthage as much had hitherto been done in support of her general in Italy as could be expected. Phoenician squadrons threatened the coasts of Italy and of the Roman islands and guarded Africa from a Roman landing, and there the matter ended. More substantial assistance was prevented not so much by the uncertainty as to where Hannibal was to be found and the want of a port of disembarkation in Italy, as by the fact that for many years the Spanish army had been accustomed to be self-sustaining, and above all by the murmurs of the peace party. Hannibal severely felt the consequences of this unpardonable inaction; in spite of all his saving of his money and of the soldiers whom he had brought with him, his chests were gradually emptied, the pay fell into arrear, and the ranks of his veterans began to thin. But now the news of the victory of Cannae reduced even the factious opposition at home to silence. The Carthaginian senate resolved to place at the disposal of the general considerable assistance in money and men, partly from Africa, partly from Spain, including 4000 Numidian horse and 40 elephants, and to prosecute the war with energy in Spain as well as in Italy.
Alliance between Carthage and Macedonia
The long-discussed offensive alliance between Carthage and Macedonia had been delayed, first by the sudden death of Antigonus, and then by the indecision of his successor Philip and the unseasonable war waged by him and his Hellenic allies against the Aetolians (534-537). It was only now, after the battle of Cannae, that Demetrius of Pharos found Philip disposed to listen to his proposal to cede to Macedonia his Illyrian possessions—which it was necessary, no doubt, to wrest in the first place from the Romans—and it was only now that the court of Pella came to terms with Carthage. Macedonia undertook to land an invading army on the east coast of Italy, in return for which she received an assurance that the Roman possessions in Epirus should be restored to her.
Alliance between Carthage and Syracuse
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;
Attitude of the Romans
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
1. Polybius’s account of the battle on the Trebia is quite clear. If Placentia lay on the right bank of the Trebia where it falls into the Po, and if the battle was fought on the left bank, while the Roman encampment was pitched upon the right—both of which points have been disputed, but are nevertheless indisputable—the Roman soldiers must certainly have passed the Trebia in order to gain Placentia as well as to gain the camp. But those who crossed to the camp must have made their way through the disorganized portions of their own army and through the corps of the enemy that had gone round to their rear, and must then have crossed the river almost in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. On the other hand the passage near Placentia was accomplished after the pursuit had slackened; the corps was several miles distant from the field of battle, and had arrived within reach of a Roman fortress; it may even have been the case, although it cannot be proved, that a bridge led over the Trebia at that point, and that the -tete de pont- on the other bank was occupied by the garrison of Placentia. It is evident that the first passage was just as difficult as the second was easy, and therefore with good reason Polybius, military judge as he was, merely says of the corps of 10,000, that in close columns it cut its way to Placentia (iii. 74, 6), without mentioning the passage of the river which in this case was unattended with difficulty.
The erroneousness of the view of Livy, which transfers the Phoenician camp to the right, the Roman to the left bank of the Trebia, has lately been repeatedly pointed out. We may only further mention, that the site of Clastidium, near the modern Casteggio, has now been established by inscriptions (Orelli-Henzen, 5117).
2. III. III. The Celts Attacked in Their Own Land
3. The date of the battle, 23rd June according to the uncorrected calendar, must, according to the rectified calendar, fall somewhere in April, since Quintus Fabius resigned his dictatorship, after six months, in the middle of autumn (Lav. xxii. 31, 7; 32, i), and must therefore have entered upon it about the beginning of May. The confusion of the calendar (p. 117) in Rome was even at this period very great.
4. The inscription of the gift devoted by the new dictator on account of his victory at Gerunium to Hercules Victor— -Hercolei sacrom M. Minuci(us) C. f. dictator vovit- —was found in the year 1862 at Rome, near S. Lorenzo.
5. III. III. Northern Italy
The War under Hannibal from Cannae to Zama
The Crisis
The aim of Hannibal in his expedition to Italy had been to break up the Italian confederacy: after three campaigns that aim had been attained, so far as it was at all attainable. It was clear that the Greek and Latin or Latinized communities of Italy, since they had not been shaken in their allegiance by the day of Cannae, would not yield to terror, but only to force; and the desperate courage with which even in Southern Italy isolated little country towns, such as the Bruttian Petelia, maintained their forlorn defence against the Phoenicians, showed very plainly what awaited them among the Marsians and Latins. If Hannibal had expected to accomplish more in this way and to be able to lead even the Latins against Rome, these hopes had proved vain. But it appears as if even in other respects the Italian coalition had by no means produced the results which Hannibal hoped for. Capua had at once stipulated that Hannibal should not have the right to call Campanian citizens compulsorily to arms; the citizens had not forgotten how Pyrrhus had acted in Tarentum, and they foolishly imagined that they should be able to withdraw at once from the Roman and from the Phoenician rule. Samnium and Luceria were no longer what they had been, when king Pyrrhus had thought of marching into Rome at the head of the Sabellian youth.
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
Above all, he found that other antagonists were opposed to him. Taught by fearful experience, the Romans adopted a more judicious system of conducting the war, placed none but experienced officers at the head of their armies, and left them, at least where it was necessary, for a longer period in command. These generals neither looked down on the enemy’s movements from the mountains, nor did they throw themselves on their adversary wherever they found him; but, keeping the true mean between inaction and precipitation, they took up their positions in entrenched camps under the walls of fortresses, and accepted battle where victory would lead to results and defeat would not be destruction. The soul of this new mode of warfare was Marcus Claudius Marcellus. With true instinct, after the disastrous day of Cannae, the senate and people had turned their eyes to this brave and experienced officer, and entrusted him at once with the actual supreme command. He had received his training in the troublesome warfare against Hamilcar in Sicily, and had given brilliant evidence of his talents as a leader as well as of his personal valour in the last campaigns against the Celts. Although far above fifty, he still glowed with all the ardour of the most youthful soldier, and only a few years before this he had, as general, cut down the mounted general of the enemy(1)—the first and only Roman consul who achieved that feat of arms. His life was consecrated to the two divinities, to whom he erected the splendid double temple at the Capene Gate—to Honour and to Valour; and, while the merit of rescuing Rome from this extremity of danger belonged to no single individual, but pertained to the Roman citizens collectively and pre-eminently to the senate, yet no single man contributed more towards the success of the common enterprise than Marcus Marcellus.
Hannibal Proceeds to Campania
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
Renewal of the War in Campania
The War in Apulia
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
Hannibal Reduced to the Defensive
His Prospects as to Reinforcements
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
For this purpose he might, at least with more prospect of success, reckon on the leaders of the Spanish patriot army, on the connections which he had formed in Syracuse, and on the intervention of Philip. Everything depended on bringing new forces into the Italian field of war against Rome from Spain, Syracuse, or Macedonia; and for the attainment or for the prevention of this object wars were carried on in Spain, Sicily, and Greece. All of these were but means to an end, and historians have often erred in accounting them of greater importance. So far as the Romans were concerned, they were essentially defensive wars, the proper objects of which were to hold the passes of the Pyrenees, to detain the Macedonian army in Greece, to defend Messana and to bar the communication between Italy and Sicily. Of course this defensive warfare was, wherever it was possible, waged by offensive methods; and, should circumstances be favourable, it might develop into the dislodging of the Phoenicians from Spain and Sicily, and into the dissolution of Hannibal’s alliances with Syracuse and with Philip. The Italian war in itself fell for the time being into the shade, and resolved itself into conflicts about fortresses and razzias, which had no decisive effect on the main issue. Nevertheless, so long as the Phoenicians retained the offensive at all, Italy always remained the central aim of operations; and all efforts were directed towards, as all interest centred in, the doing away, or perpetuating, of Hannibal’s isolation in southern Italy.
The Sending of Reinforcements Temporarily Frustrated
Had it been possible, immediately after the battle of Cannae, to bring into play all the resources on which Hannibal thought that he might reckon, he might have been tolerably certain of success. But the position of Hasdrubal at that time in Spain after the battle on the Ebro was so critical, that the supplies of money and men, which the victory of Cannae had roused the Carthaginian citizens to furnish, were for the most part expended on Spain, without producing much improvement in the position of affairs there. The Scipios transferred the theatre of war in the following campaign (539) from the Ebro to the Guadalquivir; and in Andalusia, in the very centre of the proper Carthaginian territory, they achieved at Illiturgi and Intibili two brilliant victories. In Sardinia communications entered into with the natives led the Carthaginians to hope that they should be able to master the island, which would have been of importance as an intermediate station between Spain and Italy. But Titus Manlius Torquatus, who was sent with a Roman army to Sardinia, completely destroyed the Carthaginian landing force, and reassured to the Romans the undisputed possession of the island (539). The legions from Cannae sent to Sicily held their ground in the north and east of the island with courage and success against the Carthaginians and Hieronymus; the latter met his death towards the end of 539 by the hand of an assassin. Even in the case of Macedonia the ratification of the alliance was delayed, principally because the Macedonian envoys sent to Hannibal were captured on their homeward journey by the Roman vessels of war. Thus the dreaded invasion of the east coast was temporarily suspended; and the Romans gained time to secure the very important station of Brundisium first by their fleet and then by the land army which before the arrival of Gracchus was employed for the protection of Apulia, and even to make preparations for an invasion of Macedonia in the event of war being declared. While in Italy the war thus came to a stand, out of Italy nothing was done on the part of Carthage to accelerate the movement of new armies or fleets towards the seat of war. The Romans, again, had everywhere with the greatest energy put themselves in a state of defence, and in that defensive attitude had fought for the most part with good results wherever the genius of Hannibal was absent. Thereupon the short-lived patriotism, which the victory of Cannae had awakened in Carthage, evaporated; the not inconsiderable forces which had been organized there were, either through factious opposition or merely through unskilful attempts to conciliate the different opinions expressed in the council, so frittered away that they were nowhere of any real service, and but a very small portion arrived at the spot where they would have been most useful. At the close of 539 the reflecting Roman statesman might assure himself that the urgency of the danger was past, and that the resistance so heroically begun had but to persevere in its exertions at all points in order to achieve its object.
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.
Carthaginian Expedition to Sicily
The Carthaginian Troops Destroyed
Conquest of Syracuse
In the meanwhile Carthage, which hitherto had only supported the Syracusans with her fleets, on receiving news of their renewed rising in arms against the Romans had despatched a strong land army under Himilco to Sicily, which landed without interruption at Heraclea Minoa and immediately occupied the important town of Agrigentum. To effect a junction with Himilco, the bold and able Hippocrates marched forth from Syracuse with an army: the position of Marcellus between the garrison of Syracuse and the two hostile armies began to be critical. With the help of some reinforcements, however, which arrived from Italy, he maintained his position in the island and continued the blockade of Syracuse. On the other hand, the greater portion of the small inland towns were driven to the armies of the Carthaginians not so much by the armies of the enemy, as by the fearful severity of the Roman proceedings in the island, more especially the slaughter of the citizens of Enna, suspected of a design to revolt, by the Roman garrison which was stationed there. In 542 the besiegers of Syracuse during a festival in the city succeeded in scaling a portion of the extensive outer walls that had been deserted by the guard, and in penetrating into the suburbs which stretched from the “island” and the city proper on the shore (Achradina) towards the interior. The fortress of Euryalus, which, situated at the extreme western end of the suburbs, protected these and the principal road leading from the interior to Syracuse, was thus cut off and fell not long afterwards. When the siege of the city thus began to assume a turn favourable to the Romans, the two armies under Himilco and Hippocrates advanced to its relief, and attempted a simultaneous attack on the Roman positions, combined with an attempt at landing on the part of the Carthaginian fleet and a sally of the Syracusan garrison; but the attack was repulsed on all sides, and the two relieving armies were obliged to content themselves with encamping before the city, in the low marshy grounds along the Anapus, which in the height of summer and autumn engender pestilences fatal to those that tarry in them. These pestilences had often saved the city, oftener even than the valour of its citizens; in the times of the first Dionysius, two Phoenician armies in the act of besieging the city had been in this way destroyed under its very walls. Now fate turned the special defence of the city into the means of its destruction; while the army of Marcellus quartered in the suburbs suffered but little, fevers desolated the Phoenician and Syracusan bivouacs. Hippocrates died; Himilco and most of the Africans died also; the survivors of the two armies, mostly native Siceli, dispersed into the neighbouring cities. The Carthaginians made a further attempt to save the city from the sea side; but the admiral Bomilcar withdrew, when the Roman fleet offered him battle. Epicydes himself, who commanded in the city, now abandoned it as lost,
Guerilla War in Sicily
Agrigentum Occupied by the Romans
Sicily Tranquillized
Sicily thus appeared lost to the Carthaginians; but the genius of Hannibal exercised even from a distance its influence there. He despatched to the Carthaginian army, which remained at. Agrigentum in perplexity and inaction under Hanno and Epicydes, a Libyan cavalry officer Muttines, who took the command of the Numidian cavalry, and with his flying squadrons, fanning into an open flame the bitter hatred which the despotic rule of the Romans had excited over all the island, commenced a guerilla warfare on the most extensive scale and with the happiest results; so that he even, when the Carthaginian and Roman armies met on the river Himera, sustained some conflicts with Marcellus himself successfully. The relations, however, which prevailed between Hannibal and the Carthaginian council, were here repeated on a small scale. The general appointed by the council pursued with jealous envy the officer sent by Hannibal, and insisted upon giving battle to the proconsul without Muttines and the Numidians. The wish of Hanno was carried
Philip of Macedonia and His Delay
Macedonia might have exercised an influence over the course of events more decisive than that of Syracuse. From the Eastern powers neither furtherance nor hindrance was for the moment to be expected. Antiochus the Great, the natural ally of Philip, had, after the decisive victory of the Egyptians at Raphia in 537, to deem himself fortunate in obtaining peace from the indolent Philopator on the basis of the -status quo ante-. The rivalry of the Lagidae and the constant apprehension of a renewed outbreak of the war on the one hand, and insurrections of pretenders in the interior and enterprises of all sorts in Asia Minor, Bactria, and the eastern satrapies on the other, prevented him from joining that great anti-Roman alliance which Hannibal had in view. The Egyptian court was decidedly on the side of Rome, with which it renewed alliance in 544; but it was not to be expected of Ptolemy Philopator, that he would support otherwise than by corn-ships. Accordingly there was nothing to prevent Greece and Macedonia from throwing a decisive
National patriotism was bestirring itself in Greece as in Carthage: for a moment it seemed possible to kindle a Hellenic national war against Rome. But the general in such a crusade could only be Philip of Macedonia; and he lacked the enthusiasm and the faith in the nation, without which such a war could not be waged. He knew not how to solve the arduous problem of transforming himself from the oppressor into the champion of Greece. His very delay in the conclusion of the alliance with Hannibal damped the first and best zeal of the Greek patriots; and when he did enter into the conflict with Rome, his mode of conducting war was still less fitted to awaken sympathy and confidence. His first attempt, which was made in the very year of the battle of Cannae (538), to obtain possession of the city of Apollonia, failed in a way almost ridiculous, for Philip turned back in all haste on receiving the totally groundless report that a Roman fleet was steering for the Adriatic. This took place before there was a formal breach with Rome; when the breach at length ensued, friend and foe expected a Macedonian landing in Lower Italy. Since 539 a Roman fleet and army had been stationed at Brundisium to meet it; Philip, who was without vessels of war, was constructing a flotilla of light Illyrian barks to convey his army across. But when the endeavour had to be made in earnest, his courage failed to encounter the dreaded quinqueremes at sea; he broke the promise which he had given to his ally Hannibal to attempt a landing, and with the view of still doing something he resolved to make an attack on his own share of the spoil, the Roman possessions in Epirus (540). Nothing would have come of this even at the best; but the Romans, who well knew that offensive was preferable to defensive protection, were by no means content to remain—as Philip may have hoped—spectators of the attack from the opposite shore. The Roman fleet conveyed a division of the army from Brundisium to Epirus; Oricum was recaptured from the king, a garrison was thrown into Apollonia, and the Macedonian camp was stormed. Thereupon Philip passed from partial action to total inaction, and notwithstanding all the complaints of Hannibal, who vainly tried to breathe into such a halting and shortsighted policy his own fire and clearness of decision, he allowed some years to elapse in armed inactivity.
Rome Heads a Greek Coalition against Macedonia
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
It is neither agreeable nor necessary to follow the vicissitudes of this aimless struggle. Philip, although he was superior to each one of his opponents and repelled their attacks on all sides with energy and personal valour, yet consumed his time and strength in that profitless defensive. Now he had to turn against the Aetolians, who in concert with the Roman fleet annihilated the unfortunate Acarnanians and threatened Locris and Thessaly; now an invasion of barbarians summoned him to the northern provinces; now the Achaeans solicited his help against the predatory expeditions of Aetolians and Spartans; now king Attalus of Pergamus and the Roman admiral Publius Sulpicius with their combined fleets threatened the east coast or landed troops in Euboea. The want of a war fleet paralyzed Philip in all his movements; he even
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.
Successes of the Scipios
Syphax against Carthage
The two lieutenant-governors of the Romans in the peninsula, Gnaeus and Publius Scipio—both of them, but especially Gnaeus, good generals and excellent administrators—accomplished their task with the most brilliant success. Not only was the barrier of the Pyrenees steadfastly maintained, and the attempt to re-establish the interrupted communication by land between the commander-in-chief of the enemy and his head-quarters sternly repulsed; not only had a Spanish New Rome been created, after the model of
The Scipios Defeated and Killed
Spain South of the Ebro Lost to the Romans
Nero Sent to Spain
This turn of affairs in Africa had an important effect on the war in Spain. Hasdrubal was able once more to turn to that country (543), whither he was soon followed by considerable reinforcements and by Massinissa himself. The Scipios, who during the absence of the enemy’s general (541, 542) had continued to plunder and to gain partisans in the Carthaginian territory, found themselves unexpectedly assailed by forces so superior that they were under the necessity of either retreating behind the Ebro or calling out the Spaniards. They chose the latter course, and took into their pay 20,000 Celtiberians; and then, in order the better to encounter the three armies of the enemy under Hasdrubal Barcas, Hasdrubal the son of Gisgo, and Mago, they divided their army and did not even keep their Roman troops together. They thus prepared the way for their own destruction. While Gnaeus with his corps, containing a third of the Roman and all the Spanish troops, lay encamped opposite to Hasdrubal Barcas, the latter had no difficulty
Publius Scipio
The senate, which formed a correct judgment as to the importance and the peculiar character of the Spanish war, and had learned from the Uticenses brought in as prisoners by the Roman fleet the great exertions which were making in Carthage to send Hasdrubal and Massinissa with a numerous army over the Pyrenees, resolved to despatch to Spain new reinforcements and an extraordinary general of higher rank, the nomination of whom they deemed it expedient to leave to the people. For long—so runs the story—nobody announced himself as ready to take in hand the complicated and perilous business; but at last a young officer of twenty-seven, Publius Scipio (son of the general of the same name that had fallen in Spain), who had held the offices of military tribune and aedile, came forward to solicit it. It is incredible that the Roman senate should have left to accident an election of such importance in this meeting of the Comitia which it had itself suggested, and equally incredible that ambition and patriotism should have so died out in Rome that no tried officer presented himself for the important post. If on the other hand the eyes of the senate turned to the young, talented, and experienced officer, who had brilliantly distinguished himself in the hotly-contested days on the Ticinus and at Cannae, but who still had not the rank requisite for his coming forward as the successor of men who had been praetors and consuls, it was very natural to adopt this course, which compelled the people out of good nature to admit the only candidate notwithstanding his defective qualification, and which could not but bring both him and the Spanish expedition, which was doubtless very unpopular, into favour with the multitude. If the effect of this ostensibly unpremeditated candidature was thus calculated, it was perfectly successful. The son, who went to avenge the death of a father whose life he had saved nine years before on the Ticinus; the young man of manly beauty and long locks, who with modest blushes offered himself in the absence of a better for the post of danger; the mere military tribune, whom the votes of the centuries now raised at once to the roll of the highest magistracies—all this made a wonderful and indelible impression on
Scipio Goes to Spain
Capture of New Carthage
Publius Scipio went to Spain in 544-5, accompanied by the propraetor Marcus Silanus, who was to succeed Nero and to serve as assistant and counsellor to the young commander-in-chief, and by his intimate friend Gaius Laelius as admiral, and furnished with a legion exceeding the usual strength and a well-filled chest. His appearance on the scene was at once signalized by one of the boldest and most fortunate -coups de
Success thus crowned the bold enterprise—bold, because it was not unknown to Scipio that Hasdrubal Barcas had received orders from his government to advance towards Gaul and was engaged in fulfilling them, and because the weak division left behind on the Ebro was not in a position seriously to oppose that movement, should the return of Scipio be delayed. But he was again at Tarraco, before Hasdrubal made his appearance on the Ebro. The hazard of the game which the young general played, when he abandoned his primary task in order to execute a dashing stroke, was concealed by the fabulous success which Neptune and Scipio had gained in concert. The marvellous capture of the Phoenician capital so abundantly justified all the expectations which had been formed at home regarding the wondrous youth, that none could venture to utter any adverse opinion. Scipio’s command was indefinitely prolonged; he himself resolved no longer to confine his efforts to the meagre task of guarding the passes of the Pyrenees. Already, in consequence of the fall of New Carthage, not only had the Spaniards on the north of the Ebro completely submitted, but even beyond the Ebro the most powerful princes had exchanged the Carthaginian for the Roman protectorate.
Scipio Goes to Andalusia
Hasdrubal Crosses the Pyrenees
Scipio employed the winter of 545-6 in breaking up his fleet and increasing his land army with the men thus acquired, so that he might at once guard the north and assume the offensive in the south more energetically than before; and he marched in 546 to Andalusia. There he: encountered Hasdrubal Barcas, who, in the execution of his long-cherished plan, was moving northward to the help of his brother. A battle took place at Baecula, in which the Romans claimed the victory and professed to have made 10,000 captives; but Hasdrubal substantially attained his end, although at the sacrifice of a portion of his army. With his chest, his elephants, and the best portion of his troops, he fought his way to the north coast of Spain; marching along the shore, he reached the western passes of the Pyrenees which appear to have been unoccupied, and before the bad season began he was in Gaul, where he took up quarters for the winter. It was evident that the resolve of Scipio to combine offensive operations with the defensive which he had been instructed to maintain was inconsiderate and unwise. The immediate task assigned to the Spanish army, which not only Scipio’s father and uncle, but even Gaius Marcius and Gaius Nero had accomplished with much inferior means, was not enough for the arrogance of the victorious general at the head of a numerous army; and he was mainly to blame for the extremely critical position of Rome in the summer of 547, when the plan of Hannibal for a combined attack on the Romans was at length realized. But the gods covered the errors of their favourite with laurels. In Italy the peril fortunately passed over; the Romans were glad to accept the bulletin of the ambiguous victory of Baecula, and, when fresh tidings of victory arrived from Spain, they thought no more of the circumstance that they had had to combat the ablest general and the flower of the Hispano-Phoenician army in Italy.
Spain Conquered
Mago Goes to Italy
Gades Becomes Roman
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
Italian War
Position of the Armies
While the war was thus terminated in Sicily by Marcellus, in Greece by Publius Sulpicius, and in Spain by Scipio, the mighty struggle went on without interruption in the Italian peninsula. There after the battle of Cannae had been fought and its effects in loss or gain could by degrees be discerned, at the commencement of 540, the fifth year of the war, the dispositions of the opposing Romans and Phoenicians were the following. North Italy had been reoccupied by the Romans after the departure of Hannibal, and was protected by three legions, two of which were stationed in the Celtic territory, the third as a reserve in Picenum. Lower Italy, as far as Mount Garganus and the Volturnus, was, with the exception of the fortresses and most of the ports, in the hands of Hannibal. He lay with his main army at Arpi, while Tiberius Gracchus with four legions confronted him in Apulia, resting upon the fortresses of Luceria and Beneventum. In the land of the Bruttians, where the inhabitants had thrown themselves entirely into the arms of Hannibal, and where even the ports—excepting Rhegium, which the Romans protected from Messana—had been occupied by the Phoenicians, there was a second Carthaginian army under Hanno, which in the meanwhile saw no enemy to face it. The Roman main army of four legions under the two consuls, Quintus Fabius and Marcus Marcellus, was on the point of attempting to recover Capua. To these there fell to be
Conflicts in the South of Italy
At first the war turned chiefly towards Campania. Hannibal appeared in good time to protect its capital, which he prevented from being invested; but he was unable either to wrest any of the Campanian towns held by the Romans from their strong Roman garrisons, or to prevent —in addition to a number of less important country towns—Casilinum, which secured his passage over the Volturnus, from being taken by the two consular armies after an obstinate defence. An attempt of Hannibal to gain Tarentum, with the view especially of acquiring a safe landing-place for the Macedonian army, proved unsuccessful. Meanwhile the Bruttian army of the Carthaginians under Hanno had various encounters in Lucania with the Roman army of Apulia; here Tiberius Gracchus sustained the struggle with good results, and after a successful combat not far from Beneventum, in which the slave legions pressed into service had distinguished themselves, he bestowed liberty and burgess-rights on his slave-soldiers in the name of the people.
Arpi Acquired by the Romans
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.
Tarentum Taken by Hannibal
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.
Conflicts around Capua
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
Hannibal Marches toward Rome
Hannibal tried a further expedient, the last which occurred to his inventive genius, to save the important city. After giving the Campanians information of his intention and exhorting them to hold out, he started with the relieving army from Capua and took the road for Rome. With the same dexterous boldness which he had shown in his first Italian campaigns, he threw himself with a weak army between the armies and fortresses of the enemy, and led his troops through Samnium and along the Valerian Way past Tibur to the bridge over the Anio, which he passed and encamped on the opposite bank, five miles from the city. The children’s children of the Romans still shuddered, when they were told of “Hannibal at the gate”; real danger there was none. The country houses and fields in the neighbourhood of the city were laid waste by the enemy; the two legions in the city, who went forth against them, prevented the investment of the walls. Besides, Hannibal had never expected to surprise Rome by a -coup de main-, such as Scipio soon afterwards executed against New Carthage, and still less had he meditated a siege in earnest; his only hope was that in the first alarm part of the besieging army of Capua would march to Rome and thus give him an opportunity of breaking up the blockade. Accordingly after a brief stay he departed. The Romans saw in his withdrawal a miraculous intervention of the gods, who by portents and visions had compelled the wicked man to depart, when in truth the Roman legions were unable to compel him; at the spot where Hannibal had approached nearest to the city, at the second milestone on the Appian Way in front of the Capene gate, with grateful credulity the Romans erected an altar to the god “who turned back and protected” (-Rediculus Tutanus-), Hannibal in reality retreated, because this was part of his plan, and directed his march towards Capua. But the Roman generals had not committed the mistake on which their opponent had reckoned; the legions remained unmoved in the lines round Capua, and only a weak corps had been detached on the news of Hannibal’s march towards Rome. When Hannibal learned this, he suddenly turned against the consul Publius Galba, who had imprudently followed him from Rome, and with whom he had hitherto avoided an engagement, vanquished him, and took his camp by storm.
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.
Superiority of the Romans
Tarentum Capitulates
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,
Hannibal Driven Back
Death of Marcellus
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).
Pressure of the War
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
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
Hasdrubal’s Approach
Amidst these difficulties and strained relations, news suddenly arrived that Hasdrubal had crossed the Pyrenees in the autumn of 546, and that the Romans must be prepared to carry on the war next year with both the sons of Hamilcar in Italy. Not in vain had Hannibal persevered at his post throughout the long anxious years; the aid, which the factious opposition at home and the shortsighted Philip had refused to him, was at length in the course of being brought to him by his brother, who, like himself, largely inherited the spirit of Hamilcar. Already 8000 Ligurians, enlisted by Phoenician gold, were ready to unite with Hasdrubal; if he gained the first battle, he might hope that like his brother he should be able to bring the Gauls and perhaps the Etruscans into arms against Rome. Italy, moreover, was no longer what it had been eleven years before; the state and the individual citizens were exhausted, the Latin league was shaken, their best general had just fallen in the field of battle, and Hannibal was not subdued. In reality Scipio might bless the star of his genius, if it averted the consequences of his unpardonable blunder from himself and from his country.
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.
Hannibal Retires to the Bruttian Territory
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.
Stagnation of the War in Italy
Nevertheless the Romans were in no hurry to terminate the war. The state and the citizens were exhausted by the excessive moral and material strain on their energies; men gladly abandoned themselves to carelessness and repose.
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.
The war in Italy made no progress. It forms a brilliant proof of the strategic talent of Hannibal as well as of the incapacity of the Roman generals now opposed to him, that after this he was still able for four years to keep the field in the Bruttian country, and that all the superiority of his opponents could not compel him either to shut himself up in fortresses or to embark. It is true that he was obliged to retire farther and farther, not so much in consequence of the indecisive engagements which took place with the Romans, as because his Bruttian allies were always becoming more troublesome, and at last he could only reckon on the towns which his army garrisoned. Thus he voluntarily abandoned Thurii; Locri was, on the suggestion of Publius Scipio, recaptured by an expedition from Rhegium (549). As if at last his projects were to receive a brilliant justification at the hands of the very Carthaginian authorities who had thwarted him in them, these now, in their apprehension as to the anticipated landing of the Romans, revived of their own accord those plans (548, 549), and sent reinforcements and subsidies to Hannibal in Italy, and to Mago in Spain, with orders to rekindle the war in Italy so as to achieve some further respite for the trembling possessors of the Libyan country houses and the shops of Carthage. An embassy was likewise sent to Macedonia, to induce Philip to renew the alliance and to land in Italy (549). But it was too late. Philip had made peace with Rome some months before; the impending political annihilation of Carthage was far from agreeable to him, but he took no step openly at least against Rome. A small Macedonian corps went to Africa, the expenses of which, according to the assertion of the Romans, were defrayed by Philip from his own pocket; this may have been the case, but the Romans had at any rate no proof of it, as the subsequent course of events showed. No Macedonian landing in Italy was thought of.
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.
The African Expedition of Scipio
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
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
The Carthaginians, who had long expected that the plundering expeditions, which the Roman squadrons had frequently made during the last few years to the African coast, would be followed by a more serious invasion, had not only, in order to ward it off, endeavoured to bring about a revival of the Italo-Macedonian war, but had also made armed preparation at home to receive the Romans. Of the two rival Berber kings, Massinissa of Cirta (Constantine), the ruler of the Massylians, and Syphax of Siga (at the mouth of the Tafna westward from Oran), the ruler of the Massaesylians, they had succeeded in attaching the latter, who was far the more powerful and hitherto had been friendly to the Romans, by treaty and marriage alliance closely to Carthage, while they cast off the other, the old rival of Syphax and ally of the Carthaginians. Massinissa had after desperate resistance succumbed to the united power of the Carthaginians and of Syphax, and had been obliged to leave his territories a prey to the latter; he himself wandered with a few horsemen in the desert. Besides the contingent to be expected from Syphax, a Carthaginian army of 20,000 foot, 6000 cavalry, and 140 elephants—Hanno had been sent out to hunt elephants for the very purpose—was ready to fight for the protection of the capital, under the command of Hasdrubal son of Gisgo, a general who had gained experience in Spain; in the port there lay a strong fleet. A Macedonian corps under Sopater, and a consignment of Celtiberian mercenaries, were immediately expected.
Scipio Driven Back to the Coast
Surprise of the Carthaginian Camp
On the report of Scipio’s landing, Massinissa immediately arrived in the camp of the general, whom not long before he had confronted as an enemy in Spain; but the landless prince brought in the first instance nothing beyond his personal ability to the aid of the Romans, and the Libyans, although heartily weary of levies and tribute, had acquired too bitter experience in similar cases to declare at once for the invaders. So Scipio began the campaign. So long as he was only opposed by the weaker Carthaginian army, he had the advantage, and was enabled after some successful cavalry skirmishes to proceed to the siege of Utica; but when Syphax arrived, according to report with 50,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry, the siege had to be raised, and a fortified naval camp had to be constructed for the winter on a promontory, which easily admitted of entrenchment, between Utica and Carthage. Here the Roman general passed the winter of 550-1. From the disagreeable situation in which the spring found him he extricated himself by a fortunate -coup de main-. The Africans, lulled into security by proposals of peace suggested by Scipio with more artifice than honour, allowed themselves to be surprised on one and the same night in their two camps; the reed huts of the Numidians burst into flames, and, when the Carthaginians hastened to their help, their
Negotiations for Peace
Machinations of the Carthaginian Patriots
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
Hannibal Recalled to Africa
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
The two armies accordingly came to a decisive battle at Zama (presumably not far from Sicca).(5) Hannibal arranged his infantry in three lines; in the first rank the Carthaginian hired troops, in the second the African militia and the Phoenician civic force along with the Macedonian corps, in the third the veterans who had followed him from Italy. In front of the line were placed the 80 elephants; the cavalry were stationed on the wings. Scipio likewise disposed his legions in three ranks, as was the wont of the Romans, and so arranged them that the elephants could pass through and alongside of the line without breaking it. Not only was this disposition completely successful, but the elephants making their way to the side disordered also the Carthaginian cavalry on the wings, so that Scipio’s cavalry —which moreover was by the arrival of Massinissa’s troops rendered far superior to the enemy—had little trouble in dispersing them, and were soon engaged in full pursuit. The struggle of the infantry was more severe. The conflict lasted long between the first ranks on either side; at length in the extremely bloody hand-to-hand encounter both parties fell into confusion, and were obliged to seek a support in the second ranks. The Romans found that support; but the Carthaginian militia showed itself so unsteady and wavering, that the mercenaries believed themselves betrayed and a hand-to-hand combat arose between them and the Carthaginian civic force. But Hannibal now hastily withdrew what remained of the first two lines to the flanks, and pushed forward his choice
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.
Scipio has been accused of granting too favourable conditions to the enemy, lest he might be obliged to hand over the glory of terminating the most severe war which Rome had waged, along with his command, to a successor. The charge might have had some foundation, had the first proposals been carried out; it seems to have no warrant in reference to the second. His position in Rome was not such as to make the favourite of the people, after the victory of Zama, seriously apprehensive of recall—already before the victory an attempt to supersede him had been referred by the senate to the burgesses, and by them decidedly rejected. Nor do the conditions themselves warrant such a charge. The Carthaginian city never, after its hands were thus tied and a powerful neighbour was placed by its side, made even an attempt to withdraw from Roman supremacy, still less to enter into rivalry with Rome; besides, every one who cared to know knew that the war just terminated had been undertaken much more by Hannibal than by Carthage,
Results of the War
Thus ended the second Punic or, as the Romans more correctly called it, the Hannibalic war, after it had devastated the lands and islands from the Hellespont to the Pillars of Hercules for seventeen years. Before this war the policy of the Romans had no higher aim than to acquire command of the mainland of the Italian peninsula within its natural boundaries, and of the Italian islands and seas; it is clearly proved by their treatment of Africa on the conclusion of peace that they also terminated the war with the impression, not that they had laid the foundation of sovereignty
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;
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
1. III. III. The Celts Conquered by Rome
2. III. Vi. The Sending of Reinforcements Temporarily Frustrated
3. III. Vi. Conflicts in the South of Italy
4. III. Vi. Sicily Tranquillized
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.
The West from the Peace of Hannibal to the Close of the Third Period
Subjugation of the Valley of the Po
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
Measures Adopted to Check the Immigrations of the Transalpine Gauls
The chief efforts of the Romans in these regions were naturally directed to check the immigration of the Transalpine Celts, and to make the natural wall, which separates the peninsula from the interior of the continent, also its political boundary. That the terror of the Roman name had already penetrated to the adjacent Celtic cantons beyond the Alps, is shown not only by the totally passive attitude which they maintained during the annihilation or subjugation of their Cisalpine countrymen, but still more by the official disapproval and disavowal which the Transalpine cantons—we shall have to think primarily of the Helvetii (between the lake of Geneva and the Main) and the Carni or Taurisci (in Carinthia and Styria)—expressed to the envoys from Rome, who complained of the attempts made by isolated Celtic bands to settle peacefully on the Roman side of the Alps. Not less significant was the humble spirit in which these same bands of emigrants first came to the Roman senate entreating an assignment of land, and then without remonstrance obeyed the rigorous order to return over the Alps (568-575), and allowed the town, which they had already founded not far from the later Aquileia, to be again destroyed. With wise severity the senate permitted no sort of exception to the principle that the gates of the Alps should be henceforth closed for the Celtic nation, and visited with heavy penalties those Roman subjects in Italy, who had instigated any such schemes of immigration. An attempt of this kind which was made on a route hitherto little known to the Romans, in the innermost recess of the Adriatic, and still more, as if would seem, the project of Philip of Macedonia for invading Italy from the east as Hannibal had done from the west, gave occasion to the founding of a fortress in the extreme north-eastern corner of Italy—Aquileia, the most northerly of the Italian colonies (571-573)—which was intended not only to close that route for ever against foreigners, but also to secure the command of the gulf which was specially convenient for navigation, and to check the piracy which was still not wholly extirpated in those waters. The establishment of Aquileia led to a war with the Istrians (576, 577), which was speedily terminated by the storming of some strongholds and the fall of the king, Aepulo, and which was remarkable for nothing except for the panic, which the news of the surprise of the Roman camp by a handful of barbarians called forth in the fleet and throughout Italy.
Colonizing of the Region on the South of the Po
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
In the north-western mountain-land of Italy, whose valleys and hills were occupied chiefly by the much-subdivided Ligurian stock, the Romans pursued a similar course. Those dwelling immediately to the north of the Arno were extirpated. This fate befell chiefly the Apuani, who dwelt on the Apennines between the Arno and the Magra, and incessantly plundered on the one side the territory of Pisae, on the other that of Bononia and Mutina. Those who did not fall victims in that quarter to the sword of the Romans were transported into Lower Italy to the region of Beneventum (574); and by energetic measures the Ligurian nation, from which the Romans were obliged in 578 to recover the colony of Mutina which it had conquered, was completely crushed in the mountains which separate the valley of the Po from that of the Arno. The fortress of Luna (not far from Spezzia), established in 577 in the former territory of the Apuani, protected the frontier against the Ligurians just as Aquileia did against the Transalpines, and gave the Romans at the same time an excellent port which henceforth became the usual station for the passage to Massilia and to Spain. The construction of the coast or Aurelian road from Rome to Luna, and of the cross road carried from Luca by way of Florence to Arretium between the Aurelian and Cassian ways, probably belongs to the same period.
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
In Africa the policy of Rome was substantially summed up in the one idea, as short-sighted as it was narrow-minded, that she ought to prevent the revival of the power of Carthage, and ought accordingly to keep the unhappy city constantly oppressed and apprehensive of a declaration of war suspended over it by Rome like the sword of Damocles. The stipulation in the treaty of peace, that the Carthaginians should retain their territory undiminished, but that their neighbour Massinissa should have all those possessions guaranteed to him which he or his predecessor had possessed within the Carthaginian bounds, looks almost as if it had been inserted not to obviate, but to provoke disputes. The same remark applies to the obligation imposed by the Roman treaty of peace on the Carthaginians not to make war upon the allies of Rome; so that, according to the letter of the treaty, they were not even entitled to expel their Numidian neighbours from their own undisputed territory. With such stipulations and amidst the uncertainty of African frontier questions in general, the situation of Carthage in presence of a neighbour equally powerful and unscrupulous and of a liege lord who was at once umpire and party in the cause, could not but be a painful one; but the reality was worse than the worst expectations. As early as 561 Carthage found herself suddenly assailed under frivolous pretexts, and saw the richest portion of her territory, the province of Emporiae on the Lesser Syrtis, partly plundered by the Numidians, partly even seized and retained by them. Encroachments of this kind were multiplied; the level country passed into the hands of the Numidians, and the Carthaginians with difficulty maintained themselves in the larger places. Within the last two years alone, the Carthaginians declared in 582, seventy villages had been again wrested from them in opposition to the treaty. Embassy after embassy was despatched to Rome; the Carthaginians adjured the Roman senate either to allow them to defend themselves by arms, or to appoint a court of arbitration with power to enforce their award, or to regulate the frontier anew that they might at least learn once for all how much they were to lose; otherwise it were better to make them Roman subjects at once than thus gradually to deliver them over to the Libyans. But the Roman government, which already in 554 had held forth a direct prospect of extension of territory to their client, of course at the expense of Carthage, seemed to have little objection that he should himself take the booty destined for him; they moderated perhaps at times the too great impetuosity of the Libyans, who now retaliated fully on their old tormentors for their former sufferings; but it was in reality for the very sake of inflicting this torture that the Romans had assigned Massinissa as a neighbour to Carthage. All the requests and complaints had no result, except either that Roman commissions made their appearance in Africa and after
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
Continued Irritation in Rome towards Carthage
A graver responsibility than that arising out of their proceedings against Hannibal attaches to the Roman government for their persistence in suspecting and tormenting the city after his removal. Parties indeed fermented there as before; but, after the withdrawal of the extraordinary man who had wellnigh changed the destinies of the world, the patriot party was not of much more importance in Carthage than in Aetolia or Achaia. The most rational of the various ideas which then agitated the unhappy city was beyond doubt that of attaching themselves to Massinissa and of converting him from the oppressor into the protector of the Phoenicians. But neither the national section of the patriots nor the section with Libyan tendencies attained the helm; on the contrary the government remained in the hands of the oligarchs friendly to Rome, who, so far as they did not altogether renounce thought of the future, clung to the single idea of saving the material welfare and the communal freedom of Carthage under Roman protection. With this state of matters the Romans might well have been content. But neither the multitude, nor even the ruling lords of the average stamp, could rid themselves of the profound alarm produced by the Hannibalic war; and the Roman merchants with envious eyes beheld the city even now, when its political power was gone, possessed of extensive commercial dependencies and of a firmly established wealth which nothing could shake. Already in 567 the Carthaginian government offered to pay up at once the whole instalments stipulated in the peace of 553—an offer which the Romans, who attached far more importance to the having Carthage tributary than to the sums of money themselves, naturally declined, and only deduced from it the conviction that, in spite of all the trouble they had taken, the city was not ruined and was not capable of ruin.
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);
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
We have already narrated how purposely and clearly the Romans in their management of African affairs evinced their taking part with Massinissa, and how zealously and constantly the latter availed himself of the tacit permission to enlarge his territory at the expense of Carthage. The whole interior to the border of the desert fell to the native sovereign as it were of its own accord, and even the upper valley of the Bagradas (Mejerdah) with the rich town of Vaga
The State of Culture in Spain
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
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
Wars between the Romans and Spaniards
These natives, full of restlessness and fond of war—full of the spirit of the Cid and of Don Quixote—were now to be tamed and, if possible, civilized by the Romans. In a military point of view the task was not difficult. It is true that the Spaniards showed themselves, not only when behind the walls of their cities or under the leadership of Hannibal, but even when left to themselves and in the open field of battle, no contemptible opponents; with their short two-edged sword which the Romans subsequently adopted from them, and their formidable assaulting columns, they not unfrequently made even the Roman legions waver. Had they been able to submit to military discipline and to political combination, they might perhaps have shaken off the foreign yoke imposed on
The Romans Maintain a Standing Army in Spain
Cato
Gracchus
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
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.
These energetic measures were certainly not without permanent effect. Nevertheless the Romans had almost every year to reduce to subjection some mountain valley or mountain stronghold in the “peaceful province,” and the constant incursions of the Lusitanians into the Further province led occasionally to severe defeats of the Romans. In 563, for instance, a Roman army was obliged after heavy loss to abandon its camp, and to return by forced inarches into the more tranquil districts. It was not till after a victory gained by the praetor Lucius
Administration of Spain
The system of administration in the two Spanish provinces was similar to that of the Sicilo-Sardinian province, but not identical. The superintendence was in both instances vested in two auxiliary consuls, who were first nominated in 557, in which year also the regulation of the boundaries and the definitive organization of the new provinces took place. The judicious enactment of the Baebian law (573), that the Spanish praetors should always be nominated for two years, was not seriously carried out in consequence of the increasing competition for the highest magistracies, and still more in consequence of the jealous supervision exercised over the powers of the magistrates by the senate; and in Spain also, except where deviations occurred in extraordinary circumstances, the Romans adhered to the system of annually changing the governors—a system especially injudicious in the case of provinces so remote and with which it was so difficult to gain an acquaintance. The dependent communities were throughout tributary; but, instead of the Sicilian and Sardinian tenths and customs, in Spain fixed payments in money or other contributions were imposed by the Romans, just as formerly by the Carthaginians, on the several towns and tribes: the collection of these by military means was prohibited by a decree of the senate in 583, in consequence of the complaints of the Spanish communities. Grain was not furnished in their case except for compensation, and even then the governor might not levy more than a twentieth; besides, conformably to the just-mentioned ordinance
1. According to the account of Strabo these Italian Boii were driven by the Romans over the Alps, and from them proceeded that Boian settlement in what is now Hungary about Stein am Anger and Oedenburg, which was attacked and annihilated in the time of Augustus by the Getae who crossed the Danube, but which bequeathed to this district the name of the Boian desert. This account is far from agreeing with the well-attested representation of the Roman annals, according to which the Romans were content with the cession of half the territory; and, in order to explain the disappearance of the Italian Boii, we have really no need to assume a violent expulsion—the other Celtic peoples, although visited to a far less extent by war and colonization,
2. III. I. Libyphoenicians
3. III. Vi. Gades Becomes Roman
4. Of this praetor there has recently come to light the following decree on a copper tablet found in the neighbourhood of Gibraltar and now preserved in the Paris Museum: “L. Aimilius, son of Lucius, Imperator, has ordained that the slaves of the Hastenses [of Hasta regia, not far from Jerez de la Frontera], who dwell in the tower of Lascuta [known by means of coins and Plin. iii. i, 15, but uncertain as to site] should be free. The ground and the township, of which they are at the time in possession, they shall continue to possess and hold, so long as it shall please the people and senate of the Romans. Done in camp on 12 Jan. [564 or 565].” (-L. Aimilius L. f. inpeirator decreivit utei qui Hastensium servei in turri Lascutana habitarent, leiberei essent, Agrum oppidumqu[e], guod ea tempestate posedissent, item possidere habereque ioussit, dum poplus senatusque Romanus vettet. Act. in castreis a. d. XII. k. Febr.-) This is the oldest Roman document which we possess in the original, drawn up three years earlier than the well-known edict of the consuls of the year 568 in the affair of the Bacchanalia.
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.”
The Eastern States and the Second Macedonian War
The Hellenic East
The work, which Alexander king of Macedonia had begun a century before the Romans acquired their first footing in the territory which he had called his own, had in the course of time—while adhering substantially to the great fundamental idea of Hellenizing the east —changed and expanded into the construction of a system of Hellene-Asiatic states. The unconquerable propensity of the Greeks for migration and colonizing, which had formerly carried their traders to Massilia and Cyrene, to the Nile and to the Black Sea, now firmly held what the king had won; and under the protection of the -sarissae-, Greek civilization peacefully domiciled itself everywhere throughout the ancient empire of the Achaemenidae. The officers, who divided the heritage of the great general, gradually settled their differences, and a system of equilibrium was established, of which the very Oscillations manifest some sort of regularity.
The Great States
Macedonia
Of the three states of the first rank belonging to this system —Macedonia, Asia, and Egypt—Macedonia under Philip the Fifth, who had occupied the throne since 534, was externally at least very much what it had been under Philip the Second the father of Alexander —a compact military state with its finances in good order. On its northern frontier matters had resumed their former footing, after the waves of the Gallic inundation had rolled away; the guard of the frontier kept the Illyrian barbarians in check without difficulty, at least in ordinary times. In the south, not only was Greece in general dependent on Macedonia, but a large portion of it—including all Thessaly in its widest sense from Olympus to the Spercheius and the peninsula of Magnesia, the large and important island of Euboea, the provinces of Locris, Phocis, and Doris, and lastly, a number of isolated positions in Attica and in the Peloponnesus, such as the promontory of Sunium, Corinth, Orchomenus, Heraea, the Triphylian territory—was directly subject to Macedonia and received Macedonian garrisons; more especially the three important fortresses of Demetrias in Magnesia, Chalcis in Euboea, and Corinth, “the three fetters of the Hellenes.” But the strength of the state lay above all in its hereditary soil, the province of Macedonia. The population, indeed, of that extensive territory was remarkably scanty; Macedonia, putting forth all her energies, was scarcely able to bring into the field as many men as were contained in an ordinary consular army of two legions; and it was unmistakeably evident that the land had not yet recovered from the depopulation occasioned by the campaigns of Alexander and by the Gallic invasion. But while in Greece proper the moral and political energy of the people had decayed, the day of national vigour seemed to have gone by, life appeared scarce worth living for, and even of the better spirits one spent time over the wine-cup, another with the rapier, a third beside the student’s lamp; while in the east and Alexandria the Greeks were able perhaps to disseminate elements of culture among the dense native population and to diffuse among that population their language and their loquacity, their science and pseudo-science, but were barely sufficient in point of number to supply the nations with officers, statesmen, and schoolmasters, and were far too few to form even in the cities middle-class of the pure Greek type; there still existed, or the other hand, in northern Greece a goodly portion of the old national vigour, which had produced the warriors of Marathon. Hence arose the confidence with which the Macedonians, Aetolians, and Acarnanians, wherever they made their appearance in the east, claimed to be, and were taken as, a better race; and hence the superior part which they played at the courts of Alexandria and Antioch. There is a characteristic story, that an Alexandrian who had lived for a considerable time in Macedonia
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
In marked contrast to Asia, Egypt formed a consolidated and united state, in which the intelligent statecraft of the first Lagidae, skilfully availing itself of ancient national and religious precedent, had established a completely absolute cabinet government, and in which even the worst misrule failed to provoke any attempt either at emancipation or disruption. Very different from the Macedonians, whose national attachment to royalty was based upon their personal dignity and was its political expression, the rural population in Egypt was wholly passive; the capital on the other hand was everything, and that capital was a dependency of the court. The remissness and indolence of its rulers, accordingly, paralyzed the state in Egypt still more than in Macedonia and in Asia; while on the other hand when wielded by men, like the first Ptolemy and Ptolemy Euergetes, such a state machine proved itself extremely useful. It was one of the peculiar advantages of Egypt as compared with its two great rivals, that its policy did not grasp at shadows, but pursued clear and attainable objects. Macedonia, the home of Alexander, and Asia, the land where he had established his throne, never ceased to regard themselves as direct continuations of the Alexandrine monarchy and more or less loudly asserted their claim to represent it at least, if not to restore it. The Lagidae never tried to found a universal empire, and never dreamt of conquering India; but, by way of compensation, they drew the whole traffic between India and the Mediterranean from the Phoenician ports to Alexandria, and made Egypt the first commercial and maritime state of this epoch, and the mistress of the eastern Mediterranean and of its coasts and islands. It is a significant fact, that Ptolemy iii. Euergetes voluntarily restored all his conquests to Seleucus Callinicus except the seaport of Antioch. Partly by this means, partly by its favourable geographical situation, Egypt attained, with reference to the two continental powers, an excellent military position either for defence or for attack. While an opponent even in the full career of success was hardly in a position seriously to threaten Egypt, which was almost inaccessible on any side to land armies, the Egyptians were able by sea to establish themselves not only in Cyrene, but also in Cyprus and the Cyclades, on the Phoenico-Syrian coast, on the whole south and west coast of Asia Minor and even in Europe on the Thracian Chersonese. By their unexampled skill in turning to account the fertile valley of the Nile for the direct benefit of the treasury, and by a financial system—equally sagacious and unscrupulous —earnestly and adroitly calculated to foster material interests, the court of Alexandria was constantly superior to its opponents even as a moneyed power. Lastly, the intelligent munificence, with which the Lagidae welcomed the tendency of the age towards earnest inquiry in all departments of enterprise and of knowledge,
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.
The Kingdoms of Asia Minor
Among the states of the second rank, merely an indirect importance, so far as concerned the contact of the east with the west, attached in the first instance to that series of states which, stretching from the southern end of the Caspian Sea to the Hellespont, occupied the interior and the north coast of Asia Minor: Atropatene (in the modern Aderbijan, south-west of the Caspian), next to it Armenia, Cappadocia in the interior of Asia Minor, Pontus on the south-east, and Bithynia on the south-west, shore of the Black Sea. All of these were fragments of the great Persian Empire, and were ruled by Oriental, mostly old Persian, dynasties—the remote mountain-land of Atropatene in particular was the true asylum of the ancient Persian system, over which even the expedition of Alexander had swept without leaving a trace—and all were in the same relation of temporary and superficial dependence on the Greek dynasty, which had taken or wished to take the place of the great-kings in Asia.
The Celts of Asia Minor
Of greater importance for the general relations was the Celtic state in the interior of Asia Minor. There, intermediate between Bithynia, Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, and Phrygia, three Celtic tribes —the Tolistoagii, the Tectosages, and Trocmi—had settled, without abandoning either their native language and manners or their constitution and their trade as freebooters. The twelve tetrarchs, one of whom was appointed to preside over each of the four cantons in each of the three tribes, formed, with their council of 300 men, the supreme authority of the nation, and assembled at the “holy place” (-Drunemetum-), especially for the pronouncing of capital sentences. Singular as this cantonal constitution of the Celts appeared to the Asiatics, equally strange seemed to them the adventurous and marauding habits of the northern intruders, who on the one hand furnished their unwarlike neighbours with mercenaries for every war, and on the other plundered on their own account or levied contributions from the surrounding districts. These rude but vigorous barbarians were the general terror of the effeminate surrounding nations, and even of the great-kings of Asia themselves, who, after several Asiatic armies had been destroyed by the Celts and king Antiochus I. Soter had even lost his life in conflict with them (493), agreed at last to pay them tribute.
Pergamus
In consequence of bold and successful opposition to these Gallic hordes, Attalus, a wealthy citizen of Pergamus, received the royal title from his native city and bequeathed it to his posterity. This new court was in miniature what that of Alexandria was on a great scale. Here too the promotion of material interests and the fostering of art and literature formed the order of the day, and the government pursued a cautious and sober cabinet policy, the main objects of which were the weakening the power of its two dangerous continental neighbours, and the establishing an independent Greek state in the west of Asia Minor. A well-filled treasury contributed greatly to the importance of these rulers of Pergamus. They advanced considerable sums to the kings of Syria, the repayment of which afterwards formed part of the Roman conditions of peace. They succeeded even in acquiring territory in this way; Aegina, for instance, which the allied Romans and Aetolians had wrested in the last war from Philip’s allies, the Achaeans, was sold by the Aetolians, to whom it fell in terms of the treaty, to Attalus for 30 talents (7300 pounds). But, notwithstanding the splendour of the court and the royal title, the commonwealth of Pergamus always retained something of the urban character; and in its policy it usually went along with the free cities. Attalus himself, the Lorenzo de’ Medici of antiquity, remained throughout life a wealthy burgher; and the family life of the Attalid house, from which harmony and cordiality were not banished by the royal title, formed a striking contrast to the dissolute and scandalous behaviour of more aristocratic dynasties.
Greece
Epirots, Acarnanians, Boeotians
In European Greece—exclusive of the Roman possessions on the west coast, in the most important of which, particularly Corcyra, Roman magistrates appear to have resided,(1) and the territory directly subject to Macedonia—the powers more or less in a position to pursue a policy of their own were the Epirots, Acarnanians, and Aetolians in northern Greece, the Boeotians and Athenians in central Greece, and the Achaeans, Lacedaemonians, Messenians, and Eleans in the Peloponnesus. Among these, the republics of the Epirots, Acarnanians, and Boeotians were in various ways closely knit to Macedonia—the Acarnanians more especially, because it was only Macedonian protection that enabled them to escape the destruction with which they were threatened by the Aetolians; none of them were of any consequence. Their internal condition was very various. The state of things may to some extent be illustrated by the fact, that among the Boeotians —where, it is true, matters reached their worst—it had become customary to make over every property, which did not descend to heirs in the direct line, to the -syssitia-; and, in the case of candidates for the public magistracies, for a quarter of a century the primary condition of election was that they should bind themselves not to allow any creditor, least of all a foreign one, to sue his debtor.
The Athenians
The Athenians were in the habit of receiving support against Macedonia from Alexandria, and were in close league with the Aetolians. But they too were totally powerless, and hardly anything save the halo of Attic poetry and art distinguished these unworthy successors of a glorious past from a number of petty towns of the same stamp.
The Aetolians
The power of the Aetolian confederacy manifested a greater vigour. The energy of the northern Greek character was still unbroken there, although it had degenerated into a reckless impatience of discipline and control. It was a public law in Aetolia, that an Aetolian might serve as a mercenary against any state, even against a state in alliance with his own country; and, when the other Greeks urgently besought them to redress this scandal, the Aetolian diet declared that Aetolia might sooner be removed from its place than this principle from their national code. The Aetolians might have been of great service to the Greek nation, had they not inflicted still greater injury on it by this system of organized robbery, by their thorough hostility to the Achaean confederacy, and by their unhappy antagonism to the great state of Macedonia.
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.
Sparta, Elis, Messene
The policy of the weaker states in the Peloponnesus, Messene, and Sparta, was determined by their ancient enmity to the Achaean league —an enmity specially fostered by disputes regarding their frontiers —and their tendencies were Aetolian and anti-Macedonian, because the Achaeans took part with Philip. The only one of these states possessing any importance was the Spartan military monarchy, which after the death of Machanidas had passed into the hands of one Nabis. With ever-increasing hardihood Nabis leaned on the support of vagabonds and itinerant mercenaries, to whom he assigned not only the houses and lands, but also the wives and children, of the citizens; and he assiduously maintained connections, and even entered into an association for the joint prosecution of piracy, with the great refuge of mercenaries and pirates, the island of Crete, where he possessed some townships. His predatory expeditions by land, and the piratical vessels which he maintained at the promontory of Malea, were dreaded far and wide; he was personally hated for his baseness and cruelty; but his rule was extending, and about the time of the battle of Zama he had even succeeded in gaining possession of Messene.
League of the Greek Cities
Rhodes
Lastly, the most independent position among the intermediate states was held by the free Greek mercantile cities on the European shore of the Propontis as well as along the whole coast of Asia Minor, and on the islands of the Aegean Sea; they formed, at the same time, the brightest elements in the confused and multifarious picture which was presented by the Hellenic state-system. Three of them, in particular, had after Alexander’s death again enjoyed their full freedom, and by the activity of their maritime commerce had attained to respectable political power and even to considerable territorial possessions; namely, Byzantium the mistress of the Bosporus, rendered wealthy and powerful by the transit dues which she levied and by the important corn trade carried on with the Black Sea; Cyzicus on the Asiatic side of the Propontis, the daughter and heiress of Miletus, maintaining the closest relations with the court of Pergamus; and lastly and above all, Rhodes. The Rhodians, who immediately after the death of Alexander had expelled the Macedonian garrison had, by their favourable position for commerce and navigation, secured the carrying trade of all the eastern Mediterranean; and their well-handled fleet, as well as the tried courage of the citizens in the famous siege of 450, enabled them in that age of promiscuous and ceaseless hostilities to become the prudent and energetic representatives and, when occasion required, champions of a neutral commercial policy. They compelled the Byzantines, for instance, by force of arms to concede to the vessels of Rhodes exemption from dues in the Bosporus; and they did not permit the dynast of Pergamus to close the Black Sea.
Philip, King of Macedonia
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.
Macedonia and Asia Attack Egypt
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.
Ptolemy Philopator of Egypt had died in 549. Philip and Antiochus, the kings of Macedonia and Asia, had combined against his successor Ptolemy Epiphanes, a child of five years old, in order completely to gratify the ancient grudge which the monarchies of the mainland entertained towards the maritime state. The Egyptian state was to be broken up; Egypt and Cyprus were to fall to Antiochus Cyrene, Ionia, and the Cyclades to Philip. Thoroughly after the manner of Philip, who ridiculed such considerations, the kings began the war not merely without cause but even without pretext, “just as the large fishes devour the small.” The allies, moreover, had made their calculations correctly, especially Philip. Egypt had enough to do in defending herself against the nearer enemy in Syria, and was obliged to leave her possessions in Asia Minor and the Cyclades undefended when Philip threw himself upon these as his share of the spoil. In the year in which Carthage concluded peace with Rome (553), Philip ordered a fleet equipped by the towns subject to him to take on board troops, and to sail along the coast of Thrace. There Lysimachia was taken from the Aetolian garrison, and Perinthus, which stood in the relation of clientship to Byzantium, was likewise occupied. Thus the peace was broken as respected the Byzantines; and as respected the Aetolians, who had just made peace with Philip, the good understanding was at least disturbed. The crossing to Asia was attended with no difficulties, for Prusias king of Bithynia was in alliance with Macedonia. By way of recompense, Philip helped him to subdue the Greek mercantile cities in his territory. Chalcedon submitted. Cius, which resisted, was taken by storm and levelled with the ground, and its inhabitants were reduced to slavery—a meaningless barbarity, which annoyed Prusias himself who wished to get possession of the town uninjured, and which excited profound indignation throughout the Hellenic world. The Aetolians, whose -strategus- had commanded in Cius, and the Rhodians, whose attempts at mediation had been contemptuously and craftily frustrated by the king, were especially offended.
The Rhodian Hansa and Pergamus Oppose Philip
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
Diplomatic Intervention of Rome
In fact a storm was gathering against Philip in the west, which did not permit him to continue the plundering of defenceless Egypt. The Romans, who had at length in this year concluded peace on their own terms with Carthage, began to give serious attention to these complications in the east. It has often been affirmed, that after the conquest of the west they forthwith proceeded to the subjugation of the east; a serious consideration will lead to a juster judgment. It is only dull prejudice which fails to see that Rome at this period by no means grasped at the sovereignty of the Mediterranean states, but, on the contrary, desired nothing further than to have neighbours that should not be dangerous in Africa and in Greece; and Macedonia was not really dangerous to Rome. Its power certainly was far from small, and it is evident that the Roman senate only consented with reluctance to the peace of 548-9, which left it in
Preparations and Pretexts for Second Macedonian War
Thus in reality all political, commercial, and moral motives concurred in inducing Rome to undertake the second war against Philip—one of the most righteous, which the city ever waged. It greatly redounds to the honour of the senate, that it immediately resolved on its course and did not allow itself to be deterred from making the necessary preparations either by the exhaustion of the state or by the unpopularity of such a declaration of war. The propraetor Marcus Valerius Laevinus made his appearance as early
Progress of the War
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.
Meanwhile, however, the occasion for declaring war, which Rome desired, had been furnished from another quarter. The Athenians in their silly and cruel vanity had put to death two unfortunate Acarnanians, because these had accidentally strayed into their mysteries. When the Acarnanians, who were naturally indignant, asked Philip to procure them satisfaction, he could not refuse the just request of his most faithful allies, and he allowed them to levy men in Macedonia and, with these and their own troops, to invade Attica without a formal declaration of war. This, it
Declaration of War by Rome
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.
The Roman League
The position of Philip was very disadvantageous. The eastern states, which ought to have acted in unison against all interference of Rome and probably under other circumstances would have so acted, had been mainly by Philip’s fault so incensed at each other, that they were not inclined to hinder, or were inclined even to promote, the Roman invasion. Asia, the natural and most important ally of Philip, had been neglected by him, and was moreover prevented at first from active interference by being entangled in the quarrel with Egypt and the Syrian war. Egypt had an urgent interest in keeping the Roman fleet out of the eastern waters; even now an Egyptian embassy intimated at Rome very plainly, that the court of Alexandria was ready to relieve the Romans from the trouble of intervention in Attica. But the treaty for the partition of Egypt concluded between Asia and Macedonia threw that important state thoroughly into the arms of Rome, and compelled the cabinet of Alexandria to declare that it would only intermeddle in the affairs of European Greece with consent of the Romans. The Greek commercial cities, with Rhodes, Pergamus, and Byzantium at their head, were in a position similar, but of still greater perplexity. They would under other circumstances have beyond doubt done what they could to close the eastern seas against the Romans; but the cruel and destructive policy of conquest pursued by Philip had driven them to an unequal struggle, in which for their self-preservation they were obliged to use every effort to implicate the great Italian power. In Greece proper also the Roman envoys, who were commissioned to organize a second league against Philip there, found the way already substantially paved for them by the enemy. Of the anti-Macedonian party—the Spartans, Eleans, Athenians, and Aetolians—Philip might perhaps have gained the latter, for the peace of 548 had made a deep, and far from healed, breach in their friendly Alliance with Rome; but apart from the old differences which subsisted between Aetolia and Macedonia regarding the Thessalian towns withdrawn by Macedonia from the Aetolian confederacy—Echinus, Larissa Cremaste, Pharsalus, and Thebes in Phthiotis—the expulsion of the Aetolian garrisons from Lysimachia and Cius had produced fresh exasperation against Philip in the minds of the Aetolians. If they delayed to join the league against him, the chief reason doubtless was the ill-feeling that continued to prevail between them and the Romans.
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
Landing of the Romans in Macedonia
In the autumn of 554 the consul, Publius Sulpicius Galba, landed with his two legions and 1000 Numidian cavalry accompanied even by elephants derived from the spoils of Carthage, at Apollonia; on receiving accounts of which the king returned in haste from the Hellespont to Thessaly. But, owing partly to the far-advanced season, partly to the sickness of the Roman general, nothing was undertaken by land that year except a reconnaissance in force, in the course of which the townships in the vicinity, and in particular the Macedonian colony Antipatria, were occupied by the Romans. For the next year a joint attack on Macedonia was concerted with the northern barbarians, especially with Pleuratus, the then ruler of Scodra, and Bato, prince of the Dardani, who of course were eager to profit by the favourable opportunity.
More importance attached to the enterprises of the Roman fleet, which numbered 100 decked and 80 light vessels. While the rest of the ships took their station for the winter at Corcyra, a division under Gaius Claudius Cento proceeded to the Piraeeus to render assistance to the hard-pressed Athenians. But, as Cento found the Attic territory already sufficiently protected against the raids of the Corinthian garrison and the Macedonian corsairs, he sailed on and appeared suddenly before Chalcis in Euboea, the chief stronghold of Philip in Greece, where his magazines, stores of arms, and prisoners were kept, and where the commandant Sopater was far from expecting a Roman attack. The undefended walls were scaled, and the garrison was put to death; the prisoners were liberated and
Attempt of the Romans to Invade Macedonia
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.
Philip, on learning this, voluntarily abandoned his position and retreated in an easterly direction: whether he did so in order to repel the probably unexpected invasion of the Aetolians, or to draw the Roman army after him with a view to its destruction, or to take either of these courses according to circumstances, cannot well be determined. He managed his retreat so dexterously that Galba, who adopted the rash resolution of following him, lost his track, and Philip was enabled to reach by a flank movement, and to occupy, the narrow pass which separates the provinces of Lyncestis and Eordaea, with the view of awaiting the Romans and giving them a warm reception there. A battle took place on the spot which he had selected; but the long Macedonian spears proved unserviceable on the wooded and uneven ground. The Macedonians were partly turned, partly broken, and lost many men.
Return of the Romans
But, although Philip’s army was after this unfortunate action no longer able to prevent the advance of the Romans, the latter were themselves afraid to encounter further unknown dangers in an impassable and hostile country; and returned to Apollonia, after they had laid waste the fertile provinces of Upper Macedonia—Eordaea, Elymaea, and Orestis. Celetrum, the most considerable town of Orestis (now Kastoria, on a peninsula in the lake of the same name), had surrendered to them: it was the only Macedonian town that opened its gates to the Romans. In the Illyrian land Pelium, the city of the Dassaretae, on the upper confluents of the Apsus, was taken by storm and strongly garrisoned to serve as a future basis for a similar expedition.
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.
Philip might on the whole congratulate himself upon the results of this campaign. The Roman troops, after an extremely troublesome campaign, stood in autumn precisely on the spot whence they had started in spring; and, but for the well-timed interposition of the Aetolians and the unexpected success of the battle at the pass of Eordaea, perhaps not a man of their entire force would have again seen the Roman territory. The fourfold offensive had everywhere failed in its object, and not only did Philip in autumn see his whole dominions cleared of the enemy, but he was able to make an attempt—which, however, miscarried—to wrest from the Aetolians the strong town of Thaumaci, situated on the Aetolo-Thessalian frontier and commanding the plain of the Peneius. If Antiochus, for whose coming Philip vainly supplicated
Philip Encamps on the Aous
Flaminius
Philip Driven Back to Tempe
Greece in the Power of the Romans
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 new commander-in-chief immediately had a conference with the king, while the two armies lay face to face inactive. Philip made proposals of peace; he offered to restore all his own conquests, and to submit to an equitable arbitration regarding the damage inflicted on the Greek cities; but the negotiations broke down, when he was asked to give up ancient possessions of Macedonia and particularly Thessaly. For forty days the two armies lay in the narrow pass of the Aous; Philip would not retire, and Flamininus could not make up his mind whether he should order an assault, or leave the king alone and reattempt the expedition
The Achaeans Enter into Alliance with Rome
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
Vain Attempts to Arrange a Peace
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,
Philip Proceed to Thessaly
Battle of Cynoscephalae
Thus the fourth campaign, that of 557, began. Flamininus despatched a part of the fleet against the Acarnanians, who were besieged in Leucas; in Greece proper he became by stratagem master of Thebes, the capital of Boeotia, in consequence of which the Boeotians were compelled to join at least nominally the alliance against Macedonia. Content with having thus interrupted the communication between Corinth and Chalcis, he proceeded to the north, where alone a decisive blow could be struck. The great difficulties of provisioning the army in a hostile and for the most part desolate country, which had often hampered its operations, were now to be obviated by the fleet accompanying the army along the coast and carrying after it supplies sent from Africa, Sicily, and Sardinia. The decisive blow came, however, earlier than Flamininus had hoped. Philip, impatient and confident as he was, could not endure to await the enemy on the Macedonian frontier: after assembling his army at Dium, he advanced through the pass of Tempe into Thessaly, and encountered the army of the enemy advancing to meet him in the district of Scotussa.
The Macedonian and Roman armies—the latter of which had been reinforced by contingents of the Apolloniates and the Athamanes, by the Cretans sent by Nabis, and especially by a strong band of Aetolians—contained nearly equal numbers of combatants, each about 26,000 men; the Romans, however, had the superiority in cavalry. In front of Scotussa, on the plateau of the Karadagh, during a gloomy day of rain, the Roman vanguard unexpectedly encountered that of the enemy, which occupied a high and steep hill named Cynoscephalae, that lay between the two camps. Driven back into the plain, the Romans were reinforced from the camp by the light troops and the excellent corps of Aetolian cavalry, and now in turn forced the Macedonian vanguard back upon and over the height. But here the Macedonians
Simultaneously with this great defeat, the Macedonians suffered other discomfitures at all the points which they still occupied; in Caria the Rhodian mercenaries defeated the Macedonian corps stationed there and compelled it to shut itself up in Stratonicea; the Corinthian garrison was defeated by Nicostratus and his Achaeans with severe loss, and Leucas in Acarnania was taken by assault after a heroic resistance. Philip was completely vanquished; his last allies, the Acarnanians, yielded on the news of the battle of Cynoscephalae.
Preliminaries of Peace
It was completely in the power of the Romans to dictate peace; they used their power without abusing it. The empire of Alexander might be annihilated; at a conference of the allies this desire was expressly put forward by the Aetolians. But what else would this mean, than to demolish the rampart protecting Hellenic culture from the Thracians and Celts? Already during the war just ended the flourishing Lysimachia on the Thracian Chersonese had been totally destroyed by the Thracians—a serious warning for the future. Flamininus, who had clearly perceived the bitter animosities subsisting among the Greek states, could never consent that the great Roman power should be the executioner for the grudges of the Aetolian confederacy, even if his Hellenic sympathies had not been as much won by the polished and chivalrous king as his Roman national feeling was offended by the boastings of the Aetolians, the “victors of Cynoscephalae,” as they called themselves. He replied to the Aetolians that it was not the custom of Rome to annihilate the vanquished, and that, besides, they were their own masters and were at liberty to put an end to Macedonia, if they could. The king was treated with all possible deference, and, on his declaring himself ready now to entertain the demands formerly made, an armistice for a considerable term was agreed to by Flamininus in return for the payment of a sum of money and the furnishing of hostages, among whom was the king’s son Demetrius,—an armistice which Philip greatly needed in order to expel the Dardani out of Macedonia.
Peace with Macedonia
The final regulation of the complicated affairs of Greece was entrusted by the senate to a commission of ten persons, the head and soul of which was Flamininus. Philip obtained from it terms similar to those laid down for Carthage. He lost all his foreign possessions in Asia Minor, Thrace, Greece, and in the islands of the Aegean Sea; while he retained Macedonia proper undiminished, with the exception of some unimportant tracts on the frontier and the province of Orestis, which was declared free—a stipulation which Philip felt very keenly, but which the Romans could not avoid prescribing, for with his character it was impossible to leave him free to dispose of subjects who had once revolted from their allegiance. Macedonia was further bound not to conclude any foreign
Greece Free
After Macedonia had thus been reduced to complete political nullity and was left in possession of only as much power as was needful to guard the frontier of Hellas against the barbarians, steps were taken to dispose of the possessions ceded by the king. The Romans, who just at that time were learning by experience in Spain that transmarine provinces were a very dubious gain, and who had by no means begun the war with a view to the acquisition of territory, took none of the spoil for themselves, and thus compelled their allies also to moderation. They resolved to declare all the states of Greece, which had previously been under Phillip free: and Flamininus was commissioned to read the decree to that effect to the Greeks assembled at the Isthmian games (558). Thoughtful men doubtless might ask whether freedom was a blessing capable of being thus bestowed, and what was the value of freedom to a nation apart from union and unity; but the rejoicing was great and sincere, as the intention of the senate was sincere in conferring the freedom.(2)
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
War against Nabis of Sparta
The regulation of the affairs of the Greek states, as respected both their mutual relations and their internal condition, was attended with difficulty. The most urgent matter was the war which had been carried on between the Spartans and Achaeans since 550, in which the duty of mediating necessarily fell to the Romans. But after various attempts to induce Nabis to yield, and particularly to give up the city of Argos belonging to the Achaean league, which Philip had surrendered to him, no course at last was left to Flamininus but to have war declared against the obstinate petty robber-chieftain, who reckoned on the well-known grudge of the Aetolians against the Romans and on the advance of Antiochus into Europe, and pertinaciously refused to restore Argos. War was declared, accordingly, by all the Hellenes at a great diet in Corinth, and Flamininus advanced into the Peloponnesus accompanied by the fleet and the Romano-allied army, which included a contingent sent by Philip and a division of Lacedaemonian emigrants under Agesipolis, the legitimate king of Sparta (559). In order to crush his antagonist immediately by an overwhelming superiority of force, no less than 50,000 men were brought into the field, and, the other towns being disregarded, the capital itself was at once invested; but the desired result was not attained. Nabis had sent into the field a considerable army amounting to 15,000 men, of whom 5000 were mercenaries, and he had confirmed his rule afresh by a complete reign of terror—by the execution -en masse- of the officers and inhabitants of the country whom he suspected. Even when he himself after the first successes of the Roman army and fleet resolved to yield and to accept the comparatively favourable terms of peace proposed by Flamininus, “the people,” that is to say the gang of robbers whom Nabis had domiciled in Sparta, not without reason apprehensive of a reckoning after the victory, and deceived by an accompaniment of lies as to the nature of the terms of peace and as to the advance of the Aetolians and Asiatics, rejected the peace offered by the Roman general, so that the struggle began anew. A battle took place in front of the walls and an assault was made upon them; they were already scaled by the Romans, when the setting on fire of the captured streets compelled the assailants to retire.
Settlement of Spartan Affairs
At last the obstinate resistance came to an end. Sparta retained its independence and was neither compelled to receive back the emigrants nor to join the Achaean league; even the existing monarchical constitution, and Nabis himself, were left intact. On the other hand Nabis had to cede his foreign possessions, Argos, Messene, the Cretan cities, and the whole coast besides; to bind himself neither to conclude foreign alliances, nor to wage war, nor to keep any other vessels than two open boats; and lastly to disgorge all his plunder, to give to the Romans hostages, and to pay to them a war-contribution. The towns on the Laconian coast were given to the Spartan emigrants, and this new community, who named themselves the “free Laconians” in contrast to the monarchically governed Spartans, were directed to enter the Achaean league. The emigrants did not receive back their property, as the district assigned to them was regarded as a compensation for it; it was stipulated, on the other hand, that their wives and children should not be detained in Sparta against their will. The Achaeans, although by this arrangement they gained the accession of the free Laconians as well as Argos, were yet far from content; they had expected that the dreaded and hated Nabis would be superseded, that the emigrants would be brought back, and that the Achaean symmachy would be extended to the whole Peloponnesus. Unprejudiced persons, however, will not fail to see that Flamininus managed these difficult affairs as fairly and justly as it was possible to manage them where two political parties, both chargeable with unfairness and injustice stood opposed to each other. With the old and deep hostility subsisting between the Spartans and Achaeans, the incorporation of Sparta into the Achaean league would have been equivalent to subjecting Sparta to the Achaeans, a course no less contrary to equity than to prudence. The restitution of the emigrants, and the complete restoration of a government that had been set aside for twenty years, would only have substituted one reign of terror for another; the expedient adopted by Flamininus was the right one, just because it failed to satisfy either of the extreme parties. At length thorough provision appeared to be made that the Spartan system of robbery by sea and land should cease, and that the government there, such as it was, should prove troublesome only to its own subjects. It is possible that Flamininus, who knew Nabis and could not but be aware how desirable it was that he should personally be superseded, omitted to take such a step from the mere desire to have done with the matter and not to mar the clear impression of his successes by complications that might be prolonged beyond all calculation; it is possible, moreover, that he sought to preserve Sparta as a counterpoise to the power of the Achaean confederacy in the Peloponnesus. But the former objection relates to a point of secondary importance; and as to the latter view, it is far from probable that the Romans condescended to fear the Achaeans.
Final Regulation of Greece
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
It is only contemptible disingenuousness or weakly sentimentality, which can fail to perceive that the Romans were entirely in earnest with the liberation of Greece; and the reason why the plan so nobly projected resulted in so sorry a structure, is to be sought only in the complete moral and political disorganization of the Hellenic nation. It was no small matter, that a mighty nation should have suddenly with its powerful arm brought the land, which it had been accustomed to regard as its primitive home and as the shrine of its intellectual and higher interests, into the possession of full freedom, and should have conferred on every community in it deliverance from foreign taxation and foreign garrisons and the unlimited right of self-government; it is mere paltriness that sees in this nothing save political calculation. Political calculation made the liberation of Greece a possibility for the Romans; it was converted into a reality by the Hellenic sympathies that were at that time indescribably powerful in Rome, and above all in Flamininus himself. If the Romans are liable to any reproach, it is that all of them, and in particular Flamininus who overcame the well-founded scruples of the senate, were hindered by the magic charm of the Hellenic name from perceiving in all its extent the wretched character of the Greek states of that period, and so allowed yet further freedom for the doings of communities which, owing to the impotent antipathies that prevailed alike in their internal and their mutual relations, knew neither how to act nor how to keep quiet. As things stood, it was really necessary at once to put an end to such a freedom, equally pitiful and pernicious, by means of a superior power permanently present on the spot; the feeble policy of sentiment, with all its apparent humanity, was far more cruel than the sternest occupation would have been. In Boeotia for instance Rome had, if not to instigate, at least to permit, a political murder, because the Romans had resolved to withdraw their troops from Greece and, consequently, could not prevent the Greeks friendly to Rome from seeking their remedy in the usual manner of the country. But Rome herself also suffered from the effects of this indecision. The war with Antiochus would not have arisen but for the political blunder of liberating Greece, and it would not have been dangerous but tor the military blunder of withdrawing the garrisons from the principal fortresses on the European frontier. History has a Nemesis for every sin—for an impotent craving after freedom, as well as for an injudicious generosity.
1. III. III. Acquisition of Territory in Illyria
2. III. Vi. Stagnation of the War in Italy
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.
4. III. III. Acquisition of Territory in Illyria
The War with Antiochus of Asia
Antiochus the Great
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
Difficulties with Rome
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.
It admits of no doubt, that Antiochus, so far as he was at all capable of forming a resolution and adhering to it, had already made up his mind not only to attach to his empire the Egyptian possessions in Asia, but also to make conquests on his own behalf in Europe and, if not to seek on that account a war with Rome, at any rate to risk it The Romans had thus every reason to comply with that request of their allies, and to interfere directly in Asia; but they showed little inclination to do so. They not only delayed as long as the Macedonian war lasted, and gave to Attalus nothing but the protection of diplomatic intercession, which, we may add, proved in the first instance effective; but even after the victory, while they doubtless spoke as though the cities which had been in the hands of Ptolemy and Philip ought not to be taken possession of by Antiochus, and while the freedom of the Asiatic cities, Myrina, Abydus, Lampsacus,(1) and Cius, figured in Roman documents, they took not the smallest step to give effect to it, and allowed king Antiochus to employ the favourable opportunity presented by the withdrawal of the Macedonian garrisons to introduce his own. In fact, they even went so far as to submit to his landing in Europe in the spring of 558 and invading the Thracian Chersonese, where he occupied Sestus and Madytus and spent a considerable time in the chastisement of the Thracian barbarians and the restoration of the destroyed Lysimachia, which he had selected as his chief place of arms and as the capital of the newly-instituted satrapy of Thrace. Flamininus indeed, who was entrusted with the conduct of these affairs, sent to the king at Lysimachia envoys, who talked of the integrity of the Egyptian territory and of the freedom of all the Hellenes; but nothing came out of it. The king talked in turn of his undoubted legal title to the ancient kingdom of Lysimachus conquered by his ancestor Seleucus, explained that he was employed not in making territorial acquisitions but only in preserving the integrity of his hereditary dominions, and declined the intervention of the Romans in his disputes with the cities subject to him in Asia Minor. With justice he could add that peace had already been concluded with Egypt, and that the Romans were thus far deprived of any formal pretext for interfering.(2) The sudden return of the king to Asia occasioned by a false report of the death of the young king of Egypt, and the projects which it suggested of a landing in Cyprus or even at Alexandria, led to the breaking off of the conferences without coming to any conclusion, still less producing any result. In the following year, 559, Antiochus returned to Lysimachia with his fleet and army reinforced, and employed himself in organizing the new satrapy which he destined for his son Seleucus. Hannibal, who had been obliged to flee from Carthage, came to him at Ephesus; and the singularly honourable reception accorded to the exile was virtually a declaration of war against Rome.
Preparations of Antiochus for War with Rome
Antiochus employed the unexpected respite in strengthening his position at home and his relations with his neighbours before beginning the war, on which for his part he was resolved, and became all the more so, the more the enemy appeared to procrastinate. He now (561) gave his daughter Cleopatra, previously betrothed, in marriage to the young king of Egypt. That he at the same time promised to restore the provinces wrested from his son-in-law, was afterwards affirmed on the part of Egypt, but probably without warrant; at any rate the land remained actually attached to the Syrian kingdom.(3) He offered to restore to Eumenes, who had in 557 succeeded his father Attalus on the throne of Pergamus, the towns taken from him, and to give him also one of his daughters in marriage, if he would abandon the Roman alliance. In like manner he bestowed a daughter on Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia, and gained the Galatians by presents, while he reduced by arms the Pisidians who were constantly in revolt, and other small tribes. Extensive privileges were granted to the Byzantines; respecting the cities in Asia Minor, the king declared that he
Aetolian Intrigues against Rome
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
Rupture between Antiochus and the Romans
Antiochus took his resolution. A rupture with Rome, in spite of endeavours to postpone it by the diplomatic palliative of embassies, could no longer be avoided. As early as the spring of 561 Flamininus, who continued to have the decisive voice in the senate as to eastern affairs, had expressed the Roman ultimatum to the envoys of the king, Menippus and Hegesianax; viz. that he should either evacuate Europe and dispose of Asia at his pleasure, or retain Thrace and submit to the Roman protectorate over Smyrna, Lampsacus, and Alexandria Troas. These demands had been again discussed at Ephesus, the chief place of arms and fixed quarters of the king in Asia Minor, in the spring of 562, between Antiochus and the envoys of the senate, Publius Sulpicius and Publius Villius; and they had separated with the conviction on both sides thata peaceful settlement was no longer possible. Thenceforth war was resolved on in Rome. In that very summer of 562 a Roman fleet of 30 sail, with 3000 soldiers on board, under Aulus Atilius Serranus, appeared off Gythium, where their arrival accelerated the conclusion of the treaty between the Achaeans and Spartans; the eastern coasts of Sicily and Italy were strongly garrisoned, so as to be secure against any attempts at a landing; a land army was expected in Greece in the autumn. Since the spring of 562 Flamininus, by direction of the senate, had journeyed through Greece to thwart the intrigues of the opposite
Attitude of the Minor Powers
Carthage and Hannibal
Everything depended on the extent to which that comprehensively-planned coalition against Rome, of which Antiochus came forward as the head, might be realized. As to the plan, first of all, of stirring up enemies to the Romans in Carthage and Italy, it was the fate of Hannibal at the court of Ephesus, as through his whole career, to have projected his noble and high-spirited plans for the behoof of people pedantic and mean. Nothing was done towards their execution, except that some Carthaginian patriots were compromised; no choice was left to the Carthaginians but to show unconditional submission to Rome. The camarilla would have nothing to do with Hannibal—such a man was too inconveniently great for court cabals; and, after having tried all sorts of absurd expedients, such as accusing the general, with whose name the Romans frightened their children, of concert with the Roman envoys, they succeeded in persuading Antiochus the Great, who like all insignificant monarchs plumed himself greatly on his independence and was influenced by nothing so easily as by the fear of being ruled, into the wise belief that he ought not to allow himself to be thrown into the shade by so celebrated a man. Accordingly it was in solemn council resolved that the Phoenician should be employed in future only for subordinate enterprises and for giving advice—with the reservation, of course, that the advice should never be followed. Hannibal revenged himself on the rabble, by accepting every commission and brilliantly executing all.
States of Asia Minor
In Asia Cappadocia adhered to the great-king; Prusias of Bithynia on the other hand took, as always, the side of the stronger. King Eumenes remained faithful to the old policy of his house, which was now at length to yield to him its true fruit. He had not only persistently refused |the offers of Antiochus, but had constantly urged the Romans to a war, from which he expected the aggrandizement of his kingdom. The Rhodians and Byzantines likewise joined their old allies. Egypt too took the side of Rome and offered support in supplies and men; which, however, the Romans did not accept.
Macedonia
In Europe the result mainly depended on the position which Philip of Macedonia would take up. It would have been perhaps the right policy for him, notwithstanding all the injuries or shortcomings of the past, to unite with Antiochus. But Philip was ordinarily influenced not by such considerations, but by his likings and dislikings; and his hatred was naturally directed much more against the faithless ally, who had left him to contend alone with the common enemy, had sought merely to seize his own share in the spoil, and had become a burdensome neighbour to him in Thrace, than against the conqueror, who had treated him respectfully and honourably. Antiochus had, moreover, given deep offence to the hot temper of Philip by the setting up of absurd pretenders to the Macedonian crown, and by the ostentatious burial of the Macedonian bones bleaching at Cynoscephalae. Philip therefore placed his whole force with cordial zeal at the disposal of the Romans.
The Lesser Greek States
The second power of Greece, the Achaean league, adhered no less decidedly than the first to the alliance with Rome. Of the smaller powers, the Thessalians and the Athenians held by Rome; among the latter an Achaean garrison introduced by Flamininus into the citadel brought the patriotic party, which was pretty strong, to reason. The Epirots exerted themselves to keep on good terms, if possible, with both parties. Thus, in addition to the Aetolians and the Magnetes who were joined by a portion of the neighbouring Perrhaebians, Antiochus was supported only by Amynander, the weak king of the Athamanes, who allowed himself to be dazzled by foolish designs on the Macedonian crown; by the Boeotians, among whom the party opposed to Rome was still at the helm; and in the Peloponnesus by the Eleans and Messenians, who were in the habit of taking part with the Aetolians against the Achaeans. This was indeed a hopeful beginning; and the title of commander-in-chief with absolute power, which the Aetolians decreed to the great-king, seemed insult added to injury. There had been, just as usual, deception on both sides. Instead of the countless hordes of Asia, the king brought up a force scarcely half as strong as an ordinary consular army; and instead of the open arms with which all the Hellenes were to welcome their deliverer from the Roman yoke, one or two bands of klephts and some dissolute civic communities offered to the king brotherhood in arms.
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.
Landing of the Romans
In the beginning of spring 563 the Roman staff arrived at Apollonia. The commander-in-chief was Manius Acilius Glabrio, a man of humble origin, but an able general feared both by his soldiers and by the enemy; the admiral was Gaius Livius; and among the military tribunes were Marcus Porcius Cato, the conqueror of Spain, and Lucius Valerius Flaccus, who after the old Roman wont did not disdain, although they had been consuls, to re-enter the army as simple war-tribunes. They brought with them reinforcements in ships and men, including Numidian cavalry and Libyan elephants sent by Massinissa, and the permission of the senate to accept auxiliary troops to the number of 5000 from the extra-Italian allies, so that the whole number of the Roman forces was raised to about 40,000 men. The king, who in the beginning of spring had gone to the Aetolians and had thence made an aimless expedition to Acarnania, on the news of Glabrio’s landing returned to his head-quarters to begin the campaign in earnest. But incom prehensibly, through his own negligence and that of his lieutenants in Asia, reinforcements had wholly failed to reach him, so that he had nothing but the weak army—now further decimated by sickness and desertion in its dissolute winter-quarters—with which he had landed at Pteleum in the autumn of the previous year. The Aetolians too, who had professed to send such enormous numbers into the field, now, when their support was of moment, brought to their commander-in-chief no more than 4000 men. The Roman troops had already begun operations in Thessaly, where the vanguard in concert with the Macedonian army drove the garrisons of Antiochus out of the Thessalian towns and occupied the territory of the Athamanes. The consul with the main army followed; the whole force of the Romans assembled at Larisa.
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.
Maritime War, and Preparations for Crossing to Asia
Polyxenidas and Pausistratus
Engagement off Aspendus
Battle of Myonnesus
A more serious war was impending in Asia—a war which appeared of a very hazardous character on account not so much of the enemy as of the great distance and the insecurity of the communications with home, while yet, owing to the short-sighted obstinacy of Antiochus, the struggle could not well be terminated otherwise than by an attack on the enemy in his own country. The first object was to secure the sea. The Roman fleet, which during the campaign in Greece was charged with the task of interrupting the communication between Greece and Asia Minor, and which had been successful about the time of the battle at Thermopylae in seizing a strong Asiatic transport fleet near Andros, was thenceforth employed in making preparations for the crossing of the Romans to Asia next year and first of all in driving the enemy’s fleet out of the Aegean Sea. It lay in the harbour of Cyssus on the southern shore of the tongue of land that projects from Ionia towards Chios; thither in search of it the Roman fleet proceeded, consisting of 75 Roman, 24 Pergamene, and 6 Carthaginian, decked vessels under the command of Gaius Livius. The Syrian admiral, Polyxenidas, a Rhodian emigrant, had only 70 decked vessels to oppose to it; but, as the Roman fleet still expected the ships of Rhodes, and as Polyxenidas relied on the superior seaworthiness of his vessels, those of Tyre and Sidon in particular, he immediately accepted battle. At the outset the Asiatics succeeded in sinking one of the Carthaginian vessels; but, when they came to grapple, Roman valour prevailed, and it was owing solely to the swiftness of their rowing and sailing that the enemy lost no more than 23 ships. During the pursuit the Roman fleet was joined by 25 ships from Rhodes, and the superiority of the Romans in those waters was now doubly assured. The enemy’s fleet thenceforth kept the shelter of the harbour of Ephesus, and, as it could not be induced to risk a second battle, the fleet of the Romans and allies broke up for the winter; the Roman ships of war proceeded to the harbour of Cane in the neighbourhood of Pergamus. Both parties were busy during the winter in preparing for the next campaign. The Romans sought to gain over the Greeks of Asia Minor; Smyrna, which had perseveringly resisted all the attempts of the king to get possession of the city, received the Romans with open arms, and the Roman party gained the ascendency in Samos, Chios, Erythrae, Clazomenae, Phocaea, Cyme, and elsewhere. Antiochus was resolved, if possible, to prevent the Romans from crossing to Asia, and with that view he made zealous naval preparations—employing Polyxenidas to fit out and augment the fleet stationed at Ephesus, and Hannibal to equip a new fleet in Lycia, Syria, and Phoenicia; while he further collected in Asia Minor a powerful land army from all regions of
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.
In the southern waters too the projects of Antiochus were frustrated. The fleet equipped and led by Hannibal, after having been long detained by the constant westerly winds, attempted at length to reach the Aegean; but at the mouth of the Eurymedon, off Aspendus in Pamphylia, it encountered a Rhodian squadron under Eudamus; and in the battle, which ensued between the two fleets, the excellence of the Rhodian ships and naval officers carried the victory over Hannibal’s tactics and his numerical superiority. It was the first naval battle, and the last battle against Rome, fought by the great Carthaginian. The victorious Rhodian fleet then took its station at Patara, and there prevented the intended junction of the two Asiatic fleets. In the Aegean Sea the Romano-Rhodian fleet at Samos, after being weakened by detaching the Pergamene ships to the Hellespont to support the land army which had arrived there, was in its turn attacked by that of Polyxenidas, who now numbered nine sail more than his opponents. On December 23 of the uncorrected calendar, according to the corrected calendar about the end of August, in 564, a battle took place at the promontory of Myonnesus between Teos and Colophon; the Romans broke through the line of the enemy, and totally surrounded the left wing, so that they took or sank 42 ships. An inscription in Saturnian verse over the temple of the Lares Permarini, which was built in the Campus Martius in memory of this victory, for many centuries thereafter proclaimed to the Romans how the fleet of the Asiatics had been defeated before the eyes of king Antiochus and of all his land army, and how the Romans thus “settled the mighty strife and subdued the kings.” Thenceforth the enemy’s ships no longer ventured to show themselves on the open sea, and made no further attempt to obstruct the crossing of the Roman land army.
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
Passage of the Hellespont by the Romans
On the news of the battle at Myonnesus Antiochus so completely lost his judgment, that in Europe he caused the strongly-garrisoned and well-provisioned fortress of Lysimachia to be evacuated by the garrison and by the inhabitants who were faithfully devoted to the restorer of their city, and withal even forgot to withdraw in like manner the garrisons or to destroy the rich magazines at Aenus and Maronea; and on the Asiatic coast he opposed not the slightest resistance to the landing of the Romans, but on the contrary, while it was taking place, spent his time at Sardes in upbraiding destiny. It is scarcely doubtful that, had he but provided for the defence of Lysimachia down to the no longer distant close of the summer, and moved forward his great army to the Hellespont, Scipio would have been compelled to take up winter quarters on the European shore, in a position far from being, in a military or political point of view, secure.
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
Battle of Magnesia
In the valley of the Hermus, near Magnesia at the foot of Mount Sipylus not far from Smyrna, the Roman troops fell in with the enemy late in the autumn of 564. The force of Antiochus numbered close on 80,000 men, of whom 12,000 were cavalry; the Romans—who had along with them about 5000 Achaeans, Pergamenes, and Macedonian volunteers —had not nearly half that number, but they were so sure of victory, that they did not even wait for the recovery of their general who had remained behind sick at Elaea; Gnaeus Domitius took the command in his stead. Antiochus, in order to be able even to place his immense mass of troops, formed two divisions. In the first were placed the mass of the light troops, the peltasts, bowmen, slingers, the mounted archers of Mysians, Dahae, and Elymaeans, the Arabs on their dromedaries, and the scythe-chariots. In the second division the heavy cavalry (the Cataphractae, a sort of cuirassiers) were stationed on the flanks; next to these, in the intermediate division, the Gallic and Cappadocian infantry; and in the very centre the phalanx armed after the Macedonian fashion, 16,000 strong, the flower of the army, which, however, had not room in the narrow space and had to be drawn up in double files 32 deep. In the space between the two divisions were placed 54 elephants, distributed between the bands of the phalanx and of the heavy cavalry. The Romans stationed but a few squadrons on the left wing, where the river gave protection; the mass of the cavalry and all the light armed were placed on the right, which was led by Eumenes; the legions stood in the centre. Eumenes began the battle by despatching his archers and slingers against the scythe-chariots with orders to shoot at the teams; in a short time not only were these thrown into disorder, but the camel-riders stationed next to them were also carried away, and even in the second division the left wing of heavy cavalry placed behind fell into confusion. Eumenes now threw himself with all the Roman cavalry, numbering 3000 horse, on the mercenary infantry, which was placed
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)
If the protectorate of Rome over the Hellenes was to be in Asia more than a name, an end had to be put to this tributary obligation of their new clients; and, as the Roman policy at this time declined, much more even in Asia than on the Graeco-Macedonian peninsula, the possession of the country on its own behalf and the permanent occupation therewith connected, there was no course in fact left but to carry the arms of Rome up to the limit which was to be staked off for the domain of Rome’s power, and effectively to inaugurate the new supremacy among the inhabitants of Asia Minor generally, and above all in the Celtic cantons.
This was done by the new Roman commander-in-chief, Gnaeus Manlius Volso, who relieved Lucius Scipio in Asia Minor. He was subjected to severe reproach on this score; the men in the senate who were averse to the new turn of policy failed to see either the aim, or the pretext, for such a war. There is no warrant for the former objection, as directed against this movement in particular; it was on the contrary,
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
Armenia
The two Armenias, hitherto at least nominally Asiatic satrapies, became transformed, if not exactly in pursuance with the Roman treaty of peace, yet under its influence into independent kingdoms; and their holders, Artaxias and Zariadris, became founders of new dynasties.
Cappadocia
Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia, whose land lay beyond the boundary laid down by the Romans for their protectorate, escaped with a money-fine of 600 talents (146,000 pounds); which was afterwards, on the intercession of his son-in-law Eumenes, abated to half that sum.
Bithynia
Prusias, king of Bithynia, retained his territory as it stood, and so did the Celts; but they were obliged to promise that they would no longer send armed bands beyond their bounds, and the disgraceful payments of tribute by the cities of Asia Minor came to an end. The Asiatic Greeks did not fail to repay the benefit—which was certainly felt as a general and permanent one—with golden chaplets and transcendental panegyrics.
The Free Greek Cities
In the western portion of Asia Minor the regulation of the territorial arrangements was not without difficulty, especially as the dynastic policy of Eumenes there came into collision with that of the Greek Hansa. At last an understanding was arrived at to the following effect. All the Greek cities, which were free and had joined the Romans on the day of the battle of Magnesia, had their liberties confirmed, and all of them, excepting those previously tributary to Eumenes, were relieved from the payment of tribute to the different dynasts for the future. In this way the towns of Dardanus and Ilium, whose ancient affinity with the Romans was traced to the times of Aeneas, became free, along with Cyme, Smyrna, Clazomenae, Erythrae, Chios, Colophon, Miletus, and other names of old renown. Phocaea also, which in spite of its capitulation had been plundered by the soldiers of the Roman fleet—although it did not fall under the category designated in the treaty—received back by way of compensation its territory and its freedom. Most of the cities of the Graeco-Asiatic Hansa acquired additions of territory and other advantages. Rhodes of course received most consideration; it obtained Lycia exclusive of Telmissus, and the greater part of Caria south of the Maeander; besides, Antiochus guaranteed the property and the claims of the Rhodians within his kingdom, as well as the exemption from customs-dues which they had hitherto enjoyed.
Extension of the Kingdom of Pergamus
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
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
Macedonia
In this case also Rome adhered to the principle of confining herself to Italy and the Italian islands. She took no portion of the spoil for herself, except the two islands of Cephallenia and Zacynthus, which formed a desirable supplement to the possession of Corcyra and other naval stations in the Adriatic. The rest of the territorial gain went to the allies of Rome. But the two most important of these, Philip and the Achaeans, were by no means content with the share of the spoil granted to them. Philip felt himself aggrieved, and not without reason. He might safely say that the chief difficulties in the last war—difficulties which arose not from the character of the enemy, but from the distance and the uncertainty of the communications—had been overcome mainly by his loyal aid. The senate recognized this by remitting his arrears of tribute and sending back his hostages; but he did not receive those additions to his territory which he expected. He got the territory of the Magnetes, with Demetrias which he had taken from the Aetolians; besides, there practically remained in his hands the districts of Dolopia and Athamania and a part of Thessaly, from which also the Aetolians had been expelled by him. In Thrace the interior remained under Macedonian protection, but nothing was fixed as to the coast towns and the islands of Thasos and Lemnos which were -de facto- in Philip’s hands, while the Chersonese was even expressly given to Eumenes; and it was not difficult to see that Eumenes received possessions in Europe, simply that he might in case of need keep not only Asia but Macedonia in check. The exasperation of the proud and in many respects chivalrous king was natural; it was not chicane, however, but an unavoidable political necessity that induced the Romans to take this course. Macedonia suffered for having once been a power of the first rank, and for having waged war on equal terms with Rome; there was much better reason in her case than in that of Carthage for guarding against the revival of her old powerful position.
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.
The Achaean Patriots
The Achaeans believed it their duty to display the independence of their state all the more, the less they really had; they talked of the rights of war, and of the faithful aid of the Achaeans in the wars of the Romans; they asked the Roman envoys at the Achaean diet why Rome should concern herself about Messene when Achaia put no questions as to Capua; and the spirited patriot, who had thus spoken, was applauded and was sure of votes at the elections. All this would have been very right and very dignified, had it not been much more ridiculous. There was a profound justice and a still more profound melancholy in the fact, that Rome, however earnestly she endeavoured to establish the freedom and to earn the thanks of the Hellenes, yet gave them nothing but anarchy and reaped nothing but ingratitude. Undoubtedly very generous sentiments lay at the bottom of the Hellenic antipathies to the protecting power, and the personal bravery of some of the men who took the lead in the movement was unquestionable; but this Achaean patriotism remained not the less a folly and a genuine historical caricature. With all that ambition and all that national susceptibility the whole nation was, from the highest to the lowest, pervaded by the most thorough sense of impotence. Every one was constantly listening to learn the sentiments of Rome, the liberal man no less than the servile; they thanked heaven,
Quarrels between Achaeans and Spartans
The Achaeans in particular, who, in their eagerness to round their territory, wholly failed to see how much it would have been for their own good that Flamininus had not incorporated the towns of Aetolian sympathies with their league, acquired in Lacedaemon and Messene a very hydra of intestine strife. Members of these communities were incessantly at Rome, entreating and beseeching to be released from the odious connection; and amongst them, characteristically enough, were even those who were indebted to the Achaeans for their return to their native land. The Achaean league was incessantly occupied in the work of reformation and restoration at Sparta and Messene; the wildest refugees from these quarters determined the measures of the diet. Four years after the nominal admission of Sparta to the confederacy matters came even to open war and to an insanely thorough restoration, in which all the slaves on whom Nabis had conferred citizenship were once more sold into slavery, and a colonnade was built from the proceeds in the Achaean city of Megalopolis; the old state of property in Sparta was re-established, the of Lycurgus were superseded by Achaean laws, and the walls were pulled down (566). At last the Roman senate was summoned by all parties to arbitrate on all these doings —an annoying task, which was the righteous punishment of the sentimental policy that the senate had pursued. Far from mixing itself up too much in these affairs, the senate not only bore the sarcasms of Achaean candour with
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
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.
1. According to a recently discovered decree of the town of Lampsacus (-Mitth, des arch. Inst, in Athen-, vi. 95) the Lampsacenes after the defeat of Philip sent envoys to the Roman senate with the request that the town might be embraced in the treaty concluded between Rome and (Philip) the king (—opos sumperilephthomen [en tais sunthekais] tais genomenais Pomaiois pros ton [basilea]—), which the senate, at least according to the view of the petitioners, granted to them and referred them, as regarded other matters, to Flamininus and the ten envoys. From the latter they then obtain in Corinth a guarantee of their constitution and “letters to the kings.” Flamininus also gives to them similar letters; of their contents we learn nothing more particular, than that in the decree the embassy is described as successful. But if the senate and Flamininus had formally and positively guaranteed the autonomy and democracy of the Lampsacenes, the decree would hardly dwell so much at length on the courteous answers, which the Roman commanders, who had been appealed to on the way for their intercession with the senate, gave to the envoys.
Other remarkable points in this document are the “brotherhood” of the Lampsacenes and the Romans, certainly going back to the Trojan legend, and the mediation, invoked by the former with success, of the allies and friends of Rome, the Massiliots, who were connected with the Lampsacenes through their common mother-city Phocaea.
2. The definite testimony of Hieronymus, who places the betrothal of the Syrian princess Cleopatra with Ptolemy Epiphanes in 556, taken in connection with the hints in Liv. xxxiii. 40 and Appian. Syr. 3, and with the actual accomplishment of the marriage in 561, puts it beyond a doubt that the interference of the Romans in the affairs of Egypt was in this case formally uncalled for.
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.
4. II. VII. Submission of Lower Italy
5. III. VII. The Romans Maintain a Standing Army in Spain
6. III. VIII. The Celts of Asia Minor ff.
7. From the decree of Lampsacus mentioned at iii. IX. Difficulties with Rome, it appears pretty certain that the Lampsacenes requested from the Massiliots not merely intercession at Rome, but also intercession with the Tolistoagii (so the Celts, elsewhere named Tolistobogi, are designated in this document and in the Pergamene inscription, C. J. Gr. 3536,—the oldest monuments which mention them). Accordingly the Lampsacenes were probably still about the time of the wax with Philip tributary to this canton (comp. Liv. xxxviii. 16).
8. The story that he went to Armenia and at the request of king Artaxias built the town of Artaxata on the Araxes (Strabo, xi. p. 528; Plutarch, Luc. 31), is certainly a fiction; but it is a striking circumstance that Hannibal should have become mixed up, almost like Alexander, with Oriental fables.
9. Africanus, Asiagenus, Hispallus.
The Third Macedonian War
Dissatisfactions of Philip with Rome
Philip of Macedonia was greatly annoyed by the treatment which he met with from the Romans after the peace with Antiochus; and the subsequent course of events was not fitted to appease his wrath. His neighbours in Greece and Thrace, mostly communities that had once trembled at the Macedonian name not less than now they trembled at the Roman, made it their business, as was natural, to retaliate on the fallen great power for all the injuries which since the times of Philip the Second they had received at the hands of Macedonia. The empty arrogance and venal anti-Macedonian patriotism of the Hellenes of this period found vent at the diets of the different confederacies and in ceaseless complaints addressed to the Roman senate. Philip had been allowed by the Romans to retain what he had taken from the Aetolians; but in Thessaly the confederacy of the Magnetes alone had formally joined the Aetolians, while those towns which Philip had wrested from the Aetolians in other two of the Thessalian confederacies—the Thessalian in its narrower sense, and the Perrhaebian—were demanded back by their leagues on the ground that Philip had only liberated these towns, not conquered
The Latter Years of Philip
Philip displayed in the preparation and the concealment of his designs a calmness, earnestness, and persistency which, had he shown them in better times, would perhaps have given a different turn to the destinies of the world. In particular the submissiveness towards Rome, by which he purchased the time indispensable for his objects, formed a severe trial for the fierce and haughty man; nevertheless he courageously endured it, although his subjects and the innocent occasions of the quarrel, such as the unfortunate Maronea, paid severely for the suppression of his resentment. It seemed as if war could not but break out as early as 571; but by Philip’s instructions, his younger son, Demetrius, effected a reconciliation between his father and Rome, where he had lived some years as a hostage and was a great favourite. The senate, and particularly Flamininus who managed Greek affairs, sought to form in Macedonia a Roman party that would be able to paralyze the exertions of Philip, which of course were not unknown to the Romans; and had selected as its head, and perhaps as the future king of Macedonia, the younger prince who was passionately attached to Rome. With this purpose in view they gave it clearly to be understood that the senate forgave the father for the sake of the son; the natural effect of which was, that dissensions arose in the royal household itself, and that the king’s elder son, Perseus, who, although the offspring of an unequal marriage, was destined by his father for the succession, sought to ruin his brother as his future rival. It does not appear that Demetrius was a party to the Roman intrigues; it was only when he was falsely suspected that he was forced to become guilty, and even then he intended, apparently, nothing more than flight to Rome. But Perseus took care that his father should be duly informed of this design; an intercepted letter from Flamininus to Demetrius did the rest, and induced the father to give orders that his son should be put to death. Philip learned, when it was too late, the intrigues which Perseus had concocted; and death overtook him, as he was meditating the punishment of the fratricide and his exclusion from the throne. He died in 575 at Demetrias, in his fifty-ninth year. He left behind him a shattered kingdom and a distracted household, and with a broken heart confessed to himself that all his toils and all his crimes had been in vain.
King Perseus
His son Perseus then entered on the government, without encountering opposition either in Macedonia or in the Roman senate. He was a man of stately aspect, expert in all bodily exercises, reared in the camp and accustomed to command, imperious like his father and unscrupulous in the choice of his means. Wine and women, which too often led Philip to forget the duties of government, had no charm for Perseus; he was as steady and persevering as his father had been fickle and impulsive. Philip, a king while still a boy, and attended by good fortune during the first twenty years of his reign, had been spoiled and ruined by destiny; Perseus ascended the throne in his thirty-first year, and, as he had while yet a boy borne a part in the unhappy war with Rome and had grown up under the pressure of humiliation and under the idea that a revival of the state was at hand, so he inherited along with the kingdom of his father his troubles, resentments, and hopes. In fact he entered with the utmost determination on the continuance of his father’s work, and prepared more zealously than ever for war against Rome; he was stimulated, moreover, by the reflection, that he was by no means indebted to the goodwill of the Romans for his wearing the diadem of Macedonia. The proud Macedonian nation looked with pride upon the prince whom they had been accustomed to see marching and fighting at the head of their youth; his countrymen, and many Hellenes of every variety of lineage, conceived that in him they had found the right general for the impending war of liberation. But he was not what he seemed. He wanted Philip’s geniality and Philip’s elasticity—those truly royal qualities, which success obscured and tarnished, but which under the purifying power of adversity recovered their lustre. Philip was self-indulgent, and allowed things to take their course; but, when there was occasion, he found within himself the vigour necessary for rapid and earnest action. Perseus devised comprehensive and subtle plans, and prosecuted them with unwearied perseverance; but, when the moment arrived for action and his plans and preparations confronted him in living reality, he was frightened at his own work. As is the wont of narrow minds, the means became to him the end; he heaped up treasures on treasures for war with the Romans, and, when the Romans were in the land, he was unable to part with his golden pieces. It is a significant indication of character that after defeat the father first hastened to destroy the papers in his cabinet that might compromise him, whereas the son took his treasure-chests and embarked. In ordinary times he might have made an average king, as good as or better than many another; but he was not adapted for the conduct of an enterprise, which was from the first a hopeless one unless some extraordinary man should become the soul of the movement.
Resources of Macedonia
The power of Macedonia was far from inconsiderable. The devotion of the land to the house of the Antigonids was unimpaired; in this one respect the national feeling was not paralyzed by the dissensions of political parties. A monarchical constitution has the great advantage, that every change of sovereign supersedes old resentments and quarrels and introduces a new era of other men and fresh hopes. The king had judiciously availed himself of this, and had begun his reign with a general amnesty, with the recall of fugitive bankrupts, and with the remission of arrears of taxes. The hateful severity of the father thus not only yielded benefit, but conciliated affection, to the son. Twenty-six years of peace had partly of themselves filled up the blanks in the Macedonian population, partly given opportunity to the government to take serious steps towards rectifying this which was really the weak point of the land. Philip urged the Macedonians to marry and raise up children; he occupied the coast towns, whose inhabitants he carried into the interior, with Thracian colonists of trusty valour and fidelity. He formed a barrier on the north to check once for all the desolating incursions of the Dardani, by converting the space intervening between the Macedonian frontier and the barbarian territory into a desert, and by founding new towns in the northern provinces. In short he took step by step the same course in Macedonia, as Augustus afterwards took when he laid afresh the foundations of the Roman empire. The army was numerous—30,000 men without reckoning contingents and hired troops—and the younger men were well exercised in the constant border warfare with the Thracian barbarians. It is strange that Philip did not try, like Hannibal, to organize his army after the Roman fashion; but we can understand it when we recollect the value which the Macedonians set upon their phalanx, often conquered, but still withal believed to be invincible. Through the new sources of revenue which Philip had created in mines, customs, and tenths, and through the flourishing state of agriculture and commerce, he had succeeded in replenishing his treasury, granaries, and arsenals. When the war began, there was in the Macedonian treasury money enough to pay the existing army and 10,000 hired troops for ten years, and there were in the public magazines stores of grain for as long a period (18,000,000 medimni or 27,000,000 bushels), and arms for an army of three times the strength of the existing one. In fact, Macedonia had become a very different state from what it was when surprised by the outbreak of the second war with Rome. The power of the kingdom was in all respects at least doubled: with a power in every point of view far inferior Hannibal had been able to shake Rome to its foundations.
Attempted Coalition against Rome
Its external relations were not in so favourable a position. The nature of the case required that Macedonia should now take up the plans of Hannibal and Antiochus, and should try to place herself at the head of a coalition of all oppressed states against the supremacy of Rome; and certainly threads of intrigue ramified in all directions from the court of Pydna. But their success was slight. It was indeed asserted that the allegiance of the Italians was wavering; but neither friend nor foe could fail to see that an immediate resumption of the Samnite wars was not at all probable. The nocturnal conferences likewise between Macedonian deputies and the Carthaginian senate, which Massinissa denounced at Rome, could occasion no alarm to serious and sagacious men, even if they were not, as is very possible, an utter fiction. The Macedonian court sought to attach the kings of Syria and Bithynia to its interests by intermarriages; but nothing further came of it, except that the immortal simplicity of the diplomacy which seeks to gain political ends by matrimonial means once more exposed itself to derision. Eumenes, whom it would have been ridiculous to attempt to gain, the agents of Perseus would have gladly put out of the way: he was to have been murdered at Delphi on his way homeward from Rome, where he had been active against Macedonia; but the pretty project miscarried.
Bastarnae
Genthius
Of greater moment were the efforts made to stir up the northern barbarians and the Hellenes to rebellion against Rome. Philip had conceived the project of crushing the old enemies of Macedonia, the Dardani in what is now Servia, by means of another still more barbarous horde of Germanic descent brought from the left bank of the Danube, the Bastarnae, and of then marching in person with these and with the whole avalanche of peoples thus set in motion by the land-route to Italy and invading Lombardy, the Alpine passes leading to which he had already sent spies to reconnoitre—a grand project, worthy of Hannibal, and doubtless immediately suggested by Hannibal’s passage of the Alps. It is more than probable that this gave occasion to the founding of the Roman fortress of Aquileia,(2) which was formed towards the end of the reign of Philip (573), and did not harmonize with the system followed elsewhere by the Romans in the establishment of fortresses in Italy. The plan, however, was thwarted by the desperate resistance of the Dardani and of the adjoining tribes concerned; the Bastarnae were obliged to retreat, and the whole horde were drowned in returning home by the giving way of the ice on the Danube. The king now sought at least to extend his clientship among the chieftains of the Illyrian land, the modern Dalmatia and northern Albania. One of these who faithfully adhered to Rome, Arthetaurus, perished, not without the cognizance of Perseus, by the hand of an assassin. The most considerable of the whole, Genthius the son and heir of Pleuratus, was, like his father, nominally in alliance with Rome; but the ambassadors of Issa, a Greek town on one of the Dalmatian islands, informed the senate, that Perseus had a secret understanding with the young, weak, and drunken prince, and that the envoys of Genthius served as spies for Perseus in Rome.
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.
Greek National Party
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
Rupture with Perseus
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
Preparations for War
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.
Beginning of the War
But, though Perseus stood almost alone, he was no contemptible antagonist. His army numbered 43,000 men; of these 21,000 were phalangites, and 4000 Macedonian and Thracian cavalry; the rest were chiefly mercenaries. The whole force of the Romans in Greece amounted to between 30,000 and 40,000 Italian troops, besides more than 10,000 men belonging to Numidian, Ligurian, Greek, Cretan, and especially Pergamene contingents. To these was added the fleet, which numbered only 40 decked vessels, as there was no fleet of the enemy to oppose it—Perseus, who had been prohibited from building ships of war by the treaty with Rome, was only now erecting docks at Thessalonica—but it had on board 10,000 troops, as it was destined chiefly to co-operate in sieges. The fleet was commanded by Gaius Lucretius, the land army by the consul Publius Licinius Crassus.
The Romans Invade Thessaly
The consul left a strong division in Illyria to harass Macedonia from the west, while with the main force he started, as usual, from Apollonia for Thessaly. Perseus did not think of disturbing their arduous march, but contented himself with advancing into Perrhaebia and occupying the nearest fortresses. He awaited the enemy at Ossa, and not far from Larisa the first conflict took place between the cavalry and light troops on both sides. The Romans were decidedly beaten. Cotys with the Thracian horse had defeated and broken the Italian, and Perseus with his Macedonian horse the Greek, cavalry; the Romans had 2000 foot and 200 horsemen killed, and 600 horsemen made prisoners, and had to deem themselves fortunate in being allowed to cross the Peneius without hindrance. Perseus employed the victory to ask peace on the same terms which Philip had obtained: he was ready even to pay the same sum. The Romans refused his request: they never concluded peace after a defeat, and in this case the conclusion of peace would certainly have involved as a consequence the loss of Greece.
Their Lax and Unsuccessful Management of the War
The wretched Roman commander, however, knew not how or where to attack; the army marched to and fro in Thessaly, without accomplishing anything of importance. Perseus might have assumed the offensive; he saw that the Romans were badly led and dilatory; the news had passed like wildfire through Greece, that the Greek army had been brilliantly victorious in the first engagement; a second victory might lead to a general rising of the patriot party, and, by commencing a guerilla warfare, might produce incalculable results. But Perseus, while a good soldier, was not a general like his father; he had made his preparations for a defensive war, and, when things took a different turn, he felt himself as it were paralyzed. He made an unimportant success, which the Romans obtained in a second cavalry combai near Phalanna, a pretext for reverting, as is the habit of narrow and obstinate minds, to his first plan and evacuating Thessaly.
Abuses in the Army
The consul employed himself chiefly in the reorganization of the army —a work which was above all things needful, but which required a sterner man and an officer of greater mark. Discharges and furloughs might be bought, and therefore the divisions were never up to their full numbers; the men were put into quarters in summer, and, as the officers plundered on a large, the common soldiers plundered on a small, scale. Friendly peoples were subjected to the most shameful
Marcius Enters Macedonia through the Pass of Tempe
The Armies on the Elpius
The third commander-in-chief also, whom Rome sent to Macedonia in 585, Quintus Marcius Philippus, that already-mentioned upright guest-friend of the king, was not at all equal to his far from easy task. He was ambitious and enterprising, but a bad officer. His hazardous venture of crossing Olympus by the pass of Lapathus westward of Tempe, leaving behind one division to face the garrison of the pass, and making his way with his main force through impracticable denies to Heracleum, is not excused by the fact of its success. Not only might a handful of resolute men have blocked the route, in which case retreat was out of the question; but even after the passage, when he stood with the Macedonian main force in front and the strongly-fortified mountain-fortresses of Tempe and Lapathus behind him, wedged into a narrow plain on the shore and without supplies or the possibility of foraging for them, his position was no less desperate than when, in his first consulate, he had allowed himself to be similarly surrounded in the Ligurian defiles which thenceforth bore his name. But as an accident saved him then, so the incapacity of Perseus saved him now. As if he could not comprehend the idea of defending himself against the Romans otherwise than by blocking the passes, he strangely gave himself
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.
Perseus Is Driven Back to Pydna
Battle of Pydna
Perseus Taken Prisoner
As soon as the new general arrived in the camp at Heracleum, he gave orders for the ill-guarded pass at Pythium to be surprised by Publius Nasica, while skirmishes between the outposts in the channel of the river Elpius occupied the attention of the Macedonians; the enemy was thus turned, and was obliged to retreat to Pydna. There on the Roman 4th of September, 586, or on the 22nd of June of the Julian calendar —an eclipse of the moon, which a scientific Roman officer announced beforehand to the army that it might not be regarded as a bad omen, affords in this case the means of determining the date—the outposts accidentally fell into conflict as they were watering their horses after midday; and both sides determined at once to give the battle, which it was originally intended to postpone till the following day. Passing through the ranks in person, without helmet or shield, the grey-headed Roman general arranged his men. Scarce were they in position, when the formidable phalanx assailed them; the general himself, who had witnessed many a hard fight, afterwards acknowledged that he had trembled. The Roman vanguard dispersed; a Paelignian cohort was overthrown and almost annihilated; the legions themselves hurriedly retreated till they reached a hill close upon the Roman camp. Here the fortune of the day changed. The uneven ground and the hurried pursuit had disordered the ranks of the phalanx; the Romans in single cohorts entered at every gap, and attacked it on the flanks and in rear; the Macedonian cavalry which alone could have rendered aid looked calmly on, and soon fled in a body, the king among the foremost; and thus the fate of Macedonia was decided in less than an hour. The 3000 select phalangites allowed themselves to be cut down to the last man; it was as if the phalanx, which fought its last great battle at Pydna, had itself wished to perish there. The overthrow was fearful;
Thus perished the empire of Alexander the Great, which had subdued and Hellenized the east, 144 years after its founder’s death.
Defeat and Capture of Genthius
That the tragedy, moreover, might not be without its accompaniment of farce, at the same time the war against “king” Genthius of Illyria was also begun and ended by the praetor Lucius Anicius within thirty days. The piratical fleet was taken, the capital Scodra was captured, and the two kings, the heir of Alexander the Great and the heir of Pleuratus, entered Rome side by side as prisoners.
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
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
Illyria was treated in a similar way. The kingdom of Genthius was split up into three small free states. There too the freeholders paid the half of the former land-tax to their new masters, with the exception of the towns, which had adhered to Rome and in return obtained exemption from land-tax—an exception, which there was no opportunity to make in the case of Macedonia. The Illyrian piratic fleet was confiscated, and presented to the more reputable Greek communities along that coast. The constant annoyances, which the Illyrians inflicted on the neighbours by their corsairs, were in this way put an end to, at least for a lengthened period.
Cotys
Cotys in Thrace, who was difficult to be reached and might conveniently be used against Eumenes, obtained pardon and received back his captive son.
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.
Humiliation of the Greeks in General
Course Pursued with Pergamus
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
Humiliation of Rhodes
Similar treatment befell the Rhodians. They had a singularly privileged position: their relation to Rome assumed the form not of symmachy properly so called, but of friendly equality; it did not prevent them from entering into alliances of any kind, and did not compel them to supply the Romans with a contingent on demand. This very circumstance was presumably the real reason why their good understanding with Rome had already for some time been impaired. The first dissensions with Rome had arisen in consequence of the rising of the Lycians, who were handed over to Rhodes after the defeat of Antiochus, against their oppressors who had (576) cruelly reduced them to slavery as revolted subjects; the Lycians, however, asserted that they were not subjects but allies of the Rhodians, and prevailed with this plea in the Roman senate, which was invited to settle the doubtful meaning of the instrument of peace. But in this result a justifiable sympathy with the victims of grievous oppression had perhaps the chief share; at least nothing further was done on the part of the Romans, who left this as well as other Hellenic quarrels to take their course. When the war with Perseus broke out, the Rhodians, like all other sensible Greeks, viewed it with regret,
Intervention in the Syro-Egyptian War
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.
Measures of Security in Greece
Egypt voluntarily submitted to the Roman protectorate; and thereupon the kings of Babylon also desisted from the last attempt to maintain their independence against Rome. As with Macedonia in the war waged by Perseus, the Seleucidae in the war regarding Coelesyria made a similar and similarly final effort to recover their former power; but it is a significant indication of the difference between the two kingdoms, that in the former case the legions, in the latter the abrupt language of a diplomatist, decided the controversy. In Greece itself, as the two Boeotian cities had already paid more than a sufficient penalty, the Molottians alone remained to be punished as allies of Perseus. Acting on secret orders from the senate, Paullus in one day gave up seventy townships in Epirus to plunder, and sold the inhabitants, 150,000 in number, into slavery. The Aetolians lost Amphipolis, and the Acarnanians Leucas, on account of their equivocal behaviour; whereas the Athenians, who continued to play the part of the begging poet in their own Aristophanes, not only obtained a gift of Delos and Lemnos, but were not ashamed even to petition for the deserted site of Haliartus, which was assigned to them accordingly. Thus something was done for the Muses; but more had to be done for justice. There was a Macedonian party in every city, and therefore trials for high treason began in all parts of Greece. Whoever had served in the army of Perseus was immediately executed, whoever was compromised by the papers of the king or the statements of political opponents who flocked to lodge informations, was despatched to Rome; the Achaean Callicrates and the Aetolian Lyciscus distinguished themselves in the trade of informers. In this way the more conspicuous patriots among the Thessalians, Aetolians, Acarnanians, Lesbians and so forth, were removed from their native land; and, in particular, more than a thousand Achaeans were thus disposed of —a step taken with the view not so much of prosecuting those who were carried off, as of silencing the childish opposition of the Hellenes.
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
Rome and Her Dependencies
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
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
1. —Ide gar prasde panth alion ammi dedukein— (i. 102).
2. II. VII. Last Struggles in Italy
3. The legal dissolution of the Boeotian confederacy, however, took place not at this time, but only after the destruction of Corinth (Pausan. vii. 14, 4; xvi. 6).
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.
6. The statement of Cassiodorus, that the Macedonian mines were reopened in 596, receives its more exact interpretation by means of the coins. No gold coins of the four Macedonias are extant; either therefore the gold-mines remained closed, or the gold extracted was converted into bars. On the other hand there certainly exist silver coins of Macedonia -prima- (Amphipolis) in which district the silver-mines were situated. For the brief period, during which they must have been struck (596-608), the number of them is remarkably great, and proves either that the mines were very energetically worked, or that the old royal money was recoined in large quantity.
7. The statement that the Macedonian commonwealth was “relieved of seignorial imposts and taxes” by the Romans (Polyb. xxxvii. 4) does not necessarily require us to assume a subsequent remission of these taxes: it is sufficient, for the explanation of Polybius’ words, to assume that the hitherto seignorial tax now became a public one. The continuance of the constitution granted to the province of Macedonia by Paullus down to at least the Augustan age (Liv. xlv. 32; Justin, xxxiii. 2), would, it is true, be compatible also with the remission of the taxes.
The Government and the Governed
Formation of New Parties
The fall of the patriciate by no means divested the Roman commonwealth of its aristocratic character. We have already(1) indicated that the plebeian party carried within it that character from the first as well as, and in some sense still more decidedly than, the patriciate; for, while in the old body of burgesses an absolute equality of rights prevailed, the new constitution set out from a distinction between the senatorial houses who were privileged in point of burgess rights and of burgess usufructs, and the mass of the other citizens. Immediately, therefore, on the abolition of the patriciate and the formal establishment of civic equality, a new aristocracy and a corresponding opposition were formed; and we have already shown how
Germs of the Nobility in the Patriciate
The Roman nobility attached itself, in form, to earlier institutions belonging to the times of the patriciate. Persons who once had filled the highest ordinary magistracies of the state not only, as a matter of course, practically enjoyed all along a higher honour, but also had at an early period certain honorary privileges associated with their position. The most ancient of these was doubtless the permission given to the descendants of such magistrates to place the wax images of these illustrious ancestors after their death in the family hall, along the wall where the pedigree was painted, and to have these images carried, on occasion of the death of members of the family, in the funeral procession.(3) To appreciate the importance of this distinction, we must recollect that the honouring of images was regarded in the Italo-Hellenic view as unrepublican, and on that account the Roman state-police did not at all tolerate the exhibition of effigies of the living, and strictly superintended that of effigies of the dead. With this privilege were associated various external insignia, reserved by law or custom for such magistrates and their descendants:—the golden finger-ring of the men, the silver-mounted trappings of the youths, the purple border on the toga and the golden amulet-case of the boys (4)—trifling matters, but still important in a community where civic equality even in external appearance was so strictly adhered to,(5) and where, even during the second Punic war, a burgess was arrested and kept for years in prison because he had appeared in public, in a manner not sanctioned by law, with a garland of roses upon his head.(6)
Patricio-Plebian Nobility
These distinctions may perhaps have already existed partially in the time of the patrician government, and, so long as families of higher and humbler rank were distinguished within the patriciate, may have served as external insignia for the former; but they certainly only acquired political importance in consequence of the change of constitution in 387, by which the plebeian families that attained the consulate were placed on a footing of equal privilege with the patrician families, all of whom were now probably entitled to carry images of their ancestors. Moreover, it was now settled that the offices of state to which these hereditary privileges were attached should include neither the lower nor the extraordinary magistracies nor the tribunate of the plebs, but merely the consulship, the praetorship which stood on the same level with it,(7) and the curule aedileship, which bore a part in the administration of public justice and consequently in the exercise of the sovereign powers of the state.(8) Although this plebeian nobility, in the strict sense of the term, could only be formed after the curule offices were opened to plebeians, yet it exhibited in a short time, if not at the very first, a certain compactness of organization—doubtless because such a nobility had long been prefigured in the old senatorial plebeian families. The result of the Licinian laws in reality therefore amounted nearly to what we should now call the creation of a batch of peers. Now that the plebeian families ennobled by their curule ancestors were united into one body with the patrician families and acquired a distinctive position and distinguished power in the commonwealth, the Romans had again arrived at the point whence they had started; there was once more not merely a governing aristocracy and a hereditary nobility—both of which in fact had never disappeared—but there was a governing hereditary nobility, and the feud between the gentes in possession of the government and the commons rising in revolt against the gentes could not but begin afresh. And matters very soon reached that stage. The nobility was not content with its honorary privileges which were matters of comparative indifference, but strove after separate and sole political power, and sought to convert the most important institutions of the state—the senate and the equestrian order—from organs of the commonwealth into organs of the plebeio-patrician aristocracy.
The Nobility in Possession of the Senate
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
The Nobility in Possession of the Equestrian Centuries
The institution of the equites was developed into a second, less important but yet far from unimportant, organ of the nobility. As the new hereditary nobility had not the power to usurp sole possession of the comitia, it necessarily became in the highest degree desirable that it should obtain at least a separate position within the body representing the community. In the assembly of the tribes there was no method of managing this; but the equestrian centuries under the Servian organization seemed as it were created for the very purpose. The 1800 horses which the community furnished(12) were constitutionally disposed of likewise by the censors. It was, no doubt, the duty of these to select the equites on military grounds and at their musters to insist that all horsemen incapacitated by age or otherwise, or at all unserviceable, should surrender their public horse; but the very nature of the institution implied that the equestrian horses should be given especially to men of means, and it was not at all easy to hinder the censors from looking to genteel birth more than to capacity, and from allowing men of standing who were once admitted, senators particularly, to retain their horse beyond the proper time. Perhaps it was even fixed by law that the senator might retain it as long as he wished. Accordingly it became at least practically the rule for the senators to vote in the eighteen equestrian centuries, and the other places in these were assigned chiefly to the young men of the nobility. The military system, of course, suffered from this not so much through the unfitness for effective service of no small part of the legionary cavalry, as through the destruction
Separation of the Orders in the Theatre
Of a kindred character was the formal separation of the places assigned to the senatorial order from those occupied by the rest of the multitude as spectators at the national festivals. It was the great Scipio, who effected this change in his second consulship in 560. The national festival was as much an assembly of the people as were the centuries convoked for voting; and the circumstance that the former had no resolutions to pass made the official announcement of a distinction between the ruling order and the body of subjects—which the separation implied—all the more significant. The innovation accordingly met with much censure even from the ruling class, because it was simply invidious and not useful, and because it gave a very manifest contradiction to the efforts of the more prudent portion of the aristocracy to conceal their exclusive government under the forms of civil equality.
The Censorship a Prop of the Nobility
These circumstances explain, why the censorship became the pivot of the later republican constitution; why an office, originally standing by no means in the first rank, came to be gradually invested with external insignia which did not at all belong to it in itself and with an altogether unique aristocratic-republican glory, and was viewed as the crown and completion of a well-conducted public career; and why the government looked upon every attempt of the opposition to introduce their men into this office, or even to hold the censor responsible to the people for his administration during or after his term of office, as an attack on their palladium, and presented a united front of resistance to every such attempt. It is sufficient in this respect to mention the storm which the candidature of Cato for the censorship provoked, and the measures, so extraordinarily reckless and in violation of all form, by which the senate prevented the judicial prosecution of the two unpopular censors of the year 550.
Remodelling of the Constitution According to the Views of the Nobility Inadequate Number of Magistrates
In this political position—mainly based on the senate, the equites, and the censorship—the nobility not only usurped in substance the government, but also remodelled the constitution according to their own views. It was part of their policy, with a view to keep up the appreciation of the public magistracies, to add to the number of these as little as possible, and to keep it far below what was required by the extension of territory and the increase of business. Only the most urgent exigencies were barely met by the division of the judicial functions hitherto discharged by a single praetor between two judges —one of whom tried the lawsuits between Roman burgesses, and the other those that arose between non-burgesses or between burgess and non-burgess—in 511, and by the nomination of four auxiliary consuls for the four transmarine provinces of Sicily (527), Sardinia including Corsica (527), and Hither and Further Spain (557). The far too summary mode of initialing processes in Rome, as well as the increasing influence of the official staff, are doubtless traceable in great measure to the practically inadequate numbers of the Roman magistracy.
Election of Officers in the Comitia
Among the innovations originated by the government—which were none the less innovations, that almost uniformly they changed not the letter, but merely the practice of the existing constitution—the most prominent were the measures by which the filling up of officers’ posts as well as of civil magistracies was made to depend not, as the letter of the constitution allowed and its spirit required, simply on merit and ability, but more and more on birth and seniority. As regards the nomination of staff-officers this was done not in form, but all the more in substance. It had already, in the course of the previous period, been in great part transferred from the general to the burgesses;(13) in this period came the further step, that the whole staff-officers of the regular yearly levy—the twenty-four military tribunes of the four ordinary legions—were nominated in the -comitia tributa-. Thus a line of demarcation more and more insurmountable was drawn between the subalterns, who gained their promotion from the general by punctual and brave service, and the staff, which obtained its privileged position by canvassing the burgesses.(14) With a view to check simply the worst abuses in this respect and to prevent young men quite untried from holding these important posts, it became necessary to require, as a preliminary to the bestowal of staff appointments, evidence of a certain number of years of service. Nevertheless, when once the military tribunate, the true pillar of the Roman military system, was laid down as the first stepping-stone in the political career of the young aristocrats, the obligation of service inevitably came to be frequently eluded, and the election of officers became liable to all the evils of democratic canvassing and of aristocratic exclusiveness. It was a cutting commentary on the new institution, that in serious wars (as in 583) it was found necessary to suspend this democratic mode of electing officers, and to leave once more to the general the nomination of his staff.
Restrictions on the Election of Consuls and Censors
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
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.
Government of the Nobility
Internal Administration
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
Decline in the Administration
In relation, first of all, to the individual burgess the government was no longer what it had been. The term “magistrate” meant a man who was more than other men; and, if he was the servant of the community, he was for that very reason the master of every burgess. But the tightness of the rein was now visibly relaxed. Where coteries and canvassing flourish as they did in the Rome of that age, men are chary of forfeiting the reciprocal services of their fellows or the favour of the multitude by stern words and impartial discharge of official duty. If now and then magistrates appeared who displayed the gravity and the sternness of the olden time, they were ordinarily, like Cotta (502) and Cato, new men who had not sprung from the bosom of the ruling class. It was already something singular, when Paullus, who had been named commander-in-chief against Perseus, instead of tendering his thanks in the usual manner to the burgesses, declared to them that he presumed they had chosen him as general because they accounted him the most capable of command, and requested them accordingly not to help him to command, but to be silent and obey.
As to Military Discipline and Administration of Justice
The supremacy and hegemony of Rome in the territories of the Mediterranean rested not least on the strictness of her military discipline and her administration of justice. Undoubtedly she was still, on the whole, at that time infinitely superior in these respects to the Hellenic, Phoenician, and Oriental states, which were without exception thoroughly disorganized; nevertheless grave abuses were already occurring in Rome. We have previously(20) pointed out how the wretched character of the commanders-in-chief—and that not merely in the case of demagogues chosen perhaps by the opposition, like Gaius Flaminius and Gaius Varro, but of men who were good aristocrats—had already in the third Macedonian war imperilled the weal of the state. And the mode in which justice was occasionally administered is shown by the scene in the camp of the consul Lucius Quinctius Flamininus at Placentia (562). To compensate a favourite youth for the gladiatorial games of the capital, which through his attendance on the consul he had missed the opportunity of seeing, that great lord had ordered a Boian of rank who had taken refuge in the Roman
As to the Management of Finances
The financial system of the Roman community also retrograded rather than advanced during this epoch. The amount of their revenues, indeed, was visibly on the increase. The indirect taxes—there were no direct taxes in Rome—increased in consequence of the enlargement of the Roman territory, which rendered it necessary, for example, to institute new customs-offices along the Campanian and Bruttian coasts at Puteoli, Castra (Squillace), and elsewhere, in 555 and 575. The same reason led to the new salt-tariff of 550 fixing the scale of prices at which salt was to be sold in the different districts of Italy, as it was no longer possible to furnish salt at one and the same price to the Roman burgesses now scattered throughout the land; but, as the Roman government probably supplied the burgesses with salt at cost price, if not below it, this financial measure yielded no gain to the state. Still more considerable was the increase in the produce of the domains. The duty indeed, which of right was payable to the treasury from the Italian domain-lands granted for occupation, was in the great majority of cases neither demanded nor paid. On the other hand the -scriptura- was retained; and not only so, but the domains recently acquired in the second Punic war, particularly the greater portion of the territory of Capua(21) and that of Leontini,(22) instead of being given up to occupation, were parcelled out and let to petty temporary lessees, and the attempts at occupation made in these cases were opposed with more than usual energy by the government; by which means the state acquired a considerable and secure source of income. The mines of the state also, particularly the important Spanish mines, were turned to profit on lease. Lastly, the revenue was augmented by the tribute of the transmarine subjects. From extraordinary sources very considerable sums accrued during this epoch to the state treasury, particularly the produce of the spoil in the war with Antiochus, 200 millions of sesterces (2,000,000 pounds), and that of the war with Perseus, 210 millions of sesterces (2,100,000 pounds)—the latter, the largest sum in cash which ever came at one time into the Roman treasury.
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
Italian Subjects
Passive Burgesses
The change in the spirit of the government was most distinctly apparent in the treatment of the Italian and extra-Italian subjects of the Roman community. Formerly there had been distinguished in Italy the ordinary, and the Latin, allied communities, the Roman burgesses -sine suffragio- and the Roman burgesses with the full franchise. Of these four classes the third was in the course of this period almost completely set aside, inasmuch as the course which had been earlier taken with the communities of passive burgesses in Latium and Sabina, was now applied also to those of the former Volscian territory, and these gradually—the last perhaps being in the year 566 Arpinum, Fundi, and Formiae—obtained full burgess-rights. In Campania Capua along with a number of minor communities in the neighbourhood was broken up in consequence of its revolt from Rome in the Hannibalic war. Although some few communities, such as Velitrae in the Volscian territory, Teanum and Cumae in Campania, may have remained on their earlier legal footing, yet, looking at the matter in the main, this franchise of a passive character may be held as now superseded.
Dediticii
On the other hand there emerged a new class in a position of peculiar inferiority, without communal freedom and the right to carry arms, and, in part, treated almost like public slaves (-peregrini dediticii-); to which, in particular, the members of the former Campanian, southern Picentine, and Bruttian communities, that had been in alliance with Hannibal,(25) belonged. To these were added the Celtic tribes tolerated on the south side of the Alps, whose position in relation to the Italian confederacy is indeed only known imperfectly, but is sufficiently characterized as inferior by the clause embodied in their treaties of alliance with Rome, that no member of these communities should ever be allowed to acquire Roman citizenship.(26)
Allies
The position of the non-Latin allies had, as we have mentioned before,(27) undergone a change greatly to their disadvantage in consequence of the Hannibalic war. Only a few communities in this category, such as Neapolis, Nola, Rhegium, and Heraclea, had during all the vicissitudes of that war remained steadfastly on the Roman side, and therefore retained their former rights as allies unaltered; by far the greater portion were obliged in consequence of having changed sides to acquiesce in a revision of the existing treaties to their disadvantage. The reduced position of the non-Latin allies is attested by the emigration from their communities into the Latin: when in 577 the Samnites and Paelignians applied to the senate for a reduction of their contingents, their request was based on the ground that during late years 4000 Samnite and Paelignian families had migrated to the Latin colony of Fregellae.
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
Roman Franchise More Difficult of Acquisition
Lastly, in the case of non-burgesses—communities as well as individuals—admission to the Roman franchise was almost completely foreclosed. The earlier course incorporating the subject communities in that of Rome had been dropped about 400, that the Roman burgess body might not be too much decentralized by its undue extension; and therefore communities of half-burgesses were instituted.(29) Now the centralization of the community was abandoned, partly through the admission of the half-burgess communities to the full franchise, partly through the accession of numerous more remote burgess-colonies to its ranks; but the older system of incorporation was not resumed with reference to the allied communities. It cannot be shown that after the complete subjugation of Italy even a single Italian community exchanged its position as an ally for the Roman franchise; probably none after that date in reality acquired it Even the transition of individual Italians to the Roman franchise was confined almost solely to the case of magistrates of the Latin communities(30) and, by special favour, of individual non-burgesses admitted to share it at the founding of burgess-colonies.(31)
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.
Position of the Governors
Punishment followed in the steps of wrong. The new provincial system necessitated the appointment of governors, whose position was absolutely incompatible not only with the welfare of the provinces, but with the Roman constitution. As the Roman community in the provinces took the place of the former ruler of the land, so their governor appeared there in the king’s stead; the Sicilian praetor, for example, resided in the palace of Hiero at Syracuse. It is true, that by right the governor nevertheless ought to administer his office with republican honesty and frugality. Cato, when governor of Sardinia, appeared in the towns subject to him on foot and attended by a single servant, who carried his coat and sacrificial ladle; and, when he returned home from his Spanish governorship, he sold his war-horse beforehand, because he did not hold himself entitled to charge the state with the expenses of its transport. There is no question that the Roman governors—although certainly but few of them pushed their conscientiousness, like Cato, to the verge of being niggardly and ridiculous—made
Control over the Governors
Supervision of the Senate over the Provinces and Their
Governors
The government had no right to be surprised at such things, for it provided no serious check on the excesses of this capricious military administration. Judicial control, it is true, was not entirely wanting. Although, according to the universal but more than questionable rule of allowing no complaint to be brought against a commander-in-chief during his term of office,(35) the Roman governor could ordinarily be called to account only after the mischief had been done, yet he was amenable both to a criminal and to a civil prosecution. In order to the institution of the former, a tribune of the people by virtue of the judicial power pertaining to him had to take the case in hand and bring it to the bar of the people; the civil action was remitted by the senator who administered the corresponding praetorship to a jury appointed, according to the constitution of the tribunal in those times, from the ranks of the senate. In both cases, therefore, the control lay in the hands of the ruling class, and, although the latter was still sufficiently upright and honourable not absolutely to set aside well-founded complaints, and the senate even in various instances, at the call of those aggrieved, condescended itself to order the institution of a civil process, yet the complaints of poor men and foreigners against powerful members of the ruling aristocracy—submitted to judges and jurymen far remote from the scene and, if not involved in the like guilt, at least belonging to the same order as the accused—could from the first only reckon on success in the event of the wrong being clear and crying; and to complain in vain was almost certain destruction. The aggrieved no doubt found a sort of support in the hereditary relations of clientship, which the subject cities and provinces entered into with their conquerors and other Romans brought into close contact with them. The Spanish governors felt that no one could with impunity maltreat clients of Cato; and the circumstance that the representatives of the three nations conquered by Paullus—the Spaniards, Ligurians, and Macedonians—would not forgo the privilege of carrying his bier to the funeral pile, was the noblest dirge in honour of that noble man. But not only did this special protection give the Greeks opportunity to display in Rome all their talent for abasing themselves in presence of their masters, and to demoralize even those masters by their ready servility—the decrees of the Syracusans in honour of Marcellus, after he had destroyed and plundered their city and they had complained of his conduct in these respects to the senate in vain, form one of the most scandalous pages in the far from honourable annals of Syracuse —but, in connection with the already dangerous family-politics, this patronage on the part of great houses had also its politically perilous side. In this way the result perhaps was that the Roman
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.
Character of the Roman Burgess-Body
Whatever could be demanded of an assembly of burgesses like the Roman, which was not the moving spring, but the firm foundation, of the whole machinery—a sure perception of the common good, a sagacious deference towards the right leader, a steadfast spirit in prosperous and evil days, and, above all, the capacity of sacrificing the individual for the general welfare and the comfort of the present for the advantage of the future—all these qualities the Roman community exhibited in so high a degree that, when we look to its conduct as a whole, all censure is lost in reverent admiration. Even now good sense and discretion still thoroughly predominated. The whole conduct of the burgesses with reference to the government as well as to the opposition shows quite clearly that the same mighty patriotism before which even the genius of Hannibal had to quit the field prevailed also in the Roman comitia. No doubt they often erred; but their errors originated not in the mischievous impulses of a rabble, but in the narrow views of burgesses and farmers. The machinery, however, by means of which the burgesses intervened in the course of public affairs became certainly more and more unwieldy, and the circumstances in which they were placed through their own great deeds far outgrew their power to deal with them. We have already stated, that in the course of this epoch most of the former communities of passive burgesses, as well as a considerable number of newly established colonies, received the full Roman franchise.(37) At the close of this period the Roman burgess-body, in a tolerably compact mass, filled Latium in its widest sense, Sabina, and a part of Campania, so that it reached on the west coast northward to
Rise of a City Rabble
At length the rabble of clients assumed a position, formally of equality and often even, practically, of superiority, alongside of the class of independent burgesses. The institutions out of which it sprang were of great antiquity. From time immemorial the Roman of quality exercised a sort of government over his freedmen and dependents, and was consulted by them in all their more important affairs; a client, for instance, was careful not to give his children in marriage without having obtained the consent of his patron, and very often the latter directly arranged the match. But as the aristocracy became converted into a special ruling class concentrating in its hands not only power but also wealth, the clients became parasites and beggars; and the new adherents of the rich undermined outwardly and inwardly the burgess class. The aristocracy not only tolerated this sort of clientship, but worked it financially and politically for their own advantage. Thus, for instance, the old penny collections, which hitherto had taken place chiefly for religious purposes and at the burial of men of merit, were now employed by lords of high standing—for the first time by Lucius Scipio, in 568, on occasion of a popular festival which he had in contemplation—for the purpose of levying on extraordinary occasions a contribution from the public. Presents were specially placed under legal restriction (in 550), because the senators began under that name to take regular tribute from their clients. But the retinue of clients was above all serviceable to the ruling class as a means of commanding the comitia; and the issue of the elections shows clearly how powerfully the dependent rabble already at this epoch competed with the independent middle class.
The very rapid increase of the rabble in the capital particularly, which is thus presupposed, is also demonstrable otherwise. The increasing number and importance of the freedmen are shown by the very serious discussions that arose in the previous century,(43) and were continued during the present, as to their right to vote in the public assemblies, and by the remarkable resolution, adopted by the senate during the Hannibalic war, to admit honourable freedwomen to a participation in the public collections, and to grant to the legitimate children of manumitted fathers the insignia hitherto belonging only to the children of the free-born.(44) The majority of the Hellenes and Orientals who settled in Rome were probably little better than the freedmen, for national servility clung as indelibly to the former as legal servility to the latter.
Systematic Corruption of the Multitude
Distributions of Grain
But not only did these natural causes co-operate to produce a metropolitan rabble: neither the nobility nor the demagogues, moreover, can be acquitted from the reproach of having systematically nursed its growth, and of having undermined, so far as in them lay, the old public spirit by flattery of the people and things still worse. The electors as a body were still too respectable to admit of direct electoral corruption showing itself on a great scale; but the favour of those entitled to vote was indirectly courted by methods far from commendable. The old obligation of the magistrates, particularly of the aediles, to see that corn could be procured at a moderate price and to superintend the games, began to degenerate into the state of things which at length gave rise to the horrible cry of the city populace under the Empire, “Bread for nothing and games for ever!” Large supplies of grain, cither placed by the provincial governors at the disposal of the Roman market officials, or delivered at Rome free of cost by the provinces themselves for the purpose of procuring favour with particular Roman magistrates, enabled the aediles, from the middle of the sixth century, to furnish grain to the population of the capital at very low prices. “It was no wonder,” Cato considered, “that the burgesses no longer listened to good advice—the belly forsooth had no ears.”
Festivals
Popular amusements increased to an alarming extent. For five hundred years the community had been content with one festival in the year, and with one circus. The first Roman demagogue by profession, Gaius Flaminius, added a second festival and a second circus (534);(45) and by these institutions—the tendency of which is sufficiently indicated by the very name of the new festival, “the plebeian games”—he probably purchased the permission to give battle at the Trasimene lake. When the path was once opened, the evil made rapid progress. The festival in honour of Ceres, the goddess who protected the plebeian order,(46) must have been but little, if at all, later than the plebeian games. On the suggestion of the Sibylline and Marcian prophecies, moreover, a fourth festival was added in 542 in honour of Apollo, and a fifth in 550 in honour of the “Great Mother” recently transplanted from Phrygia to Rome. These were the severe years of the Hannibalic war—on the first celebration of the games of Apollo the burgesses were summoned from the circus itself to arms; the superstitious fear peculiar to Italy was feverishly excited, and persons were not wanting who took advantage of the opportunity to circulate Sibylline and prophetic oracles and to recommend themselves to the multitude through their contents and advocacy: we can scarcely blame the government, which was obliged to call for so enormous sacrifices from the burgesses, for yielding in such matters. But what was once conceded had to be continued; indeed, even in more peaceful times (581) there was added another festival, although
Squandering of the Spoil
Corruption, however, was not restricted to the Forum; it was transferred even to the camp. The old burgess militia had reckoned themselves fortunate when they brought home a compensation for the toil of war, and, in the event of success, a trifling gift as a memorial of victory. The new generals, with Scipio Africanus at their head, lavishly scattered amongst their troops the money of Rome as well as the proceeds of the spoil: it was on this point, that Cato quarrelled with Scipio during the last campaigns against Hannibal in Africa. The veterans from the second Macedonian war and that waged in Asia Minor already returned home throughout as wealthy men: even the better class began to commend a general, who did not appropriate the gifts of the provincials and the gains of war entirely to himself and his immediate followers, and from whose camp not a few men returned with gold, and many with silver, in their pockets: men began to forget that the moveable spoil was the property of the state. When Lucius Paullus again dealt with it in the old mode, his own soldiers, especially the volunteers who had been allured in numbers by the prospect of rich plunder, fell little short of refusing to the victor of Pydna by popular decree the honour of a triumph—an honour which they already threw away on every one who had subjugated three Ligurian villages.
Decline of Warlike Spirit
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
The dissension in the community was reflected in the ranks of the opposition. Resting on the support of the farmers, the patriots raised a loud cry for reform; resting on the support of the mob in the capital, demagogism began its work. Although the two tendencies do not admit of being wholly separated but in various respects go hand in hand, it will be necessary to consider them apart.
The Party of Reform
Cato
The party of reform emerges, as it were, personified in Marcus Porcius Cato (520-605). Cato, the last statesman of note belonging to that earlier system which restricted its ideas to Italy and was averse to universal empire, was for that reason accounted in after times the model of a genuine Roman of the antique stamp; he may with greater justice be regarded as the representative of the opposition of the Roman middle class to the new Hellenico-cosmopolite nobility. Brought up at the plough, he was induced to enter on a political career by the owner of a neighbouring estate, one of the few nobles who kept aloof from the tendencies of the age, Lucius Valerius Flaccus. That upright patrician deemed the rough Sabine farmer the proper man to stem the current of the times; and he was not deceived in his estimate. Beneath the aegis of Flaccus, and after the good old fashion serving his fellow-citizens and the commonwealth in
Police Reform
This warfare directed against individuals, and the various attempts to repress the spirit of the age by means of justice and of police, however deserving of respect might be the sentiments in which they originated, could only at most stem the current of corruption for a short time; and, while it is remarkable that Cato was enabled in spite of that current, or rather by means of it, to play his political part, it is equally significant that he was as little successful in getting rid of the leaders of the opposite party as they were in getting rid of him. The processes of count and reckoning instituted by him and by those who shared his views before the burgesses uniformly remained, at least in the cases that were of political importance, quite as ineffectual as the counter-accusations directed against him. Nor was much more effect produced by the police-laws, which were issued at this period in unusual numbers, especially for the restriction of luxury and for the introduction of a frugal and orderly housekeeping, and some of which have still to be touched on in our view of the national economics.
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,
Reforms in the Military Service
Of a kindred character was the proposal, which Cato made in the senate, to remedy the decline of the burgess-cavalry by the institution of four hundred new equestrian stalls.(57) The exchequer cannot have wanted means for the purpose; but the proposal appears to have been thwarted by the exclusive spirit of the nobility and their endeavour to remove from the burgess-cavalry those who were troopers merely and not knights. On the other hand, the serious emergencies of the war, which even induced the Roman government to make an attempt —fortunately unsuccessful—to recruit their armies after the Oriental fashion from the slave-market,(58) compelled them to modify the qualifications hitherto required for service in the burgess-army, viz. a minimum census of 11,000 -asses- (43 pounds), and free birth. Apart from the fact that they took up for service in the fleet the persons of free birth rated between 4000 -asses- (17 pounds) and 1500 -asses-(6 pounds) and all the freedmen, the minimum census for the legionary was reduced to 4000 -asses- (17 pounds); and, in case of need, both those who were bound to serve in the fleet and the free-born rated between 1500 -asses- (6 pounds) and 375 -asses- (1 pound 10 shillings) were enrolled in the burgess-infantry. These innovations, which belong presumably to the end of the preceding or beginning of the present epoch, doubtless did not originate in party efforts any more than did the Servian military reform; but they gave a material impulse to the democratic party, in so far as those who bore civic burdens necessarily claimed and eventually obtained equalization of civic rights. The poor and the freedmen began to be of some importance in the commonwealth from the time when they served it; and chiefly from this cause arose one of the most important constitutional changes of this epoch —the remodelling of the -comitia centuriata-, which most probably took place in the same year in which the war concerning Sicily terminated
Reform of the Centuries
According to the order of voting hitherto followed in the centuriate comitia, although the freeholders were no longer—as down to the reform of Appius Claudius(59) they had been—the sole voters, the wealthy had the preponderance. The equites, or in other words the patricio-plebeian nobility, voted first, then those of the highest rating, or in other words those who had exhibited to the censor an estate of at least 100,000 -asses- (420 pounds);(60) and these two divisions, when they kept together, had derided every vote. The suffrage of those assessed under the four following classes had been of doubtful weight; that of those whose valuation remained below the standard of the lowest class, 11,000 -asses- (43 pounds), had been essentially illusory. According to the new arrangement the right of priority in voting was withdrawn from the equites, although they retained their separate divisions, and it was transferred to a voting division chosen from the first class by lot. The importance of that aristocratic right of prior voting cannot be estimated too highly, especially at an epoch in which practically the influence of the nobility on the burgesses at large was constantly on the increase. Even the patrician order proper were still at this epoch powerful enough to fill the second consulship and the second censorship, which stood open in law alike to patricians and plebeians, solely with men of their own body, the former up to the close of this period (till 582), the latter even for a generation longer (till 623); and in fact, at the most perilous moment which the Roman republic ever experienced —in the crisis after the battle of Cannae—they cancelled the quite legally conducted election of the officer who was in all respects the ablest—the plebeian Marcellus—to the consulship vacated by the death of the patrician Paullus, solely on account of his plebeianism. At the same time it is a significant token of the nature even of this reform that the right of precedence in voting was withdrawn only from the nobility, not from those of the highest rating; the right of prior voting withdrawn from the equestrian centuries passed not to a division chosen incidentally by lot from the whole burgesses, but exclusively to the first class. This as well as the five grades generally remained as they were; only the lower limit was probably shifted in such a way that the minimum census was, for the right of voting in the centuries as for service in the legion, reduced from 11,000 to 4000 -asses-. Besides, the formal retention of the earlier rates, while there was a general increase in the amount of men’s means, involved of itself in some measure an extension of the suffrage in a democratic sense. The total number of the divisions remained likewise unchanged; but, while hitherto, as we have said, the 18 equestrian centuries and the 80 of the first class had, standing by themselves, the majority in the 193 voting centuries, in the reformed arrangement the
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.
Results of the Efforts at Reform
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.
Abolition of the Dictatorship
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.
Election of Priests by the Community
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
Of greater importance was the growing interference of the burgesses in questions as to persons and things belonging to the sphere of military administration and external policy. To this head belong the transference of the nomination of the ordinary staff-officers from the general to the burgesses, which has been already mentioned;(63) the elections of the leaders of the opposition as commanders-in-chief against Hannibal;(64) the unconstitutional and irrational decree of the people in 537, which divided the supreme command between the unpopular generalissimo and his popular lieutenant who opposed him in the camp as well as at home;(65) the tribunician complaint laid before the burgesses, charging an officer like Marcellus with injudicious and dishonest management of the war (545), which even compelled him to come from the camp to the capital and there demonstrate his military capacity before the public; the still more scandalous attempts to refuse by decree of the burgesses to the victor of Pydna his triumph;(66) the investiture—suggested, it is true, by the senate—of a private man with extraordinary consular authority (544;(67)); the dangerous threat of Scipio that, if the senate should refuse him the chief command in Africa, he would seek the sanction of the burgesses (549;(68)); the attempt of a man half crazy with ambition to extort from the burgesses, against the will of the government, a declaration of war in every respect unwarranted against the Rhodians (587;(69)); and the new constitutional axiom, that every state-treaty acquired validity only through the ratification of the people.
Interference of the Community with the Finances
This joint action of the burgesses in governing and in commanding was fraught in a high degree with peril. But still more dangerous was their interference with the finances of the state; not only because any attack on the oldest and most important right of the government —the exclusive administration of the public property—struck at the root of the power of the senate, but because the placing of the most important business of this nature—the distribution of the public domains—in the hands of the primary assemblies of the burgesses necessarily dug the grave of the republic. To allow the primary assembly to decree the transference of public property without limit to its own pocket is not only wrong, but is the beginning of the end; it demoralizes the best-disposed citizens, and gives to the proposer a power incompatible with a free commonwealth. Salutary as was the distribution of the public land, and doubly blameable as was the senate accordingly for omitting to cut off this most dangerous of all weapons of agitation by voluntarily distributing the occupied lands, yet Gaius Flaminius, when he came to the burgesses in 522 with the proposal to distribute the domains of Picenum, undoubtedly injured the commonwealth more by the means than he benefited it by the end. Spurius Cassius had doubtless two hundred and fifty years earlier proposed the same thing;(70) but the two measures, closely as they coincided in the letter, were yet wholly different, inasmuch as Cassius submitted a matter affecting the community to that community while it was in vigour and self-governing, whereas Flaminius submitted a question of state to the primary assembly of a great empire.
Nullity of the Comitia
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
Disorganisation of Government
In the state, as in every organism, an organ which no longer discharges its functions is injurious. The nullity of the sovereign assembly of the people involved no small danger. Any minority in the senate might constitutionally appeal to the comitia against the majority. To every individual, who possessed the easy art of addressing untutored ears or of merely throwing away money, a path was opened up for his acquiring a position or procuring a decree in his favour, to which the magistrates and the government were formally bound to do homage. Hence sprang those citizen-generals, accustomed to sketch plans of battle on the tables of taverns and to look down on the regular service with compassion by virtue of their inborn genius for strategy: hence those staff-officers, who owed their command to the canvassing intrigues of the capital and, whenever matters looked serious, had at once to get leave of absence -en masse-; and hence the battles on the Trasimene lake and at Cannae, and the disgraceful management of the war with Perseus. At every step the government was thwarted and led astray by those incalculable decrees of the burgesses, and as was to be expected, most of all in the very cases where it was most in the right.
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
To assert the possibility of a reform would be as rash as to deny it: this much is certain, that a thorough amendment of the state in all its departments was urgently required, and that in no quarter was any serious attempt made to accomplish it. Various alterations in details, no doubt, were made on the part of the senate as well as on the part of the popular opposition. The majorities in each were still well disposed, and still frequently, notwithstanding the chasm that separated the parties, joined hands in a common endeavour to effect the removal of the worst evils. But, while they did not stop the evil at its source, it was to little purpose that the better-disposed listened with anxiety to the dull murmur of the swelling flood and worked at dikes and dams. Contenting themselves with palliatives, and failing to apply even these—especially such as were the most important, the improvement of justice, for instance, and the distribution of the domains—in proper season and due measure, they helped to prepare evil days for their posterity. By neglecting to break up the field at the proper time, they allowed weeds even to ripen which they had not sowed. To the later generations who survived the storms of revolution the period after the Hannibalic war appeared the golden age of Rome, and Cato seemed the model of the Roman statesman. It was in reality the lull before the storm and the epoch of political mediocrities, an age like that of the government of Walpole in England; and no Chatham was found in Rome to infuse fresh energy into the stagnant life of the nation. Wherever we cast our eyes, chinks and rents are yawning in the old building; we see workmen busy sometimes in filling them up, sometimes in enlarging them; but we nowhere perceive any trace of preparations
1. II. III. New Aristocracy
2. II. III. New Opposition
3. II. III. Military Tribunes with Consular Powers
4. All these insignia probably belonged on their first emergence only to the nobility proper, i. e. to the agnate descendants of curule magistrates; although, after the manner of such decorations, all of them in course of time were extended to a wider circle. This can be distinctly proved in the case of the gold finger-ring, which in the fifth century was worn only by the nobility (Plin. H. N., xxxiii. i. 18), in the sixth by every senator and senator’s son (Liv. xxvi. 36), in the seventh by every one of equestrian rank, under the empire by every one who was of free birth. So also with the silver trappings, which still, in the second Punic war, formed a badge of the nobility alone (Liv. xxvi. 37); and with the purple border of the boys’ toga, which at first was granted only to the sons of curule magistrates, then to the sons of equites, afterwards to those of all free-born persons, lastly—yet as early as the time of the second Punic war —even to the sons of freedmen (Macrob. Sat. i. 6). The golden amulet-case (-bulla-) was a badge of the children of senators in the time of the second Punic war (Macrob. l. c.; Liv. xxvi. 36), in that of Cicero as the badge of the children of the equestrian order (Cic. Verr. i. 58, 152), whereas children of inferior rank wore the leathern amulet (-lorum-). The purple stripe (-clavus-) on the tunic was a badge of the senators (I. V. Prerogatives of the Senate) and of the equites, so that at least in later times the former wore it broad, the latter narrow; with the nobility the -clavus- had nothing to do.
5. II. III. Civic Equality
6. Plin. H. N. xxi. 3, 6. The right to appear crowned in public was acquired by distinction in war (Polyb. vi. 39, 9; Liv. x. 47); consequently, the wearing a crown without warrant was an offence similar to the assumption, in the present day, of the badge of a military order of merit without due title.
7. II. III. Praetorship
8. Thus there remained excluded the military tribunate with consular powers (ii. III. Throwing Open of Marriage and of Magistracies) the proconsulship, the quaestorship, the tribunate of the people, and several others. As to the censorship, it does not appear, notwithstanding the curule chair of the censors (Liv. xl. 45; comp, xxvii. 8), to have been reckoned a curule office; for the later period, however, when only a man of consular standing could be made censor, the question has no practical importance. The plebeian aedileship certainly was not reckoned originally one of the curule magistracies (Liv. xxiii. 23); it may, however, have been subsequently included amongst them.
9. II. I. Government of the Patriciate
10. II. III. Censorship
11. II. III. The Senate
12. The current hypothesis, according to which the six centuries of the nobility alone amounted to 1200, and the whole equestrian force accordingly to 3600 horse, is not tenable. The method of determining the number of the equites by the number of duplications specified by the annalists is mistaken: in fact, each of these statements has originated and is to be explained by itself. But there is no evidence either for the first number, which is only found in the passage of Cicero, De Rep. ii. 20, acknowledged as miswritten even by the champions of this view, or for the second, which does not appear at all in ancient authors. In favour, on the other hand, of the hypothesis set forth in the text, we have, first of all, the number as indicated not by authorities, but by the institutions themselves; for it is certain that the century numbered 100 men, and there were originally three (I. V. Burdens of the Burgesses), then six (I. Vi. Amalgamation of the Palatine and Quirinal Cities), and lastly after the Servian reform eighteen (I. Vi. The Five Classes), equestrian centuries. The deviations of the authorities from this view are only apparent. The old self-consistent tradition, which Becker has developed (ii. i, 243), reckons not the eighteen patricio-plebeian, but the six patrician, centuries at 1800 men; and this has been manifestly followed by Livy, i. 36 (according to the reading which alone has manuscript authority, and which ought not to be corrected from Livy’s particular estimates), and by Cicero l. c. (according to the only reading grammatically admissible, MDCCC.; see Becker, ii. i, 244). But Cicero at the same time indicates very plainly, that in that statement he intended to describe the then existing amount of the Roman equites in general. The number of the whole body has therefore been transferred to the most prominent portion of it by a prolepsis, such as is common in the case of the old annalists not too much given to reflection: just in the same way 300 equites instead of 100 are assigned to the parent-community, including, by anticipation, the contingents of the Tities and the Luceres (Becker, ii. i, 238). Lastly, the proposition of Cato (p. 66, Jordan), to raise the number of the horses of the equites to 2200, is as distinct a confirmation of the view proposed above, as it is a distinct refutation of the opposite view. The closed number of the equites probably continued to subsist down to Sulla’s time, when with the -de facto- abeyance of the censorship the basis of it fell away, and to all appearance in place of the censorial bestowal of the equestrian horse came its acquisition by hereditary right; thenceforth the senator’s son was by birth an -eques-. Alongside, however, of this closed equestrian body, the -equites equo publico-, stood from an early period of the republic the burgesses bound to render mounted service on their own horses, who are nothing but the highest class of the census; they do not vote in the equestrian centuries, but are regarded otherwise as equites, and lay claim likewise to the honorary privileges of the equestrian order.
In the arrangement of Augustus the senatorial houses retained the hereditary equestrian right; but by its side the censorial bestowal of the equestrian horse is renewed as a prerogative of the emperor and without restriction to a definite time, and thereby the designation of equites for the first class of the census as such falls into abeyance.
13. II. III. Increasing Powers of the Burgesses
14. II. VIII. Officers
15. II. III. Restrictions As to the Accumulation and Reoccupation of Offices
16. II. III. New Opposition
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:—
Consuls Consuls Curule aediles of those 388-500 501-581 16 patrician colleges
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.
18. I. V. The Senate
19. III. IX. Death of Scipio
20. III. X. Their Lax and Unsuccessful Management of the War f.
21. III. Vi. In Italy
22. III. Vi. Conquest of Sicily
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 )
24. III. Vi. Pressure of the War
25. III. Vi. In Italy
26. III. VII. Celtic Wars
27. III. Vi In Italy
28. III. VII. Latins
29. II. VII. Non-Latin Allied Communities
30. III. VII. Latins
31. Thus, as is well known, Ennius of Rudiae received burgess-rights from one of the triumvirs, Q. Fulvius Nobilior, on occasion of the founding of the burgess-colonies of Potentia and Pisaurum (Cic. Brut. 20, 79); whereupon, according to the well-known custom, he adopted the -praenomen- of the latter. The non-burgesses who were sent to share in the foundation of a burgess-colony, did not, at least in tin’s epoch, thereby acquire -de jure- Roman citizenship, although they frequently usurped it (Liv. xxxiv. 42); but the magistrates charged with the founding of a colony were empowered, by a clause in the decree of the people relative to each case, to confer burgess-rights on a limited number of persons (Cic. pro Balb. 21, 48).
32. III. VII. Administration of Spain
33. III. IX. Expedition against the Celts in Asia Minor
34. III. X. Their Lax and Unsuccessful Management of the War f.
35. II. I. Term of Office
36. III. VII. Administration of Spain
37. III. XI. Italian Subjects, Roman Franchise More Difficult of Acquisition
38. III. XI. Roman Franchise More Difficult of Acquisition
39. In Cato’s treatise on husbandry, which, as is well known, primarily relates to an estate in the district of Venafrum, the judicial discussion of such processes as might arise is referred to Rome only as respects one definite case; namely, that in which the landlord leases the winter pasture to the owner of a flock of sheep, and thus has to deal with a lessee who, as a rule, is not domiciled in the district (c. 149). It may be inferred from this, that in ordinary cases, where the contract was with a person domiciled in the district, such processes as might spring out of it were even in Cato’s time decided not at Rome, but before the local judges.
40. II. VII. The Full Roman Franchise
41. II. VII. Subject Communities
42. III. VIII. Declaration of War by Rome
43. II. III. The Burgess-Body
44. III. XI. Patricio-Plebian Nobility
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.
46. II. II. Political Value of the Tribunate
47. III. IX. Landing of the Romans
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.
49. III. XI. Patricio-Plebian Nobility
50. II. III. New Opposition
51. III. III. The Celts Conquered by Rome
52. III. Vi. In Italy
53. III. III. The Celts Conquered by Rome
54. III. VII. Liguria
55. III. VII. Measures Adopted to Check the Immigration of the Transalpine Gauls
56. III. VII. Liguria
57. III. XI. The Nobility in Possession of the Equestrian Centuries
58. III. V. Attitude of the Romans, iii. Vi. Conflicts in the South of Italy
59. II. III. The Burgess-Body
60. As to the original rates of the Roman census it is difficult to lay down anything definite. Afterwards, as is well known, 100,000 -asses- was regarded as the minimum census of the first class; to which the census of the other four classes stood in the (at least approximate) ratio of 3/4, 1/2, 1/4, 1/9. But these rates are understood already by Polybius, as by all later authors, to refer to the light -as- (1/10th of the -denarius-), and apparently this view must be adhered to, although in reference to the Voconian law the same sums are reckoned as heavy -asses- (1/4 of the -denarius-: Geschichte des Rom. Munzwesens, p. 302). But Appius Claudius, who first in 442 expressed the census-rates in money instead of the possession of land (ii. III. The Burgess-Body), cannot in this have made use of the light -as-, which only emerged in 485 (ii. VIII. Silver Standard of Value). Either therefore he expressed the same amounts in heavy -asses-, and these were at the reduction of the coinage converted into light; or he proposed the later figures, and these remained the same notwithstanding the reduction or the coinage, which in this case would have involved a lowering of the class-rates by more than the half. Grave doubts may be raised in opposition to either hypothesis; but the former appears the more credible, for so exorbitant an advance in democratic development is not probable either for the end of the fifth century or as an incidental consequence of a mere administrative measure, and besides it would scarce have disappeared wholly from tradition. 100,000 light -asses-, or 40,000 sesterces, may, moreover, be reasonably regarded as the equivalent of the original Roman full hide of perhaps 20 -jugera- (I. Vi. Time and Occasion of the Reform); so that, according to this view, the rates of the census as a whole have changed merely in expression, and not in value.
61. III. V. Fabius and Minucius
62. II. I. The Dictator
63. III. XI. Election of Officers in the Comitia
64. III. V. Flaminius, New Warlike Preparations in Rome
65. III. V. Fabius and Minucius
66. III. XI. Squandering of the Spoil
67. III. Vi. Publius Scipio
68. III. Vi. The African Expedition of Scipio
69. III. X. Humiliation of Rhodes
70. II. II. Agrarian Law of Spurius Cassius
The Management of Land and of Capital
Roman Economics
It is in the sixth century of the city that we first find materials for a history of the times exhibiting in some measure the mutual connection of events; and it is in that century also that the economic condition of Rome emerges into view more distinctly and clearly. It is at this epoch that the wholesale system, as regards both the cultivation of land and the management of capital, becomes first established under the form, and on the scale, which afterwards prevailed; although we cannot exactly discriminate how much of that system is traceable to earlier precedent, how much to an imitation of the methods of husbandry and of speculation among peoples that were earlier civilized, especially the Phoenicians, and how much to the increasing mass of capital and the growth of intelligence in the nation. A summary outline of these economic relations will conduce to a more accurate understanding of the internal history of Rome.
Roman husbandry(1) applied itself either to the farming of estates, to the occupation of pasture lands, or to the tillage of petty holdings. A very distinct view of the first of these is presented to us in the description given by Cato.
Farming of Estates
Their Size
The Roman land-estates were, considered as larger holdings, uniformly of limited extent. That described by Cato had an area of 240 jugera; a very common measure was the so-called -centuria- of 200 -jugera-. Where the laborious culture of the vine was pursued, the unit of husbandry was made still less; Cato assumes in that case an area of 100 -jugera-. Any one who wished to invest more capital in farming did not enlarge his estate, but acquired several estates; accordingly the amount of 500 -jugera-,(2) fixed as the maximum which it was allowable to occupy, has been conceived to represent the contents of two or three estates.
Management of the Estate
Object of Husbandry
The heritable lease was not recognised in the management of Italian private any more than of Roman public land; it occurred only in the case of the dependent communities. Leases for shorter periods, granted either for a fixed sum of money or on condition that the lessee should bear all the costs of tillage and should receive in return a share, ordinarily perhaps one half, of the produce,(3) were not unknown, but they were exceptional and a makeshift; so that no distinct class of tenant-farmers grew up in Italy.(4) Ordinarily therefore the proprietor himself superintended the cultivation of his estates; he did not, however, manage them strictly in person, but only appeared from time to time on the property in order to settle the plan of operations, to look after its execution, and to audit the accounts of his servants. He was thus enabled on the one hand to work a number of estates at the same time, and on the other hand to devote himself, as circumstances might require, to public affairs.
The grain cultivated consisted especially of spelt and wheat, with some barley and millet; turnips, radishes, garlic, poppies, were also grown, and—particularly as fodder for the cattle—lupines, beans, pease, vetches, and other leguminous plants. The seed was sown ordinarily in autumn, only in exceptional cases in spring. Much activity was displayed in irrigation and draining; and drainage by means of covered ditches was early in use. Meadows also for supplying hay were not wanting, and even in the time of Cato they were frequently irrigated artificially. Of equal, if not of greater, economic importance than grain and vegetables were the olive and the vine, of which the former was planted between the crops, the latter in vineyards appropriated to itself.(5) Figs, apples, pears, and other fruit trees were cultivated; and likewise elms, poplars, and other leafy trees and shrubs, partly for the felling of the wood, partly for the sake of the leaves which were useful as litter and as fodder for cattle. The rearing of cattle, on the other hand, held a far less important place in the economy of the Italians than it holds in modern times, for vegetables formed the general fare, and animal food made its appearance at table only exceptionally; where it did appear, it consisted almost solely of the flesh of swine or lambs. Although the ancients did not fail to perceive the economic connection between agriculture and the rearing of cattle, and in particular the importance of producing manure, the modern combination of the growth of corn with the rearing of cattle was a thing foreign to antiquity. The larger cattle were kept only so far as was requisite for the tillage of the fields, and they were fed not on special pasture-land, but, wholly during summer and mostly during winter also, in the stall Sheep, again, were driven out on the stubble pasture; Cato allows 100 head to 240 -jugera-. Frequently, however, the proprietor preferred to let his winter
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
The human labour on the farm was regularly performed by slaves. At the head of the body of slaves on the estate (-familia rustica-) stood the steward (-vilicus-, from -villa-), who received and expended, bought and sold, went to obtain the instructions of the landlord, and in his absence issued orders and administered punishment. Under him were placed the stewardess (-vilica-) who took charge of the house, kitchen and larder, poultry-yard and dovecot: a number of ploughmen (-bubulci-) and common serfs, an ass-driver, a swineherd, and, where a flock of sheep was kept, a shepherd. The number, of course, varied according to the method of husbandry pursued. An arable estate of 200 -jugera- without orchards was estimated to require two ploughmen and six serfs: a similar estate with two orchards two plough-men and nine serfs; an estate of 240 -jugera- with olive plantations and sheep, three ploughmen, five serfs, and three herdsmen. A vineyard naturally required a larger expenditure of labour: an estate of 100 -jugera-with vine-plantations was supplied with one ploughman, eleven serfs, and two herdsmen. The steward of course occupied a freer position than the other slaves: the treatise of Mago advised that he should be allowed to marry, to rear children, and to have funds of his own, and Cato advises that he should be married to the stewardess; he alone had some prospect, in the event of good behaviour, of obtaining liberty from his master. In other respects all formed a common household. The slaves were, like the larger cattle, not bred on the estate, but purchased at an age capable of labour in the slave-market; and, when through age or infirmity they had become incapable of working,
Other Labourers
Ordinarily these slaves belonging to the estate were sufficient; in case of need neighbours, as a matter of course, helped each other with their slaves for day’s wages. Otherwise labourers from without were not usually employed, except in peculiarly unhealthy districts, where it was found advantageous to limit the amount of slaves and to employ hired persons in their room, and for the ingathering of the harvest, for which the regular supply of labour on the farm did not suffice. At the corn and hay harvests they took in hired reapers, who often instead of wages received from the sixth to the ninth sheaf of the produce reaped, or, if they also thrashed, the fifth of the grain: Umbrian labourers, for instance, went annually in great numbers to the vale of Rieti, to help to gather in the harvest there. The grape and olive harvest was ordinarily let to a contractor, who by means of his men—hired free labourers, or slaves of his own or of others— conducted the gleaning and pressing under the inspection of some persons appointed by the landlord for the purpose, and delivered the produce to the master;(8) very frequently the landlord sold the harvest on the tree or branch, and left the purchaser to look after the ingathering.
Spirit of the System
The whole system was pervaded by the utter regardless-ness characteristic of the power of capital. Slaves and cattle stood on the same level; a good watchdog, it is said in a Roman writer on agriculture, must not be on too friendly terms with his “fellow-slaves.” The slave and the ox were fed properly so long as they could work, because it would not have been good economy to let them starve; and they were sold like a worn-out
Husbandry of the Petty Farmers
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.
In the vicinity of Rome or of any other large seat of consumption there existed also carefully-irrigated gardens for flowers and vegetables, somewhat similar to those which one now sees around Naples; and these yielded a very abundant return.
Pastoral Husbandry
Pastoral husbandry was prosecuted on a great scale far more than agriculture. An estate in pasture land (-saltus-) had of necessity in every case an area considerably greater than an arable estate—the least allowance was 800 -jugera- —and it might with advantage to the business be almost indefinitely extended. Italy is so situated in respect of climate that the summer pasture in the mountains and the winter pasture in the plains supplement each other: already at that period, just as at the present day, and for the most part probably along the same paths, the flocks and herds were driven in spring from Apulia to Samnium, and in autumn back again from Samnium to Apulia. The winter pasturage, however, as has been already observed, did not take place entirely on ground kept for the purpose, but was partly the grazing of the stubbles. Horses, oxen, asses, and mules were reared, chiefly to supply the animals required by the landowners, carriers, soldiers, and so forth; herds of swine and of goats also were not
Results
Competition of Transmarine Corn
In order to form some estimate of the economic results of this system of husbandry, we must consider the state of prices, and particularly the prices of grain at this period. On an average these were alarmingly low; and that in great measure through the fault of the Roman government, which in this important question was led into the most fearful blunders not so much by its short-sightedness, as by an unpardonable disposition to favour the proletariate of the capital at the expense of the farmers of Italy. The main question here was that of the competition between transmarine and Italian corn. The grain which was delivered by the provincials to the Roman government, sometimes gratuitously, sometimes for a moderate compensation, was in part applied by the government to the maintenance of the Roman official staff and of the Roman armies on the spot, partly given up to the lessees of the -decumae- on condition of their either paying a sum of money for it or of their undertaking to deliver certain quantities of grain at Rome or wherever else it should be required. From the time of the second Macedonian war the Roman armies were uniformly supported by transmarine corn, and, though this tended to the benefit of the Roman exchequer, it cut off the Italian farmer from an important field of consumption for his produce. This however was the least part of the mischief. The government had long, as was reasonable, kept a watchful eye on the price of grain, and, when there was a threatening of dearth, had interfered by well-timed purchases abroad; and now, when the corn-deliveries of its subjects brought into its hands every year large quantities of grain—larger probably than were needed in times of peace—and when, moreover, opportunities were presented to it of acquiring foreign grain in almost unlimited quantity at moderate prices, there was a natural temptation to glut the markets of the capital with such grain, and to dispose of it at rates which either in themselves or as compared with the Italian rates were ruinously low. Already in the years 551-554, and in the first instance apparently at the suggestion of Scipio, 6 -modii- (1 1/2 bush.) of Spanish and African wheat
Prices of Italian Corn
The effects of this system are clearly evident. A year of extraordinary fertility like 504—when the people of the capital paid for 6 Roman -modii- (1 1/2 bush.) of spelt not more than 3/5 of a -denarius- (about 5 pence), and at the same price there were sold 180 Roman pounds (a pound = 11 oz.) of dried figs, 60 pounds of oil, 72 pounds of meat, and 6 -congii- (= 4 1/2 gallons) of wine—is scarcely by reason of its very singularity to be taken into account; but other facts speak more distinctly. Even in Cato’s time Sicily was called the granary of Rome. In productive years Sicilian and Sardinian corn was disposed of in the Italian ports for the freight. In the richest corn districts of the
Revolution in Roman Agriculture
In a great industrial state, whose agriculture cannot feed its population, such a result might perhaps be regarded as useful or at any rate as not absolutely injurious; but a country like Italy, where manufactures were inconsiderable and agriculture was altogether the mainstay of the state, was in this way systematically ruined, and the welfare of the nation as a whole was sacrificed in the most shameful fashion to the interests of the essentially unproductive population of the capital, to which in fact bread could never become too cheap. Nothing perhaps evinces so clearly as this, how wretched was the constitution and how incapable was the administration of this so-called golden age of the republic. Any representative system, however meagre, would have led at least to serious complaints and to a perception of the seat of the evil; but in those primary assemblies of the burgesses anything was listened to sooner than the warning voice of a foreboding patriot. Any government that deserved the name would of itself have interfered; but the mass of the Roman senate probably with well-meaning credulity regarded the low prices of grain as a real blessing for the people, and the Scipios and Flamininuses had, forsooth, more important things to do—to emancipate the Greeks, and to exercise the functions of republican kings. So the ship drove on unhindered towards the breakers.
Decay of the Farmers
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.
Culture of Oil and Wine, and Rearing of Cattle
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
It is of course presumed that each species of husbandry was prosecuted under the conditions that suited it, and on the soil which was adapted to its nature. These circumstances were already in themselves sufficient to supersede the husbandry of the petty farmer gradually by the system of farming on a great scale; and it was difficult by means of legislation to counteract them. But an injurious effect was produced by the Claudian law to be mentioned afterwards (shortly before 536), which excluded the senatorial houses from mercantile speculation, and thereby artificially compelled them to invest their enormous capitals mainly in land or, in other words, to replace the old homesteads of the farmers by estates under the management of land-stewards and by pastures for cattle. Moreover special circumstances tended to favour cattle-husbandry as contrasted with agriculture, although the former was far more injurious to the state. First of all, this form of extracting profit from the soil—the only one which in reality demanded and rewarded operations on a great scale—was alone in keeping with the mass of capital and with the spirit of the capitalists of this age. An estate under cultivation, although not demanding the presence of the master constantly, required his frequent appearance on the spot, while the circumstances did not well admit of his extending the estate or of his multiplying his possessions except within narrow limits; whereas an estate under pasture
Management of Money
We are prevented from giving a similar comprehensive view of the moneyed economy of Rome, partly by the want of special treatises descending from Roman antiquity on the subject, partly by its very nature which was far more complex and varied than that of the Roman husbandry. So far as can be ascertained, its principles were, still less perhaps than those of husbandry, the peculiar property of the Romans; on the contrary, they were the common heritage of all ancient civilization, under which, as under that of modern times, the operations on a great scale naturally were everywhere much alike. In money matters especially the mercantile system appears to have been established in the first instance by the Greeks, and to have been simply adopted by the Romans. Yet the precision with which it was carried out and the magnitude of the scale on which its operations were conducted were so peculiarly Roman, that the spirit of the Roman economy and its grandeur whether for good or evil are pre-eminently conspicuous in its monetary transactions.
Moneylending
The starting-point of the Roman moneyed economy was of course money-lending; and no branch of commercial industry was more zealously prosecuted by the Romans than the trade of the professional money-lender (-fenerator-) and of the money-dealer or banker (-argent arius-). The transference of the charge of the larger monetary transactions from the individual capitalists to the mediating banker, who receives and makes payments for his customers, invests and borrows money, and conducts their money dealings at home and abroad—which is the mark of a developed monetary economy—was already completely carried out in the time of Cato. The bankers, however, were not only the cashiers of the rich in Rome, but everywhere insinuated themselves into minor branches of business and settled in ever-increasing numbers in the provinces and dependent states. Already throughout the whole range of the empire the business of making advances to those who wanted money began to be, so to speak, monopolized by the Romans.
Speculation of Contractors
Closely connected with this was the immeasurable field of enterprise. The system of transacting business through mediate agency pervaded the whole dealings of Rome. The state took the lead by letting all its more complicated revenues and all contracts for furnishing supplies and executing buildings to capitalists, or associations of capitalists, for a fixed sum to be given or received. But private persons also uniformly contracted for whatever admitted of being done by contract—for buildings, for the ingathering of the harvest,(15) and even for the partition of an inheritance among the heirs or the winding up of a bankrupt estate; in which case the contractor—usually a banker—received the whole assets, and engaged on the other hand to settle the liabilities in full or up to a certain percentage and to pay the balance as the circumstances required.
Commerce
Manufacturing Industry
The prominence of transmarine commerce at an early period in the Roman national economy has already been adverted to in its proper place. The further stimulus, which it received during the present period, is attested by the increased importance of the Italian customs-duties in the Roman financial system.(16) In addition to the causes of this increase in the importance of transmarine commerce which need no further explanation, it was artificially promoted by the privileged position which the ruling Italian nation assumed in the provinces, and by the exemption from customs-dues which was probably even now in many of the client-states conceded by treaty to the Romans and Latins.
On the other hand, industry remained comparatively undeveloped. Trades were no doubt indispensable, and there appear indications that to a certain extent they were concentrated in Rome; Cato, for instance, advises the Campanian landowner to purchase the slaves’ clothing and shoes, the ploughs, vats, and locks, which he may require, in Rome. From the great consumption of woollen stuffs the manufacture of cloth must undoubtedly have been extensive and lucrative.(17) But no endeavours were apparently made to transplant to Italy any such professional industry as existed in Egypt and Syria, or even merely to carry it on abroad with Italian capital. Flax indeed was cultivated in Italy and purple dye was prepared there, but the latter branch of industry at least belonged essentially to the Greek Tarentum, and probably the import of Egyptian linen and Milesian or Tyrian purple even now preponderated everywhere over the native manufacture.
Under this category, however, falls to some extent the leasing or purchase by Roman capitalists of landed estates beyond Italy, with a view to carry on the cultivation of grain and the rearing of cattle on a great scale. This species of speculation, which afterwards developed to proportions so enormous, probably began particularly in Sicily, within the period now before us; seeing that the commercial restrictions imposed on the Siceliots,(18) if not introduced for the very purpose, must have at least tended to give to the Roman speculators, who were exempt from such restrictions, a sort of monopoly of the profits derivable from land.
Management of Business by Slaves
Business in all these different branches was uniformly carried on by means of slaves. The money-lenders and bankers instituted, throughout the range of their business, additional counting-houses and branch banks under the direction of their slaves and freedmen. The company, which had leased the customs-duties from the state, appointed chiefly its slaves and freedmen to levy them at each custom-house. Every one who took contracts for buildings bought architect-slaves; every one who undertook to provide spectacles or gladiatorial games on account of those giving them purchased or trained a company of slaves skilled in acting, or a band of serfs expert in the trade of fighting. The merchant imported his wares in vessels of his own under the charge of slaves or freedmen, and disposed of them by the same means in wholesale or retail. We need hardly add that the working of mines and manufactories was conducted entirely by slaves. The situation of these slaves was, no doubt, far from enviable, and was throughout less favourable than that of slaves in Greece; but, if we leave out of account the classes last mentioned, the industrial slaves found their position on the whole more tolerable than the rural serfs. They had more frequently a family and a practically independent household, with no remote prospect of obtaining freedom and property of their own. Hence such positions formed the true training school of those upstarts from the servile class, who by menial virtues and often by menial vices rose to the rank of Roman citizens and not seldom attained great prosperity, and who morally, economically, and politically contributed at least as much as the slaves themselves to the ruin of the Roman commonwealth.
Extent of Roman Mercantile Transactions
Coins and Moneys
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
Roman Wealth
The whole gain from these immense transactions of the Roman capitalists flowed in the long run to Rome; for, much as they went abroad, they were not easily induced to settle permanently there, but sooner or later returned to Rome, either realizing their gains and investing them in Italy, or continuing to carry on business from Rome as a centre by means of the capital and connections which they had acquired. The moneyed superiority of Rome as compared with the rest of the civilized world was, accordingly, quite as decided as its political and military ascendency. Rome in this respect stood towards other countries somewhat as the England of the present day stands towards the Continent—a Greek, for instance, observes of the younger Scipio Africanus, that he was not rich “for a Roman.” We may form some idea of what was considered as riches in the Rome of those days from the fact, that Lucius Paullus with an estate of 60 talents (14,000 pounds) was not reckoned a wealthy senator, and that a dowry—such as each of the daughters of the elder Scipio Africanus received—of 50 talents (12,000 pounds) was regarded as a suitable portion for a maiden of quality, while the estate of the wealthiest Greek of this century was not more than 300 talents (72,000 pounds).
Mercantile Spirit
It was no wonder, accordingly, that the mercantile spirit took possession of the nation, or rather—for that was no new thing in Rome—that the spirit of the capitalist now penetrated and pervaded all other aspects and stations of life, and agriculture as well as the government of the state began to become enterprises of capitalists. The preservation and increase of wealth quite formed a part of public and private morality. “A widow’s estate may diminish;” Cato wrote in the practical instructions which he composed for his son, “a man must increase his means, and he is deserving of praise and full of a divine spirit, whose account-books at his death show that he has gained more than he has inherited.” Wherever, therefore, there was giving and counter-giving, every transaction although concluded without any sort of formality was held as valid, and in case of necessity the right of action was accorded to the party aggrieved if not by the law, at any rate by mercantile custom and judicial usage;(24) but the promise of a gift without due form was null alike in legal theory and in practice. In Rome, Polybius tells us, nobody gives to any one unless he must do so, and no one pays a penny before it falls due, even among near relatives. The very legislation yielded to this mercantile morality, which regarded all giving away without recompense as squandering; the giving of presents and bequests and the undertaking of sureties were subjected to restriction at this period by decree of the burgesses, and heritages, if they did not fall to the nearest relatives, were at least taxed. In the closest connection with such views mercantile punctuality, honour, and respectability
Associations
One of the most important consequences of this mercantile spirit, which displayed itself with an intensity hardly conceivable by those not engaged in business, was the extraordinary impulse given to the formation of associations. In Rome this was especially fostered by the system already often mentioned whereby the government had its business transacted through middlemen: for from the extent of the transactions it was natural, and it was doubtless often required by the state for the sake of greater security, that capitalists should undertake such leases and contracts not as individuals, but in partnership. All great dealings were organized on the model of these state-contracts. Indications are even found of the occurrence among the Romans of that feature so characteristic of the system of association—a coalition of rival companies in order jointly to establish monopolist prices.(26) In transmarine transactions more especially and such as were otherwise attended with considerable risk, the system of partnership was so extensively adopted, that it practically took the place of insurances, which were unknown to antiquity. Nothing was more common than the nautical loan, as it was called—the modern “bottomry”—by which the risk and gain of transmarine traffic were proportionally distributed among the owners of the vessel and cargo and all the capitalists advancing money for the voyage. It was, however, a general rule of Roman economy that one should rather take small shares in many speculations than speculate independently; Cato advised the capitalist not to fit out a single ship with his money, but in concert with forty-nine other capitalists to send out fifty ships and to take an interest in each to the extent of a fiftieth part. The greater complication thus introduced into business was overcome by the Roman merchant through his punctual laboriousness and his system of management by slaves and freedmen —which, regarded from the point of view of the pure capitalist, was far preferable to our counting-house system. Thus these mercantile companies, with their hundred ramifications, largely influenced the economy of every Roman of note. There was, according to the testimony of Polybius, hardly a man of means in Rome who had not been concerned as an avowed or silent partner in leasing the public revenues; and much more must each have invested on an average a considerable portion of his capital in mercantile associations generally.
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
In consequence of the one-sided prominence assigned to capital in the Roman economy, the evils inseparable from a pure capitalist system could not fail to appear.
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.
Sterility of the Capitalist Question
A further consequence of the one-sided power of capital was the disproportionate prominence of those branches of business which were the most sterile and the least productive for the national economy as a whole. Industry, which ought to have held the highest place, in fact occupied the lowest. Commerce flourished; but it was universally passive, importing, but not exporting. Not even on the northern frontier do the Romans seem to have been able to give merchandise in exchange for the slaves, who were brought in numbers from the Celtic and probably even from the Germanic territories to Ariminum and the other markets of northern
The Capitalists and Public Opinion
But above all the deep rooted immorality, which is inherent in an economy of pure capital, ate into the heart of society and of the commonwealth, and substituted an absolute selfishness for humanity and patriotism. The better portion of the nation were very keenly sensible of the seeds of corruption which lurked in that system of speculation; and the instinctive hatred of the great multitude, as well as the displeasure of the well-disposed statesman, was especially directed against the trade of the professional money-lender, which for long had been subjected to penal laws and still continued under the letter of the law amenable to punishment. In a comedy of this period the money-lender is told that the class to which he belongs is on a parallel with the -lenones- —
-Eodem hercle vos pono et paro; parissumi estis ibus.
Hi saltem in occultis locis prostant: vos in
foro ipso.
Vos fenore, hi male suadendo et lustris lacerant homines.
Rogitationes plurimas propter vos populus scivit,
Quas vos rogatas rumpitis: aliquam reperitis
rimam.
Quasi aquam ferventem frigidam esse, ita vos putatis
leges.-
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
Reaction of the Capitalist System on Agriculture
The Romans perceived moreover—as it was not difficult to perceive —that it was of far more consequence to give a different direction to the whole national economy than to exercise a police control over speculation; it was such views mainly that men like Cato enforced by precept and example on the Roman agriculturist. “When our forefathers,” continues Cato in the preface just quoted, “pronounced the eulogy of a worthy man, they praised him as a worthy farmer and a worthy landlord; one who was thus commended was thought to have received the highest praise. The merchant I deem energetic and diligent in the pursuit of gain; but his calling is too much exposed to perils and mischances. On the other hand farmers furnish the bravest men and the ablest soldiers; no calling is so honourable, safe, and free from odium as theirs, and those who occupy themselves with it are least liable to evil thoughts.” He was wont to say of himself, that his property was derived solely from two sources —agriculture and frugality; and, though this was neither very logical in thought nor strictly conformable to the truth,(29) yet Cato was not unjustly regarded by his contemporaries and by posterity as the model of a Roman landlord. Unhappily it is a truth as remarkable as it is painful, that this husbandry, commended so much and certainly with so entire good faith as a remedy, was itself pervaded by the poison of the capitalist system. In the case of pastoral husbandry this was obvious; for that reason it was most in favour with the public and least in favour with the party desirous of moral reform. But how stood the case with agriculture itself? The warfare, which from the third onward to the fifth century capital had waged against labour, by withdrawing under the form of interest on debt the revenues of the soil from the working farmers and bringing them into the hands of the idly consuming fundholder, had been settled chiefly by the extension of the Roman economy and the throwing of the capital which existed in Latium into the field of mercantile activity opened up throughout the range of the Mediterranean. Now even the extended field of business was no longer able to contain the increased mass of capital; and an insane legislation laboured simultaneously to compel the investment of senatorial capital by artificial means in Italian estates, and systematically to reduce
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
Falling Off in the Population
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
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.
1. In order to gain a correct picture of ancient Italy, it is necessary for us to bear in mind the great changes which have been produced there by modern cultivation. Of the -cerealia-, rye was not cultivated in antiquity; and the Romans of the empire were astonished to rind that oats, with which they were well acquainted as a weed, was used by the Germans for making porridge. Rice was first cultivated in Italy at the end of the fifteenth, and maize at the beginning of the seventeenth, century. Potatoes and tomatoes were brought from America; artichokes seem to be nothing but a cultivated variety of the cardoon which was known to the Romans, yet the peculiar character superinduced by cultivation appears of more recent origin. The almond, again, or “Greek nut,” the peach, or “Persian nut,” and also the “soft nut” (-nux mollusca-), although originally foreign to Italy, are met with there at least 150 years before Christ. The date-palm, introduced into Italy from Greece as into Greece from the East, and forming a living attestation of the primitive commercial-religious intercourse between the west and the east, was already cultivated in Italy 300 years before Christ (Liv. x. 47; Pallad. v. 5, 2; xi. 12, i) not for its fruit (Plin. H. N. xiii. 4, 26), but, just as in the present day, as a handsome plant, and for the sake of the leaves which were used at public festivals. The cherry, or fruit of Cerasus on the Black Sea, was later in being introduced, and only began to be planted in Italy in the time of Cicero, although the wild cherry is indigenous there; still later, perhaps, came the apricot, or “Armenian plum.” The citron-tree was not cultivated in Italy till the later ages of the empire; the orange was only introduced by the Moors in the twelfth or thirteenth, and the aloe (Agave Americana) from America only in the sixteenth, century. Cotton was first cultivated in Europe by the Arabs. The buffalo also and the silkworm belong only to modern, not to ancient Italy.
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.
2. II. III. Licinio-Sextian Laws
3. According to Cato, de R. R, 137 (comp. 16), in the case of a lease with division of the produce the gross produce of the estate, after deduction of the fodder necessary for the oxen that drew the plough, was divided between lessor and lessee (-colonus partiarius-) in the proportions agreed upon between them. That the shares were ordinarily equal may be conjectured from the analogy of the French -bail a cheptel- and the similar Italian system of half-and-half leases, as well as from the absence of all trace of any other scheme of partition. It is erroneous to refer to the case of the -politor-, who got the fifth of the grain or, if the division took place before thrashing, from the sixth to the ninth sheaf (Cato, 136, comp. 5); he was not a lessee sharing the produce, but a labourer assumed in the harvest season, who received his daily wages according to that contract of partnership (iii. XII. Spirit of the System).
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-).
7. In this restricted sense the chaining of slaves, and even of the sons of the family (Dionys. ii. 26), was very old; and accordingly chained field-labourers are mentioned by Cato as exceptions, to whom, as they could not themselves grind, bread had to be supplied instead of grain (56). Even in the times of the empire the chaining of slaves uniformly presents itself as a punishment inflicted definitively by the master, provisionally by the steward (Colum. i. 8; Gai. i. 13; Ulp. i. ii). If, notwithstanding, the tillage of the fields by means of chained slaves appeared in subsequent times as a distinct system, and the labourers’ prison (-ergastulum-)—an underground cellar with window-aperatures numerous but narrow and not to be reached from the ground by the hand (Colum. i. 6)—became a necessary part of the farm-buildings, this state of matters was occasioned by the fact that the position of the rural serfs was harder than that of other slaves and therefore those slaves were chiefly taken for it, who had, or seemed to have, committed some offence. That cruel masters, moreover, applied the chains without any occasion to do so, we do not mean to deny, and it is clearly indicated by the circumstance that the law-books do not decree the penalties applicable to slave transgressors against those in chains, but prescribe the punishment of the half-chained. It was precisely the same with branding; it was meant to be, strictly, a punishment; but the whole flock was probably marked (Diodor. xxxv. 5; Bernays, —Phokytides—, p. xxxi.).
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).
9. Columella (ii. 12, 9) reckons to the year on an average 45 rainy days and holidays; with which accords the statement of Tertullian (De Idolol. 14), that the number of the heathen festival days did not come up to the fifty days of the Christian festal season from Easter to Whitsunday. To these fell to be added the time of rest in the middle of winter after the completion of the autumnal bowing, which Columella estimates at thirty days. Within this time, doubtless, the moveable “festival of seed-sowing” (-feriae sementivae-; comp. i. 210 and Ovid. Fast, i. 661) uniformly occurred. This month of rest must not be confounded with the holidays for holding courts in the season of the harvest (Plin. Ep. viii. 21, 2, et al.) and vintage.
10. III. I. The Carthaginian Dominion in Africa
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.
It is very doubtful, perhaps, whether in the Rome of this and of later times the prices of corn really fluctuated more than is the case in modern times. If we compare prices like those quoted above, of 4 pence and 5 pence for the bushel and a half, with those of the worst times of war-dearth and famine—such as in the second Punic war when the same quantity rose to 9 shillings 7 pence (1 -medimnus- = 15 — drachmae—; Polyb. ix. 44), in the civil war to 19 shillings 2 pence (1 -modius- = 5 -denarii-; Cic. Verr. iii. 92, 214), in the great dearth under Augustus, even to 21 shillings 3 pence (5 -modii- =27 1/2 -denarii-; Euseb. Chron. p. Chr. 7, Scal.)—the difference is indeed immense; but such extreme cases are but little instructive, and might in either direction be found recurring under the like conditions at the present day.
12. II. VIII. Farming of Estates
13. Accordingly Cato calls the two estates, which he describes, summarily “olive-plantation” (-olivetum-) and “vineyard” (-vinea-), although not wine and oil merely, but grain also and other products were cultivated there. If indeed the 800 -culei-, for which the possessor of the vineyard is directed to provide himself with casks (11), formed the maximum of a year’s vintage, the whole of the 100 -jugera- must have been planted with vines, because a produce of 8 -culei- per -jugerum- was almost unprecedented (Colum. iii. 3); but Varro (i. 22) understood, and evidently with reason, the statement to apply to the case of the possessor of a vineyard who found it necessary to make the new vintage before he had sold the old.
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-:
Price of the ground 1000 sesterces.
Price of the slaves who work it 1143
(proportion to-jugerum-)
Vines and stakes 2000
Loss of interest during the first two years 497
——
Total 4640 sesterces=
47 pounds.
He calculates the produce as at any rate 60 -amphorae-, worth at least 900 sesterces (9 pounds), which would thus represent a return of 17 per cent. But this is somewhat illusory, as, apart from bad harvests, the cost of gathering in the produce (iii. XII. Spirit of the System), and the expenses of the maintenance of the vines, stakes, and slaves, are omitted from the estimate.
The gross produce of meadow, pasture, and forest is estimated by the same agricultural writer as, at most, 100 sesterces per -jugerum-, and that of corn land as less rather than more: in fact, the average return of 25 -modii- of wheat per -jugerum- gives, according to the average price in the capital of 1 -denarius- per -modius-, not more than 100 sesterces for the gross proceeds, and at the seat of production the price must have been still lower. Varro (iii. 2) reckons as a good ordinary gross return for a larger estate 150 sesterces per -jugerum-. Estimates of the corresponding expense have not reached us: as a matter of course, the management in this instance cost much less than in that of a vineyard.
All these statements, moreover, date from a century or more after Gate’s death. From him we have only the general statement that the breeding of cattle yielded a better return than agriculture (ap. Cicero, De Off. ii. 25, 89; Colum. vi. praef. 4, comp. ii. 16, 2; Plin. H. N. xviii. 5, 30; Plutarch, Cato, 21); which of course is not meant to imply that it was everywhere advisable to convert arable land into pasture, but is to be understood
The higher net return of the culture of the vine as compared with that of corn is attested also by the fact, that under the award pronounced in the arbitration between the city of Genua and the villages tributary to it in 637 the city received a sixth of wine, and a twentieth of grain, as quitrent.
15. III. XII. Spirit of the System
16. III. XI. As to the Management of the Finances
17. The industrial importance of the Roman cloth-making is evident from the remarkable part which is played by the fullers in Roman comedy. The profitable nature of the fullers’ pits is attested by Cato (ap. Plutarch, Cat 21).
18. III. III. Organization of the Provinces
19. III. III. Property
20. III. VII. The State of Culture in Spain
21. III. I. Comparison between Carthage and Rome
22. III. Vi. Pressure of the War
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.
24. On this was based the actionable character of contracts of buying, hiring, and partnership, and, in general, the whole system of non-formal actionable contracts.
25. The chief passage as to this point is the fragment of Cato in Gellius, xiv. 2. In the case of the -obligatio litteris- also, i. e. a claim based solely on the entry of a debt in the account-book of the creditor, this legal regard paid to the personal credibility of the party, even where his testimony in his own cause is concerned, affords the key of explanation; and hence it happened that in later times, when this mercantile repute had vanished from Roman life, the -obligatio litteris-, while not exactly abolished, fell of itself into desuetude.
26. In the remarkable model contract given by Cato (141) for the letting of the olive harvest, there is the following paragraph:—
“None [of the persons desirous to contract on the occasion of letting] shall withdraw, for the sake of causing the gathering and pressing of the olives to be let at a dearer rate; except when [the joint bidder] immediately names [the other bidder] as his partner. If this rule shall appear to have been infringed, all the partners [of the company with which the contract has been concluded] shall, if desired by the landlord or the overseer appointed by him, take an oath [that they have not conspired in this way to prevent competition]. If they do not take the oath, the stipulated price is not to be paid.” It is tacitly assumed that the contract is taken by a company, not by an individual capitalist.
27. III. XIII. Religious Economy
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.
Faith and Manners
Roman Austerity and Roman Pride
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
A Roman Funeral
It was a singular procession, at which the burgesses were invited to be present by the summons of the public crier: “Yonder warrior is dead; whoever can, let him come to escort Lucius Aemilius; he is borne forth from his house.” It was opened by bands of wailing women, musicians, and dancers; one of the latter was dressed out and furnished with a mask after the likeness of the deceased, and by gesture doubtless and action recalled once more to the multitude the appearance of the well-known man. Then followed the grandest and most peculiar part of the solemnity—the procession of ancestors—before which all the rest of the pageant so faded in comparison, that men of rank of the true Roman type enjoined their heirs to restrict the funeral ceremony to that procession alone. We have already mentioned that the face-masks of those ancestors who had filled the curule aedileship or any higher ordinary magistracy, wrought in wax and painted—modelled as far as possible after life, but not wanting even for the earlier ages up to and beyond the time of the kings—were wont to be placed in wooden niches along the walls of the family hall, and were regarded as the chief ornament of the house. When a death occurred in the family, suitable persons, chiefly actors, were dressed up with these face-masks and the corresponding official costume to take part in the funeral ceremony, so that the ancestors—each in the principal dress worn by him in his lifetime, the triumphator in his gold-embroidered, the censor in his purple, and the consul in his purple-bordered, robe, with their lictors and the other insignia of office—all in chariots gave the final escort to the dead. On the bier overspread with massive purple and gold-embroidered coverlets and fine linen cloths lay the deceased himself, likewise in the full costume of the highest office which he had filled, and surrounded by the armour of the enemies whom he had slain and by the chaplets which in jest or earnest he had won. Behind the bier came the mourners, all dressed in black and without ornament, the sons of the deceased with their heads veiled, the daughters without veil, the relatives and clansmen, the friends, the clients and freedmen. Thus the procession passed on to the Forum. There the corpse was placed in an erect position; the ancestors descended from their chariots and seated themselves in the curule chairs; and the son or nearest gentile kinsman of the deceased ascended the rostra, in order to announce to the assembled multitude in simple recital the names and deeds of each of the men sitting in a circle around him and, last of all, those of him who had recently died.
This may be called a barbarous custom, and a nation of artistic feelings would certainly not have tolerated the continuance of this odd resurrection of the dead down to an epoch of fully-developed civilization; but even Greeks who were very dispassionate and but little disposed to reverence, such as Polybius, were greatly impressed by the naive pomp of this funeral ceremony. It was a conception essentially in keeping with the grave solemnity, the uniform movement, and the proud dignity of Roman life, that departed generations should continue to walk, as it were, corporeally among the living, and that, when a burgess weary of labours and of honours was gathered to his fathers, these fathers themselves should appear in the Forum to receive him among their number.
The New Hellenism
But the Romans had now reached a crisis of transition. Now that the power of Rome was no longer confined to Italy but had spread far and wide to the east and to the west, the days of the old home life of Italy were over, and a Hellenizing civilization came in its room. It is true that Italy had been subject to the influence of Greece, ever since it had a history at all. We have formerly shown how the youthful Greece and the youthful Italy—both of them with a certain measure of simplicity and originality—gave and received intellectual impulses; and how at a later period Rome endeavoured after a more external manner to appropriate to practical use the language and inventions of the Greeks. But the Hellenism of the Romans of the present period was, in its causes as well as its consequences, something essentially new. The Romans began to feel the need of a richer intellectual life, and to be startled as it were at their own utter want of mental culture; and, if even nations of artistic gifts, such as the English and Germans, have not disdained in the pauses of their own productiveness to avail themselves of the miserable French culture for filling up the gap, it need excite no surprise that the Italian nation now flung itself with fervid zeal on the glorious treasures as well as on the dissolute filth of the intellectual development of Hellas. But it was an impulse still more profound and deep-rooted, which carried the Romans irresistibly into the Hellenic vortex. Hellenic civilization still doubtless called itself by that name, but it was Hellenic no longer; it was, in fact, humanistic and cosmopolitan. It had solved the problem of moulding a mass of different nations into one whole completely in the field of intellect, and to a certain extent also in that of politics; and, now when the same task on a wider scale devolved on Rome, she took over Hellenism along with the rest of the inheritance of Alexander the Great. Hellenism therefore was no longer a mere stimulus or accessory influence; it penetrated the Italian nation to the very core. Of course, the vigorous home life of Italy strove against the foreign element. It was only after a most vehement struggle that the Italian farmer abandoned the field to the cosmopolite of the capital; and, as in Germany the French coat called forth the national Germanic frock, so the reaction against Hellenism aroused in Rome a tendency which opposed the influence of Greece on principle, in a fashion altogether foreign to the earlier centuries, and in doing so fell pretty frequently into downright follies and absurdities.
Hellenism in Politics
No department of human action or thought remained unaffected by this struggle between the old fashion and the new. Even political relations were largely influenced by it The whimsical project of emancipating the Hellenes, the well deserved failure of which has already been described, the kindred, likewise Hellenic, idea of a common interest of republics in opposition to kings, and the desire of propagating Hellenic polity at the expense of eastern despotism—the two principles that helped to regulate, for instance, the treatment of Macedonia—were fixed ideas of the new school, just as dread of the Carthaginians was the fixed idea of the old; and, if Cato pushed the latter to a ridiculous excess, Philhellenism now and then indulged in extravagances at least quite as foolish. For example, the conqueror of king Antiochus not only had a statue of him self in Greek costume erected on the Capitol, but also, instead of calling himself in good Latin -Asiaticus-, assumed the unmeaning and anomalous, but yet magnificent and almost Greek, surname of —Asiagenus—.(1) A more important consequence of this attitude of the ruling nation towards Hellenism was, that the process of Latinizing gained ground everywhere in Italy except where it encountered the Hellenes. The cities of the Greeks in Italy, so far as the war had not destroyed them, remained Greek. Apulia, about which, it is true, the Romans gave themselves little concern, appears at this very epoch to have been thoroughly pervaded by Hellenism, and the local civilization there seems to have attained the level of the decaying Hellenic culture by its side. Tradition is silent on the matter; but the numerous coins of cities, uniformly furnished with Greek inscriptions, and the manufacture of painted clay-vases after the Greek style, which was carried on in that part of Italy alone with more ambition and gaudiness than taste, show that Apulia had completely adopted Greek habits and Greek art.
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 National Religion and Unbelief
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
But if Italy still possessed—what had long been a mere antiquarian curiosity in Hellas—a national religion, it was already visibly beginning to be ossified into theology. The torpor creeping over faith is nowhere perhaps so distinctly apparent as in the alterations in the economy of divine service and of the priesthood. The public service of the gods became not only more tedious, but above all more and more costly. In 558 there was added to the three old colleges of the augurs, pontifices, and keepers of oracles, a fourth consisting of three “banquet-masters” (-tres viri epulones-), solely for the important purpose of superintending the banquets of the gods. The priests, as well as the gods, were in fairness entitled to feast; new institutions, however, were not needed with that view, as every college applied itself with zeal and devotion to its convivial affairs. The clerical banquets were accompanied by the claim of clerical immunities. The priests even in times of grave embarrassment claimed the right of exemption from public burdens, and only after very troublesome controversy submitted to make payment of the taxes in arrear (558). To the individual, as well as to the community, piety became a more and more costly article. The custom of instituting endowments, and generally of undertaking permanent pecuniary obligations, for religious objects prevailed among the Romans in a manner similar to that of its prevalence in Roman Catholic countries at the present day. These endowments—particularly after they came to be regarded by the supreme spiritual and at the same time the supreme juristic authority in the state, the pontifices, as a real burden devolving -de jure- on every heir or other person acquiring the estate—began to form an extremely oppressive charge on property; “inheritance without sacrificial obligation” was a proverbial saying among the Romans somewhat similar to our “rose without a thorn.” The dedication of a tenth of their substance became so common, that twice every month a public entertainment was given from the proceeds in the Forum Boarium at Rome. With the Oriental worship of the Mother of the Gods there was imported to Rome among other pious nuisances the practice, annually recurring on certain fixed days, of demanding penny-collections from house to house (-stipem cogere-). Lastly, the subordinate class of priests and soothsayers, as was reasonable, rendered no service without being paid for it; and beyond doubt the Roman dramatist sketched from life, when in the curtain-conversation between husband and wife he represents the account for pious services as ranking with the accounts for the cook, the nurse, and other customary presents:—
-Da mihi, vir,—quod dem Quinquatribus Praecantrici, conjectrici, hariolae atquc haruspicae; Tum piatricem clementer non potest quin munerem. Flagitium est, si nil mittetur, quo supercilio spicit.-
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
This exaggeration of conscientiousness was already a symptom of its incipient torpor; and the reaction against it—indifference and unbelief—failed not soon to appear. Even in the first Punic war (505) an instance occurred in which the consul himself made an open jest of consulting the auspices before battle—a consul, it is true, belonging to the peculiar clan of the Claudii, which alike in good and evil was ahead of its age. Towards the end of this epoch complaints were loudly made that the lore of the augurs was neglected, and that, to use the language of Cato, a number of ancient auguries and auspices were falling into oblivion through the indolence of the college. An augur like Lucius Paullus, who saw in the priesthood a science and not a mere title, was already a rare exception, and could not but be so, when the government more and more openly and unhesitatingly employed the auspices for the accomplishment of its political designs, or, in other words, treated the national religion in accordance with the view of Polybius as a superstition useful for imposing on the public at large. Where the way was thus paved, the Hellenistic irreligious spirit found free course. In connection with the incipient taste for art the sacred images of the gods began as early as the time of Cato to be employed, like other furniture, in adorning the chambers of the rich. More dangerous wounds were inflicted on religion by the rising literature. It could not indeed venture on open attacks, and such direct additions as were made by its means to religious conceptions —e.g. the Pater Caelus formed by Ennius from the Roman Saturnus in imitation of the Greek Uranos—were, while Hellenistic, of no great importance. But the diffusion of the doctrines of Epichar and Euhemerus in Rome was fraught with momentous consequences. The poetical philosophy, which the later Pythagoreans had extracted from the writings of the old Sicilian comedian Epicharmus
Home and Foreign Superstition
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
Worship of Cybele
Chaldaean astrologers and casters of nativities were already in the sixth century spread throughout Italy; but a still more important event—one making in fact an epoch in the world’s history—was the reception of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods among the publicly recognized divinities of the Roman state, to which the government had been obliged to give its consent during the last weary years of the Hannibalic war (550). A special embassy was sent for the purpose to Pessinus, a city in the territory of the Celts of Asia Minor; and the rough field-stone, which the priests of the place liberally presented to the foreigners as the real Mother Cybele, was received by the community with unparalleled pomp. Indeed, by way of perpetually commemorating the joyful event, clubs in which the members entertained each other in rotation were instituted among the higher classes, and seem to have materially stimulated the rising tendency to the formation of cliques. With the permission thus granted for the -cultus- of Cybele the worship of the Orientals gained a footing officially in Rome; and, though the government strictly insisted that the emasculate priests of the new gods should remain Celts (-Galli-) as they were called, and that no Roman burgess should devote himself to this pious eunuchism, yet the barbaric pomp of the “Great Mother” —her priests clad in Oriental costume with the chief eunuch at their head, marching in procession through the streets to the foreign music of fifes and kettledrums, and begging from house to house—and the whole doings, half sensuous, half monastic, must have exercised a most material influence over the sentiments and views of the people.
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
Of course all rational men were agreed in the condemnation of these spurious forms of religion—as absurd as they were injurious to the commonwealth: the pious adherents of the olden faith and the partisans of Hellenic enlightenment concurred in their ridicule of, and indignation at, this superstition. Cato made it an instruction to his steward, “that he was not to present any offering, or to allow any offering to be presented on his behalf, without the knowledge and orders of his master, except at the domestic hearth and on the wayside-altar at the Compitalia, and that he should consult no -haruspex-, -hariolus-, or -Chaldaeus-.” The well-known question, as to how a priest could contrive to suppress laughter when he met his colleague, originated with Cato, and was primarily applied to the Etruscan -haruspex-. Much in the same spirit Ennius censures in true Euripidean style the mendicant soothsayers and their adherents:
-Sed superstitiosi vates impudentesque arioli, Aut inertes aut insani aut quibus egestas imperat, Qui sibi semitam non sapiunt, alteri monstrant viam, Quibus divitias pollicentur, ab eis drachumam ipsi petunt.-
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
-Sperne mores transmarinos, mille habent offucias. Cive Romano per orbem nemo vivit rectius. Quippe malim unum Catonem, quam trecentos Socratas.- (3)
Such judgments will not be absolutely adopted by history; but every one who carefully considers the revolution which the degenerate Hellenism of this age accomplished in the modes of life and thought among the Romans, will be inclined to heighten rather than to lessen that condemnation of the foreign manners.
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
Luxury prevailed more and more in dress, ornaments, and furniture, in buildings and at table. Especially after the expedition to Asia Minor in 564 Asiatico-Hellenic luxury, such as prevailed at Ephesus and Alexandria, transferred its empty refinement and its dealing in trifles, destructive alike of money, time, and pleasure, to Rome. Here too women took the lead: in spite of the zealous invective of Cato they managed to procure the abolition, after the peace with Cartilage (559), of the decree of the people passed soon after the battle of Cannae (539), which forbade them to use gold ornaments, variegated dresses, or chariots; no course was left to their zealous antagonist but to impose a high tax on those articles (570). A multitude of new and for the most part frivolous articles—silver plate elegantly figured, table-couches with bronze mounting, Attalic dresses as they were called, and carpets of rich gold brocade—now found their way to Rome. Above all, this new luxury appeared in the appliances of the table. Hitherto without exception the Romans had only partaken of hot dishes once a day; now hot dishes were not unfrequently produced at the second meal (-prandium-), and for the principal meal the two courses formerly in use no longer sufficed. Hitherto the women of the household had themselves attended to the baking of bread and cooking; and it was only on occasion of entertainments that a professional cook was specially hired, who in that case superintended alike the cooking and the baking. Now, on the other hand, a scientific cookery began to prevail. In the better houses a special cook was kept The division of labour became necessary, and the trade of baking bread and cakes branched off from that of cooking—the first bakers’ shops in Rome appeared about 583. Poems on the art of good eating, with long lists of the most palatable fishes and other marine products, found their readers: and the theory was reduced to practice. Foreign delicacies—anchovies from Pontus, wine from Greece—began to be esteemed in Rome, and Cato’s receipt for giving to the ordinary wine of the country the flavour of Coan by means of brine would hardly inflict any considerable injury on the Roman vintners. The old decorous singing and reciting of the guests and their boys were supplanted by Asiatic -sambucistriae-. Hitherto the Romans had perhaps drunk pretty deeply at supper, but drinking-banquets in the strict sense were unknown; now formal revels came into vogue, on which occasions the wine was little or not at all diluted and was drunk out of large cups, and the drink-pledging, in which each was bound to follow his neighbour in regular succession, formed the leading feature—“drinking after the Greek style” (-Graeco more bibere-) or “playing the Greek” (-pergraecari-, -congraecare-) as the Romans called it. In consequence of this debauchery dice-playing, which had doubtless long been in use among the Romans, reached such proportions that it was necessary for legislation to interfere. The aversion to labour and the habit of idle lounging were visibly on the increase.(4) Cato proposed to have the market paved with pointed stones, in order to put a stop to the habit of idling; the Romans laughed at the jest and went on to enjoy the pleasure of loitering and gazing all around them.
Increase of Amusements
We have already noticed the alarming extension of the popular amusements during this epoch. At the beginning of it, apart from some unimportant foot and chariot races which should rather be ranked with religious ceremonies, only a single general festival was held in the month of September, lasting four days and having a definitely fixed maximum of cost.(5) At the close of the epoch, this popular festival had a duration of at least six days; and besides this there were celebrated at the beginning of April the festival of the Mother of the Gods or the so-called Megalensia, towards the end of April that of Ceres and that of Flora, in June that of Apollo, in November the Plebeian games—all of them probably occupying already more days than one. To these fell to be added the numerous cases where the games were celebrated afresh—in which pious scruples presumably often served as a mere pretext—and the incessant extraordinary festivals. Among these the already-mentioned banquets furnished from the dedicated tenths(6) the feasts of the gods, the triumphal and funeral festivities, were conspicuous; and above all the festal games which were celebrated—for the first time in 505—at the close of one of those longer periods which were marked off by the Etrusco-Roman religion, the -saecula-, as they were called. At the same time domestic festivals were multiplied. During the second Punic war there were introduced, among people of quality, the already-mentioned banquetings on the anniversary of the entrance of the Mother of the Gods (after 550), and, among the lower orders, the similar Saturnalia (after 537), both under the influence of the powers henceforth closely allied—the foreign priest and the foreign cook. A very near approach was made to that ideal condition in which every idler should know where he might kill time every day; and this in a commonwealth where formerly action had been with all and sundry the very object of existence, and idle enjoyment had been proscribed by custom as well as by law! The bad and demoralizing elements in these festal observances, moreover, daily acquired greater ascendency. It is true that still as formerly the chariot races formed the brilliant finale of the national festivals; and a poet of this period describes very vividly the straining expectancy with which the eyes of the multitude were fastened on the consul, when he was on the point of giving the signal for the chariots to start. But the former amusements no longer sufficed; there was a craving for new and more varied spectacles. Greek athletes now made their appearance (for the first time in 568) alongside of the native wrestlers and boxers. Of the dramatic exhibitions we shall speak hereafter: the transplanting of Greek comedy and tragedy to Rome was a gain perhaps of doubtful value, but it formed at any rate the best of the acquisitions made at this time. The Romans had probably long indulged in the sport of coursing
Nor was the evil confined to the corruption of Roman manners by Hellenic contagion; conversely the scholars began to demoralize their instructors. Gladiatorial games, which were unknown in Greece, were first introduced by king Antiochus Epiphanes (579-590), a professed imitator of the Romans, at the Syrian court, and, although they excited at first greater horror than pleasure in the Greek public, which was more humane and had more sense of art than the Romans, yet they held their ground likewise there, and gradually came more and more into vogue.
As a matter of course, this revolution in life and manners brought an economic revolution in its train. Residence in the capital became more and more coveted as well as more costly. Rents rose to an unexampled height. Extravagant prices were paid for the new articles of luxury; a barrel of anchovies from the Black Sea cost 1600 sesterces (16 pounds)—more than the price of a rural slave; a beautiful boy cost 24,000 sesterces (240 pounds)—more than many a farmer’s homestead. Money therefore, and nothing but money, became the watchword with high and low. In Greece it had long been the case that nobody did anything for nothing, as the Greeks themselves with discreditable candour allowed: after the second Macedonian war the Romans began in this respect also to imitate the Greeks. Respectability had to provide itself with legal buttresses; pleaders, for instance, had to be prohibited by decree of the people from taking money for their services; the jurisconsults alone formed a noble exception, and needed no decree of the people to compel their adherence to the honourable custom of giving good advice gratuitously. Men did not, if possible, steal outright; but all shifts seemed allowable in order to attain rapidly to riches—plundering and begging, cheating on the part of contractors and swindling on the part of speculators, usurious trading in money and in grain, even the turning of purely moral relations such as friendship and marriage to economic account. Marriage especially became on both sides an object of mercantile speculation; marriages for money were common, and it appeared necessary to refuse legal validity to the’ presents which the spouses made to each other. That, under such a state of things, plans for setting fire on all sides to the capital came to the knowledge of the authorities, need excite no surprise. When man no longer finds enjoyment in work, and works merely in order to attain as quickly as possible to enjoyment, it is a mere accident that he does not become a criminal. Destiny had lavished all the glories of power and riches with liberal hand on the Romans; but, in truth, the Pandora’s box was a gift of doubtful value.
1. That —Asiagenus— was the original title of the hero of Magnesia and of his descendants, is established by coins and inscriptions; the fact that the Capitoline Fasti call him -Asiaticus- is one of several traces indicating that these have undergone a non-contemporary revision. The former surname can only he a corruption of —Asiagenus— —the form which later authors substituted for it—which signifies not the conqueror of Asia, but an Asiatic by birth.
2. II. VIII. Religion
3. [In the first edition of this translation I gave these lines in English on the basis of Dr. Mommsen’s German version, and added in a note that I had not been able to find the original. Several scholars whom I consulted were not more successful; and Dr. Mommsen was at the time absent from Berlin. Shortly after the first edition appeared, I received a note from Sir George Cornewall Lewis informing me that I should find them taken from Florus (or Floridus) in Wernsdorf, Poetae Lat. Min. vol. iii. p. 487. They were accordingly given in the revised edition of 1868 from the Latin text Baehrens (Poet. Lat. Min. vol. iv. p. 347) follows Lucian Muller in reading -offucia-. —Tr.]
4. A sort of -parabasis- in the -Curculio- of Plautus describes what went on in the market-place of the capital, with little humour perhaps, but with life-like distinctness.
-Conmonstrabo, quo in quemque hominem facile inveniatis
loco,
Ne nimio opere sumat operam, si quis conventum velit
Vel vitiosum vel sine vitio, vel probum vel inprobum.
Qui perjurum convenire volt hominem, ito in comitium;
Qui mendacem et gloriosum, apud Cloacinae sacrum.
[Ditis damnosos maritos sub basilica quaerito.
Ibidem erunt scorta exoleta quique stipulari solent.]
Symbolarum conlatores apud forum piscarium.
In foro infumo boni homines atque dites ambulant;
In medio propter canalem ibi ostentatores meri.
Confidentes garrulique et malevoli supra lacum,
Qui alteri de nihilo audacter dicunt contumeliam
Et qui ipsi sat habent quod in se possit vere dicier.
Sub veteribus ibi sunt, qui dant quique accipiunt
faenore.
Pone aedem Castoris ibi sunt, subito quibus credas
male.
In Tusco vico ibi sunt homines, qui ipsi sese venditant.
In Velabro vel pistorem vel lanium vel haruspicem
Vel qui ipsi vorsant, vel qui aliis, ut vorsentur,
praebeant.
Ditis damnosos maritos apud Leucadiam Oppiam.-
The verses in brackets are a subsequent addition, inserted after the building of the first Roman bazaar (570). The business of the baker (-pistor-, literally miller) embraced at this time the sale of delicacies and the providing accommodation for revellers (Festus, Ep. v. alicariae, p. 7, Mull.; Plautus, Capt. 160; Poen. i. a, 54; Trin. 407). The same was the case with the butchers. Leucadia Oppia may have kept a house of bad fame.
5. II. IX. The Roman National Festival
6. III. XIII. Religious Economy
Literature and Art
The influences which stimulated the growth of Roman literature were of a character altogether peculiar and hardly paralleled in any other nation. To estimate them correctly, it is necessary in the first place that we should glance at the instruction of the people and its recreations during this period.
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.
Under the influence of such circumstances Roman instruction developed itself. It is a mistaken opinion, that antiquity was materially inferior to our own times in the general diffusion of elementary attainments. Even among the lower classes and slaves there was much reading, writing, and counting: in the case of a slave steward, for instance, Cato, following the example of Mago, takes for granted the ability to read and write. Elementary instruction, as well as instruction in Greek, must have been long before this period imparted to a very considerable
In a similar way greater importance came to be attached to instruction in Latin. The higher society of Rome began to feel the need, if not of exchanging their mother-tongue for Greek, at least of refining it and adapting it to the changed state of culture; and for this purpose too they found themselves in every respect dependent on the Greeks. The economic arrangements of the Romans placed the work of elementary instruction in the mother-tongue—like every other work held in little estimation and performed for hire—chiefly in the hands of slaves, freedmen, or foreigners, or in other words chiefly in the hands of Greeks or half-Greeks;(4) which was attended with the less difficulty, because the Latin alphabet was almost identical with the Greek and the two languages possessed a close and striking affinity. But this was the least part of the matter; the importance of the study of Greek in a formal point of view exercised
But unfortunately the chief requisite for such a transference was wanting. The Romans could, no doubt, learn to read and write Latin by means of the Twelve Tables; but a Latin culture presupposed a literature, and no such literature existed in Rome.
The Stage under Greek Influence
To this defect was added a second. We have already described the multiplication of the amusements of the Roman people. The stage had long played an important part in these recreations; the chariot-races formed strictly the principal amusement in all of them, but these races uniformly took place only on one, viz. the concluding, day, while the earlier days were substantially devoted to stage-entertainments. But for long these stage-representations consisted chiefly of dances and jugglers’ feats; the improvised chants, which were produced on these occasions, had neither dialogue nor plot.(5) It was only now that the Romans looked around them for a real drama. The Roman popular festivals were throughout under the influence of the Greeks, whose talent for amusing and for killing time naturally rendered them purveyors of pleasure for the Romans. Now no national amusement was a greater favourite in Greece, and none was more varied, than the theatre; it could not but speedily attract the attention of those who provided the Roman festivals and their staff of assistants. The earlier Roman stage-chant contained within it a dramatic germ capable perhaps of development; but to develop the drama from that germ required on the part of the poet and the public a genial power of giving and receiving, such as was not to be found among the Romans at all, and least of all at this period; and, had it been possible to find it, the impatience of those entrusted with the amusement of the multitude would hardly have allowed to the noble fruit peace and leisure to ripen. In this case too there was an outward want, which the nation was unable to satisfy; the Romans desired a theatre, but the pieces were wanting.
Rise of a Roman Literature
On these elements Roman literature was based; and its defective character was from the first and necessarily the result of such an origin. All real art has its root in individual freedom and a cheerful enjoyment of life, and the germs of such an art were not wanting in Italy; but, when Roman training substituted for freedom and joyousness the sense of belonging to the community and the consciousness of duty, art was stifled and, instead of growing, could not but pine away. The culminating point of Roman development was the period which had no literature. It was not till Roman nationality began to give way and Hellenico-cosmopolite tendencies began to prevail, that literature made its appearance at Rome in their train. Accordingly from the beginning, and by stringent internal necessity, it took its stand on Greek ground and in broad antagonism to the distinctively Roman national spirit. Roman poetry above all had its immediate origin not from the inward impulse of the poets, but from the outward demands of the school, which needed Latin manuals, and of the stage, which needed Latin dramas. Now both institutions—the school and the stage—were thoroughly anti-Roman and revolutionary. The gaping and staring idleness of the theatre was an abomination to the sober earnestness and the spirit of activity which animated the Roman of the olden type; and—inasmuch as it was the deepest and noblest conception lying at the root of the Roman commonwealth, that within the circle of Roman burgesses there should be neither master nor slave, neither millionnaire nor beggar, but that above all a like faith and a like culture should characterize all Romans—the school and the necessarily exclusive school-culture were far more dangerous still, and were in fact utterly destructive of the sense of equality. The school and the theatre became the most effective levers in the hands of the new spirit of the age, and all the more so that they used the Latin tongue. Men might perhaps speak and write Greek and yet not cease to be Romans; but in this case they accustomed themselves to speak in the Roman language, while the whole inward being and life were Greek. It is not one of the most pleasing, but it is one of the most remarkable and in a historical point of view most instructive, facts in this brilliant era of Roman conservatism, that during its course Hellenism struck root in the whole field of intellect not immediately political, and that the -maitre de plaisir- of the great public and the schoolmaster in close alliance created a Roman literature.
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.
But this preliminary stage of literary development was soon passed. The epics and dramas of Livius were regarded by posterity, and undoubtedly with perfect justice, as resembling the rigid statues of Daedalus destitute of emotion or expression—curiosities rather than works of art.
But in the following generation, now that the foundations were once laid, there arose a lyric, epic, and dramatic art; and it is of great importance, even in a historical point of view, to trace this poetical development.
Drama
Theatre
Both as respects extent of production and influence over the public, the drama stood at the head of the poetry thus developed in Rome. In antiquity there was no permanent theatre with fixed admission-money; in Greece as in Rome the drama made its appearance only as an element in the annually-recurring or extraordinary amusements of the citizens. Among the measures by which the government counteracted or imagined that they counteracted that extension of the popular festivals which they justly regarded with anxiety, they refused to permit the erection of a stone building for a theatre.(10) Instead of this there was erected for each festival a scaffolding of boards with a stage for the actors (-proscaenium-, -pulpitum-) and a decorated background (-scaena-); and in a semicircle in front of it was staked off the space for the spectators (-cavea-), which was merely sloped without steps or seats, so that, if the spectators had not chairs brought along with them, they squatted, reclined, or stood.(11) The women were probably separated at an early period, and were restricted to the uppermost and worst places; otherwise there was no distinction of places in law till 560, after which, as already mentioned,(12) the lowest and best positions were reserved for the senators.
Audience
The audience was anything but genteel. The better classes, it is true, did not keep aloof from the general recreations of the people; the fathers of the city seem even to have been bound for decorum’s sake to appear on these occasions. But the very nature of a burgess festival implied that, while slaves and probably foreigners also were excluded, admittance free of charge was given to every burgess with his wife and children;(13) and accordingly the body of spectators cannot have differed much from what one sees in the present day at public fireworks and -gratis- exhibitions. Naturally, therefore, the proceedings were not too orderly; children cried, women talked and shrieked, now and then a wench prepared to push her way to the stage; the ushers had on these festivals anything but a holiday, and found frequent occasion to confiscate a mantle or to ply the rod.
The introduction of the Greek drama increased the demands on the dramatic staff, and there seems to have been no redundance in the supply of capable actors: on one occasion for want of actors a piece of Naevius had to be performed by amateurs. But this produced no change in the position of the artist; the poet or, as he was at this time called, the “writer,” the actor, and the composer not only belonged still, as formerly, to the class of workers for hire in itself little esteemed,(14) but were still, as formerly, placed in the most marked way under the ban of public opinion, and subjected to police maltreatment.(15) Of course all reputable persons kept aloof from such an occupation. The manager of the company (-dominus gregis-, -factionis-, also -choragus-), who was ordinarily also the chief actor, was generally a freedman, and its members were ordinarily his slaves; the composers, whose names have reached us, were all of them non-free. The remuneration was not merely small—a -honorarium-of 8000 sesterces (80 pounds) given to a dramatist is described shortly after the close of this period as unusually high—but was, moreover, only paid by the magistrates providing the festival, if the piece was not a failure. With the payment the matter ended; poetical competitions and honorary prizes, such as took place in Attica, were not yet heard of in Rome—the Romans at this time appear to have simply applauded or hissed as we now do, and to have brought forward only a single piece for exhibition each day.(16) Under such circumstances, where art worked for daily wages and the artist instead of receiving due honour was subjected to disgrace, the new national theatre of the Romans could not present any development either original or even at all artistic; and, while the noble rivalry of the noblest Athenians had called into life the Attic drama, the Roman drama taken as a whole could be nothing but a spoiled copy of its predecessor, in which the only wonder is that it has been able to display so much grace and wit in the details.
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
In the dramatic world comedy greatly preponderated over tragedy; the spectators knit their brows, when instead of the expected comedy a tragedy began. Thus it happened that, while this period exhibits poets who devoted themselves specially to comedy, such as Plautus and Caecilius, it presents none who cultivated tragedy alone; and among the dramas of this epoch known to us by name there occur three comedies for one tragedy. Of course the Roman comic poets, or rather translators, laid hands in the first instance on the pieces which had possession of the Hellenic stage at the time; and thus they found themselves exclusively(17) confined to the range of the newer Attic comedy, and chiefly to its best-known poets, Philemon of Soli in Cilicia (394?-492) and Menander of Athens (412-462). This comedy came to be of so great importance as regards the development not only of Roman literature, but even of the nation at large, that even history has reason to pause and consider it.
Character of the Newer Attic Comedy
The pieces are of tiresome monotony. Almost without exception the plot turns on helping a young man, at the expense either of his father or of some -leno-, to obtain possession of a sweetheart of undoubted charms and of very doubtful morals. The path to success in love regularly lies through some sort of pecuniary fraud; and the crafty servant, who provides the needful sum and performs the requisite swindling while the lover is mourning over his amatory and pecuniary distresses, is the real mainspring of the piece. There is no want of the due accompaniment of reflections on the joys and sorrows of love, of tearful parting scenes, of lovers who in the anguish of their hearts threaten to do themselves a mischief; love or rather amorous intrigue was, as the old critics of art say, the very life-breath of the Menandrian poetry. Marriage forms, at least with Menander, the inevitable finale; on which occasion, for the greater edification and satisfaction of the spectators, the virtue of the heroine usually comes forth almost if not wholly untarnished, and the heroine herself proves to be the lost daughter of some rich man and so in every respect an eligible match. Along with these love-pieces we find others of a pathetic kind. Among the comedies of Plautus, for instance, the -Rudens- turns on a shipwreck and the right of asylum; while the -Trinummus- and the -Captivi- contain no amatory intrigue, but depict the generous devotedness of the friend to his friend and of the slave to his master. Persons and situations recur down to the very details like patterns on a carpet; we never get rid of the asides of unseen listeners, of knocking at the house-doors, and of slaves scouring the streets on some errand or other. The standing masks, of which there was a certain fixed number—viz., eight masks for old men, and seven for servants—from which alone in ordinary cases at least the poet had to make his choice, further favoured a stock-model
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
-Sed sumne ego stultus, qui rem curo publicam Ubi sunt magistratus, quos curare oporteat?-
and taken as a whole, we can hardly imagine a comedy politically more tame than was that of Rome in the sixth century.(22) The oldest Roman comic writer of note, Gnaeus Naevius, alone forms a remarkable exception. Although he did not write exactly original Roman comedies, the few fragments of his, which we possess, are full of references to circumstances and persons in Rome. Among other liberties he not only ridiculed one Theodotus a painter by name, but even directed against the victor of Zama the following verses, of which Aristophanes need not have been ashamed:
-Etiam qui res magnas manu saepe gessit gloriose, Cujus facta viva nunc vigent, qui apud gentes solus praestat, Eum suus pater cum pallio uno ab amica abduxit.-
As he himself says,
-Libera lingua loquemur ludis Liberalibus,-
he may have often written at variance with police rules, and put dangerous questions, such as:
-Cedo qui vestram rem publicam tantam amisistis tam cito?-
which he answered by an enumeration of political sins, such as:
-Proveniebant oratores novi, stulti adulescentuli.-
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.
Character of the Editing of Roman Comedy
Persons and Situations
But the restrictions thus stringently and laboriously imposed by custom and police on Roman poetry stifled its very breath, Not without reason might Naevius declare the position of the poet under the sceptre of the Lagidae and Seleucidae enviable as compared with his position in free Rome.(23) The degree of success in individual instances was of course determined by the quality of the original which was followed, and by the talent of the individual editor; but amidst all their individual variety the whole stock of translations must have agreed in certain leading features, inasmuch as all the comedies were adapted to similar conditions of exhibition and a similar audience. The treatment of the whole as well as of the details was uniformly in the highest degree free; and it was necessary that it should be so. While the original pieces were performed in presence of that society which they copied, and in this very fact lay their principal charm, the Roman audience of this period was so different from the Attic, that it was not even in a position rightly to understand that foreign world. The Roman comprehended neither the grace and kindliness, nor the sentimentalism and the whitened emptiness of the domestic life of the Hellenes. The slave-world was utterly different; the Roman slave was a piece of household furniture, the Attic slave was a servant. Where marriages of slaves occur or a master carries on a kindly conversation with his slave, the Roman translators ask their audience not to take offence at such things which are usual in Athens;(24) and, when at a later period comedies began to be written in Roman costume, the part of the crafty servant had to be rejected, because the Roman public did not tolerate slaves of this sort overlooking and controlling their masters. The professional figures and those illustrative of character, which were sketched more broadly and farcically, bore the process of transference better than the polished figures of every-day life; but even of those delineations the Roman editor had to lay aside several—and these probably the very finest and most original, such as the Thais, the match-maker, the moon-conjuress, and the mendicant priest of Menander —and to keep chiefly to those foreign trades, with which the Greek luxury of the table, already very generally diffused in Rome, had made his audience familiar. If the professional cook and the jester in the comedy of Plautus are delineated with so striking vividness and so much relish, the explanation lies in the fact, that Greek cooks had even at that time daily offered their services in the Roman market, and that Cato found it necessary even to instruct his steward not to keep a jester. In like manner the translator could make no use of a very large portion of the elegant Attic conversation in his originals. The Roman citizen or farmer stood in much the same relation to the refined revelry and debauchery of Athens, as the
Construction of the Plot
The havoc, which the Roman editors were compelled in deference to their audience to make in the originals, drove them inevitably into methods of cancelling and amalgamating incompatible with any artistic construction. It was usual not only to throw out whole character-parts of the original, but also to insert others taken from other comedies of the same or of another poet; a treatment indeed which, owing to the outwardly methodical construction of the originals and the recurrence of standing figures and incidents, was not quite so bad as it might seem. Moreover the poets, at least in the earlier period, allowed themselves the most singular liberties in the construction of the plot. The plot of the -Stichus- (performed in 554) otherwise so excellent turns upon the circumstance, that two sisters, whom their father urges to abandon their absent husbands, play the part of Penelopes, till the husbands return home with rich mercantile gains and with a beautiful damsel as a present for their father-in-law. In the -Casina-, which was received with quite special favour by the public, the bride, from whom the piece is named and around whom the plot revolves, does not make her appearance at all, and the denouement is quite naively described by the epilogue as “to be enacted later within.” Very often the plot as it thickens is suddenly broken off, the connecting thread is allowed to drop, and other similar signs of an unfinished art appear. The reason of this is to be sought probably far less in the unskilfulness of the Roman editors, than in the indifference of the Roman public to aesthetic laws. Taste, however, gradually formed itself. In the later pieces Plautus has evidently bestowed more care on their construction, and the -Captivi- for instance, the -Pseudolus-, and the -Bacchides- are executed in a masterly manner after their kind. His successor Caecilius, none of whose pieces are extant, is said to have especially distinguished himself by the more artistic treatment of the subject.
Roman Barbarism
In the treatment of details the endeavour of the poet to bring matters as far as possible home to his Roman hearers, and the rule of police which required that the pieces should retain a foreign character, produced the most singular contrasts. The Roman gods, the ritual, military, and juristic terms of the Romans, present a strange appearance amid the Greek world; Roman -aediles- and -tresviri- are grotesquely mingled with -agoranomi- and -demarchi-; pieces whose scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol. Such a patchwork of Roman local tints distributed over the Greek ground is barbarism enough; but interpolations of this nature, which are often in their naive way very ludicrous, are far more tolerable than that thorough alteration of the pieces into a ruder shape, which the editors deemed necessary to suit the far from Attic culture of their audience. It is true that several even of the new Attic poets probably needed no accession to their coarseness; pieces like the -Asinaria- of Plautus cannot owe their unsurpassed dulness and vulgarity solely to the translator. Nevertheless coarse incidents so prevail in the Roman comedy, that the translators must either have interpolated them or at least have made a very one-sided selection. In the endless abundance of cudgelling and in the lash ever suspended over the back of the slaves we recognize very clearly the household-government inculcated by Cato, just as we recognize the Catonian opposition to women in the never-ending disparagement of wives. Among the jokes of their own invention, with which the Roman editors deemed it proper to season the elegant Attic dialogue, several are almost incredibly unmeaning and barbarous.(25)
Metrical Treatment
So far as concerns metrical treatment on the other hand, the flexible and sounding verse on the whole does all honour to the composers. The fact that the iambic trimeters, which predominated in the originals and were alone suitable to their moderate conversational tone, were very frequently replaced in the Latin edition by iambic or trochaic tetrameters, is to be attributed not so much to any want of skill on the part of the editors who knew well how to handle the trimeter, as to the uncultivated taste of the Roman public which was pleased with the sonorous magnificence of the long verse even where it was not appropriate.
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
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:
-Immortales mortales si foret fas fiere,
Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam;
Itaque, postquam est Orci traditus thesauro,
Obliti sunt Romae loquier lingua Latina.-
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
His younger contemporary, Titus Maccius Plautus (500?-570), appears to have been far inferior to him both in outward position and in the conception of his poetic calling. A native of the little town of Sassina, which was originally Umbrian but was perhaps by this time Latinized, he earned his livelihood in Rome at first as an actor, and then—after he had lost in mercantile speculations what he had gained by his acting—as a theatrical composer reproducing Greek comedies, without occupying himself with any other department of literature and probably without laying claim to authorship properly so called. There seems to have been at that time a considerable number of persons who made a trade of thus editing comedies in Rome; but their names, especially as they did not perhaps in general publish their works,(32) were virtually forgotten, and the pieces belonging to this stock of plays, which were preserved, passed in after times under the name of the most popular of them, Plautus. The -litteratores- of the following century reckoned up as many as 130 such “Plautine pieces”; but of these a large portion at any rate were merely revised by Plautus or had no connection with him at all; the best of them are still extant. To form a proper judgment, however, regarding the poetical character of the editor is very difficult, if not impossible, since the originals have not been preserved. That the editors reproduced good and bad pieces without selection; that they were subject and subordinate both to the police and to the public; that they were as indifferent to aesthetical requirements as their audience, and to please the latter, lowered the originals to a farcical and vulgar tone—are objections which apply rather to the whole manufacture of translations than to the individual remodeller. On the other hand we may regard as characteristic of Plautus, the masterly handling of the language and of the varied rhythms, a rare skill in adjusting and working the situation for dramatic effect, the almost always clever and often excellent dialogue, and, above all, a broad
Caecilius
Still less are we able to form a special opinion as to the third and last—for though Ennius wrote comedies, he did so altogether unsuccessfully—comedian of note in this epoch, Statins Caecilius. He resembled Plautus in his position in life and his profession. Born in Cisalpine Gaul in the district of Mediolanum, he was brought among the Insubrian prisoners of war(33) to Rome, and earned a livelihood, first as a slave, afterwards as a freedman, by remodelling Greek comedies for the theatre down to his probably early death (586). His language was not pure, as was to be expected from his origin; on the other hand, he directed his efforts, as we have already said,(34) to a more artistic construction of the plot. His pieces experienced but a dull reception from his contemporaries, and the public of later times laid aside Caecilius for Plautus and Terence; and, if nevertheless the critics of the true literary age of Rome—the Varronian and Augustan epoch—assigned to Caecilius the first place among the Roman editors of Greek comedies, this verdict appears due to the mediocrity of the connoisseur gladly preferring a kindred spirit of mediocrity in the poet to any special features of excellence. These art-critics probably took Caecilius under their wing, simply because he was more regular than Plautus and more vigorous than Terence; notwithstanding which he may very well have been far inferior to both.
Moral Result
If therefore the literary historian, while fully acknowledging the very respectable talents of the Roman comedians, cannot recognize in their mere stock of translations a product either artistically important or artistically pure, the judgment of history respecting its moral aspects must necessarily be far more severe. The Greek comedy which formed its basis was morally so far a matter of indifference, as it was simply on the same level of corruption with its audience; but the Roman drama was, at this epoch when men were wavering between the old austerity and the new corruption, the academy at once of Hellenism and of vice. This Attico-Roman comedy, with its prostitution of body and soul usurping the name of love—equally immoral in shamelessness and in sentimentality—with its offensive and unnatural generosity, with its uniform glorification of a life of debauchery, with its mixture of rustic coarseness and foreign refinement, was one continuous lesson of Romano-Hellenic demoralization, and was felt as such. A proof of this is preserved in the epilogue of the -Captivi- of Plautus:—
-Spectators, ad pudicos mores facta haec fabulast.
Neque in hoc subigitationes sunt neque ulla amatio
Nec pueri suppositio nec argenti circumductio,
Neque ubi amans adulescens scortum liberet clam suum
patrem.
Huius modi paucas poetae reperiunt comoedias,
Ubi boni meliores fiant. Nunc vos, si vobis
placet,
Et si placuimus neque odio fuimus, signum hoc mittite;
Qui pudicitiae esse voltis praemium, plausum date!-
We see here the opinion entertained regarding the Greek comedy by the party of moral reform; and it may be added, that even in those rarities, moral comedies, the morality was of a character only adapted to ridicule innocence more surely. Who can doubt that these dramas gave a practical impulse to corruption? When Alexander the Great derived no pleasure from a comedy of this sort which its author read before him, the poet excused himself by saying that the fault lay not with him, but with the king; that, in order to relish such a piece, a man must be in the habit of holding revels and of giving and receiving blows in an intrigue. The man knew his trade: if, therefore, the Roman burgesses gradually acquired a taste for these Greek comedies, we see at what a price it was bought. It is a reproach to the Roman government not that it did so little in behalf of this poetry, but that it tolerated it at all Vice no doubt is powerful even without a pulpit; but that is no excuse for erecting a pulpit to proclaim it. To debar the Hellenic comedy from immediate contact with the persons and institutions of Rome, was a subterfuge rather than a serious means of defence. In fact, comedy would probably have been much less injurious morally, had they allowed it to have a more free course, so that the calling of the poet might have been ennobled and a Roman poetry in some measure independent might have been developed; for poetry is also a moral power, and, if it inflicts deep wounds, it can do much to heal them. As it was, in this field also the government did too little and too much; the political neutrality and moral hypocrisy of its stage-police contributed their part to the fearfully rapid breaking up of the Roman nation.
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,—
-Qui Obsce et Volsce fabulantur; nam Latine nesciunt.-
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
Roman Tragedy
The Hellenism of Euripides flowed to Rome through very various channels, and probably produced a speedier and deeper effect there by indirect means than in the form of direct translation. The tragic drama in Rome was not exactly later in its rise than the comic;(39) but the far greater expense of putting a tragedy on the stage—which was undoubtedly felt as a consideration of moment, at least during the Hannibalic war—as well as the nature of the audience(40) retarded the development of tragedy. In the comedies of Plautus the allusions to tragedies are not very frequent, and most references of this kind may have been taken from the originals. The first and only influential tragedian of this epoch was the younger contemporary of Naevius and Plautus, Quintus Ennius (515-585), whose pieces were already travestied by contemporary comic writers, and were exhibited and declaimed by posterity down to the days of the empire.
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.
Moral Effect of Tragedy
The historical position and influence of Greek tragedy in Rome were entirely analogous to those of Greek comedy; and while, as the difference in the two kinds of composition necessarily implied, the Hellenistic tendency appeared in tragedy under a purer and more spiritual form, the tragic drama of this period and its principal representative Ennius displayed far more decidedly an anti-national and consciously propagandist aim. Ennius, hardly the most important but certainly the most influential poet of the sixth century, was not a Latin by birth, but on the contrary by virtue of his origin half a Greek. Of Messapian descent and Hellenic training, he settled in his thirty-fifth
-Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum, Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus; Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest.-
We have already remarked(45) that Ennius scientifically inculcated the same irreligion in a didactic poem of his own; and it is evident that he was in earnest with this freethinking. With this trait other features are quite accordant—his political opposition tinged with radicalism, that here and there appears;(46) his singing the praises of the Greek pleasures of the table;(47) above all his setting aside the last national element in Latin poetry, the Saturnian measure, and substituting for it the Greek hexameter. That the “multiform” poet executed all these tasks with equal neatness, that he elaborated hexameters out of a language of by no means dactylic structure, and that without checking the natural flow of his style he moved with confidence and freedom amidst unwonted measures and forms—are so many evidences of his extraordinary plastic talent, which was in fact more Greek than Roman;(48) where he offends us, the offence is owing much more frequently to Greek alliteration(49) than to Roman ruggedness. He was not a great poet, but a man of graceful and sprightly talent, throughout possessing the vivid sensibilities of a poetic nature, but needing the tragic buskin to feel himself a poet and wholly destitute of the comic vein. We can understand the pride with which the Hellenizing poet looked down on those rude strains —
-quos olim Faunei vatesque canebant,-
and the enthusiasm with which he celebrates his own artistic poetry:
-Enni foeta, salve, Versus propinas flammeos medullitus.-
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
Through less frequented paths, and with a less favourable wind, a bolder mariner pursued a higher aim. Naevius not only like Ennius —although with far less success—adapted Greek tragedies for the Roman stage, but also attempted to create, independently of the Greeks, a grave national drama (-fabula praetextata-). No outward obstacles here stood in the way; he brought forward subjects both from Roman legend and from the contemporary history of the country on the stage of his native land. Such were his Nursing of Romulus and Remus or the Wolf, in which Amulius king of Alba appeared, and his -Clastidium-, which celebrated the victory of Marcellus over the Celts in 532.(49) After his example, Ennius in his -Ambracia-described from personal observation the siege of that city by his patron Nobilior in 565.(50) But the number of these national dramas remained small, and that species of composition soon disappeared from the stage; the scanty legend and the colourless history of Rome were unable permanently to compete with the rich cycle of Hellenic legends. Respecting the poetic value of the pieces we have no longer the means of judging; but, if we may take account of the general poetical intention, there were in Roman literature
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
Metrical Annals
Naevius
The attempts at a metrical treatment of the national annals lay claim to greater poetical and historical importance. Here too it was Naevius who gave poetic form to so much of the legendary as well as of the contemporary history as admitted of connected narrative; and who, more especially, recorded in the half-prosaic Saturnian national metre the story of the first Punic war simply and distinctly, with a straightforward adherence to fact, without disdaining anything at all as unpoetical, and without at all, especially in the description of historical times, going in pursuit of poetical flights or embellishments—maintaining throughout his narrative the present tense.(55) What we have already said of the national drama of the same poet, applies substantially to the work of which we are now speaking. The epic, like the tragic, poetry of the Greeks lived and moved essentially in the heroic period; it was an altogether new and, at least in design, an enviably grand idea—to light up the present with the lustre of poetry. Although in point of execution the chronicle of Naevius may not have been much better than the rhyming chronicles of the middle ages, which are in various respects of kindred character, yet the poet was certainly justified in regarding this work of his with an altogether peculiar complacency. It was no small achievement, in an age when there was absolutely no historical literature except official records, to have composed for his countrymen a connected account of the deeds of their own and the earlier time, and in addition to have placed before their eyes the noblest incidents of that history in a dramatic form.
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
-Contendunt Graecos, Graios memorare solent sos.-
The poetical value of the greatly celebrated Annals may easily be estimated after the remarks which we have already made regarding the excellences and defects of the poet in general. It was natural that as a poet of lively sympathies, he should feel himself elevated by the enthusiastic impulse which the great age of the Punic wars gave to the national sensibilities of Italy, and that he should not only often happily imitate Homeric simplicity, but should also and still more frequently make his lines strikingly echo the solemnity and decorum of the Roman character. But the construction of his epic was defective; indeed it must have been very lax and indifferent, when it was possible for the poet to insert a special book by way of supplement to please an otherwise forgotten hero and patron. On the whole the Annals were beyond question the work in which Ennius fell farthest short of his aim. The plan of making an Iliad pronounces its own condemnation. It was Ennius, who in this poem for the first time introduced into literature that changeling compound of epos and of history, which from that time up to the present day haunts it like a ghost, unable either to live or to die. But the poem certainly had its success. Ennius claimed to be the Roman Homer with still greater ingenuousness than Klopstock claimed to be the German, and was received as such by his contemporaries and still more so by posterity. The veneration for the father of Roman poetry was transmitted from generation to generation; even the polished Quintilian says, “Let
Annals as easily as we have set aside the comparison of Karschin with Sappho and of Willamov with Pindar; but no such development took place in Rome. Owing to the interest of the subject especially for aristocratic circles, and the great plastic talent of the poet, the Annals remained the oldest Roman original poem which appeared to the culture of later generations readable or worth reading; and thus, singularly enough, posterity came to honour this thoroughly anti-national epos of a half-Greek -litterateur- as the true model poem of Rome.
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
Down to the period of the Hannibalic war there was no historical composition in Rome; for the entries in the book of Annals were of the nature of records and not of literature, and never made any attempt to develop the connection of events. It is a significant illustration of the peculiarity of Roman character, that notwithstanding the extension of the power of the Roman community far beyond the bounds of Italy, and notwithstanding the constant contact of the noble society of Rome with the Greeks who were so fruitful
All these works, while not coming up to the Greek conception of history,(58) were, as contrasted with the mere detached notices of the book of Annals, systematic histories with a connected narrative and a more or less regular structure. They all, so far as we can see, embraced the national history from the building of Rome down to the time of the writer, although in point of title the work of Naevius related only to the first war with Carthage, and that of Cato only to the very early history. They were thus naturally divided into the three sections of the legendary period, of earlier, and of contemporary, history.
History of the Origin of Rome
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 Earlier History
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
Contemporary history, again, was treated in a connected and detailed manner. Naevius described the first, and Fabius the second, war with Carthage from their own knowledge; Ennius devoted at least thirteen out of the eighteen books of his Annals to the epoch from Pyrrhus down to the Istrian war;(62) Cato narrated in the fourth and fifth books of his historical work the wars from the first Punic war down to that with Perseus, and in the two last books, which probably were planned on a different and ampler scale, he related the events of the last twenty years of his life. For the Pyrrhic war Ennius may have employed Timaeus or other Greek authorities; but on the whole the accounts given were based, partly on personal observation or communications of eye-witnesses, partly on each other.
Speeches and Letters
Contemporaneously with historical literature, and in some sense as an appendage to it, arose the literature of speeches and letters. This in like manner was commenced by Cato; for the Romans possessed nothing of an earlier age except some funeral orations, most of which probably were only brought to light at a later period from family archives, such as that which the veteran Quintus Fabius, the opponent of Hannibal, delivered when an old man over his son who had died in his prime. Cato on the other hand committed to writing in his old age such of the numerous orations which he had delivered during his long and active public career as were historically important, as a sort of political memoirs, and published them partly in his historical work, partly, it would seem, as independent supplements to it. There also existed a collection of his letters.
History of Other Nations
With non-Roman history the Romans concerned themselves so far, that a certain knowledge of it was deemed indispensable for the cultivated Roman; even old Fabius is said to have been familiar not merely with the Roman, but also with foreign, wars, and it is distinctly testified that Cato diligently read Thucydides and the Greek historians in general. But, if we leave out of view the collection of anecdotes and maxims which Cato compiled for himself as the fruits of this reading, no trace is discernible of any literary activity in this field.
Uncritical Treatment of History
These first essays in historical literature were all of them, as a matter of course, pervaded by an easy, uncritical spirit; neither authors nor readers readily took offence at inward or outward inconsistencies. King Tarquinius the Second, although he was already grown up at the time of his father’s death and did not begin to reign till thirty-nine years afterwards, is nevertheless still a young man when he ascends the throne. Pythagoras, who came to Italy about a generation before the expulsion of the kings, is nevertheless set down by the Roman historians as a friend of the wise Numa. The state-envoys sent to Syracuse in the year 262 transact business with Dionysius the elder, who ascended the throne eighty-six years afterwards (348). This naive uncritical spirit is especially apparent in the treatment of Roman chronology. Since according to the Roman reckoning—the outlines of which were probably fixed in the previous epoch—the foundation of Rome took place 240 years before the consecration of the Capitoline temple(63) and 360 years before the burning of the city by the Gauls,(64) and the latter event, which is mentioned also in Greek historical works, fell according to these in the year of the Athenian archon Pyrgion 388 B. C. Ol. 98, i, the building of Rome accordingly fell on Ol. 8, i. This was, according to the chronology of Eratosthenes which was already recognized as canonical, the year 436 after the fall of Troy; nevertheless the common story retained as the founder of Rome the grandson of the Trojan Aeneas. Cato, who like a good financier checked the calculation, no doubt drew attention in this instance to the incongruity; but he does not appear to have proposed any mode of getting over the difficulty—the list of the Alban kings, which was afterwards inserted with this view, certainly did not proceed from him.
The same uncritical spirit, which prevailed in the early history, prevailed also to a certain extent in the representation of historical times. The accounts certainly without exception bore that strong party colouring, for which the Fabian narrative of the commencement of the second war with Carthage is censured by Polybius with the calm severity characteristic of him. Mistrust, however, is more appropriate in such circumstances than reproach. It is somewhat ridiculous to expect from the Roman contemporaries of Hannibal a just judgment on their opponents; but no conscious misrepresentation of the facts, except such as a simple-minded patriotism of itself involves, has been proved against the fathers of Roman history.
Science
The beginnings of scientific culture, and even of authorship relating to it, also fall within this epoch. The instruction hitherto given had been substantially confined to reading and writing and a knowledge of the law of the land.(65) But a closer contact with the Greeks gradually suggested to the Romans the idea of a more general culture; and stimulated the endeavour, if not directly to transplant this Greek culture to Rome, at any rate to modify the Roman culture to some extent after its model.
Grammar
First of all, the knowledge of the mother-tongue began to shape itself into Latin grammar; Greek philology transferred its methods to the kindred idiom of Italy. The active study of grammar began nearly at the same time with Roman authorship. About 520 Spurius Carvilius, a teacher of writing, appears to have regulated the Latin alphabet, and to have given to the letter -g, which was not previously included in it,(66) the place of the -z which could be dispensed with—the place which it still holds in the modern Occidental alphabets. The Roman school-masters must have been constantly working at the settlement of orthography; the Latin Muses too never disowned their scholastic Hippocrene, and at all times applied themselves to orthography side by side with poetry. Ennius especially—resembling Klopstock in this respect also—not only practised an etymological play on assonance quite after the Alexandrian style,(67) but also introduced, in place of the simple signs for the double consonants that had hitherto been usual, the more accurate Greek double writing. Of Naevius and Plautus, it is true, nothing of the kind is known; the popular poets in Rome must have treated orthography and etymology with the indifference which is usual with poets.
Rhetoric and Philosophy
The Romans of this epoch still remained strangers to rhetoric and philosophy. The speech in their case lay too decidedly at the very heart of public life to be accessible to the handling of the foreign schoolmaster; the genuine orator Cato poured forth all the vials of his indignant ridicule over the silly Isocratean fashion of ever learning, and yet never being able, to speak. The Greek philosophy,
-Philosophari est mihi necesse, at paucis, nam omnino haut placet. Degustandum ex ea, non in eam ingurgitandum censeo.-
Nevertheless the poem on Morals and the instructions in Oratory, which were found among the writings of Cato, may be regarded as the Roman quintessence or, if the expression be preferred, the Roman -caput mortuum- of Greek philosophy and rhetoric. The immediate sources whence Cato drew were, in the case of the poem on Morals, presumably the Pythagorean writings on morals (along with, as a matter of course, due commendation of the simple ancestral habits), and, in the case of the book on Oratory, the speeches in Thucydides and more especially the orations of Demosthenes, all of which Cato zealously studied. Of the spirit of these manuals we may form some idea from the golden oratorical rule, oftener quoted than followed by posterity, “to think of the matter and leave the words to follow from it."(68)
Medicine
Similar manuals of a general elementary character were composed by Cato on the Art of Healing, the Science of War, Agriculture, and Jurisprudence—all of which studies were likewise more or less under Greek influence. Physics and mathematics were not much studied in Rome; but the applied sciences connected with them received a certain measure of attention. This was most of all true of medicine. In 535 the first Greek physician, the Peloponnesian Archagathus, settled in Rome and there acquired such repute by his surgical operations, that a residence was assigned to him on the part of the state and he received the freedom of the city; and thereafter his colleagues flocked in crowds to Italy. Cato no doubt not only reviled the foreign medical practitioners with a zeal worthy of a better cause, but attempted, by means of his medical manual compiled from his own experience and probably in part also from the medical literature of the Greeks, to revive the good old fashion under which the father of the family was at the same time the family physician. The physicians and the public gave themselves, as was reasonable, but little concern about his obstinate invectives: at any rate the profession, one of the most lucrative which existed in Rome, continued a monopoly in the hands of the foreigners, and for centuries there were none but Greek physicians in Rome.
Mathematics
Hitherto the measurement of time had been treated in Rome with barbarous indifference, but matters were now at least in some degree improved. With the erection of the first sundial in the Roman Forum in 491 the Greek hour (—ora—, -hora-) began to come into use at Rome: it happened, however, that the Romans erected a sundial which had been prepared for Catana situated four degrees farther to the south, and were guided by this for a whole century. Towards the end of this epoch we find several persons of quality taking an interest in mathematical studies. Manius Acilius Glabrio (consul in 563) attempted to check the confusion of the calendar by a law, which allowed the pontifical college to insert or omit intercalary months at discretion: if the measure failed in its object and in fact aggravated the evil, the failure was probably owing more to the unscrupulousness than to the want of intelligence of the Roman theologians. Marcus Fulvius Nobilior (consul in 565), a man of Greek culture, endeavoured at least to make the Roman calendar more generally known. Gaius Sulpicius Gallus (consul in 588), who not only predicted the eclipse of the moon in 586 but also calculated the distance of the moon from the earth, and who appears to have come forward even as an astronomical writer, was regarded on this account by his contemporaries as a prodigy of diligence and acuteness.
Agriculture and the Art of War
Agriculture and the art of war were, of course, primarily regulated by the standard of traditional and personal experience, as is very distinctly apparent in that one of the two treatises of Cato on Agriculture which has reached our time. But the results of Graeco-Latin, and even of Phoenician, culture were brought to bear on these subordinate fields just as on the higher provinces of intellectual activity, and for that reason the foreign literature relating to them cannot but have attracted some measure of attention.
Jurisprudence
Jurisprudence, on the other hand, was only in a subordinate degree affected by foreign elements. The activity of the jurists of this period was still mainly devoted to the answering of parties consulting them and to the instruction of younger listeners; but this oral instruction contributed to form a traditional groundwork of rules, and literary activity was not wholly wanting. A work of greater importance for jurisprudence than the short sketch of Cato was the treatise published by Sextus Aelius Paetus, surnamed the “subtle” (-catus-), who was the first practical jurist of his time, and, in consequence of his exertions for the public benefit in this respect, rose to the consulship (556) and to the censorship (560). His treatise —the “-Tripartita-” as it was called—was a work on the Twelve Tables, which appended to each sentence of the text an explanation—chiefly, doubtless, of the antiquated and unintelligible expressions—and the corresponding formula of action. While this process of glossing undeniably indicated the influence of Greek grammatical studies, the portion treating of the formulae of action, on the contrary, was based on the older collection of Appius(69) and on the whole system of procedure developed by national usage and precedent.
Cato’s Encyclopaedia
The state of science generally at this epoch is very distinctly exhibited in the collection of those manuals composed by Cato for his son which, as a sort of encyclopaedia, were designed to set forth in short maxims what a “fit man” (-vir bonus-) ought to be as orator, physician, husbandman, warrior, and jurist. A distinction was not yet drawn between the propaedeutic and the professional study of science; but so much of science generally as seemed necessary or useful was required of every true Roman. The work did not include Latin grammar, which consequently cannot as yet have attained that formal development which is implied in a properly scientific instruction in language; and it excluded music and the whole cycle of the mathematical and physical sciences. Throughout it was the directly practical element in science which alone was to be handled, and that with as much brevity and simplicity as possible. The Greek literature was doubtless made use of, but only to furnish some serviceable maxims of experience culled from the mass of chaff and rubbish: it was one of Cato’s commonplaces, that “Greek books must be looked into, but not thoroughly studied.” Thus arose those household manuals of necessary information, which, while rejecting Greek subtlety and obscurity, banished also Greek acuteness and depth, but through that very peculiarity moulded the attitude of the Romans towards the Greek sciences for all ages.
Character and Historical Position of Roman Literature
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:
-Poenico bello secundo Musa pennato gradu Intulit se bellicosam Romuli in gentem feram.-
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
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.
The inward mental development and the outward political evolution of Italy had equally reached a point at which it was no longer possible to retain the Roman nationality based on the exclusion of all higher and individual mental culture, and to repel the encroachments of Hellenism. The propagation of Hellenism in Italy had certainly a revolutionary and a denationalizing tendency, but it was indispensable for the necessary intellectual equalization of the nations; and this primarily forms the historical and even the poetical justification of the Romano-Hellenistic literature. Not a single new and genuine work of art issued from its workshop, but it extended the intellectual horizon of Hellas over Italy. Viewed even in its mere outward aspect, Greek poetry presumes in the hearer a certain amount of positive acquired knowledge. That self-contained completeness, which is one of the most essential peculiarities of the dramas of Shakespeare for instance, was foreign to ancient poetry; a person unacquainted with the cycle of Greek legend would fail to discover the background and often even the ordinary meaning of every rhapsody and every tragedy. If the Roman public of this period was in some degree familiar, as the comedies of Plautus show, with the Homeric poems and the legends of Herakles, and was acquainted with at least the more generally current of the other myths,(71) this knowledge must have found its way to the public primarily through the stage alongside of the school, and thus have formed at least a first step towards the understanding of the Hellenic poetry. But still deeper was the effect—on which the most ingenious literary critics of antiquity justly laid emphasis—produced by the naturalization of the Greek poetic language and the Greek metres in Latium. If “conquered Greece vanquished her rude conqueror by art,” the victory was primarily accomplished by elaborating from the unpliant Latin idiom a cultivated and elevated poetical language, so that instead of the monotonous and hackneyed Saturnian the senarius flowed and the hexameter rushed, and the mighty tetrameters, the jubilant anapaests, and the artfully intermingled lyrical rhythms fell on the Latin ear in the mother-tongue. Poetical language is the key to the ideal world of poetry, poetic measure the key to poetical feeling; for the man, to whom the eloquent epithet is dumb and the living image is dead, and in whom the times of dactyls and iambuses awaken no inward echo, Homer and Sophocles have composed in vain. Let it not be said that poetical and rhythmical feeling comes spontaneously. The ideal feelings are no doubt implanted by nature in the human breast, but they need favourable sunshine in order to germinate; and especially in the Latin nation, which was but little susceptible of poetic impulses, they needed external nurture. Nor let it be said, that, by virtue of the widely diffused acquaintance with the Greek language, its literature would have sufficed for the susceptible Roman public.
-Enni poeta, salve, qui mortalibus Versus propinas flammeos medullitus.-
National Opposition
As the Hellenico-Roman literature of this period was essentially marked by a dominant tendency, so was also its antithesis, the contemporary national authorship. While the former aimed at neither more nor less than the annihilation of Latin nationality by the creation of a poetry Latin in language but Hellenic in form and spirit, the best and purest part of the Latin nation was driven to reject and place under the ban of outlawry the literature of Hellenism along with Hellenism itself. The Romans in the time of Cato stood opposed to Greek literature, very much as in the time of the Caesars they stood opposed to Christianity; freedmen and foreigners formed the main body of the poetical, as they afterwards formed the main body of the Christian, community; the nobility of the nation and above all the government saw in poetry as in Christianity an absolutely hostile power; Plautus and Ennius were ranked with the rabble by the Roman aristocracy for reasons nearly the same as those for which the apostles and bishops were put to death by the Roman government. In this field too it was Cato, of course, who took the lead as the vigorous champion of his native country against the foreigners. The Greek literati and physicians were in his view the most dangerous scum of the radically corrupt Greek people,(72) and the Roman “ballad-singers” are treated by him with ineffable contempt.(73) He and those who
Architecture
Let us glance, in conclusion, at the state of the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting. So far as concerns the former, the traces of incipient luxury were less observable in public than in private buildings. It was not till towards the close of this period, and especially from the time of the censorship of Cato (570), that the Romans began in the case of the former to have respect to the convenience as well as to the bare wants of the public; to line with stone the basins (-lacus-) supplied from the aqueducts, (570); to erect colonnades (575, 580); and above all to transfer to Rome the Attic halls for courts and business—the -basilicae- as they were called. The first of these buildings, somewhat corresponding to our modern bazaars—the
Plastic Art and Painting
Of Roman plastic art we scarcely encounter any other trace than, perhaps, the embossing in wax of the images of ancestors. Painters and painting are mentioned somewhat more frequently. Manius Valerius caused the victory which he obtained over the Carthaginians and Hiero in 491 off Messana(74) to be depicted on the side wall of the senate-house—the first historical frescoes in Rome, which were followed by many of similar character, and which were in the domain of the arts of design what the national epos and the national drama became not much later in the domain of poetry. We find named as painters, one Theodotus who, as Naevius scoffingly said,
-Sedens in cella circumtectus tegetibus Lares ludentis peni pinxit bubulo;-
Marcus Pacuvius of Brundisium, who painted in the temple of Hercules in the Forum Boarium—the same who, when more advanced in life, made himself a name as an editor of Greek tragedies; and Marcus Plautius Lyco, a native of Asia Minor, whose beautiful paintings in the temple of Juno at Ardea procured for him the freedom of that city.(75) But these very facts clearly indicate, not only that the exercise of art in Rome was altogether of subordinate importance and more of a manual occupation than an art, but also that it fell, probably still more exclusively than poetry, into the hands of Greeks and half Greeks.
On the other hand there appeared in genteel circles the first traces of the tastes subsequently displayed by the dilettante and the collector. They admired the magnificence of the Corinthian and Athenian temples, and regarded with contempt the old-fashioned terra-cotta figures on the roofs of those of Rome: even a man like Lucius Paullus, who shared the feelings of Cato rather than of Scipio, viewed and judged the Zeus of Phidias with the eye of a connoisseur. The custom of carrying off the treasures of art from the conquered Greek cities was first introduced on
1. A distinct set of Greek expressions, such as -stratioticus-, -machaera-, -nauclerus-, -trapezita-, -danista-, -drapeta-, — oenopolium-, -bolus-, -malacus-, -morus-, -graphicus-, -logus-, - apologus-, -techna-, -schema-, forms quite a special feature in the language of Plautus. Translations are seldom attached, and that only in the case of words not embraced in the circle of ideas to which those which we have cited belong; for instance, in the -Truculentus-—in a verse, however, that is perhaps a later addition (i. 1, 60) —we find the explanation: —phronesis— -est sapientia-. Fragments of Greek also are common, as in the -Casina-, (iii. 6, 9):
—Pragmata moi parecheis— — -Dabo- —mega kakon—, -ut opinor-.
Greek puns likewise occur, as in the -Bacchides- (240):
-opus est chryso Chrysalo-.
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):
-Fuge! euscheme hercle astitit sic dulice et comoedice!-
2. III. VIII. Greece Free
3. One of these epigrams composed in the name of Flamininus runs thus:
—Zenos io kraipnaisi gegathotes ipposunaisi
Kouroi, io Spartas Tundaridai basileis,
Aineadas Titos ummin upertatos opase doron
Ellenon teuxas paisin eleutherian.—
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).
5. II. IX. Ballad-Singers
6. The later rule, by which the freedman necessarily bore the -praenomen- of his patron, was not yet applied in republican Rome.
7. II. VII. Capture of Tarentum
8. III. Vi. Battle of Sena
9. One of the tragedies of Livius presented the line—
-Quem ego nefrendem alui Iacteam immulgens opem.-
The verses of Homer (Odyssey, xii. 16):
—oud ara Kirken ex Aideo elthontes elethomen, alla mal oka elth entunamene ama d amphipoloi pheron aute siton kai krea polla kai aithopa oinon eruthron.—
are thus interpreted:
-Topper citi ad aedis—venimus Circae
Simul duona coram(?)—portant ad navis,
Milia dlia in isdem—inserinuntur.-
The most remarkable feature is not so much the barbarism as the thoughtlessness of the translator, who, instead of sending Circe to Ulysses, sends Ulysses to Circe. Another still more ridiculous mistake is the translation of —aidoioisin edoka— (Odyss. xv. 373) by -lusi- (Festus, Ep. v. affatim, p. ii, Muller). Such traits are not in a historical point of view matters of difference; we recognize in them the stage of intellectual culture which irked these earliest Roman verse-making schoolmasters, and we at the same time perceive that, although Andronicus was born in Tarentum, Greek cannot have been properly his mother-tongue.
10. Such a building was, no doubt, constructed for the Apollinarian games in the Flaminian circus in 575 (Liv. xl. 51; Becker, Top. p. 605); but it was probably soon afterwards pulled down again (Tertull. de Spect. 10).
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.
12. III. XI. Separation of Orders in the Theatre
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).
14. III. XII. Moneyed Aristocracy
15. II. IX. Censure of Art
16. It is not necessary to infer from the prologues of Plautus (Cas. 17; Amph. 65) that there was a distribution of prizes (Ritschl, Parerg. i. 229); even the passage Trin. 706, may very well belong to the Greek original, not to the translator; and the total silence of the -didascaliae- and prologues, as well as of all tradition, on the point of prize tribunals and prizes is decisive.
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.
18. III. Vi In Italy
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.
20. Thus the prologue of the -Cistellaria- concludes with the following words, which may have a place here as the only contemporary mention of the Hannibalic war in the literature that has come down to us:—
-Haec res sic gesta est. Bene valete, et vincite
Virtute vera, quod fecistis antidhac;
Servate vostros socios, veteres et novos;
Augete auxilia vostris iustis legibus;
Perdite perduelles: parite laudem et lauream
Ut vobis victi Poeni poenas sufferant.-
The fourth line (-augete auxilia vostris iustis Iegibus-) has reference to the supplementary payments imposed on the negligent Latin colonies in 550 (Liv. xxix. 15; see ii. 350).
21. III. XIII. Increase of Amusements
22. For this reason we can hardly be too cautious in assuming allusions on the part of Plautus to the events of the times. Recent investigation has set aside many instances of mistaken acuteness of this sort; but might not even the reference to the Bacchanalia, which is found in Cas. v. 4, 11 (Ritschl, Parerg. 1. 192), have been expected to incur censure? We might even reverse the case and infer from the notices of the festival of Bacchus in the -Casina-, and some other pieces (Amph. 703; Aul. iii. i, 3; Bacch. 53, 371; Mil. Glor. 1016; and especially Men. 836), that these were written at a time when it was not yet dangerous to speak of the Bacchanalia.
23. The remarkable passage in the -Tarentilla- can have no other meaning:—
-Quae ego in theatro hic meis probavi plausibus, Ea non audere quemquam regem rumpere: Quanto libertatem hanc hic superat servitus!-
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.—
25. For instance, in the otherwise very graceful examination which in the -Stichus- of Plautus the father and his daughters institute into the qualities of a good wife, the irrelevant question—whether it is better to marry a virgin or a widow—is inserted, merely in order that it may be answered by a no less irrelevant and, in the mouth of the interlocutrix, altogether absurd commonplace against women. But that is a trifle compared with the following specimen. In Menander’s -Plocium- a husband bewails his troubles to his friend:—
—Echo d’ epikleron Lamian ouk eireka
soi
Tout’; eit’ ap’ ouchi; kurian tes
oikias
Kai ton agron kai panton ant’ ekeines
Echoumen, Apollon, os chalepon chalepotaton
Apasi d’ argalea ’stin, ouk emoi mono,
Tio polu mallon thugatri.—pragm’
amachon legeis’
Eu oida—
In the Latin edition of Caecilius, this conversation, so elegant in its simplicity, is converted into the following uncouth dialogue:—
-Sed tua morosane uxor quaeso est?—Ua!
rogas?—
Qui tandem?—Taedet rientionis, quae mihi
Ubi domum adveni ac sedi, extemplo savium
Dat jejuna anima.—Nil peccat de savio:
Ut devomas volt, quod foris polaveris.-
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).
27. III. XIII. Increase of Amusements
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-;
Or the famous words, which in the -Hector Profisciscens- Hector addresses to Priam:
-Laetus sum laudari me abs te, pater, a laudato viro;-
and the charming verse from the -Tarentilla-; —
-Alii adnutat, alii adnictat; alium amat, alium tenet.-
30. III. XIV. Political Neutrality
31. III. XIV. Political Neutrality
32. This hypothesis appears necessary, because otherwise the ancients could not have hesitated in the way they did as to the genuineness or spuriousness of the pieces of Plautus: in the case of no author, properly so called, of Roman antiquity, do we find anything like a similar uncertainty as to his literary property. In this respect, as in so many other external points, there exists the most remarkable analogy between Plautus and Shakespeare.
33. III. III. The Celts Conquered by Rome, iii. VII. Measures Adopted to Check the Immigration of the Trans-Alpine Gauls
34. III. XIV. Roman Barbarism
35 -Togatus- denotes, in juristic and generally in technical language, the Italian in contradistinction not merely to the foreigner, but also to the Roman burgess. Thus especially -formula togatorum- (Corp. Inscr. Lat., I. n. 200, v. 21, 50) is the list of those Italians bound to render military serviee, who do not serve in the legions. The designation also of Cisalpine Gaul as -Gallia togata-, which first occurs in Hirtius and not long after disappears again from the ordinary -usus loquendi-, describes this region presumably according to its legal position, in so far as in the epoch from 665 to 705 the great majority of its communities possessed Latin rights. Virgil appears likewise in the -gens togata-, which he mentions along with the Romans (Aen. i. 282), to have thought of the Latin nation.
According to this view we shall have to recognize in the -fabula togata-the comedy which laid its plot in Latium, as the -fabula palliata- had its plot in Greece; the transference of the scene of action to a foreign land is common to both, and the comic writer is wholly forbidden to bring on the stage the city or the burgesses of Rome. That in reality the -togata- could only have its plot laid in the towns of Latin rights, is shown by the fact that all the towns in which, to our knowledge, pieces of Titinius and Afranius had their scene—Setia, Ferentinum, Velitrae, Brundisium,—demonstrably had Latin or, at any rate, allied rights down to the Social war. By the extension of the franchise to all Italy the writers of comedy lost this Latin localisation for their pieces, for Cisalpine Gaul, which -de jure- took the place of the Latin communities, lay too far off for the dramatists of the capital, and so the -fabula togata- seems in fact to have disappeared. But the -de jure- suppressed communities of Italy, such as Capua and Atella, stepped into this gap (ii. 366, iii. 148), and so far the -fabula Atellana- was in some measure the continuation of the -togata-.
36. Respecting Titinius there is an utter want of literary information; except that, to judge from a fragment of Varro, he seems to have been older than Terence (558-595, Ritschl, Parerg. i. 194) for more indeed, cannot he inferred from that passage, and though, of the two groups there compared the second (Trabea, Atilius, Caecilius) is on the whole older than the first (Titinius, Terentius, Atta), it does not exactly follow that the oldest of the junior group is to be deemed younger than the youngest of the elder.
37. II. VII. First Steps toward the Latinizing of Italy
38. Of the fifteen comedies of Titinius, with which we are acquainted, six are named after male characters (-baratus-? -coecus-, -fullones-, -Hortensius-, -Quintus-, -varus-), and nine after female (-Gemina-, -iurisperita-, -prilia-? -privigna-, -psaltria- or -Ferentinatis-, -Setina-, -tibicina-, -Veliterna-, -Ulubrana?), two of which, the -iurisperita- and the -tibicina-, are evidently parodies of men’s occupations. The feminine world preponderates also in the fragments.
39. III. XIV. Livius Andronicus
40. III. XIV. Audience
41. We subjoin, for comparison, the opening lines of the -Medea- in the original of Euripides and in the version of Ennius:—
—Eith’ ophel’ ’Apgous
me diaptasthai skaphos
Kolchon es aian kuaneas sumplegadas
Med’ en napaisi Pelion pesein pote
Tmetheisa peuke, med’ epetmosai cheras
Andron arioton, oi to pagchruson deros
Pelia metelthon ou gar an despoin
Medeia purgous ges epleus Iolkias
‘Eroti thumon ekplageis’ ’Iasonos.—
-Utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus
Caesa accidisset abiegna ad terram trabes,
Neve inde navis inchoandae exordium
Coepisset, quae nunc nominatur nomine
Argo, quia Argivi in ea dilecti viri
Vecti petebant pellem inauratam arietis
Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per dolum.
Nam nunquam era errans mea domo efferret pedem
Medea, animo aegra, amort saevo saucia.-
The variations of the translation from the original are instructive —not only its tautologies and periphrases, but also the omission or explanation of the less familiar mythological names, e. g. the Symplegades, the Iolcian land, the Argo. But the instances in which Ennius has really misunderstood the original are rare.
42. III. XI. Roman Franchise More Difficult of Acquisition
43. Beyond doubt the ancients were right in recognizing a sketch of the poet’s own character in the passage in the seventh book of the Annals, where the consul calls to his side the confidant,
-quocum bene saepe libenter
Mensam sermonesque suos rerumque suarum
Congeriem partit, magnam cum lassus diei
Partem fuisset de summis rebus regundis
Consilio indu foro lato sanctoque senatu:
Cui res audacter magnas parvasque iocumque
Eloqueretur, cuncta simul malaque et bona dictu
Evomeret, si qui vellet, tutoque locaret.
Quocum multa volup ac gaudia clamque palamque,
Ingenium cui nulla malum sententia suadet
Ut faceret facinus lenis aut malus, doctus fidelis
Suavis homo facundus suo contentus beatus
Scitus secunda loquens in tempore commodus verbum
Paucum, multa tenens antiqua sepulta, vetustas
Quem fecit mores veteresque novosque tenentem,
Multorum veterum leges divumque hominumque,
Prudenter qui dicta loquive tacereve possit.-
In the line before the last we should probably read -multarum leges divumque hominumque.-
44. Euripides (Iph. in Aul. 956) defines the soothsayer as a man,
—Os olig’ alethe, polla de pseuon
legei
Tuchon, otan de me, tuche oioichetai—
This is turned by the Latin translator into the following diatribe against the casters of horoscopes:—
-Astrologorum signa in caelo quaesit, observat,
Iovis
Cum capra aut nepa aut exoritur lumen aliquod beluae.
Quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat: caeli scrutantur
plagas.-
45. III. XII. Irreligious Spirit
46. In the -Telephus- we find him saying—
-Palam mutire plebeio piaculum est.-
47. III. XIII. Luxury
48. The following verses, excellent in matter and form, belong to the adaptation of the -Phoenix- of Euripides:—
-Sed virum virtute vera vivere animatum addecet,
Fortiterque innoxium vocare adversum adversarios.
Ea libertas est, qui pectus purum et firmum gestitat:
Aliae res obnoxiosae nocte in obscura latent.-
In the -Scipio-, which was probably incorporated in the collection of miscellaneous poems, the graphic lines occurred:—
— — -mundus caeli vastus constitit
silentio,
Et Neptunus saevus undis asperis pausam dedit.
Sol equis iter repressit ungulis volantibus;
Constitere amnes perennes, arbores vento vacant.-
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:—
-Constitit credo Scamander, arbores vento vacant,-
and the incident is derived from the Iliad (xxi. 381).
49. Thus in the Phoenix we find the line:—
— — -stultust, qui cupita cupiens cupienter cupit,-
and this is not the most absurd specimen of such recurring assonances. He also indulged in acrostic verses (Cic. de Div. ii. 54, iii).
50. III. III. The Celts Conquered by Rome
51. III. IX. Conflicts and Peace with the Aetolians
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.
53. II. IX. Roman Historical Composition
54. III. XII. Irreligious Spirit
55. III. XII. Irreligious Spirit
56. The following fragments will give some idea of its tone. Of Dido he says:
-Blande et docte percontat—Aeneas quo pacto Troiam urbem liquerit.-
Again of Amulius:
-Manusque susum ad caelum—sustulit suas rex Amulius; gratulatur—divis-.
Part of a speech where the indirect construction is remarkable:
-Sin illos deserant for—tissumos virorum Magnum stuprum populo—fieri per gentis-.
With reference to the landing at Malta in 498:
-Transit Melitam Romanus—insuiam integram Urit populatur vastat—rem hostium concinnat.-
Lastly, as to the peace which terminated the war concerning Sicily:
-Id quoque paciscunt moenia—sint Lutatium
quae
Reconcilient; captivos—plurimos idem
Sicilienses paciscit—obsides ut reddant.-
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.
The historical work likewise written in Greek, ascribed to Lucius Cincius Alimentus a contemporary of Fabius, seems spurious and a compilation of the Augustan age.
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).
59. It is evidently by way of contrast with Fabius that Polybius (xl. 6, 4) calls attention to the fact, that Albinus, madly fond of everything Greek, had given himself the trouble of writing history systematically [—pragmatiken iotorian—].
60. II. IX. Roman Early History of Rome
61. III. XIV. Knowledge of Languages
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.
63. III. VII. Measures Adopted to Check the Immigration of the Transalpine Gauls
64. II. IX. Roman Early History of Rome
65. II. IX. Registers of Magistrates
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.
67. II. IX. Philology
68. Thus in his Epicharmian poems Jupiter is so called, -quod iuvat-; and Ceres, -quod gerit fruges.-
69. -Rem tene, verba sequentur.-
70. II. IX. Language
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).
74. II. IX. Censure of Art
75. III. II. War between the Romans and Carthaginians and Syracusans
76. Plautius belongs to this or to the beginning of the following period, for the inscription on his pictures (Plin. H. N. xxxv. 10, 115), being hexametrical, cannot well be older than Ennius, and the bestowal of the citizenship of Ardea must have taken place before the Social War, through which Ardea lost its independence.
* * * * *
THE HISTORY OF ROME: BOOK IV
The Revolution
This work contains many literal citations of and references to words, sounds, and alphabetic symbols drawn from many languages, including Gothic and Phoenician, but chiefly Latin and Greek. This English language Gutenberg edition, constrained within the scope of 7-bit ASCII code, adopts the following orthographic conventions:
1) Words and phrases regarded as “foreign imports”, italicized in the original text published in 1903; but which in the intervening century have become “naturalized” into English; words such as “de jure”, “en masse”, etc. are not given any special typographic distinction.
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-.
3) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents, are rendered with a preceding and a following double-dash; thus, —xxxx—. Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as —xxx-xxx—
4) Simple non-ideographic references to vocalic sounds, single letters, or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic references are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x, or -xxx.
5) The following refers particularly to the complex discussion of alphabetic evolution in Ch. XIV: Measuring And Writing). Ideographic references, meaning pointers to the form of representation itself rather than to its content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-. “id:” stands for “ideograph”, and indicates that the reader should form a mental picture based on the “xxxx” following the colon. “xxxx” may represent a single symbol, a word, or an attempt at a picture composed of ASCII characters. E. g. —“id:Gamma gamma”— indicates an uppercase Greek gamma-form Followed by the form in lowercase. Some such exotic parsing as this is necessary to explain alphabetic development because a single symbol may have been used for a number of sounds in a number of languages, or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different times. Thus, -"id:Gamma gamma” might very well refer to a Phoenician construct that in appearance resembles the form that eventually stabilized as an uppercase Greek “gamma” juxtaposed to another one of lowercase. Also, a construct such as —“id:E” indicates a symbol that in graphic form most closely resembles an ASCII uppercase “E”, but, in fact, is actually drawn more crudely.
6) The numerous subheading references, of the form “XX. XX. Topic” found in the appended section of endnotes are to be taken as “proximate” rather than topical indicators. That is, the information contained in the endnote indicates primarily the location in the main text of the closest indexing “handle”, a subheading, which may or may not echo congruent subject matter.
The reason for this is that in the translation from an original paged manuscript to an unpaged “cyberscroll”, page numbers are lost. In this edition subheadings are the only remaining indexing “handles” of sub-chapter scale. Unfortunately, in some stretches of text these subheadings may be as sparse as merely one in three pages. Therefore, it would seem to make best sense to save the reader time and temper by adopting a shortest path method to indicate the desired reference.
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.
Book iv: The Revolution
I. The Subject Countries Down to the Times of the Gracchi
II. The Reform Movement and Tiberius Gracchus
III. The Revolution and Gaius Gracchus
IV. The Rule of the Restoration
V. The Peoples of the North
Vi. The Attempt of Marius
at Revolution and the Attempt
of Drusus at Reform
VII. The Revolt of the Italian
Subjects, and the Sulpician
Revolution
VIII. The East and King Mithradates
IX. Cinna and Sulla
X. The Sullan Constitution
XI. The Commonwealth and Its Economy
XII. Nationality, Religion, and Education
XIII. Literature and Art
The Revolution
“-Aber sie treiben’s toll;
Ich furcht’, es breche.”
Nicht jeden Wochenschluss
Macht Gott die Zeche-.
Goethe.
The Subject Countries Down to the Times of the Gracchi
The Subjects
With the abolition of the Macedonian monarchy the supremacy of Rome not only became an established fact from the Pillars of Hercules to the mouths of the Nile and the Orontes, but, as if it were the final decree of fate, it weighed on the nations with all the pressure of an inevitable necessity, and seemed to leave them merely the choice of perishing in hopeless resistance or in hopeless endurance. If history were not entitled to insist that the earnest reader should accompany her through good and evil days, through landscapes of winter as well as of spring, the historian
Spain
Except in the territories which may be regarded as natural appendages of Italy—in which, however, the natives were still far from being completely subdued, and, not greatly to the credit of Rome, Ligurians, Sardinians, and Corsicans were continually furnishing occasion for “village triumphs”—the formal sovereignty of Rome at the commencement of this period was established only in the two Spanish provinces, which embraced the larger eastern and southern portions of the peninsula beyond the Pyrenees. We have already(1) attempted to describe the state of matters in the peninsula. Iberians and Celts, Phoenicians, Hellenes, and Romans were there confusedly intermingled. The most diverse kinds and stages of civilization subsisted there simultaneously and at various points crossed each other, the ancient Iberian culture side by side with utter barbarism, the civilized relations of Phoenician and Greek mercantile cities side by side with an incipient process of Latinizing, which was especially promote by the numerous Italians employed in the silver mines and by the large standing garrison. In this respect the Roman township of Italica (near Seville) and the Latin colony of Carteia (on the bay Of Gibraltar) deserve mention—the latter being the first transmarine urban community of Latin tongue and Italian constitution. Italica was founded by the elder Scipio, before he left Spain (548), for his veterans who were inclined to remain in the peninsula—probably, however, not as a burgess-community, but merely as a market-place.(2) Carteia was founded in 583 and owed its existence to the multitude of camp-children—the offspring of Roman soldiers and Spanish slaves—who grew up as slaves de jure but as free Italians de facto, and were now manumitted on behalf of the state and constituted, along with the old inhabitants of Carteia, into a Latin colony. For nearly thirty years after the organizing of the province of the Ebro by Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (575, 576)(3) the Spanish provinces, on the whole, enjoyed the blessings of peace undisturbed, although mention is made of one or two expeditions against the Celtiberians and Lusitanians.
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
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
Lucullus
When the new commander-in-chief, the consul Lucius Lucullus, arrived at head-quarters, he found the war which he had come to conduct already terminated by a formally concluded peace, and his hopes of bringing home honour and more especially money from Spain were apparently frustrated. But there was a means of surmounting this difficulty. Lucullus of his own accord attacked the western neighbours of the Arevacae, the Vaccaei, a Celtiberian nation still independent which was living on the best understanding with the Romans. The question of the Spaniards as to what fault they had committed was answered by a sudden attack on the town of Cauca (Coca, eight Spanish leagues to the west of Segovia); and, while the terrified town believed that it had purchased a capitulation by heavy sacrifices of money, Roman troops marched in and enslaved or slaughtered the inhabitants without any pretext at all. After this heroic feat, which is said to have cost the lives of some 20,000 defenceless men, the army proceeded on its march. Far and wide the villages and townships were abandoned or, as in the case of the strong Intercatia and Pallantia (Palencia) the capital of the Vaccaei, closed their
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
His Successors
Extraordinary successes in northern and in southern Spain marked the next years of his generalship. After destroying the vanguard of the praetor Gaius Plautius (608-9), Viriathus had the skill to lure him over to the right bank of the Tagus, and there to defeat him so emphatically that the Roman general went into winter quarters in the middle of summer—on which account he was afterwards charged before the
His successor, Quintus Fabius Maximus Servilianus, the adopted brother of Maximus Aemilianus, sent to the peninsula with two fresh legions and ten elephants, endeavoured to penetrate into the Lusitanian country, but after a series of indecisive conflicts and an assault on the Roman camp, which was with difficulty repulsed, found himself compelled to retreat to the Roman territory. Viriathus followed him into the province, but as his troops after the wont of Spanish insurrectionary armies suddenly melted away, he was obliged to return to Lusitania (612). Next year (613) Servilianus resumed the offensive, traversed the districts on the Baetis and Anas, and then advancing into Lusitania occupied a number of townships. A large number of the insurgents fell into his hands; the leaders—of whom there were about 500—were executed; those who had gone over from Roman territory to the enemy had their hands cut off; the remaining mass were sold into slavery. But on this occasion also the Spanish war proved true to its fickle and capricious character. After all these successes the Roman army was attacked by Viriathus while it was besieging Erisane, defeated, and driven to a rock where it was wholly in the power of the enemy. Viriathus,
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
While the southern province was scourged by Viriathus and the Lusitanians, a second and not less serious war had, not without their help, broken out in the northern province among the Celtiberian nations. The brilliant successes of Viriathus induced the Arevacae likewise in 610 to rise against the Romans; and for this reason the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus, who was sent to Spain to relieve Maximus Aemilianus, did hot proceed to the southern province, but turned against the Celtiberians. In the contest with them, and more especially during the siege of the town of Contrebia which was deemed impregnable, he showed the same ability which he had displayed in vanquishing the Macedonian pretender; after his two years’ administration (611, 612) the northern province was reduced to obedience. The two towns of Termantia and Numantia alone had not yet opened their gates to the Romans; but in their case also a capitulation had been almost concluded, and the greater part of the conditions had been fulfilled by the Spaniards. When required, however, to deliver up their arms, they were restrained like Viriathus by their genuine Spanish pride in the possession of a well-wielded sword, and they resolved to continue the war under the daring Megaravicus. It seemed folly: the consular army, the command of which was taken up in 613 by the consul Quintus Pompeius, was four times as numerous as the whole population capable of bearing arms in Numantia. But the general, who was wholly unacquainted with war, sustained defeats so severe under the walls of the two cities (613, 614), that he preferred at length to procure by means of negotiations the peace which he could not compel. With Termantia a definitive agreement must have taken place. In the case of the Numantines the Roman general liberated their captives, and summoned the community under the secret promise of favourable treatment to surrender to him at discretion. The Numantines, weary of the war, consented, and the general actually limited his demands to the smallest possible measure. Prisoners of war, deserters, and hostages were delivered up, and the stipulated sum of money was mostly paid, when in 615 the new general Marcus Popillius Laenas arrived in the camp. As soon as Pompeius saw the burden of command devolve on other shoulders, he, with a view to escape from the reckoning that awaited him at Rome for a peace which was according to Roman ideas disgraceful, lighted on the expedient of not merely breaking, but of disowning his word; and when the Numantines came to make their last payment, in the presence of their officers and his own he flatly denied the conclusion of the agreement. The matter was referred for judicial decision to the senate at Rome. While it was discussed there, the war before Numantia was suspended, and Laenas occupied himself with an expedition to Lusitania where he helped to accelerate the catastrophe of Viriathus, and with a foray against the Lusones, neighbours of the Numantines. When at length the decision of the senate arrived, its purport was that the war should be continued—the state became thus a party to the knavery of Pompeius.
Mancinus
With unimpaired courage and increased resentment the Numantines resumed the struggle; Laenas fought against them unsuccessfully, nor was his successor Gaius Hostilius Mancinus more fortunate (617). But the catastrophe was brought about not so much by the arms of the Numantines, as by the lax and wretched military discipline of the Roman generals and by—what was its natural consequence—the annually-increasing dissoluteness, insubordination, and cowardice of the Roman soldiers. The mere rumour, which moreover was false, that the Cantabri and Vaccaei were advancing to the relief of Numantia, induced the Roman army to evacuate the camp by night without orders, and to seek shelter in the entrenchments constructed sixteen years before by Nobilior.(5) The Numantines, informed of their sudden departure, hotly pursued the fugitive army, and surrounded it: there remained to it no choice save to fight its way with sword in hand through the enemy, or to conclude peace on the terms laid down by the Numantines. Although the consul was personally a man of honour, he was weak and little known. Tiberius Gracchus, who served in the army as quaestor, had more influence with the Celtiberians from the hereditary respect in which he was held on account of his father who had so wisely organized the province of the Ebro, and induced the Numantines to be content with an equitable treaty of peace sworn to by all the staff-officers. But the senate not only recalled the general immediately, but after long deliberation caused a proposal to be submitted to the burgesses that the convention should be treated as they had formerly treated that of Caudium, in other words, that they should refuse to ratify it and should devolve the responsibility for it on those by whom it had been concluded. By right this category ought to have included all the officers who had sworn to the treaty; but Gracchus and the others were saved by their connections. Mancinus alone, who did not belong to the circles of the highest aristocracy, was destined to pay the penalty for his own and others’ guilt. Stripped of his insignia, the Roman consular was conducted to the enemy’s outposts, and, when the Numantines refused to receive him that they might not on their part acknowledge the treaty as null, the late commander-in-chief stood in his shirt and with his hands tied behind his back for a whole day before the gates of Numantia, a pitiful spectacle to friend and foe. Yet the bitter lesson seemed utterly lost on the successor of Mancinus, his colleague in the consulship, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. While the discussions as to the treaty with Mancinus were pending in Rome, he attacked the free people of the Vaccaei under frivolous pretexts just as Lucullus had done sixteen years before, and began in concert with the general of the Further province to besiege Pallantia (618). A decree of the senate enjoined him to desist from the war; nevertheless, under the pretext that the circumstances had meanwhile changed,
Scipio Aemilianus
Even the Roman government began at length to perceive that matters could no longer continue on this footing; they resolved to entrust the subjugation of the small Spanish country-town, as an extraordinary measure, to the first general of Rome, Scipio Aemilianus. The pecuniary means for carrying on the war were indeed doled out to him with preposterous parsimony, and the permission to levy soldiers, which he asked, was even directly refused—a result towards which coterie-intrigues and the fear of being burdensome to the sovereign people may have co-operated. But a great number of friends and clients voluntarily accompanied him; among them was his brother Maximus Aemilianus, whosome years before had commanded with distinction against Viriathus. Supported by this trusty band, which was formed into a guard for the general, Scipio began to reorganize the deeply disordered army (620). First of all, the camp-followers had to take their departure—there were found as many as 2000 courtesans, and an endless number of soothsayers and priests of all sorts—and, if the soldier was not available for fighting, he had at least to work in the trenches and to march. During the first summer the general avoided any conflict with the Numantines; he contented himself with destroying the stores in the surrounding country, and with chastising the Vaccaei who sold corn to the Numantines, and compelling them to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. It was only towards winter that Scipio drew together his army round Numantia. Besides the Numidian contingent of horsemen, infantry, and twelve elephants led by the prince Jugurtha, and the numerous Spanish contingents, there were four legions, in all a force of 60,000 men investing a city whose citizens capable of bearing arms did not exceed 8000 at the most. Nevertheless the besieged frequently offered battle; but Scipio, perceiving clearly that the disorganization of many years was not to be repaired all at once, refused to accept it, and, when conflicts did occur in connection with the sallies of the besieged, the cowardly flight of the legionaries, checked with difficulty by the appearance of the general in person, justified
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 Callaeci Conquered
New Organization of Spain
In Further Spain the Roman dominion was confirmed and extended by the subjugation of the Lusitanians. The consul Decimus Junius Brutus, who came in Caepio’s room, settled the Lusitanian war-captives in the neighbourhood of Saguntum, and gave to their new town Valentia (Valencia), like Carteia, a Latin constitution (616); he moreover (616-618) traversed the Iberian west coast in various directions, and was the first of the Romans to reach the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. The towns of the Lusitanians dwelling there, which were obstinately defended by their inhabitants, both men and women, were subdued by him; and the hitherto independent Callaeci were united with the Roman province after a great battle, in which 50,000 of them are said to have fallen. After the subjugation of the Vaccaei, Lusitanians, and Callaeci, the whole peninsula, with the exception of the north coast, was now at least nominally subject to the Romans.
A senatorial commission was sent to Spain in order to organize, in concert with Scipio, the newly-won provincial territory after the Roman method; and Scipio did what he could to obviate the effects of the infamous and stupid policy of his predecessors. The Caucani for instance, whose shameful maltreatment by Lucullus he had been obliged to witness nineteen years before when a military tribune, were invited by him to return to their town and to rebuild it. Spain began again to experience more tolerable times. The suppression of piracy, which found dangerous lurking-places in the Baleares, through the occupation of these islands by Quintus Caecilius Metellus in 631, was singularly conducive, to the prosperity of Spanish commerce; and in other respects also the fertile islands, inhabited by a dense population which was unsurpassed in the use of the sling, were a valuable possession. How numerous the Latin-speaking population in the peninsula was even then, is shown by the settlement of 3000 Spanish Latins in the towns of Palma and Pollentia (Pollenza) in the newly-acquired islands. In spite of various grave evils the Roman administration of Spain preserved on the whole the stamp which the Catonian period, and primarily Tiberius Gracchus, had impressed on it. It is true that the Roman frontier territory had not a little to suffer from the inroads of the tribes, but half subdued or not subdued at all, on the north and west. Among the Lusitanians in particular the poorer youths regularly congregated as banditti, and in large gangs levied contributions from their countrymen or their neighbours, for which reason, even at a much later period, the isolated homesteads in this region were constructed in the style of fortresses, and were, in case of need, capable of defence; nor did the Romans succeed in putting an end to these predatory habits in the inhospitable and almost inaccessible Lusitanian mountains. But what had previously been wars assumed more and more the character of brigandage, which every tolerably efficient governor was able to repress with his ordinary resources; and in spite of such inflictions on the border districts Spain was the most flourishing and best-organized country in all the Roman dominions; the system of tenths and the middlemen were there unknown; the population was numerous, and the country was rich in corn and cattle.
The Protected States
Far more insupportable was the condition—intermediate between formal sovereignty and actual subjection—of the African, Greek, and Asiatic states which were brought within the sphere of Roman hegemony through the wars of Rome with Carthage, Macedonia, and Syria, and their consequences. An independent state does not pay too dear a price for its independence in accepting the sufferings of war when it cannot avoid them; a state which has lost its independence may find at least some compensation in the fact that its protector procures for it peace with its neighbours. But these client states of Rome had neither independence nor peace. In Africa there practically subsisted a perpetual border-war between Carthage and Numidia. In Egypt Roman arbitration had settled the dispute as to the succession between the two brothers Ptolemy Philometor and Ptolemy the Fat; nevertheless the new rulers of Egypt and Cyrene waged war for the possession of Cyprus. In Asia not only were most of the kingdoms—Bithynia, Cappadocia, Syria—likewise torn by internal quarrels as to the succession and by the interventions of neighbouring states to which these quarrels gave rise, but various and severe wars were carried on between the Attalids and the Galatians, between the Attalids and the kings of Bithynia, and even between Rhodes and Crete. In Hellas proper, in like manner, the pigmy feuds which were customary there continued to smoulder; and even Macedonia, formerly so tranquil, consumed its strength in the intestine strife that arose out of its new democratic constitutions. It was the fault of the rulers as well as the ruled, that the last vital energies and the last prosperity of the nations were expended in these aimless feuds. The client states ought to have perceived that a state which cannot wage war against every one cannot wage war at all, and that, as the possessions and power enjoyed by all these states were practically under Roman guarantee, they had in the event of any difference no alternative but to settle the matter amicably with their neighbours or to call in the Romans as arbiters. When the Achaean diet was urged by the Rhodians and Cretans to grant them the aid of the league, and seriously deliberated as to sending it (601), it was simply a political farce; the principle which the leader of the party friendly to Rome then laid down—that the Achaeans were no longer at liberty to wage war without the permission of the Romans— expressed, doubtless with disagreeable precision, the simple truth that the sovereignty of the dependent states was merely a formal one, and that any attempt to give life to the shadow must necessarily lead to the destruction of the shadow itself. But the ruling community deserves a censure more severe than that directed against the ruled. It is no easy task for a man—any more than for a state—to own to insignificance; it is the duty and right of the ruler either to renounce his authority, or by the display of an imposing material
Carthage and Numidia
Let us first glance at Africa. The order of things established by the Romans in Libya rested in substance on a balance of power between the Nomad kingdom of Massinissa and the city of Carthage. While the former was enlarged, confirmed, and civilized under the vigorous and sagacious government of Massinissa,(6) Carthage in consequence simply of a state of peace became once more, at least in wealth and population, what it had been at the height of its political power. The Romans saw with ill-concealed and envious fear the apparently indestructible prosperity of their old rival; while hitherto they had refused to grant to it any real protection against the constantly continued encroachments of Massinissa, they now began openly to interfere in favour of the neighbouring prince. The dispute which had been pending for more than thirty years between the city and the king as to the possession of the province of Emporia on the Lesser Syrtis, one of the most fertile in the Carthaginian territory, was at length (about 594) decided by Roman commissioners to the effect that the Carthaginians should evacuate those towns of Eniporia which still remained in their possession, and should pay 500 talents (120,000 pounds) to the king as compensation for the illegal enjoyment of the territory. The consequence was, that Massinissa immediately seized another Carthaginian district on the western frontier of their territory, the town of Tusca and the great plains near the Bagradas; no course was left to the Carthaginians but to commence another hopeless process at Rome. After long and, beyond doubt, intentional delay a second commission appeared in Africa (597); but, when the Carthaginians were unwilling to commit themselves unconditionally to a decision to be pronounced by it as arbiter without an exact preliminary investigation into the question of legal right, and insisted on a thorough discussion of the latter question, the commissioners without further ceremony returned to Rome.
The Destruction of Carthage Resolved on at Rome
The question of right between Carthage and Massinissa thus remained unsettled; but the mission gave rise to a more important decision. The head of this commission had been the old Marcus Cato, at that time perhaps the most influential man in the senate, and, as a veteran survivor from the Hannibalic war, still filled with thorough hatred and thorough dread of the Phoenicians. With surprise and jealousy Cato had seen with his own eyes the flourishing state
War between Massinissa and Carthage
The desired occasion was soon found. The provoking violations of right on the part of Massinissa and the Romans brought to the helm in Carthage Hasdrubal and Carthalo, the leaders of the patriotic party, which was not indeed, like the Achaean, disposed to revolt against the Roman supremacy, but was at least resolved to defend, if necessary, by arms against Massinissa the rights belonging by treaty to the Carthaginians. The patriots ordered forty of the most decided partisans of Massinissa to be banished from the city, and made the people swear that they would on no account ever permit their return; at the same time, in order to repel the attacks that might be expected from Massinissa, they formed out of the free Numidians a numerous army under Arcobarzanes, the grandson of Syphax (about 600). Massinissa, however, was prudent enough not to take arms now, but to submit himself unconditionally to the decision of the Romans respecting the disputed territory on the Bagradas; and thus the Romans could assert with some plausibility that the Carthaginian preparations must have been directed against them, and could insist on the immediate dismissal of the army and destruction of the naval stores. The
Declaration of War by Rome
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
Resistance of the Carthaginians
This fearful command aroused in the Phoenicians all the—shall we say magnanimous or frenzied?—enthusiasm, which was displayed previously by the Tyrians against Alexander, and subsequently by the Jews against Vespasian. Unparalleled as was the patience with which this nation could endure bondage and oppression, as unparalleled was now the furious rising of that mercantile and seafaring population, when the things at stake were not the state and freedom, but the beloved soil of their ancestral city and their venerated and dear home beside the sea. Hope and deliverance were out of the question; political discretion enjoined even now an unconditional submission. But the voice of the few who counselled the acceptance of what was inevitable was, like the call of the pilot during a hurricane, drowned amidst the furious yells of the multitude; which, in its frantic rage, laid hands on the magistrates of the city who had counselled the surrender of the hostages and arms, made such of the innocent bearers of the news as had ventured at all to return home expiate their terrible tidings, and tore in pieces the Italians who chanced to be sojourning in the city by way of avenging beforehand, at least on them, the destruction of its native home. No resolution was passed to defend themselves; unarmed as they were, this was a matter of course. The
Situation of Carthage
Carthage was rendered very strong both by the nature of its situation(8) and by the art of its inhabitants, who had very often to depend on the protection of its walls. Into the broad gulf of Tunis, which is bounded on the west by Cape Farina and on the east by Cape Bon, there projects in a direction from west to east a promontory, which is encompassed on three sides by the sea and is connected with the mainland only towards the west. This promontory, at its narrowest part only about two miles broad and on the whole flat, again expands towards the gulf, and terminates there in the two heights of Jebel-Khawi and Sidi bu Said, between which extends the plain of El Mersa. On its southern portion which ends in the height
The difficult task of reducing so well fortified a city was rendered still more difficult by the fact, that the resources of the capital itself and of its territory which still included 800 townships and was mostly under the power of the emigrant party on the one hand, and the numerous tribes of the free or half-free Libyans hostile to Massinissa on the other, enabled the Carthaginians simultaneously with their defence of the city to keep a numerous army in the field— an army which, from the desperate temper of the emigrants and the serviceableness of the light Numidian cavalry, the besiegers could not afford to disregard.
The Siege
The consuls accordingly had by no means an easy task to perform, when they now found themselves compelled to commence a regular siege. Manius Manilius, who commanded the land army, pitched his camp opposite the wall of the citadel, while Lucius Censorinus stationed himself with the fleet on the lake and there began operations on the tongue of land. The Carthaginian army, under Hasdrubal, encamped on the other side of the lake near the fortress of Nepheris, whence it obstructed the labours of the Roman soldiers despatched to cut timber for constructing machines, and the able cavalry-leader in particular, Himilco Phameas, slew many of the Romans. Censorinus fitted up two large battering-rams on the tongue, and made a breach with them at this weakest place of the wall; but, as evening had set in, the assault had to be postponed. During the night the besieged succeeded in filling up a great part of the breach, and in so damaging the Roman machines by a sortie that they could not work next day. Nevertheless the Romans ventured on the assault; but they found the breach and the portions of the wall and houses in the neighbourhood so strongly occupied, and advanced with such imprudence, that they were repulsed with severe loss and would have suffered still greater damage, had not the military tribune Scipio Aemilianus, foreseeing the issue of the foolhardy attack, kept together his men in front of the walls and with them intercepted the fugitives. Manilius accomplished still less against the impregnable wall of the citadel. The siege thus lingered on. The diseases engendered in the camp by the heat of summer, the departure of Censorinus the abler general, the ill-humour and inaction of Massinissa who was naturally far from pleased to see the Romans taking for themselves the booty which he had long
He only is a living man, the rest are gliding shades.(15)
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
Scipio Aemilianus
With the view of producing a change in the state of African affairs, which excited uneasiness, the Romans resorted to the extraordinary measure of entrusting the conduct of the war to the only man who had as yet brought home honour from the Libyan plains, and who was recommended for this war by his very name. Instead of calling Scipio to the aedileship for which he was a candidate, they gave to him the consulship before the usual time, setting aside the laws to the contrary effect, and committed to him by special decree the conduct of the African war. He arrived (607) in Utica at a moment when much was at stake. The Roman admiral Mancinus, charged by Piso with the nominal continuance of the siege of the capital, had occupied a steep cliff, far remote from the inhabited district and scarcely defended, on the almost inaccessible seaward side of the suburb of Magalia, and had united nearly his whole not very numerous force there, in the hope of being able to penetrate thence into the outer town. In fact the assailants had been for a moment within its gates and the camp-followers had flocked forward in a body in the hope of spoil, when they were again driven back to the cliff and, being without supplies and almost cut off, were in the greatest danger. Scipio found matters in that position. He had hardly arrived when he despatched the troops which he had brought with him and the militia of Utica by sea to the threatened point, and succeeded in saving its garrison and holding the cliff itself. After this danger was averted, the general proceeded to the camp of Piso to take over the army and bring it back to Carthage. Hasdrubal and Bithyas availed themselves of his absence to move their camp immediately up to the city, and to renew the attack on the garrison of the cliff before Magalia; but even now Scipio appeared with the vanguard of the main army in sufficient time to afford assistance to the post. Then the siege began afresh and more earnestly. First of all Scipio cleared the camp of the mass of camp-followers and sutlers and once more tightened the relaxed reins of discipline. Military operations were soon resumed with increased
Capture of the City
How fearfully these mighty agencies had laboured in the work of destruction during the interval while Hasdrubal continued to vaunt and to gormandize, appeared so soon as the Roman army proceeded in the spring of 608 to attack the inner town. Hasdrubal gave orders to set fire to the outer harbour and made himself ready to repel the expected assault on the Cothon; but Laelius succeeded in scaling the wall, hardly longer defended by the famished garrison, at a point farther up and thus penetrated into the inner harbour. The city was captured, but the struggle was still by no means at an end. The assailants occupied the market-place contiguous to the small harbour, and slowly pushed their way along the three narrow streets leading from this to the citadel—slowly, for the huge houses of six stories in height had to be taken one by one; on the roofs or on beams laid over the street the soldiers penetrated from one of these fortress-like buildings to that which was adjoining or opposite, and cut down whatever they encountered there. Thus six days elapsed, terrible for the inhabitants of the city and full of difficulty and danger also for the assailants; at length they arrived in front of the steep citadel-rock, whither Hasdrubal and the force still surviving had retreated. To procure a wider approach, Scipio gave orders to set fire to the captured streets and to level the
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.
Province of Africa
There remained the work of arranging the future organization of the country. The earlier plan of investing the allies of Rome with the transmarine possessions that she acquired was no longer viewed with favour. Micipsa and his brothers retained in substance their former territory, including the districts recently wrested from the Carthaginians on the Bagradas and in Emporia; their long-cherished hope of obtaining Carthage as a capital was for ever frustrated; the senate presented them instead with the Carthaginian libraries. The Carthaginian territory as possessed by the city in its last days— viz. The narrow border of the African coast lying immediately opposite to Sicily, from the river Tusca (near Thabraca) to Thaenae (opposite to the island of Karkenah)—became a Roman province. In the interior, where the constant encroachments of Massinissa had more and more narrowed the Carthaginian dominions and Bulla, Zama, and Aquae already belonged to the kings, the Numidians retained what they possessed. But the careful regulation of the boundary between the Roman province and the Numidian kingdom, which enclosed it on three sides, showed that Rome would by no means tolerate in reference to herself what she had permitted in reference to Carthage; while the name of the new province, Africa, on the other hand appeared to indicate that Rome did not at all regard the boundary now marked off as a definitive one. The supreme administration of the new province was entrusted to a Roman governor, who had his seat at Utica. Its frontier did not need any regular defence, as the allied Numidian kingdom everywhere separated it from the inhabitants of the desert. In the matter of taxes Rome dealt on the whole with moderation. Those communities which from the beginning of the war had taken part with Rome—viz. Only the maritime towns of Utica, Hadrumetum, Little Leptis, Thapsus, Achulla, and Usalis, and the inland town of Theudalis— retained their territory and became free cities; which was also the case with the newly-founded community of deserters. The territory of the city of Carthage—with the exception of a tract presented to Utica—and that of the other destroyed townships became Roman domain-land, which was let on lease. The remaining townships likewise forfeited in law their property in the soil and their municipal liberties; but their land and their constitution were for the time being, and until further orders from the Roman government, left to them as a possession liable to be recalled,
Macedonia and the Pseudo-Phillip
Victory of Metellus
Macedonia also disappeared about the same time as Carthage from the ranks of the nations. The four small confederacies, into which the wisdom of the Roman senate had parcelled out the ancient kingdom, could not live at peace either internally or one with another. How matters stood in the country appears from a single accidentally mentioned occurrence at Phacus, where the whole governing council of one of these confederacies were murdered on the instigation of one Damasippus. Neither the commissions sent by the senate (590), nor the foreign arbiters, such as Scipio Aemilianus (603) called in after the Greek fashion by the Macedonians, were able to establish any tolerable order. Suddenly there appeared in Thrace a young man, who called himself Philip the son of king Perseus, whom he strikingly resembled, and of the Syrian Laodice. He had passed his youth in the Mysian town of Adramytium; there he asserted that he had preserved the sure proofs of his illustrious descent. With these he had, after a vain attempt to obtain recognition in his native country, resorted to Demetrius Soter, king of Syria, his mother’s brother. There were in fact some who believed the Adramytene or professed to believe him, and urged the king either to reinstate the prince in his hereditary kingdom or to cede to him the crown of Syria; whereupon Demetrius, to put an end to the foolish proceedings, arrested the pretender and sent him to the Romans. But the senate attached so little importance to the man, that it confined him in an Italian town without taking steps to have him even seriously guarded. Thus he had escaped to Miletus, where the civic authorities once more seized him and asked the Roman commissioners what they should do with the prisoner. The latter advised them to let him go; and they did so. He now tried his fortune further in Thrace; and, singularly enough, he obtained recognition and support there not only from Teres the chief of the Thracian barbarians, the husband of his father’s sister, and Barsabas, but also from the prudent Byzantines. With Thracian support the so-called Philip invaded Macedonia, and, although he was defeated at first, he soon gained one victory over the Macedonian militia in the district of Odomantice beyond the Strymon, followed by a second on the west side of the river, which gave him possession
Province of Macedonia
The four Macedonian confederacies had not voluntarily submitted to the pretender, but had simply yielded to force. According to the policy hitherto pursued there was therefore no reason for depriving the Macedonians of the shadow of independence which the battle of Pydna had still left to them; nevertheless the kingdom of Alexander was now, by order of the senate, converted by Metellus into a Roman province. This case clearly showed that the Roman government had changed its system, and had resolved to substitute for the relation of clientship that of simple subjects; and accordingly the suppression of the four Macedonian confederacies was felt throughout the whole range of the client-states as a blow directed against all. The possessions in Epirus which were formerly after the first Roman victories detached from Macedonia—the Ionian islands and the ports of Apollonia and Epidamnus,(16) that had hitherto been under the jurisdiction of the Italian magistrates—were now reunited with Macedonia, so that the latter, probably as early as this period, reached on the north-west to a point beyond Scodra, where Illyria began. The protectorate
Thenceforth the defence of the northern and eastern frontiers of Macedonia or, in other words, of the frontier of Hellenic civilization against the barbarians devolved on the Romans. It was conducted by them with inadequate forces and not, on the whole, with befitting energy; but with a primary view to this military object the great Egnatian highway was constructed, which as early as the time of Polybius ran from Apollonia and Dyrrhachium, the two chief ports on the west coast, across the interior to Thessalonica, and was afterwards prolonged to the Hebrus (Maritza).(18) The new province became the natural basis, on the one hand for the movements against the turbulent Dalmatians, and on the other hand for the numerous expeditions against the Illyrian, Celtic, and Thracian tribes settled to the north of the Grecian peninsula, which we shall afterwards have to exhibit in their historical connection.
Greece
Greece proper had greater occasion than Macedonia to congratulate herself on the favour of the ruling power; and the Philhellenes of Rome might well be of opinion that the calamitous effects of the war with Perseus were disappearing, and that the state of things in general was improving there. The bitterest abettors of the now dominant party, Lyciscus the Aetolian, Mnasippus the Boeotian, Chrematas the Acarnanian, the infamous Epirot Charops whom honourable Romans forbade even to enter their houses, descended one after another to the grave; another generation
Achaean War
In order to screen a foul transaction, Diaeus, the president of the Achaean league for the time being, about 605 threw out in the diet the assertion that the special privileges conceded by the Achaean league to the Lacedaemonians as members—viz. their exemption from the Achaean criminal jurisdiction, and the right to send separate embassies to Rome—were not at all guaranteed to them by the Romans. It was an audacious falsehood; but the diet naturally believed what it wished, and, when the Achaeans showed themselves ready to make good their assertions with arms in hand, the weaker Spartans yielded for the time, or, to speak more correctly, those whose surrender was demanded by the Achaeans left the city to appear as complainants before the Roman senate. The senate answered as usual that it would send a commission to investigate the matter; but instead of reporting this reply the envoys stated in Achaia as well as in
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;
Province of Achaia
The renewed regulation of the affairs of Greece was entrusted to a commission of ten senators in concert with the consul Mummius, who left behind him on the whole a blessed memory in the conquered country. Doubtless it was, to say the least, a foolish thing in him to assume the name of “Achaicus” on account of his feats of war and victory, and to build in the fulness of his gratitude a temple to Hercules Victor; but, as he had not been reared in aristocratic luxury and aristocratic corruption but was a “new man” and comparatively without means, he showed himself an upright and indulgent administrator. The statement, that none of the Achaeans perished but Diaeus and none of the Boeotians but Pytheas, is a rhetorical exaggeration: in Chalcis especially sad outrages occurred; but yet on the whole moderation was observed in the infliction of penalties. Mummius rejected the proposal
Destruction of Corinth
The communities of Thebes, Chalcis, and Corinth experienced a treatment more severe. There is no ground for censure in the fact that the two former were disarmed and converted by the demolition of their walls into open villages; but the wholly uncalled-for destruction of the flourishing Corinth, the first commercial city in Greece, remains a dark stain on the annals of Rome. By express orders from the senate the Corinthian citizens were seized, and such as were not killed were sold into slavery; the city itself was not only deprived of its walls and its citadel—a measure which, if the Romans were not disposed permanently to garrison it, was certainly inevitable—but was levelled with the ground, and all rebuilding on the desolate site was prohibited in the usual forms of accursing; part of its territory was given to Sicyon under the obligation that the latter should defray the costs of the Isthmian national festival in room
In the third and more distant continent the Roman dominion exhibited a development more imperfect than in the African and Macedono-Hellenic countries, which were separated from Italy only by narrow seas.
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
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.
The eastern portion of the kingdom of the Attalids was assigned to the client kings, so as to release the Romans from the protection of the frontier and thereby from the necessity of maintaining a standing force in Asia; Telmissus(34) went to the Lycian confederacy; the European possessions in Thrace were annexed to the province of Macedonia; the rest of the territory was organized as a new Roman province, which like that of Carthage was, not without design, designated by the name of the continent in which it lay. The land was released from the taxes which had been paid to Pergamus; and it was treated with the same moderation as Hellas and Macedonia. Thus the most considerable state in Asia Minor became a Roman province.
Western Asia
Cappadocia
The numerous other small states and cities of western Asia— the kingdom of Bithynia, the Paphlagonian and Gallic principalities, the Lycian and Pamphylian confederacies, the free cities of Cyzicus and Rhodes—continued in their former circumscribed relations.
Beyond the Halys Cappadocia—after king Ariarathes V Philopator (591-624) had, chiefly by the aid of the Attalids, held his ground against his brother and rival Holophernes who was supported by Syria— followed substantially the Pergamene policy, as respected both absolute devotion to Rome and the tendency to adopt Hellenic culture. He was the means of introducing that culture into the hitherto almost barbarous Cappadocia, and along with it its extravagancies also, such as the worship of Bacchus and the dissolute practices of the bands of wandering actors—the “artists” as they were called. In reward for the fidelity to Rome, which had cost this prince his life in the struggle with the Pergamene pretender, his youthful heir Ariarathes vi was not only protected by the Romans against the usurpation attempted by the king of Pontus, but received also the south-eastern part of the kingdom of the Attalids, Lycaonia, along with the district bordering on it to the eastward reckoned in earlier times as part of Cilicia.
Pontus
In the remote north-east of Asia Minor “Cappadocia on the sea,” or more briefly the “sea-state,” Pontus, increased in extent and importance. Not long after the battle of Magnesia king Pharnaces I had extended his dominion far beyond the Halys to Tius on the frontier of Bithynia, and in particular had possessed himself of the rich Sinope, which was converted from a Greek free city into the residence of the kings of Pontus. It is true that the neighbouring states endangered by these encroachments, with king Eumenes ii at their head, had on that account waged war against him (571-575), and under Roman mediation had exacted from him a promise to evacuate Galatia and Paphlagonia; but the course of events shows that Pharnaces as well as his successor Mithradates V. Euergetes (598?-634), faithful allies of Rome in the third Punic war as well as in the struggle with Aristonicus, not only remained in possession beyond the Halys, but also in substance retained the protectorate over the Paphlagonian and Galatian dynasts. It is only on this hypothesis that we can explain how Mithradates, ostensibly for his brave deeds in the war against Aristonicus, but in reality for considerable sums paid to the Roman general, could receive Great Phrygia from the latter after the dissolution of the Attalid kingdom. How far on the other hand the kingdom of Pontus about this time extended in the direction of the Caucasus and the sources of the Euphrates, cannot be precisely determined; but it seems to have embraced the western part of Armenia about Enderes and Divirigi, or what was called Lesser Armenia, as a dependent satrapy, while the Greater Armenia and Sophene formed distinct and independent kingdoms.
Syria and Egypt
While in the peninsula of Asia Minor Rome thus substantially conducted the government and, although much was done without or in opposition to her wishes, yet determined on the whole the state of possession, the wide tracts on the other hand beyond the Taurus and the Upper Euphrates as far down as the valley of the Nile continued to be mainly left to themselves. No doubt the principle which formed the basis of the regulation of Oriental affairs in 565, viz. That the Halys should form the eastern boundary of the Roman client-states,(35) was not adhered to by the senate and was in its very nature untenable. The political horizon is a self-deception as well as the physical; if the state of Syria had the number of ships of war and war-elephants allowed to it prescribed in the treaty of peace,(36) and if the Syrian army at the bidding of the Roman senate evacuated Egypt when half-won(37), these things implied a complete recognition of hegemony and of clientship. Accordingly the disputes as to the throne in Syria and in Egypt were referred for settlement to the Roman government. In the former after the death of Antiochus Epiphanes (590) Demetrius afterwards named Soter, the son of Seleucus iv, living as a hostage at Rome, and Antiochus Eupator, a minor, the son of the last king Antiochus Epiphanes, contended for the crown; in the latter Ptolemy Philometor (573-608), the elder of the two brothers who had reigned jointly since 584, had been driven from the country (590) by the younger Ptolemy Euergetes ii or the Fat (d. 637), and had appeared in person at Rome to procure his restoration. Both affairs were arranged by the senate entirely through diplomatic agency, and substantially in accordance with Roman advantage. In Syria Demetrius, who had the better title, was set aside, and Antiochus Eupator was recognized as king; while the guardianship of the royal boy was entrusted by the senate to the Roman senator Gnaeus Octavius, who, as was to be expected, governed thoroughly in the interest of Rome, reduced the war-marine and the army of elephants agreeably to the treaty of 565, and was in the fair way of completing the military ruin of the country. In Egypt not only was the restoration of Philometor accomplished, but—partly in order to put an end to the quarrel between the brothers, partly in order to weaken the still considerable power of Egypt—Cyrene was separated from that kingdom and assigned as a provision for Euergetes. “The Romans make kings of those whom they wish,” a Jew wrote not long after this, “and those whom they do not wish they chase away from land and people.” But this was the last occasion—for a long time—on which the Roman senate came forward in the affairs of the east with that ability and energy, which it had uniformly displayed in the complications with Philip, Antiochus, and Perseus. Though the internal decline of the government was late in affecting the treatment of foreign affairs, yet it
India, Bactria
After such occurrences the Roman influence in these countries was practically shattered, and events pursued their course there for the present without the help of the Romans; but it is necessary for the right understanding of the sequel that we should not wholly omit to notice the history of the nearer, and even of the more remote, east. While in Egypt, shut off as it is on all sides, the status quo did not so easily admit of change, in Asia both to the west and east of the Euphrates the peoples and states underwent essential modifications during, and partly in consequence of, this temporary suspension of the Roman superintendence. Beyond the great desert of Iran there had arisen not long after Alexander the Great the kingdom of Palimbothra under Chandragupta (Sandracottus) on the Indus, and the powerful Bactrian state on the upper Oxus, both formed from a mixture of national elements with the most eastern offshoots of Hellenic civilization.
Decline of the Kingdom of Asia
To the west of these began the kingdom of Asia, which, although diminished under Antiochus the Great, still stretched its unwieldy bulk from the Hellespont to the Median and Persian provinces, and embraced the whole basin of the Euphrates and Tigris. That king had still carried his arms beyond the desert into the territory of the Parthians and Bactrians; it was only under him that the vast state had begun to melt away. Not only had western Asia been lost in consequence of the battle of Magnesia; the total emancipation of the two Cappadocias and the two Armenias—Armenia proper in the northeast and the region of Sophene in the south-west—and their conversion from principalities dependent on Syria into independent kingdoms also belong to this period.(38) Of these states Great Armenia in particular, under the Artaxiads, soon attained to a considerable position. Wounds perhaps still more dangerous were inflicted on the empire by the foolish levelling policy of his successor Antiochus Epiphanes (579-590). Although it was true that his kingdom resembled an aggregation of countries rather than a single state, and that the differences of nationality and religion among his subjects placed the most material obstacles in the way of the government, yet the plan of introducing throughout his dominions Helleno-Roman manners and Helleno-Roman worship and of equalizing the various peoples in a political as well as a religious point of view was under any circumstances a folly; and all the more so from the fact, that this caricature of Joseph ii was personally far from equal to so gigantic an enterprise, and introduced his reforms in the very worst way by the pillage of temples on the greatest scale and the most insane persecution of heretics.
The Jews
One consequence of this policy was, that the inhabitants of the province next to the Egyptian frontier, the Jews, a people formerly submissive even to humility and extremely active and industrious, were driven by systematic religious persecution to open revolt (about 587). The matter came to the senate; and, as it was just at that time with good reason indignant at Demetrius Soter and apprehensive of a combination between the Attalids and Seleucids, while the establishment of a power intermediate between Syria and Egypt was at any rate for the interest of Rome, it made no difficulty in at once recognizing the freedom and autonomy of the insurgent nation (about 593). Nothing, however, was done by Rome for the Jews except what could be done without personal exertion: in spite of the clause of the treaty concluded between the Romans and the Jews which promised Roman aid to the latter in the event of their being attacked, and in spite of the injunction addressed to the kings of Syria and Egypt not to march their troops through Judaea, it was of course entirely left to the Jews themselves to hold their ground against the Syrian kings. The brave and prudent conduct of the insurrection
The Parthian Empire
Of still more importance in the sequel than this insurrection of the Israelites was the contemporary movement—probably originating from the same cause—in the eastern provinces, where Antiochus Epiphanes emptied the temples of the Persian gods just as he had emptied that at Jerusalem, and doubtless accorded no better treatment there to the adherents of Ahuramazda and Mithra than here to those of Jehovah. Just as in Judaea—only with a wider range and ampler proportions— the result was a reaction on the part of the native manners and the native religion against Hellenism and the Hellenic gods; the promoters of this movement were the Parthians, and out of it arose the great Parthian empire. The “Parthwa,” or Parthians, who are early met with as one of the numerous peoples merged in the great Persian empire, at first in the modern Khorasan to the south-east of the Caspian sea, appear after 500 under the Scythian, i. e. Turanian, princely race of the Arsacids as an independent state; which, however, only emerged from its obscurity about a century afterwards. The sixth Arsaces, Mithradates I (579?-618?), was the real founder of the Parthian as a great power. To him succumbed the Bactrian empire, in itself far more powerful, but already shaken to the very foundation partly by hostilities with the hordes of Scythian horsemen from Turan and with the states of the Indus, partly by internal disorders. He achieved almost equal successes in the countries to the west of the great desert. The Syrian empire was just then in the utmost disorganization, partly through the failure of the Hellenizing attempts of Antiochus Epiphanes, partly through the troubles as to the succession that occurred after his death; and the provinces of the interior were in full course of breaking off from Antioch and the region of the coast. In Commagene for instance, the most northerly province of Syria on the Cappadocian frontier, the satrap Ptolemaeus asserted his independence, as did also on the opposite bank of the Euphrates the prince of Edessa in northern Mesopotamia or the province of Osrhoene, and the satrap Timarchus in the important province of Media; in fact the latter got his independence confirmed by the Roman senate, and, supported by Armenia as his ally, ruled as far down as Seleucia on the Tigris. Disorders of this sort were permanent features of the Asiatic empire: the provinces under their partially or wholly independent satraps were in continual revolt,
Reaction of the East against the West
This revolution in the relations of the peoples in the interior of Asia is the turning-point in the history of antiquity. The tide of national movement, which had hitherto poured from the west to the east and had found in Alexander the Great its last and highest expression, was followed by the ebb. On the establishment of the Parthian state not only were such Hellenic elements, as may still perhaps have been preserved in Bactria and on the Indus, lost, but western Iran also relapsed into the track which had been abandoned for centuries but was not yet obliterated. The Roman senate sacrificed the first essential result of the policy of Alexander, and thereby paved the way for that retrograde movement, whose last offshoots ended in the Alhambra of Granada and in the great Mosque of Constantinople. So long as the country from Ragae and Persepolis to the Mediterranean obeyed the king of Antioch, the power of Rome extended to the border of the great desert; the Parthian state could never take its place among the dependencies of the Mediterranean empire, not because it was so very powerful, but because it had its centre far from the coast, in the interior of Asia. Since the time of Alexander the world had obeyed the Occidentals alone, and the east seemed to be for these merely what America and Australia afterwards became for the Europeans; with Mithradates I the east re-entered the sphere of political movement. The world had again two masters.
Maritime Relations
Piracy
It remains that we glance at the maritime relations of this period; although there is hardly anything else to be said, than that there no longer existed anywhere a naval power. Carthage was annihilated; the war-fleet of Syria was destroyed in accordance with the treaty; the war-marine of Egypt, once so powerful, was under its present indolent rulers in deep decay. The minor states, and particularly the mercantile cities, had doubtless some armed transports; but these were not even adequate for the task—so difficult in the Mediterranean—of repressing piracy. This task necessarily devolved on Rome as the leading power in the Mediterranean. While a century previously the Romans had come forward in this matter with especial and salutary decision, and had in particular introduced their supremacy in the east by a maritime police energetically handled for the general good,(40) the complete nullity of this police at the very beginning of this period as distinctly betokens the fearfully rapid decline of the aristocratic government. Rome no longer possessed a fleet of her own; she was content to make requisitions for ships, when it seemed necessary, from the maritime towns of Italy, Asia Minor, and elsewhere. The consequence naturally was, that buccaneering became organized and consolidated. Something, perhaps, though not enough, was done towards its suppression, so far as the direct power of the Romans extended,
Crete
A bad pre-eminence in this respect belonged to Crete, which, from its favourable situation and the weakness or laxity of the great states of the west and east, was the only one of all the Greek settlements that had preserved its independence. Roman commissions doubtless came and went to this island, but accomplished still less there than they did even in Syria and Egypt. It seemed almost as if fate had left liberty to the Cretans only in order to show what was the result of Hellenic independence. It was a dreadful picture. The old Doric rigour of the Cretan institutions had become, just as in Tarentum, changed into a licentious democracy, and the chivalrous spirit of the inhabitants into a wild love of quarrelling and plunder; a respectable Greek himself testifies, that in Crete alone nothing was accounted disgraceful that was lucrative, and even the Apostle Paul quotes with approval the saying of a Cretan poet,
—Kretes aei pseustai, kaka theria, gasteres argai—.
Perpetual civil wars, notwithstanding the Roman efforts to bring about peace, converted one flourishing township after another on the old “island of the hundred cities” into heaps of ruins. Its inhabitants roamed as robbers at home and abroad, by land and by sea; the island became the recruiting ground for the surrounding kingdoms, after that evil was no longer tolerated in the Peloponnesus, and above all the true seat of piracy; about this period, for instance, the island of Siphnus was thoroughly pillaged by a fleet of Cretan corsairs. Rhodes—which, besides, was unable to recover from the loss of its possessions on the mainland and from the blows inflicted on its commerce(42)—expended its last energies in the wars which it found itself compelled to wage against the Cretans for the suppression of piracy (about 600), and in which the Romans sought to mediate, but without earnestness and apparently without success.
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
We have followed the transformation of the outward relations of Rome and the Romano-Hellenic world generally in its leading outlines, from the battle of Pydna to the period of the Gracchi, from the Tagus and the Bagradas to the Nile and the Euphrates. It was a great and difficult problem which Rome undertook, when she undertook to govern this Romano-Hellenic world; it was not wholly misunderstood, but it was by no means solved. The untenableness of the idea of Cato’s time— that the state should be limited to Italy, and that its rule beyond Italy should be only over clients—was doubtless discerned by the leading men of the following generation; and the necessity of substituting for this ruling by clientship a direct sovereignty of Rome, that should preserve the liberties of the communities, was doubtless recognized. But instead of carrying out this new arrangement firmly, speedily, and uniformly, they annexed isolated provinces just as convenience, caprice, collateral advantage, or accident led them to do so; whereas the greater portion of the territory under clientship either remained in the intolerable uncertainty of its former position, or even, as was the case with Syria especially, withdrew entirely from the influence of Rome. And even the government itself degenerated more and more into a feeble and short-sighted selfishness. They were content with governing from one day to
The Reform Movement and Tiberius Gracchus
The Roman Government before the Period of the Gracchi
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
So it seemed at a distance; matters wore a different aspect on a closer view. The government of the aristocracy was in full train to destroy its own work. Not that the sons and grandsons of the vanquished at Cannae and of the victors at Zama had so utterly degenerated from their fathers and grandfathers; the difference was not so much in the men who now sat in the senate, as in the times. Where a limited number of old families of established wealth and hereditary political importance conducts the government, it will display in seasons of danger an incomparable tenacity of purpose and power of heroic self-sacrifice, just as in seasons of tranquillity it will be shortsighted, selfish, and negligent—the germs of both results are essentially involved in its hereditary and collegiate character. The morbid matter had been long in existence, but it needed the sun of prosperity to develop it. There was a profound meaning in the question of Cato, “What was to become of Rome, when she should no longer have any state to fear?” That point had now been reached. Every neighbour whom she might have feared was politically annihilated; and of the men who had been reared under the old order of things in the severe school of the Hannibalic war, and whose words still sounded as echoes of that mighty epoch so long as they survived, death called one after another away, till at length even the voice of the last of them, the veteran Cato, ceased to be heard in the senate-house and in the Forum. A younger generation came to the helm, and their policy was a sorry answer to that question of the old patriot. We have already spoken of the shape which the government of the subjects and the external policy of Rome assumed in their hands. In internal affairs they were, if possible, still more disposed to let the ship drive before the wind: if we
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
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,
Optimates and Populares
In the Rome of this epoch the two evils of a degenerate oligarchy and a democracy still undeveloped but already cankered in the bud were interwoven in a manner pregnant with fatal results. According to their party names, which were first heard during this period, the “Optimates” wished to give effect to the will of the best, the “Populares” to that of the community; but in fact there was in the Rome of that day neither a true aristocracy nor a truly self-determining community. Both parties contended alike for shadows, and numbered in their ranks none but enthusiasts or hypocrites. Both were equally affected by political corruption, and both were in fact equally worthless. Both were necessarily tied down to the status quo, for neither on the one side nor on the other was there found any political idea—to say nothing of any political plan—reaching beyond the existing state of things; and accordingly the two parties were so entirely in agreement that they met at every step as respected both means and ends, and a change of party was a change of political tactics more than of political sentiments. The commonwealth would beyond doubt have been a gainer, if either the aristocracy had directly introduced a hereditary rotation instead of election by the burgesses, or the democracy had produced from within it a real demagogic government. But these Optimates and these Populares of the beginning of the seventh century were far too indispensable for eachother to wage such internecine war; they not only could not destroy each other, but, even if they had been able to do so, they would not have been willing. Meanwhile the commonwealth was politically and morally more and more unhinged, and was verging towards utter disorganization.
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
Slavery and Its Consequences
Before we attempt to describe the course of this second great conflict between labour and capital, it is necessary to give here some indication of the nature and extent of the system of slavery. We have not now to do with the old, in some measure innocent, rural slavery, under which the farmer either tilled the field along with his slave, or, if he possessed more land than he could manage, placed the slave—either as steward or as a sort of lessee obliged to render up a portion of the produce—over a detached farm.(6) Such relations no doubt existed at all times—around Comum, for instance, they were still the rule in the time of the empire—but as exceptional features in privileged districts and on humanely-managed estates. What we now refer to is the system of slavery on a great scale, which in the Roman state, as formerly in the Carthaginian, grew out of the ascendency of capital. While the captives taken in war and the hereditary transmission of slavery sufficed to keep up the stock of slaves during the earlier period, this system of slavery was, just like that of America, based on the methodically-prosecuted hunting of man; for, owing to the manner in which slaves were used with little regard to their life or propagation, the slave population was constantly on the wane, and even the wars which were always furnishing fresh masses to the slave-market were not sufficient to cover the
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.
Insurrection of the Slaves
The First Sicilian Slave War
The servile conspiracies and servile wars, breaking out everywhere, illustrate their management as respects police. In Italy the scenes of disorder, which were among the immediate painful consequences of the Hannibalic war,(13) seemed now to be renewed; all at once the Romans were obliged to seize and execute in the capital 150, in Minturnae 450, in Sinuessa even 4000 slaves (621). Still worse, as may be conceived, was the state of the provinces. At the great slave-market at Delos and in the Attic silver-mines about the same period the revolted slaves had to be put down by force of arms. The war against Aristonicus and his “Heliopolites” in Asia Minor was in substance a war of the landholders against the revolted slaves.(14) But worst of all, naturally, was the condition of Sicily, the chosen land of the plantation system. Brigandage had long been a standing evil there, especially in the interior; it began to swell into insurrection. Damophilus, a wealthy planter of Enna (Castrogiovanni), who vied with the Italian lords in the industrial investment of his living capital, was attacked and murdered by his exasperated rural slaves; whereupon the savage band flocked into the town of Enna, and there repeated the same process on a greater scale. The slaves rose in a body against their masters, killed or enslaved them, and summoned to the head of the already considerable insurgent army a juggler from Apamea in Syria who knew how to vomit fire and utter oracles, formerly as a slave named Eunus, now as chief of the insurgents styled Antiochus king of the Syrians. And why not? A few years before another Syrian slave, who was not even a prophet, had in Antioch itself worn the royal diadem of the Seleucids.(15) The Greek slave Achaeus, the brave “general” of the new king, traversed the island, and not only did the wild herdsmen flock from far and near to the strange standards, but the free labourers also, who bore no goodwill to the planters, made common cause with the revolted slaves. In another district of Sicily Cleon, a Cilician slave, formerly in his native land a daring bandit, followed the example which had been set and occupied Agrigentum; and, when the leaders came to a mutual understanding, after gaining various minor advantages they succeeded in at last totally defeating the praetor Lucius Hypsaeus in person and his army, consisting mostly of Sicilian militia, and in capturing his camp. By this means almost the whole island came into the power of the insurgents, whose numbers, according to the most moderate estimates, are alleged to have amounted to 70,000 men capable of bearing arms. The Romans found themselves compelled for three successive years (620-622) to despatch consuls and consular armies to Sicily, till, after several undecided and even some unfavourable conflicts, the revolt was at length subdued by the capture of Tauromenium and of Enna. The most resolute men of the insurgents threw themselves into the latter town, in order to hold their ground in that impregnable position with the determination of men who despair of deliverance or of pnrdon; the consuls Lucius Calpurnius Piso and Publius Rupilius lay before it for two years, and reduced it at last more by famine than by arms.(16)
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.
The Italian Farmers
The care of the government for the elevation of free labour, and by consequence for the restriction of the slave-proletariate, promised fruits far more difficult to be gained but also far richer. Unfortunately, in this respect there was nothing done at all. In the first social crisis the landlord had been enjoined by law to employ a number of free labourers proportioned to the number of his slave labourers.(17) Now at the suggestion of the government a Punic treatise on agriculture,(18) doubtless giving instructions in the system of plantation after the Carthaginian mode, was translated into Latin for the use and benefit of Italian speculators—the first and only instance of a literary undertaking suggested by the Roman senate! The same tendency showed itself in a more important matter, or to speak more correctly in the vital question for Rome—the system of colonization. It needed no special wisdom, but merely a recollection of the course of the first social crisis in Rome, to perceive that the only real
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.
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
Tribunate of Gracchus
His Agrarian Law
Tiberius Gracchus was invested with the tribunate of the people on the 10th of December, 620. The fearful consequences of the previous misgovernment, the political, military, economic, and moral decay of the burgesses, were just at that time naked and open to the eyes of all. Of the two consuls of this year one fought without success in Sicily against the revolted slaves, and the other, Scipio Aemilianus, was employed for months not in conquering, but in crushing a small Spanish country town. If Gracchus still needed a special summons to carry his resolution into effect, he found it in this state of matters which filled the mind of every patriot with unspeakable anxiety. His father-in-law promised assistance in counsel and action; the support of the jurist Scaevola, who had shortly before been elected consul for 621, might be hoped for. So Gracchus, immediately after entering on office, proposed the enactment of an agrarian law, which in a certain sense was nothing but a renewal of the Licinio-Sextian law of 387.(30) Under it all the state-lands which were occupied and enjoyed by the possessors without remuneration—those that were let on lease, such as the territory of Capua, were not affected by the law—were to be resumed on behalf of the state; but with the restriction, that each occupier should reserve for himself 500 -jugera- and for each son 250 (so as not, however, to exceed 1000 -jugera- in all) in permanent and guaranteed possession, or should be entitled to claim compensation in land to that extent. Indemnification appears to have been granted for any improvements executed by the former holders, such as buildings and plantations. The domain-land thus resumed was to be broken up into lots of 30 jugera; and these were to be distributed partly to burgesses, partly to Italian allies, not as their own free property, but as inalienable heritable leaseholds, whose holders bound themselves to use the land for agriculture and to pay a moderate rent to the state-chest. A -collegium- of three men, who were regarded as ordinary and standing magistrates
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
Further Plans of Gracchus
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
He Solicits Re-election to the Tribunate
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
The senate assembled in the temple of Fidelity, close by the temple of Jupiter; the bitterest opponents of Gracchus spoke in the sitting; when Tiberius moved his hand towards his forehead to signify to the people, amidst the wild tumult, that his head was in danger, it was said that he was already summoning the people to adorn his brow with the regal chaplet. The consul Scaevola was urged to have the traitor put to death at once. When that temperate man, by
The Domain Question Viewed in Itself
Let us endeavour to form a judgment regarding these momentous events. The appointment of an official commission, which had to counteract the dangerous diminution of the farmer-class by the comprehensive establishment of new small holdings from the whole Italian landed property at the disposal of the state, was doubtless no sign of a healthy condition of the national economy; but it was, under the existing circumstances political and social, suited to its purpose. The distribution of the domains, moreover, was in itself no political party-question; it might have been carried out to the last sod without changing the existing constitution or at all shaking the government of the aristocracy. As little could there be, in that case, any complaint of a violation of rights. The state was confessedly the owner of the occupied land; the holder as a possessor on mere sufferance could not, as a rule, ascribe to himself even a bonafide proprietary tenure, and, in the exceptional instances where he could do so, he was confronted by the fact that by the Roman law prescription did not run against the state. The distribution of the domains was not an abolition, but an exercise, of the right of property; all jurists were agreed as to its formal legality. But the attempt now to carry out these legal claims of the state was far from being politically warranted by the circumstance that the distribution of the domains neither infringed the existing constitution nor involved a violation of right. Such objections as have been now and then raised in our day, when a great landlord suddenly begins to assert in all their compass claims belonging to him in law but suffered for a long period to lie dormant in practice, might with equal and better right be advanced against the rogation of Gracchus. These occupied domains had been undeniably in heritable private possession, some of them for three hundred years; the state’s proprietorship of the soil, which from its very nature loses more readily than that of the burgess the character of a private right, had in the case of these lands become virtually extinct, and the present holders had universally come to their possessions by purchase or other onerous acquisition. The jurist might say what he would; to men of business the measure appeared to be an ejection of the great landholders for the benefit of the agricultural proletariate; and in fact no statesman could give it any other name. That the leading men of the Catonian epoch formed no other judgment, is very clearly shown by their treatment of a similar case that occurred in their time. The territory of Capua and the neighbouring towns, which was annexed as domain in 543, had for the most part practically passed into private possession during the following unsettled times. In the last years of the sixth century, when in various respects, especially through the influence of Cato, the reins of government were drawn tighter, the burgesses resolved to resume
It will be granted that these objections to the Sempronian agrarian law were of no small weight. Yet they are not decisive. Such a practical eviction of the holders of the domains was certainly a great evil; yet it was the only means of checking, at least for a long time, an evil much greater still and in fact directly destructive to the state—the decline of the Italian farmer-class. We can well understand therefore why the most distinguished and patriotic men even of the conservative party, headed by Gaius Laelius and Scipio Aemilianus, approved and desired the distribution of the domains viewed in itself.
The Domain Question before the Burgesses
But, if the aim of Tiberius Gracchus probably appeared to the great majority of the discerning friends of their country good and salutary, the method which he adopted, on the other hand, did not and could not meet with the approval of a single man of note and of patriotism. Rome about this period was governed by the senate. Any one who carried a measure of administration against the majority of the senate made a revolution. It was revolution against the spirit of the constitution, when Gracchus submitted the domain question to the people; and revolution also against the letter, when he destroyed not only for the moment but for all time coming the tribunician veto— the corrective of the state machine, through which the senate constitutionally got rid of interferences with its government—by the deposition of his colleague, which he justified with unworthy sophistry. But it was not in this step that the moral and political mistake of the action of Gracchus lay. There are no set forms of high treason in history; whoever provokes one power in the state to conflict with another is certainly a revolutionist, but he may be at the same time a discerning and praiseworthy statesman. The essential defect of the Gracchan revolution lay in a fact only too
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:
“—Os apoloito kai allos, otis toiauta ge pezoi—”
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.
The Revolution and Gaius Gracchus
The Commisssion for Distributing the Domains
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,
Its Suspension by Scipio Aemilianus
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
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.
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.
Democratic Agitation under Carbo and Flaccus
The distribution of land was at an end; the revolution went on. The revolutionary party, which possessed in the allotment-commission as it were a constituted leadership, had even in the lifetime of Scipio skirmished now and then with the existing government. Carbo, in particular, one of the most distinguished men of his time in oratorical talent, had as tribune of the people in 623 given no small trouble to the senate; had carried voting by ballot in the burgess-assemblies, so far as it had not been introduced already;(5) and had even made the significant proposal to leave the tribunes of the people free to reappear as candidates for the same office in the year immediately following, and thus legally to remove the obstacle by which Tiberius Gracchus had primarily been thwarted. The scheme had been at that time frustrated by the resistance of Scipio; some years later, apparently after his death, the law was reintroduced and carried through, although with limiting clauses.(6) The principal object of the party, however, was to revive the action of the allotment-commission which had been practically suspended; the leaders seriously talked of removing the obstacles which the Italian allies interposed to the scheme by conferring on them the rights of citizenship, and the agitation assumed mainly that direction. In order to meet it, the senate in 628 got the tribune of the people Marcus Junius Pennus to propose the dismissal of all non-burgesses from the capital, and in spite of the resistance of the democrats, particularly of Gaius Gracchus, and of the ferment occasioned by this odious measure in the Latin communities, the proposal was carried. Marcus Fulvius Flaccus retorted in the following year (629) as consul with the proposal to facilitate the acquisition of burgess-rights by the burgesses of the allied communities, and to concede even to those who had not acquired them an appeal to the Roman comitia against penal judgments. But he stood almost alone—Carbo had meanwhile changed his colours and was now a zealous aristocrat, Gaius Gracchus was absent as quaestor in Sardinia—and the project was frustrated by the resistance not of the senate merely, but also of the burgesses, who were but little inclined to extend their privileges to still wider circles. Flaccus left Rome to undertake the supreme command against the Celts; by his Transalpine conquests he prepared the way for the great schemes of the democracy, while he at the same time withdrew out of the difficulty of having to bear arms against the allies instigated by himself.
Destruction of Fregallae
Fregellae, situated on the borders of Latium and Campania at the principal passage of the Liris in the midst of a large and fertile territory, at that time perhaps the second city of Italy and in the discussions with Rome the usual mouthpiece of all the Latin colonies, began war against Rome in consequence of the rejection of the proposal brought in by Flaccus—the first instance which had occurred for a hundred and fifty years of a serious insurrection, not brought about by foreign powers, in Italy against the Roman hegemony. But on this occasion the fire was successfully extinguished before it had caught hold of other allied communities. Not through the superiority of the Roman arms, but through the treachery of a Fregellan Quintus Numitorius Pullus, the praetor Lucius Opimius quickly became master of the revolted city, which lost its civic privileges and its walls and was converted like Capua into a village. The colony of Fabrateria was founded on a part of its territory in 630; the remainder and the former city itself were distributed among the surrounding communities. This rapid and fearful punishment alarmed the allies, and endless impeachments for high treason pursued not only the Fregellans, but also the leaders of the popular party in Rome, who naturally were regarded by the aristocracy as accomplices in this insurrection. Meanwhile Gaius Gracchus reappeared in Rome. The aristocracy had first sought to detain the object of their dread in Sardinia by omitting to provide the usual relief, and then, when without caring for that point he returned, had brought him to trial as one of the authors of the Fregellan revolt (629-30). But the burgesses acquitted him; and now he too threw down the gauntlet, became a candidate for the tribuneship of the people, and was nominated to that office for the year 631 in an elective assembly attended by unusual numbers. War was thus declared. The democratic party, always poor in leaders of ability, had from sheer necessity remained virtually at rest for nine years; now the truce was at an end, and this time it was headed by a man who, with more honesty than Carbo and with more talent than Flaccus, was in every respect called to take the lead.
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
Alterations on the Constituion by Gaius Gracchus
Distribution of Grain
Change in the Order of Voting
Tiberius Gracchus had come before the burgesses with a single administrative reform. What Gaius introduced in a series of separate proposals was nothing else than an entirely new constitution; the foundation-stone of which was furnished by the innovation previously carried through, that a tribune of the people should be at liberty to solicit re-election for the following year.(8) While this step enabled the popular chief to acquire a permanent position and one which protected its holder, the next object was to secure for him material power or, in other words, to attach the multitude of
Agrarian Laws
Colony of Capua
Transmarine Colonialization
It is true that the Italian domain question was in a certain sense settled. The agrarian law of Tiberius and even theallotment-commission still continued legally in force; the agrarian law carried by Gracchus can have enacted nothing new save the restoration to the commissioners of the jurisdiction which they had lost. That the object of this step was only to save the principle, and that the distribution of lands, if resumed at all, was resumed only to a very limited extent, is shown by the burgess-roll, which gives exactly the same number of persons for the years 629 and 639. Gaius beyond doubt did not proceed further in this matter, because the domain-land taken into possession by Roman burgesses was already in substance distributed, and the question as to the domains enjoyed by the Latins could only be taken up anew in connection
Modifications of the Penal Law
To these measures having immediate reference to the great question of the proletariate there was added a series of enactments, which arose out of the general tendency to introduce principles milder and more accordant with the spirit of the age than the antiquated severity of the existing constitution. To this head belong the modifications in the military system. As to the length of the period of service there existed under the ancient law no other limit, except that no citizen was liable to ordinary service in the field before completing his seventeenth or after completing his forty-sixth year. When, in consequence of the occupation of Spain, the service began to become permanent,(13) it seems to have been first legally enacted that any one who had been in the field for six successive years acquired thereby a right to discharge, although this discharge did not protect him from being called out again afterwards. At a later period, perhaps about the beginning of this century, the rule arose, that a service of twenty years in the infantry or ten years in the cavalry gave exemption from further military service.(14) Gracchus renewed the rule—which presumably was often violently infringed—that no burgess should be enlisted in the army before the commencement of his eighteenth year; and also, apparently, restricted the number of campaigns requisite for full exemption from military duty. Besides, the clothing of the soldiers, the value of which had hitherto been deducted from their pay, was henceforward furnished gratuitously by the state.
To this head belongs, moreover, the tendency which is on various occasions apparent in the Gracchan legislation, if not to abolish capital punishment, at any rate to restrict it still further than had been done before—a tendency, which to some extent made itself felt even in military jurisdiction. From the very introduction of the republic the magistrate had lost the right of inflicting capital punishment on the burgess without consulting the community, except under martial law;(15) if this right of appeal by the burgess appears soon after the period of the Gracchi available even in the camp, and the right of the general to inflict capital punishments appears restricted to allies and subjects, the source of the change is probably to be sought in the law of Gaius Gracchus -de provocatione- But the right of the community to inflict or rather to confirm sentence of death was indirectly yet essentially limited by the fact, that Gracchus withdrew the cognizance of those public crimes which most frequently gave occasion to capital sentences—poisoning and murder generally— from the burgesses, and entrusted it to permanent judicial commissions. These could not, like the tribunals of the people, be broken up by the intercession of a tribune, and there not only lay no appeal from them to the community, but their sentences were as little subject to be annulled by the community as those of the long-established civil jurymen. In the burgess-tribunals it had, especially in strictly political processes, no doubt long been the rule that the accused remained at liberty during his trial, and was allowed by surrendering his burgess-rights to save at least life and freedom; for the fine laid on property, as well as the civil condemnation, might still affect even the exiled. But preliminary arrest and complete execution of the sentence remained in such cases at least legally possible, and were still sometimes carried into effect even against persons of rank; for instance, Lucius Hostilius Tubulus, praetor of 612, who was capitally impeached for a heinous crime, was refused the privilege of exile, arrested, and executed. On the other hand the judicial commissions, which originated out of the civil procedure, probably could not at the outset touch the liberty or life of the citizen, but at the most could only pronounce sentence of exile; this, which had hitherto been a mitigation of punishment accorded to one who was found guilty, now became for the first time a formal penalty This involuntary exile however, like the voluntary, left to the person banished his property, so far as it was not exhausted in satisfying claims for compensation and money-fines. Lastly, in the matter of debt Gaius Gracchus made no alteration; but very respectable authorities assert that he held out to those in debt the hope of a diminution or remission of claims—which, if it is correct, must likewise be reckoned among those radically popular measures.
Elevation of the Equestrian Order
While Gracchus thus leaned on the support of the multitude, which partly expected, partly received from him a material improvement of its position, he laboured with equal energy at the ruin of the aristocracy. Perceiving clearly how insecure was the rule of the head of the state built merely on the proletariate, he applied himself above all to split the aristocracy and to draw a part of it over to his interests. The elements of such a rupture were already in existence. The aristocracy of the rich, which had risen as one man against Tiberius Gracchus, consisted in fact of two essentially dissimilar bodies, which may be in some measure compared to the peerage and the city aristocracy of England. The one embraced the practically closed circle of the governing senatorial families who kept aloof from direct speculation and invested their immense capital partly in landed property, partly as sleeping partners in the great associations. The core of the second class was composed of the speculators, who, as managers of these companies, or on their own account, conducted the large mercantile and pecuniary transactions throughout the range of the Roman hegemony. We have already shown(16) how the latter class, especially in the course of the sixth century, gradually took its place by the side of the senatorial aristocracy, and how the legal exclusion of the senators from mercantile pursuits by the Claudian enactment, suggested by Gaius Flaminius the precursor of the Gracchi, drew an outward line of demarcation between the senators and the mercantile and moneyed men. In the present epoch the mercantile aristocracy began, under the name of the -equites-, to exercise a decisive influence in political affairs. This appellation, which originally belonged only to the burgess-cavalry on service, came gradually to be transferred, at any rate in ordinary use, to all those who, as possessors of an estate of at least 400,000 sesterces, were liable to cavalry service in general, and thus comprehended the whole of the upper society, senatorial and non-senatorial, in Rome. But not long before the time of Gaius Gracchus the law had declared a seat in the senate incompatible with service in the cavalry,(17) and the senators were thus eliminated from those qualified to be equites; and accordingly the equestrian order, taken as a whole, might be regarded as representing the aristocracy of speculators in contradistinction to the senate. Nevertheless those members of senatorial families who had not entered the senate, especially the younger members, did not cease to serve as equites and consequently to bear the name; and, in fact, the burgess-cavalry properly so called—that is, the eighteen equestrian centuries—in consequence of being made up by the censors continued to be chiefly filled up from the young senatorial aristocracy.(18)
This order of the equites—that is to say, substantially, of the wealthy merchants—in various ways came roughly into contact with the governing senate. There was a natural antipathy between the genteel aristocrats and the men to whom money had brought rank. The ruling lords, especially the better class of them, stood just as much aloof from speculations, as the men of material interests were indifferent to political questions and coterie-feuds. The two classes had already frequently come into sharp collision, particularly in the provinces; for, though in general the provincials had far more reason than the Roman capitalists had to complain of the partiality of the Roman magistrates, yet the ruling lords of the senate did not lend countenance to the greedy and unjust doings of the moneyed men, at the expense of the subjects, so thoroughly and absolutely as those capitalists desired. In spite of their concord in opposing a common foe such as was Tiberius Gracchus, a deep gulf lay between the nobility and the moneyed aristocracy; and Gaius, more adroit than his brother, enlarged it till the alliance was broken up and the mercantile class ranged itself on his side.
Insignia of the Equites
That the external privileges, through which afterwards the men of equestrian census were distinguished from the rest of the multitude— the golden finger-ring instead of the ordinary ring of iron or copper, and the separate and better place at the burgess-festivals—were first conferred on the equites by Gaius Gracchus, is not certain, but is not improbable. For they emerged at any rate about this period, and, as the extension of these hitherto mainly senatorial privileges(19) to the equestrian order which he brought into prominence was quite in the style of Gracchus, so it was in very truth his aim to impress on the equites the stamp of an order, similarly close and privileged, intermediate between the senatorial aristocracy and the common multitude; and this same aim was more promoted by those class-insignia, trifling though they were in themselves and though many qualified to be equites might not avail themselves of them, than by many an ordinance far more intrinsically important. But the party of material interests, though it by no means despised such honours, was yet not to be gained through these alone. Gracchus perceived well that it would doubtless duly fall to the highest bidder, but that it needed a high and substantial bidding; and so he offered to it the revenues of Asia and the jury courts.
Taxation of Asia
The system of Roman financial administration, under which the indirect taxes as well as the domain-revenues were levied by means of middlemen, in itself granted to the Roman capitalist-class the most extensive advantages at the expense of those liable to taxation. But the direct taxes consisted either, as in most provinces, of fixed sums of money payable by the communities—which of itself excluded the intervention of Roman capitalists—or,
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
Monarchical Government Substituted for That of the Senate
With his weapons—the proletariate and the mercantile class—thus prepared, Gracchus set about his main work, the overthrow of the ruling aristocracy. The overthrow of the senate meant, on the one hand, the depriving it of its essential functions by legislative alterations; and on the other hand, the ruining of the existing aristocracy by measures of a more personal and transient kind. Gracchus did both. The function of administration, in particular, had hitherto belonged exclusively to the senate; Gracchus took it away, partly by settling the most important administrative questions by means of comitial laws or, in other words, practically through tribunician dictation, partly by restricting the senate as much as possible in current affairs, partly by taking business after the most comprehensive fashion into his own hands. The measures of the former kind have been mentioned already: the new master of the state without consulting the senate dealt with the state-chest, by imposing a permanent and oppressive burden on the public finances in the distribution of corn; dealt with the domains, by sending out colonies not as hitherto by decree of the senate and people, but by decree of the people alone; and dealt with the provincial administration, by overturning through a law of the people the financial constitution given by the senate to the province of Asia and substituting for it one altogether different. One of the most important of the current duties of the senate—that of fixing at its pleasure the functions for the time
Character of the Constitution of Gaius Gracchus
This was the political constitution which Gaius Gracchus projected and, in its most essential points, carried out during the two years of his tribunate (631, 632), without, so far as we can see, encountering any resistance worthy of mention, and without requiring to apply force for the attainment of his ends. The order of sequence in which these measures were carried can no longer be recognized in the confused accounts handed down to us, and various questions that suggest themselves have to remain unanswered. But it does not seem as if, in what is missing, many elements of material importance have escaped us; for as to the principal matters we have quite trustworthy information, and Gaius was by no means, like his brother, urged on further and further by the current of events, but evidently had a well-considered and comprehensive plan, the substance of which he fully embodied in a series of special laws. Now the Sempronian constitution itself shows very clearly to every one who is able and willing to see, that Gaius Gracchus did not at all, as many good-natured people in ancient and modern times have supposed, wish to place the Roman republic on new democratic bases, but that on the contrary he wished to abolish it and to introduce in its stead a -tyrannis—– that is, in modern language, a monarchy not of the feudal or of the theocratic, but of the Napoleonic absolute, type—in the form of a magistracy continued for life by regular re-election and rendered absolute by an unconditional control over the formally sovereign comitia, an unlimited tribuneship of the people for life. In fact if Gracchus, as his words and still more his works plainly testify, aimed at the overthrow of the government of the senate, what other political organization but the -tyrannis- remained possible, after overthrowing the aristocratic government, in a commonwealth which had outgrown primary assemblies and for which parliamentary government did not exist? Dreamers such as was his predecessor, and knaves such as after-times produced, might call this in question; but Gaius Gracchus was a statesman, and though the formal shape, which that great man had inwardly projected for his great work, has not been handed down to us and may be conceived of very variously, yet he was beyond doubt aware of what he was doing. Little as the intention of usurping monarchical power can be mistaken, as little will those who survey the whole circumstances on this account blame Gracchus. An absolute monarchy is a great misfortune for a nation, but it is a less misfortune than an absolute oligarchy; and history cannot censure one who imposes on a nation the lesser suffering instead of the greater, least of all in the case of a nature so vehemently earnest and so far aloof from all that is vulgar as was that of Gaius Gracchus. Nevertheless it may not conceal the fact that his whole legislation was pervaded in a most pernicious way by conflicting aims; for on the
The Question As to the Allies
When Gracchus had substantially completed the new constitution projected by him for the state, he applied himself to a second and more difficult work. The question as to the Italian allies was still undecided. What were the views of the democratic leaders regarding it, had been rendered sufficiently apparent.(26) They naturally desired the utmost possible extension of the Roman franchise, not merely that they might bring in the domains occupied by the Latins for distribution, but above all that they might strengthen their body of adherents by the enormous mass of the new burgesses, might bring the comitial machine still more fully under their power by widening the body of privileged electors, and generally might abolish a distinction which had now with the fall of the republican constitution lost all serious importance. But here they encountered resistance from their own party, and especially from that band which otherwise readily gave its sovereign assent to all which it did or did not understand. For the simple reason that Roman citizenship seemed to these people, so to speak, like a partnership which gave them a claim to share in sundry very tangible profits, direct and indirect, they were not at all disposed to enlarge the number of the partners. The rejection of the Fulvian law in 629, and the insurrection of the Fregellans arising out of it, were significant indications both of the obstinate perseverance of the fraction of the burgesses that ruled the comitia, and of the impatient urgency of the allies. Towards the end of his second tribunate (632) Gracchus, probably urged by obligations which he had undertaken towards the allies, ventured on a second attempt. In concert with Marcus Flaccus—who, although a consular, had again taken the tribuneship of the people, in order now to carry the law which he had formerly proposed without success—he made a proposal to grant to the Latins the full franchise, and to the other Italian allies the former rights of the Latins. But the proposal encountered the united opposition of the senate and the mob of the capital. The nature of this coalition and its mode of conflict are clearly and distinctly seen from an accidentally preserved fragment of the speech which the consul Gaius Fannius made to the burgesses in opposition to the proposal. “Do you then think,” said the Optimate, “that, if you confer the franchise on the Latins, you will be able to find a place in future—just as you are now standing there in front of me—in the burgess-assembly, or at the games and popular amusements? Do you not believe, on the contrary, that those people will occupy every spot?” Among the burgesses of the fifth century, who on one day conferred the franchise on all the Sabines, such an orator might perhaps have been hissed; those of the seventh found his reasoning uncommonly clear and the price of the assignation of the Latin domains, which was offered to it by Gracchus, far too low. The very circumstance, that the senate carried a permission to eject from the city all non-burgesses before the day for the decisive vote, showed the fate in store for the proposal. And when before the voting Livius Drusus, a colleague of Gracchus, interposed his veto against the law, the people received the veto in such a way that Gracchus could not venture to proceed further or even to prepare for Drusus the fate of Marcus Octavius.
Overthrow of Gracchus
It was, apparently, this success which emboldened the senate to attempt the overthrow of the victorious demagogue. The weapons of attack were substantially the same with which Gracchus himself had formerly operated. The power of Gracchus rested on the mercantile class and the proletariate; primarily on the latter, which in this conflict, wherein neither side had any military reserve, acted as it were the part of an army. It was clear that the senate was not powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the proletariate their new privileges; any attempt to assail the corn-laws or the new jury-arrangement would have led, under a somewhat grosser or somewhat more civilized form, to a street-riot in presence of which the senate was utterly defenceless. But it was no less clear, that Gracchus himself and these merchants and proletarians were only kept together by mutual advantage, and that the men of material interests were ready to accept their posts, and the populace strictly so called its bread, quite as well from any other as from Gaius Gracchus. The institutions of Gracchus stood, for the moment at least, immoveably firm with the exception of a single one—his own supremacy. The weakness of the latter lay in the fact, that in the constitution of Gracchus there was no relation of allegiance subsisting at all between the chief and the army; and, while the new constitution possessed all other elements of vitality, it lacked one—the moral tie between ruler and ruled, without which every state rests on a pedestal of clay. In the rejection of the proposal to admit the Latins to the franchise it had been demonstrated with decisive clearness that the multitude in fact never voted for Gracchus, but always simply for itself. The aristocracy conceived the plan of offering battle to the author of the corn-largesses and land-assignations on his own ground.
Rival Demagogism of the Senate
The Livian Laws
As a matter of course, the senate offered to the proletariate not merely the same advantages as Gracchus had already assured to it in corn and otherwise, but advantages still greater. Commissioned by the senate, the tribune of the people Marcus Livius Drusus proposed to relieve those who received land under the laws of Gracchus from the rent imposed on them,(27) and to declare their allotments to be free and alienable property; and, further, to provide for the proletariate not in transmarine, but in twelve Italian, colonies, each of 3000 colonists, for the planting of which the people might nominate suitable men; only, Drusus himself declined—in contrast with the family-complexion of the Gracchan commission—to take part in this honourable duty. Presumably the Latins were named as those who would have to bear the costs of the plan, for there does not appear to have now existed in Italy other occupied domain-land of any extent save that which was enjoyed by them. We find isolated enactments of Drusus—
Attack on the Transmarine Colonialization
Downfall of Gracchus
Such an opportunity soon occurred. On the 10th of December, 632, Gracchus ceased to be tribune of the people; on the 1st of January, 633, Opimius entered on his office. The first attack, as was fair, was directed against the most useful and the most unpopular measure of Gracchus, the re-establishment of Carthage. While the transmarine colonies had hitherto been only indirectly assailed through the greater allurements of the Italian, African hyaenas, it was now alleged, dug up the newly-placed boundary-stones of Carthage, and the Roman priests, when requested, certified that
The Rule of the Restoration
Vacancy in the Government
The new structure, which Gaius Gracchus had reared, became on his death a ruin. His death indeed, like that of his brother, was primarily a mere act of vengeance; but it was at the same time a very material step towards the restoration of the old constitution, when the person of the monarch was taken away from the monarchy, just as it was on the point of being established. It was all the more so in the present instance, because after the fall of Gaius and the sweeping and bloody prosecutions of Opimius there existed at the moment absolutely no one, who, either by blood-relationship to the fallen chief of the state or by preeminent ability, might feel himself warranted in even attempting to occupy the vacant place. Gaius had departed from the world childless, and the son whom Tiberius had left behind him died before reaching manhood; the whole popular party, as it was called, was literally without any one who could be named as leader. The Gracchan constitution resembled a fortress without a commander; the walls and garrison were uninjured, but the general was wanting, and there was no one to take possession of the vacant place save the very government which had been overthrown.
The Restored Aristocracy
So it accordingly happened. After the decease of Gaius Gracchus without heirs, the government of the senate as it were spontaneously resumed its place; and this was the more natural, that it had not been, in the strict sense, formally abolished by the tribune, but had merely been reduced to a practical nullity by his exceptional proceedings. Yet we should greatly err, if we should discern in this restoration nothing further than a relapse of the state-machine into the old track which had been trodden and worn for centuries. Restoration is always revolution; but in this case it was not so much the old government as the old governor that was restored. The oligarchy made its appearance newly equipped in the armour of the -tyrannis- which had been overthrown. As the senate had beaten Gracchus from the field with his own weapons, so it continued in the most essential points to govern with the constitution of the Gracchi; though certainly with the ulterior idea, if not of setting it aside entirely, at any rate of thoroughly purging it in due time from the elements really hostile to the ruling aristocracy.
Prosecutions of the Democrats
At first the reaction was mainly directed against persons. Publius Popillius was recalled from banishment after the enactments relating to him had been cancelled (633), and a warfare of prosecution was waged against the adherents of Gracchus; whereas the attempt of the popular party to have Lucius Opimius after his resignation of office condemned for high treason was frustrated by the partisans of the government (634). The character of this government of the restoration is significantly indicated by the progress of the aristocracy in soundness of sentiment. Gaius Carbo, once the ally of the Gracchi, had for long been a convert,(1) and had but recently shown his zeal and his usefulness as defender of Opimius. But he remained the renegade; when the same accusation was raised against him by the democrats as against Opimius, the government were not unwilling to let him fall, and Carbo, seeing himself lost between the two parties, died by his own hand. Thus the men of the reaction showed themselves in personal questions pure aristocrats. But the reaction did not immediately attack the distributions of grain, the taxation of the province of Asia, or the Gracchan arrangement as to the jurymen and courts; on the contrary, it not only spared the mercantile class and the proletariate of the capital, but continued to render homage, as it had already done in the introduction of the Livian laws, to these powers and especially to the proletariate far more decidedly than had been done by the Gracchi. This course was not adopted merely because the Gracchan revolution still thrilled for long the minds of its contemporaries and protected its creations; the fostering and cherishing at least of the interests of the populace was in fact perfectly compatible with the personal advantage of the aristocracy, and thereby nothing further was sacrificed than merely the public weal.
The Domain Question under the Restoration
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 Italian domain-question was settled in a similar spirit. The Italian colonies of Gaius, especially Capua, were cancelled, and such of them as had already been planted were again broken up; only the unimportant one of Tarentum was allowed to subsist in the form of the new town Neptunia placed alongside of the former Greek community. So much of the domains as had already been distributed by non-colonial assignation remained in the hands of the recipients; the restrictions imposed on them by Gracchus in the interest of the commonwealth—the ground-rent and the prohibition of alienation—had already been abolished by Marcus Drusus. With reference on the other hand to the domains still possessed by right of occupation—which, over and above the domain-land enjoyed by the Latins, must have mostly consisted of the estates left with
The Proletariate and the Equestrian Order under the Restoration
While the restored government was thus careful thoroughly to eradicate the germs of improvement which existed in the Gracchan constitution, it remained completely powerless in presence of the hostile powers that had been, not for the general weal, aroused by Gracchus. The proletariate of the capital continued to have a recognized title to aliment; the senate likewise acquiesced in the taking of the jurymen from the mercantile order, repugnant though this yoke was to the better and prouder portion of the aristocracy. The fetters which the aristocracy wore did not beseem its dignity; but we do not find that it seriously set itself to get rid of them. The law of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus in 632, which at least enforced the constitutional restrictions on the suffrage of freedmen, was for long the only attempt—and that a very tame one—on the part of the senatorial government once more to restrain their mob-tyrants. The proposal, which the consul Quintus Caepio seventeen years after the introduction of the equestrian tribunals (648) brought in for again entrusting the trials to senatorial jurymen, showed what the government wished; but showed also how little it could do, when the question was one not of squandering domains but of carrying a measure in the face of an influential order. It broke down.(5) The government was not emancipated from the inconvenient associates who shared its power; but these measures probably contributed still further to disturb the never sincere agreement of the ruling aristocracy with the merchant-class and the proletariate. Both were very well aware, that the senate granted all its concessions only from fear and with reluctance; permanently attached to the rule of the senate by considerations neither of gratitude nor of interest, both were very ready to render similar services to any other master who offered them more or even as much, and had no objection, if an opportunity occurred, to cheat or to thwart the senate. Thus the restoration continued to govern with the desires and sentiments of a legitimate aristocracy, and with the constitution and means of government of a -tyrannis-. Its rule not only rested on the same bases as that of Gracchus, but it was equally ill, and in fact still worse, consolidated; it was strong, when in league with the populace it overthrew serviceable institutions, but it was utterly powerless, when it had to face the bands of the streets or the interests of the merchants. It sat on the vacated throne with an evil conscience and divided hopes, indignant at the institutions of the state which it ruled and yet incapable of even systematically assailing them, vacillating in all its conduct except where its own material advantage prompted a decision, a picture of faithlessness towards its own as well as the opposite party, of inward inconsistency, of the most pitiful impotence, of the meanest selfishness—an unsurpassed ideal of misrule.
The Men of the Restoration
It could not be otherwise; the whole nation was in a state of intellectual and moral decline, but especially the upper classes. The aristocracy before the period of the Gracchi was truly not over-rich in talent, and the benches of the senate were crowded by a pack of cowardly and dissolute nobles; nevertheless there sat in it Scipio Aemilianus, Gaius Laelius, Quintus Metellus, Publius Crassus, Publius Scaevola and numerous other respectable and able men, and an observer favourably predisposed might be of opinion that the senate maintained a certain moderation in injustice and a certain decorum in misgovernment. This aristocracy had been overthrown and then reinstated; henceforth there rested on it the curse of restoration. While the aristocracy had formerly governed for good or ill, and for more than a century without any sensible opposition, the crisis which it had now passed through revealed to it, like a flash of lightning in a dark night, the abyss which yawned before its feet. Was it any wonder that henceforward rancour always, and terror wherever they durst, characterized the government of the lords of the old nobility? that those who governed confronted as an united and compact party, with far more sternness and violence than hitherto, the non-governing multitude? that family-policy now prevailed once more, just as in the worst times of the patriciate, so that e. g. the four sons and (probably) the two nephews of Quintus Metellus—with a single exception persons utterly insignificant and some of them called to office on account of their very simplicity—attained within fifteen years (631-645) all of them to the consulship, and all with one exception also to triumphs—to say nothing of sons-in-law and so forth? that the more violent and cruel the bearing of any of their partisans towards the opposite party, he received the more signal honour, and every outrage and every infamy were pardoned in the genuine aristocrat? that the rulers and the ruled resembled two parties at war in every respect, save in the fact that in their warfare no international law was recognized? It was unhappily only too palpable that, if the old aristocracy beat the people with rods, this restored aristocracy chastised it with scorpions. It returned to power; but it returned neither wiser nor better. Never hitherto had the Roman aristocracy been so utterly deficient in men of statesmanly and military capacity, as it was during this epoch of restoration between the Gracchan and the Cinnan revolutions.
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus
A significant illustration of this is afforded by the chief of the senatorial party at this time, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. The son of highly aristocratic but not wealthy parents, and thus compelled to make use of his far from mean talents, he raised himself to the consulship (639) and censorship (645), was long the chief of the senate and the political oracle of his order, and immortalized his name not only as
Administration under the Restoration
Social State of Italy
The administration, internal and external, was what was to be expected under such a government. The social ruin of Italy spread with alarming rapidity; since the aristocracy had given itself legal permission to buy out the small holders, and in its new arrogance allowed itself with growing frequency to drive them out, the farms disappeared like raindrops in the sea. That the economic oligarchy at least kept pace with the political, is shown by the opinion expressed about 650 by Lucius Marcius Philippus, a man of moderate democratic views, that there were among the whole burgesses hardly 2000 families of substantial means. A practical commentary on this state of things was once more furnished by the servile insurrections, which during the first years of the Cimbrian war broke out annually in Italy, e. g. at Nuceria, at Capua, and in the territory of Thurii. This last conspiracy was so important that the urban praetor had to march with a legion against it and yet overcame the insurrection
The Provinces
Occupation of Cilicia
The provinces suffered still more in comparison. We shall have an idea of the condition of Sicily and Asia, if we endeavour to realize what would be the aspect of matters in the East Indies provided the English aristocracy were similar to the Roman aristocracy of that day. The legislation, which entrusted the mercantile class with control over the magistrates, compelled the latter to make common cause to a certain extent with the former, and to purchase for themselves unlimited liberty of plundering and protection from impeachment by unconditional indulgence towards the capitalists in the provinces. In addition to these official and semi-official robbers, freebooters and pirates pillaged all the countries of the Mediterranean. In the Asiatic waters more especially the buccaneers carried their outrages so far that even the Roman government found itself under the necessity in 652 of despatching to Cilicia a fleet, mainly composed of the vessels of the dependent mercantile cities, under the praetor Marcus Antonius, who was invested with proconsular powers. This fleet captured a number of corsair-vessels and destroyed some rock-strongholds and not only so, but the Romans even settled themselves permanently there, and in order to the suppression of piracy in its chief seat, the Rugged or western Cilicia occupied strong military positions—the first step towards the establishment of the province of Cilicia, which thenceforth appears among the Roman magistracies.(7) The design was commendable, and the scheme in itself was suitable for its purpose; only, the continuance and the increase of the evil of piracy in the Asiatic waters, and especiallyin Cilicia, unhappily showed with how inadequate means the pirates were combated from the newly-acquired position.
Revolt of the Slaves
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.
The Second Sicilian Slave-War
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.
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,
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.
The Dependent States
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
The kingdom of Numidia stretched from the river Molochath to the great Syrtis,(9) bordering on the one side with the Mauretanian kingdom of Tingis (the modern Morocco) and on the other with Cyrene and Egypt, and surrounding on the west, south, and east the narrow district of coast which formed the Roman province of Africa. In addition to the old possessions of the Numidian chiefs, it embraced by far the greatest portion of the territory which Carthage had possessed in Africa during the times of its prosperity—including several important Old-Phoenician cities, such as Hippo Regius (Bona) and Great Leptis (Lebidah)—altogether the largest and best part of the rich seaboard of northern Africa. Numidia was beyond question, next to Egypt, the most considerable of all the Roman client-states. After the death of Massinissa (605), Scipio had divided the sovereign functions of that prince among his three sons, the kings Micipsa, Gulussa, and Mastanabal, in such a way that the firstborn obtained the residency and the state-chest, the second the charge of war, and the third the administration of justice.(10) Now after the death of his two brothers Massinissa’s eldest son, Micipsa,(11) reigned alone, a feeble peaceful old man, who was fond of occupying himself more with the study of Greek philosophy than with affairs of state. As his sons were not yet grown up, the reins of government were practically held by an illegitimate nephew of the king, the prince Jugurtha. Jugurtha was no unworthy grandson of Massinissa. He was a handsome man and a skilled and courageous rider and hunter; his countrymen held him in high honour as a clear and sagacious administrator, and he had displayed his military ability as leader of the Numidian contingent before Numantia under the eyes of Scipio. His position in the kingdom, and the influence which he possessed with the Roman government by means of his numerous friends and war-comrades, made it appear to king Micipsa advisable to adopt him (634), and to arrange in his testament that his own two elder sons Adherbal and Hiempsal, and his adopted son Jugurtha along with them, should jointly inherit and govern the kingdom, just as he himself had done with his two brothers. For greater security this arrangement was placed under the guarantee of the Roman government.
The War for the Numidian Succession
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
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
Roman Intervention
Treaty between Rome and Numidia
A cry of indignation rose throughout Italy. The minority in the senate itself and every one out of the senate unanimously condemned the government, with whom the honour and interest of the country seemed mere commodities for sale; loudest of all was the outcry of the mercantile class, which was most directly affected by the sacrifice of the Roman and Italian merchants at Cirta. It is true that the majority of the senate still even now struggled; they appealed to the class-interests of the aristocracy, and set in motion all the contrivances of collegiate procrastination, with a view to preserve still longer the peace which they loved. But when Gaius Memmius, designated as tribune of the people for next year, an active and eloquent man, brought the matter publicly forward and threatened in his capacity of tribune to call the worst offenders to judicial account, the senate permitted war to be declared against Jugurtha (642-3). The step seemed taken in earnest. The envoys of Jugurtha were dismissed from Italy without being admitted to an audience; the new consul Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, who was distinguished, among the members of his order at least, by judgment and activity, prosecuted the warlike preparations with energy; Marcus Scaurus himself took the post of a commander in the African army. In a short time a Roman army was on African ground, and marching upward along the Bagradas (Mejerdah) advanced into the Numidian kingdom, where the towns most remote from the seat of the royal power, such as Great Leptis, already voluntarily sent in their submission, while Bocchus king of Mauretania, although his daughter was married to Jugurtha, offered friendship and alliance to the Romans. Jugurtha himself lost courage, and sent envoys to the Roman headquarters to request an armistice. The end of the contest seemed near, and came still more rapidly than was expected. The treaty with Bocchus broke down, because the king, unacquainted with Roman customs, had conceived that he should be able to conclude a treaty so advantageous for the Romans without any gratuity, and therefore had neglected to furnish his envoys with the usual market price of Roman alliances. Jugurtha at all events knew Roman institutions better, and had not omitted to support his proposals for an armistice by a due accompaniment of money; but he too was deceived.
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.
Cancelling of the Treaty
Declaration of War
Capitulation of the Romans
Second Peace
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).
Dissatisfaction in the Capital
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
Cancelling of the Second Treaty
Metellus Appointed to the Command
Renewal of the War
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
Metellus led it over the Numidian frontier. When Jugurtha perceived the altered state of things, he gave himself up as lost, and, before the struggle began, made earnest proposals for an accommodation, requesting ultimately nothing more than a guarantee for his life. Metellus, however, was resolved and perhaps even instructed not to terminate the war except with the unconditional subjugation and execution of the daring client-prince; which was in fact the only issue that could satisfy the Romans. Jugurtha since the victory over Albinus was regarded as the deliverer of Libya from the rule of the hated foreigners; unscrupulous and cunning as he was, and unwieldy as was the Roman government, he might at any time even after a peace rekindle the war in his native country; tranquillity would not be secured, and the removal of the African army would not be possible, until king Jugurtha should cease to exist. Officially Metellus gave evasive answers to the proposals of the king; secretly he instigated the envoys to deliver their master living or dead to the Romans. But, when the Roman general undertook to compete with the African in the field of assassination, he there met his master; Jugurtha saw through the plan, and, when he could not do otherwise, prepared for a desperate resistance.
Battle on the Muthul
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
Numidia Occupied by the Romans
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
War in the Desert
Mauretanian Complications
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
Thereupon Metellus left the province, which he had been compelled by decree of the people to give up to his former lieutenant Marius who was now consul; and the latter assumed the supreme command for the next campaign in 648. He was indebted for it in some degree to a revolution. Relying on the services which he had rendered and at the same time on oracles which had been communicated to him, he had resolved to come forward as a candidate for the consulship. If the aristocracy had supported the constitutional, and in other respects quite justifiable, candidature of this able man, who was not at all inclined to take part with the opposition, nothing would have come of the matter but the enrolment of a new family in the consular Fasti. Instead of this the man
Conflicts without Result
Accordingly he took the place of Metellus in the course of 647; and held the command in the campaign of the following year; but his confident promise to do better than his predecessor and to deliver Jugurtha bound hand and foot with all speed at Rome was more easily given than fulfilled. Marius carried on a desultory warfare with the Gaetulians; he reduced several towns that had not previously been occupied; he undertook an expedition to Capsa (Gafsa) in the extreme south-east of the kingdom, which surpassed even that of Thala in difficulty, took the town by capitulation, and in spite of the convention caused all the adult men in it to be slain—the only means, no doubt, of preventing the renewed revolt of that remote city of the desert; he attacked a mountain-stronghold—situated on the river Molochath, which separated the Numidian territory from the Mauretanian—whither Jugurtha had conveyed his treasure-chest, and, just as he was about to desist from the siege in despair of success, fortunately gained possession of the impregnable fastness through the coup de main of some daring climbers.
Negotiations with Bocchus
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
Surrender and Execution of Jugurtha
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
Reorganization of Numidia
Otherwise, this insurrection of the Numidian client-state passed away without producing any noticeable change either in political relations generally or even in those of the African province. By a deviation from the policy elsewhere followed at this period Numidia was not converted into a Roman province; evidently because the country could not be held without an army to protect the frontier against the barbarians of the desert, and the Romans were by no means disposed to maintain a standing army in Africa. They contented themselves accordingly with annexing the most westerly district of Numidia, probably the tract from the river Molochath to the harbour of Saldae (Bougie)—the later Mauretania Caesariensis (province of Algiers)—to the kingdom of Bocchus, and with handing over the kingdom of Numidia thus diminished to the last legitimate grandson of Massinissa still surviving, Gauda the half-brother of Jugurtha, feeble in body and mind, who had already in 646 at the suggestion of Marius asserted his claims before the senate.(15) At the same time the Gaetulian tribes in the interior of Africa were received as free allies into the number of the independent nations that had treaties with Rome.
Political Issues
Of greater importance than this regulation of African clientship were the political consequences of the Jugurthine war or rather of the Jugurthine insurrection, although these have been frequently estimated too highly. Certainly all the evils of the government were therein brought to light in all their nakedness; it was now not merely notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal—the treaty of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself. But the whole external and internal
The Peoples of the North
Relations of Rome to the North
The Country between the Alps and the Pyrenees
Conflicts with the Ligurians and the Salassi
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.
Transalpine Relations of Rome
The Arverni
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
War with Allobroges and Arverni
The attack of Flaccus, however, fell in the first instance not on the Arverni, but on the smaller tribes in the district between the Alps and the Rhone, where the original Ligurian inhabitants had become mixed with subsequent arrivals of Celtic bands, and there had arisen a Celto-Ligurian population that may in this respect be compared to the Celtiberian. He fought (629, 630) with success against the Salyes or Salluvii in the region of Aix and in the valley of the Durance, and against their northern neighbours the Vocontii (in the departments of Vaucluse and Drome); and so did his successor Gaius Sextius Calvinus (631, 632) against the Allobroges, a powerful Celtic clan in the rich valley of the Isere, which had come at the request of the fugitive king of the Salyes, Tutomotulus, to help him to reconquer his land, but was defeated in the district of Aix. When the Allobroges nevertheless refused to surrender the king of the Salyes, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, the successor of Calvinus, penetrated into their own territory (632). Up to this period the leading Celtic tribe had been spectators of the encroachments of their Italian neighbours; the Arvernian king Betuitus, son of the Luerius already mentioned, seemed not much inclined to enter on a dangerous war for the sake of the loose relation of clientship in which the eastern cantons might stand to him. But when the Romans showed signs of attacking the Allobroges in their own territory, he offered his mediation, the rejection of which was followed by his taking the field with all his forces to help the Allobroges; whereas the Haedui embraced the side of the Romans. On receiving accounts of the rising of the Arverni, the Romans sent the consul of 633, Quintus Fabius Maximus, to meet in concert with Ahenobarbus
Province of Narbo
The result of these military operations was the institution of a new Roman province between the maritime Alps and the Pyrenees. All the tribes between the Alps and the Rhone became dependent on the Romans and, so far as they did not pay tribute to Massilia, presumably became now tributary to Rome. In the country between the Rhone and the Pyrenees the Arverni retained freedom and were not bound to pay tribute to the Romans; but they had to cede to Rome the most southerly portion of their direct or indirect territory-the district to the south of the Cevennes as far as the Mediterranean, and the upper course of the Garonne as far as Tolosa (Toulouse). As the primary object of these occupations was the establishment of a land communication between Italy and Spain, arrangements were made immediately thereafter for the construction of the road along the coast. For this purpose a belt of coast from the Alps to the Rhone, from 1 to 1 3/4 of a mile in breadth, was handed over to the Massiliots, who already had a series of maritime stations along this coast, with the obligation of keeping the road in proper condition; while from the Rhone to the Pyrenees the Romans themselves laid out a military highway, which obtained from its originator Ahenobarbus the name of the -Via Domitia-.
Roman Settlements in the Region of the Rhone
As usual, the formation of new fortresses was combined with the construction of roads. In the eastern portion the Romans chose the spot where Gaius Sextius had defeated the Celts, and where the pleasantness and fertility of the region as well as the numerous hot and cold springs invited them to settlement; a Roman township sprang up there—the “baths of Sextius,” Aquae Sextiae (Aix). To the west of the Rhone the Romans settled in Narbo, an ancient Celtic town on the navigable river Atax (Aude) at a small distance from the sea, which is already mentioned by Hecataeus, and which even before its occupation by the Romans vied with Massilia as a place of stirring commerce, and as sharing the trade in British tin. Aquae did not obtain civic rights, but remained a standing camp;(4) whereas Narbo, although in like manner founded mainly as a watch and outpost against the Celts, became as “Mars’ town,” a Roman burgess-colony and the usual seat of the governor of the new Transalpine Celtic province or, as it was more frequently called, the province of Narbo.
The Advance of the Romans Checked by the Policy of the Restoration
The Gracchan party, which suggested these extensions of territory beyond the Alps, evidently wished to open up there a new and immeasurable field for their plans of colonization,—a field which offered the same advantages as Sicily and Africa, and could be more easily wrested from the natives than he Sicilian and Libyan estates from the Italian capitalists. The fall of Gaius Gracchus, no doubt, made itself felt here also in the restriction of acquisitions of territory and still more of the founding of towns; but, if the design was not carried out in its full extent, it was at any rate not wholly frustrated. The territory acquired and, still more, the foundation of Narbo—a settlement for which the senate vainly endeavoured to prepare the fate of that at Carthage—remained standing as parts of an unfinished structure, exhorting the future successor of Gracchus to continue the building. It is evident that the Roman mercantile class, which was able to compete with Massilia in the Gallo-Britannic traffic at Narbo alone, protected that settlement from the assaults of the Optimates.
Illyria
Dalmatians
Their Subjugation
A problem similar to that in the north-west had to be dealt with in the north-east of Italy; it was in like manner not wholly neglected, but was solved still more imperfectly than the former. With the foundation of Aquileia (571) the Istrian peninsula came into possession of the Romans;(5) in part of Epirus and the former territory of the lords of Scodra they had already ruled for some considerable time previously. But nowhere did their dominion reach into the interior; and even on the coast they exercised scarcely a nominal sway over the inhospitable shore-belt between Istria and Epirus, which, with its wild series of mountain-caldrons
The Romans in Macedonia and Thrace
But this very conversion of Macedonia into a province directly dependent on Rome gave to the relations of Rome with the peoples on the north-east greater importance, by imposing on the Romans the obligation of defending the everywhere exposed frontier on the north and east against the adjacent barbarian tribes; and in a similar way not long afterwards (621) the acquisition by Rome of the Thracian Chersonese (peninsula of Gallipoli)
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
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.
Conflicts on the Frontier
In the Alps
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
In Thrace
On the opposite Thracian frontier they appear to have given themselves little concern about their neighbours; except that there is mention made in 651 of conflicts with the Thracians, and in 657 of others with the Maedi in the border mountains between Macedonia and 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 expedition of the consul of 639, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, against the Taurisci(12) presented more the character of a war of conquest. He was the first of the Romans to cross the chain of the eastern Alps where it falls lowest between Trieste and Laybach, and contracted hospitable relations with the Taurisci; which secured a not unimportant commercial intercourse without involving the Romans, as a formal subjugation would have involved them, in the movements of the peoples to the north of the Alps. Of the conflicts with the Scordisci, which have passed almost wholly into oblivion, a page, which speaks clearly even in its isolation, has recently been brought to light through a memorial stone from the year 636 lately discovered in the neighbourhood of Thessalonica. According to it, in this year the governor of Macedonia Sextus Pompeius fell near Argos (not far from Stobi on the upper Axius or Vardar) in a battle fought with these Celts; and, after his quaestor Marcus Annius had come up with his troops and in some measure mastered the enemy, these same Celts in connection with Tipas the king of the Maedi (on the upper Strymon) soon made a fresh irruption in still larger masses, and it was with difficulty that the Romans defended themselves against the onset of the barbarians.(13) Things soon assumed so threatening a shape that it became necessary to despatch consular armies to Macedonia.(14) A few years afterwards the consul of 640 Gaius Porcius Cato was surprised in the Servian mountains by the same Scordisci, and his army completely destroyed, while he himself with a few attendants disgracefully fled; with difficulty the praetor Marcus Didius protected the Roman frontier. His successors fought with better fortune, Gaius Metellus Caprarius (641-642), Marcus Livius Drusus (642-643), the first Roman general to reach the Danube, and Quintus Minucius Rufus (644-647) who carried his arms along the Morava(15) and thoroughly defeated the Scordisci. Nevertheless they soon afterwards in league with the Maedi and the Dardani invaded the Roman territory and plundered even the sanctuary at Delphi; it was not till then that Lucius Scipio put an end to the thirty-two years’ warfare with the Scordisci and drove the remnant over to the left bank of the Danube.(16) Thenceforth in their stead the just-named Dardani (in Servia) begin to play the first part in the territory between the northern frontier of Macedonia and 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.
Cimbrian Movements and Conflicts
Defeat of Carbo
This homeless people of the Cimbri, which hitherto had been prevented from advancing to the south by the Celts on the Danube, more especially by the Boii, broke through that barrier in consequence of the attacks directed by the Romans against the Danubian Celts; either because the latter invoked the aid of their Cimbrian antagonists against the advancing legions, or because the Roman attack prevented them from protecting as hitherto their northern frontiers. Advancing through the territory of the Scordisci into the Tauriscan country, they approached in 641 the passes of the Carnian Alps, to protect which the consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo took up a position on the heights not far from Aquileia. Here, seventy years before, Celtic tribes had attempted to settle on the south of the Alps, but at the bidding of the Romans had evacuated without resistance the ground which they had already occupied;(18) even now the dread of the Transalpine peoples at the Roman name showed itself strongly. The Cimbri did not attack; indeed, when Carbo ordered them to evacuate the territory of the Taurisci who were in relations of hospitality with Rome—an order which the treaty with the latter by no means bound him to make—they complied and followed the guides whom Carbo had assigned to them to escort them over the frontier. But these guides were in fact instructed to lure the Cimbri into an ambush, where the consul awaited them. Accordingly an engagement took place not far from Noreia in the modern Carinthia, in which the betrayed gained the victory over the betrayer and inflicted on him considerable loss; a storm, which separated the combatants, alone prevented the complete annihilation of the Roman army. The Cimbri might have immediately directed their attack towards Italy; they preferred to turn to the westward. By treaty with the Helvetii and the Sequani rather than by force of arms they made their way to the left bank of the Rhine and over the Jura, and there some years after the defeat of Carbo once more threatened the Roman territory by their immediate vicinity.
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.
Inroad of the Helvetii into Southern Gaul
Defeat of Longinus
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.
But, as the Cimbri continued to employ themselves elsewhere, and the Helvetii did not further molest for the moment the Roman province, the new Roman commander-in-chief, Quintus Servilius Caepio, had full time to recover possession of the town of Tolosa by treachery and to empty at leisure the immense treasures accumulated in the old and famous sanctuary of the Celtic Apollo. It was a desirable gain for the embarrassed exchequer, but unfortunately the gold and silver vessels on the way from Tolosa to Massilia were taken from the weak escort by a band of robbers, and totally disappeared: the consul himself and his staff were, it was alleged, the instigators of this onset (648). Meanwhile they confined themselves to the strictest defensive as regarded the chief enemy, and guarded the Roman province with three strong armies, till it should please the Cimbri to repeat their attack.
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
The Roman Opposition
Warfare of Prosecutions
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.
It was against Quintus Caepio that their attacks were first directed; and justly, in so far as he had primarily occasioned the defeat of Arausio by his insubordination, even apart from the probably well-founded but not proved charge of embezzling the Tolosan booty; but the fury which the opposition displayed against him was essentially augmented by the fact, that he had as consul ventured on an attempt to wrest the posts of jurymen from the capitalists.(22) On his account the old venerable principle, that the sacredness of the magistracy should be respected even in the person of its worst occupant, was violated; and, while the censure due to the author of the calamitous day of Cannae had been silently repressed within the breast, the author of the defeat of Arausio was by decree of the people unconstitutionally deprived of his proconsulship, and—what had not occurred since the crisis in which the monarchy had perished—his property was confiscated to the state-chest (649?). Not long afterwards he was by a second decree of the burgesses expelled from the senate (650). But this was not enough; more victims were desired, and above all Caepio’s blood. A number of tribunes of the people favourable to the opposition, with Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Gaius Norbanus at their head, proposed in 651 to appoint an extraordinary judicial commission in reference to the embezzlement and treason perpetrated in Gaul; in spite of the de facto abolition of arrest during investigation and of the punishment of death for political offences, Caepio was arrested and the intention of pronouncing and executing in his case sentence of death was openly expressed. The government party attempted to get rid of the proposal by tribunician intervention; but the interceding tribunes were violently driven from the assembly, and in the furious tumult the first men of the senate were assailed with stones. The investigation could not be prevented, and the warfare of prosecutions pursued its course in 651 as it had done six years before; Caepio himself, his colleague in the supreme command Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, and numerous other men of note were condemned: a tribune of the people, who was a friend of Caepio, with difficulty succeeded by the sacrifice of his own civic existence in saving at least the life of the chief persons accused.(23)
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
Roman Defensive
The new commander-in-chief, Gaius Marius, appeared in 650 beyond the Alps, followed by a number of experienced officers—among whom the bold captor of Jugurtha, Lucius Sulla, soon acquired fresh distinction— and by a numerous host of Italian and allied soldiers. At first he did not find the enemy against whom he was sent. The singular people, who had conquered at Arausio, had in the meantime (as we have already mentioned), after plundering the country to the west of the Rhone, crossed the Pyrenees and were carrying on a desultory warfare in Spain with the brave inhabitants of the northern coast and of the interior; it seemed as if the Germans wished at their very first appearance in the field of history to display their lack of persistent grasp. So Marius found ample time on the one hand to reduce the revolted Tectosages to obedience, to confirm afresh the wavering fidelity of the subject
The Cimbri, Teutones, and Helvetii Unite
Expedition to Italy Resolved on
Teutones in the Province of Gaul
At length, apparently in the course of 651, the wave of the Cimbri, after having broken itself in Spain on the brave resistance of the native tribes and especially of the Celtiberians, flowed back again over the Pyrenees and thence, as it appears, passed along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, where everything from the Pyrenees to the Seine submitted to the terrible invaders. There, on the confines of the brave confederacy of the Belgae, they first encountered serious resistance; but there also, while they were in the territory of the Vellocassi (near Rouen), considerable reinforcements reached them. Not only three cantons of the Helvetii, including the Tigorini and Tougeni who had formerly fought against the Romans at the Garonne, associated themselves, apparently about this period, with the Cimbri, but these were also joined by the kindred Teutones under their king Teutobod, who had been driven by events which tradition has not recorded from their home on the Baltic sea to appear now on the Seine.(24) But even the united hordes were unable to overcome the brave resistance of the Belgae. The leaders accordingly resolved, now that their numbers were thus swelled, to enter in all earnest on the expedition to Italy which they had several times contemplated. In order not to encumber themselves with the spoil which they had heretofore collected, they left it behind under the protection of a division of 6000 men, which after many wanderings subsequently gave rise to the tribe of the Aduatuci on the Sambre. But, whether from the difficulty of finding supplies on the Alpine routes or from other reasons, the mass again broke up into two hosts, one of which, composed of the Cimbri and Tigorini, was to recross the Rhine and to invade Italy through the passes of the eastern Alps already reconnoitred in 641, and the other, composed of the newly-arrived Teutones, the Tougeni, and the Ambrones—the flower of the Cimbrian host already tried in the battle of Arausio—was to invade Italy through Roman Gaul and the western passes. It was this second division, which in the summer of 652 once more crossed the Rhone without
Battle of Aquae Sextiae
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.
Battle on the Raudine Plain
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.
The Victory and the Parties
The political parties of Rome continued their pitiful quarrels over the carcase, without troubling themselves about the great chapter in the world’s history the first page of which was thus opened, without even giving way to the pure feeling that on this day Rome’s aristocrats as well as Rome’s democrats had done their duty. The rivalry of the two generals—who were not only political antagonists, but were also set at variance in a military point of view by the so different results of the two campaigns of the previous year—broke out immediately after the battle in the most offensive form. Catulus might with justice assert that the centre division which he commanded had decided the victory, and that his troops had captured thirty-one standards, while those of Marius had brought in only two, his soldiers led even the deputies of the town of Parma through the heaps of the dead to show to them that Marius had slain his thousand, but Catulus his ten thousand. Nevertheless Marius was regarded as the real conqueror of the Cimbri, and justly; not merely because by virtue of his higher rank he had held the chief command on the decisive
The Attempt of Marius at Revolution and the Attempt of Drusus at Reform
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
Political Position of Marius
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
The New Military Organization
He held in his hand a formidable weapon in the newly organized army. Previously to his time the fundamental principle of the Servian constitution—by which the levy was limited entirely to the burgesses possessed of property, and the distinctions as to armour were regulated solely by the property qualification(2)—had necessarily been in various respects relaxed. The minimum census of 11,000 -asses- (43 pounds), which bound its possessor to enter the burgess-army, had been lowered to 4000 (17 pounds;(3)). The older six property-classes, distinguished by their respective kinds of armour, had been restricted to three; for, while in accordance with the Servian organization they selected the cavalry from the wealthiest, and the light-armed from the poorest, of those liable to serve, they arranged the middle class, the proper infantry of the line, no longer according to property but according to age of service, in the three divisions of -hastati-, -principes-, and -triarii-. They had, moreover, long ago brought in the Italian allies to share to a very great extent in war-service; but in their case too, just as among the Roman burgesses, military duty was chiefly imposed on the propertied classes. Nevertheless the Roman military system down to the time of Marius rested in the main on that
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
Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform
This complete revolution in the constitution of the Roman army seems certainly in substance to have originated from purely military motives; and on the whole to have been not so much the work of an individual, least of all of a man of calculating ambition, as the remodelling which the force of circumstances enjoined in arrangements which had become untenable. It is probable that the introduction of the system of inland enlistment by Marius saved the state in a military point of view from destruction, just as several centuries afterwards Arbogast and Stilicho prolonged its existence for a time by the introduction of foreign enlistment. Nevertheless, it involved a complete—although not yet developed—political revolution. The republican constitution was essentially based on the view that the citizen was at the same time a soldier, and that the soldier was above all a citizen; there was an end of it, so soon as a soldier-class was formed. To this issue the new system of drill, with its routine borrowed from the professional gladiator, could not but lead; the military service became gradually a profession. Far more rapid was the effect of the admission—though but limited—of the proletariate to participate in military service; especially in connection with the primitive maxims, which conceded to the general an arbitrary right of rewarding his soldiers compatible only with very solid republican institutions, and gave to the capable and successful soldier a sort
Political Projects of Marius
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
For the execution of his task two methods of operation offered themselves; Marius might attempt to overthrow the oligarchy either as -imperator- at the head of the army, or in the mode prescribed by the constitution for constitutional changes: his own past career pointed to the former course, the precedent of Gracchus to the latter. It is easy to understand why he did not adopt the former plan, perhaps did not even think of the possibility of adopting it The senate was or seemed so powerless and helpless, so hated and despised, that Marius conceived himself scarcely to need any other support in opposing it than his immense popularity, but hoped in case of necessity to find such a support, notwithstanding the dissolution of the army, in the soldiers discharged and waiting for their rewards. It is probable that Marius, looking to Gracchus’ easy and apparently almost complete victory and to his own resources far surpassing those of Gracchus, deemed the overthrow of a constitution four hundred years old, and intimately bound up with the manifold habits and interests of the body-politic arranged in a complicated hierarchy, a far easier task than it was. But any one, who looked more deeply into the difficulties of the enterprise than Marius probably did, might reflect that the army, although in the course of transition from a militia to a body of mercenaries, was still during this state of transition by no means adapted for the blind instrument of a coup d’etat, and that an attempt to set aside the resisting elements by military means would have probably augmented the power of resistance in his antagonists. To mix up the organized armed force in the struggle could not but appear at the first glance superfluous and at the second hazardous; they were just at the beginning of the crisis, and the antagonistic elements were still far from having reached their last, shortest, and simplest expression.
The Popular Party
Marius therefore discharged the army after his triumph in accordance with the existing regulation, and entered on the course traced out by Gaius Gracchus for procuring to himself supremacy in the state by undertaking its constitutional magistracies. In this enterprise he found himself dependent for support on what was called the popular party, and sought his allies in its leaders for the time being all the more, that the victorious general by no means possessed the gifts and experiences requisite for the command of the streets. Thus the democratic party after long insignificance suddenly regained political importance. It had, in the long interval from Gaius Gracchus to Marius, materially deteriorated. Perhaps the dissatisfaction with the senatorial government was not now less than it was then; but several of the hopes, which had brought to the Gracchi their most faithful adherents, had in the meanwhile been recognized as illusory, and there had sprung up in many minds a misgiving that this Gracchan agitation tended towards an issue whither a very large portion of the discontented were by no means willing to follow it. In fact, amidst the chase and turmoil of twenty years there had been rubbed off and worn away very much of the fresh enthusiasm, the steadfast faith, the moral purity of effort, which mark the early stages of revolutions. But, if the democratic party was no longer what it had been under Gaius Gracchus, the leaders of the intervening period were now as far beneath their party as Gaius Gracchus had been exalted above it. This was implied in the nature of the case. Until there should emerge a man having the boldness like Gaius Gracchus to grasp at the supremacy of the state, the leaders could only be stopgaps: either political novices, who gave furious vent to their youthful love of opposition and then, when duly accredited as fiery declaimers and favourite speakers, effected with more or less dexterity their retreat to the camp of the government party; or people who had nothing to lose in respect of property and influence, and usually not even anything to gain in respect of honour, and who made it their business to obstruct and annoy the government from personal exasperation or even from the mere pleasure of creating a noise. To the former sort belonged, for instance, Gaius Memmius(5) and the well-known orator Lucius Crassus, who turned the oratorical laurels which they had won in the ranks of the opposition to account in the sequel as zealous partisans of the government.
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
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
The Appuleian Laws
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
Violent Proceedings in the Voting
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.
The Fall of the Revolutionary Party
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.
Opposition of the Whole Aristocracy
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.
Variance between Marius and the Demogogues
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
The consequences of this behaviour—stupid beyond parallel—on the part of the celebrated general soon developed themselves. Saturninus and Glaucia had not undertaken the revolution and procured for Marius the supremacy of the state, in order that they might be disowned and sacrificed by him; if Glaucia, the favourite jester of the people, had hitherto lavished on Marius the gayest flowers of his jovial eloquence, the garlands which he now wove for him were by no means redolent of roses and violets. A total rupture took place, by which both parties were lost; for Marius had not a footing sufficiently firm singly to maintain the colonial law which he had himself called in question and to possess himself of the position which it assigned to him, nor were Saturninus and Glaucia in a condition to continue on their own account the work which Marius had begun.
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
Ascendency of the Government
Marius Politically Annihilated
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.
The Equestrian Party
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
Collision between the Senate and Equites in the Administration of the Provinces
Everything depended on recovering the nomination of the jurymen. The administration of the provinces—the chief foundation of the senatorial government—had become dependent on the jury courts, more particularly on the commission regarding exactions, to such a degree that the governor of a province seemed to administer it no longer for the senate, but for the order of capitalists and merchants. Ready as the moneyed aristocracy always was to meet the views of the government when measures against the democrats were in question, it sternly resented every attempt to restrict it in this its well-acquired right of unlimited sway in the provinces. Several such attempts were now made; the governing aristocracy began again to come
Livius Drusus
An attack on the equestrian courts was inevitable. Every one in the government party who was still alive to the fact that governing implies not merely rights but also duties, every one in fact who still felt any nobler or prouder ambition within him, could not but rise in revolt against this oppressive and disgraceful political control, which precluded any possibility of upright administration. The scandalous condemnation of Rutilius Rufus seemed a summons to begin the attack at once, and Marcus Livius Drusus, who was tribune of the people in 663, regarded that summons as specially addressed to himself. Son of the man of the same name, who thirty years before had primarily caused the overthrow of Gaius Gracchus(11) and had afterwards made himself a name as an officer by the subjugation of the Scordisci,(12) Drusus was, like his father, of strictly conservative views, and had already given practical proof that such were his sentiments in the insurrection of Saturninus. He belonged to the circle of the highest nobility, and was the possessor of a colossal fortune; in disposition too he was a genuine aristocrat—a man emphatically proud, who scorned to bedeck himself with the insignia of his offices, but declared on his death-bed that there would not soon arise a citizen like to him; a man with whom the beautiful saying, that nobility implies obligation, was and continued to be the rule of his life. With all the vehement earnestness of his temperament he had turned away from the frivolity and venality that marked the nobles of the common stamp; trustworthy and strict in morals, he was respected rather than properly beloved on the part of the common people, to whom his door and his purse were always open, and notwithstanding his youth, he was through the personal dignity of his character a man of weight in the senate as in the Forum. Nor did he stand alone. Marcus Scaurus had the courage on occasion of his defence in the trial for extortion publicly to summon Drusus to undertake a reform of the judicial arrangements; he and the famous orator, Lucius Crassus, were in
Attempt at Reform on the Part of the Moderate Party
Drusus drew up a proposal to withdraw the functions of jurymen from the burgesses of equestrian rating and to restore them to the senate, which at the same time was to be put in a position to meet its increased obligations by the admission of 300 new members; a special criminal commission was to be appointed for pronouncing judgment in the case of those jurymen who had been or should be guilty of accepting bribes. By this means the immediate object was gained; the capitalists were deprived of their political exclusive rights, and were rendered responsible for the perpetration of injustice. But the proposals and designs of Drusus were by no means limited to this; his projects were not measures adapted merely for the occasion, but a comprehensive and thoroughly-considered plan of reform. He proposed, moreover, to increase the largesses of grain and to cover the increased expense by the permanent issue of a proportional number of copper plated, alongside of the silver, -denarii-; and then to set apart all the still undistributed arable land of Italy—thus including in particular the Campanian domains—and the best part of Sicily for the settlement of burgess-colonists. Lastly, he entered into the most distinct obligations towards the Italian allies to procure for them the Roman franchise. Thus the very same supports of power and the very same ideas of reform, on which the constitution of Gaius Gracchus had rested, presented themselves now on the side of the aristocracy—a singular, and yet easily intelligible coincidence. It was only to be expected that, as the -tyrannis-
Discussions on the Livian Laws
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.
The Revolt of the Italian Subjects, and the Sulpician Revolution
Romans and Italians
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
Disabilities and Wrongs of the Subjects
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
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
The Rupture
Fregellan War
Difficulty of a General Insurrection
It belongs to the nature of such differences that, restrained by the sense of national unity and by the remembrance of dangers surmounted in common, they make their appearance at first gently and as it were modestly, till the breach gradually widens and the relation between the rulers, whose might is their sole right, and the ruled, whose obedience reaches no farther than their fears, manifests at length undisguisedly the character of force. Down to the revolt and razing of Fregellae in 629, which as it were officially attested the altered character of the Roman rule, the ferment among the Italians did not properly wear a revolutionary character. The longing after equal rights had gradually risen from a silent wish to a loud request, only to be the more decidedly rejected, the more distinctly it was put forward. It was very soon apparent that a voluntary concession was not to be hoped for, and the wish to extort what was refused would not be wanting; but the position of Rome at that time hardly permitted them to entertain any idea of realizing that wish. Although the numerical proportions of the burgesses and non-burgesses in Italy cannot be properly ascertained, it may be regarded as certain that the number of the burgesses was not very much less than that of the Italian allies; for nearly 400,000 burgesses capable of bearing arms there were at least 500,000, probably 600,000 allies.(7) So long as with such proportions the burgesses were united and there was no outward enemy worthy of mention, the Italian allies, split up into an endless number of isolated urban and cantonal communities, and connected with Rome by a thousand relations public and private, could never attain to common action; and with moderate prudence the government could not fail to control their troublesome and indignant subjects partly by the compact mass of the burgesses, partly by the very considerable resources which the provinces afforded, partly by setting one community against another.
The Italian and the Roman Parties
Accordingly the Italians kept themselves quiet, till the revolution began to shake Rome; but, as soon as this had broken out, they too mingled in the movements and agitations of the Roman parties, with a view to obtain equality of rights by means of the one or the other. They had made common cause first with the popular and then with the senatorial party, and gained equally little by either. They had been driven to the conviction that, while the best men of both parties acknowledged the justice and equity of their claims, these best men, aristocrats as well as Populares, had equally little power to procure ahearing for those claims with the mass of their party. They had also observed that the most gifted, most energetic, and most celebrated statesmen of Rome had found themselves, at the very moment when they came forward as advocates of the Italians, deserted by their own adherents and had been accordingly overthrown. In all the vicissitudes of the thirty years of revolution and restoration governments enough had been installed and deposed, but, however the programme might vary, a short-sighted and narrow-minded spirit sat always at the helm.
The Italians and the Oligarchy
The Licinio-Mucian Law
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.
The Italians and Drusus
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
Moreover, the present moment presented comparatively favourable prospects for a general insurrection throughout Italy. We are not exactly informed how far the Romans had carried out the dissolution of the larger Italian confederacies;(9) but it is not improbable that the Marsians, the Paelignians, and perhaps even the Samnites and Lucanians still were associated in their old communal leagues, though these had lost their political significance and were in some cases probably reduced to mere fellowship of festivals and sacrifices. The insurrection, if it should now begin, would still find a rallying point in these unions; but who could say how soon the Romans would for that very reason proceed to abolish these also? The secret league, moreover, which was alleged to be headed by Drusus, had lost in him its actual or expected chief, but it continued to exist and afforded an important nucleus for the political organization of the insurrection; while its military organization might be based on the fact that each allied town possessed its own armament and experienced soldiers. In Rome on the other hand no serious preparations had been made. It was reported, indeed, that restless movements were occurring in Italy, and that the communities of the allies maintained a remarkable intercourse with each other; but instead of calling the citizens in all haste to arms, the governing corporation contented itself with exhorting the magistrates in the customary fashion to watchfulness and with sending out spies to learn farther particulars. The capital was so totally undefended, that a resolute Marsian officer Quintus Pompaedius Silo, one of the most intimate friends of Drusus, is said to have formed the design of stealing into the city at the head of a band of trusty associates carrying swords under their clothes, and of seizing it by a coup de main. Preparations were accordingly made for a revolt; treaties were concluded, and arming went on silently but actively, till at last, as usual, the insurrection broke out through an accident somewhat earlier than the leading men had intended.
Outbreak of the Insurrection in Asculum
Marsians and Sabellians
Central and Southern Italy
The Roman praetor with proconsular powers, Gaius Servilius, informed by his spies that the town of Asculum (Ascoli) in the Abruzzi was sending hostages to the neighbouring communities, proceeded thither with his legate Fonteius and a small escort, and addressed to the multitude, which was just then assembled in the theatre for the celebration of the great games, a vehement and menacing harangue. The sight of the axes known only too well, the proclamation of threats that were only too seriously meant, threw the spark into the fuel of bitter hatred that had been accumulating for centuries; the Roman magistrates were torn to pieces by the multitude in the theatre itself, and immediately, as if it were their intention by a fearful outrage to break down every bridge of reconciliation, the gates were closed by command of the magistracy, all the Romans residing in Asculum were put to death, and their property was plundered. The revolt ran through the peninsula like the flame through the steppe. The brave and numerous people of the Marsians took the lead, in connection with the small but hardy confederacies in the Abruzzi—the Paeligni, Marrucini, Frentani, and Vestini. The brave and sagacious Quintus Silo, already mentioned, was here the soul of the movement. The Marsians were the first formally to declare against the Romans, whence the war retained afterwards the name of the Marsian war. The example thus given was followed by the Samnite communities, and generally by the mass of the communities from the Liris and the Abruzzi down to Calabria and Apulia; so that all Central and Southern Italy was soon in arms against Rome.
Italians Friendly to Rome
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
Impression As to the Insurrection in Rome
Rejection of the Proposals for an Accomodation
Commission of High Treason
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
Energetic Decrees
In the first instance, however, the outbreak of the insurrection, and the terrorism which the commission of high treason exercised, produced at least a semblance of unity and vigour. Party feuds were silent; able officers of all shades—democrats like Gaius Marius, aristocrats like Lucius Sulla, friends of Drusus like Publius Sulpicius Rafus—placed themselves at the disposal of the government. The largesses of corn were, apparently about this time, materially abridged by decree of the people with a view to husband the financial resources of the state for the war; which was the more necessary, as, owing to the threatening attitude of king Mithradates, the province of Asia might at any moment fall into the hand of the enemy and thus one of the chief sources of the Roman revenue be dried up. The courts, with the exception of the commission of high treason, in accordance with a decree of the senate temporarily suspended their action; all business stood still, and nothing was attended to but the levying of soldiers and the manufacture of arms.
Political Organizatin of the Insurrection
Opposition—Rome
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
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.
Subdivision of the Armies on Either Side
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.
Commencement of the War
The Fortresses
Caesar in Campania and Samnium
Aesernia Taken by the Insurgents
As also Nola
Campania for the Most Part Lost to the Romans
The first assault, as a matter of course, fell on the fortresses adhering to Rome in the insurgent districts, which in all haste closed their gates and carried in their moveable property from the country. Silo threw himself on the fortress designed to hold in check the Marsians, the strong Alba, Mutilus on the Latin town of Aesernia established in the heart of Samnium: in both cases they encountered the most resolute resistance. Similar conflicts probably raged in the north around Firmum, Atria, Pinna, in the south around Luceria, Beneventum, Nola, Paestum, before and while the Roman armies gathered on the borders of the insurgent country. After the southern army under Caesar had assembled in the spring of 664 in Campania which for the most part held by Rome, and had provided Capua—with its domain so important for the Roman finances—as well as the more important allied cities with garrisons, it attempted to assume the offensive and to come to the aid of the smaller divisions sent on before it to Samnium and Lucania under Marcus Marcellus and Publius Crassus. But Caesar was repulsed by the Samnites and Marsians under Publius Vettius Scato with severe loss, and the important town of Venafrum thereupon passed over to the insurgents, into whose hands it delivered its Roman garrison. By the defection of this town, which lay on the military road from Campania to Samnium, Aesernia was isolated, and that fortress already vigorously assailed found itself now exclusively dependent on the courage and perseverance of its defenders and their commandant Marcellus. It is true that an incursion, which Sulla happily
Combats with the Marsians
Defeat and Death of Lupus
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),
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.
Disadvantageous Aggregate Result of the First Year of the War
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.
Despondency of the Romans
The temper of the burgesses was singularly depressed. After the battle on the Tolenus, when the dead bodies of the consul and the numerous citizens of note who had fallen with him were brought back from the neighbouring battlefield to the capital and were buried there; when the magistrates in token of public mourning laid aside their purple and insignia; when the government issued orders to the inhabitants of the capital to arm en masse; not a few had resigned themselves to despair and given up all as lost. It is true that the worst despondency had somewhat abated after the victories achieved by Caesar at Acerrae and by Strabo in Picenum: on the news of the former the wardress in the capital had been once more exchanged for the dress of the citizen, on the news of the second the signs of public mourning had been laid aside; but it was not doubtful that on the whole the Romans had been worsted in this passage of arms: and above all the senate and the burgesses had lost the spirit, which had formerly borne them to victory through all the crises of the Hannibalic war. They still doubtless began war with the same defiant arrogance as then, but they knew not how to end it as they had then done; rigid obstinacy, tenacious persistence had given place to a remiss and cowardly disposition. Already after the first year of war their outward and inward policy became suddenly changed, and betook itself to compromise. There is no doubt that in this they did the wisest thing which could be done; not however because, compelled by the immediate force of arms, they could not avoid acquiescing in disadvantageous conditions, but because the subject-matter of dispute—the perpetuation of the political precedence of the Romans over the other Italians—was injurious rather than beneficial to the commonwealth itself. It sometimes happens in public life that one error compensates another; in this case cowardice in some measure remedied the mischief which obstinacy had incurred.
Revolution in Political Processes
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.
Bestowal of the Franchise on the Italians Who Remained Faithful— or Submitted
Of greater importance than this singularly candid political recantation, was the change in the course of their policy toward the Italians. Exactly three hundred years had passed since Rome had last been obliged to submit to the dictation of peace; Rome was now worsted once more, and the peace which she desired could only be got by yielding in part at least to the terms of her antagonists. With the communities, doubtless, which had already risen in arms to subdue and to destroy Rome, the feud had become too bitter for the Romans to prevail on themselves to make the required concessions; and, had they done so, these terms would now perhaps have been rejected by the other side. But, if the original demands were conceded under certain limitations to the communities that had hitherto remained faithful, such a course would on the one hand preserve the semblance of voluntary concession, while on the other hand it would prevent the otherwise inevitable consolidation of the confederacy and thereby pave the way for its subjugation. Accordingly the gates of Roman citizenship, which had so long remained closed against entreaty, now suddenly opened when the sword knocked at them; yet even now not fully and wholly, but in a manner reluctant and annoying even for those admitted. A law carried by the consul Lucius Caesar(16) conferred the Roman franchise on the burgesses of all those communities of Italian allies which had not up to that time openly declared against Rome; a second, emanating from the tribunes of the people Marcus Plautius Silvanus and Gaius Papirius Carbo, laid down for every man who had citizenship and domicile in Italy a term of two months, within which he was to be allowed to acquire the Roman franchise by presenting himself before a Roman magistrate. But these new burgesses were to be restricted as to the right of voting in a way similar to the freedmen, inasmuch as they could only be enrolled in eight, as the freedmen only in four, of the thirty-five tribes; whether the restriction was personal or, as it would seem, hereditary, cannot be determined with certainty.
Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts
This measure related primarily to Italy proper, which at that time extended northward little beyond Ancona and Florence. In Cisalpine Gaul, which was in the eye of the law a foreign country, but in administration and colonization had long passed as part of Italy, all the Latin colonies were treated like the Italian communities. Otherwise on the south side of the Po the greatest portion of the soil was, after the dissolution of the old Celtic tribal communities, not organized according to the municipal system, but remained withal in the ownership of Roman burgesses mostly dwelling together in market-villages (-fora-). The not numerous allied townships to the south of the Po, particularly Ravenna, as well as the whole
Considerable as these concessions were, if we compare them with the rigid exclusiveness which the Roman burgess-body had retained for more than a hundred and fifty years, they were far from involving a capitulation with the actual insurgents; they were on the contrary intended partly to retain the communities that were wavering and threatening to revolt, partly to draw over as many deserters as possible from the ranks of the enemy. To what extent these laws and especially the most important of them—that of Caesar—were applied, cannot be accurately stated, as we are only able to specify in general terms the extent of the insurrection at the time when the law was issued. The main matter at any rate was that the communities hitherto Latin—not only the survivors of the old Latin confederacy, such as Tibur and Praeneste, but more especially the Latin colonies, with the exception of the few that passed over to the insurgents—were thereby admitted to Roman citizenship. Besides, the law was applied to the allied cities that remained faithful in Etruria and especially in Southern Italy, such as Nuceria and Neapolis. It was natural that individual communities, hitherto specially privileged, should hesitate as to the acceptance of the franchise; that Neapolis, for example, should scruple to give up its former treaty with Rome—which guaranteed to its citizens exemption from land-service and their Greek constitution, and perhaps domanial advantages besides—for the restricted rights of new burgesses. It was probably in virtue of conventions concluded on account of these scruples that this city, as well as Rhegium and perhaps other Greek communities
Second Year of the War
Etruria and Umbria Tranquillized
On the strength of these concessions to the wavering communities, the Romans resumed with fresh courage the conflict against the insurgent districts. They had pulled down as much of the existing political institutions as seemed necessary to arrest the extension of the conflagration; the insurrection thenceforth at least spread no farther. In Etruria and Umbria especially, where it was just beginning, it was subdued with singular rapidity, still more, probably, by means of the Julian law than through the success of the Roman arms. In the former Latin colonies, and in the thickly-peopled region of the Po, there were opened up copious and now trustworthy sources of aid: with these, and with the resources of the burgesses themselves, they could proceed to subdue the now isolated conflagration. The two former commanders-in-chief returned to Rome, Caesar as censor elect, Marius because his conduct of the war was blamed as vacillating and slow, and the man of sixty-six was declared to be in his dotage. This objection was very probably groundless; Marius showed at least his bodily vigour by appearing daily in the circus at Rome, and even as commander-in-chief he seems to have displayed on the whole his old ability in the last campaign; but he had not achieved the brilliant successes by which alone after his political bankruptcy he could have rehabilitated himself in public opinion, and so the celebrated champion was to his bitter vexation now, even as an officer, unceremoniously laid aside as useless. The place of Marius in the Marsian army was taken by the consul of this year, Lucius Porcius Cato, who had fought with distinction in Etruria, and that of Caesar in the Campanian army by his lieutenant, Lucius Sulla, to whom were due some of the most material successes of the previous campaign; Gnaeus Strabo retained— now as consul—the command which he had held so successfully in the Picenian territory.
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.
Subjugation of Campania As Far As Nola
Sulla in Samnium
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.
The Insurrection on the Whole Overpowered
The position of affairs had undergone a most complete change. Powerful, victorious, aggressive as was the insurrection when it began the campaign of 665, it emerged from it deeply humbled, everywhere beaten, and utterly hopeless. All northern Italy was pacified. In central Italy both coasts were wholly in the Roman power, and the Abruzzi almost entirely; Apulia as far as Venusia, and Campania as far as Nola, were in the hands of the Romans; and by the occupation of the Hirpinian territory the communication was broken off between the only two regions still persevering in open resistance, the Samnite and the Lucano-Bruttian. The field of the insurrection resembled the scene of an immense conflagration dying out; everywhere the eye fell on ashes and ruins and smouldering brands; here and there the flame still blazed up among the ruins, but the fire was everywhere mastered, and there was no further threatening of danger. It is to be regretted that we no longer sufficiently discern
Perseverance of the Samnites
We see only—and this fact points to an internal breaking up of Italia, that must certainly have been attended by violent convulsions—that the Samnites, perhaps under the leadership of the Marsian Quintus Silo who had been from the first the soul of the insurrection and after the capitulation of the Marsians had gone as a fugitive to the neighbouring people, now assumed another organization purely confined to their own land, and, after “Italia” was vanquished, undertook to continue the struggle as “Safini” or Samnites.(18) The strong Aesernia was converted from the fortress that had curbed, into the last retreat that sheltered, Samnite freedom; an army assembled consisting, it was said, of 30,000 infantry and 1000 cavalry, and was strengthened by the manumission and incorporation of 20,000 slaves; five generals were placed at its head, among whom Silo was the first and Mutilus next to him. With astonishment men saw the Samnite wars beginning anew after a pause of two hundred years, and the resolute nation of farmers making a fresh attempt, just as in the fifth century, after the Italian confederation was shattered, to force Rome with their own hand to recognize their country’s independence. But this resolution of the bravest despair made not much change in the main result; although the mountain-war in Samnium and Lucania might still require some time and some sacrifices, the insurrection was nevertheless already substantially at an end.
Outbreak of the Mithradatic War
In the meanwhile, certainly, there had occurred a fresh complication, for the Asiatic difficulties had rendered it imperatively necessary to declare war against Mithradates king of Pontus, and for next year (666) to destine the one consul and a consular army to Asia Minor. Had this war broken out a year earlier, the contemporary revolt of the half of Italy and of the most important of the provinces would have formed an immense peril to the Roman state. Now that the marvellous good fortune of Rome had once more been evinced in the rapid collapse of the Italian insurrection, this Asiatic war just beginning was, notwithstanding its being mixed up with the expiring Italian struggle, not of a really dangerous character;
Third Campaign
Capture of Venusia
Fall of Silo
So the third campaign in 666 began amidst favourable prospects for Rome. Strabo put down the last resistance which was still offered in the Abruzzi. In Apulia the successor of Cosconius, Quintus Metellus Pius, son of the conqueror of Numidia and not unlike his father in his strongly conservative views as well as in military endowments, put an end to the resistance by the capture of Venusia, at which 3000 armed men were taken prisoners. In Samnium Silo no doubt succeeded in retaking Bovianum; but in a battle, in which he engaged the Roman general Mamercus Aemilius, the Romans conquered, and—what was more important than the victory itself—Silo was among the 6000 dead whom the Samnites left on the field. In Campania the smaller townships, which the Samnites still occupied, were wrested from them by Sulla, and Nola was invested. The Roman general Aulus Gabinius penetrated also into Lucania and gained no small advantages; but, after he had fallen in an attack on the enemy’s camp, Lamponius the insurgent leader and his followers once more held almost undisturbed command over the wide and desolate Lucano-Bruttian country. He even made an attempt to seize Rhegium, which was frustrated, however, by the Sicilian governor Gaius Norbanus. Notwithstanding isolated mischances the Romans were constantly drawing nearer to the attainment of their end; the fall of Nola, the submission of Samnium, the possibility of rendering considerable forces available for Asia appeared no longer distant, when the turn taken by affairs in the capital unexpectedly gave fresh life to the well-nigh extinguished insurrection.
Ferment in Rome
The Bestowal of the Franchise and Its Limitations
Secondary Effect of the Political Prosecutions
Marius
Rome was in a fearful ferment. The attack of Drusus upon the equestrian courts and his sudden downfall brought about by the equestrian party, followed by the two-edged Varian warfare of prosecutions, had sown the bitterest discord between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie as well as between the moderates and the ultras. Events had completely justified the party of concession; what it had proposed voluntarily to bestow, men had been more than half compelled to concede; but the mode in which the concession was made bore, just like the earlier refusal, the stamp of obstinate and shortsighted envy. Instead of granting equality of rights to all Italian communities, they had only expressed the inferiority in another form. They had received a great number of Italian communities into Roman citizenship, but had attached to what they thus conferred an offensive stigma, by placing the new burgesses alongside of the old on nearly the same footing as the freedmen occupied alongside of the freeborn. They had irritated rather than pacified the communities between the Po and the Alps by the concession of Latin rights. Lastly, they had withheld the franchise from a considerable, and that not the worst, portion of the Italians—the whole of the insurgent communities which had again submitted; and not only so, but, instead of legally re-establishing the former treaties annulled by the insurrection, they had at most renewed them as a matter of favour and subject to revocation at pleasure.(20) The disability as regarded the right of voting gave the deeper offence, that it was—as the comitia were then constituted—politically absurd, and the hypocritical care of the government for the unstained purity of the electors appeared to every unprejudiced person ridiculous; but all these restrictions were dangerous, inasmuch as they invited every demagogue to carry his ulterior objects by taking up the more or less just demands of the new burgesses and of the Italians excluded from the franchise. While accordingly the more clear-seeing of the aristocracy could not but find these partial and grudging concessions as inadequate as did the new burgesses and the excluded themselves, they further painfully felt the absence from their ranks of the numerous and excellent men whom the Varian commission of high treason had exiled, and whom it was the more difficult to recall because they had been condemned by the verdict not of the people but of the jury-courts; for, while there was little hesitation as to cancelling a decree of the people even of a judicial character by means of a second, the cancelling of a verdict of jurymen bythe people appeared to the betterportion of the aristocracy as a very dangerous precedent. Thus neither the ultras nor the moderates were content with the issue of the Italian crisis. But still deeper indignation swelled the heart of the old man, who had gone forth to the Italian war with freshened hopes and had come back from it reluctantly, with the consciousness of
Decay of Military Discipline
With these elements of political convulsion was combined the rapidly spreading decay of decorous soldierly habits and of military discipline. The seeds, which were sown by the enrolment of the proletariate in the army, developed themselves with alarming rapidity during the demoralizing insurrectionary war, which compelled Rome to admit to the service every man capable of bearing arms without distinction, and which above all carried political partizanship directly into the headquarters and into the soldiers’ tent. The effects soon appeared in the slackening of all the bonds of the military hierarchy. During the siege of Pompeii the commander of the Sullan besieging corps, the consular Aulus Postumius Albinus, was put to death with stones and bludgeons by his soldiers, who believed themselves betrayed by their general to the enemy; and Sulla the commander-in-chief contented himself with exhorting the troops to efface the memory of that occurrence by their brave conduct in presence of the enemy. The authors of that deed were the marines, from of old the least respectable of the troops. A division of legionaries raised chiefly from the city populace soon followed the example thus given. Instigated by Gaius Titius, one of the heroes of the market-place, it laid hands on the consul Cato. By an accident he escaped death on this occasion; Titius was arrested, but was not punished. When Cato soon afterwards actually perished in a combat, his own officers, and particularly the younger Gaius Marius, were—whether justly or unjustly, cannot be ascertained—designated as the authors of his death.
Economic Crisis
Murder of Asellio
To the political and military crisis thus beginning fell to be added the economic crisis—perhaps still more terrible—which set in upon the Roman capitalists in consequence of the Social war and the Asiatic troubles. The debtors, unable even to raise the interest due and yet inexorably pressed by their creditors, had on the one hand entreated from the proper judicial authority, the urban praetor Asellio, a respite to enable them to dispose of their possessions, and on the other hand had searched out once more the old obsolete laws as to usury(21) and, according to the rule established in olden times, had sued their creditors for fourfold the amount of the interest paid to them contrary to the law. Asellio lent himself to bend the actually existing law into conformity with the letter, and put into
The Sulpician Laws
Sulpicius Rufus
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
Tendency of These Laws
Yet the proposals brought in by him were of such a nature as to be by no means out of keeping with the personal character and the previous party-position of their author. The equalization of the new burgesses with the old was simply a partial resumption of the proposals drawn up by Drusus in favour of the Italians; and, like these, only carried out the requirements of a sound policy. The recall of those condemned by the Varian jurymen no doubt sacrificed the principle of the inviolability of such a sentence, in defence of which Sulpicius himself had just practically interposed; but it mainly benefited in the first instance the members of the proposer’s own party, the moderate conservatives, and it may be very well conceived that so impetuous a man might when first coming forward decidedly combat such a measure and then, indignant at the resistance which he encountered, propose it himself. The measure against the insolvency of senators was doubtless called forth by the exposure of the economic condition of the ruling families—so
Resistance of the Government
Riots
Position of Sulla
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.
Marius Nominated Commander-in-Chief in Sulla’s Stead
But, be this as it might, Sulpicius, with a view to parry the presumed blow, conceived the scheme of taking the supreme command from Sulla; and for this purpose joined with Marius, whose name was still sufficiently popular to make a proposal to transfer to him the chief command in the Asiatic war appear plausible to the multitude, and whose military position and ability might prove a support in the event of a rupture with Sulla. Sulpicius probably did not overlook the danger involved in placing that old man—not less incapable than vengeful and ambitious—at
Sulla’s Recall
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.
Sulla’s March on Rome
On these views he acted. He assembled his soldiers—there were six legions, or about 35,000 men—and explained to them the summons that had arrived from Rome, not forgetting to hint that the new commander-in-chief would undoubtedly lead to Asia Minor not the army as it stood, but another formed of fresh troops. The superior officers, who still had more of the citizen than the soldier, kept aloof, and only one of them followed the general towards the capital; but the soldiers, who in accordance with earlier experiences(23) hoped to find in Asia an easy war and endless booty, were furious; in a moment the two tribunes that had come from Rome were torn in pieces, and from all sides the cry arose that the general should lead them to Rome. Without delay the consul started, and forming a junction with his like-minded colleague by the way, he arrived by quick marches—little troubling himself about the deputies who hastened from Rome to meet and attempted to detain him—beneath the walls of the capital. Suddenly the Romans beheld columns of Sulla’s army take their station at the bridge over the Tiber and at the Colline and Esquiline gates; and then two legions in battle array, with their standards at their head, passed the sacred ring-wall within which the law had forbidden war to enter. Many a worse quarrel, many an important feud had been brought to a settlement within those walls, without any need for a Roman army breaking the sacred peace of the city; that step was now taken, primarily for thesake of the miserable question whether this or that officer was called to command in the east.
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.
First Sullan Restoration
Death of Sulpicius
Flight of Marius
The first military intervention in civil feuds had made it quite evident, not only that the political struggles had reached the point at which nothing save open and direct force proves decisive, but also that the power of the bludgeon was of no avail against the power of the sword. It was the conservative party which first drew the sword, and which accordingly in due time experienced the truth of the ominous words of the Gospel as to those who first have recourse to it. For the present it triumphed completely and might put the victory into formal shape at its pleasure. As a matter of course, the Sulpician laws were characterized as legally null. Their author and his most notable adherents had fled; they were, twelve in number, proscribed by the senate for arrest and execution as enemies of their country. Publius Sulpicius was accordingly seized at Laurentum and put to death; and the head of the tribune, sent to Sulla, was by his orders exposed in the Forum at the very rostra where he himself had stood but a few days before in the full vigour of youth and eloquence. The rest of the proscribed were pursued; the assassins were on the track of even the old Gaius Marius. Although the general might have clouded the memory of his glorious days by a succession of pitiful proceedings, now that the deliverer of his country was running for his life, he was once more the victor of Vercellae, and with breathless suspense all Italy listened to the incidents of his marvellous flight. At Ostia he had gone on board a transport with the view of sailing for Africa; but adverse winds and want of provisions compelled him to land at the Circeian promontory and to wander at random. With few attendants and without trusting himself under a roof, the grey-haired consular, often suffering from hunger, found his way on foot to the neighbourhood of the Roman colony of Minturnae at the mouth of the Garigliano. There the pursuing cavalry were seen in the distance; with great difficulty he reached the shore, and a trading— vessel lying there withdrew him from his pursuers; but the timid mariners soon put him ashore again and made off, while Marius stole along the beach. His pursuers found him in the salt-marsh of Minturnae sunk to the girdle in the mud and with his head concealed amidst a quantity of reeds, and delivered him to the civic authorities of Minturnae. He was placed in prison, and the town-executioner, a Cimbrian slave, was sent to put him to death; but the German trembled before the flashing eyes of his old conqueror and the axe fell from his hands, when the general with his powerful voice haughtily demanded whether he dared to kill Gaius Marius. When they learned this, the magistrates of Minturnae were ashamed that the deliverer of Rome should meet with greater reverence from slaves to whom he had brought bondage than from his fellow-citizens to whom he had brought freedom;
Legislation of Sulla
With a view to remove existing evils and to prevent future revolutions, Sulla suggested a series of new legislative enactments. For the hard-pressed debtors nothing seems to have been done, except that the rules as to the maximum of interest were enforced;(24) directions moreover were given for the sending out of a number of colonies. The senate which had been greatly thinned by the battles and prosecutions of the Social war was filled up by the admission of 300 new senators, who were naturally selected in the interest of the Optimates. Lastly, material changes were adopted in respect to the mode of election and the initiative of legislation. The old Servian arrangement for voting in the centuriate comitia, under which the first class, with an estate of 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds) or upwards, alone possessed almost half of the votes, again took the place of the arrangements introduced in 513 to mitigate the preponderance of the first class.(25) Practically there was thus introduced for the election of consuls, praetors, and censors, a census which really excluded the non-wealthy from exercising the suffrage. The legislative initiative in the case of the tribunes of the people was restricted by the rule, that every proposal had henceforth to be submitted by them in the first instance to the senate and could only come before the people in the event of the senate approving it.
These enactments which were called forth by the Sulpician attempt at revolution from the man who then came forward as the shield and sword of the constitutional party—the consul Sulla—bear an altogether peculiar character. Sulla ventured, without consulting the burgesses or jurymen, to pronounce sentence of death on twelve of the most distinguished men, including magistrates actually in office and the most famous general of his time, and publicly to defend these proscriptions; a violation of the venerable and sacred laws of appeal, which met with severe censure even
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
The East and King Mithradates
State of the East
The state of breathless excitement, in which the revolution kept the Roman government by perpetually renewing the alarm of fire and the cry to quench it, made them lose sight of provincial matters generally; and that most of all in the case of the Asiatic lands, whose remote and unwarlike nations did not thrust themselves so directly on the attention of the government as Africa, Spain, and its Transalpine neighbours. After the annexation of the kingdom of Attalus, which took place contemporaneously with the outbreak of the revolution, for a whole generation there is hardly any evidence of Rome taking a serious part in Oriental affairs—with the exception of the establishment of the province of Cilicia in 652,(1) to which the Romans were driven by the boundless audacity of the Cilician pirates, and which was in reality nothing more than the institution of a permanent station for a small division of the Roman army and fleet in the eastern waters. It was not till the downfall of Marius in 654 had in some measure consolidated the government of the restoration, that the Roman authorities began anew to bestow some attention on the events in the east
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.
The Parthian State
Armenia
The monarchy of the Arsacids had to pass through a dangerous crisis about the time of the Gracchi, chiefly in consequence of the inroads of Turanian tribes. The ninth Arsacid, Mithradates ii or the Great (630?-667?), had recovered for the state its position of ascendency in the interior of Asia, repulsed the Scythians, and advanced the frontier of the kingdom towards Syria and Armenia; but towards the end of his life new troubles disturbed his reign; and, while the grandees of the kingdom including his own brother Orodes rebelled against the king and at length that brother overthrew him and had put him to death, the hitherto unimportant Armenia rose into power. This country, which since its declaration of independence(2) had been divided into the north-eastern portion or Armenia proper, the kingdom of the Artaxiads, and the south-western or Sophene, the kingdom of the Zariadrids, was for the first time united into one kingdom by the Artaxiad Tigranes (who had reigned since 660); and this doubling of his power on the one hand, and the weakness of the Parthian rule on the other, enabled the new king of all Armenia not only to free himself from dependence on the Parthians and to recover the provinces formerly ceded to them, but even to bring to Armenia the titular supremacy of Asia, as it had passed from the Achaemenids to the Seleucids and from the Seleucids to the Arsacids.
Asia Minor
Lastly in Asia Minor the territorial arrangements, which had been made under Roman influence after the dissolution of the kingdom of Attalus,(3) still subsisted in the main unchanged. In the condition of the dependent states—the kingdoms of Bithynia, Cappadocia, Pontus, the principalities of Paphlagonia and Galatia, the numerous city-leagues and free towns—no outward change was at first discernible. But, intrinsically, the character of the Roman rule had certainly undergone everywhere a material alteration. Partly through the constant growth of oppression naturally incident to every tyrannic government, partly through the indirect operation of the Roman revolution—in the seizure, for instance, of the property of the soil in the province of Asia by Gaius Gracchus, in the Roman tenths and customs, and in the human hunts
Mithradates Eupator
There reigned at that time in the kingdom of Pontus Mithradates vi surnamed Eupator (born about 624, 691) who traced back his lineage on the father’s side in the sixteenth generation to king Darius the son of Hystaspes and in the eighth to Mithradates I the founder of the Pontic kingdom, and was on the mother’s side descended from the Alexandrids and the Seleucids. After the early death of his father Mithradates Euergetes, who fell by the hand of an assassin at Sinope, he had received the title of king about 634, when a boy of eleven years of age; but the diadem brought to him only trouble and danger. His guardians, and even as it would seem his own mother called to take a part in the government by his father’s will, conspired against the boy-king’s life. It is said that, in order to escape from the daggers of his legal protectors, he became of his own accord a wanderer, and during seven years, changing his resting-place night after night, a fugitive in his own kingdom, led the homeless life of a hunter. Thus the boy grew into a powerful man. Although our accounts regarding him are in substance traceable to written records of contemporaries, yet the legendary tradition, which is generated in the east with the rapidity of lightning, early adorned the mighty king with many of the traits of its Samsons and Rustems. These traits, however, belong to the character, just as the crown of clouds belongs to the character of the highest mountain-peaks; the outlines of the figure appear in both cases only more coloured and fantastic, not disturbed or essentially altered. The armour, which fitted the gigantic frame of king Mithradates, excited the wonder of the Asiatics and still more that of the Italians. As a runner he overtook the swiftest deer; as a rider he broke in the wild steed, and was able by changing horses to accomplish 120 miles in a day; as a charioteer he drove with sixteen in hand, and gained in competition many a prize—it was dangerous, no doubt, in such sport to carry off victory from the king. In hunting on horseback, he hit the game at full gallop and never missed his aim. He challenged competition
The Nationalities of Asia Minor
Manifest however as is the foreign and un-Hellenic character of the whole life and action of the Cappadocian king, it is difficult definitely to specify the national element preponderating in it, nor will research perhaps ever succeed in getting beyondbgeneralities or in attaining clear views on this point. In the whole circle of ancient civilization there is no region where the stocks subsisting side by side or crossing each other were so numerous, so heterogeneous, so variously from the remotest times intermingled, and where in consequence the relations of the nationalities were less clear than in Asia Minor. The Semitic population continued in an unbroken chain from Syria to Cyprus and Cilicia, and to it the original stock of the population along the west coast in the regions of Caria and Lydia seems also to have belonged, while the north-western point was occupied by the Bithynians, who were akin to the Thracians in Europe. The interior and the north coast, on the other hand, were filled chiefly by Indo-Germanic peoples most nearly cognate to the Iranian. In the case of the Armenian and Phrygian languages(4) it is ascertained, in that of the Cappadocian it is highly probable, that they had immediate affinity with the Zend; and the statement made as to the Mysians, that among them the Lydian and Phrygian languages met, just denotes a mixed Semitic-Iranian population that may be compared perhaps with that of Assyria. As to the regions stretching between Cilicia and Caria, more especially Lydia, there is still, notwithstanding the full remains of the native language and writing that are in this particular instance extant, a want of assured results, and it is merely probable that these tribes ought to be reckoned among the Indo-Germans rather than the Semites. How all this confused mass of peoples was overlaid first with a net of Greek mercantile cities, and then with the Hellenism called into life by the military as well as intellectual ascendency of the Greek nation, has been set forth in outline already.
Pontus
In these regions ruled king Mithradates, and that first of all in Cappadocia on the Black Sea or Pontus as it was called, a district in which, situated as it was at the northeastern extremity of Asia Minor towards Armenia and in constant contact with the latter, the Iranian nationality presumably preserved itself with less admixture than anywhere else in Asia Minor. Not even Hellenism had penetrated far into that region. With the exception of the coast where several originally Greek settlements subsisted—especially the important commercial marts Trapezus, Amisus, and above all Sinope, the birthplace and residence of Mithradates and the most flourishing city of the empire—the country was still in a very primitive condition. Not that it had lain waste; on the contrary, as the region of Pontus is still one of the most fertile on the face of the earth, with its fields of grain alternating with forests of wild fruit trees, it was beyond doubt even in the time of Mithradates well cultivated and also comparatively populous. But there were hardly any towns properly so called; the country possessed nothing but strongholds, which served the peasants as places of refuge and the king as treasuries for the custody of the revenues which accrued to him; in the Lesser Armenia alone, in fact, there were counted seventy-five of these little royal forts. We do not find that Mithradates materially contributed to promote the growth of towns in his empire; and situated as he was,—in practical, though not perhaps on his own part quite conscious, reaction against Hellenism,—this is easily conceivable.
Acquisitions of Territory by Mithradates
Colchis
Northern Shores of the Black Sea
He appears more actively employed—likewise quite in the Oriental style—in enlarging on all sides his kingdom, which was even then not small, though its compass is probably over-stated at 2300 miles; we find his armies, his fleets, and his envoys busy along the Black Sea as well as towards Armenia and towards Asia Minor. But nowhere did so free and ample an arena present itself to him as on the eastern and northern shores of the Black Sea, the state of which at that time we must not omit to glance at, however difficult or in fact impossible it is to give a really distinct idea of it. On the eastern coast of the Black Sea—which, previously almost unknown, was first opened up to more general knowledge by Mithradates—the region of Colchis on the Phasis (Mingrelia and Imeretia) with the important commercial town of Dioscurias was wrested from the native princes and converted into a satrapy of Pontus. Of still greater moment were his enterprises in the northern regions.(5) The wide steppes destitute of hills and trees, which stretch to the north of the Black Sea, of the Caucasus, and of the Caspian, are by reason of their natural conditions—more especially from the variations of temperature fluctuating between the climate of Stockholm and that of Madeira, and from the absolute
Hellenism in That Quarter
In sharp contrast to all these barbarians stood the Hellenic settlements, which at the time of the mighty impetus given to Greek commerce had been founded chiefly by the efforts of Miletus on these coasts, partly as trading-marts, partly as stations for prosecuting important fisheries and even for agriculture, for which, as we have already said, the north-western shores of the Black Sea presented in antiquity conditions less unfavourable than at the present day. For the use of the soil the Hellenes paid here, like the Phoenicians in Libya, tax and ground-rent to the native rulers. The most important of these settlements were the free city of Chersonesus (not far from Sebastopol), built on the territory of the Scythians in the Tauric peninsula (Crimea), and maintaining itself in moderate prosperity, under circumstances far from favourable, by virtue of its good constitution and the public spirit of its citizens; and Panticapaeum (Kertch)
Mithradates Master of the Bosphoran Kingdom
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.
Paphlagonia and Cappadocia Acquired
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
The Romans and Mithradates
Intervention of the Senate
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
Sulla Sent to Cappadocia
The decrees sounded energetic enough; only it was an error, that instead of sending an army they directed the governor of Cilicia, Lucius Sulla, with the handful of troops whom he commanded there against the pirates and robbers, to intervene in Cappadocia. Fortunately the remembrance of the former energy of the Romans defended their interests in the east better than their present government did, and the energy and dexterity of the governor supplied what the senate lacked in both respects. Mithradates kept back and contented himself with inducing Tigranes the great-king of Armenia, who held a more free position with reference to the Romans than he did, to send troops to Cappadocia. Sulla quickly collected his forces and the contingents of the Asiatic allies, crossed the Taurus, and drove the governor Gordius along with his Armenian auxiliaries out of Cappadocia. This proved effectual. Mithradates yielded on all points; Gordius had to assume the blame of the Cappadocian troubles, and the pseudo-Ariarathes disappeared; the election of king, which the Pontic faction had vainly attempted to direct towards Gordius, fell on the respected Cappadocian Ariobarzanes.
First Contact between the Romans and the Parthians
When Sulla in following out his expedition arrived in the region of the Euphrates, in whose waters the Roman standards were then first mirrored, the Romans came for the first time into contact with the Parthians, who in consequence of the variance between them and Tigranes had occasion to make approaches to the Romans. On both sides there seemed a feeling that it was of some moment, in this first contact between the two great powers of the east and the west, that neither should renounce its claims to the sovereignty of the world; but Sulla, bolder than the Parthian envoy, assumed and maintained in the conference the place of honour between the king of Cappadocia and the Parthian
New Aggressions of Mithradates
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.
Aquillius Sent to Asia
The Roman government, appealed to for aid by the kings Ariobarzanes and Nicomedes in person, despatched to Asia Minor in support of Lucius Cassius who was governor there the consular Manius Aquillius— an officer tried in the Cimbrian and Sicilian wars—not, however, as general at the head of an army, but as an ambassador, and directed the Asiatic client states and Mithradates in particular to lend armed assistance in case of need. The result was as it had been two years before. The Roman officer accomplished the commission entrusted to him with the aid of the small Roman corps which the governor of the province of Asia had at his disposal, and of the levy of the Phrygians and Galatians; king Nicomedes and king Ariobarzanes again ascended their tottering thrones; Mithradates under various pretexts evaded the summons to furnish contingents, but gave to the Romans no open resistance; on the contrary the Bithynian pretender Socrates was even put to death by his orders (664).
The State of Things Intermediate between War and Peace
It was a singular complication. Mithradates was fully convinced that he could do nothing against the Romans in open conflict, and was therefore firmly resolved not to allow matters to come to an open rupture and war with them. Had he not been so resolved, there was no more favourable opportunity for beginning the struggle than the present: just at the time when Aquillius marched into Bithynia and Cappadocia, the Italian insurrection was at the height of its power and might encourage even the weak to declare against Rome; yet Mithradates allowed the year 664 to pass without profiting by the opportunity. Nevertheless he pursued with equal tenacity and activity his plan of extending his territory in Asia Minor. This strange combination of a policy of peace at any price with a policy of conquest was certainly in itself untenable, and was simply a fresh proof that Mithradates did not belong to the class of genuine statesmen; he knew neither how to prepare for conflict like king Philip nor how to submit like king Attalus, but in the true style of a sultan was perpetually fluctuating between a greedy desire of conquest and the sense of his own weakness. But even in this point of view his proceedings can only be understood, when we recollect that Mithradates had become acquainted by twenty years’ experience with the Roman policy of that day. He knew very well that the Roman government were far from desirous of war; that they in fact, looking to the serious danger which threatened their rule from any general of reputation, and with the fresh remembrance of the Cimbrian war and Marius, dreaded war still more if possible than he did himself. He acted accordingly. He was not afraid to demean himself in a way which would have given to any energetic government not fettered by selfish considerations manifold ground and occasion for declaring war; but he carefully avoided any open rupture which would have placed the senate under the necessity of declaring it. As soon as men appeared to be in earnest he drew back, before Sulla as well as before Aquillius; he hoped, doubtless, that he would not always be confronted by energetic generals, that he too would, as well as Jugurtha, fall in with his Scaurus or Albinus. It must be owned that this hope was not without reason; although the very example of Jugurtha had on the other hand shown how foolish it was to confound the bribery of a Roman commander and the corruption of a Roman army with the conquest of the Roman people.
Aquillius Brings about War
Nicomedes
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
Preparations of Mithradates
Mithradates prosecuted the political and military preparations for the passage of arms thus forced upon him with all his characteristic energy. First of all he drew closer his alliance with Tigranes king of Armenia, and obtained from him the promise of an auxiliary army which was to march into western Asia and to take possession of the soil there for king Mithradates and of the moveable property for king Tigranes. The Parthian king, offended by the haughty carriage of Sulla, though not exactly coming forward as an antagonist to the Romans, did not act as their ally. To the Greeks the king endeavoured to present himself in the character of Philip and Perseus, as the defender of the Greek nation against the alien rule of the Romans. Pontic envoys were sent to the king of Egypt and to the last remnant of free Greece, the league of the Cretan cities, and adjured those for whom Rome had already forged her chains to rise now at the last moment and save Hellenic nationality; the attempt was in the case of Crete at least not wholly in vain, and numerous Cretans took service in the Pontic army. Hopes were entertained that the lesser and least of the protected states—Numidia, Syria, the Hellenic republics—would successively rebel, and that the provinces would revolt, particularly the west of Asia Minor, the victim of unbounded oppression.
Weak Counterpreparatons of the Romans
However much it was in itself a political necessity for Rome to declare war against Mithradates, yet the particular moment was as unhappily chosen as possible; and for this reason it is very probable that Manius Aquillius brought about the rupture between Rome and Mithradates at this precise time primarily from regard to his own interests. For the moment they had no other troops at their disposal in Asia than the small Roman division under Lucius Cassius and the militia of western Asia, and, owing to the military and financial distress in which they were placed at home in consequence of the insurrectionary war, a Roman army could not in the most favourable case land in Asia before the summer of 666. Hitherto the Roman magistrates there had a difficult position; but they hoped to protect the Roman province and to be able to hold their ground as they stood—the Bithynian army under king Nicomedes in its position taken up in the previous year in the Paphlagonian territory between Amastris and Sinope, and the divisions under Lucius Cassius, Manius Aquillius, and Quintus Oppius, farther back in the Bithynian, Galatian, and Cappadocian territories, while the Bithyno-Roman fleet continued to blockade the Bosporus.
Mithradates Occupies Asia Minor
Anti-Roman Movements There
In the beginning of the spring of 666 Mithradates assumed the offensive. On a tributary of the Halys, the Amnias (near the modern Tesch Kopri), the Pontic vanguard of cavalry and light-armed troops encountered the Bithynian army, and notwithstanding its very superior numbers so broke it at the first onset that the beaten army dispersed and the camp and military chest fell into the hands of the victors. It was mainly to Neoptolemus and Archelaus that the king was indebted for this brilliant success. The far more wretched Asiatic militia, stationed farther back, thereupon gave themselves up as vanquished, even before they encountered the enemy; when the generals of Mithradates approached them, they dispersed. A Roman division was defeated in Cappadocia; Cassius sought to keep the field in Phrygia with the militia, but he discharged it again without venturing on a battle, and threw himself with his few trustworthy troops into the townships on the upper Maeander, particularly into Apamea. Oppius in like manner evacuated Pamphylia and shut himself up in the Phrygian Laodicea; Aquillius was overtaken while retreating at the Sangarius in the Bithynian territory, and so totally defeated that he lost his camp and had to seek refuge at Pergamus in the Roman province; the latter also was soon overrun, and Pergamus itself fell into the hands of the king, as likewise the Bosporus and the ships that were there. After each victory Mithradates had dismissed all the prisoners belonging to the militia of Asia Minor, and had neglected no step to raise to a higher pitch the national sympathies that were from the first turned towards him. Now the whole country as far as the Maeander was with the exception of a few fortresses in his power; and news at the same time arrived, that a new revolution had broken out at Rome, that the consul Sulla destined to act against Mithradates had instead of embarking for Asia marched on Rome, that the most celebrated Roman generals were fighting battles with each other in order to settle to whom the chief command in the Asiatic war should belong. Rome seemed zealously employed in the work of self-destruction: it is no wonder that, though even now minorities everywhere adhered to Rome, the great body of the natives of Asia Minor joined the Pontic king. Hellenes and Asiatics united in the rejoicing which welcomed the deliverer; it became usual to compliment the king, in whom as in the divine conqueror of the Indians Asia and Hellas once more found a common meeting-point, under the name of the new Dionysus. The cities and islands sent messengers to meet him, wherever he went, and to invite “the delivering god” to visit them; and in festal attire the citizens flocked forth in front of their gates to receive him. Several places delivered the Roman officers sojourning among them in chains to the king; Laodicea thus surrendered Quintus Oppius, the commandant of the town, and Mytilene
Orders Issued from Ephesus for a General Massacre
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.
Organization of the Conquered Provinces
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.
The king’s treasury was, no doubt, copiously replenished otherwise by the immense sums which accrued from the property of the Italians and other confiscations; for instance in Cos alone 800 talents (195,000 pounds) which the Jews had deposited there were carried of by Mithradates. The northern portion of Asia Minor and most of the islands belonging to it were in the king’s power; except some petty Paphlagonian dynasts, there was hardly a district which still adhered to Rome; the whole Aegean Sea was commanded by his fleets. The south-west alone, the city-leagues of Caria and Lycia and the city of Rhodes, resisted him. In Caria, no doubt, Stratonicea was reduced by force of arms; but Magnesia on the Sipylus successfully withstood a severe siege, in which Mithradates’ ablest officer Archelaus was defeated and wounded. Rhodes, the asylum of the Romans who had escaped from Asia with the governor Lucius Cassius among them, was assailed on the part of Mithradates by sea and land with immense superiority of force. But his sailors, courageously as they did their duty under the eyes of the king, were awkward novices, and so Rhodian squadrons vanquished those of Pontus four times as strong and returned home with captured vessels. By land also the siege made no progress; after a part of the works had been destroyed, Mithradates abandoned the enterprise, and the important island as well as the mainland opposite remained in the hands of the Romans.
Pontic Invasion of Europe
Predatory Inroads of the Thracians
Thrace and Macedonia Occupied by the Pontic Armies
Pontic Fleet in the Aegean
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.
The Pontic Proceedings in Greece
There Mithradates carried on his operations not only by arms, but at the same time by national propagandism. His chief instrument for Athens was one Aristion, by birth an Attic slave, by profession formerly a teacher of the Epicurean philosophy, now a minion of Mithradates; an excellent master of persuasion, who by the brilliant career which he pursued at court knew how to dazzle the mob, and with due gravity to assure them that help was already on the way to Mithradates from Carthage, which had been for about sixty years lying in ruins. These addresses of the new Pericles were so far effectual that, while the few persons possessed of judgment escaped from Athens, the mob and one or two literati whose heads were turned formally renounced the Roman rule. So the ex-philosopher became a despot who, supported by his bands of Pontic mercenaries, commenced an infamous and bloody rule; and the Piraeeus was converted into a Pontic harbour. As soon as the troops of Mithradates gained a footing on the Greek continent, most of the small free states—the Achaeans, Laconians, Boeotians—as far as Thessaly joined them. Sura, after having drawn
Position of the Romans
The position of the Roman government began to be critical. Asia Minor and Hellas were wholly, Macedonia to a considerable extent, in the enemy’s hands; by sea the Pontic flag ruled without a rival. Then there was the Italian insurrection, which, though baffled on the whole, still held the undisputed command of wide districts of Italy; the barely hushed revolution, which threatened every moment to break out afresh and more formidably; and, lastly, the alarming commercial and monetary crisis(13) occasioned by the internal troubles of Italy and the enormous losses of the Asiatic capitalists, and the want of trustworthy troops. The government would have required three armies, to keep down the revolution in Rome, to crush completely the insurrection in Italy, and to wage war in Asia; it had but one, that of Sulla; for the northern army was, under the untrustworthy Gnaeus Strabo, simply an additional embarrassment. Sulla had to choose which of these three tasks he would undertake; he decided, as we have seen, for the Asiatic war. It was no trifling matter—we should perhaps say, it was a great act of patriotism—that in this conflict between the general interest of his country and the special interest of his party the former retained the ascendency; and that Sulla, in spite of the dangers which his removal from Italy involved for his constitution and his party, landed in the spring of 667 on the coast of Epirus.
Sulla’s Landing
Greece Occupied
But he came not, as Roman commanders-in-chief had been wont to make their appearance in the East. That his army of five legions or of at most 30,000 men,(14) was little stronger than an ordinary consular army, was the least element of difference. Formerly in the eastern wars a Roman fleet had never been wanting, and had in fact without exception commanded the sea; Sulla, sent to reconquer two continents and the islands of the Aegean sea, arrived without a single vessel of war. Formerly the general had brought with him a full chest and drawn the greatest portion of his supplies by sea from home; Sulla came with empty hands—for the sums raised with difficulty for the campaign of 666 were expended in Italy—and found himself exclusively left dependent on requisitions. Formerly the general had found his only opponent in the enemy’s camp, and since the close of
Protracted Siege of Athens and the Piraeus
Athens Falls
The sieges in Attica advanced less rapidly. Sulla found himself compelled to prepare all sorts of heavy besieging implements for which the trees of the Academy and the Lyceum had to supply the timber. Archelaus conducted the defence with equal vigour and judgment; he armed the crews of his vessels, and thus reinforced repelled the attacks of the Romans with superior strength and made frequent and not seldom successful sorties. The Pontic army of Dromichaetes advancing to the relief of the city was defeated under the walls of Athens by the Romans after a severe struggle, in which Sulla’s brave legate Lucius Licinius Murena particularly distinguished himself; but the siege did not on that account advance more rapidly. From Macedonia, where the Cappadocians had meanwhile definitively established themselves, plentiful and regular supplies arrived by sea, which Sulla was not in a condition to cut off from the harbour-fortress; in Athens no doubt provisions were beginning to fail, but from the proximity of the two fortresses Archelaus was enabled to make various attempts to throw quantities
Critical Position of Sulla
Want of a Fleet
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
Pontic Armies Enter Greece
Evacuation of the Piraeus
King Mithradates undertook to deliver his antagonist from his perilous position. He it was, to all appearance, who disapproved the defensive system of his generals and sent orders to them to vanquish the enemy with the utmost speed. As early as 667 his son Ariarathes had started from Macedonia to combat Sulla in Greece proper; only the sudden death, which overtook the prince on the march at the Tisaean promontory in Thessaly, had at that time led to the abandonment of the expedition. His successor Taxiles now appeared (668), driving before him the Roman corps stationed in Thessaly, with an army of, it is said, 100,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry at Thermopylae. Dromichaetes joined him. Archelaus also—compelled, apparently, not so much by Sulla’s arms as by his master’s orders— evacuated the Piraeeus first partially and then entirely, and joined the Pontic main army in Boeotia. Sulla, after the Piraeeus with all its greatly-admired fortifications had been by his orders destroyed, followed the Pontic army, in the hope of being able to fight a pitched battle before the arrival of Flaccus. In vain Archelaus advised that they should avoid such a battle, but should keep the sea and the coast occupied and the enemy in suspense. Now just as formerly under Darius and Antiochus, the masses of the Orientals, like animals terrified in the midst of a fire, flung themselves hastily and blindly into battle; and did so on this occasion more foolishly than ever, since the Asiatics might perhaps have needed to wait but a few months in order to be the spectators of a battle between Sulla and Flaccus.
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.
Slight Effect of the Victory
Sulla and Flaccus
It was a great victory, but the results were trifling, partly because of the want of a fleet, partly because the Roman conqueror, instead of pursuing the vanquished, was under the necessity in the first instance of protecting himself against his own countrymen. The sea was still exclusively covered by Pontic squadrons, which now showed themselves even to the westward of the Malean promontory; even after the battle of Chaeronea Archelaus landed troops on Zacynthus and made an attempt to establish himself on that island. Moreover Lucius Flaccus had in the meanwhile actually landed with two legions in Epirus, not without having sustained severe loss on the way from storms and from the war-vessels of the enemy cruising in the Adriatic; his troops were already in Thessaly; thither Sulla had in the
Second Pontic Army Sent to Greece
Battle of Orchomenus
In the spring of 669 there was again fresh work in Europe. Mithradates, who continued his preparations indefatigably in Asia Minor, had sent an army not much less than that which had been extirpated at Chaeronea, under Dorylaus to Euboea; thence it had, after a junction with the remains of the army of Archelaus, passed over the Euripus to Boeotia. The Pontic king, who judged of what his army could do by the standard of victories over the Bithynian and Cappadocian militia, did not understand the unfavourable turn which things had taken in Europe; the circles of the courtiers were already whispering as to the treason of Archelaus; peremptory orders were issued to fight a second battle at once with the new army, and not to fail on this occasion to annihilate the Romans. The master’s will was carried out, if not in conquering, at least in fighting. The Romans and Asiatics met once more in the plain of the Cephissus, near Orchomenus. The numerous and excellent cavalry of the latter flung itself impetuously on the Roman infantry, which began to waver and give way: the danger was so urgent, that Sulla seized a standard and advancing with his adjutants and orderlies against the enemy called out with a loud voice to the soldiers that, if they should be asked at home where they had abandoned their general, they might reply—at Orchomenus. This had its effect; the legions rallied and vanquished the enemy’s horse, after which the infantry were overthrown with little difficulty. On the following day the camp of the Asiatics was surrounded and stormed; far the greatest portion of them fell
Reaction in Asia Minor against Mithradates
Meanwhile the circumstances of Asia Minor also had undergone a material change. If king Mithradates had once come forward as the liberator of the Hellenes, if he had introduced his rule with the recognition of civic independence and with remission of taxes, they had after this brief ecstasy been but too rapidly and too bitterly undeceived. He had very soon emerged in his true character, and had begun to exercise a despotism far surpassing the tyranny of the Roman governors—a despotism which drove even the patient inhabitants of Asia Minor to open revolt. The sultan again resorted to the most violent expedients. His decrees granted independence to the townships which turned to him, citizenship to the -metoeci-, full remission of debts to the debtors, lands to those that had none, freedom to the slaves; nearly 15,000 such manumitted slaves fought in the army of Archelaus. The most fearful scenes were the result of this high-handed subversion of all existing order. The most considerable mercantile cities, Smyrna, Colophon, Ephesus, Tralles, Sardes, closed their gates against the king’s governors or put them to death, and declared for Rome.(16) On the other hand the king’s lieutenant Diodorus, a philosopher of note like Aristion, of another school, but equally available for the worst subservience, under the instructions of his master caused the whole town-council of Adramyttium to be put to death. The Chians, who were suspected of an inclination to Rome, were fined in the first instance in 2000 talents (480,000 pounds) and, when the payment was found not correct, they were en masse put on board ship and deported in chains under the charge of their own slaves to the coast of Colchis, while their island was occupied with Pontic colonists. The king gave orders that the chiefs of the Celts in Asia Minor should all be put to death along with their wives and children in one day, and that Galatia should be converted into a Pontic satrapy. Most of these bloody edicts were carried into effect either at Mithradates’ own headquarters or in Galatia, but the few who escaped placed themselves at the head of their powerful tribes and expelled Eumachus, the governor of the king, out of their bounds. It may readily be conceived that such a king would be pursued by the daggers of assassins; sixteen hundred men were condemned to death by the royal courts of inquisition as having been implicated in such conspiracies.
Lucullus and the Fleet on the Asiatic Coast
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.
Flaccus Arrives in Asia
Fimbria
Fimbria’s Victory at Miletopolis
Perilous Position of Mithradates
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
Negotiations for Peace
Mithradates attempted to negotiate. Under other circumstances no doubt the author of the edict for the Ephesian massacre could never have cherished the hope of being admitted at all to terms of peace with Rome; but amidst the internal convulsions of the Roman republic, when the ruling government had declared the general sent against Mithradates an outlaw and subjected his partisans at home to the most fearful persecutions, when one Roman general opposed the other and yet both stood opposed to the same foe, he hoped that he should be able to obtain not merely a peace, but a favourable peace. He had the choice of applying to Sulla or to Fimbria; he caused negotiations to be instituted with both, yet it seems from the first to have been his design to come to terms with Sulla, who, at least from the king’s point of view, seemed decidedly superior to his rival. His general Archelaus, a instructed by his master, asked Sulla to cede Asia to the king and to expect in return the king’s aid against the democratic party in Rome. But Sulla, cool and clear as ever, while urgently desiring a speedy settlement of Asiatic affairs on account of the position of things in Italy, estimated the advantages of the Cappadocian alliance for the war impending over him in Italy as very slight, and was altogether too much of a Roman to consent to so disgraceful and so injurious a concession.
Preliminaries of Delium
In the peace conferences, which took place in the winter of 669-70, at Delium on the coast of Boeotia opposite to Euboea, Sulla distinctly refused to cede even a foot’s-breadth of land, but, with good reason faithful to the old Roman custom of not increasing after victory the demands made before battle, did not go beyond the conditions previously laid down. He required the restoration of all the conquests made by the king and not wrested from him again— Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Galatia, Bithynia, Asia Minor and the islands—the surrender of prisoners and deserters, the delivering up of the eighty war-vessels of Archelaus to reinforce the still insignificant Roman fleet; lastly, pay and provisions for the army and the very moderate sum of 3000 talents (720,000 pounds) as indemnity for the expenses of the war. The Chians carried off to the Black Sea were to be sent home, the families of the Macedonians who were friendly to Rome and had become refugees were to be
New Difficulties
Sulla Proceeds to Asia
But Mithradates rejected the peace and demanded at least that the Romans should not insist on the surrender of the war-vessels and should concede to him Paphlagonia; while he at the same time asserted that Fimbria was ready to grant him far more favourable conditions. Sulla, offended by this placing of his offers on an equal footing with those of an unofficial adventurer, and having already gone to the utmost measure of concession, broke off the negotiations. He had employed the interval to reorganize Macedonia and to chastise the Dardani, Sinti, and Maedi, in doing which he at once procured booty for his army and drew nearer Asia; for he was resolved at any rate to go thither, in order to come to a reckoning with Fimbria. He now at once put his legions stationed in Thrace as well as his fleet in motion towards the Hellespont. Then at length Archelaus succeeded in wringing from his obstinate master a reluctant consent to the treaty; for which he was subsequently regarded with an evil eye at court as the author of the injurious peace, and even accused of treason, so that some time afterwards he found himself compelled to leave the country and to take refuge with the Romans, who readily received him and loaded him with honours. The Roman soldiers also murmured; their disappointment doubtless at not receiving the expected spoil of Asia probably contributed to that murmuring more than their indignation—in itself very justifiable— that the barbarian prince, who had murdered eighty thousand of their countrymen and had brought unspeakable misery on Italy and Asia, should be allowed to return home unpunished with the greatest part of the treasures which he had collected by the pillage of Asia. Sulla himself may have been painfully sensible that the political complications thwarted in a most vexatious way a task which was in a military point of view so simple, and compelled him after such victories to content himself with such a peace. But the self-denial and the sagacity with which he had conducted this whole war were only displayed afresh in the conclusion of this peace; for war with a prince, to whom almost the whole coast of the Black Sea belonged, and whose
Peace at Dardanus
Sulla against Fimbria
Fimbria’s Death
So Sulla, attended by his legions and by Archelaus, crossed the Hellespont; after he had met with Mithradates on its Asiatic shore at Dardanus and had orally concluded the treaty, he made his army continue its march till he came upon the camp of Fimbria at Thyatira not far from Pergamus, and pitched his own close beside it. The Sullan soldiers, far superior to the Fimbrians in number, discipline, leadership, and ability, looked with contempt on the dispirited and demoralized troops and their uncalled commander-in-chief. Desertions from the ranks of the Fimbrians became daily more numerous. When Fimbria ordered an attack, the soldiers refused to fight against their fellow-citizens, or even to take the oath which he required that they would stand faithfully by each other in battle. An attempt to assassinate Sulla miscarried; at the conference which Fimbria requested Sulla did not make his appearance, but contented himself with suggesting to him through one of his officers a means of personal escape. Fimbria was of an insolent temperament, but he was no poltroon; instead of accepting the vessel which Sulla offered to him and fleeing to the barbarians, he went to Pergamus and fell on his own sword in the temple of Asklepios. Those who were most compromised in his army resorted to Mithradates or to the pirates, with whom they found ready reception; the main body placed itself under the orders of Sulla.
Regulation of Asiatic Affairs
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,
Sulla Embarks for Italy
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
Cinna and Sulla
Ferment in Italy
This state of suspense and uncertainty existing in Italy when Sulla took his departure for Greece in the beginning of 667 has been already described: the half-suppressed insurrection, the principal army under the more than half-usurped command of a general whose politics were very doubtful, the confusion and the manifold activity of intrigue in the capital. The victory of the oligarchy by force of arms had, in spite or because of its moderation, engendered manifold discontent. The capitalists, painfully affected by the blows of the most severe financial crisis which Rome had yet witnessed, were indignant at the government on account of the law which it had issued as to interest, and on account of the Italian and Asiatic wars which it had not prevented. The insurgents, so far as they had laid down their arms, bewailed not only the disappointment of their proud hopes of obtaining equal rights with the ruling burgesses, but also the forfeiture of their venerable treaties, and their new position as subjects utterly destitute of rights. The communities between the Alps and the Po were likewise discontented with the partial concessions made to them, and the new burgesses and freedmen were exasperated by the cancelling of the Sulpician laws. The populace of the city suffered amid the general distress, and found it intolerable that the government of the sabre was no longer disposed to acquiesce in the constitutional rule of the bludgeon. The adherents, resident in the capital, of those outlawed after the Sulpician revolution— adherents who remained very numerous in consequence of the remarkable moderation of Sulla—laboured zealously to procure permission for the outlaws to return home; and in particular some ladies of wealth and distinction spared for this purpose neither trouble nor money. None of these grounds of ill-humour were such as to furnish any immediate prospect of a fresh violent collision between the parties; they were in great part of an aimless and temporary nature; but they all fed the general discontent, and had already been more or less concerned in producing the murder of Rufus, the repeated attempts to assassinate Sulla, the issue of the consular and tribunician elections for 667 partly in favour of the opposition.
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.
Outbreak of the Cinnan Revolution
Victory of the Government
So long as Sulla was in Italy, the confederates for good reasons remained quiet. But when the dreaded proconsul, yielding not to the exhortations of the consul Cinna but to the urgent state of matters in the east, had embarked, Cinna, supported by the majority of the college of tribunes, immediately submitted the projects of law which had been concerted as a partial reaction against the Sullan restoration of 666. They embraced the political equalization of the new burgesses and the freedmen, as Sulpicius had proposed it, and the restitution of those who had been banished in consequence of the Sulpician revolution to their former status. The new burgesses flocked en masse
The Cinnans in Italy
Landing of Marius
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
Dubious Attitude of Strabo
The Cinnans around Rome
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
Negotiations of Parties with the Italians
Death of Strabo
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
Vacillation of the Government
Rome Capitulates
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
Marian Reign of Terror
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
The Last Days of Marius
The originator of all these outrages was Gaius Marius. He designated the victims and the executioners—only in exceptional cases, as in those of Merula and Catulus, was any form of law observed; not unfrequently a glance or the silence with which he received those who saluted him formed the sentence of death, which was always executed at once. His revenge was not satisfied even with the death of his victim; he forbade the burial of the dead bodies: he gave orders—anticipated, it is true, in this respect by Sulla—that the heads of the senators slain should be fixed to the rostra in the Forum; he ordered particular corpses to be dragged through the Forum, and that of Gaius Caesar to be stabbed afresh at the tomb of Quintus Varius, whom Caesar presumably had once impeached;(6) he publicly embraced the man who delivered to him as he sat at table the head of Antonius, whom he had been with difficulty restrained from seeking out in his hiding-place, an slaying with his own hand. His legions of slaves, and in particular a division of Ardyaeans,(7) chiefly served as his executioners, and did not neglect, amidst these Saturnalia of their new freedom, to plunder the houses of their former masters and to dishonour and murder all whom they met with there. His own associates were in despair at this insane fury; Sertorius adjured the consul to put a stop to it at any price, and even Cinna was alarmed. But in times such as these were, madness itself becomes a power; man hurls himself into the abyss, to save himself from giddiness. It was not easy to restrain the furious old man and his band, and least of all had Cinna the courage to do so; on the contrary, he chose Marius as his colleague in the consulship for the next year. The reign of terror alarmed the more moderate of the victors not much less than the defeated party; the capitalists alone were not displeased to see that another hand lent itself to the work of thoroughly humbling for once the haughty oligarchs, and that at the same time, in consequence of the extensive confiscations and auctions, the best part of the spoil came to themselves—in these times of terror they acquired from the people the surname of the “hoarders.”
Death of Marius
Fate had thus granted to the author of this reign of terror, the old Gaius Marius, his two chief wishes. He had taken vengeance on the whole genteel pack that had embittered his victories and envenomed his defeats; he had been enabled to retaliate for every sarcasm by a stroke of the dagger. Moreover he entered on the new year once more as consul; the vision of a seventh consulate, which the oracle had promised him, and which he had sought for thirteen years to grasp, had now been realized. The gods had granted to him what he wished; but now too, as in the old legendary period, they practised the fatal irony of destroying man by the fulfilment of his wishes. In his early consulates the pride, in his sixth the laughing-stock, of his fellow-citizens, he was now in his seventh loaded with the execration of all parties, with the hatred of the whole nation; he, the originally upright, capable, gallant man, was branded as the crackbrained chief of a reckless band of robbers. He himself seemed to feel it. His days were passed as in delirium, and by night his couch denied him rest, so that he grasped the wine-cup in order merely to drown thought. A burning fever seized him; after being stretched for seven days on a sick bed, in the wild fancies of which he was fighting on the fields of Asia Minor the battles of which the laurels were destined for Sulla, he expired on the 13th Jan. 668. He died, more than seventy years old, in full possession of what he called power and honour, and in his bed; but Nemesis assumes various shapes, and does not always expiate blood with blood. Was there no sort of retaliation in the fact, that Rome and Italy now breathed more freely on the news of the death of the famous saviour of the people than at the tidings of the battle on the Raudine plain?
Even after his death individual incidents no doubt occurred, which recalled that time of terror; Gaius Fimbria, for instance, who more than any other during the Marian butcheries had dipped his hand in blood, made an attempt at the very funeral of Marius to kill the universally revered -pontifex maximus- Quintus Scaevola (consul in 659) who had been spared even by Marius, and then, when Scaevola recovered from the wound he had received, indicted him criminally on account of the offence, as Fimbria jestingly expressed it, of having not been willing to let himself be murdered. But the orgies of murder at any rate were over. Sertorius called together the Marian bandits, under pretext of giving them their pay, surrounded them with his trusty Celtic troops, and caused them to be cut down en masse to the number, according to the lowest estimate, of 4000.
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
Cinna and Sulla
Italy and the Provinces in Favour of the Government
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.
Like Italy, most of the provinces adhered to the oligarchy— Sicily, Sardinia, the two Gauls, the two Spains. In Africa Quintus Metellus, who had fortunately escaped the murderers, made an attempt to hold that province for the Optimates; Marcus Crassus, the youngest son of the Publius Crassus who had perished in the Marian massacre, resorted to him from Spain, and reinforced him by a band which he had collected there. But on their quarrelling with each other they were obliged to yield to Gaius Fabius Hadrianus, the governor appointed by the revolutionary government. Asia was in the hands of Mithradates; consequently the province of Macedonia, so far as it was in the power of Sulla, remained the only asylum of the exiled oligarchy. Sulla’s wife and children who had with difficulty escaped death, and not a few senators who had made their escape, sought refuge there, so that a sort of senate was soon formed at his head-quarters.
Measures against Sulla
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
On the other hand Sulla’s letter, which in the circumstances might be called extremely moderate, awakened in the middle-party hopes of a peaceful adjustment. The majority of the senate resolved, on the proposal of the elder Flaccus, to set on foot an attempt at reconciliation, and with that view to summon Sulla to come under the guarantee of a safe-conduct to Italy, and to suggest to the consuls Cinna and Carbo that they should suspend their preparations till the arrival of Sulla’s answer. Sulla did not absolutely reject the proposals. Of course he did not come in person, but he sent a message that he asked nothing but the restoration of the banished to their former status and the judicial punishment of the crimes that had been perpetrated, and moreover that he did not desire security to be provided for himself, but proposed to bring it to those who were at home. His envoys found the state of things in Italy essentially altered. Cinna had, without concerning himself further about
Difficult Position of 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
His Moderation
Sulla fully surveyed the situation of affairs, and was far removed from the blind exasperation and the obstinate rigour which characterized the majority of his party. While the edifice of the state was in flames, while his friends were being murdered, his houses destroyed, his family driven into exile, he had remained undisturbed at his post till the public foe was conquered and the Roman frontier was secured. He now treated Italian affairs in the same spirit of patriotic and judicious moderation, and did whatever he could to pacify the moderate party and the new burgesses, and to prevent the civil war from assuming the far more dangerous form of a fresh war between the Old Romans and the Italian allies. The first letter which Sulla addressed to the senate had asked nothing but what was right and just, and had expressly disclaimed a reign of terror. In harmony with its terms, he now presented the prospect of unconditional pardon to all those who should even now break off from the revolutionary government, and caused his soldiers man by man to swear that they would meet the Italians thoroughly as friends and fellow-citizens. The most binding declarations secured to the new burgesses the political rights which they had acquired; so that Carbo, for that reason, wished hostages to be furnished to him by every civic community in Italy, but the proposal broke down under general indignation and under the opposition of the senate. The chief difficulty in the position of Sulla really consisted in the fact, that in consequence of the faithlessness and perfidy which prevailed the new burgesses had every reason, if not to suspect his personal designs, to doubt at any rate whether he would be able to induce his party to keep their word after the victory.
Sulla Lands in Italy
And Is Reinforced by Partisans and Deserters
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
Sulla in Campania Opposed by Norbanus and Scipio
Sulla Gains a Victory over Norbanus at Mount Tifata
Defection of Scipio’s Army
Reinforced thus considerably both in a moral and material point of view, Sulla and Metellus marched from Apulia through the still insurgent Samnite districts towards Campania. The main force of the enemy also proceeded thither, and it seemed as if the matter could not but there be brought to a decision. The army of the consul Gaius Norbanus was already at Capua, where the new colony had just established itself with all democratic pomp; the second consular army was likewise advancing along the Appian road. But, before it arrived, Sulla was in front of Norbanus. A last attempt at mediation, which Sulla made, led only to the arrest of his envoys. With fresh indignation his veteran troops threw themselves on the enemy; their vehement charge down from Mount Tifata at the first onset broke the enemy drawn up in the plain; with the remnant of his force Norbanus threw himself into the revolutionary colony of Capua and the new-burgess town of Neapolis, and allowed himself to be blockaded there. Sulla’s troops, hitherto not without apprehension as they compared their weak numbers with the masses of the enemy, had by this victory gained a full conviction of their
Preparations on Either Side
The results of the first campaign in favour of Sulla were the submission of Apulia, Picenum, and Campania, the dissolution of the one, and the vanquishing and blockading of the other, consular army. The Italian communities, compelled severally to choose between their twofold oppressors, already in numerous instances entered into negotiations with him, and caused the political rights, which had been won from the opposition party, to be guaranteed to them by formal separate treaties on the part of the general of the oligarchy. Sulla cherished the distinct expectation, and intentionally made boast of it, that he would overthrow the revolutionary government in the next campaign and again march into Rome.
But despair seemed to furnish the revolution with fresh energies. The consulship was committed to two of its most decided leaders, to Carbo for the third time and to Gaius Marius the younger; the circumstance that the latter, who was just twenty years of age, could not legally be invested with the consulship, was as little heeded as any other point of the constitution. Quintus Sertorius, who in this and other matters proved an inconvenient critic, was ordered to proceed to Etruria with a view to procure new levies, and thence to his province Hither Spain. To replenish the treasury, the senate was obliged to decree the melting down of the gold and silver vessels of the temples in the capital; how considerable the produce was, is clear from the fact that after several months’ warfare there was still on hand nearly 600,000 pounds (14,000 pounds of gold and 6000 pounds of silver). In the considerable portion of Italy, which still voluntarily or under compulsion adhered to the revolution, warlike preparations were prosecuted with vigour. Newly-formed divisions of some strength came from Etruria, where the communities of new burgesses were very numerous, and from the region of the Po. The veterans of Marius in great numbers ranged themselves under the standards at the call of his son. But nowhere were preparations made for the struggle against Sulla with such eagerness as in the insurgent Samnium and some districts of Lucania. It was owing to anything but devotion towards the revolutionary Roman government, that numerous contingents from the Oscan districts reinforced their armies; but it was well understood there that an oligarchy restored by Sulla would not acquiesce, like the lax Cinnan government, in the independence of these lands as now de facto subsisting; and therefore the primitive rivalry between the Sabellians and the Latins was roused afresh in the struggle against Sulla. For Samnium and Latium this war was as much a national struggle as the wars of the fifth century; they strove not for a greater or less amount of political rights, but for the purpose of appeasing long-suppressed hate by the annihilation of their antagonist. It was no wonder, therefore, that the war in this region bore a character altogether different from the conflicts elsewhere, that no compromise was attempted there, that no quarter was given or taken, and that the pursuit was continued to the very uttermost.
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.
Sulla Proceeds to Latium to Oppose the Younger Marius
His Victory at Sacriportus
Democratic Massacres in Rome
The army of the Optimates was divided. The proconsul Metellus undertook, resting on the support of the Picenian insurrection, to advance to Upper Italy, while Sulla marched from Campania straight against the capital. Carbo threw himself in the way of the former; Marius would encounter the main army of the enemy in Latium. Advancing along the Via Latina, Sulla fell in with the enemy not far from Signia; they retired before him as far as the so-called “Port of Sacer,” between Signia and the chief stronghold of the Marians, the strong Praeneste. There Marius drew up his force for battle. His army was about 40,000 strong, and he was in savage fury and personal bravery the true son of his father; but his troops were not the well trained bands with which the latter had fought his battles, and still less might this inexperienced young man bear comparison with the old master of war. His troops soon gave way; the defection of a division even during the battle accelerated the defeat. More than the half of the Marians were dead or prisoners; the remnant, unable either to keep the field or to gain the other bank of the Tiber, was compelled to seek protection in the neighbouring fortresses; the capital, which they had neglected to provision, was irrecoverably lost. In consequence of this Marius gave orders to Lucius Brutus Damasippus, the praetor commanding there, to evacuate it, but before doing so to put to death all the esteemed men, hitherto spared, of the opposite party. This injunction, by which the son even outdid the proscriptions of his father, was carried into effect; Damasippus made a pretext for convoking the senate, and the marked men were struck down partly in the sitting itself, partly on their flight from the senate-house. Notwithstanding the thorough clearance previously effected, there were still found several victims of note. Such were the former aedile Publius Antistius, the father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompeius, and the former praetor Gaius Carbo, son of the well-known friend and subsequent opponent of the Gracchi,(14) since the death of so many men of more distinguished talent the two best orators in the judicial courts of the desolated Forum; the consular Lucius Domitius, and above all the venerable -pontifex maximus- Quintus Scaevola, who had escaped the dagger of Fimbria only to bleed to death during these last throes of the revolution in the vestibule of the temple of Vesta entrusted to his guardianship. With speechlesshorror the multitude saw the corpses of these last victims of the reign of terror dragged through the streets, and thrown into the river.
Siege of Praeneste
Occupation of Rome
The broken bands of Marius threw themselves into the neighbouring and strong cities of new burgesses Norba and Praeneste: Marius in person with the treasure and the greater part of the fugitives entered the latter. Sulla left an able officer, Quintus Ofella, before Praeneste just as he had done in the previous year before Capua, with instructions not to expend his strength in the siege of the strong town, but to enclose it with an extended line of blockade and starve it into surrender. He himself advanced from different sides upon the capital, which as well as the whole surrounding district he found abandoned by the enemy, and occupied without resistance. He barely took time to compose the minds of the people by an address and to make the most necessary arrangements, and immediately passed on to Etruria, that in concert with Metellus he might dislodge his antagonists from Northern Italy.
Metellus against Carbo in Northern Italy
Carbo Assailed on Three Sides of Etruria
Metellus had meanwhile encountered and defeated Carbo’s lieutenant Carrinas at the river Aesis (Esino between Ancona and Sinigaglia), which separated the district of Picenum from the Gallic province; when Carbo in person came up with his superior army, Metellus had been obliged to abstain from any farther advance. But on the news of the battle at Sacriportus, Carbo, anxious about his communications, had retreated to the Flaminian road, with a view to take up his headquarters at the meeting-point of Ariminum, and from that point to hold the passes of the Apennines on the one hand and the valley of the Po on the other. In this retrograde movement different divisions fell into the hands of the enemy, and not only so, but Sena Gallica was stormed and Carbo’s rearguard was broken in a brilliant cavalry engagement by Pompeius; nevertheless Carbo attained on the whole his object. The consular Norbanus took the command in the valley of the Po; Carbo himself proceeded to Etruria. But the march of Sulla with his victorious legions to Etruria altered the position of affairs; soon three Sullan armies from Gaul, Umbria, and Rome established communications with each other. Metellus with the fleet went past Ariminum to Ravenna, and at Faventia cut off the communication between Ariminum and the valley of the Po, into which he sent forward a division along the great road to Placentia under Marcus Lucullus, the quaestor of Sulla and brother of his admiral in the Mithradatic war. The young Pompeius and his contemporary and rival Crassus penetrated from Picenum by mountain-paths into Umbria and gained the Flaminian road at Spoletium, where they defeated Carbo’s legate Carrinas and shut him up in the town; he succeeded, however, in escaping from it on a rainy night and making his way, though not without loss, to the army of Carbo. Sulla himself marched from Rome into Etruria with his army in two divisions, one of which advancing along the coast defeated the corps opposed
Conflicts about Praeneste
In the vicinity of Rome also events appeared to assume a more favourable turn for the revolutionary party, and the war seemed as if it would again be drawn chiefly towards this region. For, while the oligarchic party were concentrating all their energies on Etruria, the democracy everywhere put forth the utmost efforts to break the blockade of Praeneste. Even the governor of Sicily Marcus Perpenna set out for that purpose; it does not appear, however, that he reached Praeneste. Nor was the very considerable corps under Marcius, detached by Carbo, more successful in this; assailed and defeated by the troops of the enemy which were at Spoletium, demoralized by disorder, want of supplies, and mutiny, one portion went back to Carbo, another to Ariminum; the rest dispersed. Help in earnest on the other hand came from Southern Italy. There the Samnites under Pontius of Telesia, and the Lucanians under their experienced general Marcus Lamponius, set out without its being possible to prevent their departure, were joined in Campania where Capua still held out by a division of the garrison under Gutta, and thus to the number, it was said, of 70,000 marched upon Praeneste. Thereupon Sulla himself, leaving behind a corps against Carbo, returned to Latium and took up a well-chosen position in the defiles in front of Praeneste, where he barred the route of the relieving army.(15) In vain the garrison attempted to break through the lines of Ofella, in vain the relieving army attempted to dislodge Sulla; both remained immoveable in their strong positions, even after Damasippus, sent by Carbo, had reinforced the relieving army with two legions.
Successes of the Sullans in Upper Italy
Etruria Occupied by the Sullans
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
The Samnites and Democrats Attack Rome
Battle at the Colline Gate
Slaughter of the Prisoners
Its leaders then determined to desist from the relief of Praeneste and to throw themselves with all their united strength on Rome, which was only a good day’s march distant. By so doing they were, in a military point of view, ruined; their line of retreat, the Latin road, would by such a movement fall into Sulla’s hands; and even if they got possession of Rome, they would be infallibly crushed there, enclosed within a city by no means fitted for defence, and wedged in between the far superior armies of Metellus and Sulla. Safety, however, was no longer thought of; revenge alone dictated this march to Rome, the last outbreak of fury in the passionate revolutionists and especially in the despairing Sabellian nation. Pontius of Telesia was in earnest, when he called out to his followers that, in order to get rid of the wolves which had robbed Italy of freedom, the forest in which they harboured must be destroyed. Never was Rome in a more fearful peril than on the 1st November 672, when Pontius, Lamponius, Carrinas, Damasippus advanced along the Latin road towards Rome, and encamped about a mile from the Colline gate. It was threatened with a day like the 20th July 365 u. c. or the 15th June 455 a. d.— the days of the Celts and the Vandals. The time was gone by when a coup de main against Rome was a foolish enterprise, and the assailants could have no want of connections in
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.
The Provinces
There was still work to be done in the provinces. Sardinia had been speedily wrested by Lucius Philippus from the governor of the revolutionary government Quintus Antonius (672), and Transalpine Gaul offered little or no resistance; but in Sicily, Spain, and Africa the cause of the party defeated in Italy seemed still by no means lost. Sicily was held for them by the trustworthy governor Marcus Perpenna. Quintus Sertorius had the skill to attach to himself the provincials in Hither Spain, and to form from among the Romans settled in that quarter a not inconsiderable army, which in the first instance closed the passes of the Pyrenees: in this he had given fresh proof that, wherever he was stationed, he was in his place, and amidst all the incapables of the revolution was the only man practically useful. In Africa the governor Hadrianus, who followed out the work of revolutionizing too thoroughly and began to give liberty to the slaves, had been, on occasion of a tumult instigated by the Roman merchants of Utica, attacked in his official residence and burnt with his attendants (672); nevertheless the province adhered to the revolutionary government, and Cinna’s son-in-law, the young and able Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, was invested with the supreme command there. Propagandism had even been carried from thence into the client-states, Numidia and Mauretania. Their legitimate rulers, Hiempsal ii son of Gauda, and Bogud son of Bocchus, adhered doubtless to Sulla; but with the aid of the Cinnans the former had been dethroned by the democratic pretender Hiarbas, and similar feuds agitated the Mauretanian kingdom. The consul Carbo who had fled from Italy tarried on the island Cossyra (Pantellaria) between Africa and Sicily, at a loss, apparently, whether he should flee to Egypt or should attempt to renew the struggle in one of the faithful provinces.
Spain
Sertorius Embarks
Sulla sent to Spain Gaius Annius and Gaius Valerius Flaccus, the former as governor of Further Spain, the latter as governor of the province of the Ebro. They were spared the difficult task of opening up the passes of the Pyrenees by force, in consequence of the general who was sent thither by Sertorius having been killed by one of his officers and his troops having thereafter melted away. Sertorius, much too weak to maintain an equal struggle, hastily collected the nearest divisions and embarked at New Carthage—for what destination he knew not himself, perhaps for the coast of Africa, or for the Canary Islands—it mattered little whither, provided only Sulla’s arm did not reach him. Spain then willingly submitted to the Sullan magistrates (about 673) and Flaccus fought successfully with the Celts, through whose territory he marched, and with the Spanish Celtiberians (674).
Sicily
Gnaeus Pompeius was sent as propraetor to Sicily, and, when he appeared on the coast with 120 sail and six legions, the island was evacuated by Perpenna without resistance. Pompeius sent a squadron thence to Cossyra, which captured the Marian officers sojourning there. Marcus Brutus and the others were immediately executed; but Pompeius had enjoined that the consul Carbo should be brought before himself at Lilybaeum in order that, unmindful of the protection accorded to him in a season of peril by that very man,(17) he might personally hand him over to the executioner (672).
Africa
Having been ordered to go on to Africa, Pompeius with his army which was certainly far more numerous, defeated the not inconsiderable forces collected by Ahenobarbus and Hiarbas, and, declining for the time to be saluted as -imperator-, he at once gave the signal for assault on the hostile camp. He thus became master of the enemy in one day; Ahenobarbus was among the fallen: with the aid of king Bogud, Hiarbas was seized and slain at Bulla, and Hiempsal was reinstated in his hereditary kingdom; a great razzia against the inhabitants of the desert, among whom a number of Gaetulian tribes recognized as free by Marius were made subject to Hiempsal, revived in Africa also the fallen repute of the Roman name: in forty days after the landing of Pompeius in Africa all was at an end (674?). The senate instructed him to break up his army— an implied hint that he was not to be allowed a triumph, to which as an extraordinary magistrate he could according to precedent make no claim. The general murmured secretly, the soldiers loudly; it seemed for a moment as if the African army would revolt against the senate and Sulla would have to take the field against his son-in-law. But Sulla yielded, and allowed the young man to boast of being the only Roman who had become a triumphator before he was a senator (12 March 675); in fact the “Fortunate,” not perhaps without a touch of irony, saluted the youth on his return from these easy exploits as the “Great.”
Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates
In the east also, after the embarkation of Sulla in the spring of 671, there had been no cessation of warfare. The restoration of the old state of things and the subjugation of individual towns cost in Asia as in Italy various bloody struggles. Against the free city of Mytilene in particular Lucius Lucullus was obliged at length to bring up troops, after having exhausted all gentler measures; and even a victory in the open field did not put an end to the obstinate resistance of the citizens.
Meanwhile the Roman governor of Asia, Lucius Murena, had fallen into fresh difficulties with king Mithradates. The latter had since the peace busied himself in strengthening anew his rule, which was shaken even in the northern provinces; he had pacified the Colchians by appointing his able son Mithradates as their governor; he had then made away with that son, and was now preparing for an expedition into his Bosporan kingdom. The assurances of Archelaus who had meanwhile been obliged to seek an asylum with Murena,(18) that these preparations were directed against Rome, induced Murena, under the pretext that Mithradates still kept possession of Cappadocian frontier districts, to move his troops towards the Cappadocian Comana and thus to violate the Pontic frontier (671). Mithradates contented himself with complaining to Murena and, when this was in vain, to the Roman government. In fact commissioners from Sulla made their appearance to dissuade the governor, but he did not submit; on the contrary he crossed the Halys and entered on the undisputed territory of Pontus, whereupon Mithradates resolved to repel force by force. His general Gordius had to detain the Roman army till the king came up with far superior forces and compelled battle; Murena was vanquished and with great loss driven back over the Roman frontier to Phrygia, and the Roman garrisons were expelled from all Cappadocia. Murena had the effrontery, no doubt, to call himself the victor and to assume the title of -imperator- on account of these events (672); but the sharp lesson and a second admonition from Sulla induced him at last to push the matter no farther; the peace between Rome and Mithradates was renewed (673).
Second Peace
Capture of Mytilene
This foolish feud, while it lasted, had postponed the reduction of the Mytilenaeans; it was only after a long siege by land and by sea, in which the Bithynian fleet rendered good service, that Murena’s successor succeeded in taking the city by storm (675).
General Peace
The ten years’ revolution and insurrection were at an end in the west and in the east; the state had once more unity of government and peace without and within. After the terrible convulsions of the last years even this rest was a relief. Whether it was to furnish more than a mere relief; whether the remarkable man, who had succeeded in the difficult task of vanquishing the public foe and in the more difficult work of subduing the revolution, would be able to meet satisfactorily the most difficult task of all— the re-establishing of social and political order shaken to its very foundations—could not but be speedily decided
The Sullan Constitution
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 Regent of Rome
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
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
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
Confiscations
The confiscated property was dealt with in a similar way. Sulla from political considerations sought to induce the respectable burgesses to take part in its purchase; a great portion of them, moreover, voluntarily pressed forward, and none more zealously than the young Marcus Crassus. Under the existing circumstances the utmost depreciation was inevitable; indeed, to some extent it was the necessary result of the Roman
Maintenance of the Burgess-Rights Previously Conferred
In regulating the relations of Italy and of the capital, Sulla— although he otherwise in general treated as null all state-acts done during the revolution except in the transaction of current business— firmly adhered to the principle, which it had laid down, that every burgess of an Italian community was by that very fact a burgess also of Rome; the distinctions between burgesses and Italian allies, between old burgesses with better, and new burgesses with more restricted, rights, were abolished, and remained so. In the case of the freedmen alone the unrestricted right of suffrage was again withdrawn, and for them the old state of matters was restored. To the aristocratic ultras this might seem a great concession; Sulla perceived that it was necessary to wrest these mighty levers out of the hands of the revolutionary chiefs, and that the rule of the oligarchy was not materially endangered by increasing the number of the burgesses.
Punishments Inflicted on Particular Communities
But with this concession in principle was combined a most rigid inquisition, conducted by special commissioners with the co-operation of the garrisons distributed throughout Italy, in respect to particular communities in all districts of the land. Several towns were rewarded; for instance Brundisium, the first community which had joined Sulla, now obtained the exemption from customs so important for such a seaport; more were punished. The less guilty were required to pay fines, to pull down their walls, to raze their citadels; in the case of those whose opposition had been most obstinate the regent confiscated a part of their territory, in some cases even the whole of it—as it certainly might be regarded in law as forfeited, whether they were to be treated as burgess-communities which had borne arms against their fatherland, or as allied states which had waged war with Rome contrary to their treaties of perpetual peace. In this case all the dispossessed burgesses—but these only—were deprived of their municipal, and at the same time of the Roman, franchise, receiving in return the lowest Latin rights.(7) Sulla thus avoided furnishing the opposition with a nucleus in Italian subject-communities of inferior rights; the homeless dispossessed of necessity were soon lost in the mass of the proletariate. In Campania not only was the democratic colony of Capua done away and its domain given back to the state, as was naturally to be expected, but the island of Aenaria (Ischia) was also, probably about this time, withdrawn from the community of Neapolis. In Latium the whole territory of the large and wealthy city of Praeneste and presumably of Norba also was confiscated, as was likewise that of Spoletium in Umbria. Sulmo in the Paelignian district was even razed. But the iron arm of the regent fell with especial weight on the two regions which had offered a serious resistance up to the end and even after the battle at the Colline gate—Etruria and Samnium. There a number of the most considerable communes, such as Florentia, Faesulae, Arretium, Volaterrae, were visited with total confiscation. Of the fate of Samnium we have already spoken; there was no confiscation there, but the land was laid waste for ever, its flourishing towns, even the former Latin colony of Aesernia, were left in ruins, and the country was placed on the same footing with the Bruttian and Lucanian regions.
Assignations to the Soldiers
These arrangements as to the property of the Italian soil placed on the one hand those Roman domain-lands which had been handed over in usufruct to the former allied communities and now on their dissolution reverted to the Roman government, and on the other hand the confiscated territories of the communities incurring punishment, at the disposal of the regent; and he employed them for the purpose of settling thereon the soldiers of the victorious army. Most of
The Cornelian Freedmen in Rome
Akin to this practical constituting of a standing army for the senate was the measure by which the regent selected from the slaves of the proscribed upwards of 10,000 of the youngest and most vigorous men, and manumitted them in a body. These new Cornelians, whose civil existence was linked to the legal validity of the institutions of their patron, were designed to be a sort of bodyguard for the oligarchy and to help it to command the city populace, on which, indeed, in the absence of a garrison everything in the capital now primarily depended.
Abolition of the Gracchan Institutions
These extraordinary supports on which the regent made the oligarchy primarily to rest, weak and ephemeral as they doubtless might appear even to their author, were yet its only possible buttresses, unless expedients were to be resorted to—such as the formal institution of a standing army in Rome and other similar measures—which would have put an end to the oligarchy far sooner than the attacks of demagogues. The permanent foundation of the ordinary governing power of the oligarchy of course could not but be the senate, with a power so increased and so concentrated that it presented a superiority to its non-organized opponents at every single point of attack. The system of compromises followed for forty years was at an end. The Gracchan constitution, still spared in the first Sullan reform of 666, was now utterly set aside. Since the time of Gaius Gracchus the government had conceded, as it were, the right of -’emeute- to the proletariate of the capital, and bought it off by regular distributions of corn to the burgesses domiciled there; Sulla abolished these largesses. Gaius Gracchus had organized and consolidated the order of capitalists by the letting of the tenths and customs of the province of Asia in Rome; Sulla abolished the system of middlemen, and converted the former contributions of the Asiatics into fixed taxes, which were assessed on the several districts according to the valuation-rolls drawn up for the purpose of gathering in the arrears.(9) Gaius Gracchus had by entrusting the posts of jurymen to men of equestrian census procured for the capitalist class an indirect share in administering and in governing, which proved itself not seldom stronger than the official adminis-tration and government; Sulla abolished the equestrian and restored the senatorial courts. Gaius Gracchus or at any rate the Gracchan period had conceded to the equites a special place at the popular festivals, such as the senators had for long possessed;(10) Sulla abolished it and relegated the equites to the plebeian benches.(11) The equestrian order, created as such by Gaius Gracchus, was deprived of its political existence by Sulla. The senate was to exercise the supreme power in legislation, administration, and jurisdiction, unconditionally, indivisibly, and permanently, and was to be distinguished also by outward tokens not merely as a privileged, but as the only privileged, order.
Reorganization of the Senate
Its Complement Filled Up by Extraordinary Election
Admission to the Senate through the Quaestorship
Abolition of the Censorial Supervision of the Senate
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
Regulations As to the Burgesses
In respect to legislation Sulla contented himself with reviving the regulations made in 666, and securing to the senate the legislative initiative, which had long belonged to it practically, by legal enactment at least as against the tribunes. The burgess-body remained formally sovereign; but so far as its primary assemblies were concerned, while it seemed to the regent necessary carefully to preserve the form, he was still more careful to prevent any real activity on their part. Sulla dealt even with the franchise itself in the most contemptuous manner; he made no difficulty either in conceding it to the new burgess-communities, or in bestowing it on Spaniards and Celts en masse; in fact, probably not without design, no steps were taken at all for the adjustment of the burgess-roll, which nevertheless after so violent revolutions stood in urgent need of a revision, if the government was still at all in earnest with the legal privileges attaching to it. The legislative functions of the comitia, however, were not directly restricted; there was no need in fact for doing so, for in consequence of the better-secured initiative of the senate the people could not readily against the will of the government intermeddle with administration, finance, or criminal jurisdiction, and its legislative co-operation was once more reduced in substance to the right of giving assent to alterations of the constitution.
Co-optation Restored in the Priestly Colleges
Regulating of the Qualifications for Office
Of greater moment was the participation of the burgesses in the elections—a participation, with which they seemed not to be able to dispense without disturbing more than Sulla’s superficial restoration could or would disturb. The interferences of the movement party in the sacerdotal elections were set aside; not only the Domitian law of 650, which transferred the election of the supreme priesthoods generally to the people,(19) but also the similar older enactments as to the -Pontifex Maximus- and the -Curio Maximus-(20) were cancelled by Sulla, and the colleges of priests received back the right of self-completion in its original absoluteness. In the case of elections to the offices of state, the mode hitherto pursued was on the whole retained; except in so far as the new regulation of the military command to be mentioned immediately certainly involved as its consequence a material restriction of the powers of the burgesses, and indeed in some measure transferred the right of bestowing the appointment of generals from the burgesses to the senate. It does not even appear that Sulla now resumed the previously attempted restoration of the Servian voting-arrangement;(21) whether it was that he regarded the particular composition of the voting-divisions as altogether a matter of indifference, or whether it was that this older arrangement seemed to him to augment the dangerous influence of the capitalists. Only the qualifications were restored and partially raised. The limit of age requisite for the holding of each office was enforced afresh; as was also the enactment that every candidate for the consulship should have previously held the praetorship, and every candidate for the praetorship should have previously held the quaestorship, whereas the aedileship was allowed to be passed over. The various attempts that had been recently made to establish a -tyrannis- under the form of a consulship continued for several successive years led to special rigour in dealing with this abuse; and it was enacted that at least two years should elapse between the holding of one magistracy and the holding of another, and at least ten years should elapse before the same office could be held a second time. In this latter enactment the earlier ordinance of 412 (22) was revived, instead of the absolute prohibition of all re-election to the consulship, which had been the favourite idea of the most recent ultra-oligarchical epoch.(23) On the whole, however, Sulla left the elections to take their course, and sought merely to fetter the power of the magistrates in such a way that—let the incalculable caprice of the comitia call to office whomsoever it might—the person elected should not be in a position to rebel against the oligarchy.
Weakening of the Tribunate of the People
The supreme magistrates of the state were at this period practically the three colleges of the tribunes of the people, the consuls and praetors, and the censors. They all emerged from the Sullan restoration with materially diminished rights, more especially the tribunician office, which appeared to the regent an instrument indispensable doubtless for senatorial government, but yet— as generated by revolution and having a constant tendency to generate fresh revolutions in its turn—requiring to be rigorously and permanently shackled. The tribunician authority had arisen out of the right to annul the official acts of the magistrates by veto, and, eventually, to fine any one who should oppose that right and to take steps for his farther punishment; this was still left to the tribunes, excepting that a heavy fine, destroying as a rule a man’s civil existence, was imposed on the abuse of the right of intercession. The further prerogative of the tribune to have dealings with the people at pleasure, partly for the purpose of bringing up accusations and especially of calling former magistrates to account at the bar of the people, partly for the purpose of submitting laws to the vote, had been the lever by which the Gracchi, Saturninus, and Sulpicius had revolutionized the state; it was not abolished, but its exercise was probably made dependent on a permission to be previously requested from the senate.(24) Lastly it was added that the holding of the tribunate should in future disqualify for the undertaking of a higher office—an enactment which, like many other points in Sulla’s restoration, once more reverted to the old patrician maxims, and, just as in the times before the admission of the plebeians to the civil magistracies, declared the tribunate and the curule offices to be mutually incompatible. In this way the legislator of the oligarchy hoped to check tribunician demagogism and to keep all ambitious and aspiring men aloof from the tribunate, but to retain it as an instrument of the senate both for mediating between it and the burgesses, and, should circumstances require, for keeping in check the magistrates; and, as the authority of the king and afterwards of the republican magistrates over the burgesses scarcely anywhere comes to light so clearly as in the principle that they exclusively had the right of addressing the people, so the supremacy of the senate, now first legally established, is most distinctly apparent in this permission which the leader of the people had to ask from the senate for every transaction with his constituents.
Limitation of the Supreme Magistracy
Regulation of the Consular and Praetorian Functions
before—
The Time of Sulla
The consulship and praetorship also, although viewed by the aristocratic regenerator of Rome with a more favourable eye than the tribunate liable in itself to be regarded with suspicion, by no means escaped that distrust towards its own instruments which is throughout characteristic of oligarchy. They were restricted with more tenderness in point of form, but in a way very sensibly felt. Sulla here began with the partition of functions. At the beginning of this period the arrangement in that respect stood as follows. As formerly there had devolved on the two consuls the collective functions of the supreme magistracy, so there still devolved on them all those official duties for which distinct functionaries had not been by law established. This latter course had been adopted with the administration of justice in the capital, in which the consuls, according to a rule inviolably adhered to, might not interfere, and with the transmarine provinces then existing—Sicily, Sardinia, and the two Spains—in which, while the consul might no doubt exercise his -imperium-, he did so only exceptionally. In the ordinary course of things, accordingly, the six fields of special jurisdiction— the two judicial appointments in the capital and the four transmarine provinces—were apportioned among the six praetors, while there devolved on the two consuls, by virtue of their general powers, the management of the non-judicial business of the capital and the military command in the continental possessions. Now as this field of general powers was thus doubly occupied, the one consul in reality remained at the disposal of the government; and in ordinary times accordingly those eight supreme annual magistrates fully, and in fact amply, sufficed. For extraordinary cases moreover power was reserved on the one hand to conjoin the non-military functions, and on the other hand to prolong the military powers beyond the term of their expiry (-prorogare-). It was not unusual to commit the two judicial offices to the same praetor, and to have the business of the capital, which in ordinary circumstances had to be transacted by the consuls, managed by the -praetor urbanus-; whereas, as far as possible, the combination of several commands in the same hand was judiciously avoided. For this case in reality a remedy was provided by the rule that there was no interregnum in the military -imperium-, so that, although it had its legal term, it yet continued after the arrival of that term de jure, until the successor appeared and relieved his predecessor of the command; or—which is the same thing— the commanding consul or praetor after the expiry of his term of office, if a successor did not appear, might continue to act, and was bound to do so, in the consul’s or praetor’s stead. The influence of the senate on this apportionment of functions consisted in its having by use and wont the power of either giving effect to the ordinary rule—so that the six praetors allotted among
Regulation of Their Functions by Sulla
Separation of the Political and Military Authority
Cisalpine Gaul Erected into a Province
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)
Lastly, as the number of praetors to be nominated yearly was raised from six to eight, the new arrangement of the duties was such, that the ten chief magistrates to be nominated yearly devoted themselves, during their first year of office, as consuls or praetors to the business of the capital—the two consuls to government and administration, two of the praetors to the administration of civil law, the remaining six to the reorganized administration of criminal justice—and, during their second year of office, were as proconsuls or propraetors invested with the command in one of the ten governorships: Sicily, Sardinia, the two Spains, Macedonia, Asia, Africa, Narbo, Cilicia, and Italian Gaul. The already-mentioned augmentation of the number of quaestors by Sulla to twenty was likewise connected with this arrangement.(28)
Better Arrangement of Business
Increase of the Power of the Senate
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
Lastly we have already observed that the highest of all magistracies, the censorship, though not formally abolished, was shelved in the same way as the dictatorship had previously been. Practically it might certainly be dispensed with. Provision was otherwise made for filling up the senate. From the time that Italy was practically tax-free and the army was substantially formed by enlistment, the register of those liable to taxation and service lost in the main its significance; and, if disorder prevailed in the equestrian roll or the list of those entitled to the suffrage, that disorder was probably not altogether unwelcome. There thus remained only the current financial functions which the consuls had hitherto discharged when, as frequently happened, no election of censors had taken place, and which they now took as a part of their ordinary official duties. Compared with the substantial gain that by the shelving of the censorship the magistracy lost its crowning dignity, it was a matter of little moment and was not at all prejudicial to the sole dominion of the supreme governing corporation, that—with a view to satisfy the ambition of the senators now so much more numerous—the number of the pontifices and that of the augurs was increased from nine,(30) that of the custodiers of oracles from ten,(31) to fifteen each, and that of the banquet-masters from three(32) to seven.
Regulation of the Finances
In financial matters even under the former constitution the decisive voice lay with the senate; the only point to be dealt with, accordingly, was the re-establishment of an orderly administration. Sulla had found himself at first in no small difficulty as to money; the sums brought with him from Asia Minor were soon expended for the pay of his numerous and constantly swelling army. Even after thevictory at the Colline gate the senate, seeing that the state-chest had been carried off to Praeneste, had been obliged to resort to urgent measures. Various building-sites in the capital and several portions of the Campanian domains were exposed to sale, the client kings, the freed and allied communities, were laid under extraordinary contribution, their landed property and their customs-revenues were in some cases confiscated, and in others new privileges were granted to them for money. But the residue of nearly 600,000 pounds found in the public chest on the surrender of Praeneste, the public auctions which soon began, and other extraordinary resources, relieved the embarrassment of the moment. Provision was made for the future not so much by the reform in the Asiatic revenues, under which the tax-payers were the principal gainers, and the state chest was perhaps at most no loser, as by the resumption of the Campanian domains, to which Aenaria was now added,(33) and above all by the abolition of the largesses of grain, which since the time of Gaius Gracchus had eaten like a canker into the Roman finances.
Reorganization of the Judicial System.
Previous Arrangements
Ordinary Procedure
Permanent and Special -Quaestiones-
Centumviral Court
The judicial system on the other hand was essentially revolutionized, partly from political considerations, partly with a view to introduce greater unity and usefulness into the previous very insufficient and unconnected legislation on the subject. According to the arrangements hitherto subsisting, processes fell to be decided partly by the burgesses, partly by jurymen. The judicial cases in which the whole burgesses decided on appeal from the judgment of the magistrate were, down to the time of Sulla, placed in the hands primarily of the tribunes of the people, secondarily of the aediles, inasmuch as all the processes, through which a person entrusted with an office or commission by the community was brought to answer for his conduct of its affairs, whether they involved life and limb or money-fines, had to be in the first instance dealt with by the tribunes of the people, and all the other processes in which ultimately the people decided, were in the first instance adjudicated on, in the second presided over, by the curule or plebeian aediles. Sulla, if he did not directly abolish the tribunician process of calling to account, yet made it dependent, just like the initiative of the tribunes in legislation, on the previous consent of the senate, and presumably also limited in like manner the aedilician penal procedure. On the other hand he enlarged the jurisdiction of the jury courts. There existed at that time two sorts of procedure before jurymen. The ordinary procedure, which was applicable in all cases adapted according to our view for a criminal or civil process with the exception of crimes immediately directed against the state, consisted in this, that one of the two praetors of the capital technically adjusted the cause and a juryman (-iudex-) nominated by him decided it on the basis of this adjustment. The extraordinary jury-procedure again was applicable in particular civil or criminal cases of importance, for which, instead of the single juryman, a special jury-court had been appointed by special laws. Of this sort were the special tribunals constituted for individual cases;(34) the standing commissional tribunals, such as had been appointed for exactions,(35) for poisoning and murder,(36) perhaps also for bribery at elections and other crimes, in the course of the seventh century; and lastly, the two courts of the “Ten-men” for processes affecting freedom, and the “Hundred and five,” or more briefly, the “Hundred-men,” for processes affecting inheritance, also called, from the shaft of a spear employed in all disputes as to property, the “spear-court” (-hasta-). The court of Ten-men (-decemviri litibus iudicandis-) was a very ancient institution for the protection of the plebeians against their masters.(37) The period and circumstances in which the spear-court originated
Sullan -Quaestiones-
Sulla’s leading reforms were of a threefold character. First, he very considerably increased the number of the jury-courts. There were henceforth separate judicial commissions for exactions; for murder, including arson and perjury; for bribery at elections; for high treason and any dishonour done to the Roman name; for the most heinous cases of fraud—the forging of wills and of money; for adultery; for the most heinous violations of honour, particularly for injuries to the person and disturbance of the domestic peace; perhaps also for embezzlement of public moneys, for usury and other crimes; and at least the greater number of these courts were either found in existence or called into life by Sulla, and were provided by him with special ordinances setting forth the crime and form of criminal procedure. The government, moreover, was not deprived of the right to appoint in case of emergency special courts for particular groups of crimes. As a result of these arrangements, the popular tribunals were in substance done away with, processes of high treason in particular were consigned to the new high treason commission, and the ordinary jury procedure was considerably restricted, for the more serious falsifications and injuries were withdrawn from it. Secondly, as respects the presidency of the courts, six praetors, as we have already mentioned, were now available for the superintendence of the different jury-courts, and to these were added a number of other directors in the care of the commission which was most frequently called into action—that for dealing with murder. Thirdly, the senators were once more installed in the office of jurymen in room of the Gracchan equites.
The political aim of these enactments—to put an end to the share which the equites had hitherto had in the government—is clear as day; but it as little admits of doubt, that these were not mere measures of a political tendency, but that they formed the first attempt to amend the Roman criminal procedure and criminal law, which had since the struggle between the orders fallen more and more into confusion. From this Sullan legislation dates the distinction— substantially unknown to the earlier law—between civil and criminal causes, in the sense which we now attach to these expressions; henceforth a criminal cause appears as that which comes before the bench of jurymen under the presidency of the praetor, a civil cause as the procedure, in which the juryman or jurymen do not discharge their duties under praetorian presidency. The whole body of the Sullan ordinances as to the -quaestiones- may be characterized at once as the first Roman code after the Twelve Tables, and as the first criminal code ever specially issued at all. But in the details also there appears a laudable and liberal spirit. Singular as it may sound regarding the author of the proscriptions, it remains nevertheless true that he abolished the punishment of death for political offences; for, as according to the Roman custom which even Sulla retained unchanged the people only, and not the jury-commission, could sentence to forfeiture of life or to imprisonment,(38) the transference of processes of high treason from the burgesses to a standing commission amounted to the abolition of capital punishment for such offences. On the other hand, the restriction of the pernicious special commissions for particular cases of high treason, of which the Varian commission(39) in the Social war had been a specimen, likewise involved an improvement. The whole reform was of singular and lasting benefit, and a permanent monument of the practical, moderate, statesmanly spirit, which made its author well worthy, like the old decemvirs, to step forward between the parties as sovereign mediator with his code of law.
Police Laws
We may regard as an appendix to these criminal laws the police ordinances, by which Sulla, putting the law in place of the censor, again enforced good discipline and strict manners, and, by establishing new maximum rates instead of the old ones which had long been antiquated, attempted to restrain luxury at banquets, funerals, and otherwise.
The Roman Municipal System
Lastly, the development of an independent Roman municipal system was the work, if not of Sulla, at any rate of the Sullan epoch. The idea of organically incorporating the community as a subordinate political unit in the higher unity of the state was originally foreign to antiquity; the despotism of the east knew nothing of urban commonwealths in the strict sense of the word, and city and state were throughout the Helleno-Italic world necessarily coincident.
In the seventh century this absolute centralization of the public life of the Roman community in the one focus of Rome was given up, so far as Italy at least was concerned. Now that Italy was a single civic community and the civic territory reached from the Arnus and Rubico down to the Sicilian Straits,(41) it was necessary to consent to the formation of smaller civic communities within that larger unit. So Italy was organized into communities of full burgesses; on which occasion also the larger cantons that were dangerous from their size were probably broken up, so far as this had not been done already, into several smaller town-districts.(42) The position of these new communities of full burgesses was a compromise between that which had belonged to them hitherto as allied states, and that which by the earlier law would have belonged to them as integral parts of the Roman community. Their basis was in general the constitution of the former formally sovereign Latin community, or, so far as their constitution in its principles resembled the Roman, that of the Roman old-patrician-consular community; only care was taken to apply to the same institutions in the -municipium- names different from,
Relation of the -Municipium- to the State
With reference to the relation of this secondary political organism to the primary organism of the state, political prerogatives in general belonged completely to the former as well as to the latter, and consequently the municipal decree and the -imperium- of the municipal magistrates bound the municipal burgess just as the decree of the people and the consular -imperium- bound the Roman. This led, on the whole, to a co-ordinate exercise of power by the authorities of the state and of the town; both had, for instance, the right of valuation and taxation, so that in the case of any municipal valuations and taxes those prescribed by Rome were not taken into account, and vice versa; public buildings might be instituted both by the Roman magistrates throughout Italy and by the municipal authorities in their own district, and so in other cases. In the event of collision, of course the community yielded to the state and the decree of the people invalidated the municipal decree. A formal division of functions probably took place only in the administration of justice, where the system of pure co-ordination would have led to the greatest confusion. In criminal procedure presumably all capital causes, and in civil procedure those more difficult cases which presumed an independent action on the part of the directing magistrate, were reserved for the authorities and jurymen of the capital, and the Italian municipal courts were restricted to the minor and less complicated lawsuits, or to those which were very urgent.
Rise of the -Municipium-
The origin of this Italian municipal system has not been recorded by tradition. It is probable that its germs may be traced to exceptional regulations for the great burgess-colonies, which were founded at the end of the sixth century;(43) at least several, in themselves indifferent, formal differences between burgess-colonies and burgess—municipia- tend to show that the new burgess-colony, which at that time practically took the place of the Latin, had originally a better position in state-law than the far older burgess--municipium-, and the advantage doubtless can only have consisted in a municipal constitution approximating to the Latin, such as afterwards belonged to all burgess-colonies and burgess—municipia-. The new organization is first distinctly demonstrable for the revolutionary colony of Capua;(44) and it admits of no doubt that it was first fully applied, when all the hitherto sovereign towns of Italy had to be organized, in consequence of the Social war, as burgess-communities. Whether it was the Julian law, or the censors of 668, or Sulla, that first arranged the details, cannot be determined: the entrusting of the censorial functions to the -duumviri- seems indeed to have been introduced after the analogy of the Sullan ordinance superseding the censorship, but may be equally well referred to the oldest Latin constitution to which also the censorship was unknown. In any case this municipal constitution— inserted in, and subordinate to, the state proper—is one of the most remarkable and momentous products of the Sullan period, and of the life of the Roman state generally. Antiquity was certainly as little able to dovetail the city into the state as to develop of itself representative government and other great principles of our modern state-life; but it carried its political development up to those limits at which it outgrows and bursts its assigned dimensions, and this was the case especially with Rome, which in every respect stands on the line of separation and connection between the old and the new intellectual worlds. In the Sullan constitution the primary assembly and the urban character of the commonwealth of Rome, on the one hand, vanished almost into a meaningless form; the community subsisting within the state on the other hand was already completely developed in the Italian -municipium-. Down to the name, which in such cases no doubt is the half of the matter, this last constitution of the free republic carried out the representative system and the idea of the state built upon the basis of the municipalities.
The municipal system in the provinces was not altered by this movement; the municipal authorities of the non-free towns continued— special exceptions apart—to be confined to administration and police, and to such jurisdiction as the Roman authorities did not prefer to take into their own hands.
Impression Produced by the Sullan Reorganization
Opposition of the Officers
Such was the constitution which Lucius Cornelius Sulla gave to the commonwealth of Rome. The senate and equestrian order, the burgesses and proletariate, Italians and provincials, accepted it as it was dictated to them by the regent, if not without grumbling, at any rate without rebelling: not so the Sullan officers. The Roman army had totally changed its character. It had certainly been rendered by the Marian reform more ready for action and more militarily useful than when it did not fight before the walls of Numantia; but it had at the same time been converted from a burgess-force into a set of mercenaries who showed no fidelity to the state at all, and proved faithful to the officer only if he had the skill personally to gain their attachment. The civil war had given fearful evidence of this total revolution in the spirit of the army: six generals in command, Albinus,(45) Cato,(46) Rufus,(47) Flaccus,(48) Cinna,(49) and Gaius Carbo,(50) had fallen during its course by the hands of their soldiers: Sulla alone had hitherto been able to retain the mastery of the dangerous crew, and that only, in fact, by giving the rein to all their wild desires as no Roman general before him had ever done. If the blame of destroying the old military discipline is on this account attached to him, the censure is not exactly without ground, but yet without justice; he was indeed the first Roman magistrate who was only enabled to discharge his military and political task by coming forward as a -condottiere-. He had not however taken the military dictatorship for the purpose of making the state subject to the soldiery, but rather for the purpose of compelling everything in the state, and especially the army and the officers, to submit once more to the authority of civil order. When this became evident, an opposition arose against him among his own staff. The oligarchy might play the tyrant as respected other citizens; but that the generals also, who with their good swords had replaced the overthrown senators in their seats, should now be summoned to yield implicit obedience to this very senate, seemed intolerable. The very two officers in whom Sulla had placed most confidence resisted the new order of things. When Gnaeus Pompeius, whom Sulla had entrusted with the conquest of Sicily and Africa and had selected for his son-in-law, after accomplishing his task received orders from the senate to dismiss his army, he omitted to comply and fell little short of open insurrection.
Quintus Ofella, to whose firm perseverance in front of Praeneste the success of the last and most severe campaign was essentially due in equally open violation of the newly issued ordinances became a candidate for the consulship without having held the inferior magistracies. With Pompeius there was effected, if not a cordial reconciliation, at any rate a compromise. Sulla, who knew his man sufficiently not to fear him, did not resent the impertinent remark which Pompeius
Re-establishment of Constitutional Order
One thing still remained—perhaps the most difficult of all: to bring the exceptional state of things into accordance with the paths prescribed by the new or old laws. It was facilitated by the circumstance, that Sulla never lost sight of this as his ultimate aim. Although the Valerian law gave him absolute power and gave to each of his ordinances the force of law, he had nevertheless availed himself of this extraordinary prerogative only in the case of measures, which were of transient importance, and to take part in which would simply have uselessly compromised the senate and burgesses, especially in the case of the proscriptions.
Sulla Resigns the Regency
Ordinarily he had himself observed those regulations, which he prescribed for the future. That the people were consulted, we read in the law as to the quaestors which is still in part extant; and the same is attested of other laws, e. g. the sumptuary law and those regarding the confiscation of domains. In like manner the senate was previously consulted in the more important administrative acts, such as in the sending forth and recall of the African army and in the conferring of the charters of towns. In the same spirit Sulla caused consuls to be elected even for 673, through which at least the odious custom of dating officially by the regency was avoided; nevertheless the power still lay exclusively with the regent, and the election was directed so as to fall on secondary personages. But in the following year (674) Sulla revived the ordinary constitution in full efficiency, and administered the state as consul in concert with his comrade in arms Quintus Metellus, retaining the regency, but allowing it for the time to lie dormant. He saw well how dangerous it was for his own very institutions to perpetuate the military dictatorship. When the new state of things seemed likely to hold its ground and the largest and most important portion of the new arrangements had been completed, although various matters, particularly in colonization, still remained to be done, he allowed the elections for
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.
Sulla’s Political Career
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,
Sulla and His Work
We do not mean that the Sullan constitution was a work of political genius, such as those of Gracchus and Caesar. There does not occur in it—as is, indeed, implied in its very nature as a restoration—a single new idea in statesmanship. All its most essential features— admission to the senate by the holding of the quaestorship, the abolition of the censorial right to eject a senator from the senate, the initiative of the senate in legislation, the conversion of the tribunician office into an instrument of the senate for fettering the -imperium-, the prolonging of the duration of the supreme office to two years, the transference of the command from the popularly-elected magistrate to the senatorial proconsul or propraetor, and even the new criminal and municipal arrangements— were not created by Sulla, but were institutions which had previously grown out of the oligarchic government, and which he merely regulated and fixed. And even as to the horrors attaching to his restoration, the proscriptions and confiscations—are they, compared with the doings of Nasica, Popillius, Opimius, Caepio and so on, anything else than the legal embodiment of the customary oligarchic mode of getting rid of opponents? On the Roman oligarchy of this period no judgment can be passed save one of inexorable and remorseless condemnation; and, like everything, else connected with it, the Sullan constitution is completely involved in that condemnation. To accord praise which the genius of a bad man bribes us into bestowing is to sin against the sacred character of history; but we may be allowed to bear in mind that Sulla was far less answerable for the Sullan restoration than the body of the Roman aristocracy, which had ruled as a clique for centuries and had every year become more enervated and embittered by age, and that all that was hollow and all that was nefarious therein is ultimately traceable to that aristocracy. Sulla reorganized the state—not, however, as the master of the house who puts his shattered estate and household in order according to his own discretion, but as the temporary business-manager who faithfully complies with his instructions; it is superficial and false in such a case to devolve the final and essential responsibility from the master
Value of the Sullan Constitution
But the whole country—and not the aristocracy merely—was more indebted to him than posterity was willing to confess. Sulla definitely terminated the Italian revolution, in so far as it was based on the disabilities of individual less privileged districts as compared with others of better rights, and, by compelling himself and his party to recognize the equality of the rights of all Italians in presence of the law, he became the real and final author of the full political unity of Italy—a gain which was not too dearly purchased by ever so many troubles and streams of blood. Sulla however did more. For more than half a century the power of Rome had been declining, and anarchy had been her permanent condition: for the government of the senate with the Gracchan constitution was anarchy, and the government of Cinna and Carbo was a yet far worse illustration of the absence of a master-hand (the sad image of which is most clearly reflected in that equally confused and unnatural league with the Samnites), the most uncertain, most intolerable, and most mischievous of all conceivable political conditions—in fact the beginning of the end. We do not go too far when we assert that the long-undermined Roman commonwealth must have necessarily fallen to pieces, had not Sulla by his intervention in Asia and Italy saved its existence. It is true that the constitution of Sulla had as little endurance as that of Cromwell, and it was not difficult to see that his structure was no solid one; but it is arrant thoughtlessness
Immoral and Superficial Nature of the Sullan Restoration
It is not, however, the statesman alone who has a voice in judging the dead; and with justice outraged human feeling will never reconcile itself to what Sulla did or suffered others to do. Sulla not only established his despotic power by unscrupulous violence, but in doing so called things by their right name with a certain cynical frankness, through which he has irreparably offended the great mass of the weakhearted who are more revolted at the name than at the thing, but through which, from the cool and dispassionate character of his crimes, he certainly appears to the moral judgment more revolting than the criminal acting from passion. Outlawries, rewards to executioners, confiscations of goods, summary procedure with insubordinate officers had occurred a hundred times, and the obtuse political morality of ancient civilization had for such things only lukewarm censure; but it was unexampled that the names of the outlaws should be publicly posted up and their heads publicly exposed, that a set sum should be fixed for the bandits who slew them and that it should be duly entered in the public account-books, that the confiscated property should be brought to the hammer like the spoil of an enemy in the public market, that the general should order a refractory officer to be at once cut down and acknowledge the deed before all the people. This public mockery of humanity was also a political error; it contributed not a little to envenom later revolutionary crises beforehand, and on that account even now a dark shadow deservedly rests on the memory of the author of the proscriptions.
Sulla may moreover be justly blamed that, while in all important matters he acted with remorseless vigour, in subordinate and more especially in personal questions he very frequently yielded to his sanguine temperament and dealt according to his likings or dislikings. Wherever he really felt hatred, as for instance against the Marians, he allowed it to take its course without restraint even against the innocent, and boasted of himself that no one had better requited friends and foes.(52) He did not disdain on occasion of his plenitude of power to accumulate a colossal fortune. The first absolute monarch of the Roman state, he verified the maxim of absolutism—that the laws do not bind the prince—forthwith in the case of those laws which he himself issued as to adultery and extravagance. But his lenity towards his own party and his own circle was more pernicious for the state than his indulgence towards himself. The laxity of his military discipline, although it was partly enjoined by his political exigencies, may be reckoned as coming under this category; but far more pernicious was his indulgence towards his political adherents. The extent of his occasional forbearance is hardly credible: for instance Lacius Murena was not only released from punishment for defeats which he sustained through arrant perversity and insubordination,(53) but was even allowed a triumph; Gnaeus Pompeius, who had behaved still worse, was still more extravagantly honoured by Sulla.(54) The extensive range and the worst enormities of the proscriptions and confiscations probably arose not so much from Sulla’s own wish as from this spirit of indifference, which in his position indeed was hardly more pardonable. That Sulla with his intrinsically energetic and yet withal indifferent temperament should conduct himself very variously, sometimes with incredible indulgence, sometimes with inexorable severity, may readily be conceived. The saying repeated a thousand times, that he was before his regency a good-natured, mild man, but when regent a bloodthirsty tyrant, carries in it its own refutation; if he as regent displayed the reverse of his earlier gentleness, it must rather be said that he punished with the same careless nonchalance with which he pardoned. This half-ironical frivolity pervades his whole political action. It is always as if the victor, just as it pleased him to call his merit in gaining victory good fortune, esteemed the victory itself of no value; as if he had a partial presentiment of the vanity and perishableness of his own work; as if after the manner of a steward he preferred making repairs to pulling down and rebuilding, and allowed himself in the end to be content with a sorry plastering to conceal the flaws.
Sulla after His Retirement
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
Italy never witnessed a grander funeral solemnity. In every place through which the deceased was borne in regal attire, with his well-known standards and fasces before him, the inhabitants and above all his old soldiers joined the mourning train: it seemed as if the whole army would once more meet round the hero in death, who had in life led it so often and never except to victory. So the endless funeral procession reached the capital, where the courts kept holiday and all business was suspended, and two thousand golden chaplets awaited the dead—the last
The Commonwealth and Its Economy
External and Internal Bankruptcy of the Roman State
We have traversed a period of ninety years—forty years of profound peace, fifty of an almost constant revolution. It is the most inglorious epoch known in Roman history. It is true that the Alps were crossed both in an easterly and westerly direction,(1) and the Roman arms reached in the Spanish peninsula as far as the Atlantic Ocean(2) and in the Macedono-Grecian peninsula as far as the Danube;(3) but the laurels thus gained were as cheap as they were barren. The circle of the “extraneous peoples under the will, sway, dominion, or friendship of the Roman burgesses,"(4) was not materially extended; men were content to realize the gains of a better age and to bring the communities, annexed to Rome in laxer forms of dependence, more and more into full subjection. Behind the brilliant screen of provincial reunions was concealed a very sensible decline of Roman power. While the whole ancient civilization was daily more and more distinctly embraced in the Roman state, and embodied there in forms of more general validity, the nations excluded from it began simultaneously beyond the Alps and beyond the Euphrates to pass from defence to aggression. On the battle-fields of Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae, of Chaeronea and Orchomenus, were heard the first peals of that thunderstorm, which the Germanic tribes and the Asiatic hordes were destined to bring upon the Italo-Grecian world, and the last dull rolling of which has reached almost to our own times. But in internal development also this epoch bears the same character. The old organization collapses irretrievably. The Roman commonwealth was planned as an urban community, which through its
The Prospect
The state of matters threatened to end in utter anarchy and in the inward and outward dissolution of the state. The political movement tended thoroughly towards the goal of despotism; the only point still in dispute was whether the close circle of the families of rank, or the senate of capitalists, or a monarch was to be the despot. The political movement followed thoroughly the paths that led to despotism; the fundamental principle of a free commonwealth— that the contending powers should reciprocally confine themselves to indirect coercion—had become effete in the eyes of all parties alike, and on both sides the fight for power began to be carried on first by the bludgeon, and soon by the sword. The revolution, at an end in so far as the old constitution was recognized by both sides as finally set aside and the aim and method of the new political development were clearly settled, had yet up to this time discovered nothing but provisional solutions for this problem of the reorganization of the state; neither the Gracchan nor the Sullan constitution of the community bore the stamp of finality. But the bitterest feature of this bitter time was that even hope and effort failed the clear-seeing patriot. The sun of freedom with all its endless store of blessings was constantly drawing nearer to its setting, and the twilight was settling over the very world that was still so brilliant. It was no accidental catastrophe which patriotism
Finances of the State
It remains that we should notice the economic and social relations of the period before us, so far as we have not already done so.
Italian Revenues
The finances of the state were from the commencement of this epoch substantially dependent on the revenues from the provinces. In Italy the land-tax, which had always occurred there merely as an extraordinary impost by the side of the ordinary domanial and other revenues, had not been levied since the battle of Pydna, so that absolute freedom from land-tax began to be regarded as a constitutional privilege of the Roman landowner. The royalties of the state, such as the salt monopoly(5) and the right of coinage, were not now at least, if ever at all, treated as sources of income. The new tax on inheritance(6) was allowed to fall into abeyance or was perhaps directly abolished. Accordingly the Roman exchequer drew from Italy including Cisalpine Gaul nothing but the produce of the domains, particularly of the Campanian territory and of the gold mines in the land of the Celts, and the revenue from manumissions and from goods imported by sea into the Roman civic territory not for the personal consumption of the importer. Both of these may be regarded essentially as taxes on luxury, and they certainly must have been considerably augmented by the extension of the field of Roman citizenship and at the same time of Roman customs-dues to all Italy, probably including Cisalpine Gaul.
Provincial Revenues
In the provinces the Roman state claimed directly as its private property, on the one hand, in the states annulled by martial law the whole domain, on the other hand in those states, where the Roman government came in room of the former rulers, the landed property possessed by the latter. By virtue of this right the territories of Leontini, Carthage, and Corinth, the domanial property of the kings of Macedonia, Pergamus, and Cyrene, the mines in Spain and Macedonia were regarded as Roman domains; and, in like manner with the territory of Capua, were leased by the Roman censors to private contractors in return for the delivery of a proportion of the produce or a fixed sum of money. We have already explained that Gaius Gracchus went still farther, claimed the whole land of the provinces as domain, and in the case of the province of Asia practically carried out this principle; inasmuch as he legally justified the -decumae-, -scriptura-, and -vectigalia- levied there on the ground of the Roman state’s right of property in the land, pasture, and coasts of the province, whether these had previously belonged to the king or private persons.(7)
There do not appear to have been at this period any royalties from which the state derived profit, as respected the provinces; the prohibition of the culture of the vine and olive in Transalpine Gaul did not benefit the state-chest as such. On the other hand direct and indirect taxes were levied to a great extent. The client states recognized as fully sovereign—such as the kingdoms of Numidia and Cappadocia, the allied states (-civitates foederatae-) of Rhodes, Messana, Tauromenium, Massilia, Gades—were legally exempt from taxation, and merely bound by their treaties to support the Roman republic in times of war by regularly furnishing a fixed number of ships or men at their own expense, and, as a matter of course in case of need, by rendering extraordinary aid of any kind.
Taxes
The rest of the provincial territory on the other hand, even including the free cities, was throughout liable to taxation; the only exceptions were the cities invested with the Roman franchise, such as Narbo, and the communities on which immunity from taxation was specially conferred (-civitates immunes-), such as Centuripa in Sicily. The direct taxes consisted partly—as in Sicily and Sardinia—of a title to the tenth(8) of the sheaves and other field produce as of grapes and olives, or, if the land lay in pasture, to a corresponding -scriptura-; partly—as in Macedonia, Achaia, Cyrene, the greater part of Africa, the two Spains, and by Sulla’s arrangements also in Asia—of a fixed sum of money to be paid annually by each community to Rome (-stipendium-, -tributum-). This amounted, e. g. for all Macedonia, to 600,000 -denarii-(24,000 pounds), for the small island of Gyaros near Andros to 150 -denarii- (6 pounds, 10 shillings), and was apparently on the whole low and less than the tax paid before the Roman rule. Those ground-tenths and pasture-moneys the state farmed out to private contractors on condition of their paying fixed quantities of grain or fixed sums of money; with respect to the latter money-payments the state drew upon the respective communities, and left it to these to assess the amount, according to the general principles laid down by the Roman government, on the persons liable, and to collect it from them.(9)
Customs
The indirect taxes consisted—apart from the subordinate moneys levied from roads, bridges, and canals—mainly of customs-duties. The customs-duties of antiquity were, if not exclusively, at any rate principally port-dues, less frequently frontier-dues, on imports and exports destined for sale, and were levied by each community in its ports and its territory at discretion. The Romans recognized this principle generally, in so far as their original customs-domain did not extend farther than the range of the Roman franchise and the limit of the customs was by no means coincident with the limits of the empire, so that a general imperial tariff was unknown: it was only by means of state-treaty that a total exemption from customs-dues in the client communities was secured for the Roman state, and in various cases at least favourable term for the Roman burgess. But in those districts, which had not been admitted to alliance with Rome but were in the condition of subjects proper and had not acquired immunity, the customs fell as a matter of course to the proper sovereign, that is, to the Roman community; and in consequence of this several larger regions within the empire were constituted as separate Roman customs-districts, in which the several communities allied or privileged with immunity were marked off as exempt from Roman customs. Thus Sicily even from the Carthaginian period formed a closed customs-district, on the frontier of which a tax of 5 per cent on the value was levied from all imports or exports; thus on the frontiers of Asia there was levied in consequence of the Sempronian law(10) a similar tax of 21 per cent; in like manner the province of Narbo, exclusively the domain of the Roman colony, was organized as a Roman customs-district This arrangement, besides its fiscal objects, may have been partly due to the commendable purpose of checking the confusion inevitably arising out of a variety of communal tolls by a uniform regulation of frontier-dues. The levying of the customs, like that of the tenths, was without exception leased to middlemen.
Costs of Collection
The ordinary burdens of Roman taxpayers were limited to these imposts; but we may not overlook the fact, that the expenses of collection were very considerable, and the contributors paid an amount disproportionately great as compared with what the Roman government received. For, while the system of collecting taxes by middlemen, and especially by general lessees, is in itself the most expensive of all, in Rome effective competition was rendered extremely difficult in consequence of the slight extent to which the lettings were subdivided and the immense association of capital.
Requisitions
To these ordinary burdens, however, fell to be added in the first place the requisitions which were made. The costs of military administration were in law defrayed by the Roman community. It provided the commandants of every province with the means of transport and all other requisites; it paid and provisioned the Roman soldiers in the province. The provincial communities had to furnish merely shelter, wood, hay, and similar articles free of cost to the magistrates and soldiers; in fact the free towns were even ordinarily exempted from the winter quartering of the troops— permanent camps were not yet known. If the governor therefore needed grain, ships, slaves to man them, linen, leather, money, or aught else, he was no doubt absolutely at liberty in time of war—nor was it far otherwise in time of peace—to demand such supplies according to his discretion and exigencies from the subject-communities or the sovereign protected states; but these supplies were, like the Roman land-tax, treated legally as purchases or advances, and the value was immediately or afterwards made good by the Roman exchequer. Nevertheless these requisitions became, if not in the theory of state-law, at any rate practically, one of the most oppressive burdens of the provincials; and the more so, that the amount of compensation was ordinarily settled by the government or even by the governor after a one-sided fashion. We meet indeed with several legislative restrictions on this dangerous right of requisition of the Roman superior magistrates: for instance, the rule already mentioned, that in Spain there should not be taken from the country people by requisitions for grain more than the twentieth sheaf, and that the price even of this should be equitably ascertained;(11) the fixing of a maximum quantity of grain to be demanded by the governor for the wants of himself and his retinue; the previous adjustment of a definite and high rate of compensation for the grain which was frequently demanded, at least from Sicily, for the wants of the capital. But, while by fixing such rules the pressure of those requisitions on the economy of the communities and of individuals in the province was doubtless mitigated here and there, it was by no means removed. In extraordinary crises this pressure unavoidably increased and often went beyond all bounds, for then in fact the requisitions not unfrequently assumed the form of a punishment imposed or that of voluntary contributions enforced, and compensation was thus wholly withheld. Thus Sulla in 670-671 compelled the provincials of Asia Minor, who certainly had very gravely offended against Rome, to furnish to every common soldier quartered among them forty-fold pay (per day 16 -denarii- = 11 shillings), to every centurion seventy-five-fold pay, in addition to clothing and meals along with the right to invite guests at pleasure; thus the same Sulla soon afterwards imposed a general contribution on the client and subject communities,(12) in which case nothing, of course, was said of repayment.
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
Lastly we must not forget the great chapter of injustice by which in manifold ways the Roman magistrates and farmers of the revenue augmented the burden of taxation on the provinces. Although every present which the governor took might be treated legally as an exaction, and even his right of purchase might be restricted by law, yet the exercise of his public functions offered to him, if he was disposed to do wrong, pretexts more than enough for doing so. The quartering of the troops; the free lodging of the magistrates and of the host of adjutants of senatorial or equestrian rank, of clerks, lictors, heralds, physicians, and priests; the right which the messengers of the state had to be forwarded free of cost; the approval of, and providing transport for, the contributions payable in kind; above all the forced sales and the requisitions—gave all magistrates opportunity to bring home princely fortunes from the provinces. And the plundering became daily more general, the more that the control of the government appeared to be worthless and that of the capitalist-courts to be in reality dangerous to the upright magistrate alone. The institution of a standing commission regarding the exactions of magistrates in the provinces, occasioned by the frequency of complaints as to such cases, in 605,(15) and the laws as to extortion following each other so rapidly and constantly augmenting its penalties, show the daily increasing height of the evil, as the Nilometer shows the rise of the flood.
Under all these circumstances even a taxation moderate in theory might become extremely oppressive in its actual operation; and that it was so is beyond doubt, although the financial oppression, which the Italian merchants and bankers exercised over the provinces, was probably felt as a far heavier burden than the taxation with all the abuses that attached to it.
Aggregate Financial Result
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
The Finances and Public Buildings
An approximate measure of the condition of Roman finance at this period is furnished, in the absence of definite statements, first of all by the public buildings. In the first decades of this epoch these were prosecuted on the greatest scale, and the construction of roads in particular had at no time been so energetically pursued. In Italy the great southern highway of presumably earlier origin, which as a prolongation of the Appian road ran from Rome by way of Capua, Beneventum, and Venusia to the ports of Tarentum and Brundisium, had attached to it a branch-road from Capua to the Sicilian straits, a work of Publius Popillius, consul in 622. On the east coast, where hitherto only the section from Fanum to Ariminum had been constructed as part of the Flaminian highway (ii. 229), the coast road was prolonged southward as far as Brundisium, northward by way of Atria on the Po as far as Aquileia, and the portion at least from Ariminum to Atria was formed by the Popillius just mentioned in the same year. The two great Etruscan highways— the coast or Aurelian road from Rome to Pisa and Luna, which was in course of formation in 631, and the Cassian road leading by way of Sutrium and Clusium to Arretium and Florentia, which seems not to have been constructed before 583—may as Roman public highways belong only to this age. About Rome itself new
In Italy at least great works of drainage were prosecuted as well as the formation of roads. In 594 the drying of the Pomptine marshes—a vital matter for Central Italy—was set about with great energy and at least temporary success; in 645 the draining of the low-lying lands between Parma and Placentia was effected in connection with the construction of the north Italian highway. Moreover, the government did much for the Roman aqueducts, as indispensable for the health and comfort of the capital as they were costly. Not only were the two that
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.
The Finances in the Revolution
The financial condition of Rome of course assumed a far worse aspect, when the storms of revolution set in. The new and, even in a mere financial point of view, extremely oppressive burden imposed upon the state by the obligation under which Gaius Gracchus placed it to furnish corn at nominal rates to the burgesses of the capital, was certainly counterbalanced at first by the newly-opened sources of income in the province of Asia. Nevertheless the public buildings seem from that time to have almost come to a standstill. While the public works which can be shown to have been constructed from the battle of Pydna down to the time of Gaius Gracchus were numerous, from the period after 632 there is scarcely mention of any other than the projects of bridges, roads, and drainage which Marcus Aemilius Scaurus organized as censor in 645. It must remain a moot point whether this was the effect of the largesses of grain or, as is perhaps more probable, the consequence of the system of increased savings, such as befitted a government which became daily more and more a rigid oligarchy, and such as is indicated by the statement that the Roman reserve reached its highest point in 663. The terrible storm of insurrection and revolution, in combination with the five years’ deficit of the revenues of Asia Minor, was the first serious trial to which the Roman finances were subjected after the Hannibalic war: they failed to sustain it. Nothing perhaps so clearly marks the difference of the times as the circumstance that in the Hannibalic war it was not till the tenth year of the struggle, when the burgesses were almost sinking under taxation, that the reserve was touched;(22) whereas the Social war was from the first supported by the balance in hand, and when this was expended after two campaigns to the last penny, they preferred to sell by auction the public sites in the capital(23) and to seize the treasures of the temples(24) rather than levy a tax on the burgesses. The storm however, severe as it was, passed over; Sulla, at the expense doubtless of enormous economic sacrifices imposed on the subjects and Italian revolutionists in particular, restored order to the finances and, by abolishing the largesses of corn and retaining although in a reduced form the Asiatic revenues, secured for the commonwealth a satisfactory economic condition, at least in the sense of the ordinary expenditure remaining far below the ordinary income.
Private Economics
Agriculture
In the private economics of this period hardly any new feature emerges; the advantages and disadvantages formerly set forth as incident to the social circumstances of Italy(25) were not altered, but merely farther and more distinctly developed. In agriculture we have already seen that the growing power of Roman capital was gradually absorbing the intermediate and small landed estates in Italy as well as in the provinces, as the sun sucks up the drops of rain. The government
Trades
Of trades and manufactur es there is nothing to be said, except that the Italian nation in this respect persevered in an inaction bordering on barbarism. They destroyed the Corinthian factories, the depositories of so many valuable industrial traditions—not however that they might establish similar factories for themselves, but that they might buy up at extravagant prices such Corinthian vases of earthenware or copper and similar “antique works” as were preserved in Greek houses. The trades that were still somewhat prosperous, such as those connected with building, were productive of hardly any benefit for the commonwealth, because here too the system of employing slaves in every more considerable undertaking intervened: in the construction of the Marcian aqueduct, for instance, the government concluded contracts for building and materials simultaneously with 3000 master-tradesmen, each of whom then performed the work contracted for with his band of slaves.
Money-Dealing and Commerce
The most brilliant, or rather the only brilliant, side of Roman private economics was money-dealing and commerce. First of all stood the leasing of the domains and of the taxes, through which a large, perhaps the larger, part of the income of the Roman state flowed into the pockets of the Roman capitalists. The money-dealings, moreover, throughout the range of the Roman state were monopolized by the Romans; every penny circulated in Gaul, it is said in a writing issued soon after the end of this period, passes through the books of the Roman merchants, and so it was doubtless everywhere. The co-operation of rude economic conditions and of the unscrupulous employment of Rome’s political ascendency for the benefit of the private interests of every wealthy Roman rendered a usurious system of interest universal, as is shown for example by the treatment of the war-tax imposed by Sulla on the province of Asia in 670, which the Roman capitalists advanced; it swelled with paid and unpaid interest within fourteen years to sixfold its original amount. The communities had to sell their public buildings, their works of art and jewels, parents had to sell their grown-up children, in order to meet the claims of the Roman creditor: it was no rare occurrence for the debtor to be not merely subjected to moral torture, but directly placed upon the rack. To these sources of gain fell to be added the wholesale traffic. The exports and imports of Italy were very considerable. The former consisted chiefly of wine and oil, with which Italy and Greece almost exclusively—for the production of wine in the Massiliot and Turdetanian territories can at that time have been but small— supplied the whole region of the Mediterranean; Italian wine was sent in considerable quantities to the Balearic islands and Celtiberia, to Africa, which was merely a corn and pasture country, to Narbo and into the interior of Gaul. Still more considerable was the import to Italy, where at that time all luxury was concentrated, and whither most articles of luxury for food, drink, or clothing, ornaments, books, household furniture, works of art were imported by sea. The traffic in slaves, above all, received through the ever-increasing demand of the Roman merchants an impetus to which no parallel had been known in the region of the Mediterranean, and which stood in the closest connection with the flourishing of piracy. All lands and all nations were laid under contribution for slaves, but the places where they were chiefly captured were Syria and the interior of Asia Minor.(27)
Ostia
Puteoli
In Italy the transmarine imports were chiefly concentrated in the two great emporia on the Tyrrhene sea, Ostia and Puteoli. The grain destined for the capital was brought to Ostia, which was far from having a good roadstead, but, as being the nearest port to Rome, was the most appropriate mart for less valuable wares; whereas the traffic in luxuries with the east was directed mainly to Puteoli, which recommended itself by its good harbour for ships with valuable cargoes, and presented to merchants a market in its immediate neighbourhood little inferior to that of the capital— the district of Baiae, which came to be more and more filled with villas. For a long time this latter traffic was conducted through Corinth and after its destruction through Delos, and in this sense accordingly Puteoli is called by Lucilius the Italian “Little Delos”; but after the catastrophe which befel Delos in the Mithradatic war,(28) and from which it never recovered, the Puteolans entered into direct commercial connections with Syria and Alexandria, and their city became more and more decidedly the first seat of transmarine commerce in Italy. But it was not merely the gain which was made by the Italian exports and imports, that fell mainly to the Italians; at Narbo they competed in the Celtic trade with the Massiliots, and in general it admits of no doubt that the Roman merchants to be met with everywhere, floating or settled, took to themselves the best share of all speculations.
Capitalist Oligarchy
Putting together these phenomena, we recognize as the most prominent feature in the private economy of this epoch the financial oligarchy of Roman capitalists standing alongside of, and on a par with, the political oligarchy. In their hands were united the rents of the soil of almost all Italy and of the best portions of the provincial territory, the proceeds at usury of the capital monopolized by them, the commercial gain from the whole empire, and lastly, a very considerable part of the Roman state-revenue in the form of profits accruing from the lease of that revenue. The daily-increasing accumulation of capital is evident in the rise of the average rate of wealth: 3,000,000 sesterces (30,000 pounds) was now a moderate senatorial, 2,000,000 (20,000 pounds) was a decent equestrian fortune; the property of the wealthiest man of the Gracchan age, Publius Crassus consul in 623 was estimated at 100,000,000 sesterces (1,000,000 pounds). It is no wonder, that this capitalist order exercised a preponderant influence on external policy; that it destroyed out of commercial rivalry Carthage and Corinth(29) as the Etruscans had formerly destroyed Alalia and the Syracusans Caere; that it in spite of the senate upheld the colony of Narbo.(30) It is likewise no wonder, that this capitalist oligarchy engaged in earnest and often victorious competition with the oligarchy of the nobles in internal politics. But it is also no wonder, that ruined men of wealth
A compensation of very dubious value was afforded by the free parasitic Helleno-Oriental population, which sojourned in the capital as diplomatic agents for kings or communities, as physicians, schoolmasters, priests, servants, parasites, and in the myriad employments of sharpers and swindlers, or, as traders and mariners, frequented especially Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium. Still more hazardous was the disproportionate increase of the multitude of slaves in the peninsula.
The economic relations of this epoch are clearly mirrored to us even now in the Roman monetary system. Its treatment shows throughout the sagacious merchant. For long gold and silver stood side by side as general means of payment on such a footing that, while for the purpose of general cash-balances a fixed ratio of value was legally laid down between the two metals,(39) the giving one metal for the other was not, as a rule, optional, but payment was to be in gold or silver according to the tenor of the bond. In this way the great evils were avoided, that are otherwise inevitably associated with the setting up of two precious metals; the severe gold crises—as about 600, for instance, when in consequence of the discovery of the Tauriscan gold-seams(40) gold as compared with silver fell at once in Italy about 33 1/3 per cent—exercised at least no direct influence on the silver money and retail transactions. The nature of the case implied that, the more transmarine traffic extended, gold the more decidedly rose from the second place to the first; and that it did so, is confirmed by the statements as to the balances in the treasury and as to its transactions; but the government was not thereby induced to introduce gold into the coinage. The coining of gold attempted in the exigency of the Hannibalic war(41) had been long allowed to fall into abeyance; the few gold pieces which Sulla struck as regent were scarcely more than pieces coined for the occasion of his triumphal presents. Silver still as before circulated exclusively as actual money; gold, whether it, as was usual, circulated in bars or bore the stamp of a foreign or possibly
Yet it had also its weak point. According to a custom, common in all antiquity, but which reached its highest development at Carthage,(44) the Roman government issued along with the good silver -denarii- also -denarii- of copper plated with silver, which had to be accepted like the former and were just a token-money analogous to our paper currency, with compulsory circulation and recourse on the public chest, inasmuch as it also was not entitled to reject the plated pieces. This was no more an official adulteration of the coinage than our manufacture of paper-money, for they practised the thing quite openly; Marcus Drusus proposed in 663, with the view of gaining the means for his largesses of grain, the sending forth of one plated -denarius- for every seven silver ones issuing fresh from the mint; nevertheless this measure not only offered a dangerous handle to private forgery, but designedly left the public uncertain whether it was receiving silver or token money, and to what total amount the latter was in circulation. In the embarrassed period of the civil war and of the great financial crisis they seem to have so unduly availed themselves of plating, that a monetary crisis accompanied the financial one, and the quantity of spurious and really worthless pieces rendered dealings extremely insecure. Accordingly during the Cinnan government an enactment was passed by the praetors and tribunes, primarily by Marcus Marius Gratidianus,(45) for redeeming all the token-money by silver, and for that purpose an assay-office was established. How far the calling-in was accomplished, tradition has not told us; the coining of token-money itself continued to subsist.
As to the provinces, in accordance with the setting aside of gold money on principle, the coining of gold was nowhere permitted, not even in the client-states; so that a gold coinage at this period occurs only where Rome had nothing at all to say, especially among the Celts to the north of the Cevennes and among the states in revolt against Rome; the Italians, for instance, as well as Mithradates Eupator struck gold coins. The government seems to have made efforts to bring the coinage of silver also more and more into its hands, particularly in the west. In Africa and Sardinia the Carthaginian gold and silver money may have remained in circulation even after the fall of the Carthaginian state; but no coinage of precious metals took place there after either the Carthaginian or the Roman standard, and certainly very soon after the Romans took possession, the -denarius- introduced from Italy acquired the predominance in the transactions of the two countries. In Spain and Sicily, which came earlier to the Romans and experienced altogether a milder treatment, silver was no doubt coined under the Roman rule, and indeed in the former country the silver coinage was first called into existence by the Romans and based on the Roman standard;(46) but there exist good grounds for the supposition, that even in these two countries, at least from the beginning of the seventh century, the provincial and urban mints were obliged to restrict their issues to copper small money. Only in Narbonese Gaul the right of coining silver could not be withdrawn from the old-allied and considerable free city of Massilia; and the same was presumably true of the Greek cities in Illyria, Apollonia and Dyrrhachium. But the privilege of these communities to coin money was restricted indirectly by the fact, that the three-quarter -denarius-, which by ordinance of the Roman government was coined both at Massilia and in Illyria, and which had been under the name of -victoriatus- received into the Roman monetary system,(47) was about the middle of the seventh century set aside in the latter; the effect of which necessarily was, that the Massiliot and Illyrian currency was driven out of Upper Italy and only remained in circulation, over and above its native field, perhaps in the regions of the Alps and the Danube. Such progress had thus been made already in this epoch, that the standard of the -denarius- exclusively prevailed in the whole western division of the Roman state; for Italy, Sicily—of which it is as respects the beginning of the next period expressly attested, that no other silver money circulated there but the -denarius—–Sardinia, Africa, used exclusively Roman silver money, and the provincial silver still current in Spain as well as the silver money of the Massiliots and Illyrians were at least struck after the standard of the -denarius-.
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.
It is easy to form a general conception of the aspect which under such economic conditions the social relations must have assumed; but to follow out in detail the increase of luxury, of prices, of fastidiousness and frivolity is neither pleasant nor instructive. Extravagance and sensuous enjoyment formed the main object with all, among the parvenus as well as among the Licinii and Metelli; not the polished luxury which is the acme of civilization, but that sort of luxury which had developed itself amidst the decaying Hellenic civilization of Asia Minor and Alexandria, which degraded everything beautiful and significant to the purpose of decoration and studied enjoyment with a laborious pedantry, a precise punctiliousness, rendering it equally nauseous to the man of fresh feeling as to the man of fresh intellect. As to the popular festivals, the importation of transmarine wild beasts prohibited in the time of Cato(48) was, apparently about the middle of this century, formally permitted anew by a decree of the burgesses proposed by Gnaeus Aufidius; the effect of which was, that animal-hunts came into enthusiastic favour and formed a chief feature of the burgess-festivals. Several lions first appeared in the Roman arena about 651, the first elephants about 655; Sulla when praetor exhibited a hundred lions in 661. The same holds true of gladiatorial games. If the forefathers had publicly exhibited representations of great battles, their grandchildren
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
It is worth while to dwell for a moment on the luxury that went on increasing in defiance of these laws, as respects silver plate. In the sixth century silver plate for the table was, with the exception of the traditionary silver salt-dish, a rarity; the Carthaginian ambassadors jested over the circumstance, that at every house to which they were invited they had encountered the same silver plate.(50) Scipio Aemilianus possessed not more than 32 pounds (120 pounds) in wrought silver; his nephew Quintus Fabius (consul in 633) first brought his plate up to 1000 pounds (4000 pounds), Marcus Drusus (tribune of the people in 663) reached 10,000 pounds (40,000 pounds); in Sulla’s time there were already counted in the capital about 150 silver state-dishes weighing 100 pounds each, several of which brought their possessors into the lists of proscription. To judge of the sums expended on these, we must recollect that the workmanship also was paid for at enormous rates; for instance Gaius Gracchus paid for choice articles of silver fifteen times, and Lucius Crassus, consul in 659, eighteen times the value of the metal, and the latter gave for a pair of cups by a noted silversmith 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds). So it was in proportion everywhere.
How it fared with marriage and the rearing of children, is shown by the Gracchan agrarian laws, which first placed a premium on these.(51) Divorce, formerly in Rome almost unheard of, was now an everyday occurrence; while in the oldest Roman marriage the husband had purchased his wife, it might have been proposed to the Romans of quality in the present times that, with the view of bringing the name into accordance with the reality, they should introduce marriage for hire. Even a man like Metellus Macedonicus, who for his honourable domestic life and his numerous host of children was the admiration of his contemporaries, when censor in 623 enforced the obligation of the burgesses to live in a state of matrimony by describing it as an oppressive public burden, which patriots ought nevertheless to undertake from a sense of duty.(52)
There were, certainly, exceptions. The circles of the rural towns, and particularly those of the larger landholders, had preserved more faithfully the old honourable habits of the Latin nation. In the capital, however, the Catonian opposition had become a mere form of words; the modern tendency bore sovereign sway, and though individuals of firm and refined organization, such as Scipio Aemilianus, knew the art of combining Roman manners with Attic culture, Hellenism was among the great multitude synonymous with intellectual and moral corruption. We must never lose sight of the reaction exercised by these social evils on political life, if we would understand the Roman revolution. It was no matter of indifference, that of the two men of rank, who in 662 acted as supreme masters of morals to the community, the one publicly reproached the other with having shed tears over the death of a -muraena- the pride of his fishpond, and the latter retaliated on the former that he had buried three wives and had shed tears over none of them. It was no matter of indifference, that in 593 an orator could make sport in the open Forum with the following description of a senatorial civil juryman, whom the time fixed for the cause finds amidst the circle of his boon-companions. “They play at hazard, delicately perfumed, surrounded by their mistresses. As the afternoon advances, they summon the servant and bid him make enquiries on the Comitium, as to what has occurred in the Forum, who has spoken in favour of or against the new project of law, what tribes have voted for and what against it. At length they go themselves to the judgment-seat, just early enough not to bring the process down on their own neck. On the way there is no opportunity in any retired alley which they do not avail themselves of, for they have gorged themselves with wine. Reluctantly they come to the tribunal and give audience to the parties. Those who are concerned bring forward their cause. The juryman orders the witnesses to come forward; he himself steps aside. When he returns, he declares that he has heard everything, and asks for the documents. He looks into the writings; he can hardly keep his eyes open for wine. When he thereupon withdraws to consider his sentence, he says to his boon-companions, ’What concern have I with these tiresome people? why should we not rather go to drink a cup of mulse mixed with Greek wine, and accompany it with a fat fieldfare and a good fish, a veritable pike from the Tiber island?’ Those who heard the orator laughed; but was it not a very serious matter, that such things were subjects for laughter?”
Nationality, Religion, and Education
Paramount Ascendency of Latinism and Hellenism
In the great struggle of the nationalities within the wide circuit of the Roman empire, the secondary nations seem at this period on the wane or disappearing. The most important of them all, the Phoenician, received through the destruction of Carthage a mortal wound from which it slowly bled to death. The districts of Italy which had hitherto preserved their old language and manners, Etruria and Samnium, were not only visited by the heaviest blows of the Sullan reaction, but were compelled also by the political levelling of Italy to adopt the Latin language and customs in public intercourse, so that the old native languages were reduced to popular dialects rapidly decaying. There no longer appears throughout the bounds of the Roman state any nationality entitled even to compete with the Roman and the Greek.
Latinism
On the other hand the Latin nationality was, as respected both the extent of its diffusion and the depth of its hold, in the most decided ascendant. As after the Social war any portion of Italian soil might belong to any Italian in full Roman ownership, and any god of an Italian temple might receive Roman gifts; as in all Italy, with the exception of the region beyond the Po, the Roman law thenceforth had exclusive authority, superseding all other civic and local laws; so the Roman language at that time became the universal language of business, and soon likewise the universal language of cultivated intercourse, in the whole peninsula from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. But it no longer restricted itself to these natural limits. The mass of capital accumulating in Italy, the riches of its products, the intelligence of its agriculturists, the versatility of its merchants, found no adequate scope in the peninsula; these circumstances and the public service carried the Italians in great numbers to the provinces.(1) Their privileged position there rendered the Roman language and the Roman law privileged also, even where Romans were not merely transacting business with each other.(2) Everywhere the Italians kept together as compact and organized masses, the soldiers in their legions, the merchants of every larger town as special corporations, the Roman burgesses domiciled or sojourning in the particular provincial court-district as “circuits” (-conventus civium Romanorum-) with their own list of jurymen and in some measure with a communal constitution; and, though these provincial Romans ordinarily returned sooner or later to Italy, they nevertheless gradually laid the foundations of a fixed population in the provinces, partly Roman, partly mixed, attaching itself to the Roman settlers. We have already mentioned that it was in Spain, where the Roman army first became a standing one, that distinct provincial towns with Italian constitution were first organized—Carteia in 583,(3) Valentia in 616,(4) and at a later date Palma and Pollentia.(5) Although the interior was still far from civilized,—the territory
Hellenism
But, however rapidly and vigorously the Latin language and nationality gain ground, they at the same time recognize the Hellenic nationality as having an entirely equal, indeed an earlier and better title, and enter everywhere into the closest alliance with it or become intermingled with it in a joint development. The Italian revolution, which otherwise levelled all the non-Latin nationalities in the peninsula, did not disturb the Greek cities of Tarentum, Rhegium, Neapolis, Locri.(6) In like manner Massilia, although now enclosed by Roman territory, remained continuously a Greek city and, just as such, firmly connected with Rome. With the complete Latinizing of Italy the growth of Hellenizing went hand in hand. In the higher circles of Italian society Greek training became an integral element of their native culture. The consul of 623, the -pontifex maximus- Publius Crassus, excited the astonishment even of the native Greeks, when as governor of Asia he delivered his judicial decisions, as the case required, sometimes in ordinary Greek, sometimes in one of the four dialects which
Mixture of Peoples
The immediate result of this complete revolution in the relations of nationality was certainly far from pleasing. Italy swarmed with Greeks, Syrians, Phoenicians, Jews, Egyptians, while the provinces swarmed with Romans; sharply defined national peculiarities everywhere came into mutual contact, and were visibly worn off; it seemed as if nothing was to be left behind but the general impress of utilitarianism. What the Latin character gained in diffusion it lost in freshness; especially in Rome itself, where the middle class disappeared the soonest and most entirely, and nothing was left but the grandees and the beggars, both in like measure cosmopolitan. Cicero assures us that about 660 the general culture in the Latin towns stood higher than in Rome; and this is confirmed by the literature of this period, whose most pleasing, healthiest, and most characteristic products, such as the national comedy and the Lucilian satire, are with greater justice described as Latin, than as Roman. That the Italian Hellenism of the lower orders was in reality nothing but a repulsive cosmopolitanism tainted at once with all the extravagances of culture and with a superficially whitewashed barbarism, is self-evident; but even in the case of the better society the fine taste of the Scipionic circle did not remain the permanent standard. The more the mass of society began to take interest in Greek life, the more decidedly it resorted not to the classical literature, but to the most modern and frivolous productions of the Greek mind; instead of moulding the Roman character in the Hellenic spirit, they contented themselves with borrowing that sort of pastime which set their own intellect to work as little as possible. In this sense the Arpinate landlord Marcus Cicero, the father of the orator, said that among the Romans, just as among Syrian slaves, each was the less worth, the more he understood Greek.
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.
The suppression of the secondary, and the mutual interpenetration of the two primary nationalities, which are thus apparent on a general survey of national relations, now fall to be more precisely exhibited in detail in the several fields of religion, national education, literature, and art.
Religion
The Roman religion was so intimately interwoven with the Roman commonwealth and the Roman household—so thoroughly in fact the pious reflection of the Roman burgess-world—that the political and social revolution necessarily overturned also the fabric of religion. The ancient Italian popular faith fell to the ground; over its ruins rose—like the oligarchy and the -tyrannis- rising over the ruins of the political commonwealth—on the one side unbelief, state-religion, Hellenism, and on the other side superstition, sectarianism, the religion of the Orientals, The germs certainly of both, as indeed the germs of the politico-social revolution also, may be traced back to the previous epoch (iii. 109-117). Even then the Hellenic culture of the higher circles was secretly undermining their ancestral faith; Ennius introduced the allegorizing and historical versions of the Hellenic religion into Italy; the senate, which subdued Hannibal, had to sanction the transference of the worship of Cybele from Asia Minor to Rome, and to take the most serious steps against other still worse superstitions, particularly the Bacchanalian scandal. But, as during the preceding period the revolution generally was rather preparing its way in men’s minds than assuming outward shape, so the religious revolution was in substance, at any rate, the work only of the Gracchan and Sullan age.
Greek Philosophy
Let us endeavour first to trace the tendency associating itself with Hellenism. The Hellenic nation, which bloomed and faded far earlier than the Italian, had long ago passed the epoch of faith and thenceforth moved exclusively in the sphere of speculation and reflection; for long there had been no religion there—nothing but philosophy. But even the philosophic activity of the Hellenic mind had, when it began to exert influence on Rome, already left the epoch of productive speculation far behind it, and had arrived at the stage at which there is not only no origination of truly new systems, but even the power of apprehending the more perfect of the older systems begins to wane and men restrict themselves to the repetition, soon passing into the scholastic tradition, of the less complete dogmas of their predecessors; at that stage, accordingly, when philosophy, instead of giving greater depth and freedom to the mind, rather renders it shallow and imposes on it the worst of all chains—chains of its own forging. The enchanted draught of speculation, always dangerous, is, when diluted and stale, certain poison. The contemporary Greeks presented it thus flat and diluted to the Romans, and these had not the judgment either to refuse it or to go back from the living schoolmasters to the dead masters. Plato and Aristotle, to say nothing of the sages before Socrates, remained without material influence on the Roman culture, although their illustrious names were freely used, and their more easily understood writings were probably read and translated. Accordingly the Romans became in philosophy simply inferior scholars of bad teachers.
Leading Schools
Newer Academy
Epicurus and Zeno
Besides the historico-rationalistic conception of religion, which resolved the myths into biographies of various benefactors of the human race living in the grey dawn of early times whom superstition had transformed into gods, or Euhemerism as it was called,(8) there were chiefly three philosophical schools that came to be of importance for Italy; viz. the two dogmatic schools of Epicurus (484) and Zeno (491) and the sceptical school of Arcesilaus (513) and Carneades (541-625), or, to use the school-names, Epicureanism, the Stoa, and the newer Academy. The last of these schools, which started from the impossibility of assured knowledge and in its stead conceded as possible only a provisional opinion sufficient for practical needs, presented mainly a polemical aspect, seeing that it caught every proposition of positive faith or of philosophic dogmatism in the meshes of its dilemmas. So far it stands nearly on a parallel with the older method of the sophists; except that, as may be conceived, the sophists made war more against the popular faith, Carneades and his disciples more against their philosophical colleagues. On the other hand Epicurus and Zeno agreed both in their aim of rationally explaining the nature of things, and in their physiological method, which set out from the conception of matter. They diverged, in so far as Epicurus, following the atomic theory of Democritus, conceived the first principle as rigid matter, and evolved the manifoldness of things out of this matter merely by mechanical variations; whereas Zeno, forming his views after the Ephesian Heraclitus, introduces even into his primordial matter a dynamic antagonism and a movement of fluctuation up and down. From this are derived the further distinctions—that in the Epicurean system the gods as it were did not exist or were at the most a dream of dreams, while the Stoical gods formed the ever-active soul of the world, and were as spirit, as sun, as God powerful over the body, the earth, and nature; that Epicurus did not, while Zeno did, recognize a government of the world and a personal immortality of the soul; that the proper object of human aspiration was according to Epicurus an absolute equilibrium disturbed neither by bodily desire nor by mental conflict, while it was according to Zeno a manly activity always increased by the constant antagonistic efforts of the mind and body, and striving after a harmony with nature perpetually in conflict and perpetually at peace. But in one point all these schools were agreed with reference to religion, that faith as such was nothing, and had necessarily to be supplemented by reflection— whether this reflection might consciously despair of attaining any result, as did the Academy; or might reject the conceptions of the popular faith, as did the school of Epicurus; or might partly retain them with explanation of the reasons for doing so, and partly modify them, as did the Stoics.
Carneades at Rome
It was accordingly only a natural result, that the first contact of Hellenic philosophy with the Roman nation equally firm in faith and adverse to speculation should be of a thoroughly hostile character. The Roman religion was entirely right in disdaining alike the assaults and the reasoned support of these philosophical systems, both of which did away with its proper character. The Roman state, which instinctively felt itself assailed when religion was attacked, reasonably assumed towards the philosophers the attitude which a fortress assumes towards the spies of the army advancing to besiege it, and as early as 593 dismissed the Greek philosophers along with the rhetoricians from Rome. In fact the very first debut of philosophy on a great scale in Rome was a formal declaration of war against faith and morals. It was occasioned by the occupation of Oropus by the Athenians, a step which they commissioned three of the most esteemed professors of philosophy, including Carneades the master of the modern sophistical school, to justify before the senate (599). The selection was so far appropriate, as the utterly scandalous transaction defied any justification in common sense; whereas it was quite in keeping with the circumstances of the case, when Carneades proved by thesis and counter-thesis that exactly as many and as cogent reasons might be adduced in praise of injustice as in praise of justice, and when he showed in the best logical form that with equal propriety the Athenians might be required to surrender Oropus and the Romans to confine themselves once more to their old straw huts on the Palatine. The young men who were masters of the Greek language were attracted in crowds by the scandal as well as by the rapid and emphatic delivery of the celebrated man; but on this occasion at least Cato could not be found fault with, when he not only bluntly enough compared the dialectic arguments of the philosophers to the tedious dirges of the wailing-women, but also insisted on the senate dismissing a man who understood the art of making right wrong and wrong right, and whose defence was in fact nothing but a shameless and almost insulting confession of wrong. But such dismissals had no great effect, more especially as the Roman youth could not be prevented from hearing philosophic discourses at Rhodes and Athens. Men became accustomed first to tolerate philosophy at least as a necessary evil, and ere long to seek for the Roman religion, which in its simplicity was no longer tenable, a support in foreign philosophy—a support which no doubt ruined it as faith, but in return at any rate allowed the man of culture decorously to retain in some measure the names and forms of the popular creed. But this support could neither be Euhemerism, nor the system of Carneades or of Epicurus.
Euhemerism Not an Adequate Support
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
Far different were the position and influence of the Stoic philosophy in Italy. In direct contrast to these schools it attached itself to the religion of the land as closely as science can at all accommodate itself to faith. To the popular faith with its gods and oracles the Stoic adhered on principle, in so far as he recognized in it an instinctive knowledge, to which scientific knowledge was bound to have regard and even in doubtful cases to subordinate itself. He believed in a different way from the people rather than in different objects; the essentially true and supreme God was in his view doubtless the world-soul,
Wide Influence of Stoicism
Panaetius
So this philosophy thoroughly incorporated itself, as a plant borrowed no doubt from abroad but acclimatized on Italian soil, with the Roman national economy, and we meet its traces in the most diversified spheres of action. Its earliest appearance beyond doubt goes further back; but the Stoa was first raised to full influence in the higher ranks of Roman society by means of the group which gathered round Scipio Aemilianus. Panaetius of Rhodes, the instructor of Scipio and of all Scipio’s intimate friends
State-Religion
Closely allied to this new state-philosophy—or, strictly speaking, its other side—was the new state-religion; the essential characteristic of which was the conscious retention, for reasons of outward convenience, of the principles of the popular faith, which were recognized as irrational. One of the most prominent men of the Scipionic circle, the Greek Polybius, candidly declares that the strange and ponderous ceremonial of Roman religion was invented solely on account of the multitude, which, as reason had no power over it, required to be ruled by signs and wonders, while people of intelligence had certainly no need of religion. Beyond doubt the Roman friends of Polybius substantially shared these sentiments, although they did not oppose science and religion to each other in so gross and downright a fashion. Neither Laelius nor Scipio Aemilianus can have looked on the augural discipline, which Polybius has primarily in view, as anything else than a political institution; yet the national spirit in them was too strong and their sense of decorum too delicate to have permitted their coming forward in public with such hazardous explanations. But even in the following generation the -pontifex maximus- Quintus Scaevola (consul in 659;(10)) set forth at least in his oral instructions in law without hesitation the propositions, that there were two sorts of religion—one philosophic, adapted to the intellect, and one traditional, not so adapted; that the former was not fitted for the religion of the state, as it contained various things which it was useless or even injurious for the people to know; and that accordingly the traditional religion of the state ought to remain as it stood. The theology of Varro, in which the Roman religion is treated throughout as a state institution, is merely a further development of the same principle. The state, according to his teaching, was older than the gods of the state as the painter is older than the picture; if the question related to making the gods anew, it would certainly be well to make and to name them after a manner more befitting and more in theoretic accordance with the parts of the world-soul, and to lay aside the images of the gods which only excited erroneous ideas,(11) and the mistaken system of sacrifice; but, since these institutions had been once established, every good citizen ought to own and follow them and do his part, that the “common man” might learn rather to set a higher value on, than to contemn, the gods. That the common man, for whose benefit the grandees thus surrendered their judgment, now despised this faith and sought his remedy elsewhere, was a matter of course and will be seen in the sequel. Thus then the Roman “high church” was ready, a sanctimonious body of priests and Levites, and an unbelieving people. The more openly the religion of the land was declared a political institution, the more decidedly the political parties regarded the field of the state-church as an
Priestly Colleges
Conversely, the Roman opposition rebelled against the ancient practice under which the four principal colleges of priests filled up their own ranks when vacancies arose, and demanded the extension of popular election to the stalls themselves, as it had been previously introduced with reference to the presidents, of these colleges.(12) This was certainly inconsistent with the spirit of these corporations; but they had no right to complain of it, after they had become themselves untrue to their spirit, and had played into the hands of the government at its request by furnishing religious pretexts for the annulling of political proceedings. This affair became an apple of contention between the parties: the senate beat off the first attack in 609, on which occasion the Scipionic circle especially turned the scale for the rejection of the proposal; on the other hand the project passed in 650 with the proviso already made in reference to the election of the presidents for the benefit of scrupulous consciences, that not the whole burgesses but only the lesser half of the tribes should make the election;(13) finally Sulla restored the right of co-optation in its full extent.(14)
Practical Use Made of Religion
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
Oriental Religions in Italy
In sharp contrast to this ghost of religion which we have just described stand the different foreign worships, which this epoch cherished and fostered, and which were at least undeniably possessed of a very decided vitality. They meet us everywhere, among genteel ladies and lords as well as among the circles of the slaves, in the general as in the trooper, in Italy as in the provinces. It is incredible to what a height this superstition already reached. When in the Cimbrian war a Syrian prophetess, Martha, offered to furnish the senate with ways and means for the vanquishing of the Germans, the senate dismissed her with contempt; nevertheless the Roman matrons and Marius’ own wife in particular despatched her to his head-quarters, where the general readily received her and carried her about with him till the Teutones were defeated. The leaders of very different parties in the civil war, Marius, Octavius, Sulla, coincided in believing omens and oracles. During its course even the senate was under the necessity, in the troubles of 667, of consenting to issue directions in accordance with the fancies of a crazy prophetess. It is significant of the ossification of the Romano-Hellenic religion as well as of the increased craving of the multitude after stronger religious stimulants, that superstition no longer, as in the Bacchic mysteries, associates itself with the national religion; even the Etruscan mysticism is already left behind; the worships matured in the sultry regions of the east appear throughout in the foremost rank. The copious introduction of elements from Asia Minor and Syria into the population, partly by the import of slaves, partly by the augmented traffic of Italy with the east, contributed very greatly to this result.
The power of these foreign religions is very distinctly apparent in the revolts of the Sicilian slaves, who for the most part were natives of Syria. Eunus vomited fire, Athenion read the stars; the plummets thrown by the slaves in these wars bear in great part the names of gods, those of Zeus and Artemis, and especially that of the mysterious Mother who had migrated from Crete to Sicily and was zealously worshipped there. A similar effect was produced by commercial intercourse, particularly after the wares of Berytus and Alexandria were conveyed directly to the Italian ports; Ostia and Puteoli became the great marts not only for Syrian unguents and Egyptian linen, but also for the faith of the east. Everywhere the mingling of religions was constantly on the increase along with the mingling of nations. Of all allowed worships the most popular was that of the Pessinuntine Mother of the Gods, which made a deep impression on the multitude by its eunuch-celibacy, its banquets, its music, its begging processions, and all its sensuous pomp; the collections from house to house were already felt as an economic burden. In the most dangerous time of the Cimbrian war Battaces the high-priest of Pessinus appeared in person at Rome, in order to defend the interests of the temple of his goddess there which was alleged to have been profaned, addressed the Roman people by the special orders of the Mother of the Gods, and performed also various miracles. Men of sense were scandalized, but the women and the great multitude were not to be debarred from escorting the prophet at his departure in great crowds. Vows of pilgrimage to the east were already no longer uncommon; Marius himself, for instance, thus undertook a pilgrimage to Pessinus; in fact even thus early (first in 653) Roman burgesses devoted themselves to the eunuch-priesthood.
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.
Education
Just as in the sphere of religion, the revolution begun in the previous epoch was now completed also in the sphere of education and culture. We have already shown how the fundamental idea of the Roman system—civil equality—had already during the sixth century begun to be undermined in this field also. Even in the time of Pictor and Cato Greek culture was widely diffused in Rome, and there was a native Roman culture; but neither of them had then got beyond the initial stage. Cato’s encyclopaedia shows tolerably what was understood at this period by a Romano-Greek model training;(16) it was little more than an embodiment of the knowledge of the old Roman householder, and truly, when compared with the Hellenic culture of the period, scanty enough. At how low a stage the average instruction of youth in Rome still stood at the beginning of the seventh century, may be inferred from the expressions of Polybius, who in this one respect prominently censures the criminal indifference of the Romans as compared with the intelligent private and public care of his countrymen; no Hellene, not even Polybius himself, could rightly enter into the deeper idea of civil equality that lay at the root of this indifference.
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
It was a singular circumstance that the same man, who in a political point of view definitively vanquished the Hellenic nation, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was at the same time the first or one of the first who fully recognized the Hellenic civilization as— what it has thenceforth continued to be beyond dispute—the civilization of the ancient world. He was himself indeed an old man before it was granted to him, with the Homeric poems in his mind, to stand before the Zeus of Phidias; but his heart was young enough to carry home the full sunshine of Hellenic beauty and the unconquerable longing after the golden apples of the Hesperides in his soul; poets and artists had found in the foreigner a more earnest and cordial devotee than was any of the wise men of the Greece of those days. He made no epigram on Homer or Phidias, but he had his children introduced into the realms of intellect. Without neglecting their national education, so far as there was such, he made provision like the Greeks for the physical development of his boys, not indeed by gymnastic exercises which were according to Roman notions inadmissible, but by instruction in the chase, which was among the Greeks developed almost like an art; and he elevated their Greek instruction in such a way that the language was no longer merely learned and practised for the sake of speaking, but after the Greek fashion the whole subject-matter of general higher culture was associated with the language and developed out of it—embracing, first of all, the knowledge of Greek literature with the mythological and historical information necessary for understanding it, and then rhetoric and philosophy. The library of king Perseus was the only portion of the Macedonian spoil that Paullus took for himself, with the view of presenting it to his sons. Even Greek painters and sculptors were found in his train and completed the aesthetic training of his children. That the time was past when men could in this field preserve a merely repellent attitude as regarded Hellenism, had been felt even by Cato; the better classes had probably now a presentiment that the noble substance of Roman character was less endangered by Hellenism as a whole, than by Hellenism mutilated and misshapen: the mass of the upper society of Rome and Italy went along with the new mode. There had been for long no want of Greek schoolmasters in Rome; now they arrived in troops—and as teachers not merely of the language but of literature and culture in general—at the newly-opened lucrative market for the sale of their wisdom. Greek tutors and teachers of philosophy, who, even if they were not slaves, were as a rule accounted as servants,(17) were now permanent inmates in the palaces of Rome; people speculated in them, and there is a statement that 200,000 sesterces (2000 pounds) were paid for a Greek literary slave of the first rank. As early as 593 there existed in the capital a number of special establishments for the practice of Greek declamation. Several distinguished
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
The formation of Latin oratory took place in a similar way. The Roman youth of rank, who were even at an early age incited to come forward in public with panegyrics and forensic speeches, can never have lacked exercises in oratory; but it was only at this epoch, and in consequence of the new exclusive culture, that there arose a rhetoric properly so called. Marcus Lepidus Porcina (consul in 617) is mentioned as the first Roman advocate who technically handled the language and subject-matter; the two famous advocates of the Marian age, the masculine and vigorous Marcus Antonius (611- 667) and the polished and chaste orator Lucius Crassus (614-663) were already complete rhetoricians. The exercises of the young men in speaking increased naturally in extent and importance, but still remained, just like the exercises in Latin literature, essentially limited to the personal attendance of the beginner on the master of the art so as to be trained by his example and his instructions.
Formal instruction both in Latin literature and in Latin rhetoric was given first about 650 by Lucius Aelius Praeconinus of Lanuvium, called the “penman” (-Stilo-), a distinguished Roman knight of strict conservative views, who read Plautus and similar works with a select circle of younger men—including Varro and Cicero—and sometimes also went over outlines of speeches with the authors, or put similar outlines into the hands of his friends. This was instruction, but Stilo was not a professional schoolmaster; he taught literature and rhetoric, just as jurisprudence was taught at Rome, in the character of a senior friend of aspiring young men, not of a man hired and holding himself at every one’s command.
Course of Literature and Rhetoric
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
As the aggregate result of this modern Roman education there sprang up the new idea of “humanity,” as it was called, which consisted partly of a more or less superficial appropriation of the aesthetic culture of the Hellenes, partly of a privileged Latin culture as an imitation or mutilated copy of the Greek. This new humanity, as the very name indicates, renounced the specific characteristics of Roman life, nay even came forward in opposition to them, and combined in itself, just like our closely kindred “general culture,” a nationally cosmopolitan and socially exclusive character. Here too we trace the revolution, which separated classes and blended nations.
Literature and Art
Literary Reaction
The sixth century was, both in a political and a literary point of view, a vigorous and great age. It is true that we do not find in the field of authorship any more than in that of politics a man of the first rank; Naevius, Ennius, Plautus, Cato, gifted and lively authors of distinctly-marked individuality, were not in the highest sense men of creative talent; nevertheless we perceive in the soaring, stirring, bold strain of their dramatic, epic, and historic attempts, that these rest on the gigantic struggles of the Punic wars. Much is only artificially transplanted, there are various faults in delineation and colouring, the form of art and the language are deficient in purity of treatment, Greek and national elements are quaintly conjoined; the whole performance betrays the stamp of its scholastic origin and lacks independence and completeness; yet there exists in the poets and authors of that age, if not the full power to reach their high aim, at any rate the courage to compete with and the hope of rivalling the Greeks. It is otherwise in the epoch before us. The morning mists fell; what had been begun in the fresh feeling of the national strength hardened amidst war, with youthful want of insight into the difficulty of the undertaking and into the measure of their own talent, but also with youthful delight in and love to the work, could not be carried farther now, when on the one hand the dull sultriness of the approaching revolutionary storm began to fill the air, and on the other hand the eyes of the more intelligent were gradually opened to the incomparable glory of Greek poetry and art and to the very modest artistic endowments of their own nation. The literature of the sixth century had arisen from the influence of Greek art on half-cultivated, but excited and susceptible minds. The increased Hellenic culture of the seventh called forth a literary reaction, which destroyed the germs of promise contained in those simple imitative attempts by the winter-frost of reflection, and rooted up the wheat and the tares of the older type of literature together.
Scipionic Circle
This reaction proceeded primarily and chiefly from the circle which assembled around Scipio Aemilianus, and whose most prominent members among the Roman world of quality were, in addition to Scipio himself, his elder friend and counsellor Gaius Laelius (consul in 614) and Scipio’s younger companions, Lucius Furius Philus (consul in 618) and Spurius Mummius, the brother of the destroyer of Corinth, among the Roman and Greek literati the comedian Terence, the satirist Lucilius, the historian Polybius, and the philosopher Panaetius. Those who were familiar with the Iliad, with Xenophon, and with Menander, could not be greatly impressed by the Roman Homer, and still less by the bad translations of the tragedies
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
More readable and adroit imitations of Greek tragedy were furnished by Pacuvius’ younger contemporary, Lucius Accius, son of a freedman of Pisaurum (584-after 651), with the exception of Pacuvius the only notable tragic poet of the seventh century. An active author also in the field of literary history and grammar, he doubtless laboured to introduce instead of the crude manner of his predecessors greater purity of language and style into Latin tragedy; yet even his inequality and incorrectness were emphatically censured by men of strict observance like Lucilius.
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,
National Comedy
Afranius
We have formerly shown(7) that in all probability already in the course of the sixth century a national Roman comedy (-togata-) was added to the Graeco-Roman (-palliata-), as a portraiture not of the distinctive life of the capital, but of the ways and doings of the Latin land. Of course the Terentian school rapidly took possession of this species of comedy also; it was quite in accordance with its spirit to naturalise Greek comedy in Italy on the one hand by faithful translation, and on the other hand by pure Roman imitation. The chief representative of this school was Lucius Afranius (who flourished about 66). The fragments of his comedies remaining give no distinct impression, but they are not inconsistent with what the Roman critics of art remark regarding him. His numerous national comedies were in their construction thoroughly formed on the model of the Greek intrigue-piece; only, as was natural in imitation, they were simpler and shorter. In the details also he borrowed what pleased him partly from Menander, partly from the older national literature. But of the Latin local tints, which are so distinctly marked in Titinius the creator of this species of art, we find not much in Afranius;(8) his subjects retain a very general character, and may well have been throughout imitations of particular Greek comedies with merely an alteration of costume. A polished eclecticism and adroitness in composition— literary allusions not unfrequently occur—are characteristic of him as of Terence: the moral tendency too, in which his pieces approximated to the drama, their inoffensive tenor in a police point of view, their purity of language are common to him with the latter. Afranius is sufficiently indicated as of a kindred spirit with Menander and Terence by the judgment of posterity that he wore the -toga- as Menander would have worn it had he been an Italian, and by his own expression that to his mind Terence surpassed all other poets.
Atellanae
The farce appeared afresh at this period in the field of Roman literature. It was in itself very old:(9) long before Rome arose, the merry youths of Latium may have improvised on festal occasions in the masks once for all established for particular characters. These pastimes obtained a fixed local background in the Latin “asylum of fools,” for which they selected the formerly Oscan town of Atella, which was destroyed in the Hannibalic war and was thereby handed over to comic use; thenceforth the name of “Oscan plays” or “plays of Atella” was commonly used for these exhibitions.(10) But these pleasantries had nothing to do with the stage(11) and with literature; they were performed by amateurs where and when they pleased, and the text was not written or at any rate was not published. It was not until the present period that the Atellan piece was handed over to actors properly so called,(12) and was employed, like the Greek satyric drama, as an afterpiece
Dramatic Arrangements
Lastly as regards the development of dramatic arrangements we are not in a position to set forth in detail—what is clear on the whole—that the general interest in dramatic performances was constantly on the increase, and that they became more and more frequent and magnificent. Not only was there hardly any ordinary or extraordinary popular festival that was now celebrated without dramatic exhibitions; even in the country-towns and in private houses representations by companies of hired actors were common. It is true that, while probably various municipal towns already at this time possessed theatres built of stone, the capital was still without one; the building of a theatre, already contracted for, had been again prohibited by the senate in 599 on the suggestion of Publius Scipio Nasica. It was quite in the spirit of the sanctimonious policy of this age, that the building of a permanent theatre was prohibited out of respect for the customs of their ancestors, but nevertheless theatrical entertainments were allowed rapidly to increase, and enormous sums were expended annually in erecting and decorating structures of boards for them. The arrangements of the stage became visibly better. The improved scenic arrangements and the reintroduction of masks about the time of Terence are doubtless connected with the fact, that the erection and maintenance of the stage and stage-apparatus were charged in 580 on the public chest.(16) The plays which Lucius Mummius produced after the capture of Corinth (609) formed an epoch in the history of the theatre. It was probably then that a theatre acoustically constructed after the Greek fashion and provided with seats was first erected, and more care generally was expended on the exhibitions.(17) Now also there is frequent mention of the bestowal of a prize of victory—which implies the competition of several pieces—of the audience taking a lively part for or against the leading actors, of cliques and -claqueurs-. The decorations and machinery were improved; moveable scenery artfully painted and audible theatrical thunder made their appearance under the aedileship of Gaius Claudius
Satura
In recitative poetry the most surprising circumstance is the insignificance of the Epos, which during the sixth century had occupied decidedly the first place in the literature destined for reading; it had numerous representatives in the seventh, but not a single one who had even temporary success. From the present epoch there is hardly anything to be reported save a number of rude attempts to translate Homer, and some continuations of the Ennian Annals, such as the “Istrian War” of Hostius and the “Annals (perhaps) of the Gallic War” by Aulus Furius (about 650), which to all appearance took up the narrative at the very point where Ennius had broken off—the description of the Istrian war of 576 and 577. In didactic and elegiac poetry no prominent name appears. The only successes which the recitative poetry of this period has to show, belong to the domain of what was called -Satura—–a species of art, which like the letter or the pamphlet allowed of any form and admitted any sort of contents, and accordingly in default of all proper generic characters derived its individual shape wholly from the individuality of each poet, and occupied a position not merely on the boundary between poetry and prose, but even more than half beyond the bounds of literature proper. The humorous poetical epistles, which one of the younger men of the Scipionic circle, Spurius Mummius, the brother of the destroyer of Corinth, sent home from the camp of Corinth to his friends, were still read with pleasure a century afterwards; and numerous poetical pleasantries of that sort not destined for publication probably proceeded at that time from the rich social and intellectual life of the better circles of Rome.
Lucilius
Its representative in literature is Gaius Lucilius (606-651) sprung of a respectable family in the Latin colony of Suessa, and likewise a member of the Scipionic circle. His poems are, as it were, open letters to the public. Their contents, as a clever successor gracefully says, embrace the whole life of a cultivated man of independence, who looks upon the events passing on the political stage from the pit and occasionally from the side-scenes; who converses with the best of his epoch as his equals; who follows literature and science with sympathy and intelligence without wishing personally to pass for a poet or scholar; and who, in fine, makes his pocket-book the confidential receptacle for everything good and bad that he meets with, for his political experiences and expectations,
-Nunc vero a mane ad noctem, festo atque profesto
Toto itidem pariterque die populusque patresque
Iactare indu foro se omnes, decedere nusquam.
Uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti;
Verba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose,
Blanditia certare, bonum simulare virum se,
Insidias facere ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes-.
The illustrations of this inexhaustible text remorselessly, without omitting his friends or even the poet himself, assailed the evils of the age, the coterie-system, the endless Spanish war-service, and the like; the very commencement of his Satires was a great debate in the senate of the Olympian gods on the question, whether Rome deserved to enjoy the continued protection of the celestials. Corporations, classes, individuals, were everywhere severally mentioned by name; the poetry of political polemics, shut out from the Roman stage, was the true element and life-breath of the Lucilian poems, which by the power of the most pungent wit illustrated with the richest imagery—a power which still entrances us even in the remains that survive—pierce and crush their adversary “as by a drawn sword.” In this—in the moral ascendency and the proud sense of freedom of the poet of Suessa—lies the reason why the refined Venusian, who in the Alexandrian age of Roman poetry revived the Lucilian satire, in spite of all his superiority in formal skill with true modesty yields to the earlier poet as “his better.” The language is that of a man of thorough culture, Greek and Latin, who freely indulges his humour; a poet like Lucilius, who is alleged to have made two hundred hexameters before dinner and as many after it, is in far too great a hurry to be nice; useless prolixity, slovenly repetition of the same turn, culpable instances of carelessness frequently occur: the first word, Latin or Greek, is always the best. The metres are similarly treated, particularly the very predominant hexameter: if we transpose the words—his clever imitator says—no man would observe that he had anything else before him than simple prose; in point of effect they can only be compared to our doggerel verses.(24) The poems of Terence and those of Lucilius stand on the same level of culture, and have the same relation to each other as a carefully prepared and polished literary work has to a letter written on the spur of the moment. But the incomparably higher intellectual gifts and the freer view of life, which mark the knight of Suessa as compared with the African slave, rendered his success as rapid and brilliant as that of Terence had been laborious and doubtful; Lucilius became immediately the favourite of the nation, and he like Beranger could say of his poems that “they alone of all were read by the people.” The uncommon popularity of the Lucilian poem is, in a historical point of view, a remarkable event; we see from it that literature was already a power, and beyond doubt we should fall in with various traces of its influence,
Of poetry attaching itself to the Alexandrian school nothing occurs in Rome at this epoch except minor poems translated from or modelled on Alexandrian epigrams, which deserve notice not on their own account, but as the first harbingers of the later epoch of Roman literature. Leaving out of account some poets little known and whose dates cannot be fixed with certainty, there belong to this category Quintus Catulus, consul in 652(25) and Lucius Manlius, an esteemed senator, who wrote in 657. The latter seems to have been the first to circulate among the Romans various geographical tales current among the Greeks, such as the Delian legend of Latona, the fables of Europa and of the marvellous bird Phoenix; as it was likewise reserved for him on his travels to discover at Dodona and to copy that remarkable tripod, on which might be read the oracle imparted to the Pelasgians before their migration into the land of the Siceli and Aborigines—a discovery which the Roman annals did not neglect devoutly to register.
Historical Composition
Polybius
In historical composition this epoch is especially marked by the emergence of an author who did not belong to Italy either by birth or in respect of his intellectual and literary standpoint, but who first or rather alone brought literary appreciation and description to bear on Rome’s place in the world, and to whom all subsequent generations, and we too, owe the best part of our knowledge of the Roman development. Polybius (c. 546-c. 627) of Megalopolis in the Peloponnesus, son of the Achaean statesman Lycortas, took part apparently as early as 565 in the expedition of the Romans against the Celts of Asia Minor, and was afterwards on various occasions, especially during the third Macedonian war, employed by his countrymen in military and diplomatic affairs. After the crisis occasioned by that war in Hellas he was carried off along with the other Achaean hostages to Italy,(26) where he lived in exile for seventeen years (587-604) and was introduced by the sons of Paullus to the genteel circles of the capital. By the sending back of the Achaean hostages(27) he was restored to his home, where he thenceforth acted as permanent mediator between his confederacy and the Romans. He was present at the destruction of Carthage and of Corinth (608). He seemed educated, as it were, by destiny to comprehend the historical position of Rome more clearly than the Romans of that day could themselves. From the place which he occupied, a Greek statesman and
Their histories were either purely outward records, or they were pervaded by the verbiage and sophistries of Attic rhetoric and only too often by the venality and vulgarity, the sycophancy and the bitterness of the age. Among the Romans as among the Greeks there was nothing but histories of cities or of tribes. Polybius, a Peloponnesian, as has been justly remarked, and holding intellectually a position at least as far aloof from the Attics as from the Romans, first stepped beyond these miserable limits, treated the Roman materials with mature Hellenic criticism, and furnished a history, which was not indeed universal, but which was at any rate dissociated from the mere local states and laid hold of the Romano-Greek state in the course of formation. Never perhaps has any historian united within himself all the advantages of an author drawing from original sources so completely as Polybius. The compass of his task is completely clear and present to him at every moment; and his eye is fixed throughout on the real historical connection of events. The legend, the anecdote, the mass of worthless chronicle-notices are thrown aside; the description of countries and peoples, the representation of political and mercantile relations—all the facts of so infinite importance, which escape the annalist because they do not admit of being nailed to a particular year—are put into possession of their long-suspended rights. In the procuring of historic materials Polybius shows a caution and perseverance such as are not perhaps paralleled in antiquity; he avails himself of documents, gives comprehensive attention to the literature of different nations, makes the most extensive use of his favourable position for collecting the accounts of actors and eye-witnesses, and, in fine, methodically travels over the whole domain of the Mediterranean states and part of the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.(28) Truthfulness is his nature. In all great matters he has no interest for one state or against another, for this man or against that, but is singly and solely interested in the essential connection of events, to present which in their true relation of causes and effects seems to him not merely the first but the sole task of the historian. Lastly, the narrative is a model of completeness, simplicity, and clearness. Still all these uncommon advantages by no means constitute a historian of the first rank. Polybius grasps his literary task, as he grasped his practical, with great understanding, but with the understanding alone. History, the struggle of necessity and liberty, is a moral problem; Polybius treats it as if it were a mechanical one. The whole alone has value for him, in nature as in the state; the particular event, the individual man, however wonderful they may appear, are yet properly mere single elements, insignificant wheels in the highly artificial mechanism which is named the state. So far Polybius was certainly qualified as no other was to narrate the history of the Roman people, which
Roman Chroniclers
In singular contrast to this grand conception and treatment of Roman history by a foreigner stands the contemporary historical literature of native growth. At the beginning of this period we still find some chronicles written in Greek such as that already mentioned(29) of Aulus Postumius (consul in 603), full of wretched rationalizing, and that of Gaius Acilius (who closed it at an advanced age about 612). Yet under the influence partly of Catonian patriotism, partly of the more refined culture of the Scipionic circle, the Latin language gained so decided an ascendency in this field, that of the later historical works not more than one or two occur written in Greek;(30) and not only so, but the older Greek chronicles were translated into Latin and were probably read mainly in these translations. Unhappily beyond the employment of the mother-tongue there is hardly anything else deserving of commendation in the chronicles of this epoch composed in Latin. They were numerous and detailed enough—there are mentioned, for example, those of Lucius Cassius Hemina (about 608), of Lucius Calpurnius Piso (consul in 621), of Gaius Sempronius Tuditanus (consul in 625), of Gaius Fannius (consul in 632). To these falls to be added the digest of the official annals of the city in eighty books, which Publius Mucius Scaevola (consul in 621), a man esteemed also as a jurist, prepared and published as -pontifex maximus-, thereby closing the city-chronicle in so far as thenceforth the pontifical records, although not exactly discontinued, were no longer at any rate, amidst the increasing diligence of private chroniclers, taken account of in literature. All these annals, whether they gave themselves forth as private or as official works, were substantially similar compilations of the extant historical and quasi-historical materials; and the value of their authorities as well as their formal value declined beyond doubt in the same proportion as their amplitude increased. Chronicle certainly nowhere presents truth without fiction, and it would be very foolish to quarrel with Naevius and Pictor because they have not acted otherwise than Hecataeus and Saxo Grammaticus; but the later attempts to build houses out of such castles in the air put even the most tried patience to a severe test No blank in tradition presents so wide a chasm, but that this system of smooth and downright invention will fill it up with playful facility. The eclipses of the sun, the numbers of the census, family-registers, triumphs, are without hesitation carried back from the current year up to the year One; it stands duly recorded, in what year, month, and day king Romulus went up to heaven, and how king Servius Tullius triumphed over the Etruscans first on the 25th November 183, and again on the 25th May 187, In entire harmony with such details accordingly the vessel in which Aeneas had voyaged from Ilion to Latium was shown in the Roman docks, and even the identical sow, which had served as a guide to Aeneas,
Memoirs and Speeches
The subordinate, more individual and ephemeral, species of historical literature—memoirs, letters, and speeches—were strongly represented also, at least as respects quantity. The first statesmen of Rome already recorded in person their experiences: such as Marcus Scaurus (consul in 639), Publius Rufus (consul in 649), Quintus Catulus (consul in 652), and even the regent Sulla; but none of these productions seem to have been of importance for literature otherwise than by the substance of their contents. The collection of letters of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, was remarkable partly for the classical purity of the language and the high spirit of the writer, partly as the first correspondence published in Rome, and as the first literary production of a Roman lady. The literature of speeches preserved at this period the stamp impressed on it by Cato; advocates’ pleadings were not yet looked on as literary productions, and such speeches as were published were political pamphlets. During the revolutionary commotions this pamphlet-literature increased in extent and importance, and among the mass of ephemeral productions there were some which, like the Philippics of Demosthenes and the fugitive pieces of Courier, acquired a permanent place in literature from the important position of their authors or from their own weight. Such were the political speeches of Gaius Laelius and of Scipio Aemilianus, masterpieces of excellent Latin as of the noblest patriotism; such were the gushing speeches of Gaius Titius, from whose pungent pictures of the place and the time—his description of the senatorial juryman has been given already(31)—the national comedy borrowed various points; such above all were the numerous orations of Gaius Gracchus, whose fiery words preserved in a faithful mirror the impassioned earnestness, the aristocratic bearing, and the tragic destiny of that lofty nature.
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
In the field of letters Latin philology flourished vigorously, in close association with the philological treatment—long ago placed on a sure basis—of Greek literature. It was already mentioned that about the beginning of this century the Latin epic poets found their -diaskeuastae- and revisers of their text;(33) it was also noticed, that not only did the Scipionic circle generally insist on correctness above everything else, but several also of the most noted poets, such as Accius and Lucilius, busied themselves with the regulation of orthography and of grammar. At the same period we find isolated attempts to develop archaeology from the historical side; although the dissertations of the unwieldy annalists of this age, such as those of Hemina “on the Censors” and of Tuditanus “on the Magistrates,” can hardly have been better than their chronicles. Of more interest were the treatise on the Magistracies by Marcus Junius the friend of Gaius Gracchus, as the first attempt to make archaeological investigation serviceable for political objects,(34) and the metrically composed -Didascaliae-of the tragedian Accius, an essay towards a literary history of the Latin drama. But those early attempts at a scientific treatment of the mother-tongue still bear very much a dilettante stamp, and strikingly remind us of our orthographic literature in the Bodmer-Klopstock period; and we may likewise without injustice assign but a modest place to the antiquarian researches of this epoch.
Stilo
The Roman, who established the investigation of the Latin language and antiquities in the spirit of the Alexandrian masters on a scientific basis, was Lucius Aelius Stilo about 650.(35) He first went back to the oldest monuments of the language, and commented on the Salian litanies and the Twelve Tables. He devoted his special attention to the comedy of the sixth century, and first formed a list of the pieces of Plautus which in his opinion were genuine. He sought, after the Greek fashion, to determine historically the origin of every single phenomenon in the Roman life and dealings and to ascertain in each case the “inventor,” and at the same time brought the whole annalistic tradition within the range of his research. The success, which he had among his contemporaries, is attested by the dedication to him of the most important poetical, and the most important historical, work of his time, the Satires of Lucilius and the Annals of Antipater; and this first Roman philologist influenced the studies of his nation for the future by transmitting his spirit of investigation both into words and into things to his disciple Varro.
Rhetoric
The literary activity in the field of Latin rhetoric was, as might be expected, of a more subordinate kind. There was nothing here to be done but to write manuals and exercise-books after the model of the Greek compendia of Hermagoras and others; and these accordingly the schoolmasters did not fail to supply, partly on account of the need for them, partly on account of vanity and money. Such a manual of rhetoric has been preserved to us, composed under Sulla’s dictatorship by an unknown author, who according to the fashion then prevailing(36) taught simultaneously Latin literature and Latin rhetoric, and wrote on both; a treatise remarkable not merely for its terse, clear, and firm handling of the subject, but above all for its comparative independence in presence of Greek models. Although in method entirely dependent on the Greeks, the Roman yet distinctly and even abruptly rejects all “the useless matter which the Greeks had gathered together, solely in order that the science might appear more difficult to learn.” The bitterest censure is bestowed on the hair-splitting dialectics—that “loquacious science of inability to speak”—whose finished master, for sheer fear of expressing himself ambiguously, at last no longer ventures to pronounce his own name. The Greek school-terminology is throughout and intentionally avoided. Very earnestly the author points out the danger of many teachers, and inculcates the golden rule that the scholar ought above all to be induced by the teacher to help himself; with equal earnestness he recognizes the truth that the school is a secondary, and life the main, matter, and gives in his examples chosen with thorough independence an echo of those forensic speeches which during the last decades had excited notice in the Roman advocate-world. It deserves attention, that the opposition to the extravagances of Hellenism, which had formerly sought to prevent the rise of a native Latin rhetoric,(37) continued to influence it after it arose, and thereby secured to Roman eloquence, as compared with the contemporary eloquence of the Greeks, theoretically and practically a higher dignity and a greater usefulness.
Philosophy
Philosophy, in fine, was not yet represented in literature, since neither did an inward need develop a national Roman philosophy nor did outward circumstances call forth a Latin philosophical authorship. It cannot even be shown with certainty that there were Latin translations of popular summaries of philosophy belonging to this period; those who pursued philosophy read and disputed in Greek.
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.
The development of juristic literature admits of being more distinctly recognized. It had hitherto been restricted to collections of formularies and explanations of terms in the laws; at this period there was first formed a literature of opinions (-responsa-), which answers nearly to our modern collections of precedents. These opinions—which were delivered no longer merely by members of the pontifical college, but by every one who found persons to consult him, at home or in the open market-place, and with which were already associated rational and polemical illustrations and the standing controversies peculiar to jurisprudence—began to be noted down and to be promulgated in collections about the beginning
Art exhibits still less pleasing results. In architecture, sculpture, and painting there was, no doubt, a more and more general diffusion of a dilettante interest, but the exercise of native art retrograded rather than advanced. It became more and more customary for those sojourning in Grecian lands personally to inspect the works of art; for which in particular the winter-quarters of Sulla’s army in Asia Minor in 670-671 formed an epoch. Connoisseur-ship developed itself also in Italy. They had commenced with articles in silver and bronze; about the commencement of this epoch they began to esteem not merely Greek statues, but also Greek pictures. The first picture publicly exhibited in Rome was the Bacchus of Aristides, which Lucius Mummius withdrew from the sale of the Corinthian spoil, because king Attalus offered as much as 6000 -denarii- (260 pounds) for it. The buildings became more splendid; and in particular transmarine, especially Hymettian, marble (Cipollino) came into use for that purpose—the Italian marble quarries were not yet in operation. A magnificent colonnade still admired in the time of the empire, which Quintus Metellus (consul in 611) the conqueror of Macedonia constructed in the Campus Martius, enclosed the first marble temple which the capital had seen; it was soon followed by similar structures built on the Capitol by Scipio Nasica (consul in 616), and near to the Circus by Gnaeus Octavius (consul in 626). The first private house adorned with marble columns was that of the orator Lucius Crassus (d. 663) on the Palatine.(42) But where they could
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.
If, in conclusion, we glance back at the picture as a whole which the literature and art of Italy unfold to our view from the death of Ennius to the beginning of the Ciceronian age, we find in these respects as compared with the preceding epoch a most decided decline of productiveness. The higher kinds of literature—such as epos, tragedy, history—have died out or have been arrested in their development. The subordinate kinds—the translation and imitation of the intrigue-piece, the farce, the poetical and prose brochure—alone are successful; in this last field of literature swept by the full hurricane of revolution we meet with the two men of greatest literary talent in this epoch, Gaius Gracchus and Gaius Lucilius, who stand out amidst a number of more or less mediocre writers just as in a similar epoch of French literature Courier and Beranger stand out amidst a multitude of pretentious nullities. In the plastic and delineative arts likewise the production, always weak, is now utterly null. On the other hand the receptive enjoyment of art and literature flourished; as the Epigoni of this period in the political field gathered in and used up the inheritance that fell to their fathers, we find them in this field also as diligent frequenters of plays, as patrons of literature, as connoisseurs and still more as collectors in art. The most honourable aspect of this activity was its learned research, which put forth a native intellectual energy, more especially in jurisprudence and in linguistic and antiquarian investigation. The foundation of these sciences which properly falls within the present epoch, and the first small beginnings of an imitation of the Alexandrian hothouse poetry, already herald the approaching epoch of Roman Alexandrinism. All the productions of the present epoch are smoother, more free from faults, more systematic than the creations of the sixth century. The literati and the friends of literature of this period not altogether unjustly looked down on their predecessors as bungling novices: but while they ridiculed or censured the defective labours of these novices, the very men who were the most gifted among them may have confessed to themselves that the season of the nation’s youth was past, and may have ever and anon perhaps felt in the still depths of the heart a secret longing to stray once more in the delightful paths of youthful error.
Chapter I
1. III. VII. The State of Culture in Spain.
2. Italica must have been intended by Scipio to be what was called in Italy forum et -conciliabulum civium Romanorum-; Aquae Sextiae in Gaul had a similar origin afterwards. The formation of transmarine burgess-communities only began at a later date with Carthage and Narbo: yet it is remarkable that Scipio already made a first step, in a certain sense, in that direction.
3. III. VII. Gracchus
4. The chronology of the war with Viriathus is far from being precisely settled. It is certain that the appearance of Viriathus dates from the conflict with Vetilius (Appian, Hisp. 61; Liv. lii.; Oros. v. 4), and that he perished in 615 (Diod. Vat. p. 110, etc.); the duration of his rule is reckoned at eight (Appian, Hisp. 63), ten (Justin, xliv. 2), eleven (Diodorus, p. 597), fifteen (Liv. liv.; Eutrop. iv. 16; Oros. v. 4; Flor. i. 33), and twenty years (Vellei. ii. 90). The first estimate possesses some probability, because the appearance of Viriathus is connected both in Diodorus (p. 591; Vat. p. 107, 108) and in Orosius (v. 4) with the destruction of Corinth. Of the Roman governors, with whom Viriathus fought, several undoubtedly belong to the northern province; for though Viriathus was at work chiefly in the southern, he was not exclusively so (Liv. lii.); consequently we must not calculate the number of the years of his generalship by the number of these names.
5. IV. I. Celtiberian War
6. III. VII. Massinissa
7. III. Vi. Peace, iii. VII. Carthage
8. The line of the coast has been in the course of centuries so much changed that the former local relations are but imperfectly recognizable on the ancient site. The name of the city is preserved by Cape Cartagena—also called from the saint’s tomb found there Ras Sidi bu Said—the eastern headland of the peninsula, projecting into the gulf with its highest point rising to 393 feet above the level of the sea.
9. The dimensions given by Beule (Fouilles a Carthage, 1861) are as follows in metres and in Greek feet (1=0.309 metre):—
Outer wall 2 metres = 6 1/2 feet.
Corridor 1.9 " = 6 "
Front wall of casemates 1 " = 3 1/4 "
Casemate rooms 4.2 " = 14 "
Back wall of casemates 1 " = 3 1/4 "
------------------------
Whole breadth of the walls 10.1 metres = 33 feet.
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
10. Such is the height given by Appian, l. c.; Diodorus gives the height, probably inclusive of the battlements, at 40 cubits or 60 feet. The remnant preserved is still from 13 to 16 feet (4-5 metres) high.
11. The rooms of a horse-shoe shape brought to light in excavation have a depth of 14, and a breadth of 11, Greek feet; the width of the entrances is not specified. Whether these dimensions and the proportions of the corridor suffice for our recognizing them as elephants’ stalls, remains to be settled by a more accurate investigation. The partition-walls, which separate the apartments, have a thickness of 1.1 metre = 3 1/2 feet.
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.
13. It now bears the fort Goletta.
14. That this Phoenician word signifies a basin excavated in a circular shape, is shown both by Diodorus (iii. 44), and by its being employed by the Greeks to denote a “cup.” It thus suits only the inner harbour of Carthage, and in that sense it is used by Strabo (xvii. 2, 14, where it is strictly applied to the admiral’s island) and Fest. Ep. v. -cothones-, p. 37. Appian (Pun. 127) is not quite accurate in describing the rectangular harbour in front of the Cothon as part of it.
15. —Oios pepnutai, toi de skiai aissousin—.
16. III. III. Acquisition of Territory in Illyria, iii. IX. Macedonia
17. III. X. Macedonia Broken Up
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.
19. III. X. Greek National Party
20. III. IX. The Achaeans
21. III. IX. The Achaeans
22. At Sabine townships, at Parma, and even at Italica in Spain (p. 214), several pediments marked with the name of Mummius have been brought to light, which once supported gifts forming part of the spoil.
23. III. III. Organization of the Provinces
24. III. VIII. Final Regulation of Greece
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
On the other hand, if we look to the formal sovereignty of the free communities, it must be granted that the position of Greece was not altered in point of constitutional law by the events of 608. It was a difference de facto rather than de jure, when instead of the Achaean league the individual communities of Achaia now appeared by the side of Rome as tributary protected states, and when, after the erection of Macedonia as a separate Roman province, the latter relieved the authorities of the capital of the superintendence over the Greek client-states. Greece therefore may or may not be regarded as a part of the “command” of Macedonia, according as the practical or the formal point of view preponderates; but the preponderance is justly conceded to the former.
26. III. X. Intervention in the Syro-Egyptian War
27. A remarkable proof of this is found in the names employed to designate the fine bronze and copper wares of Greece, which in the time of Cicero were called indiscriminately “Corinthian” or “Delian” copper. Their designation in Italy was naturally derived not from the places of manufacture but from those of export (Plin. H. N. xxxiv. 2, 9); although, of course, we do not mean to deny that similar vases were manufactured in Corinth and Delos themselves.
28. III. X. Course Pursued with Pergamus
29. III. IX. Extension of the Kingdom of Pergamus
30. III. X. Course Pursued with Pergamus
31. Several letters recently brought to light (Munchener Sitzungsberichte, 1860, p. 180 et seq.) from the kings Eumenes ii, and Attalus ii to the priest of Pessinus, who was uniformly called Attis (comp. Polyb. xxii. 20), very clearly illustrate these relations. The earliest of these and the only one with a date, written in the 34th year of the reign of Eumenes on the 7th day before the end of Gorpiaeus, and therefore in 590-1 u. c. offers to the priest military aid in order to wrest from the Pesongi (not otherwise known) temple-land occupied by them. The following, likewise from Eumenes, exhibits the king as a party in the feud between the priest of Pessinus and his brother Aiorix. Beyond doubt both acts of Eumenes were included among those which were reported at Rome in 590 et seq. as attempts on his part to interfere further in Gallic affairs, and to support his partisans in that quarter (Polyb. xxxi. 6, 9; xxxii. 3, 5). On the other hand it
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.
33. These strange “Heliopolites” may, according to the probable opinion which a friend has expressed to me, be accounted for by supposing that the liberated slaves constituted themselves citizens of a town Heliopolis—not otherwise mentioned or perhaps having an existence merely in imagination for the moment—which derived its name from the God of the Sun so highly honoured in Syria.
34. III. IX. Extension of the Kingdom of Pergamus
35. III. IX. Extension of the Kingdom of Pergamus
36. III. IX. Extension of the Kingdom of Pergamus
37. III. X. Intervention in the Syro-Egyptian War
38. III. IX. Armenia
39. From him proceed the coins with the inscription “Shekel Israel,” and the date of the “holy Jerusalem,” or the “deliverance of Sion.” The similar coins with the name of Simon, the prince (Nessi) of Israel, belong not to him, but to Bar-Cochba the leader of the insurgents in the time of Hadrian.
40. III. III. Illyrian Piracy
41. IV. I. New Organization of Spain
42. III. X. Intervention in the Syro-Egyptian War
1. In 537 the law restricting re-election to the consulship was suspended during the continuance of the war in Italy, that is, down to 551 (p. 14; Liv. xxvii. 6). But after the death of Marcellus in 546 re-elections to the consulship, if we do not include the abdicating consuls of 592, only occurred in the years 547, 554, 560, 579, 585, 586, 591, 596, 599, 602; consequently not oftener in those fifty-six years than, for instance, in the ten years 401-410. Only one of these, and that the very last, took place in violation of the ten years’ interval (i. 402); and beyond doubt the singular election of Marcus Marcellus who was consul in 588 and 599 to a third consulship in 602, with the special circumstances of which we are not acquainted, gave occasion to the law prohibiting re-election to the consulship altogether (Liv. Ep. 56); especially as this proposal must have been introduced before 605, seeing that it was supported by Cato (p. 55, Jordan).
2. III. XI. The Nobility in Possession of the Equestrian Centuries
3. III. XI. Festivals
4. IV. I. General Results
5. III. XII. Results
6. I. XIII. Landed Proprietors
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
9. III. XII. Pastoral Husbandry
10. III. I. The Carthaginian Dominion in Africa
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
13. III. XII. Falling Off in the Population
14. IV. I. War against Aristonicus
15. IV. I. Cilicia
16. Even now there are not unfrequently found in front of Castrogiovanni, at the point where the ascent is least abrupt, Roman projectiles with the name of the consul of 621: L. Piso L. f. cos.
17. II. III. Licinio-Sextian Laws
18. III. I. Capital and Its Power in Carthage
19. II. III. Influence of the Extension of the Roman Dominion in Elevating the Farmer-Class
20. III. XI. Assignations of Land
21. II. II. Public Land
22. III. XII. Falling Off of the Population
23. IV. II. Permanent Criminal Commissions
24. III. XI. Position of the Governors
25. III. IX. Death of Scipio
26. III. XI. Reform of the Centuries
27. III. VII. Gracchus
28. IV. I. War against Aristonicus
29. IV. I. Mancinus
30. II. III. Licinio-Sextian Laws
31. II. III. Its Influence in Legislation
32. IV. I. War against Aristonicus
33. II. III. Attempts at Counter-Revolution
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.
35. II. II. Agrarian Law of Spurius Cassius
36. III. XI. Rise of A City Rabble
37. III. IX. Nullity of the Comitia
1. IV. I. War against Aristonicus
2. IV. II. Ideas of Reform
3. III. Vi. The African Expedition of Scipio
4. To this occasion belongs his oration -contra legem iudiciariam-Ti. Gracchi—which we are to understand as referring not, as has been asserted, to a law as to the -indicia publica-, but to the supplementary law annexed to his agrarian rogation: -ut triumviri iudicarent-, qua publicus ager, qua privatus esset (Liv. Ep. lviii.; see iv. II. Tribunate of Gracchus above).
5. IV. II. Vote by Ballot
6. The restriction, that the continuance should only be allowable if there was a want of other qualified candidates (Appian, B. C. i. 21), was not difficult of evasion. The law itself seems not to have belonged to the older regulations (Staatsrecht, i. 473), but to have been introduced for the first time by the Gracchans.
7. Such are the words spoken on the announcement of his projects of law:—“If I were to speak to you and ask of you—seeing that I am of noble descent and have lost my brother on your account, and that there is now no survivor of the descendants of Publius Africanus and Tiberius Gracchus excepting only myself and a boy—to allow me to take rest for the present, in order that our stock may not be extirpated and that an offset of this family may still survive; you would perhaps readily grant me such a request.”
8. IV. III. Democratic Agitation under Carbo and Flaccus
9. III. XII. Results. Competition of Transmarine Corn
10. III. XII. Prices of Italian Corn
11. III. XI. Reform of the Centuries
12. IV. III. The Commission for Distributing the Domains
13. III. VII. The Romans Maintain A Standing Army in Spain
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.
15. II. I. Right of Appeal; ii. VIII. Changes in Procedure
16. III. XII. Moneyed Aristocracy
17. IV. II. Exclusion of the Senators from the Equestrian Centuries
18. III. XI. The Censorship A Prop of the Nobility
19. III. XI. Patricio-Plebeian Nobility, iii. XI. Family Government
20. IV. I. Western Asia
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.
22. IV. III. Modifications of the Penal Law
23. We still possess a great portion of the new judicial ordinance— primarily occasioned by this alteration in the personnel of the judges— for the standing commission regarding extortion; it is known under the name of the Servilian, or rather Acilian, law -de repetundis-.
24. This and the law -ne quis iudicio circumveniatur- may have been identical.
25. A considerable fragment of a speech of Gracchus, still extant, relates to this trafficking about the possession of Phrygia, which after the annexation of the kingdom of Attalus was offered for sale by Manius Aquillius to the kings of Bithynia and of Pontus, and was bought by the latter as the highest bidder.(p. 280) In this speech he observes that no senator troubled himself about public affairs for nothing, and adds that with reference to the law under discussion (as to the bestowal of Phrygia on king Mithradates) the senate was divisible into three classes, viz. Those who were in favour of it, those who were against it, and those who were silent: that the first were bribed by kingMithra dates, the second by king Nicomedes, while the third were the most cunning, for they accepted money from the envoys of both kings and made each party believe that they were silent in its interest.
26. IV. III. Democratic Agitation under Carbo and Flaccus
27. IV. II. Tribunate of Gracchus
28. II. II. Legislation
29. II. III. Political Abolition of the Patriciate
1. IV. III. Democratic Agitation under Carbo and Flaccus
2. IV. II. Tribunate of Gracchus
3. It is in great part still extant and known under the erroneous name, which has now been handed down for three hundred years, of the Thorian agrarian law.
4. II. VII. Attempts at Peace
5. II. VII. Attempts at Peace
6. This is apparent, as is well known, from the further course of events. In opposition to this view stress has been laid on the fact that in Valerius Maximus, vi. 9, 13, Quintus Caepio is called patron of the senate; but on the one hand this does not prove enough, and on the other hand what is there narrated does not at all suit the consul of 648, so that there must be an error either in the name or in the facts reported.
7. It is assumed in many quarters that the establishment of the province of Cilicia only took place after the Cilician expedition of Publius Servilius in 676 et seq., but erroneously; for as early as 662 we find Sulla (Appian, Mithr. 57; B. C. i. 77; Victor, 75), and in 674, 675, Gnaeus Dolabella (Cic. Verr. i. 1, 16, 44) as governors of Cilicia—which leaves no alternative but to place the establishment of the province in 652. This view is further supported by the fact that at this time the expeditions of the Romans against the corsairs—e. g. the Balearic, Ligurian, and Dalmatian expeditions—appear to have been regularly directed to the occupation of the points of the coast whence piracy issued; and this was natural, for, as the Romans had no standing fleet, the only means of effectually checking piracy was the occupation of the coasts. It is to be remembered, moreover, that the idea of a -provincia- did not absolutely involve possession of the country, but in itself implied no more than an independent military command; it is very possible, that the Romans in the first instance occupied nothing in this rugged country save stations for their vessels and troops.
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.
8. IV. II. Insurrections of the Slaves
9. III. VII. Numidians
10. IV. I The Siege
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 JugurthaPage 1223
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
12. In the exciting and clever description of this war by Sallust the chronology has been unduly neglected. The war terminated in the summer of 649 (c. 114); if therefore Marius began his management of the war as consul in 647, he held the command there in three campaigns. But the narrative describes only two, and rightly so. For, just as Metellus to all appearance went to Africa as early as 645, but, since he arrived late (c. 37, 44), and the reorganization of the army cost time (c. 44), only began his operations in the following year, in like manner Marius, who was likewise detained for a considerable time in Italy by his military preparations (c. 84), entered on the chief command either as consul in 647 late in the season and after the close of the campaign, or only as proconsul in 648; so that the two campaigns of Metellus thus fall in 646, 647, and those of Marius in 648, 649. It is in keeping with this that Metellus did not triumph till the year 648 (Eph. epigr. iv. p. 277). With this view the circumstance also very well accords, that the battle on the Muthul and the siege of Zama must, from the relation in which they stand to Marius’ candidature for the consulship, be necessarily placed in 646. In no case can the author be pronounced free from inaccuracies; Marius, for instance, is even spoken of by him as consul in 649.
The prolongation of the command of Metellus, which Sallust reports (lxii. 10), can in accordance with the place at which it stands only refer to the year 647; when in the summer of 646 on the footing of the Sempronian law the provinces of the consuls to be elected for 647 were to be fixed, the senate destined two other provinces and thus left Numidia to Metellus. This resolve of the senate was overturned by the plebiscitum mentioned at lxxii. 7. The following words which are transmitted to us defectively in the best manuscripts of both families, -sed paulo... decreverat; ea res frustra fuit,- must either have named the provinces destined for the consuls by the senate, possibly -sed paulo [ante ut consulibus Italia et Gallia provinciae essent senatus] decreverat- or have run according to the way of filling up the passage in the ordinary manuscripts; -sed paulo [ante senatus Metello Numidiam] decreverat-.
13. Now Beja on the Mejerdah.
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.
15. Sallust’s political genre-painting of the Jugurthine war—the only picture that has preserved its colours fresh in the otherwise utterly faded and blanched tradition of this epoch—closes with the fall of Jugurtha, faithful to its style of composition, poetical, not historical; nor does there elsewhere exist any connected account of the treatment of the Numidian kingdom. That Gauda became Jugurtha’s successor is indicated by Sallust, c. 65 and Dio. Fr. 79, 4, Bekk., and confirmed by an inscription of Carthagena (Orell. 630), which calls him king and father of Hiempsal ii. That on the east the frontier relations subsisting between Numidia on the one hand and Roman Africa and Cyrene on the other remained unchanged, is shown by Caesar (B. C. ii. 38; B. Afr. 43, 77) and by the later provincial constitution. On the other hand the nature of the case implied, and Sallust (c. 97, 102, 111) indicates, that the kingdom of Bocchus was considerably enlarged; with which is undoubtedly connected the fact, that Mauretania, originally restricted to the region of Tingis (Morocco), afterwards extended to the region of Caesarea (province of Algiers) and to that of Sitifis (western half of the province of Constantine). As Mauretania was twice enlarged by the Romans, first in 649 after the surrender of Jugurtha, and then in 708 after the breaking up of the Numidian kingdom, it is probable that the region of Caesarea was added on the first, and that of Sitifis on the second augmentation.
16. III. VIII. Interference of the Community with the Finances
1. If Cicero has not allowed himself to fall into an anachronism when he makes Africanus say this as early as 625 (de Rep. iii. 9), the view indicated in the text remains perhaps the only possible one. This enactment did not refer to Northern Italy and Liguria, as the cultivation of the vine by the Genuates in 637 (iii. XII. Culture Of Oil and Wine, and Rearing of Cattle, note) proves; and as little to the immediate territory of Massilia (Just. xliii 4; Posidon. Fr. 25, Mull.; Strabo, iv. 179). The large export of wine and oil from Italy to the region of the Rhone in the seventh century of the city is well known.
2. In Auvergne. Their capital, Nemetum or Nemossus, lay not far from Clermont.
3. The battle at Vindalium is placed by the epitomator of Livy and by Orosius before that on the Isara; but the reverse order is supported by Floras and Strabo (iv. 191), and is confirmed partly by the circumstance that Maximus, according to the epitome of Livy and Pliny, H. N. vii. 50, conquered the Gauls when consul, partly and especially by the Capitoline Fasti, according to which Maximus not only triumphed before Ahenobarbus, but the former triumphed over the Allobroges and the king of the Arverni, the latter only over the Arverni. It is clear that the battle with the Allobroges and Arverni must have taken place earlier than that with the Arverni alone.
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
6. III. III. Expedition against Scodra
7. III. III. Impression in Greece and Macedonia
8. III. X. Humiliation of the Greeks in General
9. IV. I. Province of Macedonia. the Pirustae in the valleys of the Drin belonged to the province of Macedonia, but made forays into the neighbouring Illyricum (Caesar, B. G. v. 1).
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-).
13. The quaestor of Macedonia M. Annius P. f., to whom the town of Lete (Aivati four leagues to the north-west of Thessalonica) erected in the year 29 of the province and 636 of the city this memorial stone (Dittenberger, Syll. 247), is not otherwise known; the praetor Sex. Pompeius whose fall is mentioned in it can be no other than the grandfather of the Pompeius with whom Caesar fought and the brother-in-law of the poet Lucilius. The enemy are designated as —Galaton ethnos—. It is brought into prominence that Annius in order to spare the provincials omitted to call out their contingents and repelled the barbarians with the Roman troops alone. To all appearance Macedonia even at that time required a de facto standing Roman garrison.
14. If Quintus Fabius Maximus Eburnus consul in 638 went to Macedonia (C. I. Gr. 1534; Zumpt, Comm. Epigr. ii. 167), he too must have suffered a misfortune there, since Cicero, in Pison. 16, 38, says: -ex (Macedonia) aliquot praetorio imperio, consulari quidem nemo rediit, qui incolumis fuerit, quin triumpharit-; for the triumphal list, which is complete for this epoch, knows only the three Macedonian triumphs of Metellus in 643, of Drusus in 644, and of Minucius in 648.
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.
18. III. VII. Measures Adopted to Check the Immigrations of the Transalpine Gauls
19. IV. III. Modifications of the Penal Law
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.
21. To this, beyond doubt, the fragment of Diodorus (Vat. p. 122) relates.
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
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.
25. It is injudicious to deviate from the traditional account and to transfer the field of battle to Verona: in so doing the fact is overlooked that a whole winter and various movements of troops intervened between the conflicts on the Adige and the decisive engagement, and that Catulus, according to express statement (Plut. Mar. 24), had retreated as far as the right bank of the Po. The statements that the Cimbri were defeated on the Po (Hier. Chron.), and that they were defeated where Stilicho afterwards defeated the Getae, i. e. at Cherasco on the Tanaro, although both inaccurate, point at least to Vercellae much rather than to Verona.
1. IV. IV. The Domain Question under the Restoration
2. I. Vi. The Servian Constitution, ii. III. Its Composition
3. III. XI. Reforms in the Military Service
4. III. XI. The Nobility in Possession of the Equestrian Centuries
5. IV. IV. Treaty between Rome and Numidia
6. IV. V. Warfare of Prosecutions
7. It is not possible to distinguish exactly what belongs to the first and what to the second tribunate of Saturninus; the more especially, as in both he evidently followed out the same Gracchan tendencies. The African agrarian law is definitely placed by the treatise De Viris Ill. 73, 1 in 651; and this date accords with the termination, which had taken place just shortly before, of the Jugurthine war. The second agrarian law belongs beyond doubt to 654. The treason-law and the corn-law have been only conjecturally placed, the former in 651 (p. 442 note), the latter in 654.
8. All indications point to this conclusion. The elder Quintus Caepio was consul in 648, the younger quaestor in 651 or 654, the former consequently was born about or before 605, the latter about 624 or 627. The fact that the former died without leaving sons (Strabo, iv. 188) is not inconsistent with this view, for the younger Caepio fell in 664, and the elder, who ended his life in exile at Smyrna, may very well have survived him.
9. IV. IV. Treaty between Rome and Numidia
10. IV. V. Warfare of Prosecutions
11. IV. IV. Rival Demagogism of the Senate. The Livian Laws
12. IV. V. And Reach the Danube
13. IV. IV. Administration under the Restoration
14. IV. Vi. Collision between the Senate and Equites in the Administration of the Provinces
1. IV. III. Modifications of the Penal Law
2. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium, ii. V. As to the Officering of the Army
3. II. VII. Furnishing of Contingents; iii. XI. Latins
4. III. XI. Roman Franchise More Difficult of Acquisition
5. III. XI. Roman Franchise More Difficult of Acquisition
6. IV. III. Democratic Agitation under Carbo and Flaccus, iv. III. Overthrow of Gracchus
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
8. The form of oath is preserved (in Diodor. Vat. p. 116); it runs thus: “I swear by the Capitoline Jupiter and by the Roman Vesta and by the hereditary Mars and by the generative Sun and by the nourishing Earth and by the divine founders and enlargers (the Penates) of the City of Rome, that he shall be my friend and he shall be my foe who is friend or foe to Drusus; also that I will spare neither mine own life nor the life of my children or of my parents, except in so far as it is for the good of Drusus and those who share this oath. But if I should become a burgess by the law of Drusus, I will esteem Rome as my home and Drusus as the greatest of my benefactors. I shall tender this oath to as many of my fellow-citizens as I can; and if I swear truly, may it fare with me well; if I swear falsely, may it fare with me ill.” But we shall do well to employ this account with caution; it is derived either from the speeches delivered against Drusus by Philippus (which seems to be indicated by the absurd title “oath of Philippus” prefixed by the extractor of the formula) or at best from the documents of criminal procedure subsequently drawn up respecting this conspiracy in Rome; and even on the latter hypothesis it remains questionable, whether this form of oath was elicited from the accused or imputed to them in the inquiry.
9. II. VII. Dissolution of National Leagues
10. IV. Vi. Discussions on the Livian Laws
11. IV. IV. Dissatisfaction in the Capital, iv. V. Warfare of Prosecutions
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.
15. That this statement of Appian is not exaggerated, is shown by the bullets found at Asculum which name among others the fifteenth legion.
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.
19. I. VII. Servian Wall
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.
21. II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes
22. IV. Vi. The Equestrian Party
23. II. XI. Squandering of the Spoil
24. It is not clear, what the -lex unciaria- of the consuls Sulla and Rufus in the year 666 prescribed in this respect; but the simplest hypothesis is that which regards it as a renewal of the law of 397 (i. 364), so that the highest allowable rate of interest was again 1 1/12th of the capital for the year of ten months or 10 per cent for the year of twelve months.
25. III. XI. Reform of the Centuries
26. II. III. Powers of the Senate
27. IV. II. Death of Gracchus, iv. III. Attack on The Transmarine Colonization. Downfall of Gracchus, iv. Vi. Saturninus Assailed
28. II. III. The Tribunate of the People As an Instrument of Government
1. IV. VIII. Occupation of Cilicia
2. III. IX. Armenia
3. IV. I. Western Asia
4. The words quoted as Phrygian —Bagaios— = Zeus and the old royal name —Manis— have been beyond doubt correctly referred to the Zend -bagha- = God and the Germanic -Mannus-, Indian -Manus-(Lassen, -Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenland-. Gesellschaft, vol. x. p. 329 f.).
5. They are here grouped together, because, though they were in part doubtless not executed till between the first and the second war with Rome, they to some extent preceded even the first (Memn. 30; Justin, xxxviii. 7 ap. fin.; App. Mithr. 13; Eutrop. v. 5) and a narrative in chronological order is in this case absolutely impracticable. Even the recently found decree of Chersonesus (p. 17) has given no information in this respect According to it Diophantus was twice sent against the Taurian Scythians; but that the second insurrection of these is connected with the decree of the Roman senate in favour of the Scythian princes (p. 21) is not clear from the document, and is not even probable.
6. It is very probable that the extraordinary drought, which is the chief obstacle now to agriculture in the Crimea and in these regions generally, has been greatly increased by the disappearance of the forests of central and southern Russia, which formerly to some extent protected the coast-provinces from the parching northeast wind.
7. The recently discovered decree of the town of Chersonesus in honour of this Diophantus (Dittenberger, Syll. n. 252) thoroughly confirms the traditional account. It shows us the city in the immediate vicinity—the port of Balaclava must at that time have been in the power of the Tauri and Simferopol in that of the Scythians—hard pressed partly by the Tauri on the south coast of the Crimea, partly and especially by the Scythians who held in their power the whole interior of the peninsula and the mainland adjoining; it shows us further how the general of king Mithradates relieves on all sides the Greek city, defeats the Tauri, and erects in their territory a stronghold (probably Eupatorion), restores the connection between the western and the eastern Hellenes of the peninsula, overpowers in the west the dynasty of Scilurus, and in the east Saumacus prince of the Scythians, pursues the Scythians even to the mainland, and at length conquers them with the Reuxinales—such is the name given to the later Roxolani here, where they first appear—in the great pitched battle, which is mentioned also in the traditional account. There does not seem to have been any formal subordination of the Greek city under the king; Mithradates appears only as protecting ally, who fights the battles against the Scythians that passed as invincible (—tous anupostatous dokountas eimen—), on behalf of the Greek city, which probably stood to him nearly in the relation of Massilia and Athens to Rome. The Scythians on the other band in the Crimea become subjects (—upakooi—) of Mithradates.
8. The chronology of the following events can only be determined approximately. Mithradates Eupator seems to have practically entered on the government somewhere about 640; Sulla’s intervention took place in 662 (Liv. Ep. 70) with which accords the calculation assigning to the Mithradatic wars a period of thirty years (662-691) (Plin. H. N. vii. 26, 97). In the interval fell the quarrels as to the Paphlagonian and Cappadocian succession, with which the bribery attempted by Mithradates in Rome (Diod. 631) apparently in the first tribunate of Saturninus in 651 (iv. Vi. Saturninus) was probably connected. Marius, who left Rome in 665 and did not remain long in the east, found Mithradates already in Cappadocia and negotiated with him regarding his aggressions (Cic. ad Brut. i. 5; Plut. Mar. 31); Ariarathes vi had consequently been by that time put to death.
9. IV. III. Character of the Constitution of Gaius Gracchus
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.
11. III. IX. Rupture between Antiochus and the Romans
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.
13. IV. VII. Economic Crisis
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.
16. The resolution of the citizens of Ephesus to this effect has recently been found (Waddington, Additions to Lebas, Inscr. iii. 136 a). They had, according to their own declaration, fallen into the power of Mithradates “the king of Cappadocia,” being frightened by the magnitude of his forces and the suddenness of his attack; but, when opportunity offered, they declared war against him “for the rule (—egemonia—) of the Romans and the common weal.”
17. The statement that Mithradates in the peace stipulated for impunity to the towns which had embraced his side (Memnon, 35) seems, looking to the character of the victor and of the vanquished, far from credible, and it is not given by Appian or by Licinianus. They neglected to draw up the treaty of peace in writing, and this neglect afterwards left room far various misrepresentations.
18. Armenian tradition also is acquainted with the first Mithradatic war. Ardasches king of Armenia—Moses of Chorene tells us—was not content with the second rank which rightfully belonged to him in the Persian (Parthian) empire, but compelled the Parthian king Arschagan to cede to him the supreme power, whereupon he had a palace built for himself in Persia and had coins struck there with his own image. He appointed Arschagan viceroy of Persia and his son Dicran (Tigranes) viceroy of Armenia, and gave his daughter Ardaschama in marriage to the great-prince of the Iberians Mihrdates (Mithradates) who was descended from Mihrdates satrap of Darius
We have no difficulty in recognizing here various facts of the first Mithradatic war, but the whole narrative is evidently confused, furnished with heterogeneous additions, and in particular transferred by patriotic falsification to Armenia. In just the same way the victory over Crassus is afterwards attributed to the Armenians. These Oriental accounts are to be received with all the greater caution, that they are by no means mere popular legends; on the contrary the accounts of Josephus, Eusebius, and other authorities current among the Christians of the fifth century have been amalgamated with the Armenian traditions, and the historical romances of the Greeks and beyond doubt the patriotic fancies also of Moses himself have been laid to a considerable extent under contribution. Bad as is cur Occidental tradition in itself, to call in the aid of Oriental tradition in this and similar cases—as has been attempted for instance by the uncritical Saint-Martin—can only lead to still further confusion.
19. III. X. Intervention in the Syro-Egyptian War
1. The whole of the representation that follows is based in substance on the recently discovered account of Licinianus, which communicates a number of facts previously unknown, and in particular enables us to perceive the sequence and connection of these events more clearly than was possible before.
2. IV. VII. The Bestowal of the Franchise and Its Limitations. That there was no confirmation by the comitia, is clear from Cic. Phil. xii. 11, 27. The senate seems to have made use of the form of simply prolonging the term of the Plautio- Papirian law (iv. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts), a course which by use and wont (i. 409) was open to it and practically amounted to conferring the franchise on all Italians.
3. “-Ad flatus sidere-,” as Livy (according to Obsequens, 56) expresses it, means “seized by the pestilence” (Petron. Sat. 2; Plin. H. N. ii. 41, 108; Liv. viii. 9, 12), not “struck by lightning,” as later writers have misunderstood it.
4. IV. VII. Combats with the Marsians
5. IV. VII. Sulpicius Rufus
6. IV. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts
7. IV. V. In Illyria
8. IV. Vi. Discussions on the Livian Laws
9. IV. VII. Energetic Decrees
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).
11. IV. Vi. The Equestrian Party
12. IV. VII. Sulla Embarks for Asia
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.
14. IV. IV. Prosecutions of the Democrats
15. It is stated, that Sulla occupied the defile by which alone Praeneste was accessible (App. i. 90); and the further events showed that the road to Rome was open to him as well as to the relieving army. Beyond doubt Sulla posted himself on the cross road which turns off from the Via Latina, along which the Samnites advanced, at Valmontone towards Palestrina; in this case Sulla communicated with the capital by the Praenestine, and the enemy by the Latin or Labican, road.
16. Hardly any other name can well be concealed under the corrupt reading in Liv. 89 -miam in Samnio-; comp. Strabo, v. 3, 10.
17. IV. IX. Pompeius
18. IV. VIII. New Difficulties
1. III. XI. Abolition of the Dictatorship
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
4. IV. VII. Legislation of Sulla
5. This total number is given by Valerius Maximus, ix. 2. 1. According to Appian (B. C. i. 95), there were proscribed by Sulla nearly 40 senators, which number subsequently received some additions, and about 1600 equites; according to Florus (ii. 9, whence Augustine de Civ. Dei, iii. 28), 2000 senators and equites. According to Plutarch (Sull. 31), 520 names were placed on the list in the first three days; according to Orosius (v. 21), 580 names during the first days. there is no material contradiction between these various reports, for it was not senators and equites alone that were put to death, and the list remained open for months. When Appian, at another passage (i. 103), mentions as put to death or banished by Sulla, 15 consulars, 90 senators, 2600 equites, he there confounds, as the connection shows, the victims of the civil war throughout with the victims of Sulla. The 15 consulars were— Quintus Catulus, consul in 652; Marcus Antonius, 655; Publius Crassus, 657; Quintus Scaevola, 659; Lucius Domitius, 660; Lucius Caesar, 664; Quintus Rufus, 666; Lucius Cinna, 667-670; Gnaeus Octavius, 667; Lucius Merula, 667; Lucius Flaccus, 668; Gnaeus Carbo, 669, 670, 672; Gaius Norbanus, 671; Lucius Scipio, 671; Gaius Marius, 672; of whom fourteen were killed, and one, Lucius Scipio, was banished. When, on the other hand, the Livian account in Eutropius (v. 9) and Orosius (v. 22) specifies as swept away (-consumpti-) in the Social and Civil wars, 24 consulars, 7 praetorians, 60 aedilicians, 200 senators, the calculation includes partly the men who fell in the Italian war, such as the consulars Aulus Albinus, consul in 655; Titus Didius, 656; Publius Lupus, 664; Lucius Cato, 665; partly perhaps Quintus Metellus Numidicus (iv. Vi. Violent Proceedings in The Voting), Manius Aquillius, Gaius Marius the father, Gnaeus Strabo, whom we may certainly regard as also victims of that period, or other men whose fate is unknown to us. Of the fourteen consulars killed, three—Rufus, Cinna, and Flaccus— fell through military revolts, while eight Sullan and three Marian consulars fell as victims to the opposite party. On a comparison of the figures given above, 50 senators and 1000 equites were regarded as victims of Marius, 40 senators and 1600 equites as victims of Sulla; this furnishes a standard—at least not altogether arbitrary—for estimating the extent of the crimes on both sides.
6. The Sextus Alfenus, frequently mentioned in Cicero’s oration on behalf of Publius Quinctius, was one of these.
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
8. IV. IV. The Domain Question under the Restoration
9. That Sulla’s assessment of the five years’ arrears and of the war expenses levied on the communities of Asia (Appian, Mithr. 62 et al.) formed a standard for the future, is shown by the facts, that the distribution of Asia into forty districts is referred to Sulla (Cassiodor. Chron. 670) and that the Sullan apportionment was assumed as a basis in the case of subsequent imposts (Cic. pro Flacc. 14, 32), and by the further circumstance, that on occasion of building a fleet in 672 the sums applied for that purpose were deducted from the payment of tribute (-ex pecunia vectigali populo Romano-: Cic. Verr. l. i. 35, 89). Lastly, Cicero (ad Q. fr. i. i, ii, 33) directly says, that the Greeks “were not in a position of themselves to pay the tax imposed on them by Sulla without -publicani-.”
10. III. XI. Separation of the Orders in the Theatre
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.
12. IV. Vi. Livius Drusus
13. IV. VII. Rejection of the Proposals for an Accomodation
14. III. XI. The Nobility in Possession of the Senate
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.
16. III. XI. The Censorship A Prop of the Nobility
17. We cannot strictly speak at all of a fixed number of senators. Though the censors before Sulla prepared on each occasion a list of 300 persons, there always fell to be added to this list those non-senators who filled a curule office between the time when the list was drawn up and the preparation of the next one; and after Sulla there were as many senators as there were surviving quaestorians But it may be probably assumed that Sulla meant to bring the senate up to 500 or 600 members; and this number results, if we assume that 20 new members, at an average age of 30, were admitted annually, and we estimate the average duration of the senatorial dignity at from 25 to 30 years. At a numerously attended sitting of the senate in Cicero’s time 417 members were present.
18. II. III. The Senate. Its Composition
19. IV. Vi. Political Projects of Marius
20. III. XI. Interference of the Community in War and Administration
21. IV. VII. Legislation of Sulla
22. II. III. Restrictions As to the Accumulation and the Reoccupation of Offices
23. IV. II. Attempts at Reform
24. To this the words of Lepidus in Sallust (Hist. i. 41, 11 Dietsch) refer: -populus Romanus excitus... iure agitandi-, to which Tacitus (Ann. iii. 27) alludes: -statim turbidis Lepidi rogationibus neque multo post tribunis reddita licentia quoquo vellent populum agitandi-. That the tribunes did not altogether lose the right of discussing matters with the people is shown by Cic. De Leg. iii. 4, 10 and more clearly by the -plebiscitum de Thermensibus-, which however in the opening formula also designates itself as issued -de senatus sententia-. That the consuls on the other hand could under the Sullan arrangements submit proposals to the people without a previous resolution of the senate, is shown not only by the silence of the authorities, but also by the course of the revolutions of 667 and 676, whose leaders for this very reason were not tribunes but consuls. Accordingly we find at this period consular laws upon secondary questions of administration, such as the corn law of 681, for which at other times we should have certainly found -plebiscita-.
25. II. III. Influence of the Elections
26. IV. II. Vote by Ballot
27. For this hypothesis there is no other proof, except that the Italian Celt-land was as decidedly not a province—in the sense in which the word signifies a definite district administered by a governor annually changed—in the earlier times, as it certainly was one in the time of Caesar (comp. Licin. p. 39; -data erat et Sullae provincia Gallia Cisalpina-).
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.
30. II. III. Complete Opening Up of Magistracies and Priesthoods
31. II. III. Combination of The Plebian Aristocracy and The Farmers against The Nobility
32. III. XIII. Religious Economy
33. IV. X. Punishments Inflicted on Particular Communities
34. e. g. IV. IV. Dissatisfaction in the Capital, iv. V. Warfare of Prosecutions
35. IV. II. Vote by Ballot
36. IV. III. Modifications of the Penal Law
37. II. II. Intercession
38. IV. III. Modifications of the Penal Law
39. IV. VII. Rejection of the Proposals for an Accomodation
40. II. VII. Subject Communities
41. IV. X. Cisapline Gaul Erected into A Province
42. IV. VII. Preparations for General Revolt against Rome
43. III. XI. Roman Franchise More Difficult of Acquisition
44. IV. IX. Government of Cinna
45. IV. VII. Decay of Military Discipline
46. IV. VII. Economic Crisis
47. IV. VII. Strabo
48. IV. VIII. Flaccus Arrives in Asia
49. IV. IX. Death of Cinna
50. IV. IX. Nola
51. IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates
52. Euripides, Medea, 807:— —Meideis me phaulein kasthenei nomizeto Meid eisuchaian, alla thateron tropou Bareian echthrois kai philoisin eumenei—.
53. IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates
54. IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates, iv. X. Re-establishment of Constitutional Order
55. Not -pthiriasis-, as another account states; for the simple reason that such a disease is entirely imaginary.
1. IV. V. Transalpine Relations of Rome, iv. V. The Romans Cross the Eastern Alps
2. IV. I. The Callaeci Conquered
3. IV. V. And Reach the Danube
4. -Exterae nationes in arbitratu dicione potestate amicitiave populi Romani- (lex repet. v. i), the official designation of the non-Italian subjects and clients as contrasted with the Italian “allies and kinsmen” (-socii nominisve Latini-).
5. III. XI. As to the Management of the Finances
6. III. XII. Mercantile Spirit
7. IV. III. Jury Courts, iv. III. Character of the Constitution of Gaius Gracchus
8. This tax-tenth, which the state levied from private landed property, is to be clearly distinguished from the proprietor’s tenth, which it imposed on the domain-land. The former was let in Sicily, and was fixed once for all; the latter—especially that of the territory of Leontini—was let by the censors in Rome, and the proportion of produce payable and other conditions were regulated at their discretion (Cic. Verr. iii. 6, 13; v. 21, 53; de leg. agr. i. 2, 4; ii. 18, 48). Comp, my Staatsrecht, iii. 730.
9. The mode of proceeding was apparently as follows. The Roman government fixed in the first instance the kind and the amount of the tax. Thus in Asia, for instance, according to the arrangement of Sulla and Caesar the tenth sheaf was levied (Appian. B. C. v. 4); thus the Jews by Caesar’s edict contributed every second year a fourth of the seed (Joseph, iv. 10, 6; comp. ii. 5); thus in Cilicia and Syria subsequently there was paid 5 per cent from estate (Appian. Syr. 50), and in Africa also an apparently similar tax was paid—in which case, we may add, the estate seems to have been valued
10. IV. III. Jury Courts
11. III. VII. Administration of Spain
12. IV. X. Regulation of the Finances
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.
14. IV. Vi. The New Military Organization
15. IV. II. Vote by Ballot
16. III. VII. Liguria
17. IV. V. Province of Narbo
18. IV. V. In Illyria
19. IV. I. Province of Macedonia
20. III. XI. Italian Subjects, iii. XII. Roman Wealth
21. IV. V. Taurisci
22. III. IV. Pressure of the War
23. IV. VII. Outbreak of the Mithradatic War
24. IV. IX. Preparations on Either Side
25. III. XII. The Management of Land and of Capital
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.
27. IV. II. Slavery and Its Consequences
28. IV. VIII. Thrace and Macedonia Occupied by the Pontic Armies.
29. IV. I. Destruction of Carthage, iv. I. Destruction of Corinth
30. IV. V. The Advance of the Romans Checked by the Policy of the Restoration
31. IV. IV. The Provinces
32. IV. VII. Economic Crisis
33. IV. VII. The Sulpician Laws
34. IV. VII. Legislation of Sulla
35. IV. IX. Government of Cinna
36. IV. VIII. Orders Issued from Ephesus for A General Massacre
37. IV. VIII. Thrace and Macedonia Occupied by the Pontic Armies.
38. IV. Vi. Roman Intervention
39. III. XII. Roman Wealth
40. IV. V. Taurisci
41. III. Vi. Pressure of the War
42. II. VIII. Silver Standard of Value
43. III. Vi. Pressure of the War
44. III. I. Comparison between Carthage and Rome
45. IV. X. Proscription-Lists
46. III. III. Autonomy, iii. VII. the State of Culture in Spain, iii. XII. Coins and Moneys
47. III. XII. Coins and Moneys
48. III. XIII. Increase of Amusements
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.
50. III. I. Comparison between Carthage and Rome
51. IV. II. Tribunate of Gracchus
52. “If we could, citizens”—he said in his speech—“we should indeed all keep clear of this burden. But, as nature has so arranged it that we cannot either live comfortably with wives or live at all without them, it is proper to have regard rather to the permanent weal than to our own brief comfort.”
1. IV. XI. Money-Dealing and Commerce
2. IV. X. The Roman Municipal System
3. IV. I. The Subjects
4. IV. I. The Callaeci Conquered
5. IV. I. The New Organization of Spain
6. IV. VII. Second Year of the War
7. The statement that no “Greek games” were exhibited in Rome before 608 (Tac. Ann. xiv. 21) is not accurate: Greek artists (—technitai—) and athletes appeared as early as 568 (Liv. xxxix. 22), and Greek flute-players, tragedians, and pugilists in 587 (Pol. xxx, 13).
8. III. XIII. Irreligious Spirit
9. A delightful specimen may be found in Cicero de Officiis, iii. 12, 13.
10. IV. Vi. Collision between the Senate and Equites in the Administration of the Provinces; iv. IX. Siege of Praeneste
11. In Varro’s satire, “The Aborigines,” he sarcastically set forth how the primitive men had not been content with the God who alone is recognized by thought, but had longed after puppets and effigies.
12. III. XI. Interference of The Community in War and Administration
13. IV. Vi. Political Projects of Marius
14. IV. X. Co-optation Restored in the Priestly Colleges
15. IV. Vi. The Equestrian Party
16. III. XIV. Cato’s Encyclopedia
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:—
-Paenula, si quaeris, canteriu’, servu’, segestre Utilior mihi, quam sapiens-.
18. IV. XII. Panaetius
1. Thus in the -Paulus-, an original piece, the following line occurred, probably in the description of the pass of Pythium (iii. X. Perseus Is Driven Back to Pydna):—
-Qua vix caprigeno generi gradilis gressio est-.
And in another piece the hearers are expected to understand the following description—
-Quadrupes tardigrada agrestis humilis aspera, Capite brevi, cervice anguina, aspectu truci, Eviscerata inanima cum animali sono-.
To which they naturally reply—
-Ita saeptuosa dictione abs te datur, Quod conjectura sapiens aegre contuit; Non intellegimus, nisi si aperte dixeris-.
Then follows the confession that the tortoise is referred to. Such enigmas, moreover, were not wanting even among the Attic tragedians, who on that account were often and sharply taken to task by the Middle Comedy.
2. Perhaps the only exception is in the -Andria- (iv. 5) the answer to the question how matters go:—
“-Sic Ut quimus,” aiunt, “quando ut volumus non licet-”
in allusion to the line of Caecilius, which is, indeed, also imitated from a Greek proverb:—
-Vivas ut possis, quando non quis ut velis-.
The comedy is the oldest of Terence’s, and was exhibited by the theatrical authorities on the recommendation of Caecilius. The gentle expression of gratitude is characteristic.
3. A counterpart to the hind chased by dogs and with tears calling on a young man for help, which Terence ridicules (Phorm. prol. 4), may be recognized in the far from ingenious Plautine allegory of the goat and the ape (Merc, ii. 1). Such excrescences are ultimately traceable to the rhetoric of Euripides (e. g. Eurip. Hec. 90).
4. Micio in the -Adelphi- (i. i) praises his good fortune in life, more particularly because he has never had a wife, “which those (the Greeks) reckon a piece of good fortune.”
5. In the prologue of the -Heauton Timorumenos- he puts the objection into the mouth of his censors:—
-Repente ad studium hunc se applicasse musicum Amicum ingenio fretum, haud natura sua-.
And in the later prologue (594) to the -Adelphi- he says—
-Nam quod isti dicunt malevoli, homines nobiles Eum adiutare, adsidueque una scribere; Quod illi maledictum vehemens esse existimant Eam laudem hic ducit maximam, quum illis placet Qui vobis universis et populo placent; Quorum opera in bello, in otio, in negotio, Suo quisque tempore usus est sine superbia-.
As early as the time of Cicero it was the general supposition that Laelius and Scipio Aemilianus were here meant: the scenes were designated which were alleged to proceed from them; stories were told of the journeys of the poor poet with his genteel patrons to their estates near Rome; and it was reckoned unpardonable that they should have done nothing at all for the improvement of his financial circumstances. But the power which creates legend is, as is well known, nowhere more potent than in the history of literature. It is clear, and even judicious Roman critics acknowledged, that these lines could not possibly apply to Scipio who was then twenty-five years of age, and to his friend Laelius who was not much older. Others with at least more judgment thought of the poets of quality Quintus Labeo (consul in 571) and Marcus Popillius (consul in 581), and of the learned patron of art and mathematician, Lucius Sulpicius Gallus (consul in 588); but this too is evidently mere conjecture. That Terence was in close relations with the Scipionic house cannot, however, be doubted: it is a significant fact, that the first exhibition of the -Adelphi-and the second of the -Hecyra- took place at the funeral games of Lucius Paullus, which were provided by his sons Scipio and Fabius.
6. IV. XI. Token-Money
7. III. XIV. National Comedy
8. External circumstances also, it may be presumed, co-operated in bringing about this change. After all the Italian communities had obtained the Roman franchise in consequence of the Social war, it was no longer allowable to transfer the scene of a comedy to any such community, and the poet had either to keep to general ground or to choose places that had fallen into ruin or were situated abroad. Certainly this circumstance, which was taken into account even in the production of the older comedies, exercised an unfavourable effect on the national comedy.
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
An explanation quite similar may be given of the “lays of Fescennium,” which likewise belong to the burlesque poetry of the Romans and were localized in the South Etruscan village of Fescennium; it is not necessary on that account to class them with Etruscan poetry any more than the Atellanae with Oscan. That Fescennium was in historical times not a town but a village, cannot certainly be directly proved, but is in the highest degree probable from the way in which authors mention the place and from the silence of inscriptions.
11. The close and original connection, which Livy in particular represents as subsisting between the Atellan farce and the -satura-with the drama thence developed, is not at all tenable. The difference between the -histrio- and the Atellan player was just about as great as is at present the difference between a professional actor and a man who goes to a masked ball; between the dramatic piece, which down to Terence’s time had no masks, and the Atellan, which was essentially based on the character-mask, there subsisted an original distinction in no way to be effaced. The drama arose out of the flute-piece, which at first without any recitation was confined merely to song and dance, then acquired a text (-satura-), and lastly obtained through Andronicus a libretto borrowed from the Greek stage, in which the old flute-lays occupied nearly the place of the Greek chorus. This course of development nowhere in its earlier stages comes into contact with the farce, which was performed by amateurs.
12. In the time of the empire the Atellana was represented by professional actors (Friedlander in Becker’s Handbuch. vi. 549). The time at which these began to engage in it is not reported, but it can hardly have been other than the time at which the Atellan was admitted among the regular stage-plays, i. e. the epoch before Cicero (Cic. ad Fam. ix. 16). This view is not inconsistent with the circumstance that still in Livy’s time (vii. 2) the Atellan players retained their honorary rights as contrasted with other actors; for the statement that professional actors began to take part in performing the Atellana for pay does not imply that the Atellana was no longer performed, in the country towns for instance, by unpaid amateurs, and the privilege therefore still remained applicable,
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.”
14. According to Eusebius, Pomponius flourished about 664; Velleius calls him a contemporary of Lucius Crassus (614-663) and Marcus Antonius (611-667). The former statement is probably about a generation too late; the reckoning by -victoriati- (p. 182) which was discontinued about 650 still occurs in his -Pictores-, and about the end of this period we already meet the mimes which displaced the Atellanae from the stage.
15. It was probably merry enough in this form. In the -Phoenissae- of Novius, for instance, there was the line:—
-Sume arma, iam te occidam clava scirpea-, Just as Menander’s —Pseudeirakleis— makes his appearance.
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.
17. The attention given to the acoustic arrangements of the Greeks may be inferred from Vitruv. v. 5, 8. Ritschl (Parerg. i. 227, xx.) has discussed the question of the seats; but it is probable (according to Plautus, Capt. prol. 11) that those only who were not -capite censi- had a claim to a seat. It is probable, moreover, that the words of Horace that “captive Greece led captive her conqueror” primarily refer to these epoch-making theatrical games of Mummius (Tac. Ann. xiv. 21).
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:—
-Constiteram, exorientem Auroram forte salutans, Cum subito a laeva Roscius exoritur. Pace mihi liceat, coelestes, dicere vestra; Mortalis visust pulchrior esse deo-.
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.
20. IV. XII. Course of Literature and Rhetoric
21. -Quam lepide —legeis— compostae ut tesserulae omnes Arte pavimento atque emblemate vermiculato-.
22. The poet advises him—
-Quo facetior videare et scire plus quant ceteri—–to say not -pertaesum- but -pertisum-.
23. IV. III. Its Suspension by Scipio Aemilianus
24. The following longer fragment is a characteristic specimen of the style and metrical treatment, the loose structure of which cannot possibly be reproduced in German hexameters:—
-Virtus, Albine, est pretium persolvere verum
Queis in versamur, queis vivimu’ rebu’
potesse;
Virtus est homini scire quo quaeque habeat res;
Virtus scire homini rectum, utile, quid sit honestum,
Quae bona, quae mala item, quid inutile, turpe, inhonestum;
Virtus quaerendae finem rei scire modumque;
Virtus divitiis pretium persolvere posse;
Virtus id dare quod re ipsa debetur honori,
Hostem esse atque inimicum hominum morumque malorum,
Contra defensorem hominum morumque bonorum,
Hos magni facere, his bene velle, his vivere amicum;
Commoda praeterea patriai prima putare,
Deinde parentum, tertia iam postremaque nostra-.
25. IV. XIII. Dramatic Arrangements, second note
26. III. X. Measures of Security in Greece
27. IV. I. Greece
28. Such scientific travels were, however, nothing uncommon among the Greeks of this period. Thus in Plautus (Men. 248, comp. 235) one who has navigated the whole Mediterranean asks—
-Quin nos hinc domum Redimus, nisi si historiam scripturi sumus-?
29. III. XIV. National Opposition
30. The only real exception, so far as we know, is the Greek history of Gnaeus Aufidius, who flourished in Cicero’s boyhood (Tusc, v. 38, 112), that is, about 660. The Greek memoirs of Publius Rutilius Rufus (consul in 649) are hardly to be regarded as an exception, since their author wrote them in exile at Smyrna.
31. IV. XI. Hellenism and Its Results
32. IV. XII. Education
33. IV. XII. Latin Instruction
34. The assertion, for instance, that the quaestors were nominated in the regal period by the burgesses, not by the king, is as certainly erroneous as it bears on its face the impress of a partisan character.
35. IV. XII. Course of Literature and Rhetoric
36. IV. XII. Course of Literature and Rhetoric
37. IV. XII. Course of Literature and Rhetoric
38. IV. X. Permanent and Special -Quaestiones-
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
41. IV. XII. Roman Stoa f.
42. IV. XI. Buildings
* * * * *
THE HISTORY OF ROME: BOOK V
The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
This work contains many literal citations of and references to words, sounds, and alphabetic symbols drawn from many languages, including Gothic and Phoenician, but chiefly Latin and Greek. This English language Gutenberg edition, constrained within the scope of 7-bit ASCII code, adopts the following orthographic conventions:
1) Words and phrases regarded as “foreign imports”, italicized in the original text published in 1903; but which in the intervening century have become “naturalized” into English; words such as “de jure”, “en masse”, etc. are not given any special typographic distinction.
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-.
3) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents, are rendered with a preceding and a following double-dash; thus, —xxxx—. Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as —xxx-xxx—
4) Simple non-ideographic references to vocalic sounds, single letters, or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic references are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x, or -xxx.
5) The following refers particularly to the complex discussion of alphabetic evolution in Ch. XIV: Measuring and Writing). Ideographic references, meaning pointers to the form of representation itself rather than to its content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-. “id:” stands for “ideograph”, and indicates that the reader should form a mental picture based on the “xxxx” following the colon. “xxxx” may represent a single symbol, a word, or an attempt at a picture composed of ASCII characters. E. g. —“id:Gamma gamma”— indicates an uppercase Greek gamma-form Followed by the form in lowercase. Such exotic parsing is necessary to explain alphabetic development because a single symbol may have been used for a number of sounds in a number of languages, or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different times. Thus, -"id:Gamma gamma” might very well refer to a Phoenician construct that in appearance resembles the form that eventually stabilized as an uppercase Greek “gamma” juxtaposed to another one of lowercase. Also, a construct such as —“id:E” indicates a symbol that in graphic form most closely resembles an ASCII uppercase “E”, but, in fact, is actually drawn more crudely.
6) The numerous subheading references, of the form “XX. XX. Topic” found in the appended section of endnotes are to be taken as “proximate” rather than topical indicators. That is, the information contained in the endnote indicates primarily the location in the main text of the closest indexing “handle”, a subheading, which may or may not echo congruent subject matter.
The reason for this is that in the translation from an original paged manuscript to an unpaged “cyberscroll”, page numbers are lost. In this edition subheadings are the only remaining indexing “handles” of sub-chapter scale. Unfortunately, in some stretches of text these subheadings may be as sparse as merely one in three pages. Therefore, it would seem to make best sense to save the reader time and temper by adopting a shortest path method to indicate the desired reference.
7) The attentive reader will notice occasional typographic or syntactic anomalies and errors. In almost all cases this conscious and due to an editorial decision for the first Gutenberg edition to transmit transparently all but the most egregious flaws found in the source text Scribner edition of 1903. Furthermore, a number of sentences may be virtually unintelligible to the English reader due to the architecture of relative clauses, prepositions, and verbs as carried over from the original German. It is the preparer’s ambition for a second Gutenberg edition of the History of Rome to reconstruct and clarify the most turgid specimens.
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.
Book V: The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
I. Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Sertorius
II. Rule of the Sullan Restoration
III. The Fall of the Oligarchy and the Rule of Pompeius
IV. Pompeius and the East
V. The Struggle of Parties during the Absence of Pompeius
Vi. Retirement of Pompeius and Coalition of the Pretenders
VII. The Subjugation of the West
VIII. The Joint Rule of Pompeius and Caesar
IX. Death of Crassus—Rupture between the Joint Rulers
X. Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus
XI. The Old Republic and the New Monarchy
XII. Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art
The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
Wie er sich sieht so um und um,
Kehrt es ihm fast den Kopf herum,
Wie er wollt’ Worte zu allem finden?
Wie er mocht’ so viel Schwall verbinden?
Wie er mocht’ immer muthig bleiben
So fort und weiter fort zu schreiben?
Goethe.
Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Sertorius
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
Transpadanes
Freedmen
Capitalists
Proletarians of the Capital
The Dispossessed
The Proscribed and Their Adherents
There were, above all, the numerous and important classes whom the Sullan restoration had left unsatisfied, or whose political or private interests it had directly injured. Among those who for such reasons belonged to the opposition ranked the dense and prosperous population of the region between the Po and the Alps, which naturally regarded the bestowal of Latin rights in 665(1) as merely an instalment of the full Roman franchise, and so afforded a ready soil for agitation. To this category belonged also the freedmen, influential in numbers and wealth, and specially dangerous through their aggregation in the capital, who could not brook their having been reduced by the restoration to their earlier, practically useless, suffrage. In the same position stood, moreover, the great capitalists, who maintained a cautious silence, but still as before preserved their tenacity of resentment and their equal tenacity of power. The populace of the capital, which recognized true freedom in free bread-corn, was likewise discontented. Still deeper exasperation prevailed among the burgess-bodies affected by the Sullan confiscations—whether they like those of Pompeii, lived on their property curtailed by the Sullan colonists, within the same ring-wall with the latter, and at perpetual variance with them; or, like the Arretines and Volaterrans, retained actual possession of their territory, but had the Damocles’ sword of confiscation suspended over them by the Roman people; or, as was the case in Etruria especially, were reduced to be beggars in their former abodes, or robbers in the woods. Finally, the agitation extended to the whole family connections and freedmen of those democratic chiefs who had lost their lives in consequence of the restoration, or who were wandering along the Mauretanian coasts, or sojourning at the court and in the army of Mithradates, in all the misery of emigrant exile; for, according to the strict family-associations that governed the political feeling of this age, it was accounted a point of honour(2) that those who were left behind should endeavour to procure for exiled
Men of Ruined Fortunes
Men of Ambition
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.
Power of the Opposition
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
The more everything ultimately depended on the personality of the leading men on both sides, it was the more unfortunate that both, strictly speaking, lacked leaders. The politics of thisperiod were thoroughly under the sway of the coterie-system in its worst form. This, indeed, was nothing new; close unions of families and clubs were inseparable from an aristocratic organizationof the state, and had for centuries prevailed in Rome. But it was not till this epoch that they became all-powerful, for it was only now (first in 690) that their influence was attested rather than checked by legal measures of repression.
All persons of quality, those of popular leanings no less than the oligarchy proper, met in Hetaeriae; the mass of the burgesses likewise, so far as they took any regular part in political events at all, formed according to their voting-districts close unions with an almost military organization, which found their natural captains and agents in the presidents of the districts, “tribe-distributors” (-divisores tribuum-). With these political clubs everything was bought and sold; the vote of the elector especially, but also the votes of the senator and the judge, the fists too which produced the street riot, and the ringleaders who directed it—the associations of the upper and of the lower ranks were distinguished
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
Pompeius
Of the men, who were neither unconditional adherents nor open opponents of the Sullan constitution, no one attracted more the eyes of the multitude than the young Gnaeus Pompeius, who was at the time of Sulla’s death twenty-eight years of age (born 29th September 648). The fact was a misfortune for the admired as well as for the admirers; but it was natural. Sound in body and mind, a capable athlete, who even when a superior officer vied with his soldiers in leaping, running, and lifting, a vigorous and skilled rider and fencer, a bold leader of volunteer bands, the youth had become Imperator and triumphator at an age which excluded him from every magistracy and from the senate, and had acquired the first place next to Sulla in public opinion; nay, had obtained from the indulgent regent himself—half in recognition, half in irony— the surname of the Great. Unhappily, his mental endowments by no means corresponded with these unprecedented successes. He was neither a bad nor an incapable man, but a man thoroughly ordinary, created by nature to be a good sergeant, called by circumstances to be a general and a statesman. An intelligent, brave and experienced, thoroughly excellent soldier, he was still, even in his military capacity, without trace of any higher gifts. It was characteristic of him as a general, as well as in other respects, to set to work with a caution bordering on timidity, and, if possible, to give the decisive blow only when he had established an immense superiority over his opponent. His culture was the average culture of the time; although entirely a soldier, he did not neglect, when he went to Rhodes, dutifully to admire, and to make presents to, the rhetoricians there. His integrity was that of a rich man who manages with discretion his considerable property inherited and acquired. He did not disdain to make money in the usual senatorial way, but he was too cold and too rich to incur special risks, or draw down on himself conspicuous disgrace, on that account. The vice so much in vogue among his contemporaries, rather than any virtue of his own, procured for him the reputation—comparatively, no doubt, well warranted—of integrity and disinterestedness. His “honest countenance” became almost proverbial, and even after his death
Crassus
Marcus Crassus cannot, any more than Pompeius, be reckoned among the unconditional adherents of the oligarchy. He is a personage highly characteristic of this epoch. Like Pompeius, whose senior he was by a few years, he belonged to the circle of the high Roman aristocracy, had obtained the usual education befitting his rank, and had like Pompeius fought with distinction under Sulla in the Italian war. Far inferior to many of his peers in mental gifts, literary culture, and military talent, he outstripped them by his boundless activity, and by the perseverance
Leaders of the Democrats
In the opposition proper, both among the liberal conservatives and among the Populares, the storms of revolution had made fearful havoc. Among the former, the only surviving man of note was Gaius Cotta (630-c. 681), the friend and ally of Drusus, and as such banished in 663,(12) and then by Sulla’s victory brought back to his native land;(13) he was a shrewd man and a capable advocate, but not called, either by the weight of his party or by that of his personal standing, to act more than a respectable secondary part. In the democratic party, among the rising youth, Gaius Julius Caesar, who was twenty-four years of age (born 12 July 652?(14)), drew towards him the eyes of friend and foe. His relationship with Marius and Cinna (his father’s sister had been the wife of Marius, he himself had married Cinna’s daughter); the courageous refusal of the youth who had scarce outgrown the age of boyhood to send a divorce to his young wife Cornelia at the bidding of the dictator, as Pompeius had in the like case done; his bold persistence in the priesthood conferred upon him by Marius, but revoked
Lepidus
Thus the leadership of the democracy, in the absence of a man with a true vocation for it, was to be had by any one who might please to give himself forth as the champion of oppressed popular freedom; and in this way it came to Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a Sullan, who from motives more than ambiguous deserted to the camp of the democracy. Once a zealous Optimate, and a large purchaser at the auctions of the proscribed estates, he had, as governor of Sicily, so scandalously plundered the province that he was threatened with impeachment, and, to evade it, threw himself into opposition. It was a gain of doubtful value. No doubt the opposition thus acquired a well-known name, a man of quality, a vehement orator in the Forum; but Lepidus was an insignificant and indiscreet personage, who did not deserve to stand at the head either in council or in the field. Nevertheless the opposition welcomed him, and the new leader of the democrats succeeded not only in deterring his accusers from prosecuting the attack on him which they had begun, but also in carrying his election to the consulship for 676; in which, we may add, he was helped not only by the treasures exacted in Sicily, but also by the foolish endeavour of Pompeius to show Sulla and the pure Sullans on this occasion what he could do. Now that the opposition had, on the death of Sulla, found a head once more in Lepidus, and now that this their leader had become the supreme magistrate of the state, the speedy outbreak of a new revolution in the capital might with certainty be foreseen.
The Emigrants in Spain
Sertorius
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.
Renewed Outbreak of the Spanish Insurrection
Metellus Sent to Spain
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:
Organizations of Sertorius
These extraordinary successes obtained by Sertorius in the two Spanish provinces were the more significant, that they were not achieved merely by arms and were not of a mere military nature. The emigrants as such were not formidable; nor were isolated successes of the Lusitanians under this or that foreign leader of much moment. But with the most decided political and patriotic tact Sertorius acted, whenever he could do so, not as condottiere of the Lusitanians in revolt against Rome, but as Roman general and governor of Spain, in which capacity he had in fact been sent thither by the former rulers. He began(16) to form the heads of the emigration into a senate, which was to increase to 300 members and to conduct affairs and to nominate magistrates in Roman form. He regarded his army as a Roman one, and filled the officers’ posts, without exception, with Romans. When facing the Spaniards, he was the governor, who by
Death of Sulla and Its Consequences
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
Yet all the more openly were arrangements thenceforth made to introduce a fresh revolution. Daily the Forum resounded with accusations against the “mock Romulus” and his executioners. Even before the great potentate had closed his eyes, the overthrow of the Sullan constitution, the re-establishment of the distributions of grain, the reinstating of the tribunes of the people in their former position, the recall of those who were banished contrary to law, the restoration of the confiscated lands, were openly indicated by Lepidus and his adherents as the objects
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
Outbreak of the War
Lepidus Defeated
Death of Lepidus
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.
Pompeius Extorts the Command in Spain
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
First of all the new general found employment in Gaul, where no formal insurrection had broken out, but serious disturbances of the peace had occurred at several places; in consequence of which Pompeius deprived the cantons of the Volcae-Arecomici and the Helvii of their independence, and placed them under Massilia. He also laid out a new road over the Cottian Alps (Mont Genevre,(21)), and so established a shorter communication between the valley of the Po and Gaul. Amidst this work the best season of the year passed away; it was not till late in autumn that Pompeius crossed the Pyrenees.
Appearance of Pompeius in Spain
Sertorius had meanwhile not been idle. He had despatched Hirtuleius into the Further province to keep Metellus in check, and had himself endeavoured to follow up his complete victory in the Hither province, and to prepare for the reception of Pompeius. The isolated Celtiberian towns there, which still adhered to Rome, were attacked and reduced one after another; at last, in the very middle of winter, the strong Contrebia (south-east of Saragossa) had fallen. In vain the hard-pressed towns had sent message after message to Pompeius; he would not be induced by any entreaties to depart from his wonted rut of slowly advancing. With the exception of the maritime towns, which were defended by the Roman fleet, and the districts of the Indigetes and Laletani in the north-east corner of Spain, where Pompeius established himself after he had at length crossed the Pyrenees, and made his raw troops bivouac throughout the winter to inure them to hardships, the whole of Hither Spain had at the end of 677 become by treaty or force dependent on Sertorius, and the district on the upper and middle Ebro thenceforth continued the main stay of his power. Even the apprehension, which the fresh Roman force and the celebrated name of the general excited in the army of the insurgents, had a salutary effect on it. Marcus Perpenna, who hitherto as the equal of Sertorius in rank had claimed an independent command over the force which he had brought with him from Liguria, was, on the news of the arrival of Pompeius in Spain, compelled by his soldiers to place himself under the orders of his abler colleague.
For the campaign of 678 Sertorius again employed the corps of Hirtuleius against Metellus, while Perpenna with a strong army took up his position along the lower course of the Ebro to prevent Pompeius from crossing the river, if he should march, as was to be expected, in a southerly direction with the view of effecting a junction with Metellus, and along the coast for the sake of procuring supplies for his troops. The corps of Gaius Herennius was destined to the immediate support of Perpenna; farther inland on the upper Ebro, Sertorius in person prosecuted meanwhile the subjugation of several districts friendly to Rome, and held himself at the same time ready to hasten according to circumstances to the aid of Perpenna or Hirtuleius. It was still his intention to avoid any pitched battle, and to annoy the enemy by petty conflicts and cutting off supplies.
Pompeius Defeated
Pompeius, however, forced the passage of the Ebro against Perpenna and took up a position on the river Pallantias, near Saguntum, whence, as we have already said, the Sertorians maintained their communications with Italy and the east. It was time that Sertorius should appear in person, and throw the superiority of his numbers and of his genius into the scale against the greater excellence of the soldiers of his opponent.
Victories of Metellus
Meanwhile Metellus fought with better fortune. In a sharp engagement at Italica (not far from Seville), which Hirtuleius had imprudently risked, and in which both generals fought hand to hand and Hirtuleius was wounded, Metellus defeated him and compelled him to evacuate the Roman territory proper, and to throw himself into Lusitania. This victory permitted Metellus to unite with Pompeius. The two generals took up their winter-quarters in 678-79 at the Pyrenees, and in the next campaign in 679 they resolved to make a joint attack on the enemy in his position near Valentia. But while Metellus was advancing, Pompeius offered battle beforehand to the main army of the enemy, with a view to wipe out the stain of Lauro and to gain the expected laurels, if possible, alone. With joy Sertorius embraced the opportunity of fighting with Pompeius before Metellus arrived.
Battle on the Sucro
The armies met on the river Sucro (Xucar): after a sharp conflict Pompeius was beaten on the right wing, and was himself carried from the field severely wounded. Afranius no doubt conquered with the left and took the camp of the Sertorians, but during its pillage he was suddenly assailed by Sertorius and compelled also to give way. Had Sertorius been able to renew the battle on the following day, the army of Pompeius would perhaps have been annihilated. But meanwhile Metellus had come up, had overthrown the corps of Perpenna ranged against him, and taken his camp: it was not possible to resume the battle against the two armies united. The successes of Metellus, the junction of the hostile forces, the sudden stagnation after the victory, diffused terror among the Sertorians; and, as not unfrequently happened with Spanish armies, in consequence of this turn of things the greater portion of the Sertorian soldiers dispersed. But the despondency passed away as quickly as it had come; the white fawn, which represented in the eyes of the multitude the military plans of the general, was soon more popular than ever; in a
Again the Roman generals had to take up their winter quarters with the cheerless prospect of an inevitable renewal of their Sisyphean war-toils. It was not even possible to choose quarters in the region of Valentia, so important on account of the communication with Italy and the east, but fearfully devastated by friend and foe; Pompeius led his troops first into the territory of the Vascones(22) (Biscay) and then spent the winter in the territory of the Vaccaei (about Valladolid), and Metellus even in Gaul.
Indefinite and Perilous Character of the Sertorian War
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
Collapse of the Power of Sertorius
But this comparison was more ingenious than accurate. Sertorius was far from being strong enough to renew the gigantic enterprise of Hannibal. He was lost if he left Spain, where all his successes were bound up with the peculiarities of the country and the people; and even there he was more and more compelled to renounce the offensive. His admirable skill as a leader could not change the nature of his troops. The Spanish militia retained its character, untrustworthy as the wave or the wind; now collected in masses to the number of 150,000, now melting away again to a mere handful. The Roman emigrants, likewise, continued insubordinate, arrogant, and stubborn. Those kinds of armed force which require that a corps should keep together for a considerable time, such as cavalry especially, were of course very inadequately represented in his army. The war gradually swept off his ablest officers and the flower of his veterans; and even the most trustworthy communities, weary of being harassed by the Romans and maltreated by the Sertorian officers, began to show signs of impatience and wavering allegiance. It is remarkable that Sertorius, in this respect also like Hannibal, never deceived himself as to the hopelessness of his position; he allowed no opportunity for bringing about a compromise to pass, and would have been ready at any moment to lay down his staff of command on the assurance of being allowed to live peacefully in his native land. But political orthodoxy knows nothing of compromise and conciliation. Sertorius might not recede or step aside; he was compelled inevitably to move on along the path which he had once entered, however narrow and giddy it might become.
The representations which Pompeius addressed to Rome, and which derived emphasis from the behaviour of Mithradates in the east, were successful. He had the necessary supplies of money sent to him by the senate and was reinforced by two fresh legions. Thus the two generals went to work again in the spring of 680 and once more crossed the Ebro. Eastern Spain was wrested from the Sertorians in consequence of the battles on the Xucar and Guadalaviar; the struggle thenceforth became concentrated on the upper and middle Ebro around the chief strongholds of the Sertorians—Calagurris, Osca, Ilerda. As Metellus had done best in the earlier campaigns, so too on this occasion he gained the most important successes. His old opponent Hirtuleius, who again confronted him, was completely defeated and fell himself along with his brother—an irreparable loss for the Sertorians. Sertorius, whom the unfortunate news reached just as he was on the point of assailing the enemy opposed to him, cut down the messenger, that the tidings might not discourage his troops; but the news could not be long concealed. One town after another surrendered, Metellus occupied the Celtiberian towns of Segobriga (between Toledo and Cuenca) and Bilbilis (near Calatayud). Pompeius
In a similar way the campaign of the following year (681) ran its course; in this case it was especially Pompeius who slowly but steadily restricted the field of the insurrection.
Internal Dissension among the Sertorians
The discomfiture sustained by the arms of the insurgents failed not to react on the tone of feeling in their camp. The military successes of Sertorius became like those of Hannibal, of necessity less and less considerable; people began to call in question his military talent: he was no longer, it was alleged, what he had been; he spent the day in feasting or over his cups, and squandered money as well as time. The number of the deserters, and of communities falling away, increased. Soon projects formed by the Roman emigrants against the life of the general were reported to him; they sounded credible enough, especially as various officers of the insurgent army, and Perpenna in particular, had submitted with reluctance to the supremacy of Sertorius, and the Roman governors had for long promised amnesty and a high reward to any one who should kill him. Sertorius, on hearing such allegations, withdrew the charge of guarding his person from the Roman soldiers and entrusted it to select Spaniards. Against the suspected themselves he proceeded with fearful but necessary severity, and condemned various of the accused to death without resorting, as in other cases, to the advice of his council; he was now more dangerous—it was thereupon affirmed in the circles of the malcontents—to his friends than to his foes.
Assassination of Sertorius
A second conspiracy was soon discovered, which had its seat in his own staff; whoever was denounced had to take flight or die; but all were not betrayed, and the remaining conspirators, including especially Perpenna, found in the circumstances only a new incentive to make haste. They were in the headquarters at Osca. There, on the instigation of Perpenna, a brilliant victory was reported to the general as having been achieved by his troops; and at the festal banquet arranged by Perpenna to celebrate this victory Sertorius accordingly appeared, attended, as was his wont, by his Spanish retinue. Contrary to former custom in the Sertorian headquarters, the feast soon became a revel; wild words passed at table, and it seemed as if some of the guests sought opportunity to begin an altercation. Sertorius threw himself back on his couch, and seemed desirous not to hear
Perpenna Succeeds Sertorius
The murderers thought to succeed to the heritage of the murdered. After the death of Sertorius, Perpenna, as the highest among the Roman officers of the Spanish army, laid claim to the chief command. The army submitted, but with mistrust and reluctance. However men had murmured against Sertorius in his lifetime, death reinstated the hero in his rights, and vehement was the indignation of the soldiers when, on the publication of his testament, the name of Perpenna was read forth among the heirs. A part of the soldiers, especially the Lusitanians, dispersed; the remainder had a presentiment that with the death of Sertorius their spirit and their fortune had departed.
Pompeius Puts an End to the Insurrection
Accordingly, at the first encounter with Pompeius, the wretchedly led and despondent ranks of the insurgents were utterly broken, and Perpenna, among other officers, was taken prisoner. The wretch sought to purchase his life by delivering up the correspondence of Sertorius, which would have compromised numerous men of standing in Italy; but Pompeius ordered the papers to be burnt unread, and handed him, as well as the other chiefs of the insurgents, overto the executioner. The emigrants who had escaped dispersed; and most of them went into the Mauretanian deserts or joined the pirates. Soon afterwards the Plotian law, which was zealously supported by the young Caesar in particular, opened up to a portion of them the opportunity of returning home; but all those who had taken part in the murder of Sertorius, with but a single exception, died a violent death. Osca, and most of the towns which had still adhered to Sertorius in Hither Spain, now voluntarily opened their gates to Pompeius; Uxama (Osma), Clunia, and Calagurris alone had to be reduced by force. The two provinces were regulated anew; in the Further province, Metellus raised the annual tribute of the most guilty communities; in the Hither,
Rule of the Sullan Restoration
External Relations
When the suppression of the Cinnan revolution, which threatened the very existence of the senate, rendered it possible for the restored senatorial government to devote once more the requisite attention to the internal and external security of the empire, there emerged affairs enough, the settlement of which could not be postponed without injuring the most important interests and allowing present inconveniences to grow into future dangers. Apart from the very serious complications in Spain, it was absolutely necessary effectually to check the barbarians in Thrace and the regions of the Danube, whom Sulla on his march through Macedonia had only been able superficially to chastise,(1) and to regulate, by military intervention, the disorderly state of things along the northern frontier of the Greek peninsula; thoroughly to suppress the bands of pirates infesting the seas everywhere, but especially the eastern waters; and lastly to introduce better order into the unsettled relations of Asia Minor. The peace which Sulla had concluded in 670 with Mithradates, king of Pontus,(2) and of which the treaty with Murena in 673(3) was essentially a repetition, bore throughout the stamp of a provisional arrangement to meet the exigencies of the moment; and the relations of the Romans with Tigranes, king of Armenia, with whom they had de facto waged war, remained wholly untouched in this peace. Tigranes had with right regarded this as a tacit permission to bring the Roman possessions in Asia under his power. If these were not to be abandoned, it was necessary to come to terms amicably or by force with the new great-king of Asia.
In the preceding chapter we have described the movements in Italy and Spain connected with the proceedings of the democracy, and their subjugation by the senatorial government. In the present chapter we shall review the external government, as the authorities installed by Sulla conducted or failed to conduct it.
Dalmato-Macedonian Expeditions
We still recognize the vigorous hand of Sulla in the energetic measures which, in the last period of his regency, the senate adopted almost simultaneously against the Sertorians, the Dalmatians and Thracians, and the Cilician pirates.
The expedition to the Graeco-Illyrian peninsula was designed partly to reduce to subjection or at least to tame the barbarous tribes who ranged over the whole interior from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, and of whom the Bessi (in the great Balkan) especially were, as it was then said, notorious as robbers even among a race of robbers; partly to destroy the corsairs in their haunts, especially along the Dalmatian coast. As usual, the attack took place simultaneously from Dalmatia and from Macedonia, in which province an army of five legions was assembled for the purpose. In Dalmatia the former praetor Gaius Cosconius held the command, marched through the country in all directions, and took by storm the fortress of Salona after a two years’ siege. In Macedonia the proconsul Appius Claudius (676-678) first attempted along the Macedono-Thracian frontier to make himself master of the mountain districts on the left bank of the Karasu. On both sides the war was conducted with savage ferocity; the Thracians destroyed the townships which they took and massacred their captives, and the Romans returned like for like. But no results of importance were attained; the toilsome marches and the constant conflicts with the numerous and brave inhabitants of the mountains decimated the army to no purpose; the general himself sickened and died. His successor, Gaius Scribonius Curio (679-681), was induced by various obstacles, and particularly by a not inconsiderable military revolt, to desist from the difficult expedition against the Thracians, and to turn himself instead to the northern frontier of Macedonia, where he subdued the weaker Dardani (in Servia) and reached as far as the Danube. The brave and able Marcus Lucullus (682, 683) was the first who again advanced eastward, defeated the Bessi in their mountains, took their capital Uscudama (Adrianople), and compelled them to submit to the Roman supremacy. Sadalas king of the Odrysians, and the Greek towns on the east coast to the north and south of the Balkan chain—Istropolis, Tomi, Callatis, Odessus (near Varna), Mesembria, and others—became dependent on the Romans. Thrace, of which the Romans had hitherto held little more than the Attalic possessions on the Chersonese, now became a portion—though far from obedient—of the province of Macedonia.
Piracy
But the predatory raids of the Thracians and Dardani, confined as they were to a small part of the empire, were far less injurious to the state and to individuals than the evil of piracy, which was continually spreading farther and acquiring more solid organization. The commerce of the whole Mediterranean was in its power. Italy could neither export its products nor import grain from the provinces; in the former the people were starving, in the latter the cultivation of the corn-fields ceased for want of a vent for the produce. No consignment of money, no traveller was longer safe: the public treasury suffered most serious losses; a great many Romans of standing were captured by the corsairs, and compelled to pay heavy sums for their ransom, if it was not even the pleasure of the pirates to execute on individuals the sentence of death, which in that case was seasoned with a savage humour. The merchants, and even the divisions of Roman troops destined for the east, began to postpone their voyages chiefly to the unfavourable season of the year, and to be less afraid of the winter storms than of the piratical vessels, which indeed even at this season did not wholly disappear from the sea. But severely as the closing of the sea was felt, it was more tolerable than the raids made on the islands and coasts of Greece and Asia Minor. Just as afterwards in the time of the Normans, piratical squadrons ran up to the maritime towns, and either compelled them to buy themselves off with large sums, or besieged and took them by storm. When Samothrace, Clazomenae, Samos, Iassus were pillaged by the pirates (670) under the eyes of Sulla after peace was concluded with Mithradates, we may conceive how matters went where neither a Roman army nor a Roman fleet was at hand. All the old rich temples along the coasts of Greece and Asia Minor were plundered one after another; from Samothrace alone a treasure of 1000 talents (240,000 pounds) is said to have been carried off. Apollo, according to a Roman poet of this period, was so impoverished by the pirates that, when the swallow paid him a visit, he could no longer produce to it out of all his treasures even a drachm of gold. More than four hundred townships were enumerated as having been taken or laid under contribution by the pirates, including cities like Cnidus, Samos, Colophon; from not a few places on islands or the coast, which were previously flourishing, the whole population migrated, that they might not be carried off by the pirates. Even inland districts were no longer safe from their attacks; there were instances of their assailing townships distant one or two days’ march from the coast. The fearful debt, under which subsequently all the communities of the Greek east succumbed, proceeded in great part from these fatal times.
Organization of Piracy
Piracy had totally changed its character. The pirates were no longer bold freebooters, who levied their tribute from the large Italo-Oriental traffic in slaves and luxuries, as it passed through the Cretan waters between Cyrene and the Peloponnesus—in the language of the pirates the “golden sea”; no longer even armed slave-catchers, who prosecuted “war, trade, and piracy” equally side by side; they formed now a piratical state, with a peculiar esprit de corps, with a solid and very respectable organization, with a home of their own and the germs of a symmachy, and doubtless also with definite political designs. The pirates called themselves Cilicians; in fact their vessels were the rendezvous of desperadoes and adventurers from all countries—discharged mercenaries from the recruiting-grounds of Crete, burgesses from the destroyed townships of Italy, Spain, and Asia, soldiers and officers from the armies of Fimbria and Sertorius, in a word the ruined men of all nations, the hunted refugees of all vanquished parties, every one that was wretched and daring—and where was there not misery and outrage in this unhappy age? It was no longer a gang of robbers who had flocked together, but a compact soldier-state, in which the freemasonry of exile and crime took the place of nationality, and within which crime redeemed itself, as it so often does in its own eyes, by displaying the most generous public spirit. In an abandoned age, when cowardice and insubordination had relaxed all the bonds of social order, the legitimate commonwealths might have taken a pattern from this state—the mongrel offspring of distress and violence—within which alone the inviolable determination to stand side by side, the sense of comradeship, respect for the pledged word and the self-chosen chiefs, valour and adroitness seemed to have taken refuge. If the banner of this state was inscribed with vengeance against the civil society which, rightly or wrongly, had ejected its members, it might be a question whether this device was much worse than those of the Italian oligarchy and the Oriental sultanship which seemed in the fair way of dividing the world between them. The corsairs at least felt themselves on a level with any legitimate state; their robber-pride, their robber-pomp, and their robber-humour are attested by many a genuine pirate’s tale of mad merriment and chivalrous bandittism: they professed, and made it their boast, to live at righteous war with all the world: what they gained in that warfare was designated not as plunder, but as military spoil; and, while the captured corsair was sure of the cross in every Roman seaport, they too claimed the right of executing any of their captives.
Its Military-Political Power
Their military-political organization, especially since the Mithradatic war, was compact. Their ships, for the most part -myopiarones-, that is, small open swift-sailing barks, with a smaller proportion of biremes and triremes, now regularly sailed associated in squadrons and under admirals, whose barges were wont to glitter in gold and purple. To a comrade in peril, though he might be totally unknown, no pirate captain refused the requested aid; an agreement concluded with any one of them was absolutely recognized by the whole society, and any injury inflicted on one was avenged by all. Their true home was the sea from the pillars of Hercules to the Syrian and Egyptian waters; the refuges which they needed for themselves and their floating houses on the mainland were readily furnished to them by the Mauretanian and Dalmatian coasts, by the island of Crete, and, above all, by the southern coast of Asia Minor, which abounded in headlands and lurking-places, commanded the chief thoroughfare of the maritime commerce of that age, and was virtually without a master. The league of Lycian cities there, and the Pamphylian communities, were of little importance; the Roman station, which had existed in Cilicia since 652, was far from adequate to command the extensive coast; the Syrian dominion over Cilicia had always been but nominal, and had recently been superseded by the Armenian, the holder of which, as a true great-king, gave himself no concern at all about the sea and readily abandoned it to the pillage of the Cilicians. It was nothing wonderful, therefore, that the corsairs flourished there as they had never done anywhere else. Not only did they possess everywhere along the coast signal-places and stations, but further inland—in the most remote recesses of the impassable and mountainous interior of Lycia, Pamphylia, and Cilicia—they had built their rock-castles, in which they concealed their wives, children, and treasures during their own absence at sea, and, doubtless, in times of danger found an asylum themselves. Great numbers of such corsair-castles existed especially in the Rough Cilicia, the forests of which at the same time furnished the pirates with the most excellent timber for shipbuilding; and there, accordingly, their principal dockyards and arsenals were situated. It was not to be wondered at that this organized military state gained a firm body of clients among the Greek maritime cities, which were more or less left to themselves and managed their own affairs: these cities entered into traffic with the pirates as with a friendly power on the basis of definite treaties, and did not comply with the summons of the Roman governors to furnish vessels against them. The not inconsiderable town of Side in Pamphylia, for instance, allowed the pirates to build ships on its quays, and to sell the free men whom they had captured in its market.
Such a society of pirates was a political power; and as a political power it gave itself out and was accepted from the time when the Syrian king Tryphon first employed it as such and rested his throne on its support.(4) We find the pirates as allies of king Mithradates of Pontus as well as of the Roman democratic emigrants; we find them giving battle to the fleets of Sulla in the eastern and in the western waters; we find individual pirate princes ruling over a series of considerable coast towns. We cannot tell how far the internal political development of this floating state had already advanced; but its arrangements undeniably contained the germ of a sea-kingdom, which was already beginning to establish itself, and out of which, under favourable circumstances, a permanent state might have been developed.
Nullity of the Roman Marine Police
This state of matters clearly shows, as we have partly indicated already,(5) how the Romans kept—or rather did not keep—order on “their sea.” The protectorate of Rome over the provinces consisted essentially in military guardianship; the provincials paid tax or tribute to the Romans for their defence by sea and land, which was concentrated in Roman hands. But never, perhaps, did a guardian more shamelessly defraud his ward than the Roman oligarchy defrauded the subject communities. Instead of Rome equipping a general fleet for the empire and centralizing her marine police, the senate permitted the unity of her maritime superintendence— without which in this matter nothing could at all be done—to fall into abeyance, and left it to each governor and each client state to defend themselves against the pirates as each chose and was able. Instead of Rome providing for the fleet, as she had bound herself to do, exclusively with her own blood and treasure and with those of the client states which had remained formally sovereign, the senate allowed the Italian war-marine to fall into decay, and learned to make shift with the vessels which the several mercantile towns were required to furnish, or still more frequently with the coast-guards everywhere organized—all the cost and burden falling, in either case, on the subjects. The provincials might deem themselves fortunate, if their Roman governor applied the requisitions which he raised for the defence of the coast in reality solely to that object, and did not intercept them for himself; or if they were not, as very frequently happened, called on to pay ransom for some Roman of rank captured by the buccaneers. Measures undertaken perhaps with judgment, such as the occupation of Cilicia in 652, were sure to be spoilt in the execution. Any Roman of this period, who was not wholly carried away by the current intoxicating idea of the national greatness, must have wished that the ships’ beaks might be torn down from the orator’s platform in the Forum, that at least he might not be constantly reminded by them of the naval victories achieved in better times.
Expedition to the South Coast of Asia Minor
Publius Servilius Isauricus
Zenicetes Vanquished
The Isaurians Subdued
Nevertheless Sulla, who in the war against Mithradates had the opportunity of acquiring an adequate conviction of the dangers which the neglect of the fleet involved, took various steps seriously to check the evil. It is true that the instructions which he had left to the governors whom he appointed in Asia, to equip in the maritime towns a fleet against the pirates, had borne little fruit, for Murena preferred to begin war with Mithradates, and Gnaeus Dolabella, the governor of Cilicia, proved wholly incapable. Accordingly the senate resolved in 675 to send one of the consuls to Cilicia; the lot fell on the capable Publius Servilius. He defeated the piratical fleet in a bloody engagement, and then applied himself to destroy those towns on the south coast of Asia Minor which served them as anchorages and trading stations. The fortresses of the powerful maritime prince Zenicetes—Olympus, Corycus, Phaselis in eastern Lycia, Attalia in Pamphylia— were reduced, and the prince himself met his death in the flames of his stronghold Olympus. A movement was next made against the Isaurians, who in the north-west corner of the Rough Cilicia, on the northern slope of Mount Taurus, inhabited a labyrinth of steep mountain ridges, jagged rocks, and deeply-cut valleys, covered with magnificent oak forests—a region which is even at the present day filled with reminiscences of the old robber times. To reduce these Isaurian fastnesses, the last and most secure retreats ofthe freebooters, Servilius led the first Roman army over the Taurus, and broke up the strongholds of the enemy, Oroanda, and above all Isaura itself—the ideal of a robber-town, situated on the summit of a scarcely accessible mountain-ridge, and completely overlooking and commanding the wide plain of Iconium. The war, not ended till 679, from which Publius Servilius acquired for himself and his descendants the surname of Isauricus, was not without fruit; a great number of pirates and piratical vessels fell in consequence of it into the power of the Romans; Lycia, Pamphylia, West Cilicia were severely devastated, the territories of the destroyed towns were confiscated, and the province of Cilicia was enlarged by their addition to it. But, in the nature of the case, piracy was far from being suppressed by these measures; on the contrary, it simply betook itself for the time to other regions, and particularly to Crete, the oldest harbour for the corsairs of the Mediterranean.(6) Nothing but repressive measures carried out on a large scale and with unity of purpose—nothing, in fact, but the establishment of a standing maritime police—could in such a case afford thorough relief.
Asiatic Relations
Tigranes and the New Great-Kingdom of Armenia
The affairs of the mainland of Asia Minor were connected by various relations with this maritime war. The variance which existed between Rome and the kings of Pontus and Armenia did not abate, but increased more and more. On the one hand Tigranes, kingof Armenia, pursued his aggressive conquests in the most reckless manner. The Parthians, whose state was at this period torn by internal dissensions and enfeebled, were by constant hostilities driven farther and farther back into the interior of Asia. Of the countries between Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Iran, the kingdoms of Corduene (northern Kurdistan), and Media Atropatene (Azerbijan), were converted from Parthian into Armenian fiefs, and the kingdom of Nineveh (Mosul), or Adiabene, was likewise compelled, at least temporarily, to become a dependency of Armenia. In Mesopotamia, too, particularly in and around Nisibis, the Armenian rule was established; but the southern half, which was in great part desert, seems not to have passed into the firm possession of the new great-king, and Seleucia, on the Tigris, in particular, appears not to have become subject to him. The kingdom of Edessa or Osrhoene he handed over to a tribe of wandering Arabs, which he transplanted from southern Mesopotamia and settled in this region, with the view of commanding by its means the passage of the Euphrates and the great route of traffic.(7)
Cappadocia Armenian
But Tigranes by no means confined his conquests to the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Cappadocia especially was the object of his attacks, and, defenceless as it was, suffered destructive blows from its too potent neighbour. Tigranes wrested the eastern province Melitene from Cappadocia, and united it with the opposite Armenian province Sophene, by which means he obtained command of the passage of the Euphrates with the great thoroughfare of traffic between Asia Minor and Armenia. After the death of Sulla the Armenians even advanced into Cappadocia proper, and carried off to Armenia the inhabitants of the capital Mazaca (afterwards Caesarea) and eleven other towns of Greek organization.
Syria under Tigranes
Nor could the kingdom of the Seleucids, already in full course of dissolution, oppose greater resistance to the new great-king. Here the south from the Egyptian frontier to Straton’s Tower (Caesarea) was under the rule of the Jewish prince Alexander Jannaeus, who extended and strengthened his dominion step by step in conflict with his Syrian, Egyptian, and Arabic neighbours and with the imperial cities. The larger towns of Syria—Gaza, Straton’s Tower, Ptolemais, Beroea—attempted to maintain themselves on their own footing, sometimes as free communities, sometimes under so-called tyrants; the capital, Antioch, in particular, was virtually independent. Damascus and the valleys of Lebanon had submitted to the Nabataean prince, Aretas of Petra. Lastly, in Cilicia the pirates or the Romans bore sway.
Mithradates
King Mithradates acted with greater moderation. He refrained from aggressions in Asia Minor, and contented himself with— what no treaty forbade—placing his dominion along the Black Sea ona firmer basis, and gradually bringing into more definite dependence the regions which separated the Bosporan kingdom, now ruled under his supremacy by his son Machares, from that of Pontus. But he too applied every effort to render his fleet and army efficient, and especially to arm and organize the latter after the Roman model; in which the Roman emigrants, who sojourned in great numbers at his court, rendered essential service.
Demeanor of the Romans in the East
Egypt not Annexed
The Romans had no desire to become further involved in Oriental affairs than they were already. This appears with striking clearness in the fact, that the opportunity, which at this time presented itself, of peacefully bringing the kingdom of Egypt under the immediate dominion of Rome was spurned by the senate. The legitimate descendants of Ptolemaeus son of Lagus had come to an end, when the king installed by Sulla after the death of Ptolemaeus Soter ii Lathyrus—Alexander ii, a son of Alexander I—was killed, a few days after he had ascended the throne, on occasion of a tumult in the capital (673). This Alexander had in his testament(8) appointed the Roman community his heir. The genuineness of this document was no doubt disputed; but the senate acknowledged it by assuming in virtue of it the sums deposited in Tyre on account of the deceased king. Nevertheless it allowed two notoriously illegitimate sons of king Lathyrus, Ptolemaeus xi, who was styled the new Dionysos or the Flute-blower (Auletes), and Ptolemaeus the Cyprian, to take practical possession of Egypt and Cyprus respectively. They were not indeed expressly recognized by the senate, but no distinct summons to surrender their kingdoms was addressed to them. The reason why the senate allowed this state of uncertainty to continue, and did not commit itself to a definite renunciation of Egypt and Cyprus, was undoubtedly the considerable rent which these kings, ruling as it were on sufferance, regularly paid for the continuance of the uncertainty to the heads of the Roman coteries. But the motive for waiving that attractive acquisition altogether was different. Egypt, by its peculiar position and its financial organization, placed in the hands of any governor commanding it a pecuniary and naval power and generally an independent authority, which were absolutely incompatible with the suspicious and feeble government of the oligarchy: in this point of view it was judicious to forgo the direct possession of the country of the Nile.
Non-Intervention in Asia Minor and Syria
Less justifiable was the failure of the senate to interfere directly in the affairs of Asia Minor and Syria. The Roman government did not indeed recognize the Armenian conqueror as king of Cappadocia and Syria; but it did nothing to drive him back, although the war, which under pressure of necessity it began in 676 against the pirates in Cilicia, naturally suggested its interference more especially in Syria. In fact, by tolerating the loss of Cappadocia and Syria without declaring war, the government abandoned not merely those committed to its protection, but the most important foundations of its own powerful position. It adopted a hazardous course, when it sacrificed the outworks of its dominion in the Greek settlements and kingdoms on the Euphrates and Tigris; but, when it allowed the Asiatics to establish themselves on the Mediterranean which was the political basis of its empire, this was not a proof of love of peace, but a confession that the oligarchy had been rendered by the Sullan restoration more oligarchical doubtless, but neither wiser nor more energetic, and it was for Rome’s place as a power in the world the beginning of the end.
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
Apprehensions of Mithradates
Bithynia Roman
Cyrene a Roman Province
Outbreak of the Mithradatic War
Mithradates on his part followed with growing apprehension the development of the Roman policy. He could not but feel that a war between the Romans and Tigranes, however much the feeble senate might dread it, was in the long run almost inevitable, and that he would not be able to avoid taking part in it. His attempt to obtain from the Roman senate the documentary record of the terms of peace, which was still wanting, had fallen amidst the disturbances attending the revolution of Lepidus and remained without result; Mithradates found in this an indication of the impending renewal of the conflict. The expedition against the pirates, which indirectly concerned also the kings of the east whose allies they were, seemed the preliminary to such a war. Still more suspicious were the claims which Rome held in suspense over Egypt and Cyprus: it is significant that the king of Pontus betrothed his two daughters Mithradatis and Nyssa to the two Ptolemies, to whom the senate continued to refuse recognition. The emigrants urged him to strike: the position of Sertorius in Spain, as to which Mithradates despatched envoys under convenient pretexts to the headquarters of Pompeius to obtain information, and which was about this very time really imposing, opened up to the king the prospect of fighting not, as in the first Roman war, against both the Roman parties, but in concert with the one against the other. A more favourable moment could hardly be hoped for, and after all it was always better to declare war than to let it be declared against him. In 679 Nicomedes iii Philopator king of Bithynia, died, and as the last of his race—for a son borne by Nysa was, or was said to be, illegitimate—left his kingdom by testament to the Romans, who delayed not to take possession of this region bordering on the Roman province and long ago filled with Roman officials and merchants. At the same time Cyrene, which had been already bequeathed to the Romans in 658,(10) was at length constituted a province, and a Roman governor was sent thither (679). These measures, in connection with the attacks carried out about the same time against the pirates on the south coast of Asia Minor, must have excited apprehensions in the king; the annexation of Bithynia in particular made the Romans immediate neighbours of the Pontic kingdom; and this, it may be presumed, turned the scale. The king took the decisive step and declared war against the Romans in the winter of 679-680.
Preparations of Mithradates
Gladly would Mithradates have avoided undertaking so arduous a work singlehanded. His nearest and natural ally was the great-king Tigranes; but that shortsighted man declined the proposal of his father-in-law. So there remained only the insurgents and the pirates. Mithradates was careful to place himself in communication with both, by despatching strong squadrons to Spain and to Crete. A formal treaty was concluded with Sertorius,(11) by which Rome ceded to the king Bithynia, Paphlagonia, Galatia, and Cappadocia— all of them, it is true, acquisitions which needed to be ratified on the field of battle. More important was the support which the Spanish general gave to the king, by sending Roman officers to lead his armies and fleets. The most active of the emigrants inthe east, Lucius Magius and Lucius Fannius, were appointed by Sertorius as his representatives at the court of Sinope. From the pirates also came help; they flocked largely to the kingdom of Pontus, and by their means especially the king seems to have succeeded in forming a naval force imposing by the number as well as by the quality of the ships. His main support still lay in his own forces, with which the king hoped, before the Romans should arrive in Asia, to make himself master of their possessions there; especially as the financial distress produced in the province of Asia by the Sullan war-tribute, the aversion of Bithynia towards the new Roman government, and the elements of combustion left behind by the desolating war recently brought to a close in Cilicia and Pamphylia, opened up favourable prospects to a Pontic invasion. There was no lack of stores; 2,000,000 -medimni- of grain lay in the royal granaries. The fleet and the men were numerous and well exercised, particularly the Bastarnian mercenaries, a select corps which was a match even for Italian legionaries. On this occasion also it was the king who took the offensive. A corps under Diophantus advanced into Cappadocia, to occupy the fortresses there and to close the way to the kingdom of Pontus against the Romans; the leader sent by Sertorius, the propraetor Marcus Marius, went in company with the Pontic officer Eumachus to Phrygia, with a view to rouse the Roman province and the Taurus mountains to revolt; the main army, above 100,000 men with 16,000 cavalry and 100 scythe-chariots, led by Taxiles and Hermocrates under the personal superintendence of the king, and the war-fleet of 400 sail commanded by Aristonicus, moved along the north coast of Asia Minor to occupy Paphlagonia and Bithynia.
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.
Beginning of the War
Thus the war began in 680 at all points. It was a misfortune for Mithradates, that at the very moment of his declaring war the Sertorian struggle reached its crisis, by which one of his principal hopes was from the outset destroyed, and the Roman government was enabled to apply its whole power to the maritime and Asiatic contest. In Asia Minor on the other hand Mithradates reaped the advantages of the offensive, and of the great distance of the Romans from the immediate seat of war. A considerable number of cities in Asia Minor opened their gates to the Sertorian propraetor who was placed at the head of the Roman province, and they massacred, as in 666, the Roman families settled among them: the Pisidians, Isaurians, and Cilicians took up arms against Rome. The Romans for the moment had no troops at the points threatened. Individual energetic men attempted no doubt at their own hand to check this mutiny of the provincials; thus on receiving accounts of these events the young Gaius Caesar left Rhodes where he was staying on account of his studies, and with a hastily-collected band opposed himself to the insurgents; but not much could be effected by such volunteer corps. Had not Deiotarus, the brave tetrarch of the Tolistobogii—a Celtic tribe settled around Pessinus—embraced the side of the Romans and fought with success against the Pontic generals, Lucullus would have had to begin with recapturing the interior of the Roman province from the enemy. But even as it was, he lost in pacifying the province and driving back the enemy precious time, for which the slight successes achieved by his cavalry were far from affording compensation. Still more unfavourable than in Phrygia was the aspect of things for the Romans on the north coast of Asia Minor. Here the great Pontic army and the fleet had completely mastered Bithynia, and compelled the Roman consul Cotta to take shelter with his far from numerous force and his ships within the walls and port of Chalcedon, where Mithradates kept them blockaded.
The Romans Defeated at Chalcedon
This blockade, however, was so far a favourable event for the Romans, as, if Cotta detained the Pontic army before Chalcedon and Lucullus proceeded also thither, the whole Roman forces might unite at Chalcedon and compel the decision of arms there rather than in the distant and impassable region of Pontus. Lucullus did take the route for Chalcedon; but Cotta, with the view of executing a great feat at his own hand before the arrival of his colleague, ordered his admiral Publius Rutilius Nudus to make a sally, which not only ended in a bloody defeat of the Romans, but also enabled the Pontic force to attack the harbour, to break the chain which closed it, and to burn all the Roman vessels of war which were there, nearly seventy in number. On the news of these misfortunes reaching Lucullus at the river Sangarius, he accelerated his march to the great discontent of his soldiers, in whose opinion Cotta was of no moment, and who would far rather have plundered an undefended country than have taught their comrades to conquer. His arrival made up in part for the misfortunes sustained: the king raised the siege of Chalcedon, but did not retreat to Pontus; he went southward into the old Roman province, where he spread his army along the Propontis and the Hellespont, occupied Lampsacus, and began to besiege the large and wealthy town of Cyzicus. He thus entangled himself more and more deeply in the blind alley which he had chosen to enter, instead of—which alone promised success for him—bringing the wide distances into play against the Romans.
Mithradates Besieges Cyzicus
In few places had the old Hellenic adroitness and aptitude preserved themselves so pure as in Cyzicus; its citizens, although they had suffered great loss of ships and men in the unfortunate double battle of Chalcedon, made the most resolute resistance. Cyzicus lay on an island directly opposite the mainland and connected with it by a bridge. The besiegers possessed themselves not only of the line of heights on the mainland terminating at the bridge and of the suburb situated there, but also of the celebrated Dindymene heights on the island itself; and alike on the mainland and on the island the Greek engineers put forth all their art to pave the way for an assault. But the breach which they at length made was closed again during the night by the besieged, and the exertions of the royal army remained as fruitless as did the barbarous threat of the king to put to death the captured Cyzicenes before the walls, if the citizens still refused to surrender. The Cyzicenes continued the defence with courage and success; they fell little short of capturing the king himself in the course of the siege.
Destruction of the Pontic Army
Meanwhile Lucullus had possessed himself of a very strong position in rear of the Pontic army, which, although not permitting him directly to relieve the hard-pressed city, gave him the means of cutting off all supplies by land from the enemy. Thus the enormous army of Mithradates, estimated with the camp-followers at 300,000 persons, was not in a position either to fight or to march, firmly wedged in between the impregnable city and the immoveable Roman army, and dependent for all its supplies solely on the sea, which fortunately for the Pontic troops was exclusively commanded by their fleet. But the bad season set in; a storm destroyed a great part of the siege-works; the scarcity of provisions and above all of fodder for the horses began to become intolerable. The beasts of burden and the baggage were sent off under convoy of the greater portion of the Pontic cavalry, with orders to steal away or break through at any cost; but at the river Rhyndacus, to the east of Cyzicus, Lucullus overtook them and cut to pieces the whole body. Another division of cavalry under Metrophanes and Lucius Fannius was obliged, after wandering long in the west of Asia Minor, to return to the camp before Cyzicus. Famine and disease made fearful ravages in the Pontic ranks. When spring came on (681), the besieged redoubled their exertions and took the trenches constructed on Dindymon: nothing remained for the king but to raise the siege and with the aid of his fleet to save what he could. He went in person with the fleet to the Hellespont, but suffered considerable loss partly at its departure, partly through storms on the voyage. The land army under Hermaeus and Marius likewise set out thither, with the view of embarking at Lampsacus under the protection of its walls. They left behind their baggage as well as the sick and wounded, who were all put to death by the exasperated Cyzicenes. Lucullus inflicted on them very considerable loss by the way at the passage of the rivers Aesepus and Granicus; but they attained their object. The Pontic ships carried off the remains of the great army and the citizens of Lampsacus themselves beyond the reach of the Romans.
Maritime War
Mithradates Driven Back to Pontus
The consistent and discreet conduct of the war by Lucullus had not only repaired the errors of his colleague, but had also destroyed without a pitched battle the flower of the enemy’s army— it was said 200,000 soldiers. Had he still possessed the fleet which was burnt in the harbour of Chalcedon, he would have annihilated the whole army of his opponent. As it was, the work of destruction continued incomplete; and while he was obliged to remain passive, the Pontic fleet notwithstanding the disaster of Cyzicus took its station in the Propontis, Perinthus and Byzantium were blockaded by it on the European coast and Priapus pillaged on the Asiatic, and the headquarters of the king were established in the Bithynian port of Nicomedia.
Invasion of Pontus by Lucullus
Lucullus now in turn proceeded to the aggressive. Triarius received the command of the fleet, with orders first of all to blockade the Hellespont and lie in wait for the Pontic ships returning from Crete and Spain; Cotta was charged with the siege of Heraclea; the difficult task of providing supplies was entrusted to the faithful and active princes of the Galatians and to Ariobarzanes king of Cappadocia; Lucullus himself advanced in the autumn of 681 into the favoured land of Pontus, which had long been untrodden by an enemy. Mithradates, now resolved to maintain the strictest defensive, retired without giving battle from Sinope
Victory of Cabira
As soon as he received through the first fugitives that arrived at Cabira from the field of battle—significantly enough, the beaten generals themselves—the fatal news, earlier even than Lucullus got tidings of the victory, he resolved on an immediate farther retreat. But the resolution taken by the king spread with the rapidity of lightning among those immediately around him; and, when the soldiers saw the confidants of the king packing in all haste, they
Pontus Becomes Roman
Sieges of the Pontic Cities
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
Remarkable, in an historical point of view, as was that obstinate resistance of the Pontic mercantile towns to the victorious Romans, it was of little immediate use; the cause of Mithradates was none the less lost. The great-king had evidently, for the present at least, no intention at all of restoring him to his kingdom. The Roman emigrants in Asia had lost their best men by the destruction of the Aegean fleet; of the survivors not a few, such as the active leaders Lucius Magius and Lucius Fannius, had made their peace with Lucullus; and with the death of Sertorius, who perished in the year of the battle of Cabira, the last hope of the emigrants vanished. Mithradates’ own power was totally shattered, and one after another his remaining supports gave way; his squadrons returning from Crete and Spain, to the number of seventy sail, were attacked and destroyed by Triarius at the island of Tenedos; even the governor of the Bosporan kingdom, the king’s own son Machares, deserted him, and as independent prince of the Tauric Chersonese concluded on his own behalf peace and friendship with the Romans (684). The king himself, after a not too glorious resistance, was confined in a remote Armenian mountain-stronghold, a fugitive from his kingdom and almost a prisoner of his son-in-law. Although the bands of corsairs might still hold out in Crete, and such as had escaped from Amisus and Sinope might make their way along the hardly-accessible east coast of the Black Sea to the Sanigae and Lazi, the skilful conduct of the war by Lucullus and his judicious moderation, which did not disdain to remedy the just grievances of the provincials and to employ the repentant emigrants as officers in his army, had at a moderate sacrifice delivered Asia Minor from the enemy and annihilated the Pontic kingdom, so that it might be converted from a Roman client-state into a Roman province. A commission of the senate was expected, to settle in concert with the commander-in-chief the new provincial organization.
Beginning of the Armenian War
But the relations with Armenia were not yet settled. Thata declaration of war by the Romans against Tigranes was in itself justified and even demanded, we have already shown. Lucullus, who looked at the state of affairs from a nearer point of view and with a higher spirit than the senatorial college in Rome, perceived clearly the necessity of confining Armenia to the other side of the Tigris and of re-establishing
Difficulties to Be Encountered
The resolution was a grave one, especially considering the condition of the Roman army. It was indispensable during the campaign in Armenia to keep the extensive territory of Pontus strongly occupied, for otherwise the army stationed in Armenia might lose its communications with home; and besides it might be easily foreseen that Mithradates would attempt an inroad into his former kingdom. The army, at the head of which Lucullus had ended the Mithradatic war, amounting to about 30,000 men, was obviously inadequate for this double task. Under ordinary circumstances the general would have asked and obtained from his government the despatch of a second army; but as Lucullus wished, and was in some measure compelled, to take up the war over the head of the government, he found himself necessitated to renounce that plan and—although he himself incorporated the captured Thracian mercenaries of the Pontic king with his troops—to carry the war over the Euphrates with not more than two legions, or at most 15,000 men. This was in itself hazardous; but the smallness of the number might be in some degree compensated by the tried valour of the army consisting throughout of veterans. A far worse feature was the temper of the soldiers, to which Lucullus, in his high aristocratic fashion, had given far too little heed. Lucullus was an able general, and—according to the aristocratic standard— an upright and kindly-disposed man, but very far from being a favourite with his soldiers. He was unpopular, as a decided adherent of the oligarchy; unpopular, because he had vigorously checked the monstrous usury of the Roman capitalists in Asia Minor; unpopular, on account of the toils and fatigues which he inflicted on his troops; unpopular, because he demanded strict discipline in his soldiers and prevented as far as possible the pillage of the Greek towns by his men, but withal caused many a waggon and many a camel to be laden with the treasures of the east for himself; unpopular too on account of his manner, which was polished, haughty, Hellenizing, not at all familiar, and inclining, wherever it was possible, to ease and pleasure. There was no trace in him of the charm which weaves a personal bond between the general and the soldier. Moreover, a large portion of his ablest soldiers had every reason to complain of the unmeasured prolongation of their term of service. His two best legions were the same which Flaccus and Fimbria had led in 668 to the east;(14) notwithstanding that shortly after the battle of Cabira they had been promised their discharge well earned by thirteen campaigns, Lucullus now led them beyond the Euphrates to face a new incalculable war—it seemed as though the victors of Cabira were to be treated worse than the vanquished of Cannae.(15) It was in fact more than rash that, with troops so weak and so much out of humour, a general should at his own hand and, strictly speaking, at variance with the constitution, undertake an expedition to a distant
Lucullus Crosses the Euphrates
The mission of Appius Claudius was designed not only to furnish a diplomatic pretext for the war, but also to induce the princes and cities of Syria especially to take arms against the great-king: in the spring of 685 the formal attack began. During the winter the king of Cappadocia had silently provided vessels for transport; with these the Euphrates was crossed at Melitene, and the further march was directed by way of the Taurus-passes to the Tigris. This too Lucullus crossed in the region of Amida (Diarbekr), and advanced towards the road which connected the second capital Tigranocerta,(16) recently founded on the south frontier of Armenia, with the old metropolis Artaxata. At the former was stationed the great-king, who had shortly before returned from Syria, after having temporarily deferred the prosecution of his plans of conquest on the Mediterranean on account of the embroilment with the Romans. He was just projecting an inroad into Roman Asia from Cilicia and Lycaonia, and was considering whether the Romans would at once evacuate Asia or would previously give him battle, possibly at Ephesus, when the news was brought to him of the advance of Lucullus, which threatened to cut off his communications with Artaxata. He ordered the messenger to be hanged, but the disagreeable reality remained unaltered; so he left the new capital and resorted to the interior of Armenia, in order there to raise a force—which had not yet been done—against the Romans. Meanwhile Mithrobarzanes with the troops actually at his disposal and in concert with the neighbouring Bedouin tribes, who were called out in all haste, was to give employment to the Romans. But the corps of Mithrobarzanes was dispersed by the Roman vanguard, and the Arabs by a detachment under Sextilius; Lucullus gained the road leading from Tigranocerta to Artaxata, and, while on the right bank of the Tigrisa Roman detachment pursued the great-king retreating northwards, Lucullus himself crossed to the left and marched forward to Tigranocerta.
Siege and Battle of Tigranocerta
The exhaustless showers of arrows which the garrison poured upon the Roman army, and the setting fire to the besieging machines by means of naphtha, initiated the Romans into the new dangers of Iranian warfare; and the brave commandant Mancaeus maintained the city, till at length the great royal army of relief had assembled from all parts of the vast empire and the adjoining countries that were open to Armenian recruiting officers, and had advanced through the north-eastern passes to the relief of the capital. The leader Taxiles, experienced in the wars of Mithradates, advised Tigranes to avoid a battle, and to surround and starve out the small Roman army by means of his cavalry. But when the king saw the Roman general, who had determined to give battle without raising the siege, move out with not much more than 10,000 men against a force twenty times superior, and boldly cross the river which separated the two armies; when he surveyed on the one side this little band, “too many for an embassy, too few for an army,” and on the other side his own immense host, in which the peoples from the Black Sea and the Caspian met with those of the Mediterranean and of the Persian Gulf, in which the dreaded iron-clad lancers alone were more numerous than the whole army of Lucullus, and in which even infantry armed after the Roman fashion were not wanting; he resolved promptly to accept the battle desired by the enemy. But while the Armenians were still forming their array, the quick eye of Lucullus perceived that they had neglected to occupy a height which commanded the whole position of their cavalry. He hastened to occupy it with two cohorts, while at the same time his weak cavalry by a flank attack diverted the attention of the enemy from this movement; and as soon as he had reached the height, he led his little band against the rear of the enemy’s cavalry. They were totally broken and threw themselves on the not yet fully formed infantry, which fled without even striking a blow. The bulletin of the victor—that 100,000 Armenians and five Romans had fallen and that the king, throwing away his turban and diadem, had galloped off unrecognized with a few horsemen—is composed in the style of his master Sulla. Nevertheless the victory achieved on the 6th October 685 before Tigranocerta remains one of the most brilliant stars in the glorious history of Roman warfare; and it was not less momentous than brilliant.
All the Armenian Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans
All the provinces wrested from the Parthians or Syrians to the south of the Tigris were by this means strategically lost to the Armenians, and passed, for the most part, without delay into the possession of the victor. The newly-built second capital itselfset the example. The Greeks, who had been forced in large numbers to settle there, rose against the garrison and opened to the Roman army the gates of the city, which was abandoned to the pillage of the soldiers. It
Tigranes and Mithradates
The great-king was deeply humbled. He was of a feeble character, arrogant in prosperity, faint-hearted in adversity. Probably an agreement would have been come to between him and Lucullus— an agreement which there was every reason that the great-king should purchase by considerable sacrifices, and the Roman general should grant under tolerable conditions—had not the old Mithradates been in existence. The latter had taken no part in the conflicts around Tigranocerta. Liberated after twenty months’ captivity about the middle of 684 in consequence of the variance that had occurred between the great-king and the Romans, he had been despatched with 10,000 Armenian cavalry to his former kingdom, to threaten the communications of the enemy. Recalled even before he could accomplish anything there, when the great-king summoned his whole force to relieve the capital which he had built, Mithradates was met on his arrival before Tigranocerta by the multitudes just fleeing from the field of battle. To every one, from the great-king down to the common soldier, all seemed lost. But if Tigranes should now make peace, not only would Mithradates lose the last chance of being reinstated in his kingdom, but his surrender would be beyond doubt the first condition of peace; and certainly Tigranes would not have acted otherwise towards him than Bocchus had formerly acted towards Jugurtha. The king accordingly staked his whole personal weight to prevent things from taking
Renewal of the War
The veteran of varied experience, who stood towards the great-king almost as a father, and was now able to exercise a personal influence over him, overpowered by his energy that weak man, and induced him not only to resolve on the continuance of the war, but also to entrust Mithradates with its political and military management. The war was now to be changed from a cabinet contest into a national Asiatic struggle; the kings and peoples of Asia were to unite for this purpose against the domineering and haughty Occidentals. The greatest exertions were made to reconcile the Parthians and Armenians with each other, and to induce them to make common cause against Rome. At the suggestion of Mithradates, Tigranes offered to give back to the Arsacid Phraates the God (who had reigned since 684) the provinces conquered by the Armenians— Mesopotamia, Adiabene, the “great valleys”—and to enter into friendship and alliance with him. But, after all that had previously taken place, this offer could scarcely reckon on a favourable reception; Phraates preferred to secure the boundary of the Euphrates by a treaty not with the Armenians, but with the Romans, and to look on, while the hated neighbour and the inconvenient foreigner fought out their strife. Greater success attended the application of Mithradates to the peoples of the east than to the kings. It was not difficult to represent the war as a national one of the east against the west, for such it was; it might very well be made a religious war also, and the report might be spread that the object aimed at by the army of Lucullus was the temple of the Persian Nanaea or Anaitis in Elymais or the modern Luristan, the most celebrated and the richest shrine in the whole region of the Euphrates.(17) From far and near the Asiatics flocked in crowds to the banner of the kings, who summoned them to protect the east and its gods from the impious foreigners. But facts had shown not only that
Dissatisfaction with Lucullus in the Capital and in the Army
The year 686 found Lucullus in a position of difficulty, which daily assumed a more dangerous aspect. In spite of his brilliant victories, people in Rome were not at all satisfied with him. The senate felt the arbitrary nature of his conduct: the capitalist party, sorely offended by him, set all means of intrigue and corruption at work to effect his recall. Daily the Forum echoed with just and unjust complaints regarding the foolhardy, the covetous, the un-Roman, the traitorous general. The senate so far yielded to the complaints regarding the union of such unlimited power—two ordinary governorships and an important extraordinary command—in the hands of such a man, as to assign the province of Asia to one of the praetors, and the province of Cilicia along with three newly-raised legions to the consul Quintus Marcius Rex, and to restrict the general to the command against Mithradates and Tigranes.
These accusations springing up against the general in Rome found a dangerous echo in the soldiers’ quarters on the Iris andon the Tigris; and the more so that several officers including the general’s own brother-in-law, Publius Clodius, worked upon the soldiers with this view. The report beyond doubt designedly circulated by these, that Lucullus now thought of combining with the Pontic-Armenian war an expedition against the Parthians, fed the exasperation of the troops.
Lucullus Advances into Armenia
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.
At midsummer, 686, Lucullus set out from Tigranocerta, and, marching doubtless through the pass of Bitlis and farther to the westward along the lake of Van—arrived on the plateau of Musch and at the Euphrates. The march went on—amidst constant and very troublesome skirmishing with the enemy’s cavalry, and especially with the mounted archers—slowly, but without material hindrance; and the passage of the Euphrates, which was seriously defended by the Armenian cavalry, was secured by a successful engagement; the Armenian infantry showed itself, but the attempt to involve it in the conflict did not succeed. Thus the army reached the tableland, properly so called, of Armenia, and continued its march into the unknown country. They had suffered no actual misfortune; but the mere inevitable delaying of the march by the difficulties of the ground and the horsemen of the enemy was itself a very serious disadvantage. Long before they had reached Artaxata, winter set in; and when the Italian soldiers saw snow and ice around them, the bow of military discipline that had been far too tightly stretched gave way.
Lucullus Retreats to Mesopotamia
Capture of Nisibus
A formal mutiny compelled the general to order a retreat, which he effected with his usual skill. When he had safely reached Mesopotamia where the season still permitted farther operations, Lucullus crossed the Tigris, and threw himself with the mass of his army on Nisibis, the last city that here remained to the Armenians. The great-king, rendered wiser by the experience acquired before Tigranocerta, left the city to itself: notwithstanding its brave defence it was stormed in a dark, rainy night by the besiegers, and the army of Lucullus found there booty not less rich and winter-quarters not less comfortable than the year before in Tigranocerta.
Conflicts in Pontus and at Tigranocerta
But, meanwhile, the whole weight of the enemy’s offensive fell on the weak Roman divisions left behind in Pontus and in Armenia. Tigranes compelled the Roman commander of the latter corps, Lucius Fannius—the same who had formerly been the medium of communication between Sertorius and Mithradates (18)—to throw himself into a fortress, and kept him beleaguered there. Mithradates advanced into Pontus with 4000 Armenian horsemen and 4000 of his own, and as liberator and avenger summoned the nation to rise against the common foe. All joined him; the scattered Roman soldiers were everywhere seized and put to death: when Hadrianus, the Roman commandant in Pontus,(19) led his troops against him, the former mercenaries of the king and the numerous natives of Pontus following the army as slaves made common cause with the enemy. For two successive days the unequal conflict lasted; it was only the circumstance that the king after receiving two wounds had to be carried off from the field of battle, which gave the Roman commander the opportunity of breaking off the virtually lost battle, and throwing himself with the small remnant of his troops into Cabira. Another of Lucullus’ lieutenants who accidentally came into this region, the resolute Triarius, again gathered round him a body of troops and fought a successful engagement with the king; but he was much too weak to expel him afresh from Pontic soil, and had to acquiesce while the king took up winter-quarters in Comana.
Farther Retreat to Pontus
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.
Defeat of the Romans in Pontus at Ziela
What Triarius had foreseen, occurred. In spite of the stoutest resistance the wing which the king commanded in person broke the Roman line and huddled the infantry together into a clayey ravine, where it could make neither a forward nor a lateral movement and was cut to pieces without pity. The king indeed was dangerously wounded by a Roman centurion, who sacrificed his life for it; but the defeat was not the less complete. The Roman camp was taken; the flower of the infantry, and almost all the staff and subaltern officers, strewed the ground; the dead were left lying unburied on the field of battle, and, when Lucullus arrived on the right bank of the Euphrates, he learned the defeat not from his own soldiers, but through the reports of the natives.
Mutiny of the Soldiers
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.
Farther Retreat to Asia Minor
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
War with the Pirates
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.
Defeat of Antonius off Cydonia
The results were corresponding. In the Campanian waters the fleet of Antonius captured a number of piratical vessels. But an engagement took place with the Cretans, who had entered into friendship and alliance with the pirates and abruptly rejected his demand that they should desist from such fellowship; and the chains, with which the foresight of Antonius had provided his vessels for the purpose of placing the captive buccaneers in irons, served to fasten the quaestor and the other Roman prisoners to the masts of the captured Roman ships, when the Cretan generals Lasthenes and Panares steered back in triumph to Cydonia from the naval combat in which they had engaged the Romans off their island. Antonius, after having squandered immense sums and accomplished not the slightest result by his inconsiderate mode of warfare, died in 683 at Crete. The ill success of his expedition, the costliness of building a fleet, and the repugnance of the oligarchy to confer any powers of a more comprehensive kind on the magistrates, led them, after the practical termination of this enterprise by Antonius’ death, to make no farther nomination of an admiral-in-chief, and to revert to the old system of leaving each governor to look after the suppression of piracy in his own province: the fleet equipped by Lucullus for instance(22) was actively employed for this purpose in the Aegean sea.
Cretan War
So far however as the Cretans were concerned, a disgrace like that endured off Cydonia seemed even to the degenerate Romans of this age as if it could be answered only by a declaration of war. Yet the Cretan envoys, who in the year 684 appeared in Rome with the request that the prisoners might be taken back and the old alliance reestablished, had almost obtained a favourable decree of the senate; what the whole corporation termed a disgrace, the individual senator was ready to sell for a substantial price. It was not till a formal resolution of the senate rendered the loans of the Cretan envoys among the Roman bankers non-actionable— that is, not until the senate had incapacitated itself for undergoing bribery—that a decree passed to the effect that the Cretan communities, if they wished to avoid war, should hand over not only the Roman deserters but the authors of the outrage perpetrated off Cydonia—the leaders Lasthenes and Panares—to the Romans for befitting punishment, should deliver up all ships and boats of four or more oars, should furnish 400 hostages, and should pay a fine of 4000 talents (975,000 pounds). When the envoys declared that they were not empowered to enter into such terms, one of the consuls of the next year was appointed to depart on the expiry of his official term for Crete, in order either to receive there what was demanded or to begin the war.
Metellus Subdues Crete
Accordingly in 685 the proconsul Quintus Metellus appeared in the Cretan waters. The communities of the island, with the larger towns Gortyna, Cnossus, Cydonia at their head, were resolved rather to defend themselves in arms than to submit to those excessive demands. The Cretans were a nefarious and degenerate people,(23) with whose public and private existence piracy was as intimately associated as robbery with the commonwealth of the Aetolians; but they resembled the Aetolians in valour as in many other respects, and accordingly these two were the only Greek communities that waged a courageous and honourable struggle for independence. At Cydonia, where Metellus landed his three legions, a Cretan army of 24,000 men under Lasthenes and Panares was ready to receive him; a battle took place in the open field, in which the victory after a hard struggle remained with the Romans. Nevertheless the towns bade defiance from behind their walls to the Roman general; Metellus had to make up his mind to besiege them in succession. First Cydonia, in which the remains of the beaten army had taken refuge, was after a long siege surrendered by Panares in return for the promise of a free departure for himself. Lasthenes, who had escaped from the town, had to be besieged a second time in Cnossus; and, when this fortress also was on the point of falling, he destroyed its treasures and escaped once more to places which still continued their defence, such as Lyctus, Eleuthera, and others. Two years (686, 687) elapsed, before Metellus became master of the whole island and the last spot of free Greek soil thereby passed under the control of the dominant Romans; the Cretan communities, as they were the first of all Greek commonwealths to develop the free urban constitution and the dominion of the sea, were also to be the last of all those Greek maritime states that formerly filled the Mediterranean to succumb to the Roman continental power.
The Pirates in the Mediterranean
All the legal conditions were fulfilled for celebrating another of the usual pompous triumphs; the gens of the Metelli could add to its Macedonian, Numidian, Dalmatian, Balearic titles with equal right the new title of Creticus, and Rome possessed another name of pride. Nevertheless the power of the Romans in the Mediterranean was never lower, that of the corsairs never higher, than in those years. Well might the Cilicians and Cretans of the seas, who are said to have numbered at this time 1000 ships, mock the Isauricus and the Creticus, and their empty victories. With what effect the pirates interfered in the Mithradatic war, and how the obstinate resistance of the Pontic maritime towns derived its best resources from the corsair-state, has been already related. But that state transacted business on a hardly less grand scale on its own behoof. Almost under the eyes of the fleet of Lucullus, the pirate Athenodorus surprised in 685 the island of Delos, destroyed its
Servile Disturbances
We have already described how the senate restored by Sulla carried out its guardianship of the frontier in Macedonia, its discipline over the client kings of Asia Minor, and lastly its marine police; the results were nowhere satisfactory. Nor did better success attend the government in another and perhaps even more urgent matter, the supervision of the provincial, and above all of the Italian, proletariate. The gangrene of a slave-proletariate Gnawed at the vitals of all the states of antiquity, and the more so, the more vigorously they had risen and prospered; for the power and riches of the state regularly led, under the existing circumstances, to a disproportionate increase of the body of slaves. Rome naturally suffered more severely from this cause than any other state of antiquity. Even the government of the sixth century had been under the necessity of sending
Outbreak of the Gladiatorial War in Italy
Spartacus
The gladiatorial games, which now held the first rank among the popular amusements in Italy, had led to the institution of numerous establishments, more especially in and around Capua, designed partly for the custody, partly for the training of those slaves who were destined to kill or be killed for the amusement of the sovereign multitude. These were naturally in great part brave men captured in war, who had not forgotten that
The Insurrection Takes Shape
The inroads of this little band, numbering at first only seventy-four persons, but rapidly swelling by concourse from the surrounding country, soon became so troublesome to the inhabitants of the rich region of Campania, that these, after having vainly attempted themselves to repel them, sought help against them from Rome. A division of 3000 men hurriedly collected appeared under the leadership of Clodius Glaber, and occupied the approaches to Vesuvius with the view of starving out the slaves. But the brigands in spite of their small number and their defective armament had the boldness to scramble down steep declivities and to fall upon the Roman posts; and when the wretched militia saw the little band of desperadoes unexpectedly assail them, they took to their heels and fled on all sides. This first success procured for the robbers arms and increased accessions to their ranks. Although even now a great portion of them carried nothing but pointed clubs, the new and stronger division of the militia— two legions under the praetor Publius Varinius—which advanced from Rome into Campania, found them encamped almost like a regular army in the plain. Varinius had a difficult position. His militia, compelled to bivouac opposite the enemy, were severely weakened by the damp autumn weather and the diseases which it engendered; and, worse than the epidemics, cowardice and insubordination thinned the ranks. At the very outset one of his divisions broke up entirely, so that the fugitives did not fall back on the main corps, but went straight home. Thereupon, when the order was given to advance against the enemy’s entrenchments and attack them, the greater portion of the troops refused to comply with it. Nevertheless Varinius set out with those who kept their ground against the robber-band; but it was no longer to be found where he sought it. It had broken up in the deepest silence and had turned to the south towards Picentia (Vicenza near Amain), where Varinius overtook it indeed, but could not prevent it from retiring over the Silarus into the interior of Lucania, the chosen land of shepherds and robbers. Varinius followed thither, and there at length the despised enemy arrayed themselves for battle. All the circumstances under which the combat took place were to the disadvantage of the Romans:
Great Victories of Spartacus
In Rome people were with reason apprehensive as to the destructive conflagration which was daily spreading. It was resolved next year (682) to send both consuls against the formidable leaders of the gang. The praetor Quintus Arrius, a lieutenant of the consul Lucius Gellius, actually succeeded in seizing and destroying at Mount Garganus in Apulia the Celtic band, which under Crixus had separated from the mass of the robber-army and was levying contributions at its own hand. But Spartacus achieved all the more brilliant victories in the Apennines and in northern Italy, where first the consul Gnaeus Lentulus who had thought to surround and capture the robbers, then his colleague Gellius and the so recently victorious praetor Arrius, and lastly at Mutina the governor of Cisalpine Gaul Gaius Cassius (consul 681) and the praetor Gnaeus Manlius, one after another succumbed to his blows. The scarcely-armed gangs of slaves were the terror of the legions; the series of defeats recalled the first years of the Hannibalic war.
Internal Dissension among the Insurgents
What might have come of it, had the national kings from the mountains of Auvergne or of the Balkan, and not runaway gladiatorial slaves, been at the head of the victorious bands, it is impossible to say; as it was, the movement remained notwithstanding its brilliant victories a rising of robbers, and succumbed less to the superior force of its opponents than to internal discord and the want of definite plan. The unity in confronting the common foe, which was so remarkably conspicuous in the earlier servile wars of Sicily, was wanting in this Italian war—a difference probably due to the fact that, while the Sicilian slaves found a quasi-national point of union in the common Syrohellenism, the Italian slaves were separated into the two bodies of Helleno-Barbarians and Celto-Germans. The rupture between the Celtic Crixus and the Thracian Spartacus—Oenomaus had fallen in one of the earliest conflicts—and other similar quarrels crippled them in turning to account the successes achieved, and procured for the Romans several important victories. But the want of a definite plan and aim produced far more injurious effects on the enterprise than the insubordination of the Celto-Germans. Spartacus doubtless—to judge by the little which we learn regarding that remarkable man—stood in this respect above his party. Along with his strategic ability he displayed no ordinary talent for organization, as indeed from the very outset the uprightness, with which he presided over his band and distributed the spoil, had directed the eyes of the multitude to him quite as much at least as his valour. To remedy the severely felt want of cavalry and of arms, he tried with the help of the herds of horses seized in Lower Italy to train and discipline a cavalry, and, so soon as he got the port of Thurii into his hands, to procure from that quarter iron and copper, doubtless through the medium of the pirates. But in the main matters he was unable to induce the wild hordes whom he led to pursue any fixed ulterior aims. Gladly would he have checked the frantic orgies of cruelty, in which the robbers indulged on the capture of towns, and which formed the chief reason why no Italian city voluntarily made common cause with the insurgents; but the obedience which the bandit-chief found in the conflic ceased with the victory, and his representations and entreaties were in vain. After the victories obtained in the Apennine in 682 the slave army was free to move in any direction. Spartacus himself is said to have intended to cross the Alps, with a view to open to himself and his followers the means of return to their Celtic or Thracian home: if the statement is well founded, it shows how little the conqueror overrated his successes and his power. When his men refused so speedily to turn their backs on the riches of Italy, Spartacus took the route for Rome, and is said to have meditated blockading the capital. The troops, however, showed themselves also averse to this desperate but yet methodical enterprise;
Conflicts in the Bruttian Country
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.
Disruption of the Rebels and Their Subjugation
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.
The Government of the Restoration as a Whole
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?
The external wars, however, had produced a result still less gratifying. It is true that the Thraco-Macedonian war had yielded a result not directly unfavourable, although far from corresponding to the considerable expenditure of men and money. In the wars in Asia Minor and with the pirates on the other hand, the government had exhibited utter failure. The former ended with the loss of the whole conquests made in eight bloody campaigns, the latter with the total driving of the Romans from “their own sea.” Once Rome, fully conscious of the irresistibleness of her power by land, had transferred her superiority also to the other element; now the mighty state was powerless at sea and, as it seemed, on the point of also losing its dominion at least over the Asiatic continent. The material benefits which a state exists to confer— security of frontier, undisturbed peaceful intercourse, legal protection, and regulated administration—began all of them to vanish for the whole of the nations united in the Roman state; the gods of blessing seemed all to have mounted up to Olympus and to have left the miserable earth at the mercy of the officially called or volunteer plunderers and tormentors. Nor was this decay of the state felt as a public misfortune merely perhaps by such as had political rights and public spirit; the insurrection of the proletariate, and the brigandage and piracy which remind us of the times of the Neapolitan Ferdinands, carried the sense of this decay into the remotest valley and the humblest hut of Italy, and made every one who pursued trade and commerce, or who bought even a bushel of wheat, feel it as a personal calamity.
If inquiry was made as to the authors of this dreadful and unexampled misery, it was not difficult to lay the blame of it with good reason on many. The slaveholders whose heart was in their money-bags, the insubordinate soldiers, the generals cowardly, incapable, or foolhardy, the demagogues of the market-place mostly pursuing a mistaken aim, bore their share of the blame; or, to speak more truly, who was there that did not share in it? It was instinctively felt that this misery, this disgrace, this disorder were too colossal to be the work of any one man. As the greatness of the Roman commonwealth was the work not of prominent individuals, but rather of a soundly-organized burgess-body, so the decay of this mighty structure was the result not of the destructive genius of individuals, but of a general disorganization. The great majority of the burgesses were good for nothing, and every rotten stone in the building helped to bring about the ruin of the whole; the whole nation suffered for what was the whole nation’s fault. It was unjust to hold the government, as the ultimate tangible organ of the state, responsible for all its curable and incurable diseases; but it certainly was true that the government contributed after a very grave fashion to the general culpability. In the Asiatic
The Fall of the Oligarchy and the Rule of Pompeius
Continued Subsistence of the Sullan Constitution
The Sullan constitution still stood unshaken. The assault, which Lepidus and Sertorius had ventured to make on it, had been repulsed with little loss. The government had neglected, it is true, to finish the half-completed building in the energetic spirit of its author. It is characteristic of the government, that it neither distributed the lands which Sulla had destined for allotment but had not yet parcelled out, nor directly abandoned the claim to them, but tolerated the former owners in provisional possession without regulating their title, and indeed even allowed various still undistributed tracts of Sullan domain-land to be arbitrarily taken possession of by individuals according to the old system of occupation, which was de jure and de facto set aside by the Gracchan reforms.(1) Whatever in the Sullan enactments was indifferent or inconvenient for the Optimates, was without scruple ignored or cancelled; for instance, the sentences under which whole communities were deprived of the right of citizenship, the prohibition against conjoining the new farms, and several of the privileges conferred by Sulla on particular communities—of course, without giving back to the communities the sums paid for these exemptions. But though these violations of the ordinances of Sulla by the government itself contributed to shake the foundations of his structure, the Sempronian laws were substantially abolished and remained so.
Attacks of the Democracy
Corn-Laws
Attempts to Restore the Tribunician Power
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
Attacks on the Senatorial Tribunals
Complaints also, only too well founded, prevailed respecting the bad administration of justice by the senatorial jurymen. The condemnation of a man of any influence could hardly be obtained. Not only did colleague feel reasonable compassion for colleague, those who had been or were likely to be accused for the poor sinner under accusation at the moment; the sale also of the votes of jurymen was hardly any longer exceptional. Several senators had been judicially convicted of this crime: men pointed with the finger at others equally guilty; the most respected Optimates, such as Quintus Catulus, granted in an open sitting of the senate that the complaints were quite well founded; individual specially striking cases compelled the senate on several occasions, e. g. in 680, to deliberate on measures to check the venality of juries, but only of course till the first outcry had subsided and the matter could be allowed to slip out of sight. The consequences of this wretched administration of justice appeared especially in a system of plundering and torturing the provincials, compared with which even previous outrages seemed tolerable and moderate. Stealing and robbing had been in some measure legitimized by custom; the commission on extortions might be regarded as an institution for taxing the senators returning from the provinces for the benefit of their colleagues that remained at home. But when an esteemed Siceliot, because he had not been ready to help the governor in a crime, was by the latter condemned to death in his absence and unheard; when even Roman burgesses, if they were not equites or senators, were in the provinces no longer safe from the rods and axes of the Roman magistrate, and the oldest acquisition of the Roman democracy—security of life and person—began to be trodden under foot by the ruling oligarchy; then even the public in the Forum at Rome had an ear for the complaints regarding its magistrates in the provinces, and regarding the unjust judges who morally shared the responsibility of such misdeeds. The opposition of course did not omit to assail its opponents in—what was almost the only ground left to it—the tribunals. The young Gaius Caesar, who also, so far as his age allowed, took zealous part in the agitation for the re-establishment of the tribunician
Want of Results from the Democratic Agitation
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.
Quarrel between the Government and Their General Pompeius
But this state of matters so favourable to the government was altered, when the differences became more distinctly developed which subsisted between it and those of its partisans, whose hopes aspired to higher objects than the seat of honour in the senate and the aristocratic villa. In the first rank of these stood Gnaeus Pompeius. He was doubtless a Sullan; but we have already shown(2) how little he was at home among his own party, how his lineage, his past history, his hopes separated him withal from the nobility as whose protector and champion he was officially regarded. The breach already apparent had been widened irreparably during the Spanish campaigns of the general (677-683). With reluctance and semi-compulsion the government had associated him as colleague with their true representative Quintus Metellus; and in turn he accused the senate, probably not without ground, of having by its careless or malicious neglect of the Spanish armies brought about their defeats and placed the fortunes of the expedition in jeopardy. Now he returned as victor over his open and his secret foes, at the head of an army inured to war and wholly devoted to him, desiring assignments of land for his soldiers, a triumph and the consulship for himself. The latter demands came into collision with the law. Pompeius, although several times invested in an extraordinary way with supreme official authority, had not yet administered any ordinary magistracy, not even the quaestorship, and was still not a member of the senate; and none but one who had passed through the round of lesser ordinary magistracies could become consul, none but one who had been invested with the ordinary supreme power could triumph. The senate was legally entitled, if he became a candidate for the consulship, to bid him begin with the quaestorship; if he requested a triumph, to remind him of the great Scipio, who under like circumstances had renounced his triumph over conquered Spain. Nor was Pompeius less dependent constitutionally on the good will of the senate as respected the lands promised to his soldiers. But, although the senate—as with its feebleness even in animosity was very conceivable—should yield those points and concede to the victorious general, in return for his executioner’s service against the democratic chiefs, the triumph, the consulate, and the assignations of land, an honourable annihilation in senatorial indolence among the long series of peaceful senatorial Imperators was the most favourable lot which
Coalition of the Military Chiefs and the Democracy
Pompeius and the democrats thus found themselves urged into coalition. Personal dislikings were probably not wanting on either side: it was not possible that the victorious general could love the street orators, nor could these hail with pleasure as their chief the executioner of Carbo and Brutus; but political necessity outweighed at least for the moment all moral scruples.
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.
To the two Italian armies, the great capitalists, and the democracy, which thus came forward in league for the overthrow of the Sullan constitution, the senate had nothing to oppose save perhaps the second Spanish army under Quintus Metellus Pius. But Sulla had truly predicted that what he did would not be done a second time; Metellus, by no means inclined to involve himself in a civil war, had discharged his soldiers immediately after crossing the Alps. So nothing was left for the oligarchy but to submit to what was inevitable. The senate granted the dispensations requisite for the consulship and triumph; Pompeius and Crassus were, without opposition, elected consuls for 684, while their armies, on pretext of awaiting their triumph, encamped before the city. Pompeius thereupon, even before entering on office, gave his public and formal adherence to the democratic programme in an assembly of the people held by the tribune Marcus Lollius Palicanus. The change of the constitution was thus in principle decided.
Re-establishing of the Tribunician Power
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.
New Arrangement as to Jurymen
With respect to the position of jurymen, the regulation of Sulla, that the roll of the senators was to serve as the list of jurymen, was no doubt abolished; but this by no means led to a simple restoration of the Gracchan equestrian courts. In future—so it was enacted by the new Aurelian law—the colleges of jurymen were to consist one-third of senators and two-thirds of men of equestrian census, and of the latter the half must have rilled the office of district-presidents, or so-called -tribuni aerarii-. This last innovation was a farther concession made to the democrats, inasmuch as according to it at least a third part of the criminal jurymen were indirectly derived from the elections of the tribes. The reason, again, why the senate was not totally excluded from the courts is probably to be sought partly in the relations of Crassus to the senate, partly in the accession of the senatorial middle party to the coalition; with which is doubtless connected the circumstance that this law was brought in by the praetor Lucius Cotta, the brother of their lately deceased leader.
Renewal of the Asiatic Revenue-Farming
Not less important was the abolition of the arrangements as to taxation established for Asia by Sulla,(3) which presumably likewise fell to this year. The governor of Asia at that time, Lucius Lucullus, was directed to reestablish the system of farming the revenue introduced by Gaius Gracchus; and thus this important source of money and power was restored to the great capitalists.
Renewal of the Censorship
Lastly, the censorship was revived. The elections for it, which the new consuls fixed shortly after entering on their office, fell, in evident mockery of the senate, on the two consuls of 682, Gnaeus Lentulus Clodianus and Lucius Gellius, who had been removed by the senate from their commands on account of their wretched management of the war against Spartacus.(4) It may readily be conceived that these men put in motion all the means which their important and grave office placed at their command, for the purpose of doing homage to the new-holders of power and of annoying the senate. At least an eighth part of the senate, sixty-four senators, a number hitherto unparalleled, were deleted from the roll, including Gaius Antonius, formerly impeached without success by Gaius Caesar,(5) and Publius Lentulus Sura, the consul of 683, and presumably also not a few of the most obnoxious creatures of Sulla.
The New Constitution
Thus in 684 they had reverted in the main to the arrangements that subsisted before the Sullan restoration.
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.
Impending Miliatry Dictatorship of Pompeius
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
But the democrats averted this catastrophe by their sagacity and their pliancy. For their party too, as well as for the senate and Crassus, it was all-important that Pompeius should not seize the dictatorship; but with a truer discernment of their own weakness and of the character of their powerful opponent their leaders tried the method of conciliation. Pompeius lacked no condition for grasping at the crown except the first of all—proper kingly courage.
Senate, Equites, and Populares
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
The Events in the East, and Their Reaction on Rome
But while the factions of the capital were indulging in their wonted mutual quarrels, which they were never able to bring to any proper decision, events in the east followed their fatal course, as we have already described; and it was these events that brought the dilatory course of the politics of the capital to a crisis. The war both by land and by sea had there taken a most unfavourable turn. In the beginning of 687 the Pontic army of the Romans was destroyed, and their Armenian army was utterly breaking up on its retreat; all their conquests were lost, the sea was exclusively in the power of the pirates, and the price of grain in Italy was thereby so raised that they were afraid of an actual famine. No doubt, as we saw, the faults of the generals, especially the utter incapacity of the admiral Marcus Antonius and the temerity of the otherwise able Lucius Lucullus, were in part the occasion of these calamities; no doubt also the democracy had by its revolutionary agitations materially contributed to the breaking up of the Armenian army. But of course the government was now held cumulatively responsible for all the mischief which itself and others had occasioned, and the indignant hungry multitude desired only an opportunity to settle accounts with the senate.
Reappearance of Pompeius
It was a decisive crisis. The oligarchy, though degraded and disarmed, was not yet overthrown, for the management of public affairs was still in the hands of the senate; but it would fall, if its opponents should appropriate to themselves that management, and more especially the superintendence of military affairs; and now this was possible. If proposals for another and better management of the war by land and sea were now submitted to the comitia, the senate was obviously—looking to the temper of the burgesses— not in a position to prevent their passing; and an interference of the burgesses in these supreme questions of administration was practically the deposition of the senate and the transference of the conduct of the state to the leaders of opposition. Once more the concatenation of events brought the decision into the hands of Pompeius. For more than two years the famous general had lived as a private citizen in the capital. His voice was seldom heard in the senate-house or in the Forum; in the former he was unwelcome and without decisive influence, in the latter he was afraid of the stormy proceedings of the parties. But when he did show himself, it was with the full retinue of his clients high and low, and the very solemnity of his reserve imposed on the multitude. If he, who was still surrounded with the full lustre of his extraordinary successes, should now offer to go to the east, he would beyond doubt be readily invested by the burgesses with all the plenitude of military and political power which he might himself ask. For the oligarchy, which saw in the political-military dictatorship their certain ruin, and in Pompeius himself since the coalition of 683 their most hated foe, this was an overwhelming blow; but the democratic party also could have little comfort in the prospect. However desirable the putting an end to the government of the senate could not but be in itself, it was, if it took place in this way, far less a victory for their party than a personal victory for their over-powerful ally. In the latter there might easily arise a far more dangerous opponent to the democratic party than the senate had been. The danger fortunately avoided a few years before by the disbanding of the Spanish army and the retirement of Pompeius would recur in increased measure, if Pompeius should now be placed at the head of the armies of the east.
Overthrow of the Senatorial Rule, and New Power of Pompeius
On this occasion, however, Pompeius acted or at least allowed others to act in his behalf. In 687 two projects of law were introduced, one of which, besides decreeing the discharge— long since demanded by the democracy—of the soldiers of the Asiatic army who had served their term, decreed the recall of its commander-in-chief Lucius Lucullus and the supplying of his place by one of the consuls of the current year, Gaius Piso or Manius Glabrio; while the second revived and extended the plan proposed
Effect of the Projects of Law
It is clear that by these projects of law, especially by that which related to the expedition against the pirates, the government of the senate was set aside. Doubtless the ordinary supreme magistrates nominated by the burgesses were of themselves the proper generals of the commonwealth, and the extraordinary magistrates needed, at least according to strict law, confirmation by the burgesses in order to act as generals; but in the appointment to particular commands no influence constitutionally belonged to the community, and it was only on the proposition of the senate, or at any rate on that of a magistrate entitled in himself to hold the office of general, that the comitia had hitherto now and again interfered in this matter and conferred such special functions. In this field, ever since there had existed a Roman free state, the practically decisive voice pertained to the senate, and this its prerogative had in the course of time obtained full recognition. No doubt the democracy had already assailed it; but even in the most doubtful of the cases which had hitherto occurred—the transference of the African command to Gaius Marius in 647(9)—it was only a magistrate constitutionally entitled to hold the office of general that was entrusted by the resolution of the burgesses with a definite expedition.
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.
Pompeius and the Gabinian Laws
These measures of a man who had just given so striking proofs of his vacillation and weakness surprise us by their decisive energy. Nevertheless the fact that Pompeius acted on this occasion more resolutely than during his consulate is very capable of explanation. The point at issue was not that he should come forward at once as monarch, but only that he should prepare the way for the monarchy by a military exceptional measure, which, revolutionary as it was in its nature, could still be accomplished under the forms of the existing constitution, and which in the first instance carried Pompeius so far on the way towards the old object of his wishes, the command against Mithradates and Tigranes. Important reasons of expediency also might be urged for the emancipation of the military power from the senate. Pompeius could not have forgotten that a plan designed on exactly similar principles for the suppression of piracy had a few
The Parties in Relation to the Gabinian Laws
The democracy, discontented as its leaders might be in secret, could not well come publicly forward against the project of law. It would, to all appearance, have been in no case able to hinder the carrying of the law; but it would by opposition have openly broken with Pompeius and thereby compelled him either to make approaches to the oligarchy or regardlessly to pursue his personal policy in the face of both parties. No course was left to the democrats but still even now to adhere to their alliance with Pompeius, hollow as it was, and to embrace the present opportunity of at least definitely overthrowing the senate and passing over from opposition into government, leaving the ulterior issue to the future and to the well-known weakness of Pompeius’ character. Accordingly their leaders—the praetor Lucius Quinctius, the same who seven years before had exerted himself for the restoration of the tribunician power,(11) and the former quaestor Gaius Caesar— supported the Gabinian proposals.
The privileged classes were furious—not merely the nobility, but also the mercantile aristocracy, which felt its exclusive rights endangered by so thorough a state-revolution and once more recognized its true patron in the senate. When the tribune Gabinius after the introduction of his proposals appeared in the senate-house, the fathers of the city were almost on the point of strangling him with their own hands, without considering in their zeal how extremely disadvantageous for them this method of arguing must have ultimately proved. The tribune escaped to the Forum and summoned the multitude to storm the senate-house, when just at the right time the sitting terminated. The consul Piso, the champion of the oligarchy, who accidentally fell into the hands of the multitude, would have certainly become a victim to popular fury, had not Gabinius come up and, in order that his certain success might not be endangered by unseasonable acts of violence, liberated the consul. Meanwhile the exasperation of the multitude remained undiminished and constantly found fresh nourishment in the high prices of grain and the numerous rumours more or less absurd which were in circulation—such as that Lucius Lucullus had invested the money entrusted to him for carrying on the war at interest in Rome, or had attempted with its aid to make the praetor Quinctius withdraw from the cause of the people; that the senate intended to prepare for the “second Romulus,” as they called Pompeius, the fate of the first,(12) and other reports of a like character.
The Vote
Thereupon the day of voting arrived. The multitude stood densely packed in the Forum; all the buildings, whence the rostra could be seen, were covered up to the roofs with men. All the colleagues of Gabinius had promised their veto to the senate; but in presence of the surging masses all were silent except the single Lucius Trebellius, who had sworn to himself and the senate rather to die than yield. When the latter exercised his veto, Gabinius immediately interrupted the voting on his projects of law and proposed to the assembled people to deal with his refractory colleague, as Octavius had formerly been dealt with on the proposition of Tiberius Gracchus,(13) namely, to depose him immediately from office. The vote was taken and the reading out of the voting tablets began; when the first seventeen tribes, which came to be read out, had declared for the proposal and the next affirmative vote would give to it the majority, Trebellius, forgetting his oath, pusillanimously withdrew his veto. In vain the tribune Otho then endeavoured to procure that at least the collegiate principle might be preserved, and two generals elected instead of one; in vain the aged Quintus Catulus, the most respected man in the senate, exerted his last energies to secure that the lieutenant-generals should not be nominated by the commander-in-chief, but chosen by the people. Otho could not even procure a hearing amidst the noise of the multitude; the well-calculated complaisance of Gabinius procured a hearing for Catulus, and in respectful silence the multitude listened to the old man’s words; but they were none the less thrown away. The proposals were not merely converted into law with all the clauses unaltered, but the supplementary requests in detail made by Pompeius were instantaneously and completely agreed to.
Successes of Pompeius in the East
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.
Meanwhile the confusion on the Asiatic continent had become still worse. Glabrio, who was to take up in the stead of Lucullus the chief command against Mithradates and Tigranes, had remained stationary in the west of Asia Minor and, while instigating the soldiers by various proclamations against Lucullus, had not entered on the supreme command, so that Lucullus was forced to retain it. Against Mithradates, of course, nothing was done; the Pontic cavalry plundered fearlessly and with impunity in Bithynia and Cappadocia. Pompeius had been led by the piratical war to proceed with his army to Asia Minor; nothing seemed more natural than to invest him with the supreme command in the Pontic-Armenian war, to which he himself had long aspired. But the democratic party did not, as may be readily conceived, share the wishes of its general, and carefully avoided taking the initiative in the matter. It is very probable that it had induced Gabinius not to entrust both the war with Mithradates and that with the pirates from the outset to Pompeius, but to entrust the former to Glabrio; upon no account could it now desire to increase and perpetuate the exceptional position of the already too-powerful general. Pompeius himself retained according to his custom a passive attitude; and perhaps he would in reality have returned home after fulfilling the commission which he had received, but for the occurrence of an incident unexpected by all parties.
The Manillian Law
One Gaius Manilius, an utterly worthless and insignificant man had when tribune of the people by his unskilful projects of legislation lost favour both with the aristocracy and with the democracy. In the hope of sheltering himself under the wing of the powerful general, if he should procure for the latter what every one knew that he eagerly desired but had not the boldness to ask, Manilius proposed to the burgesses to recall the governors Glabrio from Bithynia and Pontus and Marcius Rex from Cilicia, and to entrust their offices as well as the conduct of the war in the east, apparently without any fixed limit as to time and at any rate with the freest authority to conclude peace and alliance, to the proconsul of the seas and coasts in addition to his previous office (beg. of 688). This occurrence very clearly showed how disorganized was the machinery of the Roman constitution, whenthe power of legislation was placed as respected the initiative inthe hands of any demagogue however insignificant, and as respected the final determination in the hands of the incapable multitude, while it at the same time was extended to the most important questions of administration. The Manilian proposal was acceptable to none of the political parties; yet it scarcely anywhere encountered serious resistance. The democratic leaders, for the same reasons which had forced them to acquiesce in the Gabinian law, could not venture earnestly to oppose the Manilian; they kept their displeasure and their fears to themselves and spoke in public for the general of the democracy. The moderate Optimates declared themselves for the Manilian proposal, because after the Gabinian law resistance in any case was vain, and far-seeing men already perceived that the true policy for the senate was to make approaches as far as possible to Pompeius and to draw him over to their side on occasion of the breach which might be foreseen between him and the democrats. Lastly the trimmers blessed the day when they too seemed to have an opinion and could come forward decidedly without losing favour with either of the parties— it is significant that Marcus Cicero first appeared as an orator on the political platform in defence of the Manilian proposal. The strict Optimates alone, with Quintus Catulus at their head, showed at least their colours and spoke against the proposition. Of course it was converted into law by a majority bordering on unanimity. Pompeius thus obtained, in addition to his earlier extensive powers, the administration of the most important provinces of Asia Minor— so that there scarcely remained a spot of land within the wide Roman bounds that had not to obey him—and the conduct of a war as to which, like the expedition of Alexander, men could tell where and when it began, but not where and when it might end. Never since Rome stood had such power been united in the hands of a single man.
The Democratic-Military Revolution
The Gabinio-Manilian proposals terminated the struggle between the senate and the popular party, which the Sempronian laws had begun sixty-seven years before. As the Sempronian laws first constituted the revolutionary party into a political opposition, the Gabinio-Manilian first converted it from an opposition into the government; and as it had been a great moment when the first breach in the existing constitution was made by disregarding the veto of Octavius, it was a moment no less full of significance when the last bulwark of the senatorial rule fell with the withdrawal of Trebellius. This was felt on both sides and even the indolent souls of the senators were convulsively roused by this death-struggle; but yet the war as to the constitution terminated in a very different and far more pitiful fashion than it had begun. A youth in every sense noble had commenced the revolution; it was concluded by pert intriguers and demagogues of the lowest type. On the other hand, while the Optimates had begun the struggle with a measured resistance and with a defence which earnestly held out even at the forlorn posts, they ended with taking the initiative in club-law, with grandiloquent weakness, and with pitiful perjury. What had once appeared a daring dream, was now attained; the senate had ceased to govern. But when the few old men who had seen the first storms of revolution and heard the words of the Gracchi, compared that time with the present they found that everything had in the interval changed—countrymen and citizens, state-law and military discipline, life and manners; and well might those painfully smile, who compared the ideals of the Gracchan period with their realization. Such reflections however belonged to the past. For the present and perhaps also for the future the fall of the aristocracy was an accomplished fact. The oligarchs resembled an army utterly broken up, whose scattered bands might serve to reinforce another body of troops, but could no longer themselves keep the field or risk a combat on their own account. But as the old struggle came to an end, a new one was simultaneously beginning—the struggle between the two powers hitherto leagued for the overthrow of the aristocratic constitution, the civil-democratic opposition and the military power daily aspiring to greater ascendency. The exceptional position of Pompeius even under the Gabinian, and much more under the Manilian, law was incompatible with a republican organization. He had been as even then his opponents urged with good reason, appointed by the Gabinian law not as admiral, but as regent of the empire; not unjustly was he designated by a Greek familiar with eastern affairs “king of kings.” If he should hereafter, on returning from the east once more victorious and with increased glory, with well-filled chests, and with troops ready for battle and devoted to his cause, stretch forth his hand to seize the crown—who would then arrest his arm? Was the consular Quintus Catulus, forsooth,
Pompeius and the East
Pompeius Suppresses Piracy
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
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.
Dissensions between Pompeius and Metellus as to Crete
A disagreeable interlude in the island of Crete, however, disturbed in some measure this pleasing success of the Roman arms. There Quintus Metellus was stationed in the second year of his command, and was employed in finishing the subjugation-already substantially effected—of the island,(2) when Pompeius appeared in the eastern waters. A collision was natural, for according to the Gabinian law the command of Pompeius extended concurrently with that of Metellus over the whole island, which stretched to a great length but was nowhere more than ninety miles broad;(3) but Pompeius was considerate enough not to assign it to any of his lieutenants. The still resisting Cretan communities, however, who had seen their subdued countrymen taken to task by Metellus with the most cruel severity and had learned on the other hand the gentle terms which Pompeius was in the habit of imposing on the townships which surrendered to him in the south of Asia Minor, preferred to give in their joint surrender to Pompeius. He accepted it in Pamphylia, where he was just at the moment, from their envoys, and sent along with them his legate Lucius Octavius to announce to Metellus the conclusion of the conventions and to take over the towns. This proceeding was, no doubt, not like that of a colleague; but formal right was wholly on the side of Pompeius, and Metellus was most evidently in the wrong when, utterly ignoring the convention of the cities with Pompeius, he continued to treat them as hostile. In vain Octavius protested; in vain, as he had himself come without troops, he summoned from Achaia Lucius Sisenna, the lieutenant of Pompeius stationed there; Metellus, not troubling himself about either Octavius or Sisenna, besieged Eleutherna and took Lappa by storm, where Octavius in person was taken prisoner and ignominiously dismissed, while the Cretans who were taken with him were consigned to the executioner. Accordingly formal conflicts took place between the troops of Sisenna, at whose head Octavius placed himself after that leader’s death, and those of Metellus; even when the former had been commanded to return to Achaia, Octavius continued the war in concert with the Cretan Aristion, and Hierapytna, where both made a stand, was only subdued by Metellus after the most obstinate resistance.
In reality the zealous Optimate Metellus had thus begun formal civil war at his own hand against the generalissimo of the democracy. It shows the indescribable disorganization in the Roman state, that these incidents led to nothing farther than a bitter correspondence between the two generals, who a couple of years afterwards were sitting once more peacefully and even “amicably” side by side in the senate.
Pompeius Takes the Supreme Command against Mithradates
Pompeius during these events remained in Cilicia; preparing for the next year, as it seemed, a campaign against the Cretans or rather against Metellus, in reality waiting for the signal which should call him to interfere in the utterly confused affairs of the mainland of Asia Minor. The portion of the Lucullan army that was still left after the losses which it had suffered and the departure of the Fimbrian legions remained inactive on the upper Halys in the country of the Trocmi bordering on the Pontic territory. Lucullus still held provisionally the chief command, as his nominated successor Glabrio continued to linger in the west of Asia Minor. The three legions commanded by Quintus Marcius Rex lay equally inactive in Cilicia. The Pontic territory was again wholly in the power of king Mithradates, who made the individuals and communities that had joined the Romans, such as the town of Eupatoria, pay for their revolt with cruel severity. The kings of the east did not proceed to any serious offensive movement against the Romans, either because it formed no part of their plan, or—as was asserted— because the landing of Pompeius in Cilicia induced Mithradates and Tigranes to desist from advancing farther. The Manilian law realized the secretly-cherished hopes of Pompeius more rapidly than he probably himself anticipated; Glabrio and Rex were recalled and the governorships of Pontus-Bithynia and Cilicia with the troops stationed there, as well as the management of the Pontic-Armenian war along with authority to make war, peace, and alliance with the dynasts of the east at his own discretion, were transferred to Pompeius. Amidst the prospect of honours and spoils so ample Pompeius was glad to forgo the chastising of an ill-humoured Optimate who enviously guarded his scanty laurels; he abandoned the expedition against Crete and the farther pursuit of the corsairs, and destined his fleet also to support the attack which he projected on the kings of Pontus and Armenia. Yet amidst this land-war he by no means wholly lost sight of piracy, which was perpetually raising its head afresh. Before he left Asia (691) he caused the necessary ships to be fitted out there against the corsairs; on his proposal in the following year a similar measure was resolved on for Italy, and the sum needed for the purpose was granted by the senate. They continued to protect the coasts with guards of cavalry and small squadrons, and though as the expeditions to be mentioned afterwards against Cyprus in 696 and Egypt in 699 show, piracy was not thoroughly mastered, it yet after the expedition of Pompeius amidst all the vicissitudes and political crises of Rome could never again so raise its head and so totally dislodge the Romans from the sea, as it had done under the government of the mouldering oligarchy.
War Preparations of Pompeius
Alliance with the Parthians
Variance between Mithradates and Tigranes
The few months which still remained before the commencement of the campaign in Asia Minor, were employed by the new commander-in-chief with strenuous activity in diplomatic and military preparations. Envoys were sent to Mithradates, rather to reconnoitre than to attempt a serious mediation. There was a hope at the Pontic court that Phraates king of the Parthians would be induced by the recent considerable successes which the allies had achieved over Rome to enter into the Pontic-Armenian alliance. To counteract this, Roman envoys proceeded to the court of Ctesiphon; and the internal troubles, which distracted the Armenian ruling house, came to their aid. A son of the great-king Tigranes, bearing the same name had rebelled against his father, either because he was unwilling to wait for the death of the old man, or because his father’s suspicion, which had already cost several of his brothers their lives, led him to discern his only chance of safety in open insurrection. Vanquished by his father, he had taken refuge with a number of Armenians of rank at the court of the Arsacid, and intrigued against his father there. It was partly due to his exertions, that Phraates preferred to take the reward which was offered to him by both sides for his accession—the secured possession of Mesopotamia—from the hand of the Romans, renewed with Pompeius the agreement concluded with Lucullus respecting the boundary of the Euphrates,(4) and even consented to operate in concert with the Romans against Armenia. But the younger Tigranes occasioned still greater mischief than that which arose out of his promoting the alliance between the Romans and the Parthians, for his insurrection produced a variance between the kings Tigranes and Mithradates themselves. The great-king cherished in secret the suspicion that Mithradates might have had a hand in the insurrection of his grandson—Cleopatra the mother of the younger Tigranes was the daughter of Mithradates— and, though no open rupture took place, the good understanding between the two monarchs was disturbed at the very moment when it was most urgently needed.
At the same time Pompeius prosecuted his warlike preparations with energy. The Asiatic allied and client communities were warned to furnish the stipulated contingents. Public notices summoned the discharged veterans of the legions of Fimbria to return to the standards as volunteers, and by great promises and the name of Pompeius a considerable portion of them were induced in reality to obey the call. The whole force united under the orders of Pompeius may have amounted, exclusive of the auxiliaries, to between 40,000 and 50,000 men.(5)
Pompeius and Lucullus
In the spring of 688 Pompeius proceeded to Galatia, to take the chief command of the troops of Lucullus and to advance with them into the Pontic territory, whither the Cilician legions were directed to follow. At Danala, a place belonging to the Trocmi, the two generals met; but the reconciliation, which mutual friends had hoped to effect, was not accomplished. The preliminary courtesies soon passed into bitter discussions, and these into violent altercation: they parted in worse mood than they had met. As Lucullus continued to make honorary gifts and to distribute lands just as if he were still in office, Pompeius declared all the acts performed by his predecessor subsequent to his own arrival null and void. Formally he was in the right; customary tactin the treatment of a meritorious and more than sufficientlymortified opponent was not to be looked for from him.
Invasion of Pontus
Retreat of Mithradates
So soon as the season allowed, the Roman troops crossed the frontier of Pontus. There they were opposed by king Mithradates with 30,000 infantry and 3000 cavalry. Left in the lurch by his allies and attacked by Rome with reinforced power and energy, he made an attempt to procure peace; but he would hear nothing of the unconditional submission which Pompeius demanded—what worse could the most unsuccessful campaign bring to him? That he might not expose his army, mostly archers and horsemen, to the formidable shock of the Roman infantry of the line, he slowly retired before the enemy, and compelled the Romans to follow him in his various cross-marches; making a stand at the same time, wherever there was opportunity, with his superior cavalry against that of the enemy, and occasioning no small hardship to the Romans by impeding their supplies. At length Pompeius in his impatience desisted from following the Pontic army, and, letting the king alone, proceeded to subdue the land; he marched to the upper Euphrates, crossed it, and entered the eastern provinces of the Pontic empire. But Mithradates followed along the left bank of the Euphrates, and when he had arrived in the Anaitic or Acilisenian province, he intercepted the route of the Romans at the castle of Dasteira, which was strong and well provided with water, and from which with his light troops he commanded the plain. Pompeius, still wanting the Cilician legions and not strong enough to maintain himself in this position without them, had to retire over the Euphrates and to seek protection from the cavalry and archers of the king in the wooded ground of Pontic Armenia extensively intersected by rocky ravines and deep valleys. It was not till the troops from Cilicia arrived and rendered it possible to resume the offensive with a superiority of force, that Pompeius again advanced, invested the camp of the king with a chain of posts of almost eighteen miles in length, and kept him formally blockaded there, while the Roman detachments scoured the country far and wide.
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.
Tigranes Breaks with Mithradates
Mithradates Crosses the Phasis
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
Almost without meeting resistance he arrived in the region of Artaxata (not far from Erivan) and pitched his camp thirteen miles from the city. There he was met by the son of the great-king, who hoped after the fall of his father to receive the Armenian diadem from the hand of the Romans, and therefore had endeavoured in every way to prevent the conclusion of the treaty between his father and the Romans. The great-king was only the more resolved to purchase peace at any price. On horseback and without his purple robe, but adorned with the royal diadem and the royal turban, he appeared at the gate of the
The Tribes of the Caucasus
Iberians
Albanians
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
Albanians Conquered by Pompeius
Iberians Conquered
Alarmed by the information that the Roman commander-in-chief intended next spring to cross the mountains and to pursue the Pontic king beyond the Caucasus—for Mithradates, they heard, was passing the winter in Dioscurias (Iskuria between Suchum Kale and Anaklia) on the Black Sea—the Albanians under their prince Oroizes first crossed the Kur in the middle of the winter of 688-689 and threw themselves on the army, which was divided for the sake of its supplies into three larger corps under Quintus Metellus Celer, Lucius Flaccus, and Pompeius in person. But Celer, on whom the chief attack fell, made a brave stand, and Pompeius, after having delivered himself from the division sent to attack him, pursued the barbarians beaten at all points as far as the Kur. Artoces the king of the Iberians kept quiet and promised peace and friendship; but Pompeius, informed that he was secretly arming so as to fall upon the Romans on their march in the passes of the Caucasus, advanced in the spring of 689, before resuming the pursuit of Mithradates, to the two fortresses just two miles distant from each other, Harmozica (Horum Ziche or Armazi) and Seusamora (Tsumar) which a little above the modern Tiflis command the two valleys of the river Kur and its tributary the Aragua, and with these the only passes leading from Armenia to Iberia. Artoces, surprised by the enemy before he was aware of it, hastily burnt the bridge over the Kur and retreated negotiating into the interior. Pompeius occupied the fortresses and followed the Iberians to the other bank of the Kur; by which he hoped to induce them to immediate submission. But Artoces retired farther and farther into the interior, and, when at length he halted on the river Pelorus, he did so not to surrender but to fight. The Iberian archers however withstood not for a moment the onset of the Roman legions, and, when Artoces saw the Pelorus also crossed by the Romans, he submitted at length to the conditions which the victor proposed, and sent his children as hostages.
Pompeius Proceeds to Colchis
Pompeius now, agreeably to the plan which he had formerly projected, marched through the Sarapana pass from the region of the Kur to that of the Phasis and thence down that river to the Black Sea, where on the Colchian coast the fleet under Servilius already awaited him. But it was for an uncertain idea, and an aim almost unsubstantial, that the army and fleet were thus brought to the richly fabled shores of Colchis. The laborious march just completed through unknown and mostly hostile nations was nothing when compared with what still awaited them, and if they should really succeed in conducting the force from the mouth of the Phasis to the Crimea, through warlike and poor barbarian tribes, on inhospitable and unknown waters, along a coast where at certain places the mountains sink perpendicularly into the sea and it would have been absolutely necessary to embark in the ships— if such a march should be successfully accomplished, which was perhaps more difficult than the campaigns of Alexander and Hannibal— what was gained by it even at the best, corresponding at all to its toils and dangers? The war doubtless was not ended, so long as the old king was still among the living; but who could guarantee that they would really succeed in catching the royal game for the sake of which this unparalleled chase was to be instituted? Was it not better even at the risk of Mithradates once more throwing the torch of war into Asia Minor, to desist from a pursuit which promised so little gain and so many dangers? Doubtless numerous voices in the army, and still more numerous voices in the capital, urged the general to continue the pursuit incessantly and at any price; but they were the voices partly of foolhardy Hotspurs, partly of those perfidious friends, who would gladly at any price have kept the too-powerful Imperator aloof from the capital and entangled him amidst interminable undertakings in the east. Pompeius was too experienced and too discreet an officer to stake his fame and his army in obstinate adherence to so injudicious an expedition; an insurrection of the Albanians in rear of the army furnished the pretext for abandoning the further pursuit of the king and arranging its return. The fleet received instructions to cruise in the Black Sea, to protect the northern coast of Asia Minor against any hostile invasion, and strictly to blockade the Cimmerian Bosporus under the threat of death to any trader who should break the blockade. Pompeius conducted the land troops not without great hardships through the Colchian and Armenian territory to the lower course of the Kur and onward, crossing the stream, into the Albanian plain.
Fresh Conflicts with the Albanians
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.
Mithradates Goes to Panticapaeum
Accordingly king Mithradates was left to himself and to destiny. As formerly his ancestor, the founder of the Pontic state had first entered his future kingdom as a fugitive from the executioners of Antigonus and attended only by six horsemen, so had the grandson now been compelled once more to cross the bounds of his kingdom and to turn his back on his own and his fathers’ conquests. But for no one had the dice of fate turned up the highest gains and the greatest losses more frequently and more capriciously than for the old sultan of Sinope; and the fortunes of men change rapidly and incalculably in the east. Well might Mithradates now in the evening of his life accept each new vicissitude with the thought that it too was only in its turn paving the way for a fresh revolution, and that the only thing constant was the perpetual change of fortune. Inasmuch as the Roman rule was intolerable for the Orientals at the very core of their nature, and Mithradates himself was in good and in evil a true prince of the east, amidst the laxity of the rule exercised by the Roman senate over the provinces, and amidst the dissensions of the political parties in Rome fermenting and ripening
His Last Preparations against Rome
Mithradates, however, had no thought of delivering himself into the hands of the enemy, but was projecting new and still more extravagant plans. Straining all the resources with which the treasures that he had saved and the remnant of his states supplied him, he equipped a new army of 36,000 men consisting partly of slaves which he armed and exercised after the Roman fashion, and a war-fleet; according to rumour he designed to march westward through Thrace, Macedonia, and Pannonia, to carry along with him the Scythians in the Sarmatian steppes and the Celts on the Danube as allies, and with this avalanche of peoples to throw himself on Italy. This has been deemed a grand idea, and the plan of war of the Pontic king has been compared with the military march of Hannibal; but the same project, which in a gifted man is a stroke of genius, becomes folly in one who is wrong-headed. This intended invasion of Italy by the Orientals was simply ridiculous, and nothing but a product of the impotent imagination of despair. Through the prudent coolness of their leader the Romans were prevented from Quixotically pursuing their Quixotic antagonist and warding off in the distant Crimea an attack, which, if it were not nipped of itself in the bud, would still have been soon enough met at the foot of the Alps.
Revolt against Mithradates
In fact, while Pompeius, without troubling himself further as to the threats of the impotent giant, was employed in organizing the territory which he had gained, the destinies of the aged king drew on to their fulfilment without Roman aid in the remote north. His extravagant preparations had produced the most violent excitement among the Bosporans, whose houses were torn down, and whose oxen were taken from the plough and put to death, in order to procure beams and sinews for constructing engines of war. The
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.
The death of Mithradates was looked on by the Romans as equivalent to a victory: the messengers who reported to the general the catastrophe appeared crowned with laurel, as if they had a victory to announce, in the Roman camp before Jericho. In him a great enemy was borne to the tomb, a greater than had ever yet withstood the Romans in the indolent east. Instinctively the multitude felt this: as formerly Scipio had triumphed even more over Hannibal than over Carthage, so the conquest of the numerous tribes of the east and of the great-king himself was almost forgotten in the death of Mithradates; and at the solemn entry of Pompeius nothing attracted more the eyes of the multitude than the pictures, in which they saw king Mithradates as a fugitive leading his horse by the rein and thereafter sinking down in death between the dead bodies of his daughters. Whatever judgment may be formed as to the idiosyncrasy of the king, he is a figure of great significance—in the full sense of the expression—for the history of the world. He was not a personage of genius, probably not even of rich endowments; but he possessed the very respectable gift of hating, and out of this hatred he sustained an unequal conflict against superior foes throughout half a century, without success doubtless, but with honour. He became still more significant through the position in which history had placed him thanthrough his individual character. As the forerunner of the national reaction of the Orientals against the Occidentals, he opened the new conflict of the east against the west; and the feeling remained with the vanquished as with the victors, that his death was not so much the end as the beginning.
Pompeius Proceeds to Syria
Meanwhile Pompeius, after his warfare in 689 with the peoples of the Caucasus, had returned to the kingdom of Pontus, and there reduced the last castles still offering resistance; these were razed in order to check the evils of brigandage, and the castle wells were rendered unserviceable by rolling blocks of rock into them. Thence he set out in the summer of 690 for Syria, to regulate its affairs.
State of Syria
It is difficult to present a clear view of the state of disorganization which then prevailed in the Syrian provinces. It is true that in consequence of the attacks of Lucullus the Armenian governor Magadates had evacuated these provinces in 685,(7) and that the Ptolemies, gladly as they would have renewed the attempts of their predecessors to attach the Syrian coast to their kingdom, were yet afraid to provoke the Roman government by the occupation of Syria; the more so, as that government had not yet regulated their more than doubtful legal title even in the case of Egypt, and had been several times solicited by the Syrian princes to recognize them as the legitimate heirs of the extinct house of the Lagids. But, though the greater powers all at the moment refrained from interference in the affairs of Syria, the land suffered far more than it would have suffered amidst a great war, through the endless and aimless feuds of the princes, knights, and cities.
Arabian Princes
The actual masters in the Seleucid kingdom were at this time the Bedouins, the Jews, and the Nabataeans. The inhospitable sandy steppe destitute of springs and trees, which, stretching from the Arabianpeninsula up to and beyond the Euphrates, reaches towards the west as far as the Syrian mountain-chain and its narrow belt of coast, toward the east as far as the rich lowlands of the Tigris and lower Euphrates—this Asiatic Sahara—was the primitive home of the sons of Ishmael; from the commencement of tradition we find the “Bedawi,” the “son of the desert,” pitching his tents there and pasturing his camels, or mounting his swift horse in pursuit now of the foe of his tribe, now of the travelling merchant. Favoured formerly by king Tigranes, who made use of them for his plans half commercial half political,(8) and subsequently by the total absence of any master in the Syrian land, these children of the desert spread themselves over northern Syria. Wellnigh the leading part in a political point of view was enacted by those tribes, which had appropriated the first rudiments of a settled existence from the vicinity of the civilized Syrians. The most noted of these emirs were Abgarus, chief of the Arab tribe of the Mardani, whom Tigranes had settled about Edessa and Carrhae in upper Mesopotamia;(9) then to the west of the Euphrates Sampsiceramus, emir of the Arabs of Hemesa (Homs) between Damascus and Antioch, and master of the strong fortress Arethusa; Azizus the head of another horde roaming in the same region; Alchaudonius, the prince of the Rhambaeans, who had already put himself into communication with Lucullus; and several others.
Robber-Chiefs
Alongside of these Bedouin princes there had everywhere appeared bold cavaliers, who equalled or excelled the children of the desert in the noble trade of waylaying. Such was Ptolemaeus son of Mennaeus, perhaps the most powerful among these Syrian robber-chiefs and one of the richest men of this period, who ruled over the territory of the Ityraeans—the modern Druses—in the valleys of the Libanus as well as on the coast and over the plain of Massyas to the northward with the cities of Heliopolis (Baalbec) and Chalcis, and maintained 8000 horsemen at his own expense; such were Dionysius and Cinyras, the masters of the maritime cities Tripolis (Tarablus) and Byblus (between Tarablus and Beyrout); such was the Jew Silas in Lysias, a fortress not far from Apamea on the Orontes.
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
Pharisees
Sadducees
The spirit of religious independence, and the spirit of national independence—the energetic union of which had called the Maccabee state into life—speedily became once more dissociated and even antagonistic. The Jewish orthodoxy or Pharisaism, as it was called, was content with the free exercise of religion, as it had been asserted in defiance of the Syrian rulers; its practical aim was a community of Jews, composed of the orthodox in the lands of all rulers, essentially irrespective of the secular government— a community which found its visible points of union in the tribute for the temple at Jerusalem, which was obligatory on every conscientious Jew, and in the schools of religion and spiritual courts. Overagainst this orthodoxy, which turned away from political life and became more and more stiffened into theological formalism and painful ceremonial service, were arrayed the defenders of the national independence, invigorated amidst successful struggles against foreign rule, and advancing towards the ideal of a restoration of the Jewish state, the representatives of the old great families—the so-called Sadducees—partly on dogmatic grounds, in so far as they acknowledged only the sacred books themselves and conceded authority merely, not canonicity, to the “bequests of the scribes,” that is, to canonical tradition;(12) partly and especially on political grounds, in so far as, instead of a fatalistic waiting for the strong arm of the Lord of Zebaoth, they taught that the salvation of the nation was to be expected from the weapons of this world, and from the inward and outward strengthening of the kingdom of David as re-established in the glorious times of the Maccabees. Those partisans of orthodoxy found their support in the priesthood and the multitude;
Nabataeans
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
Amidst the system of violence and feud which thus prevailed from one end of Syria to another, the larger cities were of course the principal sufferers, such as Antioch, Seleucia, Damascus, whose citizens found themselves paralysed in their husbandry as well as in their maritime and caravan trade. The citizens of Byblus and Berytus (Beyrout) were unable to protect their fields and their ships from the Ityraeans, who issuing from their mountain and maritime strongholds rendered land and sea equally insecure. Those of Damascus sought to ward off the attacks of the Ityraeans and Ptolemaeus by handing themselves over to the more remote kings of the Nabataeans or of the Jews. In Antioch Sampsiceramus and Azizus mingled in the internal feuds of the citizens, and the Hellenic great city had wellnigh become even now the seat of an Arab emir. The state of things reminds us of the kingless times of the German middle ages, when Nuremberg and Augsburg found their protection not in the king’s law and the king’s courts, but in their own walls alone; impatiently the merchant-citizens of Syria awaited the strong arm, which should restore to them peace and security of intercourse.
The Last Seleucids
There was no want, however, of a legitimate king in Syria; there were even two or three of them. A prince Antiochus from the house of the Seleucids had been appointed by Lucullus as ruler of the most northerly province in Syria, Commagene.(13) Antiochus Asiaticus, whose claims on the Syrian throne had met with recognition both from the senate and from Lucullus,(14) had been received in Antioch after the retreat of the Armenians and there acknowledged as king. A third Seleucid prince Philippus had immediately confronted him there as a rival; and the great population of Antioch, excitable and delighting in opposition almost like that of Alexandria, as well as one or two of the neighbouring Arab emirs had interfered in the family strife which now seemed inseparable from the rule of the Seleucids. Was there any wonder that legitimacy became ridiculous and loathsome to its subjects, and that the so-called rightful kings were of even somewhat less importance in the land than the petty princes and robber-chiefs?
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
Military Pacification of Syria
But, to establish the new Roman government and introduce any tolerable order into the confusion of affairs, it was further necessary to advance into Syria with a military force and to terrify or subdue all the disturbers of the peace, who had sprung up during the many years of anarchy, by means of the Roman legions. Already during the campaigns in the kingdom of Pontus and on the Caucasus Pompeius had turned his attention to the affairs of Syria and directed detached commissioners and corps to interfere, where there was need. Aulus Gabinius—the same who as tribune of the people had sent Pompeius to the east—had in 689 marched along the Tigris and then across Mesopotamia to Syria, to adjust the complicated affairs of Judaea. In like manner the severely pressed Damascus had already been occupied by Lollius and Metellus. Soon afterwards another adjutant of Pompeius, Marcus Scaurus, arrived in Judaea, to allay the feuds ever breaking out afresh there. Lucius Afranius also, who during the expedition of Pompeius to the Caucasus held the command of the Roman troops in Armenia, had proceeded from Corduene (the northern Kurdistan) to upper Mesopotamia, and, after he had successfully accomplished the perilous march through the desert with the sympathizing help of the Hellenes settled in Carrhae, brought the Arabs in Osrhoene to submission. Towards the end of 690 Pompeius in person arrived in Syria,(15) and remained there till the summer of the following year, resolutely interfering and regulating matters for the present and the future. He sought to restore the kingdom to its state in the better times of the Seleucid rule; all usurped powers were set aside, the robber-chiefs were summoned to give up their castles, the Arab sheiks were again restricted to their desert domains, the affairs of the several communities were definitely regulated.
The Robber-Chiefs Chastised
The legions stood ready to procure obedience to these stern orders, and their interference proved especially necessary against the audacious robber-chiefs. Silas the ruler of Lysias, Dionysius the ruler of Tripolis, Cinyras the ruler of Byblus were taken prisoners in their fortresses and executed, the mountain and maritime strongholds of the Ityraeans were broken up, Ptolemaeus son of Mennaeus in Chalcis was forced to purchase his freedom and his lordship with a ransom of 1000 talents (240,000 pounds). Elsewhere the commands of the new master met for the most part with unresisting obedience.
Negotiations and Conflicts with the Jews
The Jews alone hesitated. The mediators formerly sent by Pompeius, Gabinius and Scaurus, had—both, as it was said, bribed with considerable sums—in the dispute between the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus decided in favour of the latter, and had also induced king Aretas to raise the siege of Jerusalem and to proceed homeward, in doing which he sustained a defeat at the hands of Aristobulus. But, when Pompeius arrived in Syria, he cancelled the orders of his subordinates and directed the Jews to resume their old constitution under high-priests, as the senate had recognized it about 593,(16) and to renounce along with the hereditary principality itself all the conquests made by the Hasmonaean princes. It was the Pharisees, who had sent an embassy of two hundred of their most respected men to the Roman general and procured from him the overthrow of the kingdom; not to the advantage of their own nation, but doubtless to that of the Romans, who from the nature of the case could not but here revert to the old rights of the Seleucids, and could not tolerate a conquering power like that of Jannaeus within the limits of their empire. Aristobulus was uncertain whether it was better patiently to acquiesce in his inevitable doom or to meet his fate with arms in hand; at one time he seemed on the point of submitting to Pompeius, at another he seemed as though he would summon the national party among the Jews to a struggle with the Romans. When at length, with the legions already at the gates, he yielded to the enemy, the more resolute or more fanatical portion of his army refused to comply with the orders of a king who was not free. The capital submitted; the steep temple-rock was defended by that fanatical band for three months with an obstinacy ready to brave death, till at last the besiegers effected an entrance while the besieged were resting on the Sabbath, possessed themselves of the sanctuary, and handed over the authors of that desperate resistance, so far as they had not fallen under the sword of the Romans, to the axes of the lictors. Thus ended the last resistance of the territories newly annexed to the Roman state.
The New Relations of the Romans in the East
The work begun by Lucullus had been completed by Pompeius; the hitherto formally independent states of Bithynia, Pontus, and Syria were united with the Roman state; the exchange—which had been recognized for more than a hundred years as necessary— of the feeble system of a protectorate for that of direct sovereignty over the more important dependent territories,(17) had at length been realized, as soon as the senate had been overthrown and the Gracchan party had come to the helm. Rome had obtained in the east new frontiers, new neighbours, new friendly and hostile relations. There were now added to the indirect territories of Rome the kingdom of Armenia and the principalities of the Caucasus, and also the kingdom on the Cimmerian Bosporus, the small remnant of the extensive conquests of Mithradates Eupator, now a client-state of Rome under the government of his son and murderer Pharnaces; the town of Phanagoria alone, whose commandant Castor had given the signal for the revolt, was on that account recognized by the Romans as free and independent.
Conflicts with the Nabataeans
No like successes could be boasted of against the Nabataeans. King Aretas had indeed, yielding to the desire of the Romans, evacuated Judaea; but Damascus was still in his hands, and the Nabataean land had not yet been trodden by any Roman soldier. To subdue that region or at least to show to their new neighbours in Arabia that the Roman eagles were now dominant on the Orontes and on the Jordan, and that the time had gone by when any one was free to levy contributions in the Syrian lands as a domain without a master, Pompeius began in 691 an expedition against Petra; but detained by the revolt of the Jews, which broke out during this expedition, he was not reluctant to leave to his successor Marcus Scaurus the carrying out of the difficult enterprise against the Nabataean city situated far off amidst the desert.(18) In reality Scaurus also soon found himself compelled to return without having accomplished his object. He had to content himself with making war on the Nabataeans in the deserts on the left bank of the Jordan, where he could lean for support on the Jews, but yet bore off only very trifling successes. Ultimately the adroit Jewish minister Antipater from Idumaea persuaded Aretas to purchase a guarantee for all his possessions, Damascus included, from the Roman governor for a sum of money; and this is the peace celebrated on the coins of Scaurus, where king Aretas appears—leading his camel— as a suppliant offering the olive branch to the Roman.
Difficulty with the Parthians
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
Organization of the Provinces
There still devolved on the general the duty of regulating the internal relations of the newly-acquired provinces and of removing as far as possible the traces of a thirteen years’ desolating war. The work of organization begun in Asia Minor by Lucullus and the commission associated with him, and in Crete by Metellus, received its final conclusion from Pompeius. The former province of Asia, which embraced Mysia, Lydia, Phrygia, and Caria, was converted from a frontier province into a central one. The newly-erected provinces were, that of Bithynia and Pontus, which was formed out of the whole former kingdom of Nicomedes and the western half of the former Pontic state as far as and beyond the Halys; that of Cilicia, which indeed was older, but was now for the first time enlarged and organized in a manner befitting its name, and comprehended also Pamphylia and Isauria; that of Syria,
Feudatory Kings
Cappadocia
Commagene
Galatia
The first place, in rank at least, among the dependent dynasts was held by the king of Cappadocia, whose territory Lucullus had already enlarged by investing him with the province of Melitene (about Malatia) as far as the Euphrates, and to whom Pompeius farther granted on the western frontier some districts taken off Cilicia from Castabala as far as Derbe near Iconium, and on the eastern frontier the province of Sophene situated on the left bank of the Euphrates opposite Melitene and at first destined for the Armenian prince Tigranes; so that the most important passage of the Euphrates thus came wholly into the power of the Cappadocian prince. The small province of Commagene between Syria and Cappadocia with its capital Samosata (Samsat) remained a dependent kingdom in the hands of the already-named Seleucid Antiochus;(21) to him too were assigned the important fortress of Seleucia (near Biradjik) commanding the more southern passage of the Euphrates, and the adjoining tracts on the left bank of that river; and thus care was taken that the two chief passages of the Euphrates with a corresponding territory on the eastern bank were left in the hands of two dynasts wholly dependent on Rome. Alongside of the kings of Cappadocia and Commagene, and in real power far superior to them, the new king Deiotarus ruled in Asia Minor. One of the tetrarchs of the Celtic stock of the Tolistobogii settled round Pessinus, and summoned by Lucullus and Pompeius to render military service with the other small Roman clients, Deiotarus had in these campaigns so brilliantly proved his trustworthiness and his energy as contrasted with all the indolent Orientals that the Roman generals conferred upon him, in addition to his Galatian heritage and his possessions in the rich country between Amisus and the mouth of the Halys, the eastern half of the former Pontic empire with the maritime towns of Pharnacia and Trapezus and the Pontic Armenia as far as the frontier of Colchis and the Greater Armenia, to form the kingdom of Lesser Armenia. Soon afterwards he increased his already considerable territory by the country of the Celtic Trocmi, whose tetrarch he dispossessed. Thus the petty feudatory became one of the most powerful dynasts of Asia Minor, to whom might be entrusted the guardianship of an important part of the frontier of the empire.
Princes and Chiefs
Vassals of lesser importance were, the other numerous Galatian tetrarchs, one of whom, Bogodiatarus prince of the Trocmi, was on account of his tried valour in the Mithradatic war presented by Pompeius with the formerly Pontic frontier-town of Mithradatium; Attalus prince of Paphlagonia, who traced back his lineage to the old ruling house of the Pylaemenids; Aristarchus and other petty lords in the Colchian territory; Tarcondimotus who ruled in eastern Cilicia in the mountain-valleys of the Amanus; Ptolemaeus son of Mennaeus who continued to rule in Chalcis on the Libanus; Aretas king of the Nabataeans as lord of Damascus; lastly, the Arabic emirs in the countries on either side of the Euphrates, Abgarus in Osrhoene, whom the Romans endeavoured in every way to draw over to their interest with the view of using him as an advanced post against the Parthians, Sampsiceramus in Hemesa, Alchaudonius the Rhambaean, and another emir in Bostra.
Priestly Princes
To these fell to be added the spiritual lords who in the east frequently ruled over land and people like secular dynasts, and whose authority firmly established in that native home of fanaticism the Romans prudently refrained from disturbing, as they refrained from even robbing the temples of their treasures: the high-priest of the Goddess Mother in Pessinus; the two high-priests of the goddess Ma in the Cappadocian Comana (on the upper Sarus) and in the Pontic city of the same name (Gumenek near Tocat), both lords who were in their countries inferior only to the king in power, and each of whom even at a much later period possessed extensive estates with special jurisdiction and about six thousand temple-slaves—Archelaus, son of the general of that name who passed over from Mithradates to the Romans, was invested by Pompeius with the Pontic high-priesthood—the high-priest of the Venasian Zeus in the Cappadocian district of Morimene, whose revenues amounted annually to 3600 pounds (15 talents); the “archpriest and lord” of that territory in Cilicia Trachea, where Teucer the son of Ajax had founded a temple to Zeus, over which his descendants presided by virtue of hereditary right; the “arch-priest and lord of the people” of the Jews, to whom Pompeius, after having razed the walls of the capital and the royal treasuries and strongholds in the land, gave back the presidency of the nation with a serious admonition to keep the peace and no longer to aim at conquests.
Urban Communities
Alongside of these secular and spiritual potentates stood the urban communities. These were partly associated into larger unions which rejoiced in a comparative independence, such as in particular the league of the twenty-three Lycian cities, which was well organized and constantly, for instance, kept aloof from participation in the disorders of piracy; whereas the numerous detached communities, even if they had self-government secured by charter, were in practice wholly dependent on the Roman governors.
Elevation of Urban Life in Asia
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.
New Towns Established
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
Pompeius was no less intent on regulating and elevating the existing communities than on founding new townships. The abuses and usurpations which prevailed were done away with as far as lay in his power; detailed ordinances drawn up carefully for the different provinces regulated the particulars of the municipal system. A number of the most considerable cities had fresh privileges conferred on them. Autonomy was bestowed on Antioch on the Orontes, the most important city of Roman Asia and but little inferior to the Egyptian Alexandria and to the Bagdad of antiquity, the city of Seleucia in the Parthian empire; as also on the neighbour of Antioch, the Pierian Seleucia, which was thus rewarded for its courageous resistance to Tigranes; on Gaza and generally on all the towns liberated from the Jewish rule; on Mytilene in the west of Asia Minor; and on Phanagoria on the Black Sea.
Aggregate Results
Thus was completed the structure of the Roman state in Asia, which with its feudatory kings and vassals, its priests made into princes, and its series of free and half-free cities puts us vividly in mind of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. It was no miraculous work, either as respects the difficulties overcome or as respects the consummation attained; nor was it made so by all the high-sounding words, which the Roman world of quality lavished in favour of Lucullus and the artless multitude in praise of Pompeius. Pompeius in particular consented to be praised, and praised himself, in such a fashion that people might almost have reckoned him still more weak-minded than he really was. If the Mytilenaeans erected a statue to him as their deliverer and founder, as the man who had as well by land as by sea terminated the wars with which the world was filled, such a homage might not seem too extravagant for the vanquisher of the pirates and of the empires of the east. But the Romans this time surpassed the Greeks. The triumphal inscriptions of Pompeius himself enumerated 12 millions of people as subjugated and 1538 cities and strongholds as conquered—it seemed as if quantity was to make up for quality— and made the circle of his victories extend from the Maeotic Sea to the Caspian and from the latter to the Red Sea, when his eyes had never seen any one of the three; nay farther, if he did not exactly say so, he at any late induced the public to suppose that the annexation of Syria, which in truth was no heroic deed, had added the whole east as far as Bactria and India to the Roman empire— so dim was the mist of distance, amidst which according to his statements the boundary-line of his eastern conquests was lost. The democratic servility, which has at all times rivalled that of courts, readily entered into these insipid extravagances. It was not satisfied by the pompous triumphal procession, which moved through the streets of Rome on the 28th and 29th Sept. 693— the forty-sixth birthday of Pompeius the Great—adorned,
Lucullus and Pompeius as Administrators
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
The conversion of the clients into subjects, the better regulation of the eastern frontier, the establishment of a single and strong government, were full of blessing for the rulers as well as for the ruled. The financial gain acquired by Rome was immense; the new property tax, which with the exception of some specially exempted communities all those princes, priests, and cities had to pay to Rome, raised the Roman state-revenues almost by a half above their former amount. Asia indeed suffered severely. Pompeius brought in money and jewels an amount of 2,000,000 pounds (200,000,000 sesterces) into the state-chest and distributed 3,900,000 pounds (16,000 talents) among his officers and soldiers; if we add to this the considerable sums brought home by Lucullus, the non-official exactions of the Roman army, and the amount of the damage done by the war, the financial exhaustion of the land may be readily
The East after the Departure of Pompeius
Peace continued substantially in the east, till the idea—merely indicated by Pompeius with his characteristic timidity—of joining the regions eastward of the Euphrates to the Roman empire was taken up again energetically but unsuccessfully by the new triumvirate of Roman regents, and soon thereafter the civil war drew the eastern provinces as well as all the rest into its fatal vortex. In the interval the governors of Cilicia had to fight constantly with the mountain-tribes of the Amanus and those of Syria with the hordes of the desert, and in the latter war against the Bedouins especially many Roman troops were destroyed; but these movements had no farther significance. More remarkable was the obstinate resistance, which the tough Jewish nation opposed to the conquerors. Alexander, son of the deposed king Aristobulus, and Aristobulus himself who after some time succeeded in escaping from captivity, excited during the governorship of Aulus Gabinius (697-700) three different revolts against the new rulers, to each of which the government of the high-priest Hyrcanus installed by Rome impotently succumbed. It was not political conviction, but the invincible repugnance of the Oriental towards the unnatural yoke, which compelled them to kick against
The Kingdom of Egypt
It still remains that we should glance at the kingdom of Egypt along with the last dependency that remained to it of the extensive acquisitions of the Lagids, the fair island of Cyprus. Egypt was now the only state of the Hellenic east that was still at least nominally independent; just as formerly, when the Persians established themselves along the eastern half of the Mediterranean, Egypt was their last conquest, so now the mighty conquerors from the west long delayed the annexation of that opulent and peculiar country. The reason lay, as was already indicated, neitherin any fear of the resistance of Egypt nor in the want of a fitting occasion. Egypt was just about as powerless as Syria, and had already in 673 fallen in all due form of law to the Roman community.(28) The control exercised over the court of Alexandria by the royal guard—which appointed and deposed ministers and occasionally kings, took for itself what it pleased, and, if it was refused a rise of pay, besieged the king in his palace— was by no means liked in the country or rather in the capital (for the country with its population of agricultural slaves was hardly taken into account); and at least a party there wished for the annexation of Egypt by Rome, and even took steps to procure it But the less the kings of Egypt could think of contending in arms against Rome, the more energetically Egyptian gold set itself to resist the Roman plans of union; and in consequence of the peculiar despotico-communistic centralization of the Egyptian finances the revenues of the court of Alexandria were still nearly equal to the public income of Rome even after its augmentation by Pompeius. The suspicious jealousy of the oligarchy, which was chary of allowing any individual either to conquer or to administer Egypt, operated in the same direction. So the de facto rulers of Egypt and Cyprus were enabled by bribing the leading men in the senate not merely to respite their tottering
Cyprus Annexed
The result in the two cases was different. The annexation of Cyprus was decreed in 696 by the people, that is, by the leaders of the democracy, the support given to piracy by the Cypriots being alleged as the official reason why that course should now be adopted. Marcus Cato, entrusted by his opponents with the execution of this measure, came to the island without an army; but he had no need of one. The king took poison; the inhabitants submitted without offering resistance to their inevitable fate, and were placed under the governor of Cilicia. The ample treasure of nearly 7000 talents (1,700,000 pounds), which the equally covetous and miserly king could not prevail on himself to apply for the bribes requisite to save his crown, fell along with the latter to the Romans, and filled after a desirable fashion the empty vaults of their treasury.
Ptolemaeus in Egypt Recognized but Expelled by His Subjects
On the other hand the brother who reigned in Egypt succeeded in purchasing his recognition by decree of the people from the new masters of Rome in 695; the purchase-money is said to have amounted to 6000 talents (1,460,000 pounds). The citizens indeed, long exasperated against their good flute-player and bad ruler, and now reduced to extremities by the definitive loss of Cyprus and the pressure of the taxes which were raised to an intolerable degree in consequence of the transactions with the Romans (696), chased him on that account out of the country. When the king thereupon applied, as if on account of his eviction from the estate which he had purchased, to those who sold it, these were reasonable enough to see that it was their duty as honest men of business to get back his kingdom for Ptolemaeus; only the parties could not agree as to the person to whom the important charge of occupying Egypt by force along with the perquisites thence to be expected should be assigned. It was only when the triumvirate was confirmed anew at the conference of Luca, that this affair was also arranged, after Ptolemaeus had agreed to a further payment of 10,000 talents (2,400,000 pounds); the governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, now obtained orders from those in power to take the necessary steps immediately for bringing back the king. The citizens of Alexandria had meanwhile placed the crown on the head of Berenice the eldest daughter of the ejected king, and given to her a husband in the person of one of the spiritual princes of Roman Asia, Archelaus the high-priest of Comana,(29) who possessed ambition enough to hazard his secure and respectable position in the hope of mounting the throne of the Lagids. His attempts to gain the Roman regents to his interests remained without success; but he did not recoil before the idea of being obliged to maintain his new kingdom with arms in hand even against the Romans.
And Brought Back by Gabinius
A Roman Garrison Remains in Alexandria
Gabinius, without ostensible powers to undertake war against Egypt but directed to do so by the regents, made a pretext out of the alleged furtherance of piracy by the Egyptians and the building of a fleet by Archelaus, and started without delay for the Egyptian frontier (699). The march through the sandy desert between Gaza and Pelusium, in which so many invasions previously directed against Egypt had broken down, was on this occasion successfully accomplished—a result especially due to the quick and skilful leader of the cavalry Marcus Antonius. The frontier fortress of Pelusium also was surrendered without resistance by the Jewish garrison stationed there. In front of this city the Romans met the Egyptians, defeated them—on which occasion Antonius again distinguished himself—and arrived, as the first Roman army, at the Nile. Here the fleet and army of the Egyptians were drawn up for the last decisive struggle; but the Romans once more conquered, and Archelaus himself with many of his followers perished in the combat. Immediately after this battle the capital surrendered, and therewith all resistance was at an end. The unhappy land was handed over to its legitimate oppressor; the hanging and beheading, with which, but for the intervention of the chivalrous Antonius, Ptolemaeus would have already in Pelusium begun to celebrate the restoration of the legitimate government, now took its course unhindered, and first of all the innocent daughter was sent by her father to the scaffold. The payment of the reward agreed upon with the regents broke down through the absolute impossibility of exacting from the exhausted land the enormous sums required, although they took from the poor people the last penny; but care was taken that the country should at least be kept quiet by the garrison of Roman infantry and Celtic and German cavalry left in the capital, which took the place of the native praetorians and otherwise emulated them not unsuccessfully. The previous hegemony of Rome over Egypt was thus converted into a direct military occupation, and the nominal continuance of the native monarchy was not so much a privilege granted to the land as a double burden imposed on it.
The Struggle of Parties During the Absence of Pompeius.
The Defeated Aristocracy
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
Cato
There was among the younger men a single exception; it was Marcus Porcius Cato (born in 659), a man of the best intentions and of rare devotedness, and yet one of the most Quixotic and one of the most cheerless phenomena in this age so abounding in political caricatures. Honourable and steadfast, earnest in purpose and in action, full of attachment to his country and to its hereditary constitution, but dull in intellect and sensuously as well as morally destitute of passion, he might certainly have made a tolerable state-accountant. But unfortunately he fell early under the power of formalism, and swayed partly by the phrases of the Stoa, which in their abstract baldness and spiritless isolation were current among the genteel world of that day, partly by the example of his great-grandfather whom he deemed it his especial task to reproduce, he began to walk about in the sinful capital as a model burgess and mirror of virtue, to scold at the times like the old Cato, to travel on foot instead of riding, to take no interest, to decline badges of distinction as a soldier, and to introduce the restoration of the good old days by going after the precedent of king Romulus without a shirt. A strange caricature of his ancestor—the gray-haired farmer whom hatred and anger made an orator, who wielded in masterly style the plough as well as the sword, who with his narrow, but original and sound common sense ordinarily hit the nail on the head—was this young unimpassioned pedant from whose lips dropped scholastic wisdom and who was everywhere seen sitting book in hand, this philosopher who understood neither the art of war nor any other art whatever, this cloud-walker in the realm of abstract morals. Yet he attained
Democratic Attacks
To continue the conflict with this aristocracy brought little honour. Of course the attacks of the democracy on the vanquished foe did not on that account cease. The pack of the Populares threw themselves on the broken ranks of the nobility like the sutlers on a conquered camp, and the surface at least of politics was by this agitation ruffled into high waves of foam. The multitude entered into the matter the more readily, as Gaius Caesar especially kept them in good humour by the extravagant magnificence of his games (689)—in which all the equipments, even the cages of the wild beasts, appeared of massive silver—and generally by a liberality which was all the more princely that it was based solely on the contraction of debt. The attacks on the nobility were of the most varied kind. The abuses of aristocratic rule afforded copious materials; magistrates and advocates who were liberal or assumed a liberal hue, like Gaius Cornelius, Aulus Gabinius, Marcus Cicero, continued systematically to unveil the most offensive and scandalous aspects of the Optimate doings and to propose laws against
What had hitherto been simply understood as matter of course was now expressly laid down as a law, that the praetors were bound to administer justice in conformity with the rules set forth by them, after the Roman fashion, at their entering on office (687).
Transpadanes
Freedmen
But, above all, efforts were made to complete the democratic restoration and to realize the leading ideas of the Gracchan period in a form suitable to the times. The election of the priests by the comitia, which Gnaeus Domitius had introduced(2) and Sulla had again done away,(3) was established by a law of the tribune of the people Titus Labienus in 691. The democrats were fond of pointing out how much was still wanting towards the restoration of the Sempronian corn-laws in their full extent, and at the same time passed over in silence the fact that under the altered circumstances—with the straitened condition of the public finances and the great increase in the number of fully-privileged Roman citizens—that restoration was absolutely impracticable. In the country between the Po and the Alps they zealously fostered the agitation for political equality with the Italians. As early as 686 Gaius Caesar travelled from place to place there for this purpose; in 689 Marcus Crassus as censor made arrangements to enrol the inhabitants directly in the burgess-roll—which was only frustrated by the resistance of his colleague; in the following censorships this attempt seems regularly to have been repeated. As formerly Gracchus and Flaccus had been the patrons of the Latins, so the present leaders of the democracy gave themselves forth as protectors of the Transpadanes, and Gaius Piso (consul in 687) had bitterly to regret that he had ventured to outrage one of these clients of Caesar and Crassus. On the other hand the same leaders appeared by no means disposed to advocate the political equalization of the freedmen; the tribune of the people Gaius Manilius, who in a thinly attended assembly had procured the renewal (31 Dec. 687) of the Sulpician law as to the
Process against Rabirius
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
The democratic reaction manifested still greater vehemence in all personal questions, wherever it could and dared. Prudence indeed enjoined it not to urge the restoration of the estates confiscated by Sulla to their former owners, that it might not quarrel with its own allies and at the same time fall into a conflict with material interests, for which a policy with a set purpose is rarelya match; the recall of the emigrants was too closely connected with this question of property not to appear quite as unadvisable. On the other hand great exertions were made to restore to the children of the proscribed the political rights withdrawn from them (691), and the heads of the senatorial party were incessantly subjected to personal attacks. Thus Gaius Memmius set on foot a process aimed at Marcus Lucullus in 688. Thus they allowed his more famous brother to wait for three years before the gates of the capital for his well-deserved triumph (688-691). Quintus Rex and the conqueror of Crete Quintus Metellus were similarly insulted.
It produced a still greater sensation, when the young leader of the democracy Gaius Caesar in 691 not merely presumed to compete with the two most distinguished men of the nobility, Quintus Catulus and Publius Servilius the victor of Isaura, in the candidature for the supreme pontificate, but even carried the day among the burgesses. The heirs of Sulla, especially his son Faustus, found themselves constantly threatened with an action for the refunding of the public moneys which, it was alleged, had been embezzled by the regent. They talked even of resuming the democratic impeachments suspended in 664 on the basis of the Varian law.(7) The individuals who had taken part in the Sullan executions were, as may readily be conceived, judicially prosecuted with the utmost zeal. When the quaestor Marcus Cato, in his pedantic integrity, himself made a beginning by demanding back from them the rewards which they had received for murder as property illegally alienated from the state (689), it can excite no surprise that in the following year (690) Gaius Caesar, as president of the commission regarding murder, summarily treated the clause in the Sullan ordinance, which declared that a proscribed person might be killed with impunity, as null and void, and caused the most noted of Sulla’s executioners, Lucius Catilina, Lucius Bellienus, Lucius Luscius to be brought before his jurymen and, partially, to be condemned.
Rehabilitation of Saturninus and Marius
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
Worthlessness of the Democratic Successes
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.
Impending Collision between the Democrats and Pompeius
It could not be otherwise. In the struggle with the aristocracy the democrats had remained victors; but they had not conquered alone, and the fiery trial still awaited them—the reckoning not with their former foe, but with their too powerful ally, to whom in the struggle with the aristocracy they were substantially indebted for victory, and to whose hands they had now entrusted an unexampled military and political power, because they dared not refuse it to him. The general of the east and of the seas was still employed in appointing and deposing kings. How long time he would take for that work, or when he would declare the business of the war to be ended, no one could tell but himself; since like everything else the time of his return to Italy, or in other words the day of decision, was left in his own hands. The parties in Rome meanwhile sat and waited. The Optimates indeed looked forward to the arrival of the dreaded general with comparative calmness; by the rupture between Pompeius and the democracy, which they saw to be approaching, they could not lose, but could only gain. The democrats on the contrary waited with painful anxiety, and sought, during the interval still allowed to them by the absence of Pompeius, to lay a countermine against the impending explosion.
Schemes for Appointing a Democratic Military Dictatorship
In this policy they again coincided with Crassus, to whom no course was left for encountering his envied and hated rival but that of allying himself afresh, and more closely than before, with the democracy. Already in the first coalition a special approximation had taken place between Caesar and Crassus as the two weaker parties; a common interest and a common danger tightened yet more the bond which joined the richest and the most insolvent of Romans in closest alliance. While in public the democrats described the absent general as the head and pride of their party and seemed to direct all their arrows against the aristocracy, preparations were secretly made against Pompeius; and these attempts of the democracy to escape from the impending military dictatorship have historically a far higher significance than the noisy agitation, for the most part employed only as a mask, against the nobility. It is true that they were carried on amidst a darkness, upon which our tradition allows only some stray gleams of light to fall; for not the present alone, but the succeeding age also had its reasons for throwing a veil over the matter. But in general both the course and the object of these efforts are completely clear. The military power could only be effectually checkmated by another military power. The design of the democrats was to possess themselves of the reins of government after the example of Marius and Cinna, then to entrust one of their leaders either with the conquest of Egypt or with the governorship of Spain or some similar ordinary or extraordinary office, and thus to find in him and his military force a counterpoise to Pompeius and his army. For this they required a revolution, which was directed immediately against the nominal government, but in reality against Pompeius as the designated monarch;(8) and, to effect this revolution, there was from the passing of the Gabinio-Manilian laws down to the return of Pompeius (688-692) perpetual conspiracy in Rome. The capital was in anxious suspense; the depressed temper of the capitalists, the suspensions of payment, the frequent bankruptcies were heralds of the fermenting revolution, which seemed as though it must at the same time produce a totally new position of parties. The project of the democracy, which pointed beyond the senate at Pompeius, suggested an approximation between that general and the senate. But the democracy in attempting to oppose to the dictatorship of Pompeius that of a man more agreeable to it, recognized, strictly speaking, on its part also the military government, and in reality drove out Satan by Beelzebub; the question of principles became in its hands a question of persons.
League of the Democrats and the Anarchists
The first step towards the revolution projected by the leaders of the democracy was thus to be the overthrow of the existing government by means of an insurrection primarily instigated in Rome by democratic conspirators. The moral condition of the lowest as of the highest ranks of society in the capital presented the materials for this purpose in lamentable abundance. We need not here repeat what was the character of the free and the servile proletariate of the capital. The significant saying was already heard, that only the poor man was qualified to represent the poor; the idea was thus suggested, that the mass of the poor might constitute itself an independent power as well as the oligarchy of the rich, and instead of allowing itself to be tyrannized over, might perhaps in its own turn play the tyrant. But even in the circles of the young men of rank similar ideas found an echo. The fashionable life of the capital shattered not merely the fortunes of men, but also their vigour of body and mind. That elegant world of fragrant ringlets, of fashionable mustachios and ruffles—merry as were its doings in the dance and with the harp, and early and late at the wine-cup—yet concealed in its bosom an alarming abyss of moral and economic ruin, of well or ill concealed despair, and frantic or knavish resolves. These circles sighed without disguise for a return of the time of Cinna with its proscriptions and confiscations and its annihilation of account-books for debt; there were people enough, including not a few of no mean descent and unusual abilities, who only waited the signal to fall like a gang of robbers on civil society and to recruit by pillage the fortune which they had squandered. Where a band gathers, leaders are not wanting; and in this case the men were soon found who were fitted to be captains of banditti.
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.
To form out of such elements a conspiracy for the overthrow of the existing order of things could not be difficult to men who possessed money and political influence. Catilina, Piso, and their fellows entered readily into any plan which gave the prospect of proscriptions and cancelling of debtor-books; the former had moreover special hostility to the aristocracy, because it had opposed the candidature of that infamous and dangerous man for the consulship. As he had formerly in the character of an executioner of Sulla hunted the proscribed at the head of a band of Celts and had killed among others his own aged father-in-law with his own hand, he now readily consented to promise similar services to the opposite party. A secret league was formed. The number of individuals received into it is said to have exceeded 400; it included associates in all the districts and urban communities of Italy; besides which, as a matter of course, numerous recruits would flock unbidden from the ranks of the dissolute youth to an insurrection, which inscribed on its banner the seasonable programme of wiping out debts.
Failure of the First Plans of Conspiracy
In December 688—so we are told—the leaders of the league thought that they had found the fitting occasion for striking a blow. The two consuls chosen for 689, Publius Cornelius Sulla and Publius Autronius Paetus, had recently been judicially convicted of electoral bribery, and therefore had according to legal rule forfeited their expectancy of the highest office. Both thereupon joined the league. The conspirators resolved to procure the consulship for them by force, and thereby to put themselves in possession of the supreme power in the state. On the day when the new consuls should enter on their office—the 1st Jan. 689— the senate-house was to be assailed by armed men, the new consuls and the victims otherwise designated were to be put to death, and Sulla and Paetus were to be proclaimed as consuls after the cancelling of the judicial sentence which excluded them. Crassus was then to be invested with the dictatorship and Caesar with the mastership of the horse, doubtless with a view to raise an imposing military force, while Pompeius was employed afar off at the Caucasus. Captains and common soldiers were hired and instructed; Catilina waited on the appointed day in the neighbourhood of the senate-house for the concerted signal, which was to be given him by Caesar on a hint from Crassus. But he waited in vain; Crassus was absent from the decisive sitting of the senate, and for this time the projected insurrection failed. A similar still more comprehensive plan of murder was then concerted for the 5th Feb.; but this too was frustrated, because Catilina gave the signal too early, before the bandits who were bespoken had all arrived. Thereupon the secret was divulged. The government did not venture openly to proceed against the conspiracy, but it assigned a guard to the consuls who were primarily threatened, and it opposed to the band of the conspirators a band paid by the government. To remove Piso, the proposal was made that he should be sent as quaestor with praetorian powers to Hither Spain; to which Crassus consented, in the hope of securing through him the resources of that important province for the insurrection. Proposals going farther were prevented by the tribunes.
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.
Resumption of the Conspiracy
For a moment the conspiracy came to a standstill. The elections for 690 took place without Crassus and Caesar renewing their attempt to get possession of the consulate; which may have been partly owing to the fact that a relative of the leader of the democracy, Lucius Caesar, a weak man who was not unfrequently employed by his kinsman as a tool, was on this occasion a candidate for the consulship. But the reports from Asia urged them to make haste. The affairs of Asia Minor and Armenia were already completely arranged. However clearly democratic strategists showed that the Mithradatic war could only be regarded as terminated by the capture of the king, and that it was therefore necessary to undertake the pursuit round the Black Sea, and above all things to keep aloof from Syria(11)—Pompeius, not concerning himself about such talk, had set out in the spring of 690 from Armenia and marched towards Syria. If Egypt was really selected as the headquarters of the democracy, there was no time to be lost; otherwise Pompeius might easily arrive in Egypt sooner than Caesar. The conspiracy of 688, far from being broken up by the lax and timid measures of repression, was again astir when the consular elections for 691 approached. The persons were, it may be presumed, substantially the same, and the plan was but little altered.
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
New Projects of the Conspirators
Meanwhile the development of Oriental affairs grew daily more perilous for the democracy. The settlement of Syria rapidly advanced; already invitations had been addressed to Pompeius from Egypt to march thither and occupy the country for Rome; they could not but be afraid that they would next hear of Pompeius in person having taken possession of the valley of the Nile. It was by this very apprehension probably that the attempt of Caesar to get himself sent by the people to Egypt for the purpose of aiding the king against his rebellious subjects(16) was called forth; it failed, apparently, through the disinclination of great and small to undertake anything whatever against the interest of Pompeius. His return home, and the probable catastrophe which it involved, were always drawing the nearer; often as the string of the bow had been broken, it was necessary that there should be a fresh attempt to bend it. The city was in sullen ferment; frequent conferences of the heads of the movement indicated that some step was again contemplated.
The Servilian Agrarian Law
What they wished became manifest when the new tribunes of the people entered on their office (10 Dec. 690), and one of them, Publius Servilius Rullus, immediately proposed an agrarian law, which was designed to procure for the leaders of the democrats a position similar to that which Pompeius occupied in consequence of 2the Gabinio-Manilian proposals. The nominal object was the founding of colonies in Italy. The ground for these, however, was not to be gained by dispossession; on the contrary all existing private rights were guaranteed, and even the illegal occupations of the most recent times(17) were converted into full property. The leased Campanian domain alone was to be parcelled out and colonized; in other cases the government was to acquire the land destined for assignation by ordinary purchase. To procure the sums necessary for this purpose, the remaining Italian, and more especially all the extra-Italian, domain-land was successively to be brought to sale; which was understood to include the former royal hunting domains in Macedonia, the Thracian Chersonese, Bithynia, Pontus, Cyrene, and also the territories of the cities acquired in full property by right of war in Spain, Africa, Sicily, Hellas, and Cilicia. Everything was likewise to be sold which the state had acquired in moveable and immoveable property since the year 666, and of which it had not previously disposed; this was aimed chiefly at Egypt and Cyprus. For the same purpose all subject communities, with the exception of the towns with Latin rights and the other free cities, were burdened with very high rates of taxes and tithes. Lastly there was likewise destined for those purchases the produce of the new provincial revenues, to be reckoned from 692, and the proceeds of the whole booty not yet legally applied; which regulations had reference to the new sources of taxation opened up by Pompeius in the east and to the public moneys that might be found in the hands of Pompeius and the heirs of Sulla. For the execution of this measure decemvirs with a special jurisdiction and special -imperium- were to be nominated, who were to remain five years in office and to surround themselves with 200 subalterns from the equestrian order; but in the election of the decemvirs only those candidates who should personally announce themselves were to be taken into account, and, as in the elections of priests,(18) only seventeen tribes to be fixed by lot out of the thirty-five were to make the election. It needed no great acuteness to discern that in this decemviral college it was intended to create a power after the model of that of Pompeius, only with somewhat less of a military and more of a democratic hue. The jurisdiction was especially needed for the sake of deciding the Egyptian question, the military power for the sake of arming against Pompeius; the clause, which forbade the choice of an absent person, excluded Pompeius; and the diminution of the tribes entitled to vote as well as the manipulation of the balloting were designed to facilitate the management of the election in accordance with the views of the democracy.
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.
Preparations of the Anarchists in Etruria
Wearied by all this vain agitation and scheming without result, Catilina determined to push the matter to a decision and make an end of it once for all. He took his measures in the course of the summer to open the civil war. Faesulae (Fiesole), a very strong town situated in Etruria—which swarmed with the impoverished and conspirators—and fifteen years before the centre of the rising of Lepidus, was again selected as the headquarters of the insurrection. Thither were despatched the consignments of money, for which especially the ladies of quality in the capital implicated in the conspiracy furnished the means; there arms and soldiers were collected; and there an old Sullan captain, Gaius Manlius, as brave and as free from scruples of conscience as was ever any soldier of fortune, took temporarily the chief command. Similar though less extensive warlike preparations were made at other points of Italy. The Transpadanes were so excited that they seemed only waiting for the signal to strike. In the Bruttian country, on the east coast of Italy, in Capua—wherever great bodies of slaves were accumulated—a second slave insurrection like that of Spartacus seemed on the eve of arising. Even in the capital there was something brewing; those who saw the haughty bearing with which the summoned debtors appeared before the urban praetor, could not but remember the scenes which had preceded the murder of Asellio.(19) The capitalists were in unutterable anxiety; it seemed needful to enforce the prohibition of the export of gold and silver, and to set a watch over the principal ports. The plan of the conspirators was—on occasion of the consular election for 692, for which Catilina had again announced himself— summarily to put to death the consul conducting the election as well as the inconvenient rival candidates, and to carry the election of Catilina at any price; in case of necessity, even to bring armed bands from Faesulae and the other rallying points against the capital, and with their help to crush resistance.
Election of Catalina as Consul again Frustrated
Cicero, who was always quickly and completely informed by his agents male and female of the transactions of the conspirators, on the day fixed for the election (20 Oct.) denounced the conspiracy in the full senate and in presence of its principal leaders. Catilina did not condescend to deny it; he answered haughtily that, if the election for consul should fall on him, the great headless party would certainly no longer want a leader against the small party led by wretched heads. But as palpable evidences of the plot were not before them, nothing farther was to be got from the timid senate, except that it gave its previous sanction in the usual way to the exceptional measures which the magistrates might deem suitable (21 Oct.). Thus the election battle approached— on this occasion more a battle than an election; for Cicero too had formed for himself an armed bodyguard out of the younger men, more especially of the mercantile order; and it was his armed force that covered and dominated the Campus Martius on the 28th October, the day to which the election had been postponed by the senate. The conspirators were not successful either in killing the consul conducting the election, or in deciding the elections according to their mind.
Outbreak of the Insurrection in Etruria
Repressive Measures of the Government
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.
The Conspirators in Rome
Catilina was in a painful position. According to his design there should have been a simultaneous rising in the capital and in Etruria on occasion of the consular elections; the failure of the former and the outbreak of the latter movement endangered his person as well as the whole success of his undertaking. Now that his partisans at Faesulae had once risen in arms against the government, he could no longer remain in the capital; and yet not only did everything depend on his inducing the conspirators of the capital now at least to strike quickly, but this had to be done even before he left Rome—for he knew his helpmates too well to rely on them for that matter. The more considerable of the conspirators—Publius Lentulus Sura consul in 683, afterwards expelled from the senate and now, in order to get back into the senate, praetor for the second time, and the two former praetors Publius Autronius and Lucius Cassius—were incapable men; Lentulus an ordinary aristocrat of big words and great pretensions, but slow in conception and irresolute in action; Autronius distinguished for nothing but his powerful screaming voice; while as to Lucius Cassius no one comprehended how a man so corpulent and so simple had fallen among the conspirators. But Catilina could not venture to place his abler partisans, such as the young senator Gaius Cethegus and the equites Lucius Statilius and Publius Gabinius Capito, at the head of the movement; for even among the conspirators the traditional hierarchy of rank held its ground, and the very anarchists thought that they should be unable to carry the day unless a consular or at least a praetorian were at their head. Therefore, however urgently the army of the insurrection might long for its general, and however perilous it was for the latter to remain longer at the seat of government after the outbreak of the revolt, Catilina nevertheless resolved still to remain for a time in Rome. Accustomed to impose on his cowardly opponents by his audacious insolence, he showed himself publicly in the Forum and in the senate-house and replied to the threats which were there addressed to him, that they should beware of pushing him to extremities; that, if they should set the house on fire, he would be compelled to extinguish the conflagration in ruins. In reality neither private persons nor officials ventured to lay hands on the dangerous man; it was almost a matter of indifference when a young nobleman brought him to trial on account of violence, for long before the process could come to an end, the question could not but be decided elsewhere. But the projects of Catilina failed; chiefly because the agents of the government had made their way into the circle of the conspirators and kept it accurately informed of every detail of the plot. When, for instance, the conspirators appeared before the strong Praeneste (1 Nov.), which they had hoped to surprise by a -coup de main-, they found the inhabitants warned and armed;
Catalina Proceed to Etruria
On the following day (8 Nov.) Cicero convoked the senate. Even now Catilina ventured to appear and to attempt a defence against the indignant attacks of the consul, who unveiled before his face the events of the last few days; but men no longer listened to him, and in the neighbourhood of the place where he sat the benches became empty. He left the sitting, and proceeded, as he would doubtless have done even apart from this incident, in accordance with the agreement, to Etruria. Here he proclaimed himself consul, and assumed an attitude of waiting, in order to put his troops in motion against the capital on the first announcement of the outbreak of the insurrection there. The government declared the two leaders Catilina and Manlius, as well as those of their comrades who should not have laid down their arms by a certain day, to be outlaws, and called out new levies; but at the head of the army destined against Catilina was placed the consul Gaius Antonius, who was notoriously implicated in the conspiracy, and with whose character it was wholly a matter of accident whether he would lead his troops against Catilina or over to his side. They seemed to have directly laid their plans towards converting this Antonius into a second Lepidus. As little were steps taken against the leaders of the conspiracy who had remained behind in the capital, although every one pointed the finger at them and the insurrection in the capital was far from being abandoned by the conspirators—on the contrary the plan of it had been settled by Catilina himself before his departure from Rome. A tribune was to give the signal by calling an assembly of the people; in the following night Cethegus was to despatch the consul Cicero; Gabinius and Statilius were to set the city simultaneously on fire at twelve places; and a communication was to be established as speedily as possible with the army of Catilina, which should have meanwhile advanced. Had the urgent representations of Cethegus borne fruit and had Lentulus, who after Catilina’s departure was placed at the head of the conspirators, resolved on rapidly striking a blow, the conspiracy might even now have been successful. But the conspirators were just as incapable and as cowardly as their opponents; weeks elapsed and the matter came to no decisive issue.
Conviction and Arrest of the Conspirators in the Capital
At length the countermine brought about a decision. Lentulus in his tedious fashion, which sought to cover negligence in regard to what was immediate and necessary by the projection of large and distant plans, had entered into relations with the deputies of a Celtic canton, the Allobroges, now present in Rome; had attempted to implicate these—the representatives of a thoroughly disorganized commonwealth and themselves deeply involved in debt—in the conspiracy; and had given them on their departure messages and letters to his confidants. The Allobroges left Rome, but were arrested in the night between 2nd and 3rd Dec. close to the gates by the Roman authorities, and their papers were taken from them. It was obvious that the Allobrogian deputies had lent themselves as spies to the Roman government, and had carried on the negotiations only with a view to convey into the hands of the latter the desired proofs implicating the ringleaders of the conspiracy. On the following morning orders were issued with the utmost secrecy by Cicero for the arrest of the most dangerous leaders of the plot, and executed in regard to Lentulus, Cethegus, Gabinius, and Statilius, while some others escaped from seizure by flight. The guilt of those arrested as well as of the fugitives was completely evident. Immediately after the arrest the letters seized, the seals and handwriting of which the prisoners could not avoid acknowledging, were laid before the senate, and the captives and witnesses were heard; further confirmatory facts, deposits of arms in the houses of the conspirators, threatening expressions which they had employed, were presently forthcoming; the actual subsistence of the conspiracy was fully and validly established, and the most important documents were immediately on the suggestion of Cicero published as news-sheets.
The indignation against the anarchist conspiracy was general. Gladly would the oligarchic party have made use of the revelations to settle accounts with the democracy generally and Caesar in particular, but it was far too thoroughly broken to be able to accomplish this, and to prepare for him the fate which it had formerly prepared for the two Gracchi and Saturninus; in this respect the matter went no farther than good will. The multitude of the capital was especially shocked by the incendiary schemes of the conspirators. The merchants and the whole party of material interests naturally perceived in this war of the debtors against the creditors a struggle for their very existence; in tumultuous excitement their youth crowded, with swords in their hands, round the senate-house and brandished them against the open and secret partisans of Catilina. In fact, the conspiracy was for the moment paralyzed; though its ultimate authors perhaps were still at liberty, the whole staff entrusted with its execution were either captured or had fled; the band assembled at Faesulae could not possibly accomplish much, unless supported by an insurrection in the capital.
Discussions in the Senate as to the Execution of Those Arrested
In a tolerably well-ordered commonwealth the matter would now have been politically at an end, and the military and the tribunals would have undertaken the rest. But in Rome matters had come to such a pitch, that the government was not even in a position to keep a couple of noblemen of note in safe custody. The slaves and freedmen of Lentulus and of the others arrested were stirring; plans, it was alleged, were contrived to liberate them by force from the private houses in which they were detained; there was no lack— thanks to the anarchist doings of recent years—of ringleaders in Rome who contracted at a certain rate for riots and deeds of violence; Catilina, in fine, was informed of what had occurred, and was near enough to attempt a coup de main with his bands. How much of these rumours was true, we cannot tell; but there was ground for apprehension, because, agreeably to the constitution, neither troops nor even a respectable police force were at the command of the government in the capital, and it was in reality left at the mercy of every gang of banditti. The idea was suggested of precluding all possible attempts at liberation by the immediate execution of the prisoners. Constitutionally, this was not possible. According to the ancient and sacred right of appeal, a sentence of death could only be pronounced against the Roman burgess by the whole body of burgesses, and not by any other authority; and, as the courts formed by the body of burgesses had themselves become antiquated, a capital sentence was no longer pronounced at all. Cicero would gladly have rejected the hazardous suggestion; indifferent as in itself the legal question might be to the advocate, he knew well how very useful it is to an advocate to be called liberal, and he showed little desire to separate himself for ever from the democratic party by shedding this blood. But those around him, and particularly his genteel wife, urged him to crown his services to his country by this bold step; the consul like all cowards anxiously endeavouring to avoid the appearance of cowardice, and yet trembling before the formidable responsibility, in his distress convoked the senate, and left it to that body to decide as to the life or death of the four prisoners. This indeed had no meaning; for as the senate was constitutionally even less entitled to act than the consul, all the responsibility still devolved rightfully on the latter: but when was cowardice ever consistent? Caesar made every exertion to save the prisoners, and his speech, full of covert threats as to the future inevitable vengeance of the democracy, made the deepest impression. Although all the consulars and the great majority of the senate had already declared for the execution, most of them, with Cicero at their head, seemed now once more inclined to keep within the limits of the law. But when Cato in pettifogging fashion brought the champions of the milder view into suspicion of being accomplices of the plot, and pointed to the preparations for liberating the prisoners by a street-riot, he succeeded in throwing the waverers into a fresh alarm, and in securing a majority for the immediate execution of the transgressors.
Execution of the Catalinarians
The execution of the decree naturally devolved on the consul, who had called it forth. Late on the evening of the 5th of December the prisoners were brought from their previous quarters, and conducted across the market-place still densely crowded by men to the prison in which criminals condemned to death were wont to be kept. It was a subterranean vault, twelve feet deep, at the foot of the Capitol, which formerly had served as a well-house. The consul himself conducted Lentulus, and praetors the others, all attended by strong guards; but the attempt at rescue, which had been expected, did not take place. No one knew whether the prisoners were being conveyed to a secure place of custody or to the scene of execution. At the door of the prison they were handed over to the -tresviri- who conducted the executions, and were strangled in the subterranean vault by torchlight. The consul had waited before the door till the executions were accomplished, and then with his loud well-known voice proclaimed over the Forum to the multitude waiting in silence, “They are dead.” Till far on in the night the crowds moved through the streets and exultingly saluted the consul, to whom they believed that they owed the security of their houses and their property. The senate ordered public festivals of gratitude, and the first men of the nobility, Marcus Cato and Quintus Catulus, saluted the author of the sentence of death with the name—now heard for the first time—of a “father of his fatherland.”
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-.
Suppression of the Etruscan Insurrection
After the conspiracy had been thus stifled in the capital even before it came to an outbreak, there remained the task of putting an end to the insurrection in Etruria. The army amounting to about 2000 men, which Catilina found on his arrival, had increased nearly fivefold by the numerous recruits who flocked in, and already formed two tolerably full legions, in which however only about a fourth part of the men were sufficiently armed. Catilina had thrown
Attitude of Crassus and Caesar toward the Anarchists
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.
The following scene which occurred in the senate shows significantlyhow matters stood. Immediately after the arrest of Lentulus and his comrades, a messenger despatched by the conspirators in the capital to Catilina was seized by the agents of the government, and, after having been assured of impunity, was induced to make a comprehensive confession in a full meeting of the senate. But when he came to the critical portions of his confession and in particular named Crassus as having commissioned him, he was interrupted by the senators, and on the suggestion of Cicero it was resolved to cancel the whole statement without farther inquiry, but to imprison its author notwithstanding the amnesty assured to him, until such time as he should have not merely retracted the statement, but should have also confessed who had instigated him to give such false testimony! Here it is abundantly clear, not merely that that man had a very accurate knowledge of the state of matters who, when summoned to make an attack upon Crassus, replied that he had no desire to provoke the bull of the herd, but also that the majority of the senate with Cicero at their head were agreed in not permitting the revelations to go beyond a certain limit. The public was not so nice; the young men, who had taken up arms to ward off the incendiaries, were exasperated against no one so much as against Caesar, on the 5th of December, when he left the senate, they pointed their swords at his breast and even now he narrowly escaped with his life on the same spot where the fatal blow fell on him seventeen years afterwards; he did not again for a considerable time enter the senate-house. Any one who impartially considers the course of the conspiracy will not be able to resist the suspicion that during all this time Catilina was backed by more powerful men, who—relying on the want of a legally complete chain of evidence and on the lukewarmness and cowardice of the majority of the senate, which was but half-initiated and greedily caught at any pretext for inaction—knew how to hinder any serious interference with the conspiracy on the part of the authorities, to procure free departure for the chief of the insurgents, and even so to manage the declaration of war and the sending of troops against the insurrection that it was almost equivalent to the sending of an auxiliary army. While the course of the events themselves thus testifies that the threads of the Catilinarian plot reached far higher than Lentulus and Catilina, it deserves also to be noticed, that at a much later period, when Caesar had got to the head of the state, he was in the closest alliance with the only Catilinarian still surviving, Publius Sittius the leader of the Mauretanian free bands, and that he modified the law of debt quite in the sense that the proclamations of Manlius demanded.
All these pieces of evidence speak clearly enough; but, even were it not so, the desperate position of the democracy in presence of the military power—which since the Gabinio-Manilian laws assumed by its side an attitude more threatening than ever—renders it almost a certainty that, as usually happens in such cases, it sought a last resource in secret plots and in alliance with anarchy. The circumstances were very similar to those of the Cinnan times. While in the east Pompeius occupied a position nearly such as Sulla then did, Crassus and Caesar sought to raise over against him a power in Italy like that which Marius and Cinna had possessed, with the view of employing it if possible better than they had done. The way to this result lay once more through terrorism and anarchy, and to pave that way Catilina was certainly the fitting man. Naturally the more reputable leaders of the democracy kept themselves as far as possible in the background, and left to their unclean associates the execution of the unclean work, the political results of which they hoped afterwards to appropriate. Still more naturally, when the enterprise had failed, the partners of higher position applied every effort to conceal their participation in it. And at a later period, when the former conspirator had himself become the target of political plots, the veil was for that very reason drawn only the more closely over those darker years in the life of the great man, and even special apologies for him were written with that very object.(21)
Total Destruction of the Democratic Party
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
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.
Retirement of Pompeius and Coalition of the Pretenders
Pompeius in the East
When Pompeius, after having transacted the affairs committed to his charge, again turned his eyes homeward, he found for the second time the diadem at his feet. For long the development of the Roman commonwealth had been tending towards such a catastrophe; it was evident to every unbiassed observer, and had been remarked a thousand times, that, if the rule of the aristocracy should be brought to an end, monarchy was inevitable. The senate had now been overthrown at once by the civic liberal opposition and by the power of the soldiery; the only question remaining was to settle the persons, names, and forms for the new order of things; and these were already clearly enough indicated in the partly democratic, partly military elements of the revolution. The events of the last five years had set, as it were, the final seal on this impending transformation of the commonwealth. In the newly-erected Asiatic provinces, which gave regal honours to their organizer as the successor of Alexander the Great, and already received his favoured freedmen like princes, Pompeius had laid the foundations of his dominion, and found at once the treasures, the army, and the halo of glory which the future prince of the Roman state required. The anarchist conspiracy, moreover, in the capital, and the civil war connected with it, had made it palpably clear to every one who studied political or even merely material interests, that a government without authority and without military power, such as that of the senate, exposed the state to the equally ludicrous and formidable tyranny of political sharpers, and that a change of constitution, which should connect the military power more closely with the government, was an indispensable necessity if social order was to be maintained. So the ruler had arisen in the east, the throne had been erected in Italy; to all appearance the year 692 was the last of the republic, the first of monarchy.
The Opponents of the Future Monarchy
This goal, it is true, was not to be reached without a struggle. The constitution, which had endured for five hundred years, and under which the insignificant town on the Tiber had risen to unprecedented greatness and glory, had sunk its roots into the soil to a depth beyond human ken, and no one could at all calculate to what extent the attempt to overthrow it would penetrate and convulse civil society. Several rivals had been outrun by Pompeius in the race towards the great goal, but had not been wholly set aside. It was not at all beyond reach of calculation that all these elements might combine to overthrow the new holder of power, and that Pompeius might find Quintus Catulus and Marcus Cato united in opposition to him with Marcus Crassus, Gaius Caesar, and Titus Labienus. But the inevitable and undoubtedly serious struggle could
Mission of Nepos to Rome
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.
Pompeius in Relation to the Parties
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.
Rupture between Pompeius and the Aristocracy
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.
Meanwhile Nepos had brought his proposals concerning Pompeius before the burgesses. On the day of voting Cato and his friend and colleague, Quintus Minucius, interposed their veto. When Nepos did not regard this and continued the reading out, a formal conflict took place; Cato and Minucius threw themselves on their colleague and forced him to stop; an armed band liberated him, and drove the aristocratic section from the Forum; but Cato and Minucius returned, now supported likewise by armed bands, and ultimately maintained the field of battle for the government. Encouraged by this victory of their bands over those of their antagonist, the senate suspended the tribune Nepos as well as the praetor Caesar, who had vigorously supported him in the bringing in of the law, from their offices; their deposition, which was proposed in the senate, was prevented by Cato, more, doubtless, because it was unconstitutional than because it was injudicious. Caesar did not regard the decree, and continued his official functions till the senate used violence against him. As soon as this was known, the multitude appeared before his house and placed itself at his disposal; it was to depend solely on him whether the struggle in the streets should begin, or whether at least the proposals made by Metellus should now be resumed and the military command in Italy desired by Pompeius should be procured for him; but this was not in Caesar’s interest, and so he induced the crowds to disperse, whereupon the senate recalled the penalty decreed against him. Nepos himself had, immediately after his suspension, left the city and embarked for Asia, in order to report to Pompeius the result of his mission.
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
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.
Pompeius without Influence
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
Rise of Caesar
Then a new combination offered itself. The leader of the democratic party had actively employed in his own interest the political calm which had immediately followed on the retirement of the previous holder of power. When Pompeius returned from Asia, Caesar had been little more than what Catilina was—the chief of a political party which had dwindled almost into a club of conspirators, and a bankrupt. But since that event he had, after administering the praetorship (692), been invested with the governorship of Further Spain, and thereby had found means partly to rid himself of his debts, partly to lay the foundation for his military repute. His old friend and ally Crassus had been induced by the hope of finding the support against Pompeius, which he had lost in Piso,(4) once more in Caesar, to relieve him even before his departure to the province from the most oppressive portion of his load of debt. He himself had energetically employed his brief sojourn there. Returning from Spain in the year 694 with filled chests and as Imperator with well-founded claims to a triumph, he came forward for the following year as a candidate for the consulship; for the sake of which, as the senate refused him permission to announce himself as a candidate for the consular election in absence, he without hesitation abandoned the honour of the triumph. For years the democracy had striven to raise one of its partisans to the possession of the supreme magistracy, that by way of this bridge it might attain a military power of its own. It had long been clear to discerning men of all shades that the strife of parties could not be settled by civil conflict, but only by military power; but the course of the coalition between the democracy and the powerful military chiefs, through which the rule of the senate had been terminated, showed with inexorable clearness that every such alliance
Second Coalition of Pompeius, Crassus, and 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
Change in the Position of Caesar
So the second coalition was concluded in the summer of 694. Caesar was assured of the consulship for the following year and a governorship in due course; to Pompeius was promised the ratification of his arrangements made in the east, and an assignation of lands for the soldiers of the Asiatic army; to the equites Caesar likewise promised to procure for them by means of the burgesses what the senate had refused; Crassus in fine—the inevitable—was allowed at least to join the league, although without obtaining definite promises for an accession which he could not refuse. It was exactly the same elements, and indeed the same persons, who concluded the league with one another in the autumn of 683 and in the summer of 694; but how entirely different was the position of the parties then and now! Then the democracy was nothing but a political party, while its allies were victorious generals at the head of their armies; now the leader of the democracy was himself an Imperator crowned with victory and full of magnificent military schemes, while his allies were retired generals without any army. Then the democracy conquered in questions of principle, and in return for that victory conceded the highest offices of state to its two confederates; now it had become more practical and grasped the supreme civil and military power for itself, while concessions were made to its allies only in subordinate points and, significantly enough, not even the old demand of Pompeius for a second consulship was attended to. Then the democracy sacrificed itself to its allies; now these had to entrust themselves to it. All the circumstances were completely changed, most of all, however, the character of the democracy itself. No doubt it had, ever since it existed at all, contained at its very core a monarchic element; but the ideal of a constitution, which floated in more or less clear outline before its best intellects, was always that of a civil commonwealth, a Periclean organization of the state, in which the power of the prince rested on the fact that he represented the burgesses in the noblest and most accomplished manner, and the most accomplished and noblest part of the burgesses recognized him as the man in whom they thoroughly confided.
Caesar Consul
The election of Caesar as consul for 695 was carried without difficulty by the united parties. The aristocracy had to rest content with giving to him—by means of a bribery, for which the whole order of lords contributed the funds, and which excited surprise even in that period of deepest corruption—a colleague in the person of Marcus Bibulus, whose narrow-minded obstinacy was regarded in their circles as conservative energy, and whose good intentions at least were not at fault if the genteel lords did not get a fit return for their patriotic expenditure.
Caesar’s Agrarian Law
As consul Caesar first submitted to discussion the requests of his confederates, among which the assignation of land to the veterans of the Asiatic army was by far the most important. The agrarian law projected for this purpose by Caesar adhered in general to the principles set forth in the project of law, which was introduced in the previous year at the suggestion of Pompeius but not carried.(5) There was destined for distribution only the Italian domain-land, that is to say, substantially, the territory of Capua, and, if this should not suffice, other Italian estates were to be purchased out of the revenue of the new eastern provinces at the taxable value recorded in the censorial rolls; all existing rights of property and heritable possession thus remained unaffected. The individual allotments were small. The receivers of land were to be poor burgesses, fathers of at least three children; the dangerous principle, that the rendering of military service gave a claim to landed estate, was not laid down, but, as was reasonable and had been done at all times, the old soldiers as well as the temporary lessees to be ejected were simply recommended to the special consideration of the land-distributors. The execution of the measure was entrusted to a commission of twenty men, into which Caesar distinctly declared that he did not wish to be himself elected.
Opposition of the Aristocracy
The opposition had a difficult task in resisting this proposal. It could not rationally be denied, that the state-finances ought after the erection of the provinces of Pontus and Syria to be in a position to dispense with the moneys from the Campanian leases; that it was unwarrantable to withhold one of the finest districts of Italy, and one peculiarly fitted for small holdings, from private enterprise; and, lastly, that it was as unjust as it was ridiculous, after the extension of the franchise to all Italy, still to withhold municipal rights from the township of Capua. The whole proposal bore the stamp of moderation, honesty, and solidity, with which a democratic party-character was very dexterously combined; for in substance it amounted to the re-establishment of the Capuan colony founded in the time of Marius and again done away by Sulla.(6) In form too Caesar observed all possible consideration. He laid the project of the agrarian law, as well as the proposal to ratify collectively the ordinances issued by Pompeius in the east, and the petition of the farmers of the taxes for remission of a third of the sums payable by them, in the first instance before the senate for approval, and declared himself ready to entertain and discuss proposals for alterations. The corporation had now opportunity of convincing itself how foolishly it had acted in driving Pompeius and the equites into the arms of the adversary by refusing these requests. Perhaps it was the secret sense of this, that drove the high-born lords to the most vehement opposition, which contrasted
Proposals before the Burgesses
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 nobility however left no means untried to frustrate the proposals of Caesar. On each day when Caesar appeared before the people, his colleague Bibulus instituted the well-known political observations of the weather which interrupted all public business;(7) Caesar did not trouble himself about the skies, but continued to prosecute his terrestrial occupation. The tribunician veto was interposed; Caesar contented himself with disregarding it. Bibulus and Cato sprang to the rostra, harangued the multitude, and instigated the usual riot; Caesar ordered that they should be led away by lictors from the Forum, and took care that otherwise no harm should befall them—it was for his interest that the political comedy should remain such as it was.
The Agrarian Law Carried
Passive Resistance of the Aristocracy
Notwithstanding all the chicanery and all the blustering of the nobility, the agrarian law, the confirmation of the Asiatic arrangements, and the remission to the lessees of taxes were adopted by the burgesses; and the commission of twenty was elected with Pompeius and Crassus at its head, and installed in office. With all their exertions the aristocracy had gained nothing, save that their blind and spiteful antagonism had drawn the bonds of the coalition still tighter, and their energy, which they were soon to need for matters more important, had exhausted itself on these affairs that were at bottom indifferent. They congratulated each other on the heroic courage which they had displayed; the declaration of Bibulus that he would rather die than yield, the peroration which Cato still continued to deliver when in the hands of the lictors, were great patriotic feats; otherwise they resigned themselves to their fate. The consul Bibulus shut himself up for the remainder of the year in his house, while he at the same time intimated by public placard that he had the pious intention of watching the signs of the sky on all the days appropriate for public assemblies during that year. His colleagues once more admired the great man who, as Ennius had said of the old Fabius, “saved the state by wise delay,” and they followed his example; most of them, Cato included, no longer appeared in the senate, but within their four walls helped their consul to fret over the fact that the history of the world went on in spite of political astronomy. To the public this passive attitude of the consul as well as of the aristocracy in general appeared, as it fairly might, a political abdication; and the coalition were naturally very well content that they were left to take their farther steps almost undisturbed.
Caesar Governor of the Two Gauls
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,
Measures Adopted by the Allies for Their Security
The permanence of the arrangements made seemed also sufficiently secured. The consulship was, at least for the next year, entrusted to safe hands. The public believed at first, that it was destined for Pompeius and Crassus themselves; the holders of power however preferred to procure the election of two subordinate but trustworth men of their party—Aulus Gabinius, the best among Pompeius’ adjutants, and Lucius Piso, who was less important but was Caesar’s father-in-law— as consuls for 696. Pompeius personally undertook to watch over Italy, where at the head of the commission of twenty he prosecuted the execution of the agrarian law and furnished nearly 20,000 burgesses, in great part old soldiers from his army, with land in the territory of Capua. Caesar’s north-Italian legions served to back him against the opposition in the capital. There existed no prospect, immediately at least, of a rupture among the holders of power themselves. The laws issued by Caesar as consul, in the maintenance of which Pompeius was at least as much interested as Caesar, formed a guarantee for the continuance of the breach between Pompeius and the aristocracy—whose heads, and Cato in particular, continued to treat these laws as null—and thereby a guarantee
Situation of the Aristocracy
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
Cato and Cicero Removed
Ultimately therefore they were content with a few isolated victims. It was of primary importance to remove Cato, who made no secret of his conviction as to the nullity of all the Julian laws, and who was a man to act as he thought. Such a man Marcus Cicero was certainly not, and they did not give themselves the trouble to fear him. But the democratic party, which played the leading part in the coalition, could not possibly after its victory leave unpunished the judicial murder of the 5th December 691, which it had so loudly and so justly censured. Had they wished to bring to account the real authors of the fatal decree, they ought to have seized not on the pusillanimous consul, but on the section of the strict aristocracy which had urged the timorous man to that execution. But in formal law it was certainly not the advisers of the consul, but the consul himself, that was responsible for it, and it was above all the gentler course to call the consul alone to account and to leave the senatorial college wholly out of the case; for which reason in the grounds of the proposal directed against Cicero the decree of the senate, in virtue of which he ordered the execution, was directly described as supposititious. Even against Cicero the holders of power would gladly have avoided steps that attracted attention; but he could not prevail on himself either to give to those in power the guarantees which they required, or to banish himself from Rome under one of the feasible pretexts on several occasions offered to him, or even to keep silence. With the utmost desire to avoid any offence and the most sincere alarm, he yet had not self-control enough to be prudent; the word had to come out, when a petulant witticism stung him, or when his self-conceit almost rendered crazy by the praise of so many noble lords gave vent to the well-cadenced periods of the plebeian advocate.
Clodius
The execution of the measures resolved on against Cato and Cicero was committed to the loose and dissolute, but clever and pre-eminently audacious Publius Clodius, who had lived for years in the bitterest enmity with Cicero, and, with the view of satisfying that enmity and playing a part as demagogue, had got himself converted under the consulship of Caesar by a hasty adoption from a patrician into a plebeian, and then chosen as tribune of the people for the year 696. To support Clodius, the proconsul Caesar remained in the immediate vicinity of the capital till the blow was struck against the two victims. Agreeably to the instructions which he had received, Clodius proposed to the burgesses to entrust Cato with the regulation of the complicated municipal affairs of the Byzantines and with the annexation of the kingdom of Cyprus, which as well as Egypt had fallen to the Romans by the testament of Alexander ii, but had not like Egypt bought off the Roman annexation, and the king of which, moreover, had formerly given personal offence to Clodius. As to Cicero, Clodius brought in a project of law which characterized the execution of a burgess without trial and sentence as a crime to be punished with banishment. Cato was thus removed by an honourable mission, while Cicero was visited at least with the gentlest possible punishment and, besides, was not designated by name in the proposal. But they did not refuse themselves the pleasure, on the one hand, of punishing a man notoriously timid and belonging to the class of political weathercocks for the conservative energy which he displayed, and, on the other hand, of investing the bitter opponent of all interferences of the burgesses in administration and of all extraordinary commands with such a command conferred by decree of the burgesses themselves; and with similar humour the proposal respecting Cato was based on the ground of the abnormal virtue of the man, which made him appear pre-eminently qualified to execute so delicate a commission, as was the confiscation of the considerable crown treasure of Cyprus, without embezzlement. Both proposals bear generally the same character of respectful deference and cool irony, which marks throughout the bearing of Caesar in reference to the senate. They met with no resistance. It was naturally of no avail, that the majority of the senate, with the view of protesting in some way against the mockery and censure of their decree in the matter of Catilina, publicly put on mourning, and that Cicero himself, now when it was too late, fell on his knees and besought mercy from Pompeius; he had to banish himself even before the passing of the law which debarred him from his native land (April 696). Cato likewise did not venture to provoke sharper measures by declining the commission which he had received, but accepted itand embarked for the east.(12) What was most immediately necessary was done; Caesar too might leave Italy to devote himself to more serious tasks.
The Subjugation of the West
The Romanizing of the West
When the course of history turns from the miserable monotony of the political selfishness, which fought its battles in the senate-house and in the streets of the capital, to matters of greater importance than the question whether the first monarch of Rome should be called Gnaeus, Gaius, or Marcus, we may well be allowed—on the threshold of an event, the effects of which still at the present day influence the destinies of the world—to look round us for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be apprehended in their bearing on the general history of the world.
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,
Historical Significance of the Conquests of Caesar
This task Gaius Caesar undertook. It is more than an error, it is an outrage upon the sacred spirit dominant in history, to regard Gaul solely as the parade ground on which Caesar exercised himself and his legions for the impending civil war. Though the subjugation of the west was for Caesar so far a means to an end that he laid the foundations of his later height of power in the Transalpine wars, it is the especial privilege of a statesman of genius that his means themselves are ends in their turn. Caesar needed no doubt for his party aims a military power, but he did not conquer Gaul as a partisan. There was a direct political necessity for Rome to meet the perpetually threatened invasion of the Germans thus early beyond the Alps, and to construct a rampart there which should secure the peace of the Roman world. But even this important object was not the highest and ultimate reason for which Gaul was conquered by Caesar. When the old home had become too narrow for the Roman burgesses and they were in danger of
Caesar in Spain
The campaign which Caesar undertook in 693 in Further Spain, may be in some sense included among the enterprises which aimed at the subjugation of the west. Long as Spain had obeyed the Romans, its western shore had remained substantially independent of them even after the expedition of Decimus Brutus against the Callaeci(1), and they had not even set foot on the northern coast; while the predatory raids, to which the subject provinces found themselves continually exposed from those quarters, did no small injury to the civilization and Romanizing of Spain. Against these the expedition of Caesar along the west coast was directed. He crossed the chain of the Herminian mountains (Sierra de Estrella) bounding the Tagus on the north; after having conquered their inhabitants and transplanted them in part to the plain, he reduced the country on both sides of the Douro and arrived at the northwest point of the peninsula, where with the aid of a flotilla brought up from Gades he occupied Brigantium (Corunna). By this means the peoples adjoining the Atlantic Ocean, Lusitanians and Callaecians, were forced to acknowledge the Roman supremacy, while the conqueror was at the same time careful to render the position of the subjects generally more tolerable by reducing the tribute to be paid to Rome and regulating the financial affairs of the communities.
But, although in this military and administrative debut of the great general and statesman the same talents and the same leading ideas are discernible which he afterwards evinced on a greater stage, his agency in the Iberian peninsula was much too transient to have any deep effect; the more especially as, owing to its physical and national peculiarities, nothing but action steadily continued for a considerable time could exert any durable influence there.
Gaul
A more important part in the Romanic development of the west was reserved by destiny for the country which stretches between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, and which since the Augustan age has been especially designated by the name of the land of the Celts—Gallia—although strictly speaking the land of the Celts was partly narrower, partly much more extensive, and the country so called never formed a national unity, and did not form a political unity before Augustus. For this very reason it is not easy to present a clear picture of the very heterogeneous state of things which Caesar encountered on his arrival there in 696.
The Roman Province
Wars and Revolts There
In the region on the Mediterranean, which, embracing approximately Languedoc on the west of the Rhone, on the east Dauphine and Provence, had been for sixty years a Roman province, the Roman arms had seldom been at rest since the Cimbrian invasion which had swept over it. In 664 Gaius Caelius had fought with the Salyes about Aquae Sextiae, and in 674 Gaius Flaccus,(2) on his march to Spain, with other Celtic nations. When in the Sertorian war the governor Lucius Manlius, compelled to hasten to the aid of his colleagues beyond the Pyrenees, returned defeated from Ilerda (Lerida) and on his way home was vanquished a second time by the western neighbours of the Roman province, the Aquitani (about 676;(3)), this seems to have provoked a general rising of the provincials between the Pyrenees and the Rhone, perhaps even of those between the Rhone and Alps. Pompeius had to make his way with the sword through the insurgent Gaul to Spain,(4) and by way of penalty for their rebellion gave the territories of the Volcae-Arecomici and the Helvii (dep. Gard and Ardeche) over to the Massiliots; the governor Manius Fonteius (678-680) carried out these arrangements and restored tranquillity in the province by subduing the Vocontii (dep. Drome), protecting Massilia from the insurgents, and liberating the Roman capital Narbo which they invested. Despair, however, and the financial embarrassment which the participation in the sufferings of the Spanish war(5) and generally the official and non-official exactions of the Romans brought upon the Gallic provinces, did not allow them to be tranquil; and in particular the canton of the Allobroges, the most remote from Narbo, was in a perpetual ferment, which was attested by the “pacification” that Gaius Piso undertook there in 688 as well as by the behaviour of the Allobrogian embassy in Rome on occasion of the anarchist plot in 691,(6) and which soon afterwards (693) broke into open revolt Catugnatus the leader of the Allobroges in this war of despair, who had at first fought not unsuccessfully, was conquered at Solonium after a glorious resistance by the governor Gaius Pomptinus.
Bounds
Relations to Rome
Notwithstanding all these conflicts the bounds of the Roman territory were not materially advanced; Lugudunum Convenarum, where Pompeius had settled the remnant of the Sertorian army,(7) Tolosa, Vienna and Genava were still the most remote Roman townships towards the west and north. But at the same time the importance of these Gallic possessions for the mother country was continually on the increase. The glorious climate, akin to that of Italy, the favourable nature of the soil, the large and rich region lying behind so advantageous for commerce with its mercantile routes reaching as far as Britain, the easy intercourse by land and sea with the mother country, rapidly gave to southern Gaul an economic importance for Italy, which much older possessions, such as those
Incipient Romanizing
It is easy to understand how under such circumstances civilization and Romanizing rapidly spread among the natives. These Celts were not fond of agriculture; but their new masters compelled them to exchange the sword for the plough, and it is very credible that the embittered resistance of the Allobroges was provoked in part by some such injunctions. In earlier times Hellenism had also to a certain degree dominated those regions; the elements of a higher culture, the stimulus to the cultivation of the vine and the olive,(8) to the use of writing(9) and to the coining of money, came to them from Massilia. The Hellenic culture was in this case far from being set aside by the Romans; Massilia gained through them more influence than it lost; and even in the Roman period Greek physicians and rhetoricians were publicly employed in the Gallic cantons. But, as may readily be conceived, Hellenism in southern Gaul acquired through the agency of the Romans the same character as in Italy; the distinctively Hellenic civilization gave place to the Latino-Greek mixed culture, which soon made proselytes here in great numbers. The “Gauls in the breeches,” as the inhabitants of southern Gaul were called by way of contrast to the “Gauls in the toga” of northern Italy, were not indeed like the latter already completely Romanized, but they were even now very perceptibly distinguished from the “longhaired Gauls” of the northern regions still unsubdued. The semiculture becoming naturalized among them furnished, doubtless, materials enough for ridicule of their barbarous Latin, and people did not fail to suggest to any one suspected of Celtic descent his “relationship with the breeches”; but this bad Latin was yet sufficient to enable even the remote Allobroges to transact business with the Roman authorities, and even to give testimony in the Roman courts without an interpreter.
While the Celtic and Ligurian population of these regions was thus in the course of losing its nationality, and was languishing and pining withal under a political and economic oppression, the intolerable nature of which is sufficiently attested by their hopeless insurrections, the decline of the native population here went hand in hand with the naturalizing of the same higher culture which we find at this period in Italy. Aquae Sextiae and still more Narbo were considerable townships, which might probably be named by the side of Beneventum and Capua; and Massilia, the best organized, most free, most capable of self-defence, and most powerful of all the Greek cities dependent on Rome, under its rigorous aristocratic government to which the Roman conservatives probably pointed as the model of a good urban constitution, in possession of an important territory which had been considerably enlarged by the Romans and of an extensive trade, stood by the side of those Latin towns as Rhegium and Neapolis stood in Italy by the side of Beneventum and Capua.
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
Gaul was, according to the reports of the ancients, comparatively well peopled. Certain statements lead us to infer that in the Belgic districts there were some 200 persons to the square mile— a proportion such as nearly holds at present for Wales and for Livonia—in the Helvetic canton about 245;(11) it is probable that in the districts which were more cultivated than the Belgic and less mountainous than the Helvetian, as among the Bituriges, Arverni, Haedui, the number rose still higher. Agriculture was no doubt practised in Gaul—for even the contemporaries of Caesar were surprised in the region of the Rhine by the custom of manuring with marl,(12) and the primitive Celtic custom of preparing beer (-cervesia-) from barley is likewise an evidence of the early and wide diffusion of the culture of grain—but it was not held in estimation. Even in the more civilized south it was reckoned not becoming for the free Celts to handle the plough. In far higher estimation among the Celts stood pastoral husbandry, for which the Roman landholders of this epoch very gladly availed themselves both of the Celtic breed of cattle, and of the brave Celtic slaves skilled in riding and familiar with the rearing of animals.(13) Particularly in the northern Celtic districts pastoral husbandry was thoroughly predominant. Brittany was in Caesar’s time a country poor in corn. In the north-east dense forests, attaching themselves to the heart of the Ardennes, stretched almost without interruption from the German Ocean to the Rhine; and on the plains of Flanders and Lorraine, now so fertile, the Menapian and Treverian herdsman then fed his half-wild swine in the impenetrable oak-forest. Just as in the valley of the Po the Romans made the production of wool and the culture of corn supersede the Celtic feeding of pigs on acorns, so the rearing of sheep and the agriculture in the plains of the Scheldt and the Maas are traceable to their influence. In Britain even the threshing of corn was not yet usual; and in its more northern districts agriculture was not practised, and the rearing of cattle was the only known mode of turning the soil to account. The culture of the olive and vine, which yielded rich produce to the Massiliots, was not yet prosecuted beyond the Cevennes in the time of Caesar.
Urban Life
The Gauls were from the first disposed to settle in groups; there were open villages everywhere, and the Helvetic canton alone numbered in 696 four hundred of these, besides a multitude of single homesteads. But there were not wanting also walled towns, whose walls of alternate layers surprised the Romans both by their suitableness and by the elegant interweaving of timber and stones in their construction; while, it is true, even in the towns of the Allobroges the buildings were erected solely of wood. Of such towns the Helvetii had twelve and the Suessiones an equal number; whereas at all events in the more northern districts, such as among the Nervii, while there were doubtless also towns, the population during war sought protection in the morasses and forests rather than behind their walls, and beyond the Thames the primitive defence of the wooden barricade altogether took the place of towns and was in war the only place of refuge for men and herds.
Intercourse
In close association with the comparatively considerable development of urban life stands the activity of intercourse by land and by water. Everywhere there were roads and bridges. The river-navigation, which streams like the Rhone, Garonne, Loire, and Seine, of themselves invited, was considerable and lucrative. But far more remarkable was the maritime navigation of the Celts. Not only were the Celts, to all appearance, the nation that first regularly navigated the Atlantic ocean, but we find that the art of building and of managing vessels had attained among them a remarkable development. The navigation of the peoples of the Mediterranean had, as may readily be conceived from the nature of the waters traversed by them, for a comparatively long period adhered to the oar; the war-vessels of the Phoenicians, Hellenes, and Romans were at all times oared galleys, in which the sail was applied only as an occasional aid to the oar; the trading vessels alone were in the epoch of developed ancient civilization “sailers” properly so called.(14) On the other hand the Gauls doubtless employed in the Channel in Caesar’s time, as for long afterwards, a species of portable leathern skiffs, which seem to have been in the main common oared boats, but on the west coast of Gaul the Santones, the Pictones, and above all the Veneti sailed in large though clumsily built ships, which were not impelled by oars but were provided with leathern sails and iron anchor-chains; and they employed these not only for their traffic with Britain, but also in naval combat. Here therefore we not only meet for the first time with navigation in the open ocean, but we find that here the sailing vessel first fully took the place of the oared boat—an improvement, it is true, which the declining activity of the old world did not know how to turn to account, and the immeasurable results of which our own epoch of renewed culture is employed in gradually reaping.
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
Mining
Hand in hand with dexterity in the elaboration of the metals went the art of procuring them, which had attained, more especially in the iron mines on the Loire, such a degree of professional skill that the miners played an important part in the sieges. The opinion prevalent among the Romans of this period, that Gaul was one of the richest gold countries in the world, is no doubt refuted by the well-known nature of the soil and by the character of the articles found in the Celtic tombs, in which gold appears but sparingly and with far less frequency than in the similar repositories of the true native regions of gold; this conception no doubt had its origin merely from the descriptions which Greek travellers and Roman soldiers, doubtless not without strong exaggeration, gave to their countrymen of the magnificence of the Arvernian kings,(15) and of the treasures of the Tolosan temples.(16) But their stories were not pure fictions. It may well be believed that in and near the rivers which flow from the Alps and the Pyrenees gold-washing and searches for gold, which are unprofitable at the present value of labour, were worked with profit and on a considerable scale in ruder times and with a system of slavery; besides, the commercial relations of Gaul may, as is not unfrequently the case with half-civilized peoples, have favoured the accumulation of a dead stock of the precious metals.
Art and Science
The low state of the arts of design is remarkable, and is the more striking by the side of this mechanical skill in handling the metals. The fondness for parti-coloured and brilliant ornaments shows the want of a proper taste, which is sadly confirmed by the Gallic coins with their representations sometimes exceedingly simple, sometimes odd, but always childish in design, and almost without exception rude beyond parallel in their execution. It is perhaps unexampled that a coinage practised for centuries with a certain technical skill should have essentially limited itself to always imitating two or three Greek dies, and always with increasing deformity. On the other hand the art of poetry was highly valued by the Celts, and intimately blended with the religious and even with the political institutions of the nation; we find religious poetry, as well as that of the court and of the mendicant, flourishing.(17) Natural science and philosophy also found, although subject to the forms and fetters of the theology of the country, a certain amount of attention among the Celts; and Hellenic humanism met with a ready reception wherever and in whatever shape it approached them. The knowledge of writing was general at least among the priests. For the most part in free Gaul the Greek writing was made use of in Caesar’s time, as was done among others by the Helvetii; but in its most southern districts even then, in consequence of intercourse with the Romanized Celts, the Latin attained predominance—we meet with it, for instance, on the Arvernian coins of this period.
Political Organization
Cantonal Constitution
The political development of the Celtic nation also presents very remarkable phenomena. The constitution of the state was based in this case, as everywhere, on the clan-canton, with its prince, its council of the elders, and its community of freemen capable of bearing arms; but the peculiarity in this case was that it never got beyond this cantonal constitution. Among the Greeks and Romans the canton was very early superseded by the ring-wall as the basis of political unity; where two cantons found themselves together within the same walls, they amalgamated into one commonwealth; where a body of burgesses assigned to a portion of their fellow-burgesses a new ring-wall, there regularly arose in this way a new state connected with the mother community only by ties of piety and, at most, of clientship. Among the Celts on the other hand the “burgess-body” continued at all times to be the clan; prince and council presided over the canton and not over any town, and the general diet of the canton formed the authority of last resort in the state. The town had, as in the east, merely mercantile and strategic, not political importance; for which reason the Gallic townships, even when walled and very considerable such as Vienna and Genava, were in the view of the Greeks and Romans nothing but villages. In the time
Development of Knighthood
Breaking Up of the Old Cantonal Constitution
It is simply the reverse side of the total want of urban commonwealths among the Celts just noticed, that the opposite pole of political development, knighthood, so thoroughly preponderates in the Celtic clan-constitution. The Celtic aristocracy was to all appearance a high nobility, for the most part perhaps the members of the royal or formerly royal families; as indeed it is remarkable that the heads of the opposite parties in the same clan very frequently belong to the same house. These great families combined in their hands financial, warlike, and political ascendency. They monopolized the leases of the profitable rights of the state. They compelled the free commons, who were oppressed by the burden of taxation, to borrow from them, and to surrender their freedom first de facto as debtors, then de jure as bondmen. They developed the system of retainers, that is, the privilege of the nobility to surround themselves with a number of hired mounted servants— the -ambacti- as they were called (18)—and thereby to form a state within the state; and, resting on the support of these troops of their own, they defied the legal authorities and the common levy and practically broke up the commonwealth. If in a clan, which numbered about 80,000 men capable of arms, a single noble could appear at the diet with 10,000 retainers, not reckoning the bondmen and the debtors, it is clear that such an one was more an independent dynast than a burgess of his clan. Moreover, the leading families of the different clans were closely connected and through intermarriages and special treaties formed virtually a compact league, in presence of which the single clan was powerless. Therefore the communities were no longer able to maintain the public peace, and the law of the strong arm reigned throughout. The dependent found protection only from his master, whom duty and interest compelled to redress the injury inflicted on his client; the state had no longer the power to protect those who were free, and consequently these gave themselves over in numbers to some powerful man as clients.
Abolition of the Monarchy
The common assembly lost its political importance; and even the power of the prince, which should have checked the encroachments of the nobility, succumbed to it among the Celts as well as in Latium. In place of the king came the “judgment-worker” or -Vergobretus-,(19) who was like the Roman consul nominated only for a year. So far as the canton still held together at all, it was led by the common council, in which naturally the heads of the aristocracy usurped the government. Of course under such circumstances there was agitation in the several clans much in the same way as there had been agitation in Latium for centuries after the expulsion of the kings: while the nobility of the different communities combined to form a separate alliance hostile to the power of the community, the multitude ceased not to desire the restoration of the monarchy; and not unfrequently a prominent nobleman attempted, as Spurius Cassius had done in Rome, with the support of the mass of those belonging to the canton to break down the power of his peers, and to reinstate the crown in its rights for his own special benefit.
Efforts towards National Unity
While the individual cantons were thus irremediably declining, the sense of unity was at the same time powerfully stirring in the nation and seeking in various ways to take shape and hold. That combination of the whole Celtic nobility in contradistinction to the individual canton-unions, while disturbing the existing order of things, awakened and fostered the conception of the collective unity of the nation. The attacks directed against the nation from without, and the continued diminution of its territory in war with its neighbours, operated in the same direction. Like the Hellenes in their wars with the Persians, and the Italians in their wars with the Celts, the Transalpine Gauls seem to have become conscious of the existence and the power of their national unity in the wars against Rome. Amidst the dissensions of rival clans and all their feudal quarrelling there might still be heard the voices of those who were ready to purchase the independence of the nation at the cost of the independence of the several cantons, and even at that of the seignorial rights of the knights. The thorough popularity of the opposition to a foreign yoke was shown by the wars of Caesar, with reference to whom the Celtic patriot party occupied a position entirely similar to that of the German patriots towards Napoleon; its extent and organization are attested, among other things, by the telegraphic rapidity with which news was communicated from one point to another.
Religious Union of the Nation
Druids
The universality and the strength of the Celtic national feeling would be inexplicable but for the circumstance that, amidst the greatest political disruption, the Celtic nation had for long been centralized in respect of religion and even of theology. The Celtic priesthood or, to use the native name, the corporation of the Druids, certainly embraced the British islands and all Gaul, and perhaps also other Celtic countries, in a common religious-national bond. It possessed a special head elected by the priests themselves; special schools, in which its very comprehensive tradition was transmitted; special privileges, particularly exemption from taxation and military service, which every clan respected; annual councils, which were held near Chartres at the “centre of the Celtic earth”; and above all, a believing people, who in painful piety and blind obedience to their priests seem to have been nowise inferior to the Irish of modern times. It may readily be conceived that such a priesthood attempted to usurp, as it partially did usurp, the secular government; where the annual monarchy subsisted, it conducted the elections in the event of an interregnum; it successfully laid claim to the right of excluding individuals and whole communities from religious, and consequently also from civil, society; it was careful to draw to itself the most important civil causes, especially processes as to boundaries and inheritance; on the ground, apparently, of its right to exclude from the community, and perhaps also of the national custom that criminals should be by preference taken for the usual human sacrifices, it developed an extensive priestly criminal jurisdiction, which was co-ordinate with that of the kings and vergobrets; it even claimed the right of deciding on war and peace. The Gauls were not far removed from an ecclesiastical state with its pope and councils, its immunities, interdicts, and spiritual courts; only this ecclesiastical state did not, like that of recent times, stand aloof from the nations, but was on the contrary pre-eminently national.
Want of Political Centralization
The Canton-Leagues
But while the sense of mutual relationship was thus vividly awakened among the Celtic tribes, the nation was still precluded from attaining a basis of political centralization such as Italy found in the Roman burgesses, and the Hellenes and Germans in the Macedonian and Frank kings. The Celtic priesthood and likewise the nobility—although both in a certain sense represented and combined the nation—were yet, on the one hand, incapable of uniting it in consequence of their particular class-interests, and, on the other hand, sufficiently powerful to allow no king and no canton to accomplish the work of union. Attempts at this work were not wanting; they followed, as the cantonal constitution suggested, the system of hegemony. A powerful canton induced a weaker to become subordinate, on such a footing that the leading canton acted for the other as well as for itself in its external relations and stipulated for it in state-treaties, while the dependent canton bound itself to render military service and sometimes also to pay a tribute. In this way a series of separate leagues arose; but there was no leading canton for all Gaul—no tie, however loose, combining the nation as a whole.
The Belgic League
The Maritime Cantons
The Leagues of Central Gaul
It has been already mentioned(20) that the Romans at the commencement of their Transalpine conquests found in the north a Britanno-Belgic league under the leadership of the Suessiones, and in central and southern Gaul the confederation of the Arverni, with which latter the Haedui, although having a weaker body of clients, carried on a rivalry. In Caesar’s time we find the Belgae in north-eastern Gaul between the Seine and the Rhine still forming such an association, which, however, apparently no longer extends to Britain; by their side there appears, in the modern Normandy and Brittany, the league of the Aremorican or the maritime cantons: in central or proper Gaul two parties as formerly contended for the hegemony, the one headed by the Haedui, the other by the Sequani after the Arvernians weakened by the wars with Rome had retired. These different confederacies subsisted independently side by side; the leading states of central Gaul appear never to have extended their clientship to the north-east nor, seriously, perhaps even to the north-west of Gaul.
Character of Those Leagues
The impulse of the nation towards freedom found doubtless a certain gratification in these cantonal unions; but they were in every respect unsatisfactory. The union was of the loosest kind, constantly fluctuating between alliance and hegemony; the representation of the whole body in peace by the federal diets, in war by the general,(21) was in the highest degree feeble. The Belgian confederacy alone seems to have been bound together somewhat more firmly; the national enthusiasm, from which the successful repulse of the Cimbri proceeded,(22) may have proved beneficial to it. The rivalries for the hegemony made a breach in every league, which time did not close but widened, because the victory of one competitor still left his opponent in possession of political existence, and it always remained open to him, even though he had submitted to clientship, subsequently to renew the struggle. The rivalry among the more powerful cantons not only set these at variance, but spread into every dependent clan, into every village, often indeed into every house, for each individual chose his side according to his personal relations. As Hellas exhausted its strength not so much in the struggle of Athens against Sparta as in the internal strife of the Athenian and Lacedaemonian factions in every dependent community, and even in Athens itself, so the rivalry of the Arverni and Haedui with its repetitions on a smaller and smaller scale destroyed the Celtic people.
The Celtic Military System
Cavalry
The military capability of the nation felt the reflex influence of these political and social relations. The cavalry was throughout the predominant arm; alongside of which among the Belgae, and still more in the British islands, the old national war-chariots appear in remarkable perfection. These equally numerous and efficient bands of combatants on horseback and in chariots were formed from the nobility and its vassals; for the nobles had a genuine knightly delight in dogs and horses, and were at much expense to procure noble horses of foreign breed. It is characteristic of the spirit and the mode of fighting of these nobles that, when the levy was called out, whoever could keep his seat on horseback, even the gray-haired old man, took the field, and that, when on the point of beginning a combat with an enemy of whom they made little account, they swore man by man that they would keep aloof from house and homestead, unless their band should charge at least twice through the enemy’s line. Among the hired warriors the free-lance spirit prevailed with all its demoralized and stolid indifference towards their own life and that of others. This is apparent from the stories— however anecdotic their colouring—of the Celtic custom of tilting by way of sport and now and then fighting for life or death at a banquet, and of the usage (which prevailed among the Celts, and outdid even the Roman gladiatorial games) of selling themselves to be killed for a set sum of money or a number of casks of wine, and voluntarily accepting the fatal blow stretched on their shield before the eyes of the whole multitude.
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.
Stage of Development of the Celtic Civilization
If we survey the whole condition of the Celts as Caesar found it in the Transalpine regions, there is an unmistakeable advance in civilization, as compared with the stage of culture at which the Celts came before us a century and a half previously in the valley of the Po. Then the militia, excellent of its kind, thoroughly preponderated in their armies;(23) now the cavalry occupies the first place. Then the Celts dwelt in open villages; now well-constructed walls surrounded their townships. The objects too found in the tombs of Lombardy are, especially as respects articles of copper and glass, far inferior to those of northern Gaul. Perhaps the most trustworthy measure of the increase of culture is the sense of a common relationship in the nation; so little of it comes to light in the Celtic battles fought on the soil of what is now Lombardy, while it strikingly appears in the struggles against Caesar. To all appearance the Celtic nation, when Caesar encountered it, had already reached the maximum of the culture allotted to it, and was even now on the decline. The civilization of the Transalpine Celts in Caesar’s time presents, even for us who are but very imperfectly informed regarding it, several aspects that are estimable, and yet more that are interesting; in some respects it is more akin to the modern than to the Hellenic-Roman culture, with its sailing vessels, its knighthood, its ecclesiastical constitution, above all with its attempts, however imperfect, to build the state not on the city, but on the tribe and in a higher degree on the nation. But just because we here meet the Celtic nation at the culminating point of its development, its lesser degree of moral endowment or, which is the same thing, its lesser capacity of culture, comes more distinctly into view. It was unable to produce from its own resources either a national art or a national state; it attained at the utmost a national theology and a peculiar type of nobility. The original simple valour was no more; the military courage based on higher morality and judicious organization, which comes in the train of increased civilization, had only made its appearance in a very stunted form among the knights. Barbarism in the strict sense was doubtless outlived; the times had gone by, when in Gaul the fat haunch was assigned to the bravest of the guests, but each of his fellow-guests who thought himself offended thereby was at liberty to challenge the receiver on that score to combat, and when the most faithful retainers of a deceased chief were burnt along with him. But human sacrifices still continued, and the maxim of law, that torture was inadmissible in the case of the free man but allowable in that of the free woman as well as of slaves, throws a far from pleasing light on the position which the female sex held among the Celts even in their period of culture. The Celts had lost the advantages which specially belong to the primitive epoch of nations, but had not acquired those which civilization brings with it when it intimately and thoroughly pervades a people.
External Relations
Celts and Iberians
Such was the internal condition of the Celtic nation. It remains that we set forth their external relations with their neighbours, and describe the part which they sustained at this moment in the mighty rival race and rival struggle of the nations, in which it is everywhere still more difficult to maintain than to acquire. Along the Pyrenees the relations of the peoples had for long been peaceably settled, and the times had long gone by when the Celts there pressed hard on, and to some extent supplanted, the Iberian, that is, the Basque, original population. The valleys of the Pyrenees as well as the mountains of Bearn and Gascony, and also the coast-steppes to the south of the Garonne, were at the time of Caesar in the undisputed possession of the Aquitani, a great number of small tribes of Iberian descent, coming little into contact with each other and still less with the outer world; in this quarter only the mouth of the Garonne with the important port of Burdigala (Bordeaux) was in the hands of a Celtic tribe, the Bituriges-Vivisci.
Celts and Romans
Advance of Roman Trade and Commerce into Free Gaul
Of far greater importance was the contact of the Celtic nation with the Roman people, and with the Germans. We need not here repeat— what has been related already—how the Romans in their slow advance had gradually pressed back the Celts, had at last occupied the belt of coast between the Alps and the Pyrenees, and had thereby totally cut them off from Italy, Spain and the Mediterranean Sea—a catastrophe, for which the way had already been prepared centuries before by the laying out of the Hellenic stronghold at the mouth of the Rhone. But we must here recall the fact that it was not merely the superiority of the Roman arms which pressed hard on the Celts, but quite as much that of Roman culture, which likewise reaped the ultimate benefit of the respectable beginnings of Hellenic civilization in Gaul. Here too, as so often happens, trade and commerce paved the way for conquest. The Celt after northern fashion was fond of fiery drinks; the fact that like the Scythian he drank the generous wine unmingled and to intoxication, excited the surprise and the disgust of the temperate southern; but the trader has no objection to deal with such customers. Soon the trade with Gaul became a mine of gold for the Italian merchant; it was nothing unusual there for a jar of wine to be exchanged for a slave. Other articles of luxury, such as Italian horses, found advantageous sale in Gaul. There were instances even already of Roman burgesses acquiring landed property beyond the Roman frontier, and turning it to profit after the Italian fashion; there is mention, for example, of Roman estates in the canton of the Segusiavi (near Lyons) as early as about 673. Beyond doubt it was a consequence of this that, as already mentioned(24) in free Gaul itself, e. g. among the Arverni, the
Celts and Germans
Still more violent even than the pressure of the Romans from the Mediterranean was that of the Germans downward from the Baltic and the North Sea—a fresh stock from the great cradle of peoples in the east, which made room for itself by the side of its elder brethren with youthful vigour, although also with youthful rudeness. Though the tribes of this stock dwelling nearest to the Rhine—the Usipetes, Tencteri, Sugambri, Ubii—had begun to be in some degree civilized, and had at least ceased voluntarily to change their abodes, all accounts yet agree that farther inland agriculture was of little importance, and the several tribes had hardly yet attained fixed abodes. It is significant in this respect that their western neighbours at this time hardly knew how to name any one of the peoples of the interior of Germany by its cantonal name; these were only known to them under the general appellations of the Suebi, that is, the roving people or nomads, and the Marcomani, that is, the land-guard(25)—names which were hardly cantonal names in Caesar’s time, although they appeared as such to the Romans and subsequently became in various cases names of cantons.
The Right Bank of the Rhine Lost to the Celts
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.
German Tribes on the Left Bank of the Rhine
But the Germans had not remained stationary at the Rhine. The march of the Cimbrian and Teutonic host, composed, as respects its flower, of German tribes, which had swept with such force fifty years before over Pannonia, Gaul, Italy, and Spain, seemed to have been nothing but a grand reconnaissance. Already different German tribes had formed permanent settlements to the west of the Rhine, especially of its lower course; having intruded as conquerors, these settlers continued to demand hostages and to levy annual tribute from the Gallic inhabitants in their neighbourhood, as if from subjects. Among these German tribes were the Aduatuci, who from a fragment of the Cimbrian horde(28) had grown into a considerable canton, and a number of other tribes afterwards comprehended under the name of the Tungri on the Maas in the region of Liege; even the Treveri (about Treves) and the Nervii (in Hainault), two of the largest and most powerful peoples of this region, are directly designated by respectable authorities as Germans. The complete credibility of these accounts must certainly remain doubtful, since, as Tacitus remarks in reference to the two peoples last mentioned, it was subsequently, at least in these regions, reckoned an honour to be descended of German blood and not to belong to the little-esteemed Celtic nation; yet the population in the region of the Scheldt, Maas, and Moselle seems certainly to have become, in one way or another, largely mingled with German elements, or at any rate to have come under German influences. The German settlements themselves were perhaps small; they were not unimportant, for amidst the chaotic obscurity, through which we see the stream of peoples on the right bank of the Rhine ebbing and flowing about this period, we can well perceive that larger German hordes were preparing to cross the Rhine in the track of these advanced posts. Threatened on two sides by foreign domination and torn by internal dissension, it was scarcely to be expected that the unhappy Celtic nation would now rally and save itself by its own vigour. Dismemberment, and decay in virtue of dismemberment, had hitherto been its history; how should a nation, which could name no day like those of Marathon and Salamis, of Aricia and the Raudine plain—a nation which, even in its time of vigour, had made no attempt to destroy Massilia by a united effort—now when evening had come, defend itself against so formidable foes?
The Roman Policy with Reference to the German Invasion
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
Ariovistus on the Middle Rhine
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.
Inaction of the Romans
This peace was concluded apparently about 693.(29) Honour and advantage enjoined the Romans to come forward in opposition to it; the noble Haeduan Divitiacus, the head of the Roman party in his clan, and for that reason now banished by his countrymen, went in person to Rome to solicit their intervention. A still more serious warning was the insurrection of the Allobroges in 693(30)— the neighbours of the Sequani—which was beyond doubt connected with these events. In reality orders were issued to the Gallic governors to assist the Haedui; they talked of sending consuls and consular armies over the Alps; but the senate, to whose decision these affairs primarily fell, at length here also crowned great words with little deeds. The insurrection of the Allobroges was suppressed by arms, but nothing was done for the Haedui; on the contrary, Ariovistus was even enrolled in 695 in the list of kings friendly with the Romans.(31)
Foundation of a German Empire in Gaul
The German warrior-prince naturally took this as a renunciation by the Romans of the Celtic land which they had not occupied; he accordingly took up his abode there, and began to establish a German principality on Gallic soil. It was his intention that the numerous bands which he had brought with him, and the still more numerous bands that afterwards followed at his call from home— it was reckoned that up to 696 some 120,000 Germans had crossed the Rhine—this whole mighty immigration of the German nation, which poured through the once opened sluices like a stream over the beautiful west, should become settled there and form a basis on which he might build his dominion over Gaul. The extent of the German settlements which he called into existence on the left bank of the Rhine cannot be determined; beyond doubt it was great, and his projects were far greater still. The Celts were treated by him as a wholly subjugated nation, and no distinction was made between the several cantons. Even the Sequani, as whose hired commander-in-chief he had crossed the Rhine, were obliged, as if they were vanquished enemies, to cede to him for his people a third of their territory—presumably upper Alsace afterwards inhabited by the Triboci—where Ariovistus permanently settled with his followers; nay, as if this were not enough, a second third was afterwards demanded of them for the Harudes who arrived subsequently. Ariovistus seemed as if he wished to take up in Gaul the part of Philip of Macedonia, and to play the master over the Celts who were friendly to the Germans no less than over those who adhered to the Romans.
The Germans on the Lower Rhine
The Germans on the Upper Rhine
Spread of the Helvetian Invasion to the Interior of
Gaul
The appearance of the energetic German prince in so dangerous proximity, which could not but in itself excite the most serious apprehension in the Romans, appeared still more threatening, inasmuch as it stood by no means alone. The Usipetes and Tencteri settled on the right bank of the Rhine, weary of the incessant devastation of their territory by the overbearing Suebian tribes, had, the year before Caesar arrived in Gaul (695), set out from their previous abodes to seek others at the mouth of the Rhine. They had already taken away from the Menapii there the portion of their territory situated on the right bank, and it might be foreseen that they would make the attempt to establish themselves also on the left. Suebian bands, moreover, assembled between Cologne and Mayence, and threatened to appear as uninvited guests in the opposite Celtic canton of the Treveri. Lastly, the territory of the most easterly clan of the Celts, the warlike and numerous Helvetii, was visited with growing frequency by the Germans, so that the Helvetii, who perhaps even apart from this were suffering from over-population through the reflux of their settlers from the territory which they had lost to the north of the Rhine, and besides were liable to be completely isolated from their kinsmen by the settlement of Ariovistus in the territory of the Sequani, conceived the desperate resolution of voluntarily evacuating the territory hitherto in their possession to the Germans, and acquiring larger and more fertile abodes to the west of the Jura, along with, if possible, the hegemony in the interior of Gaul—a plan which some of their districts had already formed and attempted to execute during the Cimbrian invasion.(32) the Rauraci whose territory (Basle and southern Alsace) was similarly threatened, the remains, moreover, of the Boii who had already at an earlier period been compelled by the Germans to forsake their homes and were now unsettled wanderers, and other smaller tribes, made common cause with the Helvetii. As early as 693 their flying parties came over the Jura and even as far as the Roman province; their departure itself could not be much longer delayed; inevitably German settlers would then advance into the important region between the lakes of Constance and Geneva forsaken by its defenders. From the sources of the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean the German tribes were in motion; the whole line of the Rhine was threatened by them; it was a moment like that when the Alamanni and the Franks threw themselves on the falling empire of the Caesars; and even now there seemed on the eve of being carried into effect against the Celts that very movement which was successful five hundred years afterwards against the Romans.
Caesar Proceeds to Gaul
Caesar’s Army
Under these circumstances the new governor Gaius Caesar arrived in the spring of 696 in Narbonese Gaul, which had been added by decree of the senate to his original province embracing Cisalpine Gaul along with Istria and Dalmatia. His office, which was committed to him first for five years (to the end of 700), then in 699 for five more (to the end of 705), gave him the right to nominate ten lieutenants of propraetorian rank, and (at least according to his own interpretation) to fill up his legions, or even to form new ones at his discretion out of the burgess-population—who were especially numerous in Cisalpine Gaul—of the territory under his sway. The army, which he received in the two provinces, consisted, as regards infantry of the line, of four legions trained and inured to war, the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, or at the utmost 24,000 men, to which fell to be added, as usual, the contingents of the subjects. The cavalry and light-armed troops, moreover, were represented by horsemen from Spain, and by Numidian, Cretan, and Balearic archers and slingers. The staff of Caesar—the elite of the democracy of the capital—contained, along with not a few useless young men of rank, some able officers, such as Publius Crassus the younger son of the old political ally of Caesar, and Titus Labienus, who followed the chief of the democracy as a faithful adjutant from the Forum to the battle-field. Caesar had not received definite instructions; to one who was discerning and courageous these were implied in the circumstances with which he had to deal. Here too the negligence of the senate had to be retrieved, and first of all the stream of migration of the German peoples had to be checked.
Repulse of the Helvetii
Just at this time the Helvetic invasion, which was closely interwoven with the German and had been in preparation for years, began. That they might not make a grant of their abandoned huts to the Germans and might render their own return impossible, the Helvetii had burnt their towns and villages; and their long trains of waggons, laden with women, children, and the best part of their moveables, arrived from all sides at the Leman lake near Genava (Geneva), where they and their comrades had fixed their rendezvous for the 28th of March(33) of this year. According to their own reckoning the whole body consisted of 368,000 persons, of whom about a fourth part were able to bear arms. As the mountain chain of the Jura, stretching from the Rhine to the Rhone, almost completely closed in the Helvetic country towards the west, and its narrow defiles were as ill adapted for the passage of such a caravan as they were well adapted for defence, the leaders had resolved to go round in a southerly direction, and to open up for themselves a way to the west at the point, where the Rhone has broken through the mountain-chain between the south-western and highest part of the Jura and the Savoy mountains, near the modern Fort de l’Ecluse. But
The Helvetii Move towards Gaul
On the other hand, the party in Gaul hostile to the Romans, which hoped to obtain a powerful reinforcement in the Helvetii, more especially the Haeduan Dumnorix brother of Divitiacus, and at the head of the national party in his canton as the latter wasat the head of the Romans, procured for them a passage through the passes of the Jura and the territory of the Sequani. The Romans had no legal title to forbid this; but other and higher interestswereat stake for them in the Helvetic expedition than the question of the formal integrity of the Roman territory— interests which could only be guarded, if Caesar, instead of confining himself, as all the governors of the senate and even Marius(34) had done, to the modest task of watching the frontier, should cross what had hitherto been the frontier at the head of a considerable army. Caesar was general not of the senate, but of the state; he showed no hesitation. He had immediately proceeded from Genava in person to Italy, and with characteristic speed brought up the three legions cantoned there as well as two newly-formed legions of recruits.
The Helvetian War
These troops he united with the corps stationed at Genava, and crossed the Rhone with his whole force. His unexpected appearance in the territory of the Haedui naturally at once restored the Roman party there to power, which was not unimportant as regarded supplies. He found the Helvetii employed in crossing the Saone, and moving from the territory of the Sequani into that of the Haedui; those of them that were still on the left bank of the Saone, especially the corps of the Tigorini, were caught and destroyed by the Romans rapidly advancing. The bulk of the expedition, however, had already crossed to the right bank of the river; Caesar followed them and in twenty-four hours effected the passage, which the unwieldy host of the Helvetii had not been able to accomplish in twenty days. The Helvetii, prevented by this passage of the river on the part of the Roman army from continuing their march westward, turned in a northerly direction, doubtless under the supposition that Caesar would not venture to follow them far into the interior of Gaul, and with the intention, if he should desist from following them, of turning again toward their proper destination. For fifteen days the Roman army marched behind that of the enemy at a distance of about four miles, clinging to its rear, and hoping for an advantageous opportunity of assailing the Helvetic host under conditions favourable to victory, and destroying it. But this moment came not: unwieldy as was the march of the Helvetic caravan, the leaders knew how to guard against a surprise, and appeared to be copiously provided with supplies as well as most accurately informed by their spies of every event in the Roman camp. On the other hand the Romans began to suffer from want of necessaries, especially when the Helvetii removed from the Saone and the means of river-transport ceased. The non-arrival of the supplies promised by the Haedui, from which this embarrassment primarily arose, excited the more suspicion, as both armies were still moving about in their territory. Moreover the considerable Roman cavalry, numbering almost 4000 horse, proved utterly untrustworthy—which doubtless admitted of explanation, for they consisted almost wholly of Celtic horsemen, especially of the mounted retainers of the Haedui, under the command of Dumnorix the well-known enemy of the Romans, and Caesar himself had taken them over still more as hostages than as soldiers. There was good reason to believe that a defeat which they suffered at the hands of the far weaker Helvetic cavalry was occasioned by themselves, and that the enemy was informed by them of all occurrences in the Roman camp. The position of Caesar grew critical; it was becoming disagreeably evident, how much the Celtic patriot party could effect even with the Haedui in spite of their official alliance with Rome, and of the distinctive interests of this canton inclining it towards the Romans; what was to be the issue, if
Battle at Bibracte
Caesar desired nothing better. The two armies posted themselves on two parallel chains of hills; the Celts began the engagement, broke up the Roman cavalry which had advanced into the plain, and rushed on against the Roman legions posted on the slope of the hill, but were there obliged to give way before Caesar’s veterans. When the Romans thereupon, following up their advantage, descended in their turn to the plain, the Celts again advanced against them, and a reserved Celtic corps took them at the same time in flank. The reserve of the Roman attacking column was pushed forward against the latter; it forced it away from the main body towards the baggage and the barricade of waggons, where it was destroyed. The bulk of the Helvetic host was at length brought to give way, and compelled to beat a retreat in an easterly direction—the opposite of that towards which their expedition led them. This day had frustrated the scheme of the Helvetii to establish for themselves new settlements on the Atlantic Ocean, and handed them over to the pleasure of the victor; but it had been a hot day also for the conquerors. Caesar, who had reason for not altogether trusting his staff of officers, had at the very outset sent away all the officers’ horses, so as to make the necessity of holding their ground thoroughly clear to his troops; in fact the battle, had the Romans lost it, would have probably brought about the annihilation of the Roman army. The Roman troops were too much exhausted to pursue the conquered with vigour; but in consequence of the proclamation of Caesar that he would treat all who should support the Helvetii as like the Helvetii themselves enemies of the Romans, all support was refused to the beaten army whithersoever it went— in the first instance, in the canton of the Lingones (about Langres)—and, deprived of all supplies and of their baggage and burdened by the mass of camp-followers incapable of fighting, they were under the necessity of submitting to the Roman general.
The Helvetii Sent back to Their Original Abode
The lot of the vanquished was a comparatively mild one. The Haedui were directed to concede settlements in their territory to the homeless Boii; and this settlement of the conquered foe in the midst of the most powerful Celtic cantons rendered almost the services of a Roman colony. The survivors of the Helvetii and Rauraci, something more than a third of the men that had marched forth, were naturally sent back to their former territory. It was incorporated with the Roman province, but the inhabitants were admitted to alliance with Rome under favourable conditions, in order to defend, under Roman supremacy, the frontier along the upper Rhine against the Germans. Only the south-western point of the Helvetic canton was directly taken into the possession of the Romans, and there subsequently, on the charming shore of the Leman lake, the old Celtic town Noviodunum (now Nyon) was converted into a Roman frontier-fortress, the “Julian equestrian colony."(35)
Caesar and Ariovistus
Negotiations
Thus the threatening invasion of the Germans on the upper Rhine was obviated, and, at the same time, the party hostile to the Romans among the Celts was humbled. On the middle Rhine also, where the Germans had already crossed years ago, and where the power of Ariovistus which vied with that of Rome in Gaul was daily spreading, there was need of similar action, and the occasion for a rupture was easily found. In comparison with the yoke threatened or already imposed on them by Ariovistus, the Roman supremacy probably now appeared to the greater part of the Celts in this quarter the lesser evil; the minority, who retained their hatred of the Romans, had at least to keep silence. A diet of the Celtic tribes of central Gaul, held under Roman influence, requested the Roman general in name of the Celtic nation for aid against the Germans. Caesar consented. At his suggestion the Haedui stopped the payment of the tribute stipulated to be paid to Ariovistus, and demanded back the hostages furnished; and when Ariovistus on account of this breach of treaty attacked the clients of Rome, Caesar took occasion thereby to enter into direct negotiation with him and specially to demand, in addition to the return of the hostages and a promise to keep peace with the Haedui, that Ariovistus should bind himself to allure no more Germans over the Rhine. The German general replied to the Roman, in the full consciousness of equality of rights, that northern Gaul had become subject to him by right of war as fairly as southern Gaul to the Romans; and that, as he did not hinder the Romans from taking tribute from the Allobroges, so they should not prevent him from taxing his subjects. In later secret overtures it appeared that the prince was well aware of the circumstances of the Romans; he mentioned the invitations which had been addressed to him from Rome to put Caesar out of the way, and offered, if Caesar would leave to him northern Gaul,
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
German Settlements on the Left Bank of the Rhine
Thus brilliantly the Roman rule announced its advent to the mighty stream, which the Italian soldiers here saw for the first time; by a single fortunate battle the line of the Rhine was won. The fate of the German settlements on the left bank of the Rhine lay in the hands of Caesar; the victor could destroy them, but he did not do so. The neighbouring Celtic cantons—the Sequani, Leuci, Mediomatrici—were neither capable of self-defence nor trustworthy; the transplanted Germans promised to become not merely brave guardians of the frontier but also better subjects of Rome, for their nationality severed them from the Celts, and their own interest in the preservation of their newly-won settlements severed them from their countrymen across the Rhine, so that in their isolated position they could not avoid adhering to the central power. Caesar here, as everywhere, preferred conquered foes to doubtful friends; he left the Germans settled by Ariovistus along the left bank of the Rhine—the Triboci about Strassburg, the Nemetes about Spires, the Vangiones about Worms—in possession of their new abodes, and entrusted them with the guarding of the Rhine-frontier against their countrymen.(37) The Suebi, who threatened the territory of the Treveri on the middle Rhine, on receiving news of the defeat of Ariovistus, again retreated into the interior of Germany; on which occasion they sustained considerable loss by the way at the hands of the adjoining tribes.
The Rhine Boundary
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
The foundations of the future edifice were laid; but in order to finish the building and completely to secure the recognition of the Roman rule by the Gauls, and that of the Rhine-frontier by the Germans, very much still remained to be done. All central Gaul indeed from the Roman frontier as far up as Chartres and Treves submitted without objection to the new ruler; and on the upper and middle Rhine also no attack was for the present to be apprehended from the Germans. But the northern provinces—as well the Aremorican cantons in Brittany and Normandy as the more powerful confederation of the Belgae—were not affected by the blows directed against central Gaul, and found no occasion to submit to the conqueror of Ariovistus. Moreover, as was already remarked, very close relations subsisted between the Belgae and the Germans over the Rhine, and at the mouth of the Rhine also Germanic tribes made themselves ready to cross the stream. In consequence of this Caesar set out with his army, now increased to eight legions, in the spring of 697 against the Belgic cantons. Mindful of the brave and successful resistance which fifty years before they had with united strength presented to the Cimbri on the borders of their land,(38) and stimulated by the patriots who had fled to them in numbers from central Gaul, the confederacy of the Belgae sent their whole first levy—300,000 armed men under the leadership of Galba the king of the Suessiones—to their southern frontier to receive Caesar there. A single canton alone, that of the powerful Remi (about Rheims) discerned in this invasion of the foreigners an opportunity to shake off the rule which their neighbours the Suessiones exercised over them, and prepared to take up in the north the part which the Haedui had played in central Gaul. The Roman and the Belgic armies arrived in their territory almost at the same time.
Conflicts on the Aisne
Submission of the Western Cantons
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
The Conflict with the Nervii
But in the eastern cantons the national feeling was more energetically roused. The Viromandui (about Arras), the Atrebates (about St. Quentin), the German Aduatuci (about Namur), but above all the Nervii (in Hainault) with their not inconsiderable body of clients, little inferior in number to the Suessiones and Bellovaci, far superior to them in valour and vigorous patriotic spirit, concluded a second and closer league, and assembled their forces on the upper Sambre. Celtic spies informed them most accurately of the movements of the Roman army; their own local knowledge, and the high tree-barricades which were formed everywhere in these districts to obstruct the bands of mounted robbers who often visited them, allowed the allies to conceal their own operations for the most part from the view of the Romans. When these arrived on the Sambre not far from Bavay, and the legions were occupied in pitching their camp on the crest of the left bank, while the cavalry and light infantry were exploring the opposite heights, the latter were all at once assailed by the whole mass of the enemy’s forces and driven down the hill into the river. In a moment the enemy had crossed this also, and stormed the heights of the left bank with a determination that braved death. Scarcely was there time left for the entrenching legionaries to exchange the mattock for the sword; the soldiers, many without helmets, had to fight just as they stood, without line of battle, without plan, without proper command; for, owing to
Subjugation of the Belgae
After this annihilating defeat the Nervii, Atrebates, and Viromandui could not but recognize the Roman supremacy. The Aduatuci, who arrived too late to take part in the fight on the Sambre, attempted still to hold their ground in the strongest of their towns (on the mount Falhize near the Maas not far from Huy), but they too soon submitted. A nocturnal attack on the Roman camp in front of the town, which they ventured after the surrender, miscarried; and the perfidy was avenged by the Romans with fearful severity. The clients of the Aduatuci, consisting of the Eburones between the Maas and Rhine and other small adjoining tribes, were declared independent by the Romans, while
Expeditions against the Maritime Cantons
Venetian War
The turn of the Aremorican cantons came. In the autumn of 697 Publius Crassus was sent thither with a Roman corps; he induced the Veneti—who as masters of the ports of the modern Morbihan and of a respectable fleet occupied the first place among all the Celtic cantons in navigation and commerce—and generally the coast-districts between the Loire and Seine, to submit to the Romans and give them hostages. But they soon repented. When in the following winter (697-698) Roman officers came to these legions to levy requisitions of grain there, they were detained by the Veneti as counter-hostages. The example thus set was quickly followed not only by the Aremorican cantons, but also by the maritime cantons of the Belgae that still remained free; where, as in some cantons of Normandy, the common council refused to join the insurrection, the multitude put them to death and attached itself with redoubled zeal to the national cause. The whole coast from the mouth of the Loire to that of the Rhine rose against Rome; the most resolute patriots from all the Celtic cantons hastened thither to co-operate in the great work of liberation; they already calculated on the rising of the whole Belgic confederacy, on aid from Britain, on the arrival of Germans from beyond the Rhine.
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,
Naval Battle between the Romans and the Veneti
Submission of the Maritime Cantons
Accordingly when the Roman fleet, long detained by storms at the mouth of the Loire, arrived at length on the coast of Brittany, it was left to decide the struggle by a naval battle. The Celts, conscious of their superiority on this element, brought forth their fleet against that of the Romans commanded by Brutus. Not only did it number 220 sail, far more than the Romans had been able to bring up, but their high-decked strong sailing-vessels with flat bottoms were also far better adapted for the high-running waves of the Atlantic Ocean than the low, lightly-built oared galleys of the Romans with their sharp keels. Neither the missiles nor the boarding-bridges of the Romans could reach the high deck of the enemy’s vessels, and the iron beaks recoiled powerless from the strong oaken planks. But the Roman mariners cut the ropes, by which the yards were fastened to the masts, by means of sickles fastened to long poles; the yards and sails fell down, and, as they did not know how to repair the damage speedily, the ship was thus rendered a wreck just as it is at the present day by the falling of the masts, and the Roman boats easily succeeded by a joint attack in mastering the maimed vessel of the enemy. When the Gauls perceived this manoeuvre, they attempted to move from the coast on which they had taken up the combat with the Romans, and to gain the high seas, whither the Roman galleys could not follow them; but unhappily for them there suddenly set in a dead calm, and the immense fleet, towards the equipment of which the maritime cantons had applied all their energies, was almost wholly destroyed by the Romans. Thus was this naval battle—so far as historical knowledge reaches, the earliest fought on the Atlantic Ocean— just like the engagement at Mylae two hundred years before,(39) notwithstanding the most unfavourable circumstances, decided in favour of the Romans by a lucky invention suggested by necessity. The consequence of the victory achieved by Brutus was the surrender of the
Sabinus meanwhile opposed to the levy of the coast-states assembled on the Channel the same tactics by which Caesar had in the previous year conquered the Belgic general levy on the Aisne; he stood on the defensive till impatience and want invaded the ranks of the enemy, and then managed by deceiving them as to the temper and strength of his troops, and above all by means of their own impatience, to allure them to an imprudent assault upon the Roman camp, in which they were defeated; whereupon the militia dispersed and the country as far as the Seine submitted.
Expeditins against the Morini and Menapii
The Morini and Menapii alone persevered in withholding their recognition of the Roman supremacy. To compel them to this, Caesar appeared on their borders; but, rendered wiser by the experiences of their countrymen, they avoided accepting battle on the borders of their land, and retired into the forests which then stretched almost without interruption from the Ardennes towards the German Ocean. The Romans attempted to make a road through the forest with the axe, ranging the felled trees on each side as a barricade against the enemy’s attacks; but even Caesar, daring as he was, found it advisable after some days of most laborious marching, especially as it was verging towards winter, to order a retreat, although but a small portion of the Morini had submitted and the powerful Menapii had not been reached at all. In the following year (699) while Caesar himself was employed in Britain the greater part of the army was sent afresh against these tribes; but this expedition also remained in the main unsuccessful. Nevertheless the result of the last campaigns was the almost complete reduction of Gaul under the dominion of the Romans. While central Gaul had submitted to it without resistance, during the campaign of 697 the Belgic, and during that of the following year the maritime, cantons had been compelled by force of arms to acknowledge the Roman rule. The lofty hopes, with which the Celtic patriots had begun the last campaign, had nowhere been fulfilled. Neither Germans nor Britons had come to their aid; and in Belgica the presence of Labienus had sufficed to prevent the renewal of the conflicts of the previous year.
Establishment of Communications with Italy by the Valais
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.
And with Spain
To gain communication with Spain, moreover, Publius Crassus was sent in the following year (698) to Aquitania with instructions to compel the Iberian tribes dwelling there to acknowledge the Roman rule. The task was not without difficulty; the Iberians held together more compactly than the Celts and knew better than these how to learn from their enemies. The tribes beyond the Pyrenees, especially the valiant Cantabri, sent a contingent to their threatened countrymen; with this there came experienced officers trained under the leadership of Sertorius in the Roman fashion, who introduced as far as possible the principles of the Roman art of war, and especially of encampment, among the Aquitanian levy already respectable from its numbers and its valour. But the excellent officer who led the Romans knew how to surmount all difficulties, and after some hardly-contested but successful battles he induced the peoples from the Garonne to the vicinity of the Pyrenees to submit to the new masters.
Fresh Violations of the Rhine-Boundary by the Germans
The Usipetes and Tencteri
One of the objects which Caesar had proposed to himself— the subjugation of Gaul—had been in substance, with exceptions scarcely worth mentioning, attained so far as it could be attained at all by the sword. But the other half of the work undertaken by Caesar was still far from being satisfactorily accomplished, and the Germans had by no means as yet been everywhere compelled to recognize the Rhine as their limit. Even now, in the winter of 698-699, a fresh crossing of the boundary had taken place on the lower course of the river, whither the Romans had not yet penetrated. The German tribes of the Usipetes and Tencteri whose attempts to cross the Rhine in the territory of the
Caesar on the Right Bank of the Rhine
Caesar however found it advisable to take yet a further step and to lead the legions over the Rhine. He was not without connections beyond the river. the Germans at the stage of culture which they had then reached, lacked as yet any national coherence; in political distraction they—though from other causes—fell nothing short of the Celts. The Ubii (on the Sieg and Lahn), the most civilized among the German tribes, had recently been made subject and tributary by a powerful Suebian canton of the interior, and had as early as 697 through their envoys entreated Caesar to free them like the Gauls from the Suebian rule. It was not Caesar’s design seriously to respond to this suggestion, which would have involved him in endless enterprises; but
Expeditions to Britain
There remained the insular Celts. From the close connection between them and the Celts of the continent, especially the maritime cantons, it may readily be conceived that they had at least sympathized with the national resistance, and that if they did not grant armed assistance to the patriots, they gave at any rate an honourable asylum in their sea-protected isle to every one who was no longer safe in his native land. This certainly involved a danger, if not for the present, at any rate for the future; it seemed judicious—if not to undertake the conquest of the island itself—at any rate to conduct there also defensive operations by offensive means, and to show the islanders by a landing on the coast that the arm of the Romans reached even across the Channel. The first Roman officer who entered Brittany, Publius Crassus had already (697) crossed thence to the “tin-islands” at the south-west point of England (Stilly islands); in the summer of 699 Caesar himself with only two legions crossed the Channel at its narrowest part.(42) He found the coast covered with masses of the enemy’s troops and sailed onward with his vessels; but the British war-chariots moved on quite as fast by land as the Roman galleys by sea, and it was only with the utmost difficulty that the Roman soldiers succeeded in gaining the shore in the face of the enemy, partly by wading, partly in boats, under the protection of the ships of war, which swept the beach with missiles thrown from machines
Caesar himself was so dissatisfied with the results of this expedition undertaken inconsiderately and with inadequate means, that he immediately (in the winter of 699-700) ordered a transport fleet of 800 sail to be fitted out, and in the spring of 700 sailed a second time for the Kentish coast, on this occasion with five legions and 2000 cavalry. The forces of the Britons, assembled this time also on the shore, retired before the mighty armada without risking a battle; Caesar immediately set out on his march into the interior, and after some successful conflicts crossed the river Stour; but he was obliged to halt very much against his will, because the fleet in the open roads had been again half destroyed by the storms of the Channel. Before they got the ships drawn up upon the beach and the extensive arrangements made for their repair, precious time was lost, which the Celts wisely turned to account.
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
The Conspiracy of the Patriots
The work of repelling the Germanic invasion and of subduing the continental Celts was completed. But it is often easier to subdue a free nation than to keep a subdued one in subjection. The rivalry for the hegemony, by which more even than by the attacks of Rome the Celtic nation had been ruined, was in some measure set aside by the conquest, inasmuch as the conqueror took the hegemony to himself. Separate interests were silent; under the common oppression at any rate they felt themselves again as one people; and the infinite value of that which they had with indifference gambled away when they possessed it—freedom and nationality— was now, when it was too late, fully appreciated by their infinite longing. But was it, then, too late? With indignant shame they confessed to themselves that a nation, which numbered at least a million of men capable of arms, a nation of ancient and well-founded warlike renown, had allowed the yoke to be imposed upon it by, at the most, 50,000 Romans. The submission of the confederacy of central Gaul without having struck even a blow; the submission of the Belgic confederacy without having done more than merely shown a wish to strike; the heroic fall on the other hand of the Nervii and the Veneti, the sagacious and successful
Insurrection
If patriotism and despair had induced the heads of the Celtic nobility to conspire, fear and self-defence now drove the conspirators to strike. In the winter of 700-701, with the exception of a legion stationed in Brittany and a second in the very unsettled canton of the Carnutes (near Chartres), the whole Roman army numbering six legions was encamped in the Belgic territory. The scantiness of the supplies of grain had induced Caesar to station his troops farther apart than he was otherwise wont to do—in six different camps constructed in the cantons of the Bellovaci, Ambiani, Morini, Nervii, Remi, and Eburones. The fixed camp placed farthest towards the east in the territory of the Eburones, probably not far from the later Aduatuca (the modern Tongern), the strongest of all, consisting of a legion under one of the most respected of Caesar’s leaders of division, Quintus Titurius Sabinus, besides different detachments led by the brave Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta(43) and amounting together to the strength of half a legion, found itself all of a sudden surrounded by the general levy of the Eburones under the kings Ambiorix and Catuvolcus. The attack came so unexpectedly,
Cicero Attacked
This success, such as the insurgents themselves had hardly ventured to hope for, increased the ferment among the Celtic patriots so greatly that the Romans were no longer sure of a single district with the exception of the Haedui and Remi, and the insurrection broke out at the most diverse points. First of all the Eburones followed up their victory. Reinforced by the levy of the Aduatuci, who gladly embraced the opportunity of requiting the injury done to them by Caesar, and of the powerful and still unsubdued Menapii, they appeared in the territory of the Nervii, who immediately joined them, and the whole host thus swelled to 60,000 moved forward to confront the Roman camp formed in the Nervian canton. Quintus Cicero, who commanded there, had with his weak corps a difficult position, especially as the besiegers, learning from the foe, constructed ramparts and trenches, -testudines- and moveable towers after the Roman fashion, and showered fire-balls and burning spears over the straw-covered huts of the camp. The only hope of the besieged rested on Caesar, who lay not so very far off with three legions in his winter encampment in the region of Amiens. But—a significant proof of the feeling that prevailed in Gaul-for a considerable time not the slightest hint reached the general either of the disaster of Sabinus or of the perilous situation of Cicero.
Caesar Proceeds to His Relief
The Insurrection Checked
At length a Celtic horseman from Cicero’s camp succeeded in stealing through the enemy to Caesar. On receiving the startling news Caesar immediately set out, although only with two weak legions, together numbering about 7000, and 400 horsemen; nevertheless the announcement that Caesar was advancing sufficed to induce the insurgents to raise the siege. It was time; not one tenth of the men in Cicero’s camp remained unwounded. Caesar, against whom the insurgent army had turned, deceived the enemy, in the way which he had already on several occasions successfully applied, as to his strength; under the most unfavourable circumstances they ventured an assault upon the Roman camp and in doing so suffered a defeat. It is singular, but characteristic of the Celtic nation, that in consequence of this one lost battle, or perhaps rather in consequence of Caesar’s appearance in person on the scene of conflict, the insurrection, which had commenced so victoriously and extended so widely, suddenly and pitiably broke off the war. The Nervii, Menapii, Aduatuci, Eburones, returned to their homes. The forces of the maritime cantons, who had made preparations for assailing the legion in Brittany, did the same. The Treveri, through whose leader Indutiomarus the Eburones, the clients of the powerful neighbouring canton, had been chiefly induced to that so successful attack, had taken arms on the news of the disaster of Aduatuca and advanced into the territory of the Remi with the view of attacking the legion cantoned there under
And Suppressed
The winter was drawing to a close when Caesar set out with his army, which meanwhile had been considerably reinforced, against the insurgents. The attempts of the Treveri to concentrate the revolt had not succeeded; the agitated districts were kept in check by the marching in of Roman troops, and those in open rebellion were attacked in detail. First the Nervii were routed by Caesar in person. The Senones and Carnutes met the same fate. The Menapii, the only canton which had never submitted to the Romans, were compelled by a grand attack simultaneously directed against them from three sides to renounce their long-preserved freedom. Labienus meanwhile was preparing the same fate for the Treveri. Their first attack had been paralyzed, partly by the refusal of the adjoining German tribes to furnish them with mercenaries, partly by the fact that Indutiomarus, the soul of the whole movement had fallen in a skirmish with the cavalry of Labienus. But they did not on this account abandon their projects. With their whole levy they appeared in front of Labienus and waited for the German bands that were to follow, for their recruiting agents found a better reception than they had met with from the dwellers on the Rhine, among the warlike tribes of the interior of Germany, especially, as it would appear, among the Chatti. But when Labienus seemed as if he wished to avoid these and to march off in all haste, the Treveri attacked the Romans even before the Germans arrived and in a most unfavourable spot, and were completely defeated. Nothing remained for the Germans who came up too
Retaliatory Expedition against the Eburones
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 sagacious calculator had on this occasion miscalculated. The fire was smothered, but not extinguished. The stroke, under which the head of Acco fell, was felt by the whole Celtic nobility. At this very moment the position of affairs presented better prospects than ever. The insurrection of the last winter had evidently failed only through Caesar himself appearing on the scene of action; now he was at a distance, detained on the Po by the imminence of civil war, and the Gallic army, which was collected on the upper Seine, was far separated from its dreaded leader. If a general insurrection now broke out in central Gaul, the Roman army might be surrounded, and the almost undefended old Roman province be overrun before Caesar reappeared beyond the Alps, even if the Italian complications did not altogether prevent him from further concerning himself about Gaul.
The Carnutes
The Arverni
Conspirators from all the cantons of central Gaul assembled; the Carnutes, as most directly affected by the execution of Acco, offered to take the lead. On a set day in the winter of 701-702 the Carnutic knights Gutruatus and Conconnetodumnus gave at Cenabum (Orleans) the signal for the rising, and put to death in a body the Romans who happened to be there. The most vehement agitation seized the length and breadth of the great Celtic land; the patriots everywhere bestirred themselves. But nothing stirred the nation so deeply as the insurrection of the Arverni. The government of this community, which had formerly under its kings been the first in southern Gaul, and had still after the fall of its principality occasioned by the unfortunate wars against Rome(45) continued to be one of the wealthiest, most civilized, and most powerful in all Gaul, had hitherto inviolably adhered to Rome. Even now the patriot party in the governing common council was in the minority; an attempt to induce it to join the insurrection was in vain. The attacks of the patriots were therefore directed against the common council and the existing constitution itself; and the more so, that the change of constitution which among the Arverni had substituted the common council for the prince(46) had taken place after the victories of the Romans and probably under their influence.
Vercingetorix
The leader of the Arvernian patriots Vercingetorix, one of those nobles whom we meet with among the Celts, of almost regal repute in and beyond his canton, and a stately, brave, sagacious man to boot, left the capital and summoned the country people, who were as hostile to the ruling oligarchy as to the Romans, at once to re-establish the Arvernian monarchy and to go to war with Rome. The multitude quickly joined him; the restoration of the throne of Luerius and Betuitus was at the same time the declaration of a national war against Rome. The centre of unity, from the want of which all previous attempts of the nation to shake off the foreign yoke had failed, was now found in the new self-nominated king of the Arverni. Vercingetorix became for the Celts of the continent what Cassivellaunus was for the insular Celts; the feeling strongly pervaded the masses that he, if any one, was the man to save the nation.
Spread of the Insurrection
Appearance of Caesar
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.
The Gallic Plan of War
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
Beginning of the Struggle
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.
Caesar before Arvaricum
According to his intention, Avaricum (Bourges), the rich and strong capital of the Bituriges, was to meet the same fate; but the majority of the war-council yielded to the suppliant entreaties of the Biturigian authorities, and resolved rather to defend that city with all their energy. Thus the war was concentrated in the first instance around Avaricum, Vercingetorix placed his infantry amidst the morasses adjoining the town in a position so unapproachable, that even without being covered by the cavalry they needed not to fear the attack of the legions. The Celtic cavalry covered all the roads and obstructed the communication. The town was strongly garrisoned, and the connection between it and the army before the walls was kept open. Caesar’s position was very awkward. The attempt to induce the Celtic infantry to fight was unsuccessful; it stirred not from its unassailable lines. Bravely as his soldiers in front of the town trenched and fought, the besieged vied with them in ingenuity and courage, and they had almost succeeded in setting fire to the siege apparatus of their opponents. The task withal of supplying an army of nearly 60,000 men with provisions in a country devastated far and wide and scoured by far superior bodies of cavalry became daily more difficult. The slender stores of the Boii were soon used up; the supply promised by the Haedui failed to appear; the corn was already consumed, and the soldier was placed exclusively on flesh-rations. But the moment was approaching when the town, with whatever contempt of death the garrison fought, could be held no longer. Still it was not impossible to withdraw the troops secretly by night and destroy the town, before the enemy occupied it. Vercingetorix made arrangements for this purpose, but the cry of distress raised at the moment of evacuation by the women and children left behind attracted the attention of the Romans; the departure miscarried.
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 before Lutetia
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.
Caesar before Gergovia
Fruitless Blockade
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.
The Haedui Waver
The Haedui, who had hitherto continued vacillating, now made preparations in earnest to join the patriotic party; the body of men, whom Caesar had ordered to Gergovia, had on the march been induced by its officers to declare for the insurgents; at the same time they had begun in the canton itself to plunder and kill the Romans settled there. Caesar, who had gone with two-thirds of the blockading army to meet that corps of the Haedui which was being brought up to Gergovia, had by his sudden appearance recalled it to nominal obedience; but it was more than ever a hollow and fragile relation, the continuance of which had been almost too dearly purchased by the great peril of the two legions left behind in front of Gergovia.
Caesar Defeated before Gergovia
Before entering however on this retreat, which was far from agreeable to his quick and confident temperament, he made yet a last attempt to free himself from his painful perplexity by a brilliant success. While the bulk of the garrison of Gergovia was occupied in intrenching the side on which the assault was expected, the Roman general watched his opportunity to surprise another access less conveniently situated but at the moment left bare. In reality the Roman storming columns scaled the camp-wall, and occupied the nearest quarters of the camp; but the whole garrison was already alarmed, and owing to the small distances Caesar found it not advisable to risk the second assault on the city-wall. He gave the signal for retreat; but the foremost legions, carried away by the impetuosity of victory, heard not or did not wish to hear, and pushed forward without halting, up to the city-wall, some even into the city. But masses more and more dense threw themselves in front of the intruders; the foremost fell, the columns stopped; in vain centurions and legionaries fought with the most devoted and heroic courage; the assailants were chased with very considerable loss out of the town and down the hill, where the troops stationed by Caesar in the plain received them and prevented greater mischief. The expected capture of Gergovia had been converted into a defeat, and the considerable loss in killed and wounded— there were counted 700 soldiers that had fallen, including 46 centurions—was the least part of the misfortune suffered.
Renewed Insurrection
Rising of the Haedui
Rising of the Belgae
The imposing position of Caesar in Gaul depended essentially on the halo of victory that surrounded him; and this began to grow pale. The conflicts around Avaricum, Caesar’s vain attempts to compel the enemy to fight, the resolute defence of the city and its almost accidental capture by storm bore a stamp different from that of the earlier Celtic wars, and had strengthened rather than impaired the confidence of the Celts in themselves and their leader. Moreover, the new system of warfare—the making head against the enemy in intrenched camps under the protection of fortresses—had completely approved itself at Lutetia as well as at Gergovia. Lastly, this defeat, the first which Caesar in person had suffered from the Celts crowned their success, and it accordingly gave as it were the signal for a second outbreak of the insurrection. The Haedui now broke formally with Caesar and entered into union with Vercingetorix. Their contingent, which was still with Caesar’s army, not only deserted from it, but also took occasion to carry off the depots of the army of Caesar at Noviodunum on the Loire, whereby the chests and magazines, a number of remount-horses, and all the hostages furnished to Caesar, fell into the hands of the insurgents. It was of at least equal importance, that on this news the Belgae, who had hitherto kept aloof from the whole movement, began to bestir themselves. The powerful canton of the Bellovaci rose with the view of attacking in the rear the corps of Labienus, while it confronted at Lutetia the levy of the surrounding cantons of central Gaul. Everywhere else too men were taking to arms; the strength of patriotic enthusiasm carried along with it even the most decided and most favoured partisans of Rome, such as Commius king of the Atrebates, who on account of his faithful services had received from the Romans important privileges for his community and the hegemony over the Morini. The threads of the insurrection ramified even into the old Roman province: they cherished the hope, perhaps not without ground, of inducing the Allobroges themselves to take arms against the Romans. With the single exception of the Remi and of the districts—dependent immediately on the Remi— of the Suessiones, Leuci, and Lingones, whose peculiar isolation was not affected even amidst this general enthusiasm, the whole Celtic nation from the Pyrenees to the Rhine was now in reality, for the first and for the last time, in arms for its freedom and nationality; whereas, singularly enough, the whole German communities, who in the former struggles had held the foremost rank, kept aloof. In fact, the Treveri, and as it would seem the Menapii also, were prevented by their feuds with the Germans from taking an active part in the national war.
Caesar’s Plan of War
Caesar Unites with Labienus
It was a grave and decisive moment, when after the retreat from Gergovia and the loss of Noviodunum a council of war was held in Caesar’s headquarters regarding the measures now to be adopted. Various voices expressed themselves in favour of a retreat over the Cevennes into the old Roman province, which now lay open on all sides to the insurrection and certainly was in urgent need of the legions that had been sent from Rome primarily for its protection. But Caesar rejected this timid strategy suggested not by the position of affairs, but by government-instructions and fear of responsibility. He contented himself with calling the general levy of the Romans settled in the province to arms, and having the frontiers guarded by that levy to the best of its ability. On the other hand he himself set out in the opposite direction and advanced by forced marches to Agedincum, to which he ordered Labienus to retreat in all haste. The Celts naturally endeavoured to prevent the junction of the two Roman armies. Labienus might by crossing the Marne and marching down the right bank of the Seine have reached Agedincum, where he had left his reserve and his baggage; but he preferred not to allow the Celts again to behold the retreat of Roman troops. He therefore instead of crossing the Marne crossed the Seine under the eyes of the deluded enemy, and on its left bank fought a battle with the hostile forces, in which he conquered, and among many others the Celtic general himself, the old Camulogenus, was left on the field. Nor were the insurgents more successful in detaining Caesar on the Loire; Caesar gave them no time to assemble larger masses there, and without difficulty dispersed the militia of the Haedui, which alone he found at that point
Position of the Insurgents at Alesia
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
Caesar in Front of Alesia
Siege of Alesia
Vercingetorix hastened the more to shut himself up in Alesia; and if Caesar was not disposed altogether to renounce the offensive, no course was left to him but for the third time in this campaign to proceed by way of attack with a far weaker force against an army encamped under a well-garrisoned and well-provisioned fortress and supplied with immense masses of cavalry. But, while the Celts had hitherto been opposed by only a part of the Roman legions, the whole forces of Caesar were united in the lines round Alesia, and Vercingetorix did not succeed, as he had succeeded at Avaricum and Gergovia, in placing his infantry under the protection of the walls of the fortress and keeping his external communications open for his own benefit by his cavalry, while he interrupted those of the enemy. The Celtic cavalry, already discouraged by that defeat inflicted on them by their lightly esteemed opponents, was beaten by Caesar’s German horse in every encounter. The line of circumvallation of the besiegers extending about nine miles invested the whole town, including the camp attached to it. Vercingetorix had been prepared for a struggle under the walls, but not for being besieged in Alesia; in that point of view the accumulated stores, considerable as they were, were yet far from sufficient for his army—which was said to amount to 80,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry—and for the numerous inhabitants of the town. Vercingetorix could not but perceive that his plan of warfare had on this occasion turned to his own destruction, and that he was lost unless the whole nation hastened up to the rescue of its blockaded general. The existing provisions were still, when the Roman circumvallation was closed, sufficient for a month and perhaps something more; at the last moment, when there was still free passage at least for horsemen, Vercingetorix dismissed his whole cavalry, and sent at the same time to the heads of the nation instructions to call out all their forces and lead them to the relief of Alesia. He himself, resolved to bear in person the responsibility for the plan of war which he had projected and which had miscarried, remained in the fortress, to share in good or evil the fate of his followers. But Caesar made up his mind at once to besiege and to be besieged. He prepared his line of circumvallation for defence also on its outer side, and furnished himself with provisions for a longer period. The days passed; they had no longer a boll of grain in the fortress, and they were obliged to drive out the unhappy inhabitants of the town to perish miserably between the entrenchments of the Celts and of the Romans, pitilessly rejected by both.
Attempt at Relief
Conflicts before Alesia
At the last hour there appeared behind Caesar’s lines the interminable array of the Celto-Belgic relieving array, said to amount to 250,000 infantry and 8000 cavalry, from the Channel to the Cevennes the insurgent cantons had strained every nerve to rescue the flower of their patriots and the general of their choice—the Bellovaci alone had answered that they were doubtless disposed to fight against the Romans, but not beyond their own bounds. The first assault, which the besieged of Alesia and the relieving troops without made on the Roman double line, was repulsed; but, when after a day’s rest it was repeated, the Celts succeeded—at a spot where the line of circumvallation ran over the slope of a hill and could be assailed from the height above— in filling up the trenches and hurling the defenders down from the rampart. Then Labienus, sent thither by Caesar, collected the nearest cohorts and threw himself with four legions on the foe. Under the eyes of the general, who himself appeared at the most dangerous moment, the assailants were driven back in a desperate hand-to-hand conflict, and the squadrons of cavalry that came with Caesar taking the fugitives in rear completed the defeat.
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
Five years afterwards he was led in triumph through the streets of the Italian capital, and, while his conqueror was offering solemn thanks to the gods on the summit of the Capitol, Vercingetorix was beheaded at its foot as guilty of high treason against the Roman nation. As after a day of gloom the sun may perhaps break through the clouds at its setting, so destiny may bestow on nations in their decline yet a last great man. Thus Hannibal stands at the close of the Phoenician history, and Vercingetorix at the close of the Celtic. They were not able to save the nations to which they belonged from a foreign yoke, but they spared them the last remaining disgrace—an
The Last Conflicts
With the Bituriges and Carnutes
The fall of Alesia and the capitulation of the army enclosed in it were fearful blows for the Celtic insurrection; but blows quite as heavy had befallen the nation and yet the conflict had been renewed. The loss of Vercingetorix, however, was irreparable. With him unity had come to the nation; with him it seemed also to have departed. We do not find that the insurgents made any attempt to continue their joint defence and to appoint another generalissimo; the league of patriots fell to pieces of itself, and every clan was left to fight or come to terms with the Romans as it pleased. Naturally the desire after rest everywhere prevailed. Caesar too had an interest in bringing the war quickly to an end. Of the ten years of his governorship seven had elapsed, and the last was called in question by his political opponents in the capital; he could only reckon with some degree of certainty on two more summers, and, while his interest as well as his honour required that he should hand over the newly-acquired regions to his successor in a condition of tolerable peace and tranquillity, there
With the Bellovaci
More serious resistance was offered by the Bellovaci, who in the previous year had kept aloof from the relief of Alesia; they seem to have wished to show that their absence on that decisive day at least did not proceed from want of courage or of love for freedom. The Atrebates, Ambiani, Caletes, and other Belgic cantons took part in this struggle; the brave king of the Atrebates Commius, whose accession to the insurrection the Romans had least of all forgiven, and against whom recently Labienus had even directed an atrocious attempt at assassination, brought to the Bellovaci 500 German horse, whose value the campaign of the previous year had shown. The resolute and talented Bellovacian Correus, to whom the chief conduct of the war had fallen, waged warfare as Vercingetorix had waged it, and with no small success. Although Caesar had gradually brought up the greater part of his army, he could neither bring the infantry of the Bellovaci to a battle, nor even prevent it from taking up other positions which afforded better protection against his augmented forces; while the Roman horse, especially the Celtic contingents, suffered most severe losses in various combats at the hands of the enemy’s cavalry, especially of the German cavalry of Commius. But after Correus had met his death in a skirmish with the Roman foragers, the resistance here too was broken; the victor proposed tolerable conditions, to which the Bellovaci along with their confederates submitted. The Treveri were reduced to obedience by Labienus, and incidentally the territory of the outlawed Eburones was once more traversed and laid waste. Thus the last resistance of the Belgic confederacy was broken.
On the Loire
The maritime cantons still made an attempt to defend themselves against the Roman domination in concert with their neighbours on the Loire. Insurgent bands from the Andian, Carnutic, and other surrounding cantons assembled on the lower Loire and besieged in Lemonum (Poitiers) the prince of the Pictones who was friendly to the Romans. But here too a considerable Roman force soon appeared against them; the insurgents abandoned the siege, and retreated with the view of placing the Loire between themselves and the enemy, but were overtaken on the march and defeated; whereupon the Carnutes and the other revolted cantons, including even the maritime ones, sent in their submission.
And in Uxellodunum
The resistance was at an end; save that an isolated leader of free bands still here and there upheld the national banner. The bold Drappes and the brave comrade in arms of Vercingetorix Lucterius, after the breaking up of the army united on the Loire, gathered together the most resolute men, and with these threw themselves into the strong mountain-town of Uxellodunum on the Lot,(50) which amidst severe and fatal conflicts they succeeded in sufficiently provisioning. In spite of the loss of their leaders, of whom Drappes had been taken prisoner, and Lucterius had been cut off from the town, the garrison resisted to the uttermost; it was not till Caesar appeared in person, and under his orders the spring from which the besieged derived their water was diverted by means of subterranean drains, that the fortress, the last stronghold of the Celtic nation, fell. To distinguish the last champions of the cause of freedom, Caesar ordered that the whole garrison should have their hands cut off and should then be dismissed, each one to his home. Caesar, who felt it all-important to put an end at least to open resistance throughout Gaul, allowed king Commius, who still held out in the region of Arras and maintained desultory warfare with the Roman troops there down to the winter of 703-704, to make his peace, and even acquiesced when the irritated and justly distrustful man haughtily refused to appear in person in the Roman camp. It is very probable that Caesar in a similar way allowed himself to be satisfied with a merely nominal submission, perhaps even with a de facto armistice, in the less accessible districts of the north-west and north-east of Gaul.(51)
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
Organization
Roman Taxation
As to administration in chief, the territories newly acquired by the governor of Narbonese Gaul remained for the time being united with the province of Narbo; it was not till Caesar gave up this office (710) that two new governorships—Gaul proper and Belgica—were formed out of the territory which he conquered. That the individual cantons lost their political independence, was implied in the very nature of conquest. They became throughout tributary to the Roman community. Their system of tribute however was, of course, not that by means of which the nobles and financial aristocracy turned Asia to profitable account; but, as was the case in Spain, a tribute fixed once for all was imposed on each individual community, and the levying of it was left to itself. In this way forty million sesterces (400,000 pounds) flowed annually from Gaul into the chests of the Roman government; which, no doubt, undertook in return the cost of defending the frontier of the Rhine. Moreover, the masses of gold accumulated in the temples of the gods and the treasuries of the grandees found their way, as a matter of course, to Rome; when Caesar offered his Gallic gold throughout the Roman empire and brought such masses of it at once into the money market that gold as compared with silver fell about 25 per cent, we may guess what sums Gaul lost through the war.
Indulgences towards Existing Arrangements
The former cantonal constitutions with their hereditary kings, or their presiding feudal-oligarchies, continued in the main to subsist after the conquest, and even the system of clientship, which made certain cantons dependent on others more powerful, was not abolished, although no doubt with the loss of political independence its edge was taken off. The sole object of Caesar was, while making use of the existing dynastic, feudalist, and hegemonic divisions, to arrange matters in the interest of Rome, and to bring everywhere into power the men favourably disposed to the foreign rule. Caesar spared no pains to form a Roman party in Gaul; extensive rewards in money and specially in confiscated estates were bestowed on his adherents, and places in the common council and the first offices of state in their cantons were procured for them by Caesar’s influence. Those cantons in which a sufficiently strong and trustworthy Roman party existed, such as those of the Remi, the Lingones, the Haedui, were favoured by the bestowal of a freer communal constitution—the right of alliance, as it was called—and by preferences in the regulation of the matter of hegemony. The national worship and its priests seem to have been spared by Caesar from the outset as far as possible; no trace is found in his case of measures such as were adopted in later times by the Roman rulers against the Druidical system, and with this is probably connected the fact that his Gallic wars, so far as we see, do not at all bear the character of religious warfare after the fashion which formed so prominent a feature of the Britannic wars subsequently.
Introduction of the Romanizing of the Country
While Caesar thus showed to the conquered nation every allowable consideration and spared their national, political, and religious institutions as far as was at all compatible with their subjection to Rome, he did so, not as renouncing the fundamental idea of his conquest, the Romanization of Gaul, but with a view to realize it in the most indulgent way. He did not content himself with letting the same circumstances, which had already in great part Romanized the south province, produce their effect likewise in the north; but, like a genuine statesman, he sought to stimulate the natural course of development and, moreover, to shorten as far as possible the always painful period of transition. To say nothing of the admission of a number of Celts of rank into Roman citizenship and even of several perhaps into the Roman senate, it was probably Caesar who introduced, although with certain restrictions, the Latin instead of the native tongue as the official language within the several cantons in Gaul, and who introduced the Roman instead of the national monetary system on the footing of reserving the coinage of gold and of denarii to the Roman authorities, while the smaller money was to be coined by the several cantons, but only for circulation within the cantonal
The Catastrophe of the Celtic Nation
Traits Common to the Celts and Irish
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
The Beginnings of Romanic Development
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
The Countries on the Danube
To complete the sketch of the relations of Rome to the peoples of the north at this period, it remains that we cast a glance at the countries which stretch to the north of the Italian and Greek peninsulas, from the sources of the Rhine to the Black Sea. It is true that the torch of history does not illumine the mighty stir and turmoil of peoples which probably prevailed at that time there, and the solitary gleams of light that fall on this region are, like a faint glimmer amidst deep darkness, more fitted to bewilder than to enlighten. But it is the duty of the historian to indicate also the gaps in the record of the history of nations; he may not deem it beneath him to mention, by the side of Caesar’s magnificent system of defence, the paltry arrangements by which the generals of the senate professed to protect on this side the frontier of the empire.
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
The turbulent peoples also, who had possession of the district along the Illyrian coast, gave their Roman masters constant employment. The Dalmatians, even at an earlier period the most considerable people of this region, enlarged their power so much by admitting their neighbours into their union, that the number of their townships rose from twenty to eighty. When they refused to give up once more the town of Promona (not far from the river Kerka), which they had wrested from the Liburnians, Caesar after the battle of Pharsalia gave orders to march against them; but the Romans were in the first instance worsted, and in consequence of this Dalmatia became for some time a rendezvous of the party hostile to Caesar, and the inhabitants in concert with the Pompeians and with the pirates offered an energetic resistance to the generals of Caesar both by land and by water.
Macedonia
Lastly Macedonia along with Epirus and Hellas lay in greater desolation and decay than almost any other part of the Roman empire. Dyrrhachium, Thessalonica, and Byzantium had still some trade and commerce; Athens attracted travellers and students by its name and its philosophical school; but on the whole there lay over the formerly populous little towns of Hellas, and her seaports once swarming with men, the calm of the grave. But if the Greeks stirred not, the inhabitants of the hardly accessible Macedonian mountains on the other hand continued after the old fashion their predatory raids and feuds; for instance about 697-698 Agraeans and Dolopians overran the Aetolian towns, and in 700 the Pirustae dwelling in the valleys of the Drin overran southern Illyria. The neighbouring peoples did likewise. The Dardani on the northern frontier as well as the Thracians in the east had no doubt been humbled by the Romans in the eight years’ conflicts from 676 to 683; the most powerful of the Thracian princes, Cotys, the ruler of the old Odrysian kingdom, was thenceforth numbered among the client kings of Rome. Nevertheless the pacified land had still as before to suffer invasions from the north and east. The governor Gaius Antonius was severely handled both by the Dardani and by the tribes settled in the modern Dobrudscha, who, with the help of the dreaded Bastarnae brought up from the left bank of the Danube, inflicted on him an important defeat (692-693) at Istropolis (Istere, not far from Kustendji). Gaius Octavius fought with better fortune against the Bessi and Thracians (694). Marcus Piso again (697-698) as general-in-chief wretchedly mismanaged matters; which was no wonder, seeing that for money he gave friends and foes whatever they wished. The Thracian Dentheletae (on the Strymon) under his governorship plundered Macedonia far and wide, and even stationed their posts on the great Roman military road leading from Dyrrhachium to Thessalonica; the people in Thessalonica made up their minds to stand a siege from them, while the strong Roman army in the province seemed to be present only as an onlooker when the inhabitants of the mountains and neighbouring peoples levied contributions from the peaceful subjects of Rome.
The New Dacian Kingdom
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
The Joint Rule of Pompeius and Caesar
Pompeius and Caesar in Juxtaposition
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
Pompeius and the Capital
Anarchy
But when Pompeius was appointed by the coalition to be ruler of the capital, he undertook a task far exceeding his powers. Pompeius understood nothing further of ruling than may be summed up in the word of command. The waves of agitation in the capital were swelled at once by past and by future revolutions; the problem of ruling this city—which in every respect might be compared to the Paris of the nineteenth century—without an armed force was infinitely difficult, and for that stiff and stately pattern-soldier altogether insoluble. Very soon matters reached such a pitch that friends and foes, both equally inconvenient to him, could, so far as he was concerned, do what they pleased; after Caesar’s departure from Rome the coalition ruled doubtless still the destinies of the world, but not the streets of the capital. The senate too, to whom there still belonged a sort of nominal government, allowed things in the capital to follow their natural course; partly because the section of this body controlled by the coalition lacked the instructions of the regents, partly because the angry opposition kept aloof out of indifference or pessimism, but chiefly because the whole aristocratic corporation began to feel at any rate, if not to comprehend, its utter impotence.
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
Clodius
The principal performer in this theatre of political rascality was that Publius Clodius, of whose services, as already mentioned,(2) the regents availed themselves against Cato and Cicero. Left to himself, this influential, talented, energetic and— in his trade—really exemplary partisan pursued during his tribunate, of the people (696) an ultra-democratic policy, gave the citizens corn gratis, restricted the right of the censors to stigmatize immoral burgesses, prohibited the magistrates from obstructing the course of the comitial machinery by religious formalities, set asidethe limitswhich had shortly before (690), for the purpose of checking the system of bands, been imposed on the right of association of the lower classes, and reestablished the “street-clubs” (-collegia compitalicia-) at that time abolished, which were nothing else than a formal organization—subdivided according to the streets, and with an almost military arrangement—of the whole free or slave proletariate of the capital. If in addition the further law, which Clodius had likewise already projected and purposed to introduce when praetor in 702, should give to freedmen and to slaves living in de facto possession of freedom the same political rights with the freeborn, the author of all these brave improvements of the constitution might declare his work complete, and as a second Numa of freedom and equality might invite the sweet rabble of the capital to see him celebrate high mass in honour of the arrival of the democratic millennium in the temple of Liberty which he had erected on the site of one of his burnings at the Palatine. Of course these exertions in behalf of freedom did not exclude a traffic in decrees of the burgesses; like Caesar himself, Caesar’s ape kept governorships and other posts great and small on sale for the benefit of his fellow-citizens, and sold the sovereign rights of the state for the benefit of subject kings and cities.
Quarrel of Pompeius with Clodius
At all these things Pompeius looked on without stirring. If he did not perceive how seriously he thus compromised himself, his opponent perceived it. Clodius had the hardihood to engage in a dispute with the regent of Rome on a question of little moment, as to the sending back of a captive Armenian prince; and the variance soon became a formal feud, in which the utter helplessness of Pompeius was displayed. The head of the state knew not how to meet the partisan otherwise than with his own weapons, only wielded with far less dexterity. If he had been tricked by Clodius respecting the Armenian prince, he offended him in turn by releasing Cicero, who was preeminently obnoxious to Clodius, from the exile into which Clodius had sent him; and he attained his object so thoroughly, that he converted his opponent into an implacable foe. If Clodius made the streets insecure with his bands, the victorious general likewise set slaves and pugilists to work; in the frays which ensued the general naturally was worsted by the demagogue and defeated in the street, and Gaius Cato was kept almost constantly under siege in his garden by Clodius and his comrades. It is not the least remarkable feature in this remarkable spectacle, that the regent and the rogue amidst their quarrel vied in courting the favour of the fallen government; Pompeius, partly to please the senate, permitted Cicero’s recall, Clodius on the other hand declared the Julian laws null and void, and called on Marcus Bibulus publicly to testify to their having been unconstitutionally passed.
Naturally no positive result could issue from this imbroglio of dark passions; its most distinctive character was just its utterly ludicrous want of object. Even a man of Caesar’s genius had to learn by experience that democratic agitation was completely worn out, and that even the way to the throne no longer lay through demagogism. It was nothing more than a historical makeshift, if now, in the interregnum between republic and monarchy, some whimsical fellow dressed himself out with the prophet’s mantle and staff which Caesar had himself laid aside, and the great ideals of Gaius Gracchus came once more upon the stage distorted into a parody; the so-called party from which this democratic agitation proceeded was so little such in reality, that afterwards it had not even a part falling to it in the decisive struggle. It cannot even be asserted that by means of this anarchical state of things the desire after a strong government based on military power had been vividly kindled in the minds of those who were indifferent to politics. Even apart from the fact that such neutral burgesses were chiefly to be sought outside of Rome, and thus were not directly affected by the rioting in the capital, those minds which could be at all influenced by such motives had been already by their former experiences, and especially by the Catilinarian conspiracy, thoroughly converted to the principle of authority; but those that were really
Pompeius in Relation to the Gallic Victories of Caesar
Little as Pompeius liked and understood taking the initiative, he was yet on this occasion compelled by the change of his position towards both Clodius and Caesar to depart from his previous inaction. The irksome and disgraceful situation to which Clodius had reduced him, could not but at length arouse even his sluggish nature to hatred and anger. But far more important was the change which took place in his relation to Caesar. While, of the two confederate regents, Pompeius had utterly failed in the functions which he had undertaken, Caesar had the skill to turn his official position to an account which left all calculations and all fears far behind. Without much inquiry as to permission, Caesar had doubled his army by levies in his southern province inhabited in great measure by Roman burgesses; had with this army crossed the Alps instead of keeping watch over Rome from Northern Italy; had crushed in the bud a new Cimbrian invasion, and within two years (696, 697) had carried the Roman arms to the Rhine and the Channel. In presence of such facts even the aristocratic tactics of ignoring and disparaging were baffled. He who had often been scoffed at as effeminate was now the idol of the army, the celebrated victory-crowned hero, whose fresh laurels outshone the faded laurels of Pompeius, and to whom even the senate as early as 697 accorded the demonstrations of honour usual after successful campaigns in richer measure than had ever fallen to the share of Pompeius. Pompeius stood towards his former adjutant precisely as after the Gabinio-Manilian laws the latter had stood towards him. Caesar was now the hero of the day and the master of the most powerful Roman army; Pompeius was an ex-general who had once been famous. It is true that no collision had yet occurred between father-in-law and son-in-law, and the relation was externally undisturbed; but every political alliance is inwardly broken up, when the relative proportions of the power of the parties are materially altered. While the quarrel with Clodius was merely annoying, the change in the position of Caesar involved a very serious danger for Pompeius; just as Caesar and his confederates had formerly sought a military support against him, he found himself now compelled to seek a military support against Caesar, and, laying aside his haughty privacy, to come forward as a candidate for some extraordinary magistracy, which would enable him to hold his place by the side of the governor
The Republican Opposition among the Public
The position of the senate also, or rather of the nobility generally, had meanwhile undergone a change. From the very fact of its complete abasement it drew fresh energy. In the coalition of 694 various things had come to light, which were by no means as yet ripe for it. The banishment of Cato and Cicero— which public opinion, however much the regents kept themselves in the background and even professed to lament it, referred with unerring tact to its real authors—and the marriage-relationship formed between Caesar and Pompeius suggested to men’s minds with disagreeable clearness monarchical decrees of banishment and family alliances. The larger public too, which stood more aloof from political events, observed the foundations of the future monarchy coming more and more distinctly into view. From the moment when the public perceived that Caesar’s object was not a modification of the republican constitution, but that the question at stake was the existence or non-existence of the republic, many of the best men, who had hitherto reckoned themselves of the popular party and honoured in Caesar its head, must infallibly have passed over to the opposite side. It was no longer in the saloons and the country houses of the governing nobilityalone that men talked of the “three dynasts,” of the “three-headed monster.” The dense crowds of people listened to the consular orations of Caesar without a sound of acclamation or approval; not a hand stirred to applaud when the democratic consul entered the theatre. But they hissed when one of the tools of the regents showed himself in public, and even staid men applauded when an actor utteredan anti-monarchic sentence or an allusion against Pompeius. Nay, when Cicero was to be banished, a great number of burgesses— it is said twenty thousand—mostly of the middle classes, put on mourning after the example of the senate. “Nothing is now more popular,” it is said in a letter of this period, “than hatred of the popular party.”
Attempts of the Regents to Check It
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
If Rome had had a representative constitution, the discontent of the burgesses would have found its natural expression in the elections, and have increased by so expressing itself; under the existing circumstances nothing was left for those true to the constitution but to place themselves under the senate, which, degraded as it was, still appeared the representative and champion of the legitimate republic. Thus it happened that the senate, now when it had been overthrown, suddenly found at its disposal an army far more considerable and far more earnestly faithful, than when in its power and splendour it overthrew the Gracchi and under the protection of Sulla’s sword restored the state. The aristocracy felt this; it began to bestir itself afresh. Just at this time Marcus Cicero, after having bound himself to join the obsequious party in the senate and not only to offer no opposition, but to work with all his might for the regents, had obtained from them permission to return. Although Pompeius in this matter only made an incidental concession
Helplessness of Pompeius
The helplessness of Pompeius in presence of these daring demonstrations, as well as the undignified and almost ridiculous position into which he had fallen with reference to Clodius, deprived him and the coalition of their credit; and the section of the senate which adhered to the regents, demoralized by the singular inaptitude of Pompeius and helplessly left to itself, could not prevent the republican-aristocratic party from regaining completely the ascendency in the corporation. The game of this party really at that time (697) was still by no means desperate for a courageous and dexterous player. It had now—what it had not possessed for a century past—a firm support in the people; if it trusted the people and itself, it might attain its object in the shortest and most honourable way. Why not attack the regents openly and avowedly? Why should not a resolute and eminent man at the head of the senate cancel the extraordinary powers as unconstitutional, and summon all the republicans of Italy to arms against the tyrants and their following? It was possible perhaps in this way once more to restore the rule of the senate. Certainly the republicans would thus play a bold game; but perhaps in this case, as often, the most courageous resolution might have been at the same time the most prudent. Only, it is true, the indolent aristocracy of this period was scarcely capable of so simple and bold a resolution. There was however another way perhaps more sure, at any rate better adapted to the character and nature of these constitutionalists; they might labour to set the two regents at variance and through this variance to attain ultimately to the helm themselves. The relations
Attempts of Pompeius to Obtain a Command through the Senate Administration of the Supplies of Corn
Things had taken such a turn as naturally to suggest an understanding between Pompeius and the republican party. Whether such an approximation was to take place, and what shape the mutual relations of the two regents and of the aristocracy, which had become utterly enigmatical, were next to assume, fell necessarily to be decided, when in the autumn of 697 Pompeius came to the senate with the proposal to entrust him with extraordinary official power. He based his proposal once more on that by which he had eleven years before laid the foundations of his power, the price of bread in the capital, which had just then—as previously to the Gabinian law—reached an oppressive height. Whether it had been forced up by special machinations, such as Clodius imputed sometimes to Pompeius, sometimes to Cicero, and these in their turn charged on Clodius, cannot be determined; the continuance of piracy, the emptiness of the public chest, and the negligent and disorderly supervision of the supplies of corn by the government were already quite sufficient of themselves, even without political forestalling, to produce scarcities of bread in a great city dependent almost solely on transmarine supplies. The plan of Pompeius was to get the senate to commit to him the superintendence of the matters relating to corn throughout the whole Roman empire, and, with a view to this ultimate object, to entrust him on the one hand with the unlimited disposal of the Roman state-treasure, and on the other hand with an army and fleet, as well as a command which not only stretched over the whole Roman empire, but was superior in each province to that of the governor—in short he designed to institute an improved edition of the Gabinian law, to which the conduct of the Egyptian war just then pending(3) would therefore quite as naturally have
Egyptian Expedition
Pompeius was nevertheless glad to have found at any rate a serious employment, and above all a fitting pretext for leaving the capital. He succeeded, moreover, in providing it with ampler and cheaper supplies, although not without the provinces severely feeling the reflex effect. But he had missed his real object; the proconsular title, which he had a right to bear in all the provinces, remained an empty name, so long as he had not troops of his own at his disposal. Accordingly he soon afterwards got a second proposition made to the senate, that it should confer on him the charge of conducting back the expelled king of Egypt, if necessary by force of arms, to his home. But the more that his urgent need of the senate became evident, the senators received
Attempt at an Aristocratic Restoration
Attack on Caesar’s Laws
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.
Conference of the Regents at Luca
Caesar, although receiving from day to day detailed accounts of the events in the capital and, whenever military considerations allowed, watching their progress from as near a point of his southern province as possible, had not hitherto, visibly at least interfered in them. But now war had been declared against him as well as his colleague, in fact against him especially; he was compelled to act, and he acted quickly. He happened to be in the very neighbourhood; the aristocracy had not even found it advisable to delay the rupture, till he should have again crossed the Alps. In the beginning of April 698 Crassus left the capital, to concert the necessary measures with his more powerful colleague; he found Caesar in Ravenna. Thence both proceeded to Luca, and there they were joined by Pompeius, who had departed from Rome soon after Crassus (11 April), ostensibly for the purpose of procuring supplies of grain from Sardinia and Africa. The most noted adherents of the regents, such as Metellus Nepos the proconsul of Hither Spain, Appius Claudius the propraetor of Sardinia, and many others, followed them; a hundred and twenty lictors, and upwards of two hundred senators were counted at this conference, where already the new monarchical senate was represented in contradistinction to the republican. In every respect the decisive voice lay with Caesar. He used it to re-establish and consolidate the existing joint rule on a new basis of more equal distribution of power of most importance in a military point of view, next to that of the two Gauls, were assigned to his two colleagues—that of the two Spains to Pompeius, that of Syria to Crassus; and these offices were to be secured to them by decree of the people for five years (700-704), and to be suitably provided for in a military and financial point of view. On the other hand Caesar stipulated for the prolongation of his command, which expired with the year 700, to the close of 705, as well as for the prerogative of increasing his legions to ten and of charging the pay for the troops arbitrarily levied by him on the state-chest. Pompeius and Crassus were moreover promised a second consulship for the next year (699) before they departed for their governorships, while Caesar kept it open to himself to administer the supreme magistracy a second time after the termination of his governorship in 706, when the ten years’ interval legally requisite between two consulships should have in his case elapsed.
Designs of Caesar in This Arrangement
That this whole settlement of the pending questions proceeded, not from a compromise among independent and rival regents meeting on equal terms, but solely from the good will of Caesar, is evident from the circumstances. Pompeius appeared at Luca in the painful position of a powerless refugee, who comes to ask aid from his opponent. Whether Caesar chose to dismiss him and to declare the coalition dissolved, or to receive him and to let the league continue just as it stood—Pompeius was in either view politically annihilated. If he did not in this case break with Caesar, he became the powerless client of his confederate. If on the other hand he did break with Caesar and, which was not very probable, effected even now a coalition with the aristocracy, this alliance between opponents, concluded under pressure of necessity and at the last moment, was so little formidable that it was hardly for the sake of averting it that Caesar agreed to those concessions. A serious rivalry on the part of Crassus with Caesar was utterly impossible. It is difficult to say what motives induced Caesar to surrender without necessity his superior position, and now voluntarily to concede—what he had refused to his rival even on the conclusion of the league of 694, and what the latter had since, with the evident design of being armed against Caesar, vainly striven in different ways to attain without, nay against, Caesar’s will—the second consulate and military power. Certainly it was not Pompeius alone that was placed at the head of an army, but also his old enemy and Caesar’s ally throughout many years, Crassus; and undoubtedly Crassus obtained his respectable military position merely as a counterpoise to the new power of Pompeius. Nevertheless Caesar was a great loser, when his rival
The Aristocracy Submits
It was now therefore the turn of the aristocracy to make good their high gage, and to wage war as boldly as they had boldly declared it. But there is no more pitiable spectacle than when cowardly men have the misfortune to take a bold resolution. They had simply exercised no foresight at all. It seemed to have occurred to nobody that Caesar would possibly stand on his defence, or that Pompeius and Crassus would combine with him afresh and more closely than ever. This seems incredible; but it becomes intelligible, when we glance at the persons who then led the constitutional opposition in the senate. Cato was still absent;(4) the most influential man in the senate at this time was Marcus Bibulus, the hero of passive resistance, the most obstinate and most stupid of all consulars. They had taken up arms only to lay them down, so soon as the adversary merely put his hand to the sheath; the bare news of the conferences in Luca sufficed to suppress all thought of a serious opposition and to bring the mass of the timid—that is, the immense majority of the senate— back to their duty as subjects, which in an unhappy hour they had abandoned. There was no further talk of the appointed discussion to try the validity of the Julian laws; the legions raised by Caesar on his own behalf were charged by decree of the senate on the public chest; the attempts on occasion of regulating the next consular provinces to take away both Gauls or one of them by decree from Caesar were rejected by the majority (end of May 698). Thus the corporation did public penance. In secret the individual lords, one after another, thoroughly frightened at their own temerity, came to make their peace and vow unconditional obedience— none more quickly than Marcus Cicero, who repented too late of his perfidy, and in respect of the most recent period of his life clothed himself with titles of honour which were altogether more appropriate than flattering.(5) Of course the regents agreed to be pacified; they refused nobody pardon, for there was nobody who was worth the trouble of making him an exception. That we may see how suddenly the tone in aristocratic circles changed after the resolutions of Luca became known, it is worth while to compare the pamphlets given forth by Cicero shortly before with the palinode which he caused to be issued to evince publicly his repentance and his good intentions.(6)
Settlement of the New Monarchical Rule
The regents could thus arrange Italian affairs at their pleasure and more thoroughly than before. Italy and the capital obtained practically a garrison although not assembled in arms, and one of the regents as commandant. Of the troops levied for Syria and Spain by Crassus and Pompeius, those destined for the east no doubt took their departure; but Pompeius caused the two Spanish provinces to be administered by his lieutenants with the garrison hitherto stationed there, while he dismissed the officers and soldiers of the legions which were newly raised—nominally for despatch to Spain—on furlough, and remained himself with them in Italy.
Doubtless the tacit resistance of public opinion increased, the more clearly and generally men perceived that the regents were working to put an end to the old constitution and with as much gentleness as possible to accommodate the existing condition of the government and administration to the forms of the monarchy; but they submitted, because they were obliged to submit. First of all all the more important affairs, and particularly all that related to military matters and external relations, were disposed of without consulting the senate upon them, sometimes by decree of the people, sometimes by the mere good pleasure of the rulers. The arrangements agreed on at Luca respecting the military command of Gaul were submitted directly to the burgesses by Crassus and Pompeius, those relating to Spain and Syria by the tribune of the people Gaius Trebonius, and in other instances the more important governorships were frequently filled up by decree of the people. That the regents did not need the consent of the authorities to increase their troops at pleasure, Caesar had already sufficiently shown: as little did they hesitate mutually to borrow troops; Caesar for instance received such collegiate support from Pompeius for the Gallic, and Crassus from Caesar for the Parthian, war. The Transpadanes, who possessed according to the existing constitution only Latin rights, were treated by Caesar during his administration practically as full burgesses of Rome.(7) While formerly the organization of newly-acquired territories had been managed by a senatorial commission, Caesar organized his extensive Gallic conquests altogether according to his own judgment, and founded, for instance, without having received any farther full powers burgess-colonies, particularly Novum-Comum (Como) with five thousand colonists. Piso conducted the Thracian, Gabinius the Egyptian, Crassus the Parthian war, without consulting the senate, and without even reporting, as was usual, to that body; in like manner triumphs and other marks of honour were accorded and carried out, without the senate being asked about them. Obviously this did not arise from a mere neglect of forms, which would be the less intelligible, seeing that in the great majority of cases no opposition from the senate was to be expected. On the contrary, it was a well-calculated design to dislodge the senate from the domain of military arrangements and of higher politics, and to restrict its share of administration to financial questions and internal affairs; and even opponents plainly discerned this and protested, so far as they could, against this conduct of the regents by means of senatorial decrees and criminal actions. While the regents thus in the main set aside the senate, they still made some use of the less dangerous popular assemblies—care was taken that in these the lords of the street should put no farther difficulty in the way of the lords of the state; in many cases however they dispensed even with this empty shadow, and employed without disguise autocratic forms.
The Senate under the Monarchy
Cicero and the Majority
The humbled senate had to submit to its position whether it would or not. The leader of the compliant majority continued to be Marcus Cicero. He was useful on account of his lawyer’s talent of finding reasons, or at any rate words, for everything; and there was a genuine Caesarian irony in employing the man, by means of whom mainly the aristocracy had conducted their demonstrations against the regents, as the mouthpiece of servility. Accordingly they pardoned him for his brief desire to kick against the pricks, not however without having previously assured themselves of his submissiveness in every way. His brother had been obliged to take the position of an officer in the Gallic army to answer in some measure as a hostage for him; Pompeius had compelled Cicero himself to accept a lieutenant-generalship under him, which furnished a handle for politely banishing him at any moment. Clodius had doubtless been instructed to leave him meanwhile at peace, but Caesar as little threw off Clodius on account of Cicero as he threw off Cicero on account of Clodius; and the great saviour of his country and the no less great hero of liberty entered into an antechamber-rivalry in the headquarters of Samarobriva, for the befitting illustration of which there lacked, unfortunately, a Roman Aristophanes. But not only was the same rod kept in suspense over Cicero’s head, which had once already descended on him so severely; golden fetters were also laid upon him. Amidst the serious embarrassment of his finances the loans of Caesar free of interest, and the joint overseership of those buildings which occasioned the circulation of enormous sums in the capital, were in a high degree welcome to him; and many an immortal oration for the senate was nipped in the bud by the thought of Caesar’s agent, who might present a bill to him after the close of the sitting. Consequently he vowed “in future to ask no more after right and honour, but to strive for the favour of the regents,” and “to be as flexible as an ear-lap.” They used him accordingly as—what he was good for— an advocate; in which capacity it was on various occasions his lot to be obliged to defend his very bitterest foes at a higher bidding, and that especially in the senate, where he almost regularly served as the organ of the dynasts and submitted the proposals “to which others probably consented, but not he himself”; indeed, as recognized leader of the majority of the compliant, he obtained even a certain political importance. They dealt with the other members of the governing corporation accessible to fear, flattery, or gold in the same way as they had dealt with Cicero, and succeeded in keeping it on the whole in subjection.
Cato and the Minority
Certainly there remained a section of their opponents, who at least kept to their colours and were neither to be terrified nor to be won. The regents had become convinced that exceptional measures, such as those against Cato and Cicero, did their cause more harm than good, and that it was a lesser evil to tolerate an inconvenient republican opposition than to convert their opponents into martyrs for the republic Therefore they allowed Cato to return (end of 698) and thenceforward in the senate and in the Forum, often at the peril of his life, to offer a continued opposition to the regents, which was doubtless worthy of honour, but unhappily was at the same time ridiculous. They allowed him on occasion of the proposals of Trebonius to push matters once more to a hand-to-hand conflict in the Forum, and to submit to the senate a proposal that the proconsul Caesar should be given over to the Usipetes and Tencteri on account of his perfidious conduct toward those barbarians.(8) They were patient when Marcus Favonius, Cato’s Sancho, after the senate had adopted the resolution to charge the legions of Caesar on the state-chest, sprang to the door of the senate-house and proclaimed to the streets the danger of the country; when the same person in his scurrilous fashion called the white bandage, which Pompeius wore round his weak leg, a displaced diadem; when the consular Lentulus Marcellinus, on being applauded, called out to the assembly to make diligent use of this privilege of expressing their opinion now while they were still allowed to do so; when the tribune of the people Gaius Ateius Capito consigned Crassus on his departure for Syria, with all the formalities of the theology of the day, publicly to the evil spirits. These were, on the whole, vain demonstrations of an irritated minority; yet the little party from which they issued was so far of importance, that it on the one hand fostered and gave the watchword to the republican opposition fermenting in secret, and on the other hand now and then dragged the majority of the senate, which ithal cherished at bottom quite the same sentiments with reference to the regents, into an isolated decree directed against them. For even the majority felt the need of giving vent, at least sometimes and in subordinate matters to their suppressed indignation, and especially—after the manner of those who are servile with reluctance—of exhibiting their resentment towards the great foes in rage against the small. Wherever it was possible, a gentle blow was administered to the instruments of the regents; thus Gabinius was refused the thanksgiving-festival that he asked (698); thus Piso was recalled from his province; thus mourning was put on by the senate, when the tribune of the people Gaius Cato hindered the elections for 699 as long as the consul Marcellinus belonging to the constitutional party was in office. Even Cicero, however humbly he always bowed before the regents, issued an equally envenomed and insipid
Continued Oppositon at the Elections
But if the guidance of the state was at the absolute disposal of the regents, there remained still a political domain separated in some measure from the government proper, which it was more easy to defend and more difficult to conquer; the field of the ordinary elections of magistrates, and that of the jury-courts. That the latter do not fall directly under politics, but everywhere, and above all in Rome, come partly under the control of the spirit dominating state-affairs, is of itself clear. The elections of magistrates certainly belonged by right to the government proper of the state; but, as at this period the state was administered substantially by extraordinary magistrates or by men wholly without title, and even the supreme ordinary magistrates, if they belonged to the anti-monarchical party, were not able in any tangible way to influence the state-machinery, the ordinary magistrates sank more and more into mere puppets—as, in fact, even those of them who were most disposed to opposition described themselves frankly and with entire justice as powerless ciphers—and their elections therefore sank into mere demonstrations. Thus, after the opposition had already been wholly dislodged from the proper field of battle, hostilities might nevertheless be continued in the field of elections and of processes. The regents spared no pains to remain victors also in this field. As to the elections, they had already at Luca settled between themselves the lists of candidates for the next years, and they left no means untried to carry the candidates agreed upon there. They expended their gold primarily for the purpose of influencing the elections. A great number of soldiers were dismissed annually on furlough from the armies of Caesar and Pompeius to take part in the voting at Rome. Caesar was wont himself to guide, and watch over, the election movements from as near a point as possible of Upper Italy. Yet the object was but very imperfectly attained. For 699 no doubt Pompeius and Crassus were elected consuls, agreeably to the convention of
And in the Courts
The jury-courts occasioned equally great difficulty to the regents. As they were then composed, while the senatorial nobility was here also influential, the decisive voice lay chiefly with the middle class. The fixing of a high-rated census for jurymen by a law proposed by Pompeius in 699 is a remarkable proof that the opposition to the regents had its chief seat in the middle class properly so called, and that the great capitalists showed themselves here, as everywhere, more compliant than the latter. Nevertheless the republican party was not yet deprived of all hold in the courts, and it was never weary of directing political impeachments, not indeed against the regents themselves, but against their prominent instruments. This warfare of prosecutions was waged the more keenly, that according to usage the duty of accusation belonged to the senatorial youth, and, as may readily be conceived, there was more of republican passion, fresh talent, and bold delight in attack to be found among these
On the whole, therefore, in the sphere of the popular elections and of the jury-courts it was the regents that fared worst. The factors which ruled in these were less tangible, and therefore more difficult to be terrified or corrupted than the direct organs of government and administration. The holders of power encountered here, especially in the popular elections, the tough energy of a close oligarchy—grouped in coteries—which is by no means finally disposed of when its rule is overthrown, and which is the more difficult to vanquish the more covert its action. They encountered here too, especially in the jury-courts, the repugnance of the middle classes towards the new monarchical rule, which with all the perplexities springing out of it they were as little able to remove. They suffered in both quarters a series of defeats. The election-victories of the opposition had, it is true, merely the value of demonstrations, since the regents possessed and employed the means of practically annulling any magistrate whom they disliked; but the criminal trials in which the opposition carried condemnations deprived them, in a way keenly felt, of useful auxiliaries. As things stood, the regents could neither set aside nor adequately control the popular elections and the jury-courts, and the opposition, however much it felt itself straitened even here, maintained to a certain extent the field of battle.
Literature of the Opposition
It proved, however, yet a more difficult task to encounter the opposition in a field, to which it turned with the greater zeal the more it was dislodged from direct political action. This was literature. Even the judicial opposition was at the same time a literary one, and indeed pre-eminently so, for the orations were regularly published and served as political pamphlets. The arrows of poetry hit their mark still more rapidly and sharply. The lively youth of the high aristocracy, and still more energetically perhaps the cultivated middle class in the Italian country towns, waged the war of pamphlets and epigrams with zeal and success. There fought side by side on this field the genteel senator’s son Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) who was as much feared in the character of an orator and pamphleteer as of a versatile poet, and the municipals of Cremona and Verona Marcus Furius Bibaculus (652-691) and Quintus Valerius Catullus (667-c. 700) whose elegant and pungent epigrams flew swiftly like arrows through Italy and were sure to hit their mark. An oppositional tone prevails throughout the literature of these years. It is full of indignant sarcasm against the “great Caesar,” “the unique general,” against the affectionate father-in-law and son-in-law, who ruin the whole globe in order to give their dissolute favourites opportunity to parade the spoils of the long-haired Celts through the streets of Rome, to furnish royal banquets with the booty of the farthest isles of the west, and as rivals showering gold to supplant honest youths at home in the favour of their mistresses. There is in the poems of Catullus(9) and the other fragments of the literature of this period something of that fervour of personal and political hatred, of that republican agony overflowing in riotous humour or in stern despair, which are more prominently and powerfully apparent in Aristophanes and Demosthenes.
The most sagacious of the three rulers at least saw well that it was as impossible to despise this opposition as to suppress it by word of command. So far as he could, Caesar tried rather personally to gain over the more notable authors. Cicero himself had to thank his literary reputation in good part for the respectful treatment which he especially experienced from Caesar; but the governor of Gaul did not disdain to conclude a special peace even with Catullus himself through the intervention of his father who had become personally known to him in Verona; and the young poet, who had just heaped upon the powerful general the bitterest and most personal sarcasms, was treated by him with the most flattering distinction. In fact Caesar was gifted enough to follow his literary opponents on their own domain and to publish— as an indirect way of repelling manifold attacks—a detailed report on the Gallic wars, which set forth before the public, with happily assumed naivete, the necessity and constitutional propriety of his military
New Exceptional Measures Resolved on
It became necessary to take serious steps against this opposition, which was powerless indeed, but was always becoming more troublesome and audacious. The condemnation of Gabinius, apparently, turned the scale (end of 700). The regents agreed to introduce a dictatorship, though only a temporary one, and by means of this to carry new coercive measures especially respecting the elections and the jury-courts. Pompeius, as the regent on whom primarily devolved the government of Rome and Italy, was charged with the execution of this resolve; which accordingly bore the impress of the awkwardness in resolution and action that characterized him, and of his singular incapacity of speaking out frankly, even where he would and could command. Already at the close of 700 the demand for a dictatorship was brought forward in the senate in the form of hints, and that not by Pompeius himself. There served as its ostensible ground the continuance of the system of clubs and bands in the capital, which by acts of bribery and violence certainly exercised the most pernicious pressure on the elections as well as on the jury-courts and kept it in a perpetual state of disturbance; we must allow that this rendered it easy for the regents to justify their exceptional measures. But, as may well be conceived, even the servile majority shrank from granting what the future dictator himself seemed to shrink from openly asking. When the unparalleled agitation regarding the elections for the consulship of 701 led to the most scandalous scenes, so that the elections were postponed a full year beyond the fixed time and only took place after a seven months’ interregnum in July 701, Pompeius found in this state of things the desired occasion for indicating now distinctly to the senate that the dictatorship was the only means of cutting, if not of loosing the knot; but the decisive word of command was not even yet spoken. Perhaps it would have still remained for long unuttered, had not the most audacious partisan of the republican opposition Titus Annius Milo stepped into the field at the consular elections for 702 as a candidate in opposition to the candidates of the regents, Quintus Metellus Scipio and Publius Plautius Hypsaeus, both men closely connected with Pompeius personally and thoroughly devoted to him.
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
The street leaders of the regents’ party—the tribunes of the people Titus Munatius Plancus, Quintus Pompeius Rufus, and Gaius Sallustius Crispus—saw in this occurrence a fitting opportunity to thwart in the interest of their masters the candidature of Milo and carry the dictatorship of Pompeius. The dregs of the populace, especially the freedmen and slaves, had lost in Clodius their patron and future deliverer;(11) the requisite excitement was thus easily aroused. After the bloody corpse had been exposed for show at the orators’ platform in the Forum and the speeches appropriate to the occasion had been made, the riot broke forth. The seat of the perfidious aristocracy was destined as a funeral pile for the great liberator; the mob carried the body to the senate-house,
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)
Changes of in the Arrangement of Magistracies and the Jury-System
Thus in legal possession of full power, Pompeius set to work and proceeded with energy against the republican party which was powerful in the clubs and the jury-courts. The existing enactments as to elections were repeated and enforced by a special law; and by another against electioneering intrigues, which obtained retrospective force for all offences of this sort committed since 684, the penalties hitherto imposed were augmented. Still more important was the enactment, that the governorships, which were by far the more important and especially by far the more lucrative half of official life, should be conferred on the consuls and praetors not immediately on their retirement from the consulate or praetorship, but only after the expiry of other five years; an arrangement which of course could only come into effect after four years, and therefore made the filling up of the governorships for the next few years substantially dependent on decrees of senate which were to be issued for the regulation of this interval, and thus practically on the person or section ruling the senate at the moment. The jury-commissions were left in existence,
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.
Humiliation of the Republicans
The scheme for the revival of the censorship failed, because among the servile majority of the senate no one possessed sufficient moral courage and authority even to become a candidate for such an office. On the other hand Milo was condemned by the jurymen (8 April 702) and Cato’s candidature for the consulship of 703was frustrated. The opposition of speeches and pamphlets received through the new judicial ordinance a blow from which it never recovered; the dreaded forensic eloquence was thereby driven from the field of politics, and thenceforth felt the restraints of monarchy. Opposition of course had not disappeared either from the minds of the great majority of the nation or even wholly from public life—to effect that end the popular elections, the jury-courts, and literature must have been not merely restricted, but annihilated. Indeed, in these very transactions themselves, Pompeius by his unskilfulness and perversity helped the republicans to gain even under his dictatorship several triumphs which he severely felt. The special measures, which the rulers took to strengthen their power, were of course officially characterized as enactments made in the interest of public tranquillity and order, and every burgess, who did not desire anarchy, was described as substantially concurring in them. But Pompeius pushed this transparent fiction so far, that instead of putting safe instruments into the
But, although the republicans were still stirring and were even refreshed by an isolated success here and there, chiefly through the blunders of Pompeius, the object which the regents had proposed to themselves in that dictatorship was on the whole attained, the reins were drawn tighter, the republican party was humbled, and the new monarchy was strengthened. The public began to reconcile themselves to the latter. When Pompeius not long after recovered from a serious illness, his restoration was celebrated throughout Italy with the accompanying demonstrations of joy which are usual on such occasions in monarchies. The regents showed themselves satisfied; as early as the 1st of August 702 Pompeius resigned his dictatorship, and shared the consulship with his client Metellus Scipio.
Death of Crassus—Rupture between the Joint Rulers
Crassus Goes to Syria
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.
Expedition against Parthia Resolved on
He found the Parthian war already commenced. The faithless conduct of Pompeius towards the Parthians has been already mentioned;(1) he had not respected the stipulated frontier of the Euphrates and had wrested several provinces from the Parthian empire for the benefit of Armenia, which was now a client state of Rome. King Phraates had submitted to this treatment; but after he had been murdered by his two sons Mithradates and Orodes, the new king Mithradates immediately declared war on the king of Armenia, Artavasdes, son of the recently deceased Tigranes (about 698).(2) This was at the same time a declaration of war against Rome; therefore as soon as the revolt of the Jews was suppressed, Gabinius, the able and spirited governor of Syria, led the legions over the Euphrates. Meanwhile, however, a revolution had occurred in the Parthian empire; the grandees of the kingdom, with the young, bold, and talented grand vizier at their head, had overthrown king Mithradates and placed his brother Orodes on the throne. Mithradates therefore made
Plan of the Campaign
The new Alexander, however, was in no haste. Before he carried into effect these great plans, he found leisure for very tedious and very lucrative collateral transactions. The temples of Derceto at Hierapolis Bambyce and of Jehovah at Jerusalem and other rich shrines of the Syrian province, were by order of Crassus despoiled of their treasures; and contingents or, still better, sums of money instead were levied from all the subjects. The military operations of the first summer were limited to an extensive reconnaissance in Mesopotamia; the Euphrates was crossed, the Parthian satrap was defeated at Ichnae (on the Belik to the north of Rakkah), and the neighbouring towns, including the considerable one of Nicephorium (Rakkah), were occupied, after which the Romans having left garrisons behind in them returned to Syria. They had hitherto been in doubt whether it was more advisable to march to Parthia by the circuitous route of Armenia or by the direct route through the Mesopotamian desert. The first route, leading through mountainous regions under the control of trustworthy allies, commended itself by its greater safety; king Artavasdes came in person to the Roman headquarters to advocate this plan of the campaign. But that reconnaissance decided in favour of the march through Mesopotamia. The numerous and flourishing Greek and half-Greek towns in the regions along the Euphrates and Tigris, above all the great city of Seleucia, were altogether averse to the Parthian rule; all the Greek townships
The Euphrates Crossed
Accordingly (701) the Euphrates was crossed (near Biradjik). To reach the Tigris from this point they had the choice of two routes; either the army might move downward along the Euphrates to the latitude of Seleucia where the Euphrates and Tigris are only a few miles distant from each other; or they might immediately after crossing take the shortest line to the Tigris right across the great Mesopotamian desert. The former route led directly to the Parthian capital Ctesiphon, which lay opposite Seleucia on the other bank of the Tigris; several weighty voices were raised in favour of this route in the Roman council of war; in particular the quaestor Gaius Cassius pointed to the difficulties of the march in the desert, and to the suspicious reports arriving from the Roman garrisons on the left bank of the Euphrates as to the Parthian warlike preparations. But in opposition to this the Arab prince Abgarus announced that the Parthians were employed in evacuating their western provinces. They had already packed up their treasures and put themselves in motion to flee to the Hyrcanians and Scythians; only through a forced march by the shortest route was it at all possible still to reach them; but by such a march the Romans would probably succeed in overtaking and cutting up at least the rear-guard of the great army under Sillaces and the vizier, and obtaining enormous spoil. These reports of the friendly Bedouins decided the direction of the march; the Roman army, consisting of seven legions, 4000 cavalry, and 4000 slingers and archers, turned off from the Euphrates and away into the inhospitable plains of northern Mesopotamia.
The March in the Desert
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
Roman and Parthian Systems of Warfare
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
To the question, under what circumstances this new style of tactics, the first national system that on its own proper ground showed itself superior to the Roman, arose among the Parthians, we unfortunately can only reply by conjectures. The lancers and mounted archers were of great antiquity in the east, and already formed the flower of the armies of Cyrus and Darius; but hitherto these arms had been employed only as secondary, and essentially to cover the thoroughly useless Oriental infantry. The Parthian armies also by no means differed in this respect from the other Oriental ones; armies are mentioned, five-sixths of which consisted of infantry. In the campaign of Crassus, on the other hand, the cavalry for the first time came forward independently, and this arm obtained quite a new application and quite a different value. The irresistible superiority of the Roman infantry in close combat seems to have led the adversaries of Rome in very different parts of the world independently of each other—at the same time and with similar success—to meet it with cavalry and distant weapons. What as completely successful with Cassivellaunus in Britain(6) and partially successful with Vercingetorix in Gaul(7)— what was to a certain degree attempted even by Mithradates Eupator(8)— the vizier of Orodes carried out only on a larger scale and more completely. And in doing so he had special advantages: for he found in the heavy cavalry the means of forming a line; the bow which was national in the east and was handled with masterly skill in the Persian provinces gave him an effective weapon for distant combat; and lastly the peculiarities of the country and the people enabled him freely to realize his brilliant idea. Here, where the Roman weapons of close combat and the Roman system of concentration yielded for the first time before the weapons of more distant warfare and the system of deploying, was initiated that military revolution which only reached its completion with the introduction of firearms.
Battle near Carrhae
Under such circumstances the first battle between the Romans and Parthians was fought amidst the sandy desert thirty miles to the south of Carrhae (Harran) where there was a Roman garrison, and at a somewhat less distance to the north of Ichnae. The Roman archers were sent forward, but retired immediately before the enormous numerical superiority and the far greater elasticity and range of the Parthian bows. The legions, which, in spite of the advice of the more sagacious officers that they should be deployed as much as possible against the enemy, had been drawn up in a dense square of twelve cohorts on each side, were soon outflanked and overwhelmed with the formidable arrows, which under such circumstances hit their man even without special aim, and against which the soldiers had no means of retaliation. The hope that the enemy might expend his missiles vanished with a glance at the endless range of camels laden with arrows. The Parthians were still extending their line. That the outflanking might not end in surrounding, Publius Crassus advanced to the attack with a select corps of cavalry, archers, and infantry of the line. The enemy in fact abandoned the attempt to close the circle, and retreated, hotly pursued by the impetuous leader of the Romans. But, when the corps of Publius had totally lost sight of the main army, the heavy cavalry made a stand against it, and the Parthian host hastening up from all sides closed in like a net round it. Publius, who saw his troops falling thickly and vainly around him under the arrows of the mounted archers, threw himself in desperation with his Celtic cavalry unprotected by any coats of mail on the iron-clad lancers of the enemy; but the death-despising valour of his Celts, who seized the lances with their hands or sprang from their horses to stab the enemy, performed its marvels in vain. The remains of the corps, including their leader wounded in the sword-arm, were driven to a slight eminence, where they only served for an easier mark to the enemy’s archers. Mesopotamian Greeks, who were accurately acquainted with the country, adjured Crassus to ride off with them and make an attempt to escape; but he refused to separate his fate from that of the brave men whom his too-daring courage had led to death, and he caused himself to be stabbed by the hand of his shield-bearer. Following his example, most of the still surviving officers put themselves to death. Of the whole division, about 6000 strong, not more than 500 were taken prisoners; no one was able to escape. Meanwhile the attack on the main army had slackened, and the Romans were but too glad to rest. When at length the absence of any tidings from the corps sent out startled them out of the deceitful calm, and they drew near to the scene of the battle for the purpose of learning its fate, the head of the son was displayed on a pole before his father’s eyes; and the terrible onslaught began once more against the main army with the same
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.
Departure from Carrhae
Surprise at Sinnaca
The squadrons of Parthian horsemen could not think of undertaking a siege of Carrhae. But the Romans soon voluntarily departed, whether compelled by want of provisions, or in consequence of the desponding precipitation of their commander-in-chief, whom the soldiers had vainly attempted to remove from the command and to replace by Cassius. They moved in the direction of the Armenian mountains; marching by night and resting by day Octavius with a band of 5000 men reached the fortress of Sinnaca, which was only a day’s march distant from the heights that would give shelter, and liberated even at the peril of his own life the commander-in-chief, whom the guide had led astray and given up to the enemy. Then the vizier rode in front of the Roman camp to offer, in the name of his king, peace and friendship to the Romans, and to propose a personal conference between the two generals. The Roman army, demoralized as it was, adjured and indeed compelled its leader to accept the offer. The vizier received the consular and his staff with the usual honours, and offered anew to conclude a compact of friendship; only, with just bitterness recalling the fate of the agreements concluded with Lucullus and Pompeius respecting the Euphrates boundary,(9) he demanded that it should be immediately reduced to writing. A richly adorned horse was produced; it was a present from the king to the Roman commander-in-chief; the servants of the vizier crowded round Crassus, zealous to mount him on the steed.
—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.
Consequences of the Defeat
The disaster, terrible in itself, seemed also as though it was to be dreadful in its consequences, and to shake the foundations of the Roman power in the east. It was among the least of its results that the Parthians now had absolute sway beyond the Euphrates; that Armenia, after having fallen away from the Roman alliance even before the disaster of Crassus, was reduced by it into entire dependence on Parthia; that the faithful citizens of Carrhae were bitterly punished for their adherence to the Occidentals by the new master appointed over them by the Parthians, one of the treacherous guides of the Romans, named Andromachus. The Parthians now prepared in all earnest to cross the Euphrates in their turn, and, in union with the Armenians and Arabs, to dislodge the Romans from Syria. The Jews and various other Occidentals awaited emancipation from the Roman rule there, no less impatiently than the Hellenes beyond the Euphrates awaited relief from the Parthian; in Rome civil war was at the door; an attack at this particular place and time was a grave peril. But fortunately for Rome the leaders on each side had changed. Sultan Orodes was too much indebted to the heroic prince, who had first placed the crown on his head and then cleared the land from the enemy, not to get rid of him as soon as possible by the executioner. His place as commander-in-chief of the invading army destined for Syria was filled by a prince, the king’s son Pacorus, with whom on account of his youth and inexperience the prince Osaces had to be associated as military adviser. On the other side the interim command in Syria in room of Crassus was taken up by the prudent and resolute quaestor Gaius Cassius.
Repulse of the Parthians
The Parthians were, just like Crassus formerly, in no haste to attack, but during the years 701 and 702 sent only weak flying bands, who were easily repulsed, across the Euphrates; so that Cassius obtained time to reorganize the army in some measure, and with the help of the faithful adherent of the Romans, Herodes Antipater, to reduce to obedience the Jews, whom resentment at the spoliation of the temple perpetrated by Crassus had already driven to arms. The Roman government would thus have had full time to send fresh troops for the defence of the threatened frontier; but this was left undone amidst the convulsions of the incipient revolution, and, when at length in 703 the great Parthian invading army appeared on the Euphrates, Cassius had still nothing to oppose to it but the two weak legions formed from the remains of the army of Crassus. Of course with these he could neither prevent the crossing nor defend the province. Syria was overrun by the Parthians, and all Western Asia trembled. But the Parthians did not understand the besieging of towns. They not only retreated from Antioch, into which Cassius had thrown himself with his troops, without having accomplished their object, but they
Impression Produced in Rome by the Defeat of Carrhae
In Rome meanwhile the periodical volcano of revolution was whirling upward its clouds of stupefying smoke. The Romans began to have no longer a soldier or a denarius to be employed against the public foe— no longer a thought for the destinies of the nations. It is one of the most dreadful signs of the times, that the huge national disaster of Carrhae and Sinnaca gave the politicians of that time far less to think and speak of than that wretched tumult on the Appian road, in which, a couple of months after Crassus, Clodius the partisan-leader perished; but it is easily conceivable and almost excusable. The breach between the two regents, long felt as inevitable and often announced as near, was now assuming such a shape that it could not be arrested. Like the boat of the ancient Greek mariners’ tale, the vessel of the Roman community now found itself as it were between two rocks swimming towards each other; expecting every moment the crash of collision, those whom it was bearing, tortured by nameless anguish, into the eddying surge that rose higher and higher were benumbed; and, while every slightest movement there attracted a thousand, eyes, no one ventured to give a glance to the right or the left.
The Good Understanding between the Regents Relaxed
After Caesar had, at the conference of Luca in April 698, agreed to considerable concessions as regarded Pompeius, and the regents had thus placed themselves substantially on a level, their relation was not without the outward conditions of durability, so far as a division of the monarchical power—in itself indivisible— could be lasting at all. It was a different question whether the regents, at least for the present, were determined to keep together and mutually to acknowledge without reserve
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.
The Old Party Names and the Pretenders
But however Pompeius might delay, the crisis was incessantly urged on by the mere force of circumstances.
The impending war was not a struggle possibly between republic and monarchy—for that had been virtually decided years before— but a struggle between Pompeius and Caesar for the possession of the crown of Rome. But neither of the pretenders found his account in uttering the plain truth; he would have thereby driven all that very respectable portion of the burgesses, which desired the continuance of the republic and believed in its possibility, directly into the camp of his opponent. The old battle-cries raised by Gracchus and Drusus, Cinna and Sulla, used up and meaningless as they were, remained still good enough for watchwords in the struggle of the two generals contending for the sole rule; and, though for the moment both Pompeius and Caesar ranked themselves officially with the so-called popular party, it could not be for a moment doubtful that Caesar would inscribe on his banner the people and democratic progress, Pompeius the aristocracy and the legitimate constitution.
The Democracy and Caesar
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 Aristocracy and Pompeius
This state of things would have decided the part of Pompeius in the impending struggle, even if apart from this it had not been self-evident that he could only enter into it as the general of the legitimate republic. Nature had destined him, if ever any one, to be a member of an aristocracy; and nothing but very accidental and very selfish motives had carried him over as a deserter from the aristocratic to the democratic camp. That he should now revert to his Sullan traditions, was not merely befitting in the case, but in every respect of essential advantage. Effete as was the democratic cry, the conservative cry could not but have the more potent effect, if it proceeded from the right man. Perhaps the majority, at any rate the flower of the burgesses, belonged to the constitutional party; and as respected its numerical and moral strength might well be called to interfere powerfully, perhaps decisively, in the impending struggle of the pretenders. It wanted nothing but a leader. Marcus Cato, its present head, did the duty, as he understood it, of its leader amidst daily peril to his life and perhaps without hope of success; his fidelity to duty deserves respect, but to be the last at a forlorn post is commendable in the soldier, not in the general. He had not the skill either to organize or to bring into action at the proper time the powerful reserve, which had sprung up as it were spontaneously in Italy for the party of the overthrown government; and he had for good reasons never made any pretension to the military leadership, on which everything ultimately depended. If instead of this man, who knew not how to act either as party-chief or as general, a man of the political and military mark of Pompeius should raise the banner of the existing constitution, the municipals of Italy would necessarily flock towards it in crowds, that under it they might help to fight, if not indeed for the kingship of Pompeius, at any rate against the kingship of Caesar.
To this was added another consideration at least as important. It was characteristic of Pompeius, even when he had formed a resolve, not to be able to find his way to its execution. While he knew perhaps how to conduct war but certainly not how to declare it, the Catonian party, although assuredly unable to conduct it, was very able and above all very ready to supply grounds for the war against the monarchy on the point of being founded. According to the intention of Pompeius, while he kept himself aloof, and in his peculiar way, now talked as though he would immediately depart for his Spanish provinces, now made preparations as though he would set out to take over the command on the Euphrates, the legitimate governing board, namely the senate, were to break with Caesar, to declare war against him, and to entrust the conduct of it to Pompeius, who then, yielding to the general desire, was to come forward as the protector of the constitution against demagogico-monarchical
The Republicans
Thus the republican opposition, after having been for years obliged to rest content with the part of a mere spectator and having hardly ventured to whisper, was now brought back once more to the political stage by the impending rupture between the regents. It consisted primarily of the circle which rallied round Cato— those republicans who were resolved to venture on the struggle for the republic and against the monarchy under all circumstances, and the sooner the better. The pitiful issue of the attempt made in 698(15) had taught them that they by themselves alone were not in a position either to conduct war or even to call it forth; it was known to every one that even in the senate, while the whole corporation with a few isolated exceptions was averse to monarchy, the majority would still only restore the oligarchic government if it might be restored without danger—in which case, doubtless, it had a good while to wait. In presence of the regents on the one hand, and on the other hand of this indolent majority, which desired peace above all things and at any price, and was averse to any decided action and most of all to a decided rupture with one or other of the regents, the only possible course for the Catonian party to obtain a restoration of the old rule lay in a coalition with the less dangerous of the rulers. If Pompeius acknowledged the oligarchic constitution and offered to fight for it against Caesar, the republican opposition might and must recognize him as its general, and in alliance with him compel the timid majority to a declaration of war. That Pompeius was not quite in earnest with his fidelity to the constitution, could indeed escape nobody; but, undecided as he was in everything, he had by no means arrived like Caesar at a clear and firm conviction that it must be the first business of the new monarch to sweep off thoroughly and conclusively the oligarchic lumber. At any rate the war would train a really republican army and really republican generals; and, after the victory over Caesar, they might proceed with more favourable prospects to set aside not merely oneof the monarchs, but the monarchy itself, which was in the course of formation. Desperate as was the cause of the oligarchy, the offer of Pompeius to become its ally was the most favourable arrangement possible for it.
Their League with Pompeius
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.
Passive Resistance of Caesar
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
On these views he acted. He armed certainly; the number of his legion was raised through new levies in the winter of 702-703 to eleven, including that borrowed from Pompeius. But at the same time he expressly and openly approved of Pompeius’ conduct during the dictatorship and the restoration of order in the capital which he had effected, rejected the warnings of officious friends as calumnies, reckoned every day by which he succeeded in postponing the catastrophe a gain, overlooked whatever could be overlooked and bore whatever could be borne— immoveably adhering only to the one decisive demand that, when his governorship of Gaul came to an end with 705, the second consulship, admissible by republican state-law and promised to him according to agreement by his colleague, should be granted to him for the year 706.
Preparation for Attacks on Caesar
This very demand became the battle-field of the diplomatic war which now began. If Caesar were compelled either to resign his office of governor before the last day of December 705, or to postpone the assumption of the magistracy in the capital beyond the 1st January 706, so that he should remain for a time between the governorship and the consulate without office, and consequently liable to criminal impeachment—which according to Roman law was only allowable against one who was not in office— the public had good reason to prophesy for him in this case the fate of Milo, because Cato had for long been ready to impeach him and Pompeius was a more than doubtful protector.
Attempt to Keep Caesar Out of the Consulship
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.
Attempt to Shorten Caesar’s Governorship
While in this way the shortening of Caesar’s governorship was only aimed at indirectly, the regulations issued at the same time as to the governorships sought the same object directly. The ten years for which the governorship had been secured to Caesar, in the last instance through the law proposed by Pompeius himself in concert with Crassus, ran according to the usual mode of reckoning from 1 March 695 to the last day of February 705. As, however, according to the earlier practice, the proconsul or propraetor had the right of entering on his provincial magistracy immediately after the termination of his consulship or praetorship, the successor of Caesar was to be nominated, not from the urban magistrates of 704, but from those of 705, and could not therefore enter before 1st Jan. 706. So far Caesar had still during the last ten months of the year 705 a right to the command, not on the ground of the Pompeio-Licinian law, but on the ground of the old rule that a command with a set term still continued after the expiry of the term up to the arrival of the successor. But now, since the new regulation of 702 called to the governorships not the consuls and praetors going out, but those who had gone out five years ago or more, and thus prescribed an interval between the civil magistracy and the command instead of the previous immediate sequence, there was no longer any difficulty in straightway filling up from another quarter every legally vacant governorship, and so, in the case in question, bringing about for the Gallic provinces the change of command on the 1st March 705, instead of the 1st Jan. 706. The pitiful dissimulation and procrastinating artifice of Pompeius are after a remarkable manner mixed up, in these arrangements, with the wily formalism and the constitutional erudition of the republican party. Years before these weapons of state-law could be employed, they had them duly prepared, and put themselves in a condition on the one hand to compel Caesar to the resignation of his command from the day when the term secured to him by Pompeius’ own law expired, that is from the 1st March 705, by sending successors to him, and on the other hand to be able to treat as null and void the votes tendered for him at the elections for 706. Caesar, not in a position to hinder these moves in the game, kept silence and left things to their own course.
Debates as to Caesar’s Recall
Gradually therefore the slow course of constitutional procedure developed itself. According to custom the senate had to deliberate on the governorships of the year 705, so far as they went to former consuls, at the beginning of 703, so far as they went to former praetors, at the beginning of 704; that earlier deliberation gave the first occasion to discuss the nomination of new governors for the two Gauls in the senate, and thereby the first occasion for open collision between the constitutional party pushed forward by Pompeius and the senatorial supporters of Caesar. The
The supporters of Caesar at this time—among whom Gaius Vibius Pansa, who was the son of a man proscribed by Sulla but yet had entered on a political career, formerly an officer in Caesar’s army and in this year tribune of the people, was the most notable— affirmed in the senate that both the state of things in Gaul and equity demanded not only that Caesar should not be recalled before the time, but that he should be allowed to retain the command along with the consulship; and they pointed beyond doubt to the facts, that a few years previously Pompeius had just in the same way combined the Spanish governorships with the consulate, that even at the present time, besides the important office of superintending the supply of food to the capital, he held the supreme command in Italy in addition to the Spanish, and that in fact the whole men capable of arms had been sworn in by him and had not yet been released from their oath.
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
In this sense accordingly the decrees of the senate were issued (29 Sept. 703). The filling up of the Gallic governorships was placed in the order of the day for the 1st March 704; but even now it was attempted to break up the army of Caesar—just as had formerly been done by decree of the people with the army of Lucullus(18)— by inducing his veterans to apply to the senate for their discharge. Caesar’s supporters effected, indeed, as far as they constitutionally could, the cancelling of these decrees by their tribunician veto; but Pompeius very distinctly declared that the magistrates were bound unconditionally to obey the senate, and that intercessions and similar antiquated formalities would produce no change. The oligarchical party, whose organ Pompeius now made himself, betrayed not obscurely the design, in the event of a victory, of revising the constitution in their sense and removing everything which had even the semblance of popular freedom; as indeed, doubtless for this reason, it omitted to avail itself of the comitia at all in its attacks directed against Caesar. The coalition between Pompeius and the constitutional party was thus formally declared; sentence too was already evidently passed on Caesar, and the term of its promulgation was simply postponed. The elections for the following year proved thoroughly adverse to him.
Counter-Arrangements of Caesar
During these party manoeuvres of his antagonists preparatory to war, Caesar had succeeded in getting rid of the Gallic insurrection and restoring the state of peace in the whole subject territory. As early as the summer of 703, under the convenient pretext of defending the frontier(19) but evidently in token of the fact that the legions in Gaul were now beginning to be no longer needed there, he moved one of them to North Italy. He could not avoid perceiving now at any rate, if not earlier, that he would not be spared the necessity of drawing the sword against his fellow-citizens; nevertheless, as it was highly desirable to leave the legions still for a time in the barely pacified Gaul,
Curio
For the discussions with the senate Caesar had succeeded in purchasing not only one of the two consuls of the year, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, but above all the tribune of the people Gaius Curio, probably the most eminent among the many profligate men of parts in this epoch;(21) unsurpassed in refined elegance, in fluent and clever oratory, in dexterity of intrigue, and in that energy which in the case of vigorous but vicious characters bestirs itself only the more powerfully amid the pauses of idleness; but also unsurpassed in his dissolute life, in his talent for borrowing— his debts were estimated at 60,000,000 sesterces (600,000 pounds)— and in his moral and political want of principle. He had previously offered himself to be bought by Caesar and had been rejected; the talent, which he thenceforward displayed in his attacks on Caesar, induced the latter subsequently to buy him up—the price was high, but the commodity was worth the money.
Debates as to the Recall of Caesar and Pompeius
Curio had in the first months of his tribunate of the people played the independent republican, and had as such thundered both against Caesar and against Pompeius. He availed himself with rare skill of the apparently impartial position which this gave him, when in March 704 the proposal as to the filling up of the Gallic governorships for the next year came up afresh for discussion in the senate; he completely approved the decree, but asked that it should be at the same time extended to Pompeius and his extraordinary commands. His arguments—that a constitutional
Caesar and Pompeius Both Recalled
The vote which could no longer be delayed on Curio’s proposal at length took place, and exhibited the defeat of the party of Pompeius and Cato in all its extent. By 370 votes against 20 the senate resolved that the proconsuls of Spain and Gaul should both be called upon to resign their offices; and with boundless joy the good burgesses of Rome heard the glad news of the saving achievement of Curio. Pompeius was thus recalled by the senate no less than Caesar, and while Caesar was ready to comply with the command, Pompeius positively refused obedience. The presiding consul Gaius Marcellus, cousin of Marcus Marcellus and like the latter belonging to the Catonian party, addressed a severe lecture to the servile majority; and it was, no doubt, vexatious to be thus beaten in their own camp and beaten by means of a phalanx of poltroons. But where was victory to come from under a leader, who, instead of shortly and distinctly dictating his orders to the senators, resorted in his old days a second time to the instructions of a professor of rhetoric, that with eloquence polished up afresh he might encounter the youthful vigour and brilliant talents of Curio?
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.
The Ultimatum of Caesar
Caesar had completely attained the object of devolving the initiative of civil war on his opponents. He had, while himself keeping on legal ground, compelled Pompeius to declare war, and to declare it not as representative of the legitimate authority, but as general of an openly revolutionary minority of the senate which overawed the majority. This result was not to be reckoned of slight importance, although the instinct of the masses could not and did not deceive itself for a moment as to the fact that the war concerned other things than questions of formal law. Now, when war was declared, it was Caesar’s interest to strike a blow as soon as possible. The preparations of his opponents were just beginning and even the capital was not occupied. In ten or twelve days an army three times as strong as the troops of Caesar that were in Upper Italy could be collected at Rome; but still it was not impossible to surprise the city undefended, or even perhaps by a rapid winter campaign to seize all Italy, and to shut off the best resources of his opponents before they could make them available. The sagacious and energetic Curio, who after resigning his tribunate (10 Dec. 704) had immediately gone to Caesar at Ravenna, vividly represented the state of things to his master; and it hardly needed such a representation to convince Caesar that longer delay now could only be injurious. But, as he with the view of not giving his antagonists occasion to complain had hitherto brought no troops to Ravenna itself, he could for the present do nothing but despatch orders to his whole force to set out with all haste; and he had to wait till at least the one legion stationed in Upper Italy reached Ravenna. Meanwhile he sent an ultimatum to Rome, which, if useful for nothing else, by its extreme submissiveness still farther compromised his opponents in public opinion, and perhaps even, as he seemed himself to hesitate, induced them to prosecute more remissly their preparations against him. In this ultimatum Caesar dropped all the counter-demands which he formerly made on Pompeius, and offered on his own part both to resign the governorship of Transalpine Gaul, and to dismiss eight of the ten legions belonging to him, at the term fixed by the senate; he declared himself content, if the senate would leave him either the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyria with one, or that of Cisalpine Gaul alone with two, legions, not, forsooth, up to his investiture with the consulship, but till after the close of the consular elections for 706. He thus consented to those proposals of accommodation, with which at the beginning of the discussions the senatorial party and even Pompeius himself had declared that they would be satisfied, and showed himself ready to remain in a private position from his election to the consulate down to his entering on office. Whether Caesar was in earnest with these astonishing concessions and had confidence that he should be able
Last Debate in the Senate
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
Caesar Marches into Italy
Now it was enough. When Caesar was informed by the tribunes who had fled to his camp entreating protection as to the reception which his proposals had met with in the capital, he called together the soldiers of the thirteenth legion, which had meanwhile arrived from its cantonments near Tergeste (Trieste) at Ravenna, and unfolded before them the state of things. It was not merely the man of genius versed in the knowledge and skilled in the control of men’s hearts, whose brilliant eloquence shone forth and glowed in this agitating crisis of his own and the world’s destiny; nor merely the generous commander-in-chief and the victorious general, addressing soldiers, who had been called by himself to arms and for eight years had followed his banners with daily-increasing enthusiasm. There spoke, above all, the energetic and consistent statesman, who had now for nine-and-twenty years defended the cause of freedom in good and evil times; who had braved for it the daggers of assassins and the executioners of the aristocracy, the swords of the Germans and the waves of the unknown ocean, without ever yielding or wavering; who had torn to pieces the Sullan constitution, had overthrown the rule of the senate, and had furnished the defenceless and unarmed democracy with protection and with arms by means of the struggle beyond the Alps. And he spoke, not to the Clodian public whose republican enthusiasm had been long burnt down to ashes and dross, but to the young men from the towns and villages of Northern Italy, who still felt freshly and purely the mighty influence of the thought of civic freedom; who were still capable of fighting and of dying for ideals; who had themselves received for their country in a revolutionary way from Caesar the burgess-rights which the government refused to them; whom Caesar’s fall would leave once more at the mercy of the -fasces-,
Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus
The Resources on Either Side
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.
Caesar’s Absolute Power within His Party
Caesar’s power rested primarily on the wholly unlimited authority which he enjoyed within his party. If the ideas of democracy and of monarchy met together in it, this was not the result of a coalition which had been accidentally entered into and might be accidentally dissolved; on the contrary it was involved in the very essence of a democracy without a representative constitution, that democracy and monarchy should find in Caesar at once their highest and ultimate expression. In political as in military matters throughout the first and the final decision lay with Caesar. However high the honour in which he held any serviceable instrument, it remained an instrument still; Caesar stood, in his own party without confederates, surrounded only by military-political adjutants, who as a rule had risen from the army and as soldiers were trained never to ask the reason and purpose of any thing, but unconditionally to obey. On this account especially, at the decisive moment when the civil war began, of all the officers and soldiers of Caesar one alone refused him obedience; and the circumstance that that one was precisely the foremost of them all, serves simply to confirm this view of the relation of Caesar to his adherents.
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
But the true soldier ought to be not merely capable, brave, and obedient, he ought to be all this willingly and spontaneously; and it is the privilege of gifted natures alone to induce the animated machine which they govern to a joyful service by means of example and of hope, and especially by the consciousness of being turned to befitting use. As the officer, who would demand valour from his troops, must himself have looked danger in the face with them, Caesar had even when general found opportunity of drawing his sword and had then used it like the best; in activity, moreover, and fatigue he was constantly far more exacting from himself than from his soldiers. Caesar took care that victory, which primarily no doubt brings gain to the general, should be associated also with personal hopes in the minds of the soldiers. We have already mentioned that he knew how to render
Above all things Caesar as a true commander understood how to awaken in every single component element, large or small, of the mighty machine the consciousness of its befitting application. The ordinary man is destined for service, and he has no objection to be an instrument, if he feels that a master guides him. Everywhere and at all times the eagle eye of the general rested on the whole army, rewarding and punishing with impartial justice, and directing the action of each towards the course conducive to the good of all: so that there was no experimenting or trifling with the sweat and blood of the humblest, but for that very reason, where it was necessary, unconditional devotion even to death was required. Without allowing each individual to see into the whole springs of action, Caesar yet allowed each to catch such glimpses of the political and military connection of things as to secure that he should be recognized—and it may be idealized—by the soldiers as a statesman and a general. He treated his soldiers throughout, not as his equals, but as men who are entitled to demand and were able to endure the truth, and who had to put faith in the promises and the assurances of their general, without thinking of deception or listening to rumours; as comrades through long years in warfare and victory, among whom there was hardly any one that was not known to him by name and that in the course of so many campaigns had not formed more or less of a personal relation to the general; as good companions, with whom he talked and dealt confidentially and with the cheerful elasticity peculiar to him; as clients, to requite whose services, and to avenge whose wrongs and death, constituted in his view a sacred duty. Perhaps there never was an army which was so perfectly what an army ought to be—a machine able for its ends and willing for its ends, in the hand of a master, who transfers to it his own elasticity. Caesar’s soldiers were, and felt themselves, a match for a tenfold superior force; in connection with which it should not be overlooked, that under the Roman tactics—calculated altogether for hand-to-hand conflict and especially for combat with the sword—the practised Roman soldier was superior to the novice in a far higher degree than is now the case under the circumstances of modern times.(3) But still more than by the superiority
Field of Caesar’s Power
Upper Italy
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
Provinces
In the provinces and the dependent states Caesar had even less influence than in Italy. Transalpine Gaul indeed as far as the Rhine and the Channel obeyed him, and the colonists of Narbo as well as the Roman burgesses elsewhere settled in Gaul were devoted to him; but in the Narbonese province itself the constitutional party had numerous adherents, and now even the newly-conquered regions were far more a burden than a benefit to Caesar in the impending civil war; in fact, for good reasons he made no use of the Celtic infantry at all in that war, and but sparing use of the cavalry. In the other provinces and the neighbouring half or wholly independent states Caesar had indeed attempted to procure for himself support, had lavished rich presents on the princes, caused great buildings to be executed in various towns, and granted to them in case of need financial and military assistance; but on the whole, of course, not much had been gained by this means, and the relations with the German and Celtic princes in the regions of the Rhine and the Danube,—particularly the connection with the Noric king Voccio, so important for the recruiting of cavalry,—were probably the only relations of this sort which were of any moment for him.
The Coalition
While Caesar thus entered the struggle only as commandant of Gaul, without other essential resources than efficient adjutants, a faithful army, and a devoted province, Pompeius began it as de facto supreme head of the Roman commonwealth, and in full possession of all the resources that stood at the disposal of the legitimate government of the great Roman empire. But while his position was in a political and military point of view far more considerable, it was also on the other hand far less definite and firm. The unity of leadership, which resulted of itself and by necessity from the position of Caesar, was inconsistent with the nature of a coalition; and although Pompeius, too much of a soldier to deceive himself as to its being indispensable, attempted to force it on the coalition and got himself nominated by the senate as sole and absolute generalissimo by land and sea, yet the senate
Field of Power of the Coalition
Juba of Numidia
While all the disadvantages incident to the coalition of powers naturally hostile were thus felt in an unusual measure by Caesar’s antagonists, this coalition was certainly still a very considerable power. It had exclusive command of the sea; all ports, all ships of war, all the materials for equipping a fleet were at its disposal. The two Spains—as it were the home of the power of Pompeius just as the two Gauls were the home of that of Caesar— were faithful adherents to their master and in the hands of able and trustworthy administrators. In the other provinces also, of course with the exception of the two Gauls, the posts of the governors and commanders had during recent years been filled up with safe men under the influence of Pompeius and the minority of the senate. The client-states throughout and with great decision took part against Caesar and in favour of Pompeius. The most important princes and cities had been brought into the closest personal relations with Pompeius in virtue of the different sections of his manifold activity. In the war against the Marians, for instance, he had been the companion in arms of the kings of Numidia and Mauretania and had reestablished the kingdom of the former;(5) in the Mithradatic war, in addition to a number of other minor principalities spiritual and temporal, he had re-established the kingdoms of Bosporus, Armenia, and Cappadocia, and created that of Deiotarus in Galatia;(6) it was primarily at his instigation that the Egyptian war was undertaken, and it was by his adjutant that the rule of the Lagids had been confirmed afresh.(7) Even the city of Massilia in Caesar’s own province, while indebted to the latter doubtless for various favours, was indebted to Pompeius at the time of the Sertorian war for a very considerable extension of territory;(8) and, besides, the ruling oligarchy there stood in natural alliance—strengthened by various mutual relations— with the oligarchy
Italy against Caesar
As to Italy the great majority of the burgesses were, as has been already mentioned, averse to Caesar—more especially, of course, the whole aristocracy with their very considerable following, but also in a not much less degree the great capitalists, who could not hope in the event of a thorough reform of the commonwealth to preserve their partisan jury-courts and their monopoly of extortion. Of equally anti-democratic sentiments were the small capitalists, the landholders and generally all classes that had anything to lose; but in these ranks of life the cares of the next rent-term and of sowing and reaping outweighed, as a rule, every other consideration.
The Pompeian Army
The army at the disposal of Pompeius consisted chiefly of the Spanish troops, seven legions inured to war and in every respect trustworthy; to which fell to be added the divisions of troops— weak indeed, and very much scattered—which were to be found in Syria, Asia, Macedonia, Africa, Sicily, and elsewhere. In Italy there were under arms at the outset only the two legions recently given off by Caesar, whose effective strength did not amount to more than 7000 men, and whose trustworthiness was more than doubtful, because—levied in Cisalpine Gaul and old comrades in arms of Caesar—they were in a high degree displeased at the unbecoming intrigue by which they had been made to change camps,(10) and recalled with longing their general who had magnanimously paid to them beforehand at their departure the presents which were promised to every soldier for the triumph. But, apart from the circumstance that the Spanish troops might arrive in Italy with the spring either by the
The state-treasury was at a low ebb as usual; they busied themselves in supplementing the inadequate amount of cash out of the local treasuries and even from the temple-treasures of the -municipia-.
Caesar Takes the Offensive
Under these circumstances the war opened at the beginning of January 705. Of troops capable of marching Caesar had not more than a legion—5000 infantry and 300 cavalry—at Ravenna, which was by the highway some 240 miles distant from Rome; Pompeius had two weak legions—7000 infantry and a small squadron of cavalry— under the orders of Appius Claudius at Luceria, from which, likewise by the highway, the distance was just about as great to the capital. The other troops of Caesar, leaving out of account the raw divisions of recruits still in course of formation, were stationed, one half on the Saone and Loire, the other half in Belgica, while Pompeius’ Italian reserves were already arriving from all sides at their rendezvous; long before even the first of the Transalpine divisions of Caesar could arrive in Italy, a far superior army could not but be ready to receive it there. It seemed folly, with a band of the strength of that of Catilina and for the moment without any effective reserve, to assume the aggressive against a superior and hourly-increasing army under an able general; but it was a folly in the spirit of Hannibal. If the beginning of the struggle were postponed till
Caesar’s Advance
Accordingly Caesar advanced into Italy.(15) Two highways led at that time from the Romagna to the south; the Aemilio-Cassian which led from Bononia over the Apennines to Arretium and Rome, and the Popillio-Flaminian, which led from Ravenna along the coast of the Adriatic to Fanum and was there divided, one branch running westward through the Furlo pass to Rome, another southward to Ancona and thence onward to Apulia. On the former Marcus Antonius advanced as far as Arretium, on the second Caesar himself pushed forward. Resistance was nowhere encountered; the recruiting officers of quality had no military skill, their bands of recruits were no soldiers, the inhabitants of the country towns were only anxious not to be involved in a siege. When Curio with 1500 men approached Iguvium, where a couple of thousand Umbrian recruits had assembled under the praetor Quintus Minucius Thermus, general and soldiers took to flight at the bare tidings of his approach; and similar results on a small scale everywhere ensued.
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.
Conflicts in Picenum
Everything depended on whether Picenum would hold out until Pompeius should come up to its defence. Already Caesar with his reunited army had penetrated into it along the coast road by way of Ancona. Here too the preparations were in full course; in the very northernmost Picenian town Auximum a considerable band of recruits was collected under Publius Attius Varus; but at the entreaty of the municipality Varus evacuated the town even before Caesar appeared, and a handful of Caesar’s soldiers which overtook the troop not far from Auximum totally dispersed it after a brief conflict— the first in this war. In like manner soon afterwards Gaius Lucilius Hirrus with 3000 men evacuated Camerinum, and Publius Lentulus Spinther with 5000 Asculum. The men, thoroughly devoted to Pompeius, willingly for the most part abandoned their houses and farms, and followed their leaders over the frontier; but the district itself was already lost, when the officer sent by Pompeius for the temporary conduct of the defence, Lucius Vibullius Rufus—no genteel senator, but a soldier experienced in war—arrived there; he had to content himself with taking the six or seven thousand recruits who were saved away from the incapable recruiting officers, and conducting them for the time to the nearest rendezvous.
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.
Pompeius Goes to Brundisium
Embarkation for Greece
Pompeius had given up Italy as lost, so soon as Caesar had occupied Picenum; only he wished to delay his embarkation as long as possible, with the view of saving so much of his force as could still be saved. Accordingly he had slowly put himself in motion for the nearest seaport Brundisium. Thither came the two legions of Luceria and such recruits as Pompeius had been able hastily to collect in the deserted Apulia, as well as the troops raised by the consuls and other commissioners in Campania and conducted in all haste to Brundisium; thither too resorted a number of political fugitives, including the most respected of the senators accompanied by their families. The embarkation began; but the vessels at hand did not suffice to transport all at once the whole multitude, which still amounted to 25,000 persons. No course remained but to divide the army. The larger half went first (4 March); with the smaller division of some 10,000 men Pompeius awaited at Brundisium the return of the fleet; for, however desirable the possession of Brundisium might be for an eventual attempt to reoccupy Italy, they did not presume to hold the place permanently against Caesar. Meanwhile Caesar arrived before Brundisium; the siege began. Caesar attempted first of all to close the mouth of the harbour by moles and floating bridges, with a view to exclude the returning fleet; but Pompeius caused the trading vessels lying in the harbour to be armed, and managed to prevent the complete closing of the harbour until the fleet appeared and the troops—whom Pompeius with great dexterity, in spite of the vigilance of the besiegers and the hostile feeling of the inhabitants, withdrew from the town to the last man unharmed—were carried off beyond Caesar’s reach to Greece (17 March). The further pursuit, like the siege itself, failed for want of a fleet.
In a campaign of two months, without a single serious engagement, Caesar had so broken up an army of ten legions, that less than the half of it had with great difficulty escaped in a confused flight across the sea, and the whole Italian peninsula, including the capital with the state-chest and all the stores accumulated there, had fallen into the power of the victor. Not without reason did the beaten party bewail the terrible rapidity, sagacity, and energy of the “monster.”
Military and Financial Results of the Seizure of Italy
But it may be questioned whether Caesar gained or lost more by the conquest of Italy. In a military respect, no doubt, very considerable resources were now not merely withdrawn from his opponents, but rendered available for himself; even in the spring of 705 his army embraced, in consequence of the levies en masse instituted everywhere, a considerable number of legions of recruits in addition to the nine old ones But on the other hand it now became necessary not merely to leave behind a considerable garrison in Italy, but
Its Political Results
Fear of Anarchy
More serious difficulties still were created by the political relations amidst which Caesar found himself placed on the conquest of Italy. The apprehension of an anarchical revolution was universal among the propertied classes. Friends and foes saw in Caesar a second Catilina; Pompeius believed or affected to believe that Caesar had been driven to civil war merely by the impossibility of paying his debts. This was certainly absurd; but in fact Caesar’s antecedents were anything but reassuring, and still less reassuring was the aspect of the retinue that now surrounded him. Individuals of the most broken reputation, notorious personages like Quintus Hortensius, Gaius Curio, Marcus Antonius,— the latter the stepson of the Catilinarian Lentulus who was executed by the orders of Cicero—were the most prominent actors in it; the highest posts of trust were bestowed on men who had long ceased even to reckon up their debts; people saw men who held office under Caesar not merely keeping dancing-girls—which was done by others also—but appearing publicly in company with them. Was there any wonder, that even grave and politically impartial men expected amnesty for all exiled criminals, cancelling of creditors’ claims, comprehensive mandates of confiscation, proscription, and murder, nay, even a plundering of Rome by the Gallic soldiery?
Dispelled by Caesar
But in this respect the “monster” deceived the expectations of his foes as well as of his friends. As soon even as Caesar occupied the first Italian town, Ariminum, he prohibited all common soldiers from appearing armed within the walls; the country towns were protected from all injury throughout and without distinction, whether they had given him a friendly or hostile reception. When the mutinous garrison surrendered Corfinium late in the evening, he in the face of every military consideration postponed the occupation of the town till the following morning,
Threats of the Emigrants
The Mass of Quiet People Gained for Caesar
But, if the aristocracy had previously refused to listen to any reconciliation, the unexpected emigration of a kind so disgraceful had raised their wrath to madness, and the wild vengeance breathed by the beaten contrasted strangely with the placability of the victor. The communications regularly coming from the camp of the emigrants to their friends left behind in Italy were full of projects for confiscations and proscriptions, of plans for purifying the senate and the state, compared with which the restoration of Sulla was child’s play, and which even the moderate men of their own party heard with horror. The frantic passion of impotence, the wise moderation of power, produced their effect. The whole mass, in whose eyes material interests were superior to political, threw itself into the arms of Caesar. The country towns idolized “the uprightness, the moderation, the prudence” of the victor; and even opponents conceded that these demonstrations of respect were meant in earnest. The great capitalists, farmers of the taxes, and jurymen, showed no special desire, after the severe shipwreck which had befallen the constitutional party in Italy, to entrust themselves farther to the same pilots; capital came once more to the light, and “the rich lords resorted again to their daily task of writing their rent-rolls.” Even the great majority of the senate, at least numerically speaking—for certainly but few of the nobler and more influential members of the senate were included in it—had
Indignation of the Anarchist Party against Caesar
The Republican Party in Italy
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
Very soon he experienced remarkable treatment in this respect at the hands of the senate. Caesar had begun the struggle to liberate the overawed senate from its oppressors. This was done; consequently he wished to obtain from the senate approval of what had been done, and full powers for the continuance of the war. for this purpose, when Caesar appeared before the capital (end of March) the tribunes of the people belonging to his party convoked for him the senate (1 April). The meeting was tolerably numerous, but the more notable of the very senators that remained in Italy were absent, including even the former leader of the servile majority Marcus Cicero and Caesar’s own father-in-law Lucius Piso; and, what was worse, those who did appear were not inclined to enter into Caesar’s proposals. When Caesar spoke of full power to continue the war, one of the only two consulars present, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, a very timid man who desired nothing but a quiet death in his bed, was of opinion that Caesar would deserve well of his country if he should abandon the thought of carrying the war to Greece and Spain. When Caesar thereupon requested the senate at least to be the medium of transmitting his peace proposals to Pompeius, they were not indeed opposed to that course in itself, but the threats of the emigrants against the neutrals had so terrified the latter, that no one was found to undertake the message of peace. Through the disinclination of the aristocracy to help the erection of the monarch’s throne, and through the same inertness of the dignified corporation, by means of which Caesar had shortly before frustrated the legal nomination of Pompeius as generalissimo in the civil war, he too was now thwarted when making a like request. Other impediments, moreover, occurred. Caesar desired, with the view of regulating in some sort of way his position, to be named as dictator; but his wish was not complied with, because such a magistrate could only be constitutionally appointed by one of the consuls, and the attempt of Caesar to buy the consul Lentulus—of which owing to the disordered condition of his finances there was a good prospect—nevertheless proved a failure. The tribune of the people Lucius Metellus, moreover, lodged a protest against all the steps of the proconsul, and made signs as though he would protect with his person the public chest, when Caesar’s men came to empty it. Caesar could not avoid in this case ordering that the inviolable person should be pushed aside as gently as possible; otherwise, he kept by his purpose of abstaining from all violent steps. He declared to the senate, just as the constitutional party had done shortly before, that he had certainly desired to regulate things in a legal way and with the help of the supreme authority; but, since this help was refused, he could dispense with it.
Provisional Arrangement of the Affairs of the Capital
The Provinces
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
Caesar hastened to resume the war. He owed his successes hitherto to the offensive, and he intended still to maintain it. The position of his antagonist was singular. After the original plan of carrying on the campaign simultaneously in the two Gauls by offensive operations from the bases of Italy and Spain had been frustrated by Caesar’s aggressive, Pompeius had intended to go to Spain. There he had a very strong position. The army amounted to seven legions; a large number of Pompeius’ veterans served in it, and several years of conflicts in the Lusitanian mountains had hardened soldiers and officers. Among its captains Marcus Varro indeed was simply a celebrated scholar and a faithful partisan; but Lucius Afranius had fought with distinction in the east and in the Alps, and Marcus Petreius, the conqueror of Catilina, was an officer as dauntless as he was able. While in the Further province Caesar had still various adherents from the time of his governorship there,(18) the more important province of the Ebrowas attached by all the ties of veneration and gratitude to the celebrated general, who twenty years before had held the command in it during the Sertorian war, and after the termination of that war had organized it anew. Pompeius could evidently after the Italian disaster do nothing better than proceed to Spain with the saved remnant of his army, and then at the head of his whole force advance to meet Caesar. But unfortunately he had, in the hope of being able still to save the troops that were in Corfinium, tarried in Apuli so long that he was compelled to choose the nearer Brundisium as his place of embarkation instead of the Campanian ports. Why, master as he was of the sea and Sicily, he did not subsequently revert to his original plan, cannot be determined; whether it was that perhaps the aristocracy after their short-sighted and distrustful fashion showed no desire to entrust themselves to the Spanish troops and the Spanish population, it is enough to say that Pompeius remained in the east, and Caesar had the option of directing his first attack either
Massilia against Caesar
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 Occupies the Pyrenees Position at Ilerda
Meanwhile Caesar himself arrived in Gaul and, as the commencement of the siege of Massilia still detained him in person, he immediately despatched the greater part of his troops assembled on the Rhone—six legions and the cavalry—along the great road leading by way of Narbo (Narbonne) to Rhode (Rosas) with the view of anticipating the enemy at the Pyrenees. The movement was successful; when Afranius and Petreius arrived at the passes, they found them already occupied by the Caesarians and the line of the Pyrenees lost. They then took up a position at Ilerda (Lerida) between the Pyrenees and the Ebro. This town lies twenty miles to the north of the Ebro on the right bank of one of its tributaries, the Sicoris (Segre), which was crossed by only a single solid bridge immediately at Ilerda. To the south of Ilerda the mountains which adjoin the left bank of the Ebro approach pretty close to the town; to the northward there stretches on both sides of the Sicoris a level country which is commanded by the hill on which the town is built. For an army, which had to submit to a siege, it was an excellent position; but the defence of Spain, after the occupation of the line of the Pyrenees had been neglected, could only be undertaken in earnest behind the Ebro, and, as no secure communication was established between Ilerda and the Ebro, and no bridge existed over the latter stream, the retreat from the temporary to the true defensive position was not sufficiently
Caesar Cut Off
When the floods came on with the melting of the snow, these temporary bridges were swept away; and, as they had no vessels for the passage of the highly swollen rivers and under such circumstance the restoration of the bridges could not for the present be thought of, the Caesarian army was confined to the narrow space between the Cinca and the Sicoris, while the left bank of the Sicoris and with it the road, by which the army communicated with Gaul and Italy, were exposed almost undefended to the Pompeians, who passed the river partly by the town-bridge, partly by swimming after the Lusitanian fashion on skins. It was the season shortly before harvest; the old produce was almost used up, the new was not yet gathered, and the narrow stripe of land between the two streams was soon exhausted. In the camp actual famine prevailed—the -modius- of wheat cost 50 -denarii-(1 pound 16 shillings)—and dangerous diseases broke out; whereas on the left bank there were accumulated provisions and varied supplies, as well as troops of all sorts—reinforcements from Gaul of cavalry and archers, officers and soldiers from furlough, foraging parties returning—in all a mass of 6000 men, whom the Pompeians attacked with superior force and drove with great loss to the mountains, while the Caesarians on the right bank were obliged to remain passive spectators of the unequal conflict. The communications of the army were in the hands of the Pompeians; in Italy the accounts from Spain suddenly ceased, and the suspicious rumours, which began to circulate there, were not so very remote from the truth. Had the Pompeians followed up their advantage with some energy, they could not have failed either to reduce under their power or at least to drive back towards Gaul the mass scarcely capable of resistance which was crowded together on the left bank of the Sicoris, and to occupy this bank so completely that not a man could cross the river without their knowledge. But both points were neglected; those bands were doubtless pushed aside with loss but neither destroyed nor completely beaten back, and the prevention of the crossing of the river was left substantially to the river itself,
Thereupon Caesar formed his plan. He ordered portable boats of a light wooden frame and osier work lined with leather, after the model of those used in the Channel among the Britons and subsequently by the Saxons, to be prepared in the camp and transported in waggons to the point where the bridges had stood. On these frail barks the other bank was reached and, as it was found unoccupied, the bridge was re-established without much difficulty; the road in connection with it was thereupon quickly cleared, and the eagerly-expected supplies were conveyed to the camp. Caesar’s happy idea thus rescued the army from the immense peril in which it was placed. Then the cavalry of Caesar which in efficiency far surpassed that of the enemy began at once to scour the country on the left bank of the Sicoris; the most considerable Spanish communities between the Pyrenees and the Ebro—Osca, Tarraco, Dertosa, and others—nay, even several to the south of the Ebro, passed over to Caesar’s side.
Retreat of the Pompeians from Ilerda
The supplies of the Pompeians were now rendered scarce through the foraging parties of Caesar and the defection of the neighbouring communities; they resolved at length to retire behind the line of the Ebro, and set themselves in all haste to form a bridge of boats over the Ebro below the mouth of the Sicoris. Caesar sought to cut off the retreat of his opponents over the Ebro and to detain them in Ilerda; but so long as the enemy remained in possession of the bridge at Ilerda and he had control of neither ford nor bridge there, he could not distribute his army over both banks of the river and could not invest Ilerda. His soldiers therefore worked day and night to lower the depth of the river by means of canals drawing off the water, so that the infantry could wade through it. But the preparations of the Pompeians to pass the Ebro were sooner finished than the arrangements of the Caesarians for investing Ilerda; when the former after finishing the bridge of boats began their march towards the Ebro along the left bank of the Sicoris, the canals of the Caesarians seemed to the general not yet far enough advanced to make the ford available for the infantry; he ordered only his cavalry to pass the stream and, by clinging to the rear of the enemy, at least to detain and harass them.
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.
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
Capitulation of the Pompeians
No bravery and no fidelity could longer avert the inevitable capitulation (2 Aug. 705). Caesar granted to officers and soldiers their life and liberty, and the possession of the property which they still retained as well as the restoration of what had been already taken from them, the full value of which he undertook personally to make good to his soldiers; and not only so, but while he had compulsorily enrolled in his army the recruits captured in Italy, he honoured these old legionaries of Pompeius by the promise that no one should be compelled against his will to enter Caesar’s army. He required only that each should give up his arms and repair to his home. Accordingly the soldiers who were natives of Spain, about a third of the army, were disbanded at once, while the Italian soldiers were discharged on the borders of Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul.
Further Spain Submits
Hither Spain on the breaking up of this army fell of itself into the power of the victor. In Further Spain, where Marcus Varro held the chief command for Pompeius, it seemed to him, when he learned the disaster of Ilerda, most advisable that he should throw himself into the insular town of Gades and should carry thither for safety the considerable sums which he had collected by confiscating the treasures of the temples and the property of prominent Caesarians, the not inconsiderable fleet which he had raised, and the two legions entrusted to him. But on the mere rumour of Caesar’s arrival the most notable towns of the province which had been for long attached to Caesar declared for the latter and drove away the Pompeian garrisons or induced them to a similar revolt; such was the case with Corduba, Carmo, and Gades itself. One of the legions also set out of its own accord for Hispalis, and passed over along with this town to Caesar’s side. When at length even Italica closed its gates against Varro, the latter resolved to capitulate.
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
When Caesar on his return from the conquest of Spain arrived before their city, he found it reduced to extremities partly by the enemy’s attacks, partly by famine and pestilence, and ready for the second time—on this occasion in right earnest— to surrender on any terms. Domitius alone, remembering the indulgence of the victor which he had shamefully misused, embarked in a boat and stole through the Roman fleet, to seek a third battle-field for his
Expeditions of Caesar to the Corn-Provinces
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
We have already mentioned that the Pompeians intended to reduce Italy to starvation. They had the means of doing so in their hands. They had thorough command of the sea and laboured with great zeal everywhere—in Gades, Utica, Messana, above all in the east—to increase their fleet. They held moreover all the provinces, from which the capital drew its means of subsistence: Sardinia and Corsica through Marcus Cotta, Sicily through Marcus Cato, Africa through the self-nominated commander-in-chief Titus Attius Varus and their ally Juba king of Numidia It was indispensably needful for Caesar to thwart these plans of the enemy and to wrest from them the corn-provinces. Quintus Valerius was sent with a legion to Sardinia and compelled the Pompeian governor to evacuate the island. The more important enterprise of taking Sicily and Africa from the enemy was entrusted to the young Gaius Curio with the assistance of the able Gaius Caninius Rebilus, who possessed experience in war. Sicily was occupied by him without a blow; Cato, without a proper army and not a man of the sword, evacuated the island, after having in his straightforward manner previously warned the Siceliots not to compromise themselves uselessly by an ineffectual resistance.
Landing of Curio in Africa
Curio left behind half of his troops to protect this island so important for the capital, and embarked with the other half— two legions and 500 horsemen—for Africa. Here he might expect to encounter more serious resistance; besides the considerable and in its own fashion efficient army of Juba, the governor Varus had formed two legions from the Romans settled in Africa and also fitted out a small squadron of ten sail. With the aid of his superior fleet, however, Curio effected without difficulty a landing between Hadrumetum, where the one legion of the enemy lay along with their ships of war, and Utica, in front of which town lay the second legion under Varus himself. Curio turned against the latter, and pitched his camp not far from Utica, just where a century and a half before the elder Scipio had taken up his first winter-camp in Africa.(20) Caesar, compelled to keep together his best troops for the Spanish war, had been obliged to make up the Sicilo-African army for the most part out of the legions taken over from the enemy, more especially the war-prisoners of Corfinium; the officers of the Pompeian army in Africa, some of whom had served in the very legions that were conquered at Corfinium, now left no means untried to bring back their old soldiers who were now fighting against them to their first allegiance. But Caesar had not erred in the choice of his lieutenant. Curio knew as well how to direct the movements of the army and of the fleet, as how to acquire personal influence over the soldiers; the supplies were abundant, the conflicts without exception successful.
Curio Conquers at Utica
When Varus, presuming that the troops of Curio wanted opportunity to pass over to his side, resolved to give battle chiefly for the sake of affording them this opportunity, the result did not justify his expectations. Animated by the fiery appeal of their youthful leader the cavalry of Curio put to flight the horsemen of the enemy and in presence of the two armies cut down also the light infantry which had accompanied the horsemen; and emboldened by this success and by Curio’s personal example, his legions advanced through the difficult ravine separating the two lines to the attack, for which the Pompeians however did not wait, but disgracefully fled back to their camp and evacuated even this in the ensuing night. The victory was so complete that Curio at once took steps to besiege Utica. When news arrived, however, that king Juba was advancing with all his forces to its relief, Curio resolved, just as Scipio had done on the arrival of Syphax, to raise the siege and to return to Scipio’s former camp till reinforcements should arrive from Sicily. Soon afterwards came a second report, that king Juba had been induced by the attacks of neighbouring princes to turn back with his main force and was sending to the aid of the besieged merely a moderate corps under Saburra. Curio, who from his lively temperament had only with great reluctance made up his mind to rest, now set out again at once to fight with Saburra before he could enter into communication with the garrison of Utica.
Curio Defeated by Juba on the Bagradas
Death of Curio
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).
So ended the expedition arranged by Caesar to Sicily and Africa. It attained its object so far, since by the occupation of Sicily in connection with that of Sardinia at least the most urgent wants of the capital were relieved; the miscarriage of the conquest of Africa— from which the victorious party drew no farther substantial gain— and the loss of two untrustworthy legions might be got over. But the early death of Curio was an irreparable loss for Caesar, and indeed for Rome. Not without reason had Caesar entrusted the most important independent command to this young man, although he had no military experience and was notorious for his dissolute life; there was a spark of Caesar’s own spirit in the fiery youth. He resembled Caesar, inasmuch as he too had drained the cup of pleasure to the dregs;
Pompeius’ Plan of Campaign for 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.
Caesar’s Fleet and Army in Illyricum Destroyed
But the expected attack was long in coming. It was not till the height of summer that the conflict began in Illyria. There Caesar’s lieutenant Gaius Antonius with his two legions lay in the island of Curicta (Veglia in the gulf of Quarnero), and Caesar’s admiral Publius Dolabella with forty ships lay in the narrow arm of the sea between this island and the mainland. The admirals of Pompeius in the Adriatic, Marcus Octavius with the Greek, Lucius Scribonius Libo with the Illyrian division of the fleet, attacked the squadron of Dolabella, destroyed all his ships, and cut off Antonius on his island. To rescue him, a corps under Basilus and Sallustius came from Italy and the squadron of Hortensius from the Tyrrhene Sea; but neither the former nor the latter were able to effect anything in presence of the far superior fleet of the enemy. The legions of Antonius had to be abandoned to their fate. Provisions came to an end, the troops became troublesome and mutinous; with the exception of a few divisions, which succeeded in reaching the mainland on rafts, the corps, still fifteen cohorts strong, laid down their arms and were conveyed in the vessels of Libo to Macedonia to be there incorporated with the Pompeian army, while Octavius was left to complete the subjugation of the Illyrian coast now denuded of troops. The Dalmatae, now far the most powerful tribe in these regions,(22) the important insular town of Issa (Lissa), and other townships, embraced the party of Pompeius; but the adherents of Caesar maintained themselves in Salonae (Spalato) and Lissus (Alessio), and in the former town not merely sustained with courage a siege, but when they were reduced to extremities, made a sally with such effect that Octavius raised the siege and sailed off to Dyrrhachium to pass the winter there.
Result of the Campaign as a Whole
The success achieved in Illyricum by the Pompeian fleet, although of itself not inconsiderable, had yet but little influence on the issue of the campaign as a whole; and it appears miserably small, when we consider that the performances of the land and naval’ forces under the supreme command of Pompeius during the whole eventful year 705 were confined to this single feat of arms, and that from the east, where the general, the senate, the second great army, the principal fleet, the immense military and still more extensive financial resources of the antagonists of Caesar were united, no intervention at all took place where it was needed in that all-decisive struggle in the west. The scattered condition of the forces in the eastern half of the empire, the method of the general never to operate except with superior masses, his cumbrous and tedious movements, and the discord of the coalition may perhaps explain in some measure, though not excuse, the inactivity of the land-force; but that the fleet, which commanded the Mediterranean without a rival, should have thus done nothing to influence the course of affairs—nothing for Spain, next to nothing for the faithful Massiliots, nothing to defend Sardinia, Sicily, Africa, or, if not to reoccupy Italy, at least to obstruct its supplies— this makes demands on our ideas of the confusion and perversity prevailing in the Pompeian camp, which we can only with difficulty meet.
The aggregate result of this campaign was corresponding. Caesar’s double aggressive movement, against Spain and against Sicily and Africa, was successful, in the former case completely, in the latter at least partially; while Pompeius’ plan of starving Italy was thwarted in the main by the taking away of Sicily, and his general plan of campaign was frustrated completely by the destruction of the Spanish army; and in Italy only a very small portion of Caesar’s defensive arrangements had come to be applied. Notwithstanding the painfully-felt losses in Africa and Illyria, Caesar came forth from this first year of the war in the most decided and most decisive manner as victor.
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
Far worse traits were the indifference of the lukewarm and the narrow-minded stubbornness of the ultras. The former could not be brought to act or even to keep silence. If they were asked to exert themselves in some definite way for the common good, with the inconsistency characteristic of weak people they regarded any such suggestion as a malicious attempt to compromise them still further, and either did not do what they were ordered at all or did it with half heart. At the same time of course, with their affectation of knowing better when it was too late and their over-wise impracticabilities, they proved a perpetual clog to those who were acting; their daily work consisted in criticizing, ridiculing, and bemoaning every occurrence great and small, and in unnerving and discouraging the multitude by their own sluggishness and hopelessness.
The Ultras
While these displayed the utter prostration of weakness, the ultras on the other hand exhibited in full display its exaggerated action. With them there was no attempt to conceal that the preliminary to any negotiation for peace was the bringing over of Caesar’s head; every one of the attempts towards peace, which Caesar repeatedly made even now, was tossed aside without being examined, or employed only to cover insidious attempts on the lives of the commissioners of their opponent. That the declared partisans of Caesar had jointly and severally forfeited life and property, was a matter of course; but it fared little better with those more or less neutral. Lucius Domitius, the hero of Corfinium, gravely proposed in the council of war that those senators who had fought in the army of Pompeius should come to a vote on all who had either remained neutral or had emigrated but not entered the army, and should according to their own pleasure individually acquit them or punish them by fine or even by the forfeiture of life and property. Another of these ultras formally lodged with Pompeius a charge of corruption and treason against Lucius Afranius for his defective defence of Spain. Among these deep-dyed republicans their political theory assumed almost the character of a confession of religious faith; they accordingly hated their own more lukewarm partisans and Pompeius with his personal adherents, if possible, still more than their open opponents, and that with all the dull obstinacy of hatred which is wont to characterize orthodox theologians; and they were mainly to blame for the numberless and bitter separate quarrels which distracted the emigrant army and emigrant senate. But they did not confine themselves to words. Marcus Bibulus, Titus Labienus, and others of this coterie carried out their theory in practice, and caused such officers or soldiers of Caesar’s army as fell into their hands to be executed en masse; which, as may well be conceived, did not tend to make Caesar’s troops fight with less energy. If the counterrevolution in favour of the friends of the constitution, for which all the
The Preparations for War
The management of the military preparations in the Macedonian camp was in the hands of Pompeius the commander-in-chief. His position, always troublesome and galling, had become still worse through the unfortunate events of 705. In the eyes of his partisans he was mainly to blame for this result. This judgment was in various respects not just. A considerable part of the misfortunes endured was to be laid to the account of the perversity and insubordination of the lieutenant-generals, especially of the consul Lentulus and Lucius Domitius; from the moment when Pompeius took the head of the army, he had led it with skill and courage, and had saved at least very considerable forces from the shipwreck; that he was not a match for Caesar’s altogether superior genius, which was now recognized by all, could not be fairly made matter of reproach to him. But the result alone decided men’s judgment. Trusting to the general Pompeius, the constitutional party had broken with Caesar; the pernicious consequences of this breach recoiled upon the general Pompeius; and, though owing to the notorious military incapacity of all the other chiefs no attempt was made to change the supreme command yet confidence at any rate in the commander-in-chief was paralyzed. To these painful consequences of the defeats endured were added the injurious influences of the emigration. Among the refugees who arrived there were certainly a number
While Pompeius thus treated the political aspect of his position with his characteristic perversity, and did his best to make what was already bad in itself still worse, he devoted himself on the other hand with commendable zeal to his duty of giving military organization to the considerable but scattered forces of his party. The flower of his force was composed of the troops brought with him from Italy, out of which with the supplementary aid of the Illyrian prisoners of war and the Romans domiciled in Greece five legions in all were formed. Three others came from the east—the two Syrian legions formed from the remains of the army of Crassus, and one made up out of the two weak legions hitherto stationed in Cilicia. Nothing stood in the way of the withdrawal of these corps of occupation: because on the one hand the Pompeians had an understanding with the Parthians,
His Cavalry
The cavalry on the other hand—with the exception of a noble guard, more respectable than militarily important, formed from the young aristocracy of Rome, and of the Apulian slave-herdsmen whom Pompeius had mounted (25)—consisted exclusively of the contingents of the subjects and clients of Rome. The flower of it consisted of the Celts, partly from the garrison of Alexandria,(26) partly the contingents of king Deiotarus who in spite of his great age had appeared in person at the head of his troops, and of the other Galatian dynasts. With them were associated the excellent Thracian horsemen, who were partly brought up by their princes Sadala and Rhascuporis, partly enlisted by Pompeius in the Macedonian province; the Cappadocian cavalry; the mounted archers sent by Antiochus king of Commagene; the contingents of the Armenians from the west side of the Euphrates under Taxiles, and from the other side under Megabates, and the Numidian bands sent by king Juba—the whole body amounted to 7000 horsemen.
Fleet
Lastly the fleet of Pompeius was very considerable. It was formed partly of the Roman transports brought from Brundisium or subsequently built, partly of the war vessels of the king of Egypt, of the Colchian princes, of the Cilician dynast Tarcondimotus, of the cities of Tyre, Rhodes, Athens, Corcyra, and generally of all the Asiatic and Greek maritime states; and it numbered nearly 500 sail, of which the Roman vessels formed a fifth. Immense magazines of corn and military stores were accumulated in Dyrrhachium. The war-chest was well filled, for the Pompeians found themselves in possession of the principal sources of the public revenue and turned to their own account the moneyed resources of the client-princes, of the senators of distinction, of the farmers of the taxes, and generally of the whole Roman and non-Roman population within their reach. Every appliance that the
Junction of the Pompeians on the Coast of Epirus
According to the design of the commander-in-chief the army and fleet were to be in substance completely united by the winter of 705-706 along the coast and in the waters of Epirus. The admiral Bibulus had already arrived with no ships at his new headquarters, Corcyra. On the other hand the land-army, the headquarters of which had been during the summer at Berrhoea on the Haliacmon, had not yet come up; the mass of it was moving slowly along the great highway from Thessalonica towards the west coast to the future headquarters Dyrrhachium; the two legions, which Metellus Scipio was bringing up from Syria, remained at Pergamus in Asia for winter quarters and were expected in Europe only towards spring. They were taking time in fact for their movements. For the moment the ports of Epirus were guarded, over and above the fleet, merely by their own civic defences and the levies of the adjoining districts.
Caesar against Pompeius
It thus remained possible for Caesar, notwithstanding the intervention of the Spanish war, to assume the offensive also in Macedonia; and he at least was not slow to act. He had long ago ordered the collection of vessels of war and transports in Brundisium, and after the capitulation of the Spanish army and the fall of Massilia had directed the greater portion of the select troops employed there to proceed to that destination. The unparalleled exertions no doubt, which were thus required by Caesar from his soldiers, thinned the ranks more than their conflicts had done and the mutiny of one of the four oldest legions, the ninth on its march through Placentia was a dangerous indication of the temper prevailing in the army; but Caesar’s presence of mind and personal authority gained the mastery, and from this
Caesar Lands in Epirus
First Successes
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
Caesar Cut Off from Italy
But the further course of the campaign did not correspond to this brilliant beginning. Bibulus subsequently made up in some measure for the negligence, of which he had allowed himself to be guilty, by redoubling his exertions. He not only captured nearly thirty of the transports returning home, and caused them with every living thing on board to be burnt, but he also established along the whole district of coast occupied by Caesar, from the island Sason (Saseno) as far as the ports of Corcyra, a most careful watch, however troublesome it was rendered by the inclement season of the year and the necessity of bringing everything necessary for the guard-ships, even wood and water, from Corcyra; in fact his successor Libo—for he himself soon succumbed to the unwonted fatigues—even blockaded for a time the port of Brundisium, till the want of water again dislodged him from the little island in front of it on which he had established himself. It was not possible for Caesar’s officers to convey the second portion of the army over to their general. As little did he himself succeed in the capture of Dyrrhachium. Pompeius learned through one of Caesar’s peace envoys as to his preparations for the voyage to the Epirot coast, and, thereupon accelerating his march, threw himself just at the right time into that important arsenal. The situation of Caesar was critical. Although he extended his range in Epirus as far as with his slight strength was at all possible, the subsistence of his army remained difficult and precarious, while the enemy, in possession of the magazines of Dyrrhachium and masters of the sea, had abundance of everything. With his army presumably little above 20,000 strong he could not offer battle to that of Pompeius at least twice as numerous, but had to deem himself fortunate that Pompeius went methodically to work and, instead of immediately forcing a battle, took up his winter quarters between Dyrrhachium and Apollonia on the right bank of the Apsus, facing Caesar on the left, in order that after the arrival of the legions from Pergamus in the spring he might annihilate the enemy with an irresistibly superior force. Thus months passed. If the arrival of the better season, which brought to the enemy a strong additional force and the free use of his fleet, found Caesar still in the same position, he was to all appearance
Antonius Proceed to Epirus
But his appearance in person was not needed to induce the faithful officer who commanded in Italy, Marcus Antonius, to make this last effort for the saving of his master. Once more the transport fleet, with four legions and 800 horsemen on board sailed from the harbour of Brundisium, and fortunately a strong south wind carried it past Libo’s galleys. But the same wind, which thus saved the fleet, rendered it impossible for it to land as it was directed on the coast of Apollonia, and compelled it to sail past the camps of Caesar and Pompeius and to steer to the north of Dyrrhachium towards Lissus, which town fortunately still adhered to Caesar.(29) When it sailed past the harbour of Dyrrhachium, the Rhodian galleys started in pursuit, and hardly had the ships of Antonius entered the port of Lissus when the enemy’s squadron appeared before it. But just at this moment the wind suddenly veered, and drove the pursuing galleys back into the open sea and partly on the rocky coast. Through the most marvellous good fortune the landing of the second freight had also been successful.
Junction of Caesar’s Army
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.
Caesar Invests the Camp of Pompeius
As his phlegmatic opponent persevered in his inaction, Caesar undertook to occupy the circle of heights which enclosed the plain on the shore held by Pompeius, with the view of being able at least to arrest the movements of the superior cavalry of the enemy and to operate with more freedom against Dyrrhachium, and if possible to compel his opponent either to battle or to embarkation. Nearly the half of Caesar’s troops was detached to the interior; it seemed almost Quixotic to propose with the rest virtually to besiege an army perhaps twice as strong, concentrated in position, and resting on the sea and the fleet. Yet Caesar’s veterans by infinite exertions invested the Pompeian camp with a chain of posts sixteen miles long, and afterwards added, just as before Alesia, to this inner line a second outer one, to protect themselves against attacks from Dyrrhachium and against attempts to turn their position which could so easily be executed with the aid of the fleet. Pompeius attacked more than once portions of these entrenchments with a view to break if possible the enemy’s line, but he did not attempt to prevent the investment by a battle; he preferred to construct in his turn a number of entrenchments around his camp, and to connect them with one another by lines. Both sides exerted themselves to push forward their trenches as far as possible, and the earthworks advanced but slowly amidst constant conflicts. At the same time skirmishing went on on the opposite side of Caesar’s camp with the garrison of Dyrrhachium; Caesar hoped to get the fortress into his power by means of an understanding with some of its inmates, but was prevented by the enemy’s fleet. There was incessant fighting at very different points—on one of the hottest days at six places simultaneously— and, as a rule, the tried valour of the Caesarians had the advantage in these skirmishes; once, for instance, a single cohort maintained itself in its entrenchments against four legions for several hours, till support came up. No prominent success was attained on either side; yet the effects of the investment came by degrees to be oppressively felt by the Pompeians. The stopping of the rivulets flowing from the heights into the plain compelled them to be content with scanty and bad well-water. Still more severely felt was the want of fodder for the beasts of burden and the horses, which the fleet was unable adequately to remedy; numbers of them died, and it was of but little avail that the horses were conveyed by the fleet to Dyrrhachium, because there also they did not find sufficient fodder.
Caesar’s Lines Broken
Caesar Once More Defeated
Pompeius could not much longer delay to free himself from his disagreeable position by a blow struck against the enemy. He was informed by Celtic deserters that the enemy had neglected to secure the beach between his two chains of entrenchments 600 feet distant from each other by a cross-wall, and on this he formed his plan. While he caused the inner line of Caesar’s entrenchments to be attacked by the legions from the camp, and the outer line by the light troops placed in vessels and landed beyond the enemy’s entrenchments, a third division landed in the space left between the two lines and attacked in the rear their already sufficiently occupied defenders. The entrenchment next to the sea was taken, and the garrison fled in wild confusion; with difficulty the commander of the next trench Marcus Antonius succeeded in maintaining it and in setting a limit for the moment to the advance of the Pompeians; but; apart from the considerable loss, the outermost entrenchment along the sea remained in the hands of the Pompeians and the lin was broken through. Caesar the more eagerly seized the opportunity, which soon after presented itself, of attacking a Pompeian legion, which had incautiously become isolated, with the bulk of his infantry. But the attacked offered valiant resistance, and, as the ground on which the fight took place had been several times employed for the encampment of larger and lesser divisions and was intersected in various directions by mounds and ditches, Caesar’s right wing along with the cavalry entirely missed its way; instead of supporting the left in attacking the Pompeian legion, it got into a narrow trench that led from one of the old camps towards the river. So Pompeius, who came up in all haste with five legions to the aid of his troops, found the two wings of the enemy separated from each other, and one of them in an utterly forlorn position. When the Caesarians saw him advance, a panic seized them; the whole plunged into disorderly flight; and, if the matter ended with the loss of 1000 of the best soldiers and Caesar’s army did not sustain a complete defeat, this was due simply to the circumstance that Pompeius also could not freely develop his force on the broken ground, and to the further fact that, fearing a stratagem, he at first held back his troops.
Consequences of Caesar’s Defeats
But, even as it was, these days were fraught with mischief. Not only had Caesar endured the most serious losses and forfeited at a blow his entrenchments, the result of four months of gigantic labour; he was by the recent engagements thrown back again exactly to the point from which he had set out. From the sea he was more completely driven than ever, since Pompeius’ elder son Gnaeus had by a bold attack partly burnt, partly carried off, Caesar’s few ships of war lying in the port of Oricum, and had soon afterwards also set fire to the transport fleet that
War Prospects of Pompeius
Scipio and Calvinus
It was for Pompeius to assume the aggressive; and he was resolved to do so. Three different ways of rendering his victory fruitful presented themselves to him. The first and simplest was not to desist from assailing the vanquished army, and, if it departed, to pursue it. Secondly, Pompeius might leave Caesar himself and his best troops in Greece, and might cross in person, as he had long been making preparations for doing, with the main army to Italy, where the feeling was decidedly antimonarchical and the forces of Caesar, after the despatch of the best troops and their brave and trustworthy commandant to the Greek army, would not be of very much moment. Lastly, the victor might turn inland, effect a junction with the legions of Metellus Scipio, and attempt to capture the troops of Caesar stationed in the interior. The latter forsooth had, immediately after the arrival of the second freight from Italy, on the one hand despatched strong detachments to Aetolia and Thessaly to procure means of subsistence for his army, and on the other had ordered a corps of two legions under Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus to advance on the Egnatian
Caesar’s Retreat from Dyrrachium to Thessaly
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
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
Caesar lay to the south of Larisa in the plain—which extends between the hill-country of Cynoscephalae and the chain of Othrys and is intersected by a tributary of the Peneius, the Enipeus— on the left bank of the latter stream near the town of Pharsalus; Pompeius pitched his camp opposite to him on the right bank of the Enipeus along the slope of the heights of Cynoscephalae.(30) The entire army of Pompeius was assembled; Caesar on the other hand still expected the corps of nearly two legions formerly detached to Aetolia and Thessaly, now stationed under Quintus Fufius Calenus in Greece, and the two legions of Cornificius which were sent after him by the land-route from Italy and had already arrived in Illyria. The army of Pompeius, numbering eleven legions or 47,000 men and 7000 horse, was more than double that of Caesar in infantry, and seven times as numerous in cavalry; fatigue and conflicts had so decimated Caesar’s troops, that his eight legions did not number more than 22,000 men under arms, consequently not nearly the half of their normal amount. The victorious army of Pompeius provided with a countless cavalry and good magazines had provisions in abundance, while the troops of Caesar had difficulty in keeping themselves alive and only hoped for better supplies from the corn-harvest not far distant. The Pompeian soldiers, who had learned in the last campaign to know war and trust their leader, were in the best of humour. All military reasons on the side of Pompeius favoured the view, that the decisive battle should not be long delayed, seeing that they now confronted Caesar in Thessaly; and the emigrant impatience of the many genteel officers and others accompanying the army doubtless had more weight than even such reasons in the council of war. Since the events of Dyrrhachium these lords regarded the triumph of their party as an ascertained fact; already there was eager strife as to the filling up of Caesar’s supreme pontificate, and instructions were sent to Rome to hire houses at the Forum for the next elections. When Pompeius hesitated on his part to cross the rivulet which separated the two armies, and which Caesar with his much weaker army did not venture to pass, this excited great indignation; Pompeius, it was alleged, only delayed the battle in order to rule somewhat longer over so many consulars and praetorians and to perpetuate his part of Agamemnon. Pompeius yielded; and Caesar, who under the impression that matters would not come to a battle, had just projected a mode of turning the enemy’s army and for that purpose was on the point of setting out towards Scotussa, likewise arrayed his legions for battle, when he saw the Pompeians preparing to offer it to him on his bank.
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.
The Political Effects of the Battle of Pharsalus
The East Submits
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
The Aristocracy after the Battle of Pharsalus
In the same way as the client communities submitted to the victor of Pharsalus, the tail of the constitutional party—all who had joined it with half a heart or had even, like Marcus Cicero and his congeners, merely danced around the aristocracy like the witches around the Brocken—approached to make their peace with the new monarch, a peace accordingly which his contemptuous indulgence readily and courteously granted to the petitioners. But the flower of the defeated party made no compromise. All was over with the aristocracy; but the aristocrats could never become converted to monarchy. The highest revelations of humanity are perishable; the religion once true may become a lie,(34) the polity once fraught with blessing may become a curse; but even the gospel that is past still finds confessors, and if such a faith cannot remove mountains like faith in the living truth, it yet remains true to itself down to its very end, and does not depart from the realm of the living till it has dragged its last priests and its last partisans along with it, and a new generation, freed from those shadows of the past and the perishing, rules over a world that has renewed its youth. So it was in Rome. Into whatever abyss of degeneracy the aristocratic rule had now sunk, it had once been a great political system; the sacred fire, by which Italy had been conquered and Hannibal had been vanquished, continued to glow—although somewhat dimmed and dull—in the Roman nobility so long as that nobility existed, and rendered a cordial understanding between the men of the old regime and the new monarch impossible. A large portion of the constitutional party submitted at least outwardly, and recognized the monarchy so far as to accept pardon from Caesar and to retire as much as possible into private life; which, however, ordinarily was not done without the mental reservation of thereby preserving themselves for a future change of things. This course was chiefly followed by the partisans of lesser note;
Cato
No one probably formed a judgment as to the situation of affairs with so painful a clearness, and so free from fear or hope on his own account, as Marcus Cato. Completely convinced that after the days of Ilerda and Pharsalus the monarchy was inevitable, and morally firm enough to confess to himself this bitter truth and to act in accordance with it, he hesitated for a moment whether the constitutional party ought at all to continue a war, which would necessarily require sacrifices for a lost cause on the part of many who did not know why they offered them. And when he resolved to fight against the monarchy not for victory, but for a speedier and more honourable fall, he yet sought as far as possible to draw no one into this war, who chose to survive the fall of the republic and to be reconciled to monarchy. He conceived that, so long as the republic had been merely threatened, it was a right and a duty to compel the lukewarm and bad citizen to take part in the struggle; but that now it was senseless and cruel to compel the individual to share the ruin of the lost republic. Not only did he himself discharge every one who desired to return to Italy; but when the wildest of the wild partisans, Gnaeus Pompeius the younger, insisted on the execution of these people and of Cicero in particular: it was Cato alone who by his moral authority prevented it.
Pompeius
Pompeius also had no desire for peace. Had he been a man who deserved to hold the position which he occupied, we might suppose him to have perceived that he who aspires to a crown cannot return to the beaten track of ordinary existence, and that there is accordingly no place left on earth for one who has failed. But Pompeius was hardly too noble-minded to ask a favour, which the victor would have been perhaps magnanimous enough not to refuse to him; on the contrary, he was probably too mean to do so. Whether it was that he could not make up his mind to trust himself to Caesar, or that in his usual vague and undecided way, after the first immediate impression of the disaster of Pharsalus had vanished, be began again to cherish hope, Pompeius was resolved to continue the struggle against Caesar and to seek for himself yet another battle-field after that of Pharsalus.
Military Effects of the Battle
The Leaders Scattered
Thus, however much Caesar had striven by prudence and moderation to appease the fury of his opponents and to lessen their number, the struggle nevertheless went on without alteration. But the leading men had almost all taken part in the fight at Pharsalus; and, although they all escaped with the exception of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who was killed in the flight, they were yet scattered in all directions, so that they were unable to concert a common plan for the continuance of the campaign. Most of them found their way, partly through the desolate mountains of Macedonia and Illyria, partly by the aid of the fleet, to Corcyra, where Marcus Cato commanded the reserve left behind. Here a sort of council of war took place under the presidency of Cato, at which Metellus Scipio, Titus Labienus, Lucius Afranius, Gnaeus Pompeius the younger and others were present; but the absence of the commander-in-chief and the painful uncertainty as to his fate, as well as the internal dissensions of the party, prevented the adoption of any common resolution, and ultimately each took the course which seemed to him the most suitable for himself or for the common cause. It was in fact in a high degree difficult to say among the many straws to which they might possibly cling which was the one that would keep longest above water.
Macedonia and Greece
Italy
The East
Egypt
Spain
Africa
Macedonia and Greece were lost by the battle of Pharsalus. It is true that Cato, who had immediately on the news of the defeat evacuated Dyrrhachium, still held Corcyra, and Rutilius Lupus the Peloponnesus, during a time for the constitutional party. For a moment it seemed also as if the Pompeians would make a stand at Patrae in the Peloponnesus; but the accounts of the advance of Calenus sufficed to frighten them from that quarter. As little was there any attempt to maintain Corcyra. On the Italian and Sicilian coasts the Pompeian squadrons despatched thither after the victories of Dyrrhachium(36) had achieved not unimportant successes against the ports of Brundisium, Messana and Vibo, and at Messana especially had burnt the whole fleet in course of being fitted out for Caesar; but the ships that were thus active, mostly from Asia Minor and Syria, were recalled by their communities in consequence of the Pharsalian battle, so that the expedition came to an end of itself. In Asia Minor and Syria there were at the moment no troops of either party, with the exception of the Bosporan army of Pharnaces which had taken possession, ostensibly on Caesar’s account, of different regions belonging to his opponents. In Egypt there was still indeed a considerable Roman army, formed of the troops left behind there by Gabinius(37) and thereafter recruited from Italian vagrants and Syrian or Cilician banditti; but it was self-evident and was soon officially confirmed by the recall of the Egyptian vessels, that the court of Alexandria by no means had the intention of holding
Hostilities of Robbers and Pirates
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
Far more serious disapproval in every respect is due to the idea of dragging an independent neighbouring state into the Roman civil war and of bringing about by its means a counter-revolution; law and conscience condemn the deserter more severely than the robber, and a victorious band of robbers finds its way back to a free and well-ordered commonwealth more easily than the emigrants who are conducted back by the public foe. Besides it was scarcely probable that the beaten party would be able to effect a restoration in this way. The only state, from which they could attempt to seek support, was that of the Parthians; and as to this it was at least doubtful whether it would make their cause its own, and very improbable that it would fight out that cause against Caesar.
The time for republican conspiracies had not yet come.
Caesar Pursues Pompeius to Egypt
While the remnant of the defeated party thus allowed themselves to be helplessly driven about by fate, and even those who had determined to continue the struggle knew not how or where to do so, Caesar, quickly as ever resolving and quickly acting, laid everything aside to pursue Pompeius—the only one of his opponents whom he respected as an officer, and the one whose personal capture would have probably paralyzed a half, and that perhaps the more dangerous half, of his opponents. With a few men he crossed the Hellespont—his single bark encountered in it a fleet of the enemy destined for the Black Sea, and took the whole crews, struck as with stupefaction by the news of the battle of Pharsalus, prisoners—and as soon as the most necessary preparations were made, hastened in pursuit of Pompeius to the east. The latter had gone from the Pharsalian battlefield to Lesbos, whence he brought away his wife and his second son Sextus, and had sailed onward round Asia Minor to Cilicia and thence to Cyprus. He might have joined his partisans at Corcyra or Africa; but repugnance toward his aristocratic allies and the thought of the reception which awaited him there after the day of Pharsalus and above all after his disgraceful flight, appear to have induced him to take his own course and rather to resort to the protection of the Parthian king than to that of Cato. While he was employed in collecting money and slaves from the Roman revenue-farmers and merchants in Cyprus, and in arming a band of 2000 slaves, he received news that Antioch had declared for Caesar and that the route to the Parthians was no longer open. So he altered his plan and sailed to Egypt, where a number of his old soldiers served in the army and the situation and rich resources of the country allowed him time and opportunity to reorganize the war.
In Egypt, after the death of Ptolemaeus Auletes (May 703) his children, Cleopatra about sixteen years of age and Ptolemaeus Dionysus about ten, had ascended the throne according to their father’s will jointly, and as consorts; but soon the brother or rather his guardian Pothinus had driven the sister from the kingdom and compelled her to seek a refuge in Syria, whence she made preparations to get back to her paternal kingdom. Ptolemaeus and Pothinus lay with the whole Egyptian army at Pelusium for the sake of protecting the eastern frontier against her, just when Pompeius cast anchor at the Casian promontory and sent a request to the king to allow him to land. The Egyptian court, long informed of the disaster at Pharsalus, was on the point of refusing to receive Pompeius; but the king’s tutor Theodotus pointed out that, in that case Pompeius would probably employ his connections in the Egyptian army to instigate rebellion; and that it would be safer, and also preferable with regard to Caesar, if they embraced the opportunity of making away with Pompeius. Political reasonings of this sort did not readily fail of their effect among the statesmen of the Hellenic world.
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
When Caesar following the track of Pompeius arrived in the roadstead of Alexandria, all was already over. With deep agitation he turned away when the murderer brought to his ship the head of the man, who had been his son-in-law and for long years his colleague in rule, and to get whom alive into his power he had come to Egypt. The dagger of the rash assassin precluded an answer to the question, how Caesar would have dealt with the captive Pompeius; but, while the humane sympathy, which still found a place in the great soul of Caesar side by side with ambition, enjoined that he should spare his former friend, his interest also required that he should annihilate Pompeius otherwise than by the executioner. Pompeius had been for twenty years the acknowledged ruler of Rome; a dominion so deeply rooted does not perish with the ruler’s death. The death of Pompeius did not break up the Pompeians, but gave to them instead of an aged, incapable, and worn-out chief in his sons Gnaeus and Sextus two leaders, both of whom were young and active and the second was a man of decided capacity. To the newly-founded hereditary monarchy hereditary pretendership attached itself at once like a parasite, and it was very doubtful whether by this change of persons Caesar did not lose more than he gained.
Caesar Regulates Egypt
Meanwhile in Egypt Caesar had now nothing further to do, and the Romans and the Egyptians expected that he would immediately set sail and apply himself to the subjugation of Africa, and to the huge task of organization which awaited him after the victory. But Caesar faithful to his custom—wherever he found himself in the wide empire—of finally regulating matters at once and in person, and firmly convinced that no resistance was to be expected either from the Roman garrison or from the court, being, moreover, in urgent pecuniary embarrassment, landed in Alexandria with the two amalgamated legions accompanying him to the number of 3200 men and 800 Celtic and German cavalry, took up his quarters in the royal palace, and proceeded to collect the necessary sums of money and to regulate the Egyptian succession, without allowing himself to be disturbed by the saucy remark of Pothinus that Caesar should not for such petty matters neglect his own so important affairs. In his dealing with the Egyptians he was just and even indulgent. Although the aid which they had given to Pompeius justified the imposing of a war contribution, the exhausted land was spared from this; and, while the arrears of the sum stipulated for in 695(40) and since then only about half paid were remitted, there was required merely a final payment of 10,000,000 -denarii- (400,000 pounds). The belligerent brother and sister were enjoined immediately to suspend hostilities, and were invited to have their dispute investigated and decided before the arbiter. They submitted; the royal boy was already in the palace and Cleopatra also presented herself there. Caesar adjudged the kingdom of Egypt, agreeably to the testament of Auletes, to the intermarried brother and sister Cleopatra and Ptolemaeus Dionysus, and further gave unasked the kingdom of Cyprus—cancelling the earlier act of annexation(41)— as the appanageof the second-born of Egypt to the younger children of Auletes, Arsinoe and Ptolemaeus the younger.
Insurrection in Alexandria
But a storm was secretly preparing. Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city as well as Rome, hardly inferior to the Italian capital in the number of its inhabitants, far superior to it in stirring commercial spirit, in skill of handicraft, in taste for science and art: in the citizens there was a lively sense of their own national importance, and, if there was no political sentiment, there was at any rate a turbulent spirit, which induced them to indulge in their street riots as regularly and as heartily as the Parisians of the present day: one may conceive their feelings, when they saw the Roman general ruling in the palace of the Lagids and their kings accepting the award of his tribunal. Pothinus and the boy-king, both as may be conceived very dissatisfied at once with the peremptory requisition of old debts and with the intervention in the throne-dispute which could only issue, as it did, in favour of Cleopatra, sent—in order to pacify the Roman demands—the treasures of the temples and the gold plate of the king with intentional ostentation to be melted at the mint; with increasing indignation the Egyptians—who were pious even to superstition, and who rejoiced in the world-renowned magnificence of their court as if it were a possession of their own—beheld the bare walls of their temples and the wooden cups on the table of their king. The Roman army of occupation also, which had been essentially denationalized by its long abode in Egypt and the many intermarriages between the soldiers and Egyptian women, and which moreover numbered a multitude of the old soldiers of Pompeius and runaway Italian criminals and slaves in its ranks, was indignant at Caesar, by whose orders it had been obliged to suspend its action on the Syrian frontier, and at his handful of haughty legionaries. The tumult even at the landing, when the multitude saw the Roman axes carried into the old palace, and the numerous cases in which his soldiers were assassinated in the city, had taught Caesar the immense danger in which he was placed with his small force in presence of that exasperated multitude. But it was difficult to return on account of the north-west winds prevailing at this season of the year, and the attempt at embarkation might easily become a signal for the outbreak of the insurrection; besides, it was not the nature of Caesar to take his departure without having accomplished his work. He accordingly ordered up at once reinforcements from Asia, and meanwhile, till these arrived, made a show of the utmost self-possession. Never was there greater gaiety in his camp than during this rest at Alexandria; and while the beautiful and clever Cleopatra was not sparing of her charms in general and least of all towards her judge, Caesar also appeared among all his victories to value most those won over beautiful women. It was a merry prelude to graver scenes. Under the leadership of Achillas and, as was afterwards proved, by the secret orders of the king and his guardian, the Roman army of occupation stationed in Egypt appeared unexpectedly in Alexandria; and as soon as the citizens saw that it had come to attack Caesar, they made common cause with the soldiers.
Caesar in Alexandria
With a presence of mind, which in some measure justifies his earlier foolhardiness, Caesar hastily collected his scattered men; seized the persons of the king and his ministers; entrenched himself in the royal residence and the adjoining theatre; and gave orders, as there was no time to place in safety the war-fleet stationed in the principal harbour immediately in front of the theatre, that it should be set on fire and that Pharos, the island with the light-tower commanding the harbour, should be occupied by means of boats. Thus at least a restricted position for defence was secured, and the way was kept open to procure supplies and reinforcements. At the same time orders were issued to the commandant of Asia Minor as well as to the nearest subject countries, the Syrians and Nabataeans, the Cretans and the Rhodians, to send troops and ships in all haste to Egypt. The insurrection at the head of which the princess Arsinoe and her confidant the eunuch Ganymedes had placed themselves, meanwhilehad free course in all Egypt and in the greater part of the capital. In the streets of the latter there was daily fighting, but without success either on the part of Caesar in gaining freer scope and breaking through to the fresh water lake of Marea which lay behind the town, where he could have provided himself with water and forage, or on the part of the Alexandrians in acquiring superiority over the besieged and depriving them of all drinking water; for, when the Nile canals in Caesar’s part of the town had been spoiled by the introduction of salt water, drinkable water was unexpectedly found in wells dug on the beach.
As Caesar was not to be overcome from the landward side, the exertions of the besiegers were directed to destroy his fleet and cut him off from the sea by which supplies reached him. The island with the lighthouse and the mole by which this was connected with the mainland divided the harbour into a western and an eastern half, which were in communication with each other through two arched openings in the mole. Caesar commanded the island and the east harbour, while the mole and the west harbour were in possession of the citizens; and, as the Alexandrian fleet was burnt, his vessels sailed in and out without hindrance. The Alexandrians, after having vainly attempted to introduce fire-ships from the western into the eastern harbour, equipped with the remnant of their arsenal a small squadron and with this blocked up the way of Caesar’s vessels, when these were towing in a fleet of transports with a legion that had arrived from Asia Minor; but the excellent Rhodian mariners of Caesar mastered the enemy. Not long afterwards, however, the citizens captured the lighthouse- island,(42) and from that point totally closed the narrow and rocky mouth of the east harbour for larger ships; so that Caesar’s fleet was compelled to take its station in the open roads before the east harbour, and his communication with the sea hung only on a weak
It was absolutely necessary to make an attempt to recover the lighthouse island. The double attack, which was made by boats from the side of the harbour and by the war-vessels from the seaboard, in reality brought not only the island but also the lower part of the mole into Caesar’s power; it was only at the second arch-opening of the mole that Caesar ordered the attack to be stopped, and the mole to be there closed towards the city by a transverse wall. But while a violent conflict arose here around the entrenchers, the Roman troops left the lower part of the mole adjoining the island bare of defenders; a division of Egyptians landed there unexpectedly, attacked in the rear the Roman soldiers and sailors crowded together on the mole at the transverse wall, and drove the whole mass in wild confusion into the sea. A part were taken on board by the Roman ships; the most were drowned. Some 400 soldiers and a still greater number of men belonging to the fleet were sacrificed on this day; the general himself, who had shared the fate of his men, had been obliged to seek refuge, in his ship, and when this sank from having been overloaded with men, he had to save himself by swimming to another. But, severe as was the loss suffered, it was amply compensated by the recovery of the lighthouse-island, which along with the mole as far as the first arch-opening remained in the hands of Caesar.
Relieving Army from Asia Minor
At length the longed-for relief arrived. Mithradates of Pergamus, an able warrior of the school of Mithradates Eupator, whose natural son he claimed to be, brought up by land from Syria a motley army— the Ityraeans of the prince of the Libanus,(43) the Bedouins of Jamblichus, son of Sampsiceramus,(44) the Jews under the minister Antipater, and the contingents generally of the petty chiefs and communities of Cilicia and Syria. From Pelusium, which Mithradates had the fortune to occupy on the day of his arrival, he took the great road towards Memphis with the view of avoiding the intersected ground of the Delta and crossing the Nile before its division; during which movement his troops received manifold support from the Jewish peasants who were settled in peculiar numbers
Battle at the Nile
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
Immediately after the battle Caesar advanced at the head of his cavalry from the land-side straight into the portion of the capital occupied by the Egyptians. In mourning attire, with the images of their gods in their hands, the enemy received him and sued for peace; and his troops, when they saw him return as victor from the side opposite to that by which he had set forth, welcomed him with boundless joy. The fate of the town, which had ventured to thwart the plans of the master of the world and had brought him within a hair’s-breadth of destruction, lay in Caesar’s hands; but he was too much of a ruler to be sensitive, and dealt with the Alexandrians as with the Massiliots. Caesar—pointing to their city severely devastated and deprived of its granaries, of its world-renowned library, and of other important public buildings on occasion of the burning of the fleet—exhorted the inhabitants in future earnestly to cultivate the arts of peace alone, and to heal the wounds which they had inflicted on themselves; for the rest, he contented himself with granting to the Jews settled in Alexandria the same rights which the Greek population of the city enjoyed,
Course of Things during Caesar’s Absence in Alexandria
This Alexandrian insurrection, insignificant as it was in itself and slight as was its intrinsic connection with the events of importance in the world’s history which took place at the same time in the Roman state, had nevertheless so far a momentous influence on them that it compelled the man, who was all in all and without whom nothing could be despatched and nothing could be solved, to leave his proper tasks in abeyance from October 706 up to March 707 in order to fight along with Jews and Bedouins against a city rabble. The consequences of personal rule began to make themselves felt. They had the monarchy; but the wildest confusion prevailed everywhere, and the monarch was absent. The Caesarians were for the moment, just like the Pompeians, without superintendence; the ability of the individual officers and, above all, accident decided matters everywhere.
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.
Calvinus Defeated at Nicopolis
Victory of Caesar at Ziela
In an engagement at Nicopolis the Pontic levy of Calvinus was cut to pieces and the Galatian legions ran off; only the one old legion of the Romans fought its way through with moderate loss. Instead of conquering Lesser Armenia, Calvinus could not even prevent Pharnaces from repossessing himself of his Pontic “hereditary states,” and pouring forth the whole vials of his horrible sultanic caprices on their inhabitants, especially the unhappy Amisenes (winter of 706-707). When Caesar in person arrived in Asia Minor and intimated to him that the service which Pharnaces had rendered to him personally by having granted no help to Pompeius could not be taken into account against the injury inflicted on the empire, and that before any negotiation he must evacuate the province of Pontus and send back the property which he had pillaged, he declared himself doubtless ready to submit; nevertheless, well knowing how good reason Caesar had for hastening to the west, he made no serious preparations for the evacuation. He did not know that Caesar finished whatever he took in hand. Without negotiating further, Caesar took with him the one legion which he brought from Alexandria and the troops of Calvinus and Deiotarus, and advanced against the camp of Pharnaces at Ziela. When the Bosporans saw him approach, they boldly crossed the deep mountain-ravine which covered their front, and charged the Romans up the hill. Caesar’s soldiers were still occupied in pitching their camp, and the ranks wavered for a moment; but the veterans accustomed to war rapidly rallied and set the example for a general attack and for a complete victory (2 Aug. 707). In five days the campaign was ended—an invaluable piece of good fortune at this time, when every hour was precious.
Regulation of Asia Minor
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.
War by Land and Sea in Illyria
Defeat of Gabinius
Naval Victory at Tauris
In Illyria also, while Caesar was in Egypt, incidents of a very grave nature had occurred. The Dalmatian coast had been for centuries a sore blemish on the Roman rule, and its inhabitants had been at open feud with Caesar since the conflicts around Dyrrhachium; while the interior also since the time of the Thessalian war, swarmed with dispersed Pompeians. Quintus Cornificius had however, with the legions that followed him from Italy, kept both the natives and the refugees in check and had at the same time sufficiently met the difficult task of provisioning the troops in these rugged districts. Even when the able Marcus Octavius, the victor of Curicta,(45) appeared with a part of the Pompeian fleet in these waters to wage war there against Caesar by sea and land, Cornificius not only knew how to maintain himself, resting for support on the ships and the harbour of the Iadestini (Zara), but in his turn also sustained several successful engagements at sea with the fleet of his antagonist. But when the new governor of Illyria, the Aulus Gabinius recalled by Caesar from exile,(46) arrived by the landward route in Illyria in the winter of 706-707 with fifteen cohorts and 3000 horse, the system of warfare changed. Instead of confining himself like his predecessor to war on a small scale, the bold active man undertook at once, in spite of the inclement season, an expedition with his whole force to the mountains. But the unfavourable weather, the difficulty of providing supplies, and the brave resistance of the Dalmatians, swept away the army; Gabinius had to commence his retreat, was attacked in the course of it and disgracefully defeated by the Dalmatians, and with the feeble remains of his fine army had difficulty in reaching Salonae, where he soon afterwards died. Most of the Illyrian coast towns thereupon surrendered to the fleet of Octavius; those that adhered to Caesar, such as Salonae and Epidaurus (Ragusa vecchia), were so hard pressed by the fleet at sea and by the barbarians on land, that the surrender and capitulation of the remains of the army enclosed in Salonae seemed not far distant. Then the commandant of the depot at Brundisium, the energetic Publius Vatinius, in the absence of ships of war caused common boats to be provided with beaks and manned with the soldiers dismissed from the hospitals, and with this extemporized war-fleet gave battle to the far superior fleet of Octavius at the island of Tauris (Torcola between Lesina and Curzola)— a battle in which, as in so many cases, the bravery of the leader and of the marines compensated for the deficiencies of the vessels, and the Caesarians achieved a brilliant victory. Marcus Octavius left these waters and proceeded to Africa (spring of 707); the Dalmatians no doubt continued their resistance for years with great obstinacy, but it was nothing beyond a local mountain-warfare. When Caesar returned from Egypt, his resolute adjutant had already got rid of the danger that was imminent in Illyria.
Reorganization of the Coalition in Africa
All the more serious was the position of things in Africa, where the constitutional party had from the outset of the civil war ruled absolutely and had continually augmented their power. Down to the battle of Pharsalus king Juba had, properly speaking, borne rule there; he had vanquished Curio, and his flying horsemen and his numberless archers were the main strength of the army; the Pompeian governor Varus played by his side so subordinate a part that he even had to deliver those soldiers of Curio, who had surrendered to him, over to the king, and had to look on while they were executed or carried away into the interior of Numidia. After the battle of Pharsalus a change took place. With the exception of Pompeius himself, no man of note among the defeated party thought of flight to the Parthians. As little did they attempt to hold the sea with their united resources; the warfare waged by Marcus Octavius in the Illyrian waters was isolated, and was without permanent success. The great majority of the republicans as of the Pompeians betook themselves to Africa, where alone an honourable and constitutional warfare might still be waged against the usurper. There the fragments of the army scattered at Pharsalus, the troops that had garrisoned Dyrrhachium, Corcyra, and the Peloponnesus, the remains of the Illyrian fleet, gradually congregated; there the second commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio, the two sons of Pompeius, Gnaeus and Sextus, the political leader of the republicans Marcus Cato, the able officers Labienus, Afranius, Petreius, Octavius and others met. If the resources of the emigrants had diminished, their fanaticism had, if possible, even increased. Not only did they continue to murder their prisoners and even the officers of Caesar under flag of truce, but king Juba, in whom the exasperation of the partisan mingled with the fury of the half-barbarous African, laid down the maxim that in every community suspected of sympathizing with the enemy the burgesses ought to be extirpated and the town burnt down, and even practically carried out this theory against some townships, such as the unfortunate Vaga near Hadrumetum. In fact it was solely owing to the energetic intervention of Cato that the capital of the province itself the flourishing Utica—which, just like Carthage formerly, had been long regarded with a jealous eye by the Numidian kings— did not experience the same treatment from Juba, and that measures of precaution merely were taken against its citizens, who certainly were not unjustly accused of leaning towards Caesar.
As neither Caesar himself nor any of his lieutenants undertook the smallest movement against Africa, the coalition had full time to acquire political and military reorganization there. First of all, it was necessary to fill up anew the place of commander-in-chief vacant by the death of Pompeius. King Juba was not disinclined still to maintain the position which he had held in Africa up to the battle of Pharsalus; indeed he bore himself no longer as a client of the Romans but as an equal ally or even as a protector, and took it upon him, for example, to coin Roman silver money with his name and device; nay, he even raised a claim to be the sole wearer of purple in the camp, and suggested to the Roman commanders that they should lay aside their purple mantle of office. Further Metellus Scipio demanded the supreme command for himself, because Pompeius had recognized him in the Thessalian campaign as on a footing of equality, more from the consideration that he was his son-in-law than on military grounds. The like demand was raised by Varus as the governor—self-nominated, it is true—of Africa, seeing that the war was to be waged in his province. Lastly the army desired for its leader the propraetor Marcus Cato. Obviously it was right. Cato was the only man who possessed the requisite devotedness, energy, and authority for the difficult office; if he was no military man, it was infinitely better to appoint as commander-in-chief a non-military man who understood how to listen to reason and make his subordinates act, than an officer of untried capacity like Varus, or even one of tried incapacity like Metellus Scipio. But the decision fell at length on this same Scipio, and it was Cato himself who mainly determined that decision. He did so, not because he felt himself unequal to such a task, or because his vanity found its account rather in declining than in accepting; still less because he loved or respected Scipio, with whom he on the contrary was personally at variance, and who with his notorious inefficiency had attained a certain importance merely in virtue of his position as father-in-law to Pompeius; but simply and solely because his obstinate legal formalism chose rather to let the republic go to ruin in due course of law than to save it in an irregular way. When after the battle of Pharsalus he met with Marcus Cicero at Corcyra, he had offered to hand over the command in Corcyra to the latter—who was still from the time of his Cilician administration invested with the rank of general— as the officer of higher standing according to the letter of the law, and by this readiness had driven the unfortunate advocate, who now cursed a thousand times his laurels from the Arnanus, almost to despair; but he had at the same time astonished all men of any tolerable discernment. The same principles were applied now, when something more was at stake; Cato weighed the question to whom the place of commander-in-chief belonged, as if the matter had reference to a field
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.
The warlike preparations were pushed forward, chiefly through the zeal of Cato, with the greatest energy, and every man capable of arms, even the freedman and Libyan, was enrolled in the legions; by which course so many hands were withdrawn from agriculture that a great part of the fields remained uncultivated, but an imposing result was certainly attained. The heavy infantry numbered fourteen legions, of which two were already raised by Varus, eight others were formed partly from the refugees, partly from the conscripts in the province, and four were legions of king Juba armed in the Roman manner. The heavy cavalry, consisting of the Celts and Germans who arrived with Labienus and sundry others incorporated in their ranks, was, apart from Juba’s squadron of cavalry equipped in the Roman style, 1600 strong. The light troops consisted of innumerable masses of Numidians riding without bridle or rein and armed merely with javelins, of a number of mounted bowmen, and a large host of archers on foot. To these fell to be added Juba’s 120 elephants, and the fleet of 55 sail commanded by Publius Varus and Marcus Octavius. The urgent want of money was in some measure remedied by a self-taxation on the part of the senate, which was the more productive as the richest African capitalists had been induced to enter it. Corn and other supplies were accumulated in immense quantities in the fortresses capable of defence; at the same time the stores were as far as possible removed from the open townships. The absence of Caesar, the troublesome temper of his legions, the ferment in Spain and Italy gradually raised men’s spirits, and the recollection of the Pharsalian defeat began to give way to fresh hopes of victory.
The time lost by Caesar in Egypt nowhere revenged itself more severely than here. Had he proceeded to Africa immediately after the death of Pompeius, he would have found there a weak, disorganized, and frightened army and utter anarchy among the leaders; whereas there was now in Africa, owing more especially to Cato’s energy, an army equal in number to that defeated at Pharsalus, under leaders of note, and under a regulated superintendence.
Movements in Spain
A peculiar evil star seemed altogether to preside over this African expedition of Caesar. He had, even before his embarkation for Egypt, arranged in Spain and Italy various measures preliminary and preparatory to the African war; but out of all there had sprung nothing but mischief. From Spain, according to Caesar’s arrangement, the governor of the southern province Quintus Cassius Longinus was to cross with four legions to Africa, to be joined there by Bogud king of West Mauretania,(47) and to advance with him towards Numidia and Africa. But that army destined for Africa included in it a number of native Spaniards and two whole legions formerly Pompeian; Pompeian sympathies prevailed in the army as in the province, and the unskilful and tyrannical behaviour of the Caesarian governor was not fitted to allay them. A formal revolt took place; troops and towns took part for or against the governor; already those who had risen against the lieutenant of Caesar were on the point of openly displaying the banner of Pompeius; already had Pompeius’ elder son Gnaeus embarked from Africa for Spain to take advantage of this favourable turn, when the disavowal of the governor by the most respectable Caesarians themselves and the interference of the commander of the northern province suppressed just in right time the insurrection. Gnaeus Pompeius, who had lost time on the way with a vain attempt to establish himself in Mauretania, came too late; Gaius Trebonius, whom Caesar after his return from the east sent to Spain to relieve Cassius (autumn of 707), met everywhere with absolute obedience. But of course amidst these blunders nothing was done from Spain to disturb the organization of the republicans in Africa; indeed in consequence of the complications with Longinus, Bogud king of West Mauretania, who was on Caesar’s side and might at least have put some obstacles in the way of king Juba, had been called away with his troops to Spain.
Military Revolt in Campania
Still more critical were the occurrences among the troops whom Caesar had caused to be collected in southern Italy, in order to his embarkation with them for Africa. They were for the most part the old legions, which had founded Caesar’s throne in Gaul, Spain, and Thessaly. The spirit of these troops had not been improved by victories, and had been utterly disorganized by long repose in Lower Italy. The almost superhuman demands which the general made on them, and the effects of which were only too clearly apparent in their fearfully thinned ranks, left behind even in these men of iron a leaven of secret rancour which required only time and quiet to set their minds in a ferment. The only man who had influence over them, had been absent and almost unheard-of for a year; while the officers placed over them were far more afraid of the soldiers than the soldiers of them, and overlooked in the conquerors of the world every outrage against those that gave them quarters, and
Caesar Proceeds to Africa
Conflict at Ruspina
This mutiny operated injuriously on the African campaign, at least in so far as it considerably delayed the commencement of it. When Caesar arrived at the port of Lilybaeum destined for the embarkation the ten legions intended for Africa werefar from being fully assembled there, and it was the experienced troops that were farthest behind. Hardly however had six legions, of which five were newly formed, arrived there and the necessary war-vessels and transports come forward, when Caesar put to sea with them (25 Dec. 707 of the uncorrected, about 8 Oct. of the Julian, calendar). The enemy’s fleet, which on account of the prevailing equinoctial gales was drawn up on the beach at the island Aegimurus in front of the bay of Carthage, did not oppose the passage; but, the same storms scattered the fleet of Caesar in all directions, and, when he availed himself of the opportunity of landing not far from Hadrumetum (Susa), he could not disembark more than some 3000 men, mostly recruits, and 150 horsemen. His attempt to capture Hadrumetum strongly occupied by the enemy miscarried; but Caesar possessed himself of the two seaports not far distant from each other, Ruspina (Monastir near Susa) and Little Leptis. Here he entrenched himself; but his position was so insecure, that he kept his cavalry in the ships and the ships ready for sea and provided with a supply of water, in order to re-embark at any moment if he should be attacked by a superior force. This however was not necessary, for just at the right time the ships that had been driven out of their course arrived (3 Jan. 708). On the very following day Caesar, whose army in consequence of the arrangements made by the Pompeians suffered from want of corn, undertook with three legions an expedition into the interior of the country, but was attacked on the march not far from Ruspina by the corps which Labienus had brought up to dislodge Caesar from the coast. As Labienus had exclusively cavalry and archers, and Caesar almost nothing but infantry of the line, the legions were quickly surrounded and exposed to the missiles of the enemy, without being able to retaliate or to attack with success. No doubt the deploying of the entire line relieved once more the flanks, and spirited charges saved the honour of their arms; but a retreat was unavoidable, and had Ruspina not been so near, the Moorish javelin would perhaps have accomplished the same result here as the Parthian bow at Carrhae.
Caesar’s Position at Ruspina
Caesar, whom this day had fully convinced of the difficulty of the impending war, would not again expose his soldiers untried and discouraged by the new mode of fighting to any such attack, but awaited the arrival of his veteran legions. The interval was employed in providing some sort of compensation against the crushing superiority of the enemy in the weapons of distant warfare. The incorporation of the suitable men
Caesar’s situation, however, continued sufficiently unpleasant. His army was crowded together within a space of six square miles; though the fleet conveyed corn, the want of forage was as much felt by Caesar’s cavalry as by those of Pompeius before Dyrrhachium. The light troops of the enemy remained notwithstanding all the exertions of Caesar so immeasurably superior to his, that it seemed almost impossible to carry offensive operations into the interior even with veterans. If Scipio retired and abandoned the coast towns, he might perhaps achieve a victory like those which the vizier of Orodes had won over Crassus and Juba over Curio, and he could at least endlessly protract the war. The simplest consideration suggested this plan of campaign; even Cato, although far from a strategist, counselled its adoption, and offered at the same time to cross with a corps to Italy and to call the republicans there to arms— which, amidst the utter confusion in that quarter, might very well meet with success. But Cato could only advise, not command; Scipio the commander-in-chief decided that the war should be carried on in the region of the coast. This was a blunder, not merely inasmuch as they thereby dropped a plan of war promising a sure result, but also inasmuch as the region to which they transferred the war was in dangerous agitation, and a good part of the army which they opposed to Caesar was likewise in a troublesome temper. The fearfully strict levy, the carrying off of the supplies, the devastating of the smaller townships, the feeling in general that they were being sacrificed for a cause
Battle at Thapsus
At last Caesar, after being joined by his last reinforcements, made a lateral movement towards Thapsus. Scipio had, as we have said, strongly garrisoned this town, and thereby committed the blunder of presenting to his opponent an object of attack easy to be seized; to this first error he soon added the second still less excusable blunder of now for the rescue of Thapsus giving the battle, which Caesar had wished and Scipio had hitherto rightly refused, on ground which placed the decision in the hands of the infantry of the line. Immediately along the shore, opposite to Caesar’s camp, the legions of Scipio and Juba appeared, the fore ranks ready for fighting, the hinder ranks occupied in forming an entrenched camp; at the same time the garrison of Thapsus prepared for a sally. Caesar’s camp-guard sufficed to repulse the latter. His
Cato in Utica
His Death
There was as little a continuance of the struggle in Africa after the battle of Thapsus, as there had been a year and a half before in the east after the defeat of Pharsalus. Cato as commandant of Utica convoked the senate, set forth how the means of defence stood, and submitted it to the decision of those assembled whether they would yield or defend themselves to the last man— only adjuring them to resolve and to act not each one for himself, but all in unison. The more courageous view found several supporters; it was proposed to manumit on behalf of the state the slaves capable of arms, which however Cato rejected as an illegal encroachment on private property, and
The Leaders of the Republicans Put to Death
Of the other fugitive leaders only a few escaped. The cavalry that fled from Thapsus encountered the bands of Sittius, and were cut down or captured by them; their leaders Afranius and Faustus were delivered up to Caesar, and, when the latter did not order their immediate execution, they were slain in a tumult by his veterans. The commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio with the fleet of the defeated party fell into the power of the cruisers of Sittius and, when they were about to lay hands on him, stabbed himself. King Juba, not unprepared for such an issue, had in that case resolved to die in a way which seemed to him befitting a king, and had caused an enormous funeral pile to be prepared in the market-place of his city Zama, which was intended to consume along with his body all his treasures and the dead bodies of the whole citizens of Zama. But the inhabitants of the town showed no desire to let themselves be employed by way of decoration for the funeral rites of the African Sardanapalus; and they closed the gates against the king when fleeing from the battle-field he appeared, accompanied by Marcus Petreius, before their city. The king—one of those natures that become savage amidst a life of dazzling and insolent enjoyment, and prepare for themselves even out of death an intoxicating feast— resorted with his companion to one of his country houses, caused a copious banquet to be served up, and at the close of the feast challenged Petreius to fight him to death in single combat. It was the conqueror of Catilina that received his death at the hand of the king; the latter thereupon caused himself to be stabbed by one of his slaves. The few men of eminence that escaped, such as Labienus and Sextus Pompeius, followed the elder brother of the latter to Spain and sought, like Sertorius formerly, a last refuge of robbers and pirates in the waters and the mountains of that still half-independent land.
Regulation of Africa
Without resistance Caesar regulated the affairs of Africa. As Curio had already proposed, the kingdom of Massinissa was broken up. The most eastern portion or region of Sitifis was united with the kingdom of Bocchus king of East Mauretania,(51) and the faithful king Bogud of Tingis was rewarded with considerable gifts. Cirta (Constantine) and the surrounding district, hitherto possessed under the supremacy of Juba by the prince Massinissa and his son Arabion, were conferred on the condottiere Publius Sittius that he might settle his half-Roman bands there;(52) but at the same time this district, as well as by far the largest and most fertile portion of the late Numidian kingdom, were united as “New Africa” with the older province of Africa, and the defence of the country along the coast against the roving tribes of the desert, which the republic had entrusted to a client-king, was imposed by the new ruler on the empire itself.
The Victory of Monarchy
The struggle, which Pompeius and the republicans had undertaken against the monarchy of Caesar, thus terminated, after having lasted for four years, in the complete victory of the new monarch. No doubt the monarchy was not established for the first time on the battle-fields of Pharsalus and Thapsus; it might already be dated from the moment when Pompeius and Caesar in league had established their joint rule and overthrown the previous aristocratic constitution. Yet it was only those baptisms of blood of the ninth August 706 and the sixth April 708 that set aside the conjoint rule so opposed to the nature of absolute dominion, and conferred fixed status and formal recognition on the new monarchy. Risings of pretenders and republican conspiracies might ensue and provoke new commotions, perhaps even new revolutions and restorations; but the continuity of the free republic that had been uninterrupted for five hundred years was broken through, and monarchy was established throughout the range of the wide Roman empire by the legitimacy of accomplished fact.
The End of the Republic
The constitutional struggle was at an end; and that it was so, was proclaimed by Marcus Cato when he fell on his sword at Utica. For many years he had been the foremost man in the struggle of the legitimate republic against its oppressors; he had continued it, long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory. But now the struggle itself had become impossible; the republic which Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived; what were the republicans now to do on the earth? The treasure was carried off, the sentinels were thereby relieved; who could blame them if they departed? There was more nobility, and above all more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life. Cato was anything but a great man; but with all that short-sightedness, that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases which have stamped him, for his own and for
The Old Republic and the New Monarchy
Character of Caesar
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
If in a nature so harmoniously organized any one aspect of it may be singled out as characteristic, it is this—that he stood aloof from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course, Caesar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no genius; but his passion was never stronger than he could control. He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken lively possession of his spirit; but with him they did not penetrate to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied him long and earnestly; but, while Alexander could not sleep for thinking of the Homeric Achilles, Caesar in his sleepless hours mused on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses, as everybody then did, but they were weak; on the other hand he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural science. While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the destroyer of care, the temperate Roman, after the revels of his youth were over, avoided it entirely. Around him, as around all those whom the full lustre of woman’s love has dazzled in youth, fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger; even in later years he had love-adventures and successes with women, and he retained a certain foppishness in his outward appearance, or, to speak more correctly, the pleasing consciousness of his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness, which he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public in his later years, and he would doubtless have surrendered some of his victories, if he could thereby have brought back his youthful locks. But, however much even when monarch he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him; even his much-censured relation to queen Cleopatra was only contrived to mask a weak point in his political position.(1) Caesar was thoroughly a realist and a man of sense; and whatever he undertook and achieved was pervaded and guided by the cool sobriety which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius. To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present, undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation; to this he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour, and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest and most incidental enterprise; to this he owed the many-sided power with which he grasped and mastered whatever understanding can comprehend and will can compel; to this he owed the self-possessed ease with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns; to this he owed the “marvellous serenity” which remained steadily with him through good and evil days; to this he owed the complete independence, which admitted of no control by favourite or by mistress, or even by friend. It resulted, moreover, from this clearness of judgment that Caesar never formed to himself illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man; in his case the friendly veil
Caesar as a Statesman
Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman. From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a statesman in the deepest sense of the term, and his aim was the highest which man is allowed to propose to himself—the political, military, intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation, and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin to his own. The hard school of thirty years’ experience changed his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached; his aim itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue and conspirator he stole towards it by paths of darkness, and in those when, as joint possessor of the supreme power and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day before the eyes of the world. All the measures of a permanent kind that proceeded from him at the most various times assume their appropriate places in the great building-plan. We cannot therefore properly speak of isolated achievements of Caesar; he did nothing isolated. With justice men commend Caesar the orator for his masculine eloquence, which, scorning all the arts of the advocate, like a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed. With justice men admire in Caesar the author the inimitable simplicity of the composition, the unique purity and beauty of the language. With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have praised Caesar the general, who, in a singular degree disregarding routine and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of warfare by which in the given case the enemy was conquered, and which was thus in the given case the right one; who with the certainty of divination found the proper means for every end; who after defeat stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and ended the campaign invariably with victory; who managed that element of warfare, the treatment of which serves to distinguish military genius from the mere ordinary ability of an officer—the rapid movement of masses—with unsurpassed perfection, and found the guarantee of victory not in the massiveness of his forces but in the celerity of their movements, not in long preparation but in rapid and daring action even with inadequate means. But all these were with Caesar mere secondary
The most remarkable peculiarity of his action as a statesman was its perfect harmony. In reality all the conditions for this most difficult of all human functions were united in Caesar. A thorough realist, he never allowed the images of the past or venerable tradition to disturb him; for him nothing was of value in politics but the living present and the law of reason, just as in his character of grammarian he set aside historical and antiquarian research and recognized nothing but on the one hand the living -usus loquendi- and on the other hand the rule of symmetry. A born ruler, he governed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds, and compelled the most heterogeneous natures to place themselves at his service—the plain citizen and the rough subaltern, the genteel matrons of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and Mauretania, the brilliant cavalry-officer and the calculating banker. His talent for organization was marvellous; no statesman has ever compelled alliances, no general has ever collected an army out of unyielding and refractory elements with such decision, and kept them together with such firmness, as Caesar displayed in constraining and upholding his coalitions and his legions; never did regent judge his instruments and assign each to the place appropriate for him with so acute an eye.
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.
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
Setting Aside of the Old Parties
If the old, in every respect vicious, state of things was to be successfully got rid of and the commonwealth was to be renovated, it was necessary first of all that the country should be practically tranquillized and that the ground should be cleared from the rubbish with which since the recent catastrophe it was everywhere strewed. In this work Caesar set out from the principle of the reconciliation of the hitherto subsisting parties or, to put it more correctly—for, where the antagonistic principles are irreconcilable, we cannot speak of real reconciliation— from the principle that the arena, on which the nobility and the populace had hitherto contended with each other, was to be abandoned by both parties, and that both were to meet together on the ground of the new monarchical constitution. First of all therefore all the older quarrels of the republican past were
Discontent of the Democrats
Far more difficult than the settlement of these questions which already belonged substantially to the past was the treatment of the parties confronting each other at the moment—on the one hand Caesar’s own democratic adherents, on the other hand the overthrown aristocracy. That the former should be, if possible, still less satisfied than the latter with Caesar’s conduct after the victory and with his summons to abandon the old standing-ground of party, was to be expected. Caesar himself desired doubtless on the whole the same issue which Gaius Gracchus had contemplated; but the designs of the Caesarians were no longer those of the Gracchans. The Roman popular party had been driven onward in gradual progression from reform to revolution, from revolution to anarchy, from anarchy to a war against property; they celebrated among themselve the memory of the reign of terror and now adorned the tomb of Catilina, as formerly that of the Gracchi, with flowers and garlands; they had placed themselves under Caesar’s banner, because they expected him to do for them what Catilina had not been able to accomplish. But as it speedily became plain that Caesar was very far from intending to be the testamentary executor of Catilina, and that the utmost which debtors might expect from him was some alleviations of payment and modifications of procedure, indignation found loud vent in the inquiry. For whom then had the popular party conquered, if not for the people? And the rabble of this description, high and low, out of pure chagrin at the miscarriage of their politico-economic Saturnalia began first to coquet with the Pompeians, and then even during Caesar’s absence of nearly two years from Italy (Jan. 706-autumn 707) to instigate there a second civil war within the first.
Caelius and Milo
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.
Measures against Pompeians and Republicans
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,
Amnesty
The republican opposition submitted to be pardoned; but it was not reconciled. Discontent with the new order of things and exasperation against the unwonted ruler were general. For open political resistance there was indeed no farther opportunity— it was hardly worth taking into account, that some oppositional tribunes on occasion of the question of title acquired for themselves the republican crown of martyrdom by a demonstrative intervention against those who had called Caesar king—but republicanism found expression all the more decidedly as an opposition of sentiment, and in secret agitation and plotting. Not a hand stirred when the Imperator appeared in public. There was abundance of wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling popular satire against the new monarchy. When a comedian ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest applause. The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free. Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field; he himself and his abler confidants replied to the Cato-literature with Anticatones, and the republican and Caesarian scribes fought round the dead hero of Utica like the Trojans and Hellenes round the dead body of Patroclus; but as a matter of course in this conflict—where the public thoroughly republican in its feelings was judge—the Caesarians had the worst of it. No course remained but to overawe the authors; on which account men well known and dangerous in a literary point of view, such as Publius Nigidius Figulus and Aulus Caecina, had more difficulty in obtaining permission to return to Italy than other exiles, while the oppositional writers tolerated in Italy were subjected to a practical censorship, the restraints of which were all the more annoying that the measure of punishment to be dreaded was utterly arbitrary.(4) The underground machinations of the overthrown parties against the new monarchy will be more fitly set forth in another connection. Here it is sufficient to say that risings of pretenders as well as of republicans were incessantly brewing throughout the Roman empire; that the flames of civil war kindled now by the Pompeians, now by the republicans, again burst forth brightly at various places; and that in the capital there was perpetual conspiracy against the life of the monarch. But Caesar could not be induced by these plots even to surround himself permanently with a body-guard, and usually contented himself with making known the detected conspiracies by public placards.
Bearing of Caesar towards the Parties
However much Caesar was wont to treat all things relating to his personal safety with daring indifference, he could not possibly conceal from himself the very serious danger with which this mass of malcontents threatened not merely himself but also his creations. If nevertheless, disregarding all the warning and urgency of his friends, he without deluding himself as to the implacability of the very opponents to whom he showed mercy, persevered with marvellous composure and energy in the course of pardoning by far the greater number of them, he did so neither from the chivalrous magnanimity of a proud, nor from the sentimental clemency of an effeminate, nature, but from the correct statesmanly consideration that vanquished parties are disposed of more rapidly and with less public injury by their absorption within the state than by any attempt to extirpate them by proscription or to eject them from the commonwealth by banishment. Caesar could not for his high objects dispense with the constitutional party itself, which in fact embraced not the aristocracy merely but all the elements of a free and national spirit among the Italian burgesses; for his schemes, which contemplated the renovation of the antiquated state, he needed the whole mass of talent, culture, hereditary, and self-acquired distinction, which this party embraced; and in this sense he may well have named the pardoning of his opponents the finest reward of victory. Accordingly the most prominent chiefs of the defeated parties were indeed removed, but full pardon was not withheld from the men of the second and third rank and especially of the younger generation; they were not, however, allowed to sulk in passive opposition, but were by more or less gentle pressure induced to take an active part in the new administration, and to accept honours and offices from it. As with Henry the Fourth and William of Orange, so with Caesar his greatest difficulties began only after the victory. Every revolutionary conqueror learns by experience that, if after vanquishing his opponents he would not remain like Cinna and Sulla a mere party-chief, but would like Caesar, Henry the Fourth, and William of Orange substitute the welfare of the commonwealth for the necessarily one-sided programme of his own party, for the moment all parties, his own as well as the vanquished, unite against the new chief; and the more so, the more great and pure his idea of his new vocation. The friends of the constitution and the Pompeians, though doing homage with the lips to Caesar, bore yet in heart a grudge either at monarchy or at least at the dynasty; the degenerate democracy was in open rebellion against Caesar from the moment of its perceiving that Caesar’s objects were by no means its own; even the personal adherents of Caesar murmured, when they found that their chief was establishing instead of a state of condottieri a monarchy equal and just towards all, and that the portions
Caesar’s Work
In attempting to give a detailed account of the mode in which the transition was effected from the old to the new state of things, we must first of all recollect that Caesar came not to begin, but to complete. The plan of a new polity suited to the times, long ago projected by Gaius Gracchus, had been maintained by his adherents and successors with more or less of spirit and success, but without wavering. Caesar, from the outset and as it were by hereditary right the head of the popular party, had for thirty years borne aloft its banner without ever changing or even so much as concealing his colours; he remained democrat even when monarch. as he accepted without limitation, apart of course from the preposterous projects of Catilina and Clodius, the heritage of his party; as he displayed the bitterest, even personal, hatred to the aristocracy and the genuine aristocrats; and as he retained unchanged the essential ideas of Roman democracy, viz. alleviation of the burdens of debtors, transmarine colonization, gradual equalization of the differences of rights among the classes belonging to the state, emancipation of the executive power from the senate: his monarchy was so little at variance with democracy, that democracy on the contrary only attained its completion and fulfilment by means of that monarchy. For this monarchy was not the Oriental despotism of divine right, but a monarchy
At this point however it is proper expressly once for all to claim what the historian everywhere tacitly presumes, and to protest against the custom—common to simplicity and perfidy—of using historical praise and historical censure, dissociated from the given circumstances, as phrases of general application, and in the present case of construing the judgment as to Caesar into a judgment as to what is called Caesarism. It is true that the history of past centuries ought to be the instructress of the present; but not in the vulgar sense, as if one could simply by turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures of the present in the records of the past, and collect from these the symptoms for a political diagnosis and the specifics for a prescription; it is instructive only so far as the observation of older forms of culture reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally— the fundamental forces everywhere alike, and the manner of their combination everywhere different—and leads and encourages men, not to unreflecting imitation, but to independent reproduction. In this sense the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism, with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master-worker, with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth a sharper censure of modern autocracy than could be written by the hand of man. According to the same law of nature in virtue of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic machine, every constitution however defective which gives play to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism; for the former is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is and therefore dead. This law of nature has verified itself in the Roman absolute military monarchy and verified itself all the more completely, that, under the impulse of its creator’s genius and in the absence of all material complications from without, that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely than any similar state. From Caesar’s time, as the sequel will show and Gibbon has shown long
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
Other Magistracies and Attributions
For other magistracies in the proper sense there remained alongside of this dictatorship no room; Caesar did not take up the censorship as such,(11) but he doubtless exercised censorial rights— particularly the important right of nominating senators—after a comprehensive fashion.
He held the consulship frequently alongside of the dictatorship, once even without colleague; but he by no means attached it permanently to his person, and he gave no effect to the calls addressed to him to undertake it for five or even for ten years in succession.
Caesar had no need to have the superintendence of worship now committed to him, since he was already -pontifex maximus-.(12) as a matter of course the membership of the college of augurs was conferred on him, and generally an abundance of old and new honorary rights, such as the title of a “father of the fatherland,” the designation of the month of his birth by the name which it still bears of Julius, and other manifestations of the incipient courtly tone which ultimately ran into utter deification. Two only of the arrangements deserve to be singled out: namely that Caesar was placed on the same footing with the tribunes of the people as regards their special personal inviolability, and that the appellation of Imperator was permanently attached to his person and borne by him as a title alongside of his other official designations.
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.
That the new organization was not meant to be restricted merely to the lifetime of its founder, is beyond doubt; but he did not succeed in settling the especially difficult question of the succession, and it must remain an undecided point whether he had it in view to institute some sort of form for the election of a successor, such as had subsisted in the case of the original kingly office, or whether he wished to introduce for the supreme office not merely the tenure for life but also the hereditary character, as his adopted son subsequently maintained.(14) It is not improbable that he had the intention of combining in some measure the two systems, and of arranging the succession, similarly to the course followed by Cromwell and by Napoleon, in such a way that the ruler should be succeeded in rule by his son, but, if he had no son, or the son should not seem fitted for the succession, the ruler should of his free choice nominate his successor in the form of adoption.
In point of state law the new office of Imperator was based on the position which the consuls or proconsuls occupied outside of the -pomerium-, so that primarily the military command, but, along with this, the supreme judicial and consequently also the administrative power, were included in it.(15) But the authority of the Imperator was qualitatively superior to the consular-proconsular, in so far as the former was not limited as respected time or space, but was held for life and operative also in the capital;(16) as the Imperator could not, while the consul could, be checked by colleagues of equal power; and as all the restrictions placed in course of time on the original supreme official power— especially the obligation to give place to the -provocatio-and to respect the advice of the senate—did not apply to the Imperator.
Re-establishment of the Regal Office
In a word, this new office of Imperator was nothing else than the primitive regal office re-established; for it was those very restrictions—as respected the temporal and local limitation of power, the collegiate arrangement, and the cooperation of the senate or the community that was necessary for certain cases— which distinguished the consul from the king.(17) There is hardly a trait of the new monarchy which was not found in the old: the union of the supreme military, judicial, and administrative authority in the hands of the prince; a religious presidency over the commonwealth; the right of issuing ordinances with binding power; the reduction of the senate to a council of state; the revival of the patriciate and of the praefecture of the city. But still more striking than these analogies is the internal similarity of the monarchy of Servius Tullius and the monarchy of Caesar; if those old kings of Rome with all their plenitude of power had yet been rulers of a free community and themselves the protectors of the commons against the nobility, Caesar too had not come to destroy liberty but to fulfil it, and
Lastly, outward considerations also recommended this recurrence to the former kingly position. Mankind have infinite difficulty in reaching new creations, and therefore cherish the once developed forms as sacred heirlooms. Accordingly Caesar very judiciously connected himself with Servius Tullius, in the same way as subsequently Charlemagne connected himself with Caesar, and Napoleon attempted at least to connect himself with Charlemagne. He did so, not in a circuitous way and secretly, but, as well as his successors, in the most open manner possible; it was indeed the very object of this connection to find a clear, national, and popular form of expression for the new state. From ancient times there stood on the Capitol the statues of those seven kings, whom the conventional history of Rome was wont to bring on the stage; Caesar ordered his own to be erected beside them as the eighth. He appeared publicly in the costume of the old kings of Alba. In his new law as to political crimes the principal variation from that of Sulla was, that there was placed alongside of the collective community, and on a level with it, the Imperator as the living and personal expression of the people. In the formula used for political oaths there was added to the Jovis and the Penates of the Roman people the Genius of the Imperator. The outward badge of monarchy was, according to the view univerally diffused in antiquity, the image of the monarch on the coins; from the year 710 the head of Caesar appears on those of the Roman state.
There could accordingly be no complaint at least on the score that Caesar left the public in the dark as to his view of his position; as distinctly and as formally as possible he came forward not merely as monarch, but as very king of Rome. It is possible even, although not exactly probable, and at any rate of subordinate importance, that he had it in view to designate his official power not with the new name of Imperator, but directly with the old one of King.(18) Even in his lifetime many of his enemies as of his friends were of opinion that he intended to have himself expressly nominated king of Rome; several indeed of
The New Court
The New Patrician Nobility
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,
Under a monarch thus practically unlimited there could hardly be scope for a constitution at all—still less for a continuance of the hitherto existing commonwealth based on the legal co-operation of the burgesses, the senate, and the several magistrates. Caesar fully and definitely reverted to the tradition of the regal period; the burgess-assembly remained—what it had already been, in that period— by the side of and with the king the supreme and ultimate expression of the will of the sovereign people; the senate was brought back to its original destination of giving advice to the ruler when he requested it; and lastly the ruler concentrated in his person anew the whole magisterial authority, so that there existed no other independent state-official by his side any more than by the side of the kings of the earliest times.
Legislation
Edicts
For legislation the democratic monarch adhered to the primitive maxim of Roman state-law, that the community of the people in concert with the king convoking them had alone the power of organically regulating the commonwealth; and he had his constitutive enactments regularly sanctioned by decree of the people. The free energy and the authority half-moral, half-political, which the yea or nay of those old warrior-assemblies had carried with it, could not indeed be again instilled into the so-called comitia of this period; the co-operation of the burgesses in legislation, which in the old constitution had been extremely limited but real and living, was in the new practically an unsubstantial shadow. There was therefore no need of special restrictive measures against the comitia; many years’ experience had shown that every government— the oligarchy as well as the monarch—easily kept on good terms with this formal sovereign. These Caesarian comitia were an important element in the Caesarian system and indirectly of practical significance, only in so far as they served to retain in principle the sovereignty of the people and to constitute an energetic protest against sultanism.
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.
The Senate as the State-Council of the Monarch
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
Personal Government by Caesar
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
In Matters of Finance
With respect to details as a matter of course in strictly political affairs Caesar avoided, so far as was at all possible, any delegation of his functions. Where it was inevitable, as especially when during his frequent absence from Rome he had need of a higher organ there, the person destined for this purpose was, significantly enough, not the legal deputy of the monarch, the prefect of the city, but a confidant without officially-recognized jurisdiction, usually Caesar’s banker, the cunning and pliant Phoenician merchant Lucius Cornelius Balbus from Gades. In administration Caesar was above all careful to resume the keys of the state-chest—which the senate had appropriated to itself after the fall of the regal power, and by means of which it had possessed itself of the government—and to entrust them only to those servants who with their persons were absolutely and exclusively devoted to him. In respect of ownership indeed the private means of the monarch remained, of course, strictly separate from the property of the state; but Caesar took in hand the administration of the whole financial and monetary system of the state, and conducted it entirely in the way in which he and the Roman grandees generally were wont to manage the administration of their own means and substance. For the future the levying of the provincial revenues and in the main also the management of the coinage were entrusted to the slaves and freedmen of the Imperator and men of the senatorial order were excluded from it— a momentous step out of which grew in course of time the important class of procurators and the “imperial household.”
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
In the Administration of the Capital
Lastly, so far as concerns the administration of the city which was his capital and residence, the Imperator evidently intended for a time to entrust this also to magistrates similarly nominated by him. He revived the old city-lieutenancy of the regal period;(27) on different occasions he committed during his absence the administration of the capital to one or more such lieutenants nominated by him without consulting the people and for an indefinite period, who united in themselves the functions of all the administrative magistrates and possessed even the right of coining money with their own name, although of course not with their own effigy In 707 and in the first nine months of 709 there were, moreover, neither praetors nor curule aediles nor quaestors; the consuls too
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
In the spiritual hierarchy on the other hand Caesar, although he issued a detailed law respecting this portion of the state-economy, made no material alteration, except that he connected with the person of the regent the supreme pontificate and perhaps also the membership of the higher priestly colleges generally; and, partly in connection with this, one new stall was created in each of the three supreme colleges, and three new stalls in the fourth college of the banquet-masters. If the Roman state-hierarchy had hitherto served as a support to the ruling oligarchy, it might render precisely the same service to the new monarchy. The conservative religious policy of the senate was transferred to the new kings of Rome; when the strictly conservative Varro published about this time his “Antiquities of Divine Things,” the great fundamental repository of Roman state-theology, he was allowed to dedicate it to the -Pontifex Maximus- Caesar. The faint lustre which the worship of Jovis was still able to impart shone round the newly-established throne; and the old national faith became in its last stages the instrument of a Caesarian papacy, which, however, was from the outset but hollow and feeble.
Regal Jurisdiction
In judicial matters, first of all, the old regal jurisdiction was re-established. As the king had originally been judge in criminal and civil causes, without being legally bound in the former to respect an appeal to the prerogative of mercy in the people, or in the latter to commit the decision of the question in dispute to jurymen; so Caesar claimed the right of bringing capital causes as well as private processes for sole and final decision to his own bar, and disposing of them in the event of his presence personally, in the event of his absence by the city-lieutenant. In fact, we find him, quite after the manner of the ancient kings, now sitting in judgment publicly in the Forum of the capital on Roman burgesses accused of high treason, now holding a judicial inquiry, in his house regarding the client princes accused of the like crime; so that the only privilege, which the Roman burgesses had as compared with the other subjects of the king, seems to have consisted in the publicity of the judicial procedure. But this resuscitated supreme jurisdiction of the kings, although Caesar discharged its duties with impartiality and care, could only from the nature of the case find practical application in exceptional cases.
Retention of the Previous Administration of Justice
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
Appeal to the Monarch
The relations of the regal and the republican jurisdiction were on the whole co-ordinate, so that any cause might be initiated as well before the king’s bar as before the competent republican tribunal, the latter of course in the event of collision giving way; if on the other hand the one or the other tribunal had pronounced sentence, the cause was thereby finally disposed of. To overturn a verdict pronounced by the jurymen duly called to act in a civil or in a criminal cause even the new ruler was not entitled, except where special incidents, such as corruption or violence, already according to the law of the republic gave occasion for cancelling the jurymen’s sentence. On the other hand the principle that, as concerned any decree emanating merely from magistrates, the person aggrieved by it was entitled to appeal to the superior of the decreeing authority, probably obtained even now the great extension, out of which the subsequent imperial appellate jurisdiction arose; perhaps all the magistrates administering law, at least the governors of all the provinces, were regarded so far as subordinates of the ruler, that appeal to him might be lodged from any of their decrees.
Decay of the Judicial System
Certainly these innovations, the most important of which— the general extension given to appeal—cannot even be reckoned absolutely an improvement, by no means healed thoroughly the evils from which the Roman administration of justice was suffering. Criminal procedure cannot be sound in any slave-state, inasmuch as the task of proceeding against slaves lies, if not de jure, at least de facto in the hands of the master. The Roman master, as may readily be conceived, punished throughout the crime of his serf, not as a crime, but only so far as it rendered the
Decay of the Roman Military System
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
The necessary consequence of this was, that in the ordinary course of things the Roman armies pillaged the provincials, mutinied against their officers, and ran off in presence of the enemy; instances occurred where considerable armies, such as the Macedonian army of Piso in 697,(33) were without any proper defeat utterly ruined, simply by this misconduct. Capable leaders on the other hand, such as Pompeius, Caesar, Gabinius, formed doubtless out of the existing materials able and effective, and to some extent exemplary, armies; but these armies belonged far more to their general than to the commonwealth. The still more complete decay of the Roman marine—which, moreover, had remained an object of antipathy to the Romans and had never been fully nationalized— scarcely requires to be mentioned. Here too, on all sides, everything that could be ruined at all had been reduced to ruin under the oligarchic government.
Its Reorganization by Caesar
The reorganization of the Roman military system by Caesar was substantially limited to the tightening and strengthening of the reins of discipline, which had been relaxed under the negligent and incapable supervision previously subsisting. The Roman military system seemed to him neither to need, nor to be capable of, radical reform; he accepted the elements of the army, just as Hannibal had accepted them. The enactment of his municipal ordinance that, in order to the holding of a municipal magistracy or sitting in the municipal council before the thirtieth year, three years’ service on horseback—that is, as officer—or six years’ service on foot should be required, proves indeed that he wished to attract the better classes to the army; but it proves with equal clearness that amidst the ever-increasing prevalence of an unwarlike spirit in the nation he himself held it no longer possible to associate the holding of an honorary office with the fulfilment of the time of service unconditionally as hitherto. This very circumstance serves to explain why Caesar made no attempt to re-establish the Roman burgess-cavalry. The levy was better arranged, the time of service was regulated and abridged; otherwise matters remained on the footing that the infantry of the line were raised chiefly from the lower orders of the Roman burgesses, the cavalry and the light infantry from the subjects. That nothing was done for the reorganization of the fleet, is surprising.
Foreign Mercenaries
Adjutants of the Legion
It was an innovation—hazardous beyond doubt even in the view of its author—to which the untrustworthy character of the cavalry furnished by the subjects compelled him,(34) that Caesar for the first time deviated from the old Roman system of never fighting with mercenaries, and incorporated in the cavalry hired foreigners, especially Germans. Another innovation was the appointment of adjutants of the legion (-legati legionis-). Hitherto the military tribunes, nominated partly by the burgesses, partly by the governor concerned, had led the legions in such a way that six of them were placed over each legion, and the command alternated among these; a single commandant of the legion was appointed by the general only as a temporary and extraordinary measure. In subsequent times on the other hand those colonels or adjutants of legions appear as a permanent and organic institution, and as nominated no longer by the governor whom they obey, but by the supreme command in Rome; both changes seem referable to Caesar’s arrangements connected with the Gabinian law.(35) The reason for the introduction of this important intervening step in the military hierarchy must be sought partly in the necessity for a more energetic centralization of the command, partly in the felt want of capable superior officers, partly and chiefly in the design of providing a counterpoise to the governor by associating with him one or more colonels nominated by the Imperator.
The New Commandership-in-Chief
The most essential change in the military system consisted in the institution of a permanent military head in the person of the Imperator, who, superseding the previous unmilitary and in every respect incapable governing corporation, united in his hands the whole control of the army, and thus converted it from a direction which for the most part was merely nominal into a real and energetic supreme command. We are not properly informed as to the position which this supreme command occupied towards the special commands hitherto omnipotent in their respective spheres. Probably the analogy of the relation subsisting between the praetor and the consul or the consul and the dictator served generally as a basis, so that, while the governor in his own right retained the supreme military authority in his province, the Imperator was entitled at any moment to take it away from him and assume it for himself or his delegates, and, while the authority of the governor was confined to the province, that of the Imperator, like the regal and the earlier consular authority, extended over the whole empire. Moreover it is extremely probable that now the nomination of the officers, both the military tribunes and the centurions, so far as it had hitherto belonged to the governor,(36) as well as the nomination of the new adjutants of the legion, passed directly into the hands of the Imperator; and in like manner even now the arrangement
Caesar’s Military Plans
Defence of the Frontier
But, however decidedly and urgently the circumstances pointed to military monarchy, and however distinctly Caesar took the supreme command exclusively for himself, he was nevertheless not at all inclined to establish his authority by means of, and on, the army. No doubt he deemed a standing army necessary for his state, but only because from its geographical position it required a comprehensive regulation of the frontiers and permanent frontier garrisons. Partly at earlier periods, partly during the recent civil war, he had worked at the tranquillizing of Spain, and had established strong positions for the defence of the frontier in Africa along the great desert, and in the north-west of the empire along the line of the Rhine. He occupied himself with similar plans for the regions on the Euphrates and on the Danube. Above all he designed an expedition against the Parthians, to avenge the day of Carrhae; he had destined three years for this war, and was resolved to settle accounts with these dangerous enemies once for all and not less cautiously than thoroughly. In like manner he had projected the scheme of attacking Burebistas king of the Getae, who was greatly extending his power on both sides of the Danube,(37) and of protecting Italy in the north-east by border-districts similar to those which he had created for it in Gaul. On the other hand there is no evidence at all that Caesar contemplated like Alexander a career of victory extending indefinitely far; it is said indeed that he had intended to march from Parthia to the Caspian and from this to the Black Sea and then along its northern shores to the Danube, to annex to the empire all Scythia and Germany as far as the Northern Ocean—which according to the notions of that time was not so very distant from the Mediterranean—and to return home through Gaul; but no authority at all deserving of credit vouches for the existence of these fabulous projects. In the case of a state which, like the Roman state of Caesar, already included a mass of barbaric elements difficult to be controlled, and had still for centuries to come more than enough to do with their assimilation, such conquests, even granting their military practicability, would have been nothing but blunders far more brilliant and far worse than the Indian expedition of Alexander. Judging both from Caesar’s conduct in Britain and Germany and from the conduct of those who became the heirs of his political ideas, it is in a high degree probable
Attempts of Caesar to Avert Military Despotism
But, if it remains a mere probability that Caesar ought not to be designated a world-conqueror in the same sense as Alexander and Napoleon, it is quite certain that his design was not to rest his new monarchy primarily on the support of the army nor generally to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate it with, and as far as possible subordinate it to, the civil commonwealth. The invaluable pillars of a military state, those old and far-famed Gallic legions, were honourably dissolved just on account of the incompatibility of their esprit de corps with a civil commonwealth, and their glorious names were only perpetuated in newly-founded urban communities. The soldiers presented by Caesar with allotments of land on their discharge were not, like those of Sulla, settled together—as it were militarily— in colonies of their own, but, especially when they settled in Italy, were isolated as much as possible and scattered throughout the peninsula; it was only in the case of the portions of the Campanian land that remained for disposal, that an aggregation of the old soldiers of Caesar could not be avoided. Caesar sought to solve the difficult task of keeping the soldiers of a standing army within the spheres of civil life, partly by retaining the former arrangement which prescribed merely certain years of service, and not a service strictly constant, that is, uninterrupted by any discharge; partly by the already-mentioned shortening of the term of service, which occasioned a speedier change in the personal composition of the army; partly by the regular settlement of the soldiers who had served out their time as agricultural colonists; partly and principally by keeping the army aloof from Italy and generally from the proper seats of the civil and political life of the nation, and directing the soldier to the points, where according to the opinion of the great king he was alone, in his place—to the frontier stations, that he might ward off the extraneous foe.
Absence of Corps of Guards
The true criterion also of the military state—the development of, and the privileged position assigned to, the corps of guards— is not to be met with in the case of Caesar. Although as respects the army on active service the institution of a special bodyguard for the general had been already long in existence,(38) in Caesar’s system this fell completely into the background; his praetorian cohort seems to have essentially consisted merely of orderly
Impracticableness of Ideal
However much of the idea of his party and of his youth— to found a Periclean government in Rome not by virtue of the sword, but by virtue of the confidence of the nation—Caesar had been obliged to abandon in the struggle with realities, he retained even now the fundamental idea—of not founding a military monarchy— with an energy to which history scarcely supplies a parallel. Certainly this too was an impracticable ideal—it was the sole illusion, in regard to which the earnest longing of that vigorous mind was more powerful than its clear judgment. A government, such as Caesar had in view, was not merely of necessity in its nature highly personal, and so liable to perish with the death of its author just as the kindred creations of Pericles and Cromwell with the death of their founders; but, amidst the deeply disorganized state of the nation, it was not at all credible that the eighth king of Rome would succeed even for his lifetime in ruling, as his seven predecessors had ruled, his fellow-burgesses merely by virtue of law and justice, and as little probable that he would succeed in incorporating the standing army—after it had during the last civil war learned its power and unlearned its reverence—once more as a subservient element in civil society. To any one who calmly considered to what extent reverence for the law had disappeared from the lowest as from the highest ranks of society, the former hope must have seemed almost a dream; and, if with the Marian reform of the military system the soldier generally had ceased to be a citizen,(39) the Campanian mutiny and the battle-field of Thapsus showed with painful clearness the nature of the support which the army now lent to the law. Even the great democrat could only with difficulty and imperfectly hold in check the powers which he had unchained; thousands of swords still at his signal flew from the scabbard, but they were no longer equally ready upon that signal to return to the sheath. Fate is mightier than genius. Caesar desired to become the restorer of the civil commonwealth, and became the founder of the military monarchy which he abhorred; he overthrew the regime of aristocrats and bankers in the state, only to put a military regime in their place, and the commonwealth continued as before to be tyrannized
Financial Administration
The regulation of financial matters occasioned comparatively little difficulty in consequence of the solid foundations which the immense magnitude of the empire and the exclusion of the system of credit supplied. If the state had hitherto found itself in constant financial embarrassment, the fault was far from chargeable on the inadequacy of the state revenues; on the contrary these had of late years immensely increased. To the earlier aggregate income, which is estimated at 200,000,000 sesterces (2,000,000 pounds), there were added 85,000,000 sesterces (850,000 pounds) by the erection of the provinces of Bithynia-Pontus and Syria; which increase, along with the other newly opened up or augmented sources of income, especially from the constantly increasing produce of the taxes on luxuries, far outweighed the loss of the Campanian rents. Besides, immense sums had been brought from extraordinary sources into the exchequer through Lucullus, Metellus, Pompeius, Cato, and others. The cause of the financial embarrassments rather la partly in the increase of the ordinary and extraordinary expenditure, partly in the disorder of management. Under the former head, the distribution of corn to the multitude of the capital claimed almost exorbitant sums; through the extension given to it by Cato in 691(40) the yearly expenditure for that purpose amounted to 30,000,000 sesterces (300,000 pounds) and after the abolition in 696 of the compensation hitherto paid, it swallowed up even a fifth of the state revenues. The military budget also had risen, since the garrisons of Cilicia, Syria, and Gaul had been added to those of Spain, Macedonia, and the other provinces. Among the extraordinary items of expenditure must be named in the first place the great cost of fitting out fleets, on which, for example, five years after the great razzia of 687, 34,000,000 sesterces (340,000 pounds) were expended at once. Add to this the very considerable sums which were consumed in wars and warlike preparations; such as 18,000,000 sesterces (180,000 pounds) paid at once to Piso merely for the outfit of the Macedonian army, 24,000,000 sesterces (240,000 pounds) even annually to Pompeius for the maintenance and pay of the Spanish army, and similar sums to Caesar
Financial Reforms of Caesar
Leasing of the Direct Taxes Abolished
As soon however as the threads of Roman state-finance were concentrated no longer as hitherto in the senate, but in the cabinet of Caesar, new life, stricter order, and more compact connection at once pervaded all the wheels and springs of that great machine. the two institutions, which originated with Gaius Gracchus and ate like a gangrene into the Roman financial system—the leasing of the direct taxes, and the distributions of grain—were partly abolished, partly remodelled. Caesar wished not, like his predecessor, to hold the nobility in check by the banker-aristocracy and the populace of the capital, but to set them aside and to deliver the commonwealth from all parasites whether of high or lower rank; and therefore he went in these two important questions not with Gaius Gracchus, but with the oligarch Sulla. The leasing system was allowed to continue for the indirect taxes, in the case of which it was very old and—under the maxim of Roman financial administration, which was retained inviolable also by Caesar, that the levying of the taxes should at any cost be kept simple and readily manageable— absolutely could not be dispensed with. But the direct taxes were thenceforth universally either treated, like the African and Sardinian deliveries of corn and oil, as contributions in kind to be directly supplied to the state, or converted, like the revenues of Asia Minor, into fixed money payments, in which case the collection of the several sums payable was entrusted to the tax-districts themselves.
Reform of the Distribution of Corn
The corn-distributions in the capital had hitherto been looked on as a profitable prerogative of the community which ruled and, because it ruled, had to be fed by its subjects. This infamous principle was set aside by Caesar; but it could not be overlooked that a multitude of wholly destitute burgesses had been protected solely by these largesses of food from starvation. In this aspect Caesar retained them. While according to the Sempronian ordinance renewed by Cato every Roman burgess settled in Rome had legally a claim to bread-corn without payment, this list of recipients, which had at last risen to the number
The Budget of Income
In addition to these fundamental reforms a thorough revision of the income and expenditure took place. The ordinary sources of income were everywhere regulated and fixed. Exemption from taxation was conferred on not a few communities and even on whole districts, whether indirectly by the bestowal of the Roman or Latin franchise, or directly by special privilege; it was obtained e. g. by all the Sicilian communities(41) in the former, by the town of Ilion in the latter way. Still greater was the number of those whose proportion of tribute was lowered; the communities in Further Spain, for instance, already after Caesar’s governorship had on his suggestion a reduction of tribute granted to them by the senate, and now the most oppressed province of Asia had not only the levying of its direct taxes facilitated, but also a third of them wholly remitted. The newly-added taxes, such as those of the communities subdued in Illyria and above all of the Gallic communities—which latter together paid annually 40,000,000 sesterces (400,000 pounds)— were fixed throughout on a low scale. It is true on the other hand that various towns such as Little Leptis in Africa, Sulci in Sardinia, and several Spanish communities, had their tribute raised by way of penalty for their conduct during the last war. The very lucrative Italian harbour-tolls abolished in the recent times
The Budget of Expenditure
In the expenditure a diminution was in the first place obtained by the considerable restriction of the largesses of grain. The distribution of corn to the poor of the capital which was retained, as well as the kindred supply of oil newly introduced by Caesar for the Roman baths, were at least in great part charged once for all on the contributions in kind from Sardinia and especially from Africa, and were thereby wholly or for the most part kept separate from the exchequer. On the other hand the regular expenditure for the military system was increased partly by the augmentation of the standing army, partly by the raising of the pay of the legionary from 480 sesterces (5 pounds) to 900 (9 pounds) annually. Both steps were in fact indispensable. There was a total want of any real defence for the frontiers, and an indispensable preliminary to it was a considerable increase of the army. The doubling of the pay was doubtless employed by Caesar to attach his soldiers firmly to him,(42) but was not introduced as a permanent innovation on that account. The former pay of 1 1/3 sesterces (3 1/4 pence) per day had been fixed in very ancient times, when money had an altogether different value from that which it had in the Rome of Caesar’s day; it could only have been retained down to a period when the common day-labourer in the capital earned
Of the amount of the extraordinary expenses which Caesar had to undertake or voluntarily undertook, it is difficult to form a conception. The wars themselves consumed enormous sums; and sums perhaps not less were required to fulfil the promises which Caesar had been obliged to make during the civil war. It was a bad example and one unhappily not lost sight of in the sequel, that every common soldier received for his participation in the civil war 20,000 sesterces (200 pounds), every burgess of the multitude in the capital for his non-participation in it 300 sesterces (3 pounds) as an addition to his aliment; but Caesar, after having once under the pressure of circumstances pledged his word, was too much of a king to abate from it. Besides, Caesar answered innumerable demands of honourable liberality, and put into circulation immense sums for building more especially, which had been shamefully neglected during the financial distress of the last times of the republic—the cost of his buildings executed partly during the Gallic campaigns, partly afterwards, in the capital was reckoned at 160,000,000 sesterces (1,600,000 pounds). The general result of the financial administration of Caesar is expressed in the fact that, while by sagacious and energetic reforms and by a right combination of economy and liberality he amply and fully met all equitable claims, nevertheless already in March 710 there lay in the public treasury 700,000,000 and in his own 100,000,000 sesterces (together 8,000,000 pounds)—a sum which exceeded by tenfold the amount of cash in the treasury in the most flourishing times of the republic.(43)
Social Condition of the Nation
But the task of breaking up the old parties and furnishing the new commonwealth with an appropriate constitution, an efficient army, and well-ordered finances, difficult as it was, was not the most difficult part of Caesar’s work. If the Italian nation was really to be regenerated, it required a reorganization which should transform all parts of the great empire—Rome, Italy, and the provinces. Let us endeavour here also to delineate the old state of things, as well as the beginnings of a new and more tolerable time.
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.
The Populace There
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.
Relations of the Oligarchy to the Populace
Moreover, the government not only did nothing to counteract this corruption of the population of the capital, but even encouraged it for the benefit of their selfish policy. The judicious rule of law, which prohibited individuals condemned for a capital offence from dwelling in the capita, was not carried into effect by the negligent police. The police-supervision—so urgently required— of association on the part of the rabble was at first neglected, and afterwards(44) even declared punishable as a restriction inconsistent with the freedom of the people. The popular festivals had been allowed so to increase that the seven ordinary ones alone—the Roman, the Plebeian, those of the Mother of the Gods, of Ceres, of Apollo, of Flora(45) and of Victoria—lasted altogether sixty-two days; and to these were added the gladiatorial games and numerous other extraordinary amusements. The duty of providing grain at low prices— which was unavoidably necessary with such a proletariate living wholly from hand to mouth—was treated with the most unscrupulous frivolity, and the fluctuations in the price of bread-corn were of a fabulous and incalculable description.(46) Lastly, the distribution of grain formed an official invitation to the whole burgess-proletariate who were destitute of food and indisposed for work to take up their abode in the capital.
Anarchy of the Capital
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
Caesar’s Treatment of Matters in the Capital
Caesar did not deplore, but he sought to help so far as help was possible. Rome remained, of course, what it was— a cosmopolitan city. Not only would the attempt to give to it once more a specifically Italian character have been impracticable; it would not have suited Caesar’s plan. Just as Alexander found for his Graeco-Oriental empire an appropriate capital in the Hellenic, Jewish, Egyptian, and above all cosmopolitan, Alexandria, so the capital of the new Romano-Hellenic universal empire, situated at the meeting-point of the east and the west, was to be not an Italian community, but the denationalized capital of many nations. For this reason Caesar tolerated the worship of the newly-settled Egyptian gods alongside of Father Jovis, and granted even to the Jews the free exercise of their strangely foreign ritual in the very capital of the empire. However offensive was the motley mixture of the parasitic—especially the Helleno-Oriental— population in Rome, he nowhere opposed its extension; it is significant, that at his popular festivals for the capital he caused dramas to be performed not merely in Latin and Greek, but also in other languages, presumably in Phoenician, Hebrew, Syrian, Spanish.
Diminution of the Proletariate
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
The Club System Restricted
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
To this was added a stricter administration of criminal justice and an energetic police. The laws, especially as regards the crime of violence, were rendered more stringent; and the irrational enactment of the republican law, that the convicted criminal was entitled to withdraw himself from a part of the penalty which he had incurred by self-banishment, was with reason set aside. The detailed regulations, which Caesar issued regarding the police of the capital, are in great part still preserved; and all who choose may convince themselves that the Imperator did not disdain to insist on the house-proprietors putting the streets into repair and paving the footpath in its whole breadth with hewn stones, and to issue appropriate enactments regarding the carrying of litters and the driving of waggons, which from the nature of the streets were only allowed to move freely through the capital in the evening and by night. The supervision of the local police remained as hitherto chiefly with the four aediles, who were instructed now at least, if not earlier, each to superintend a distinctly marked-off police district within the capital.
Buildings of the Capital
Lastly, building in the capital, and the provision connected therewith of institutions for the public benefit, received from Caesar—who combined in himself the love for building of a Roman and of an organizer—a sudden stimulus, which not merely put to shame the mismanagement of the recent anarchic times, but also left all that the Roman aristocracy had done in their best days as far behind as the genius of Caesar surpassed the honest endeavours of the Marcii and Aemilii. It was not merely by the extent of the buildings in themselves and the magnitude of the sums expended on them that Caesar excelled his predecessors; but a genuine statesmanly perception of what was for the public good distinguishes what Caesar did for the public institutions of Rome from all similar services. He did not build, like his successors, temples and other splendid structures, but he relieved the marketplace of Rome—in which the burgess-assemblies, the seats of the chief courts, the exchange, and the daily business-traffic as well as the daily idleness, still were crowded together—at least from the assemblies and the courts by constructing for the former a new -comitium-, the Saepta Julia in the Campus Martius, and for the latter a separate place of judicature, the Forum Julium between the Capitol and Palatine. Of a kindred spirit is the arrangement originating with him, by which there were supplied to the baths of the capital annually three million pounds of oil, mostly from Africa, and they were thereby enabled to furnish to the bathers gratuitously the oil required for the anointing of the body—a measure of cleanliness and sanitary policy which, according to the ancient dietetics based substantially on bathing and anointing, was highly judicious.
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
Money-Dealing
In order to show what dimensions money-dealing assumed by the side of this estate-husbandry unnaturally prospering over the ruin of the small farmers, how the Italian merchants vying with the Jews poured themselves into all the provinces and client-states of the empire, and how all capital ultimately flowed to Rome, it will be sufficient, after what has been already said, to point to the single fact that in the money-market of the capital the regular rate of interest at this time was six per cent, and consequently money there was cheaper by a half than it was on an average elsewhere in antiquity.
Social Disproportion
In consequence of this economic system based both in its agrarian and mercantile aspects on masses of capital and on speculation, there arose a most fearful disproportion in the distribution of wealth. The often-used and often-abused phrase of a commonwealth composed of millionaires and beggars applies perhaps nowhere so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic; and nowhere perhaps has the essential maxim of the slave-state— that the rich man who lives by the exertions of his slaves is necessarily respectable, and the poor man who lives by the labour of his hands is necessarily vulgar—been recognized with so terrible a precision as the undoubted principle underlying all public and private intercourse.(51) A real middle class in our sense of the term there was not, as indeed no such class can exist in any fully-developed slave-state; what appears as if it were a good middle class and is so in a certain measure, is composed of those rich men of business and landholders who are so uncultivated or so highly cultivated as to content themselves within the sphere of their activity and to keep aloof from public life. Of the men of business—a class, among whom the numerous freedmen and other upstarts, as a rule, were seized with the giddy fancy of playing the man of quality—there were not very many who showed so much judgment. A model of this sort was the Titus Pomponius Atticus frequently mentioned in the accounts of this period. He acquired an immense fortune partly from the great estate-farming which he prosecuted in Italy and Epirus, partly from his money-transactions which ramified throughout Italy, Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor; but at the same time he continued to be throughout the simple man of business, did not allow himself to be seduced into soliciting office or even into monetary transactions with the state, and, equally remote from the avaricious niggardliness and from the prodigal and burdensome luxury of his time—his table, for instance, was maintained at a daily cost of 100 sesterces (1 pound)— contented himself with an easy existence appropriating to itself the charms of a country and a city life, the pleasures of intercourse with the best society of Rome and Greece, and all the enjoyments of literature and art.
More numerous and more solid were the Italian landholders of the old type. Contemporary literature preserves in the description of Sextus Roscius, who was murdered amidst the proscriptions of 673, the picture of such a rural nobleman (-pater familias rusticanus-); his wealth, estimated at 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), is mainly invested in his thirteen landed estates; he attends to the management of it in person systematically and with enthusiasm; he comes seldom or never to the capital, and, when he does appear there, by his clownish manners he contrasts not less with the polished senator than the innumerable hosts of his uncouth rural slaves with the elegant train of domestic slaves in the capital. Far more than the circles of the nobility with their cosmopolitan culture and the mercantile class at home everywhere and nowhere, these landlords and the “country towns” to which they essentially gave tone (-municipia rusticana-) preserved as well the discipline and manners as the pure and noble language of their fathers. The order of landlords was regarded as the flower of the nation; the speculator, who has made his fortune and wishes to appear among the notables of the land, buys an estate and seeks, if not to become himself the squire, at any rate to rear his son with that view. We meet the traces of this class of landlords, wherever a national movement appears in politics, and wherever literature puts forth any fresh growth; from it the patriotic opposition to the new monarchy drew its best strength; to it belonged Varro, Lucretius, Catullus; and nowhere perhaps does the comparative freshness of this landlord-life come more characteristically to light than in the graceful Arpinate introduction to the second book of Cicero’s treatise De Legibus— a green oasis amidst the fearful desert of that equally empty and voluminous writer.
The Poor
But the cultivated class of merchants and the vigorous order of landlords were far overgrown by the two classes that gave tone to society—the mass of beggars, and the world of quality proper. We have no statistical figures to indicate precisely the relative proportions of poverty and riches for this epoch; yet we may here perhaps again recall the expression which a Roman statesman employed some fifty years before(52)—that the number of families of firmly-established riches among the Roman burgesses did not amount to 2000. The burgess-body had since then become different; but clear indications attest that the disproportion between poor and rich had remained at least as great. The increasing impoverishment of the multitude shows itself only too plainly in their crowding to the corn-largesses and to enlistment in the army; the corresponding increase of riches is attested expressly by an author of this generation, when, speaking of the circumstances of the Marian period, he describes an estate of 2,000,000 sesterces (20,000 pounds) as “riches according to the circumstances of that day”; and the statements
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
Table Luxury
But no sort of luxury flourished so much as the coarsest of all— the luxury of the table. The whole villa arrangements and the whole villa life had ultimate reference to dining; not only had they different dining-rooms for winter and summer, but dinner was served in the picture-gallery, in the fruit-chamber, in the aviary, or on a platform erected in the deer-park, around which, when the bespoken “Orpheus” appeared in theatrical costume and blew his flourish, the duly-trained roes and wild boars congregated. Such was the care bestowed on decoration; but amidst all this the reality was by no means forgotten. Not only was the cook a graduate in gastronomy, but the master himself often acted as the instructor of his cooks. The roast had been long ago thrown into the shade by marine fishes and oysters; now the Italian river-fishes were utterly banished from good tables, and Italian delicacies and Italian wines were looked on as almost vulgar. Now even at the popular festivals there were distributed, besides the Italian Falerian, three sorts of foreign wine—Sicilian, Lesbian, Chian, while a generation before it had been sufficient even at great banquets to send round Greek wine once; in the cellar of the orator Hortensius there was found a stock of 10,000 jars (at 33 quarts) of foreign wine. It was no wonder that the Italian wine-growers began to complain of the competition of the wines from the Greek islands. No naturalist could ransack land and sea more zealously for new animals and plants, than the epicures of that day ransacked them for new culinary dainties.(53) The circumstance of the guest taking an emetic after a banquet, to avoid the consequences of the varied fare set before him, no longer created surprise. Debauchery of every sort became so systematic and aggravated that it found its professors, who earned a livelihood by serving as instructors of the youth of quality in the theory and practice of vice.
Debt
It will not be necessary to dwell longer on this confused picture, so monotonous in its variety; and the less so, that the Romans were far from original in this respect, and confined themselves to exhibiting a copy of the Helleno-Asiatic luxury still more exaggerated and stupid than their model. Plutos naturally devours his children as well as Kronos; the competition for all these mostly worthless objects of fashionable longing so forced up prices, that those who swam with the stream found the most colossal estate melt away
Immortality
Under such circumstances, as a matter of course, morality and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks of society. To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime: for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom; the post of the officer and the vote of the juryman were to be had for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath is called “the plaster for debts.” Men had forgotten what honesty was; a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man, but as a personal foe. The criminal statistics of all times and countries will hardly furnish a parallel to the dreadful picture of crimes—so varied, so horrible, and so unnatural—which the trial of Aulus Cluentius unrolls before us in the bosom of one of the most respected families of an Italian country town.
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
An equally characteristic feature in the brilliant decay of this period was the emancipation of women. In an economic point of view the women had long since made themselves independent;(57) in the present epoch we even meet with solicitors acting specially for women, who officiously lend their aid to solitary rich ladies in the management of their property and their lawsuits, make an impression on them by their knowledge of business and law, and thereby procure for themselves ampler perquisites and legacies than other loungers on the exchange. But it was not merely from the economic guardianship of father or husband that women felt themselves emancipated. Love-intrigues of all sorts were constantly in progress. The ballet-dancers (-mimae-) were quite a match for those of the present day in the variety of their pursuits and the skill with which they followed them out; their primadonnas, Cytheris and the like, pollute even the pages of history. But their, as it were, licensed trade was very materially injured by the free art of the ladies of aristocratic circles. Liaisons in the first houses had become so frequent, that only a scandal altogether exceptional could make them the subject of special talk; a judicial interference seemed now almost ridiculous. An unparalleled scandal, such as Publius Clodius produced in 693 at the women’s festival in the house of the Pontifex Maximus, although a thousand times worse than the occurrences which fifty years before had led to a series of capital sentences,(58) passed almost without investigation and wholly without punishment. The watering-place season—in April, when political business was suspended and the world of quality congregated in Baiae and Puteoli— derived its chief charm from the relations licit and illicit which, along with music and song and elegant breakfasts on board or on shore, enlivened the gondola voyages. There the ladies held absolute sway; but they were by no means content with this domain which rightfully belonged to them; they also acted as politicians, appeared in party conferences, and took part with their money and their intrigues in the wild coterie-doings of the time. Any one who beheld these female statesmen performing on the stage of Scipio and Cato and saw at their side the young fop—as with smooth chin, delicate voice, and mincing gait, with headdress and neckerchiefs, frilled robe, and women’s sandals he copied the loose courtesan— might well have a horror of the unnatural world, in which the sexes seemed as though they wished to change parts. What ideas as to divorce prevailed in the circles of the aristocracy may be discerned in the conduct of their best and most moral hero Marcus Cato, who did not hesitate to separate from his wife at the request of a friend desirous to marry her, and as little scrupled on the death of this friend to marry the same wife a second time. Celibacy and childlessness became more and more common, especially among the upper classes.
Depopulation of Italy
In consequence of such a social condition the Latin stock in Italy underwent an alarming diminution, and its fair provinces were overspread partly by parasitic immigrants, partly by sheer desolation. A considerable portion of the population of Italy flocked to foreign lands. Already the aggregate amount of talent and of working power, which the supply of Italian magistrates and Italian garrisons for the whole domain of the Mediterranean demanded, transcended the resources of the peninsula, especially as the elements thus sent abroad were in great part lost for ever to the nation. For the more that the Roman community grew into an empire embracing many nations, the more the governing aristocracy lost the habit of looking on Italy as their exclusive home; while of the men levied or enlisted for service a considerable portion perished in the many wars, especially in the bloody civil war, and another portion became wholly estranged from their native country by the long period of service, which sometimes lasted for a generation. In like manner with the public service, speculation kept a portion of the landholders and almost the whole body of merchants all their lives or at any rate for a long time out of the country, and the demoralising itinerant life of trading in particular estranged the latter altogether from civic existence in the mother country and from the various conditions of family life. As a compensation for these, Italy obtained on the one hand the proletariate of slaves and freedmen, on the other hand the craftsmen and traders flocking thither from Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, who flourished chiefly in the capital and still more in the seaport towns of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium.(61) In the largest and most important part of Italy however, even such a substitution of impure elements for pure; but the population was visibly on the decline. Especially was this true of the pastoral districts such as Apulia, the chosen land of cattle-breeding, which is called by contemporaries the most deserted part of Italy, and of the region around Rome, where the Campagna was annually becoming more desolate under the constant reciprocal action of the retrograde agriculture and the increasing malaria. Labici, Gabii, Bovillae, once cheerful little country towns, were so decayed, that it was difficult to find representatives of them for the ceremony of the Latin festival. Tusculum, although still one of the
Italy under the Oligarchy
It is a dreadful picture—this picture of Italy under the rule of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast was felt on both sides—the giddier the height to which riches rose, the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned—the more frequently, amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard, were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds were externally divided, the more completely they coincided in the like annihilation of family life—which is yet the germ and core of all nationality—in the like laziness and luxury, the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property. Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state has fully developed itself, it has desolated God’s fair world in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly the Carthage of Hannibal’s time, where in exactly similar fashion the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a— hypocritically whitewashed—moral and political corruption of the nation. All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man, be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again similar fruits to reap.
Reforms of Caesar
These evils, under which the national economy of Italy lay prostrate, were in their deepest essence irremediable, and so much of them as still admitted of remedy depended essentially for its amendment on the people and on time; for the wisest government is as little able as the more skilful physician to give freshness to the corrupt juices of the organism, or to do more in the case of the deeper-rooted evils than to prevent those accidents which obstruct the remedial power of nature in its working. The peaceful energy of the new rule even of itself furnished such a preventive, for by its means some of the worst excrescences were done away, such as the artificial pampering of the proletariate, the impunity of crimes, the purchase of offices, and various others. But the government could do something more than simply abstain from harm. Caesar was not one of those over-wise people who refuse to embank the sea, because forsooth no dike can defy some sudden influx of the tide. It is better, if a nation and its economy follow spontaneously the path prescribed by nature; but, seeing that they had got out of this path, Caesar applied all his energies to bring back by special intervention the nation to its home and family life, and to reform the national economy by law and decree.
Measures against Absentees from Italy
Measures for the Elevation of the Family
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.
Laws Respecting Luxury
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
The Debt Crisis
The measures of Caesar for the better regulation of Italian monetary and agricultural relations were of a graver character and promised greater results. The first question here related to temporary enactments respecting the scarcity of money and the debt-crisis generally. The law called forth by the outcry as to locked-up capital—that no one should have on hand more than 60,000 sesterces (600 pounds) in gold and silver cash—was probably only issued to allay the indignation of the blind public against the usurers; the form of publication, which proceeded on the fiction that this was merely the renewed enforcing of an earlier law that had fallen into oblivion, shows that Caesar was ashamed of this enactment, and it can hardly have passed into actual application. A far more serious question was the treatment of the pending claims for debt, the complete remission of which was vehemently demanded from Caesar by the party which called itself by his name. We have already mentioned, that he did not yield to this demand;(63) but two important concessions were made to the debtors, and that as early as 705. First, the interest in arrear was struck off,(64) and that which was paid was deducted from the capital. Secondly, the creditor was compelled to accept the moveable and immoveable property of the debtor in lieu of payment at the estimated value which his effects had before the civil war and the general depreciation which it had occasioned. The latter enactment was not unreasonable; if the creditor was to be looked on de facto as the owner of the property of his debtor to the amount of the sum due to him, it was doubtless proper that he should bear his share in the general depreciation of the property. On the other hand the cancelling of the payments of interest made or outstanding— which practically amounted to this, that the creditors lost, besides the interest itself, on an average 25 per cent of what they were entitled to claim as capital at the time of the issuing of the law—was in fact nothing else than a partial concession of that cancelling of creditors’ claims springing out of loans, for which the democrats had clamoured so vehemently; and, however bad may have been the conduct of the usurers, it is not possible thereby to justify the retrospective abolition of all claims for interest without distinction.
New Ordinance as to Bankruptcy
But Caesar did not confine himself to helping the debtor for the moment; he did what as legislator he could, permanently to keep down the fearful omnipotence of capital. First of all the great legal maxim was proclaimed, that freedom is not a possession commensurable with property, but an eternal right of man, of which the state is entitled judicially to deprive the criminal alone, not the debtor. It was Caesar, who, perhaps stimulated in this case also by the more humane Egyptian and Greek legislation, especially that of Solon,(68) introduced this principle—diametrically opposed to the maxims of the earlier ordinances as to bankruptcy— into the common law, where it has since retained its place undisputed. According to Roman law the debtor unable to pay became the serf of his creditor.(69) The Poetelian law no doubt had allowed a debtor, who had become unable to pay only through temporary embarrassments, not through genuine
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
Elevation of Agriculture
Hand in hand with these efforts to guard against the ascendency of capital went the endeavours to bring back agriculture to the path which was most advantageous for the commonwealth. For this purpose the improvement of the administration of justice and of police was very essential. While hitherto nobody in Italy had been sure of his life and of his moveable or immoveable property, while Roman condottieri for instance, at the intervals when their gangs were not helping to manage the politics of the capital, applied themselves to robbery in the forests of Etruria or rounded off the country estates of their paymasters by fresh acquisitions, this sort of club-law was now at an end; and in particular the agricultural population of all classes must have felt the beneficial effects of the change. The plans of Caesar for great works also, which were not at all limited to the capital, were intended to tell in this respect; the construction, for instance, of a convenient high-road from Rome through the passesof the Apennines to the Adriatic was designed to stimulate the internal traffic of Italy, and the lowering the level of the Fucine lake to benefit the Marsian farmers. But Caesar also sought by more direct measures to influence the state of Italian husbandry. The Italian graziers were required to take at least a third of their herdsmen from freeborn adults, whereby brigandage was checked and at the same time a source of gain was opened to the free proletariate.
Distribution of Land
In the agrarian question Caesar, who already in his first consulship had been in a position to regulate it,(72) more judicious than Tiberius Gracchus, did not seek to restore the farmer-system at any price, even at that of a revolution—concealed under juristic clauses—directed against property; by him on the contrary, as by every other genuine statesman, the security of that which is property or is at any rate regarded by the public as property was esteemed as the first and most inviolable of all political maxims, and it was only within the limits assigned by this maxim that he sought to accomplish the elevation of the Italian small holdings, which also appeared to him as a vital question for the nation. Even as it was, there was much still left for him in this respect to do. Every private right, whether it was called property or entitled heritable possession,
Elevation of the Municipal System
Lastly while the government thus energetically applied itself to remove the diseased, and to strengthen the sound, elements of the Italian national life, the newly-regulated municipal system— which had but recently developed itself out of the crisis of the Social war in and alongside of the state-economy(76)—was intended to communicate to the new absolute monarchy the communal life which was compatible with it, and to impart to the sluggish circulation of the noblest elements of public life once more a quickened action. The leading principles in the two municipal ordinances issued in 705 for Cisalpine Gaul and in 709 for Italy,(77) the latter of which remained the fundamental law for all succeeding times, are apparently, first, the strict purifying of the urban corporations from all immoral elements, while yet no trace of political police occurs; secondly, the utmost restriction of centralization and the utmost freedom of movement in the communities, to which there was even now reserved the election of magistrates and an—although limited—civil and criminal jurisdiction. The general police enactments, such as the restrictions on the right of association,(78) came, it is true, into operation also here.
Such were the ordinances, by which Caesar attempted to reform the Italian national economy. It is easy both to show their insufficiency, seeing that they allowed a multitude of evils still to exist, and to prove that they operated in various respects injuriously by imposing restrictions, some of which were very severely felt, on freedom of dealing. It is still easier to show that the evils of the Italian national economy generally were incurable. But in spite of this the practical statesman will admire the work as well as the master-workman. It was already no small achievement that, where a man like Sulla, despairing of remedy, had contented himself with a mere formal reorganization, the evil was seized in its proper seat and grappled with there; and we may well conclude that Caesar with his reforms came as near to the measure of what was possible as it was given to a statesman and a Roman to come. He could not and did not expect from them the regeneration of Italy; but he sought on the contrary to attain this in a very different way, for the right apprehension of which it is necessary first of all to review the condition of the provinces as Caesar found them.
Provinces
The provinces, which Caesar found in existence, were fourteen in number: seven European—the Further and the Hither Spain, Transalpine Gaul, Italian Gaul with Illyricum, Macedonia with Greece, Sicily, Sardinia with Corsica; five Asiatic—Asia, Bithynia and Pontus, Cilicia with Cyprus, Syria, Crete; and two African—Cyrene and Africa. To these Caesar added three new ones by the erection of the two new governorships of Lugdunese Gaul and Belgica(79) and by constituting Illyricum a province by itself.(80)
Provincial Administration of the Oligarchy
In the administration of these provinces oligarchic misrule had reached a point which, notwithstanding various noteworthy performances in this line, no second government has ever attained at least in the west, and which according to our ideas it seems no longer possible to surpass. Certainly the responsibility for this rests not on the Romans alone. Almost everywhere before their day the Greek, Phoenician, or Asiatic rule had already driven out of the nations the higher spirit and the sense of right and of liberty belonging to better times. It was doubtless bad, that every accused provincial was bound, when asked, to appear personally in Rome to answer for himself; that the Roman governor interfered at pleasure in the administration of justice and the management of the dependent communities, pronounced capital sentences, and cancelled transactions of the municipal council; and that in case of war he treated the militia as he chose and often infamously, as e. g. when Cotta at the siege of the Pontic Heraclea assigned to the militia all the posts of danger, to spare his Italians, and on the siege not going according to his wish, ordered the heads of his engineers to be laid at his
The Romans now gave in this domain fearful proof of their old master of money-matters. We have already endeavoured to describe the Roman system of provincial oppression in its modest and rational foundations as well as in its growth and corruption as a matter of course, the latter went on increasing. The ordinary taxes became far more oppressive from the inequality of their distribution and from the preposterous system of levying them than from their high amount. As to the burden of quartering troops, Roman statesmen themselves expressed the opinion that a town suffered nearly to the same extent when a Roman army took up winter quarters in it as when an enemy took it by storm. While the taxation in its original character had been an indemnification for the burden of military defence undertaken by Rome, and the community paying tribute had thus a right to remain exempt from ordinary service, garrison-service was now—as is attested e. g. in the case of Sardinia—for the most part imposed on the provincials, and even in the ordinary armies, besides other duties, the whole heavy burden of the cavalry-service was devolved on them. The extraordinary contributions demanded—such as, the deliveries of grain for little or no compensation to benefit the proletariate of the capital; the frequent and costly naval armaments and coast-defences in order to check piracy; the task of supplying works of art, wild beasts, or other demands of the insane Roman luxury in the theatre and the chase; the military requisitions in case of war— were just as frequent as they were oppressive and incalculable. A single instance may show how far things were carried. During the three years’ administration of Sicily by Gaius Verres the number of farmers in Leontini fell from 84 to 32, in Motuca from 187 to 86, in Herbita from 252 to 120, in Agyrium from 250 to 80; so that in four of the most fertile districts of Sicily 59 per cent of the landholders preferred to let their fields lie fallow than to cultivate them under such government. And these landholders were, as their small number itself shows and as is expressly stated, by no means small farmers, but respectable planters and in great part Roman burgesses!
In the Client-States
In the client-states the forms of taxation were somewhat different, but the burdens themselves were if possible still worse, since in addition to the exactions of the Romans there came those of the native courts. In Cappadocia and Egypt the farmer as well as the king was bankrupt; the former was unable to satisfy the tax-collector, the latter was unable to satisfy his Roman creditor. Add to these the exactions, properly so called, not merely of the governor himself, but also of his “friends,” each of whom fancied that he had as it were a draft on the governor and a title accordingly to come back from the province a made man. The Roman oligarchy in this respect completely resembled a gang of robbers, and followed out the plundering of the provincials in a professional and business-like manner; capable members of the gang set to work not too nicely, for they had in fact to share the spoil with the advocates and the jurymen, and the more they stole, they did so the more securely. The notion of honour in theft too was already developed; the big robber looked down on the little, and the latter on the mere thief, with contempt; any one, who had been once for a wonder condemned, boasted of the high figure of the sums which he was proved to have exacted. Such was the behaviour in the provinces of the successors of those men, who had been accustomed to bring home nothing from their administration but the thanks of the subjects and the approbation of their fellow-citizens.
The Roman Capitalists in the Provinces
But still worse, if possible, and still less subject to any control was the havoc committed by the Italian men of business among the unhappy provincials. The most lucrative portions of the landed property and the whole commercial and monetary business in the provinces were concentrated in their hands. The estates in the transmarine regions, which belonged to Italian grandees, were exposed to all the misery of management by stewards, and never saw their owners; excepting possibly the hunting-parks, which occur as early as this time in Transalpine Gaul with an area amounting to nearly twenty square miles. Usury flourished as it had never flourished before. The small landowners in Illyricum, Asia, and Egypt managed their estates even in Varro’s time in great part practically as the debtor-slaves of their Roman or non-Roman creditors, just as the plebeians in former days for their patrician lords. Cases occurred of capital being lent even to urban communities at four per cent per month. It was no unusual thing for an energetic and influential man of business to get either the title of envoy(81) given to him by the senate or that of officer by the governor, and, if possible, to have men put at his service for the better prosecution of his affairs; a case is narrated on credible authority, where one of these honourable martial bankers on account of a claim against the town of Salamis in Cyprus kept its municipal council blockaded in the town-house, until five of the members had died of hunger.
Robberies and Damage by War
To these two modes of oppression, each of which by itself was intolerable and which were always becoming better arranged to work into each other’s hands, were added the general calamities, for which the Roman government was also in great part, at least indirectly, responsible. In the various wars a large amount of capital was dragged away from the country and a larger amount destroyed sometimes by the barbarians, sometimes by the Roman armies. Owing to the worthlessness of the Roman land and maritime police, brigands and pirates swarmed every where. In Sardinia and the interior of Asia Minor brigandage was endemic; in Africa and Further Spain it became necessary to fortify all buildings constructed outside of the city-enclosures with walls and towers. The fearful evil of piracy has been already described in another connection.(82) The panaceas of the prohibitive system, with which the Roman governor was wont to interpose when scarcity of money or dearth occurred, as under such circumstances they could not fail to do— the prohibition of the export of gold or grain from the province— did not mend the matter. The communal affairs were almost everywhere embarrassed, in addition to the general distress, by local disorders and frauds of the public officials.
The Conditions of the Provinces Generally
Where such grievances afflicted communities and individuals not temporarily but for generations with an inevitable, steady, and yearly-increasing oppression, the best regulated public or private economy could not but succumb to them, and the most unspeakable misery could not but extend over all the nations from the Tagus to the Euphrates. “All the communities,” it is said in a treatise published as early as 684, “are ruined”; the same truth is specially attested as regards Spain and Narbonese Gaul, the very provinces which, comparatively speaking, were still in the most tolerable economic position. In Asia Minor even towns like Samos and Halicarnassus stood almost empty; legal slavery seemed here a haven of rest compared with the torments to which the free provincial succumbed, and even the patient Asiatic had become, according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves, weary of life. Any one who desires to fathom the depths to which man can sink in the criminal infliction, and in the no less criminal endurance, of all conceivable injustice, may gather together from the criminal records of this period the wrongs which Roman grandees could perpetrate and Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians could suffer. Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly and frankly conceded that the Roman name was unutterably odious through all Greece and Asia; and, when the burgesses of the Pontic Heraclea on one occasion put to death the whole of the Roman tax-collectors, the only matter for regret was that such things did not occur oftener.
Caesar and the Provinces
The Optimates scoffed at the new master who went in person to inspect his “farms” one after the other; in reality the condition of the several provinces demanded all the earnestness and all the wisdom of one of those rare men, who redeem the name of king from being regarded by the nations as merely a conspicuous example of human insufficiency. The wounds inflicted had to be healed by time; Caesar took care that they might be so healed, and that there should be no fresh inflictions.
The Caesarian Magistrates
The system of administration was thoroughly remodelled. The Sullan proconsuls and propraetors had been in their provinces essentially sovereign and practically subject to no control; those of Caesar were the well-disciplined servants of a stern master, who from the very unity and life-tenure of his power sustained a more natural and more tolerable relation to the subjects than those numerous, annually changing, petty tyrants. The governorships were no doubt still distributed among the annually-retiring two consuls and sixteen praetors, but, as the Imperator directly nominated eight of the latter and the distribution of the provinces among the competitors depended solely on him,(83) they were in reality bestowed by the Imperator. The functions also of the governors were practically restricted. The superintendence of the administration of justice and the administrative control of the communities remained in their hands; but their command was paralyzed by the new supreme command in Rome and its adjutants associated with the governor,(84) and the raising of the taxes was probably even now committed in the provinces substantially to imperial officials,(85) so that the governor was thenceforward surrounded with an auxiliary staff which was absolutely dependent on the Imperator in virtue either of the laws of the military hierarchy or of the still stricter laws of domestic discipline. While hitherto the proconsul and his quaestor had appeared as if they were members of a gang of robbers despatched to levy contributions, the magistrates of Caesar were present to protect the weak against the strong; and, instead of the previous worse than useless control of the equestrian or senatorian tribunals, they had to answer for themselves at the bar of a just and unyielding monarch. The law as to exactions, the enactments of which Caesar had already in his first consulate made more stringent, was applied by him against the chief commandants in the provinces with an inexorable severity going even beyond its letter; and the tax-officers, if indeed they ventured to indulge in an injustice, atoned for it to their master, as slaves and freedmen according to the cruel domestic law of that time were wont to atone.
Regulation of Burdens
The extraordinary public burdens were reduced to the right proportion and the actual necessity; the ordinary burdens were materially lessened. We have already mentioned the comprehensive regulation of taxation;(86) the extension of the exemptions from tribute, the general lowering of the direct taxes, the limitation of the system of -decumae- to Africa and Sardinia, the complete setting aside of middlemen in the collection of the direct taxes, were most beneficial reforms for the provincials. That Caesar after the example of one of his greatest democratic predecessors, Sertorius,(87) wished to free the subjects from the burden of quartering troops and to insist on the soldiers erecting for themselves permanent encampments resembling towns, cannot indeed be proved; but he was, at least after he had exchanged the part of pretender for that of king, not the man to abandon the subject to the soldier; and it was in keeping with his spirit, when the heirs of his policy created such military camps, and then converted them into towns which formed rallying-points for Italian civilization amidst the barbarian frontier districts.
Influence on the Capitalist System
It was a task far more difficult than the checking of official irregularities, to deliver the provincials from the oppressive ascendency of Roman capital. Its power could not be directly broken without applying means which were still more dangerous than the evil; the government could for the time being abolish only isolated abuses— as when Caesar for instance prohibited the employment of the title of state-envoy for financial purposes—and meet manifest acts of violence and palpable usury by a sharp application of the general penal laws and of the laws as to usury, which extended also to the provinces;(88) but a more radical cure of the evil was only to be expected from the reviving prosperity of the provincials under a better administration. Temporary enactments, to relieve the insolvency of particular provinces, had been issued on several occasions in recent times. Caesar himself had in 694 when governor of Further Spain assigned to the creditors two thirds of the income of their debtors in order to pay themselves from that source. Lucius Lucullus likewise when governor of Asia Minor had directly cancelled a portion of the arrears of interest which had swelled beyond measure, and had for the remaining portion assigned to the creditors a fourth part of the produce of the lands of their debtors, as well as a suitable proportion of the profits accruing to them from house-rents or slave-labour. We are not expressly informed that Caesar after the civil war instituted similar general liquidations of debt in the provinces; yet from what has just been remarked and from what was done in the case of Italy,(89) it can hardly be doubted that Caesar likewise directed his efforts towards this object, or at least that it formed part of his plan.
While thus the Imperator, as far as lay within human power, relieved the provincials from the oppressions of the magistrates and capitalists of Rome, it might at the same time be with certaint expected from the government to which he imparted fresh vigour, that it would scare off the wild border-peoples and disperse the freebooters by land and sea, as the rising sun chases away the mist. However the old wounds might still smart, with Caesar there appeared for the sorely-tortured subjects the dawn of a more tolerable epoch, the first intelligent and humane government that had appeared for centuries, and a policy of peace which rested not on cowardice but on strength. Well might the subjects above all mourn along with the best Romans by the bier of the great liberator.
The Beginning of the Helleno-Italic State
But this abolition of existing abuses was not the main matter in Caesar’s provincial reform. In the Roman republic, according to the view of the aristocracy and democracy alike, the provinces had been nothing but—what they were frequently called—country-estates of the Roman people, and they were employed and worked out as such. This view had now passed away. The provinces as such were gradually to disappear, in order to prepare for the renovated Helleno-Italic nation a new and more spacious home, of whose several component parts no one existed merely for the sake of another but all for each and each for all; the new existence in the renovated home, the fresher, broader, grander national life, was of itself to overbear the sorrows and wrongs of the nation for which there was no help in the old Italy. These ideas, as is well known, were not new. The emigration from Italy to the provinces that had been regularly going on for centuries had long since, though unconsciously on the part of the emigrants themselves, paved the way for such an extension of Italy. The first who in a systematic way guided the Italians to settle beyond the bounds of Italy was Gaius Gracchus, the creator of the Roman democratic monarchy, the author of the Transalpine conquests, the founder of the colonies of Carthage and Narbo. Then the second statesman of genius produced by the Roman democracy, Quintus Sertorius, began to introduce the barbarous Occidentals to Latin civilization; he gave to the Spanish youth of rank the Roman dress, and urged them to speak Latin and to acquire the higher Italian culture at the training institute founded by him in Osca. When Caesar entered on the government, a large Italian population—though, in great part, lacking stability and concentration—already existed in all the provinces and client-states. To say nothing of the formally Italian towns in Spain and southern Gaul, we need only recall the numerous troops of burgesses raised by Sertorius and Pompeius in Spain, by Caesar in Gaul, by Juba in Numidia, by the constitutional party in Africa, Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, and Crete; the Latin lyre—ill-tuned doubtless— on which the town-poets of Corduba as early as the Sertorian war sang the praises of the Roman generals; and the translations of Greek poetry valued on account of their very elegance of language, which the earliest extra-Italian poet of note, the Transalpine Publius Terentius Varro of the Aude, published shortly after Caesar’s death.
On the other hand the interpenetration of the Latin and Hellenic character was, we might say, as old as Rome. On occasion of the union of Italy the conquering Latin nation had assimilated to itself all the other conquered nationalities, excepting only the Greek, which was received just as it stood without any attempt at external amalgamation. Wherever the Roman legionary went, the Greek schoolmaster, no less a conqueror in his own way, followed; at an early date we find famous teachers of the Greek language settled on the Guadalquivir, and Greek was as well taught as Latin in the institute of Osca. The higher Roman culture itself was in fact nothing else than the proclamation of the great gospel of Hellenic manners and art in the Italian idiom; against the modest pretension of the civilizing conquerors to proclaim it first of all in their own language to the barbarians of the west the Hellene at least could not loudly protest. Already the Greek every where— and, most decidedly, just where the national feeling was purest and strongest, on the frontiers threatened by barbaric denationalization, e. g. in Massilia, on the north coast of the Black Sea, and on the Euphrates and Tigris—descried the protector and avenger of Hellenism in Rome; and in fact the foundation of towns by Pompeius in the far east resumed after an interruption of centuries the beneficent work of Alexander.
The idea of an Italo-Hellenic empire with two languages and a single nationality was not new—otherwise it would have been nothing but a blunder; but the development of it from floating projects to a firmly-grasped conception, from scattered initial efforts to the laying of a concentrated foundation, was the work of the third and greatest of the democratic statesmen of Rome.
The Ruling Nations
The Jews
The first and most essential condition for the political and national levelling of the empire was the preservation and extension of the two nations destined to joint dominion, along with the absorption as rapidly as possible of the barbarian races, or those termed barbarian existing by their side. In a certain sense we might no doubt name along with Romans and Greeks a third nationality, which vied with them in ubiquity in the world of that day, and was destined to play no insignificant part in the new state of Caesar. We speak of the Jews. This remarkable people, yielding and yet tenacious, was in the ancient as in the modern world everywhere and nowhere at home, and everywhere and nowhere powerful. The successors of David and Solomon were of hardly more significance for the Jews of that age than Jerusalem for those of the present day; the nation found doubtless for its religious and intellectual unity a visible rallying-point in the petty kingdom of Jerusalem, but the nation itself consisted not merely of the subjects of the Hasmonaeans, but of the innumerable bodies of Jews scattered through the whole Parthian and the whole
Hellenism
But the Latin and Hellenic nationalities continued to be exclusively the positive elements of the new citizenship. The distinctively Italian state of the republic was thus at an end; but the rumour that Caesar was ruining Italy and Rome on purpose to transfer the centre of the empire to the Greek east and to make Ilion or Alexandria its capital, was nothing but a piece of talk— very easy to be accounted for, but also very silly—of the angry nobility. On the contrary in Caesar’s organizations the Latin nationality always retained the preponderance; as is indicated in the very fact that he issued all his enactments in Latin, although those destined for the Greek-speaking countries were at the same time issued in Greek. In general he arranged the relations of the two great nations in his monarchy just as his republican predecessors had arranged them in the united Italy; the Hellenic nationality was protected where it existed, the Italian was extended as far as circumstances permitted, and the inheritance of the races to be absorbed was destined for it. This was necessary, because an entire equalizing of the Greek and Latin elements in the state would in all probability have in a very short time occasioned that catastrophe which Byzantinism brought about several centuries later; for the Greek element was superior to the Roman not merely in all intellectual aspects, but also in the measure of its predominance, and it had within Italy itself in the hosts of Hellenes and half-Hellenes who migrated compulsorily or voluntarily to Italy an endless number of apostles apparently insignificant, but whose influence could not be estimated too highly. To mention only the most conspicuous phenomenon in this respect, the rule of Greek lackeys over the Roman monarchs is as old as the monarchy. The first in the equally long and repulsive list of these personages is the confidential servant of Pompeius, Theophanes of Mytilene, who by his power over his weak master contributed probably more than any one else to the outbreak of the war between Pompeius and Caesar. Not wholly without reason he was after his death treated with divine honours by his countrymen; he commenced, forsooth, the -valet de chambre- government of the imperial period, which in a certain measure was just a dominion of the Hellenes over the Romans. The government had accordingly every reason not to encourage by its fostering action the spread of Hellenism at least in the west. If Sicily was not simply relieved of the pressure of the -decumae- but had its communities invested with Latin rights, which was presumably meant to be followed in due time by full equalization with Italy, it can only have been Caesar’s design that this glorious island, which was at that time desolate and had as to management passed for the greater part into Italian hands, but which nature has destined to be not so much a neighbouring land to Italy as rather the finest of its provinces, should become altogether merged in Italy. But otherwise the Greek element, wherever it existed, was preserved and protected. However political crises might suggest to the Imperator the demolition of the strong pillars of Hellenism in the west and in Egypt, Massilia and Alexandria were neither destroyed nor denationalized.
Latinizing
On the other hand the Roman element was promoted by the government through colonization and Latinizing with all vigour and at the most various points of the empire. The principle, which originated no doubt from a bad combination of formal law and brute force, but was inevitably necessary in order to freedom in dealing with the nations destined to destruction—that all the soil in the provinces not ceded by special act of the government to communities or private persons was the property of the state, and the holder of it for the time being had merely an heritable possession on sufferance and revocable at any time—was retained also by Caesar and raised by him from a democratic party-theory to a fundamental principle of monarchical law.
Cisalpine Gaul
Gaul, of course, fell to be primarily dealt with in the extension of Roman nationality. Cisalpine Gaul obtained throughout— what a great part of the inhabitants had long enjoyed— political equalization with the leading country by the admission of the Transpadane communities into the Roman burgess-union, which had for long been assumed by the democracy as accomplished,(90) and was now (705) finally accomplished by Caesar. Practically this province had already completely Latinized itself during the forty years which had elapsed since the bestowal of Latin rights. The exclusives might ridicule the broad and gurgling accent of the Celtic Latin, and miss “an undefined something of the grace of the capital” in the Insubrian or Venetian, who as Caesar’s legionary had conquered for himself with his sword a place in the Roman Forum and even in the Roman senate-house. Nevertheless Cisalpine Gaul with its dense chiefly agricultural population was even before Caesar’s time in reality an Italian country, and remained for centuries the true asylum of Italian manners and Italian culture; indeed the teachers of Latin literature found nowhere else out of the capital so much encouragement and approbation.
The Province of Narbo
While Cisalpine Gaul was thus substantially merged in Italy, the place which it had hitherto occupied was taken by the Transalpine province, which had been converted by the conquests of Caesar from a frontier into an inland province, and which by its vicinity as well as by its climate was fitted beyond all other regions to become in due course of time likewise an Italian land. Thither principally, according to the old aim of the transmarine settlements of the Roman democracy, was the stream of Italian emigration directed. There the ancient colony of Narbo was reinforced by new settlers, and four new burgess-colonies were instituted at Baeterrae (Beziers) not far from Narbo, at Arelate (Aries) and Arausio (Orange) on the Rhone, and at the new seaport Forum Julii (Frejus); while the names assigned to them at the same time preserved the memory of the brave legions which had annexed northern Gaul to the empire.(91) The townships not furnished
Northern Gaul
In the other non-Greek and non-Latin regions of the empire, which were still more remote from the influence of Italy and the process of assimilation, Caesar confined himself to the establishment of several centres for Italian civilization such as Narbo had hitherto been in Gaul, in order by their means to pave the way for a future complete equalization. Such initial steps can be pointed out in all the provinces of the empire, with the exception of the poorest and least important of all, Sardinia. How Caesar proceeded in Northern Gaul, we have already set forth;(95) the Latin language there obtained throughout official recognition, though not yet employed for all branches of public intercourse, and the colony of Noviodunum (Nyon) arose on the Leman lake as the most northerly town with an Italian constitution.
Spain
In Spain, which was presumably at that time the most densely peopled country of the Roman empire, not merely were Caesarian colonists settled in the important Helleno-Iberian seaport town of Emporiae by the side of the old population; but, as recently-discovered records have shown, a number of colonists probably taken predominantly from the proletariate of the capital were provided for in the town of Urso (Osuna), not far from Seville in the heart of Andalusia, and perhaps also in several other townships of this province. The ancient and wealthy mercantile city of Gades, whose municipal system Caesar even when praetor had remodelled suitably to the times, now obtained from the Imperator the full rights of the Italian -municipia-(705) and became—what Tusculum had been in Italy(96)—the first extra-Italian community not founded by Rome which was admitted into the Roman burgess-union. Some years afterwards (709) similar rights were conferred also on some other Spanish communities, and Latin rights presumably on still more.
Carthage
In Africa the project, which Gaius Gracchus had not been allowed to bring to an issue, was now carried out, and on the spot where the city of the hereditary foes of Rome had stood, 3000 Italian colonists and a great number of the tenants on lease and sufferance resident in the Carthaginian territory were settled; and the new “Venus-colony,” the Roman Carthage, throve with amazing rapidity under the incomparably favourable circumstances of the locality. Utica, hitherto the capital and first commercial town in the province, had already been in some measure compensated beforehand, apparently by the bestowal of Latin rights, for the revival of its superior rival. In the Numidian territory newly annexed to the empire the important Cirta and the other communities assigned to the Roman condottiere Publius Sittius for himself and his troops(97) obtained the legal position of Roman military colonies. The stately provincial towns indeed, which the insane fury of Juba and of the desperate remnant of the constitutional party had converted into ruins, did not revive so rapidly as they had been reduced to ashes, and many a ruinous site recalled long afterwards this fatal period; but the two new Julian colonies, Carthage and Cirta, became and continued to be the centres of Africano-Roman civilization.
Corinth
The East
In the desolate land of Greece, Caesar, besides other plans such as the institution of a Roman colony in Buthrotum (opposite Corfu), busied himself above all with the restoration of Corinth. Not only was a considerable burgess-colony conducted thither, but a plan was projected for cutting through the isthmus, so as to avoid the dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus and to make the whole traffic between Italy and Asia pass through the Corintho-Saronic gulf. Lastly even in the remote Hellenic east the monarch called into existence Italian settlements; on the Black Sea, for instance, at Heraclea and Sinope, which towns the Italian colonists shared, as in the case of Emporiae, with the old inhabitants; on the Syrian coast, in the important port of Berytus, which like Sinope obtained an Italian constitution; and even in Egypt, where a Roman station was established on the lighthouse-island commanding the harbour of Alexandria.
Extension of the Italian Municipal Constitution to the Provinces
Through these ordinances the Italian municipal freedom was carried into the provinces in a manner far more comprehensive than had been previously the case. The communities of full burgesses—that is, all the towns of the Cisalpine province and the burgess-colonies and burgess-municipia—scattered in Transalpine Gaul and elsewhere— were on an equal footing with the Italian, in so far as they administered their own affairs, and even exercised a certainly limited jurisdiction; while on the other hand the more important processes came before the Roman authorities competent to deal with them—as a rule the governor of the province.(98) The formally
Italy and the Provinces Reduced to One Level
With this disappeared the first great practical distinction that separated Italy from the provinces; and the second—that ordinarily no troops were stationed in Italy, while they were stationed in the provinces—was likewise in the course of disappearing; troops were now stationed only where there was a frontier to be defended, and the commandants of the provinces in which this was not the case, such as Narbo and Sicily, were officers only in name. The formal contrast between Italy and the provinces, which had at all times depended on other distinctions,(100) continued certainly even now to subsist, for Italy was the sphere of civil jurisdiction and of consuls and praetors, while the provinces were districts under the jurisdiction of martial law and subject to proconsuls and propraetors; but the procedure according to civil and according to martial law had for long been practically coincident, and the different titles of the magistrates signified little after the one Imperator was over all.
In all these various municipal foundations and ordinances— which are traceable at least in plan, if not perhaps all in execution, to Caesar—a definite system is apparent. Italy was converted from the mistress of the subject peoples into the mother of the renovated Italo-Hellenic nation. The Cisalpine province completely equalized with the mother-country was a promise and a guarantee that, in the monarchy of Caesar just as in the healthier times of the republic, every Latinized district might expect to be placed on an equal footing by the side of its elder sisters and of the mother herself. On the threshold of full national and political equalization with Italy stood the adjoining lands, the Greek Sicily and the south of Gaul, which was rapidly becoming Latinized. In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces of the empire, in which, just as hitherto in southern Gaul Narbo had been a Roman colony, the great maritime cities—Emporiae, Gades, Carthage, Corinth, Heraclea in Pontus, Sinope, Berytus,
Organization of the New Empire
While thus the new united empire was furnished with a national character, which doubtless necessarily lacked individuality and was rather an inanimate product of art than a fresh growth of nature, it further had need of unity in those institutions which express the general life of nations—in constitution and administration, in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures, and weights; as to which, of course, local diversities of the most varied character were quite compatible with essential union. In all these departments we can only speak of the initial steps, for the thorough formation of the monarchy of Caesar into an unity was the work of the future, and all that he did was to lay the foundation for the building of centuries. But of the lines, which the great man drew in these departments, several can still be recognized; and it is more pleasing to follow him here, than in the task of building from the ruins of the nationalities.
Census of the Empire
As to constitution and administration, we have already noticed elsewhere the most important elements of the new unity— the transition of the sovereignty from the municipal council of Rome to the sole master of the Mediterranean monarchy; the conversion of that municipal council into a supreme imperial council representing Italy and the provinces; above all, the transference—now commenced— of the Roman, and generally of the Italian, municipal organization to the provincial communities. This latter course—the bestowal of Latin, and thereafter of Roman, rights on the communities ripe for full admission to the united state—gradually of itself brought about uniform communal arrangements. In one respect alone this process could not be waited for. The new empire needed immediately an institution which should place before the government at a glance the
Religion of the Empire
We need scarcely say that in religion and in jurisprudence no thorough levelling could be thought of; yet with all toleration towards local faiths and municipal statutes the new state needed a common worship corresponding to the Italo-Hellenic nationality and a general code of law superior to the municipal statutes. It needed them; for de facto both were already in existence. In the field of religion men had for centuries been busied in fusing together the Italian and Hellenic worships partly by external adoption, partly by internal adjustment of their respective conceptions of the gods; and owing to the pliant formless character of the Italian gods, there had been no great difficulty in resolving Jupiter into Zeus, Venus into Aphrodite, and so every essential idea of the Latin faith into its Hellenic counterpart. The Italo-Hellenic religion stood forth in its outlines ready-made; how much in this very department men were conscious of having gone beyond the specifically Roman point of view and advanced towards an Italo-Hellenic quasi-nationality, is shown by the distinction made in the already-mentioned theology of Varro between the “common” gods, that is, those acknowledged by Romans and Greeks, and the special gods of the Roman community.
Law of the Empire
So far as concerns the field of criminal and police law, where the government more directly interferes and the necessities of the case are substantially met by a judicious legislation, there was no difficulty in attaining, in the way of legislative action, that degree of material uniformity which certainly was in this department needful for the unity of the empire. In the civil law again, where the initiative belongs to commercial intercourse and merely the formal shape to the legislator, the code for the united empire, which the legislator certainly could not have created, had been already long since developed in a natural way by commercial intercourse itself. The Roman urban law was still indeed legally based on the embodiment of the Latin national law contained in the Twelve Tables. Later laws had doubtless introduced various improvements of detail suited to the times, among which the most important was probably the abolition of the old inconvenient mode of commencing a process through standing forms of declaration by the parties(104) and the substitution of an instruction drawn up in writing by the presiding magistrate for the single juryman (formula): but in the main the popular legislation had only piled upon that venerable foundation an endless chaos of special laws long since in great part antiquated and forgotten, which can only be compared to the English statute-law. The attempts to impart to them scientific shape and system had certainly rendered the tortuous paths of the old civil law accessible, and thrown light upon them;(105) but no Roman Blackstone could remedy the fundamental defect, that an urban code composed four hundred years ago with its equally diffuse and confused supplements was now to serve as the law of a great state.
The New Urban Law or the Edict
Commercial intercourse provided for itself a more thorough remedy. The lively intercourse between Romans and non-Romans had long ago developed in Rome an international private law (-ius gentium-;(106)), that is to say, a body of maxims especially relating to commercial matters, according to which Roman judges pronounced judgment, when a cause could not be decided either according to their own or any other national code and they were compelled—setting aside the peculiarities of Roman, Hellenic, Phoenician and other law— to revert to the common views of right underlying all dealings. The formation of the newer law attached itself to this basis. In the first place as a standard for the legal dealings of Roman burgesses with each other, it de facto substituted for the old urban law, which had become practically useless, a new code based in substance on a compromise between the national law of the Twelve Tables and the international law or so-called law of nations. The former was essentially adhered to, though of course with modifications suited to the times, in the law of marriage, family, and inheritance; whereas
Caesar’s Project of Codification
Such was the state of the law as Caesar found it. If he projected the plan for a new code, it is not difficult to say what were his intentions. This code could only comprehend the law of Roman burgesses, and could be a general code for the empire merely so far as a code of the ruling nation suitable to the times could not but of itself become general subsidiary law throughout the compass of the empire. In criminal law, if the plan embraced this at all, there was needed only a revision and adjustment of the Sullan ordinances. In civil law, for a state whose nationality was properly humanity, the necessary and only possible formal shape was to invest that urban edict, which had already spontaneously grown out of lawful commerce, with the security and precision of statute-law. The first step towards this had been taken by the Cornelian law of 687, when it enjoined the judge to keep to the maxims set forth at the beginning of his magistracy and not arbitrarily to administer other law (108)—a regulation, which may well be compared with the law of the Twelve Tables, and which became almost as significant for the fixing of the later urban law as that collection for the fixing of the earlier. But although after the Cornelian decree of the people the edict was no longer subordinate to the judge, but the judge was by law subject to the edict; and though the new code had practically dispossessed the old urban law in judicial usage as in legal instruction—every urban judge was still free at his entrance on office absolutely and arbitrarily to alter the edict, and the law of the Twelve Tables with its additions still always outweighed formally the urban edict, so that in each individual case of collision the antiquated rule had to be set aside by arbitrary interference of the magistrates, and therefore, strictly speaking, by violation of formal law. The subsidiary application of the urban edict in the court of the -praetor peregrinus- at Rome and in the different provincial judicatures was entirely subject to the arbitrary pleasure of the individual presiding magistrates. It was evidently necessary to set aside definitely the old urban law, so far as it had not been transferred to the newer, and in the case of the latter to set suitable limits to its arbitrary alteration by each individual urban judge, possibly also to regulate its subsidiary application by the side of the local statutes. This was Caesars design, when he projected the plan for his code; for it could not have been otherwise. The plan was not executed; and thus that troublesome state of transition in Roman jurisprudence was perpetuated till this necessary reform was accomplished six centuries afterwards, and then but imperfectly, by one of the successors of Caesar, the Emperor Justinian.
Lastly, in money, measures, and weights the substantial equalization of the Latin and Hellenic systems had long been in progress. It was very ancient so far as concerned the definitions of weight and the measures of capacity and of length indispensable for trade and commerce,(109) and in the monetary system little more recent than the introduction of the silver coinage.(110) But these older equations were not sufficient, because in the Hellenic world itself the most varied metrical and monetary systems subsisted side by side; it was necessary, and formed part doubtless of Caesar’s plan, now to introduce everywhere in the new united empire, so far as this had not been done already, Roman money, Roman measures, and Roman weights in such a manner that they alone should be reckoned by in official intercourse, and that the non-Roman systems should be restricted to local currency or placed in a—once for all regulated—ratio to the Roman.(111) The action of Caesar, however, can only be pointed out in two of the most important of these departments, the monetary system and the calendar.
Gold Coin as Imperial Currency
The Roman monetary system was based on the two precious metals circulating side by side and in a fixed relation to each other, gold being given and taken according to weight,(112) silver in the form of coin; but practically in consequence of the extensive transmarine intercourse the gold far preponderated over the silver. Whether the acceptance of Roman silver money was not even at an earlier period obligatory throughout the empire, is uncertain; at any rate uncoined gold essentially supplied the place of imperial money throughout the Roman territory, the more so as the Romans had prohibited the coining of gold in all the provinces and client-states, and the -denarius- had, in addition to Italy, de jure or de facto naturalized itself in Cisalpine Gaul, in Sicily, in Spain and various other places, especially in the west.(113) but the imperial coinage begins with Caesar. Exactly like Alexander, he marked the foundation of the new monarchy embracing the civilized world by the fact that the only metal forming an universal medium obtained the first place in the coinage. The greatness of the scale on which the new Caesarian gold piece (20 shillings 7 pence according to the present value of the metal) was immediately coined, is shown by the fact that in a single treasure buried seven years after Caesar’s death 80,000 of these pieces were found together. It is true that financial speculations may have exercised a collateral influence in this respect.(114) as to the silver money, the exclusive rule of the Roman -denarius- in all the west, for which the foundation had previously been laid, was finally established by Caesar, when he definitively closed the only Occidental mint that still competed in silver currency with the Roman, that of Massilia. The coining of silver or copper small money was still permitted to a number of Occidental communities; three-quarter
Reform of the Calendar
Of a kindred nature was the reform of the calendar. The republican calendar, which strangely enough was still the old decemviral calendar—an imperfect adoption of the -octaeteris-that preceded Meton (117)—had by a combination of wretched mathematics and wretched administration come to anticipate the true time by 67 whole days, so that e. g. the festival of Flora was celebrated on the 11th July instead of the 28th April. Caesar finally removed this evil, and with the help of the Greek mathematician Sosigenes introduced the Italian farmer’s year regulated according to the Egyptian calendar of Eudoxus, as well as a rational system of intercalation, into religious and official use; while at the same time the beginning of the year on the 1st March of the old calendar was abolished, and the date of the 1st January—fixed at first as the official term for changing the supreme magistrates and, in consequence of this, long since prevailing in civil life— was assumed also as the calendar-period for commencing the year. Both changes came into effect on the 1st January 709, and along with them the use of the Julian calendar so named after its author, which long after the fall of the monarchy of Caesar remained the regulative standard of the civilized world and in the main is so still. By way of explanation there was added in a detailed edict a star-calendar derived from the Egyptian astronomical observations and transferred—not indeed very skilfully—to Italy, which fixed the rising and setting of the stars named according to days of the calendar.(118) In this domain also the Roman and Greek worlds were thus placed on a par.
Caesar and His Works
Such were the foundations of the Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar. For the second time in Rome the social question had reached a crisis, at which the antagonisms not only appeared to be, but actually were, in the form of their exhibition, insoluble and, in the form of their expression, irreconcilable. On the former occasion Rome had been saved by the fact that Italy was merged in Rome and Rome in Italy, and in the new enlarged and altered home those old antagonisms were not reconciled, but fell into abeyance. Now Rome was once more saved by the fact that the countries of the Mediterranean were merged in it or became prepared for merging; the war between the Italian poor and rich, which in the old Italy could only end with the destruction of the nation, had no longer a battle-field or a meaning in the Italy of three continents. The Latin colonies closed the gap which threatened to swallow up the Roman community in the fifth century; the deeper chasm of the seventh century was filled by the Transalpine and transmarine colonizations of Gaius Gracchus and Caesar. For Rome alone history not merely performed miracles, but also repeated its miracles, and twice cured the internal crisis, which in the state itself was incurable, by regenerating the state. There was doubtless much corruption in this regeneration; as the union of Italy was accomplished over the ruins of the Samnite and Etruscan nations, so the Mediterranean monarchy built itself on the ruins of countless states and tribes once living and vigorous; but it was a corruption out of which sprang a fresh growth, part of which remains green at the present day. What was pulled down for the sake of the new building, was merely the secondary nationalities which had long since been marked out for destruction by the levelling hand of civilization. Caesar, wherever he came forward as a destroyer, only carried out the pronounced verdict of historical development; but he protected the germs of culture, where and as he found them, in his own land as well as among the sister nation of the Hellenes. He saved and renewed the Roman type; and not only did he spare the Greek type, but with the same self-relying genius with which he accomplished the renewed foundation of Rome he undertook also the regeneration of the Hellenes, and resumed the interrupted work of the great Alexander, whose image, we may well believe, never was absent from Caesar’s soul. He solved these two great tasks not merely side by side, but the one by means of the other. The two great essentials of humanity—general and individual development, or state and culture— once in embryo united in those old Graeco-Italians feeding their flocks in primeval simplicity far from the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean, had become dissevered when these were parted into Italians and Hellenes, and had thenceforth remained apart for many centuries. Now the descendant of the Trojan prince and the Latin king’s daughter created out of a state without distinctive culture and a cosmopolitan civilization a new whole, in which state and culture again met together at the acme of human existence in the rich fulness of blessed maturity and worthily filled the sphere appropriate to such an union.
The outlines have thus been set forth, which Caesar drew for this work, according to which he laboured himself, and according to which posterity— for many centuries confined to the paths which this great man marked out— endeavoured to prosecute the work, if not with the intellect and energy, yet on the whole in accordance with the intentions, of the illustrious master. Little was finished; much even was merely begun. Whether the plan was complete, those who venture to vie in thought with such a man may decide; we observe no material defect in what lies before us—every single stone of the building enough to make a man immortal, and yet all combining to form one harmonious whole. Caesar ruled as king of Rome for five years and a half, not half as long as Alexander; in the intervals of seven great campaigns, which allowed him to stay not more than fifteen months altogether(119) in the capital of his empire, he regulated the destinies of the world for the present and the future, from the establishment of the boundary-line between civilization and barbarism down to the removal of the pools of rain in the streets of the capital, and yet retained time and composure enough attentively to follow the prize-pieces in the theatre and to confer the chaplet on the victor with improvised verses. The rapidity and self-precision with which the plan was executed prove that it had been long meditated thoroughly and all its parts settled in detail; but, even thus, they remain not much less wonderful than the plan itself. The outlines were laid down and thereby the new state was defined for all coming time; the boundless future alone could complete the structure. So far Caesar might say, that his aim was attained; and this was probably the meaning of the words which were sometimes heard to fall from him—that he had “lived enough.” But precisely because the building was an endless one, the master as long as he lived restlessly added stone to stone, with always the same dexterity and always the same elasticity busy at his work, without ever overturning or postponing, just as if there were for him merely a to-day and no to-morrow. Thus he worked and created as never did any mortal before or after him; and as a worker and creator he still, after wellnigh two thousand years, lives in the memory of the nations—the first, and withal unique, Imperator Caesar.
Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art
State Religion
In the development of religion and philosophy no new element appeared during this epoch. The Romano-Hellenic state-religion and the Stoic state-philosophy inseparably combined with it were for every government—oligarchy, democracy or monarchy—not merely a convenient instrument, but quite indispensable for the very reason that it was just as impossible to construct the state wholly without religious elements as to discover any new state-religion fitted to take the place of the
The Oriental Religions
But, if in the present instance a faith no longer believed in was maintained out of political convenience, they amply made up for this in other respects. Unbelief and superstition, different hues of the same historical phenomenon, went in the Roman world of that day hand in hand, and there was no lack of individuals who in themselves combined both—who denied the gods with Epicurus, and yet prayed and sacrificed before every shrine. Of course only the gods that came from the east were still in vogue, and, as the men continued to flock from the Greek lands to Italy, so the gods of the east migrated in ever-increasing numbers to the west. The importance of the Phrygian cultus at that time in Rome is shown both by the polemical tone of the older men such as Varro and Lucretius, and by the poetical glorification of it in the fashionable Catullus, which concludes with the characteristic request that the goddess may deign to turn the heads of others only, and not that of the poet himself.
Worship of Mithra
A fresh addition was the Persian worship, which is said to have first reached the Occidental through the medium of the pirates who met on the Mediterranean from the east and from the west; the oldest seat of this cultus in the west is stated to have been Mount Olympus in Lycia. That in the adoption of Oriental worships in the west such higher speculative and moral elements as they contained were generally allowed to drop, is strikingly evinced by the fact that Ahuramazda, the supreme god of the pure doctrine of Zarathustra, remained virtually unknown in the west, and adoration there was especially directed to that god who had occupied the first place in the old Persian national religion and had been transferred by Zarathustra to the second—the sun-god Mithra.
Worship of Isis
But the brighter and gentler celestial forms of the Persian religion did not so rapidly gain a footing in Rome as the wearisome mystical host of the grotesque divinities of Egypt—Isis the mother of nature with her whole train, the constantly dying and constantly reviving Osiris, the gloomy Sarapis, the taciturn and grave Harpocrates, the dog-headed Anubis. In the year when Clodius emancipated the clubs and conventicles (696), and doubtless in consequence of this very emancipation of the populace, that host even prepared to make its entry into the old stronghold of the Roman Jupiter in the Capitol, and it was with difficulty that the invasion was prevented and the inevitable temples were banished at least to the suburbs of Rome. No worship was equally popular among the lower orders of the population in the capital: when the senate ordered the temples of Isis constructed within the ring-wall to be pulled down, no labourer ventured to lay the first hand on them, and the consul Lucius Paullus was himself obliged to apply the first stroke of the axe(704); a wager might be laid, that the more loose any woman was, the more piously she
The New Pythagoreanism
Nigidius Figulus
But by far the most remarkable phenomenon in this domain was the first attempt to mingle crude faith with speculative thought, the first appearance of those tendencies, which we are accustomed to describe as Neo-Platonic, in the Roman world. Their oldest apostle there was Publius Nigidius Figulus, a Roman of rank belonging to the strictest section of the aristocracy, who filled the praetorship in 696 and died in 709 as a political exile beyond the bounds of Italy. With astonishing copiousness of learning and still more astonishing strength of faith he created out of the most dissimilar elements a philosophico-religious structure, the singular outline of which he probably developed still more in his oral discourses than in his theological and physical writings. In philosophy, seeking deliverance from the skeletons of the current systems and abstractions, he recurred to the neglected fountain of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought had still presented itself with sensuous vividness. The researches of physical science—which, suitably treated, afford even now so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand, and in antiquity with its more defective insight into physical laws lent themselves still more easily to such objects—played in this case, as may readily be conceived, a considerable part. His theology was based essentially on that strange medley, in which Greeks of a kindred spirit had intermingled Orphic and other very old or very new indigenous wisdom with Persian, Chaldaean, and Egyptian secret doctrines, and with which Figulus incorporated the quasi-results of the Tuscan investigation into nothingness and of the indigenous lore touching the flight of birds, so as to produce further harmonious confusion. The whole system obtained its consecration—political, religious, and national—from the name of Pythagoras, the ultra-conservative statesman whose supreme principle was “to promote order and to check disorder,” the miracle-worker and necromancer, the primeval sage who was a native of Italy, who was interwoven even with the legendary history of Rome, and whose statue was to be seen in the Roman Forum. As birth and death are kindred with each other, so—it seemed—Pythagoras was to stand not merely by the cradle of the republic as friend of the wise Numa and colleague of the sagacious mother Egeria,
Training of Youth
Sciences of General Culture at This Period
The training of youth followed, as may naturally be supposed, the course of bilingual humane culture chalked out in the previous epoch, and the general culture also of the Roman world conformed more and more to the forms established for that purpose by the Greeks. Even the bodily exercises advanced from ball-playing, running, and fencing to the more artistically-developed Greek gymnastic contests; though there were not yet any public institutions for gymnastics, in the principal country-houses the palaestra was already to be found by the side of the bath-rooms. The manner in which the cycle of general culture had changed in the Roman world during the course of a century, is shown by a comparison of the encyclopaedia of Cato(2) with the similar treatise of Varro “concerning the school-sciences.” As constituent elements of non-professional culture, there appear in Cato the art of oratory, the sciences of agriculture, of law, of war, and of medicine; in Varro—according to probable conjecture—grammar, logic or dialectics, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine, and architecture. Consequently in the course of the seventh century the sciences of war, jurisprudence, and agriculture had been converted from general into professional studies. On the other hand in Varro the Hellenic training of youth appears already in all its completeness: by the side of the course of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, which had been introduced at an earlier period into Italy, we now find the course which had longer remained distinctively Hellenic, of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music.(3) That astronomy more especially, which ministered, in the nomenclature of the stars, to the thoughtless erudite dilettantism of the age and, in
Greek Instruction
Alexandrinism
In comparison with the previous epoch the Greek as well as the Latin training improved in extent and in scholastic strictness quite as much as it declined in purity and in refinement. The increasing eagerness after Greek lore gave to instruction of itself an erudite character. To explain Homer or Euripides was after all no art; teachers and scholars found their account better in handling the Alexandrian poems, which, besides, were in their spirit far more congenial to the Roman world of that day than the genuine Greek national poetry, and which, if they were not quite so venerable as the Iliad, possessed at any rate an age sufficiently respectable to pass as classics with schoolmasters. The love-poems of Euphorion, the “Causes” of Callimachus and his “Ibis,” the comically obscure “Alexandra” of Lycophron contained in rich abundance rare vocables (-glossae-) suitable for being extracted and interpreted, sentences laboriously involved and difficult of analysis, prolix digressions full of mystic combinations of antiquated myths, and generally a store of cumbersome erudition of all sorts. Instruction needed exercises more and more difficult; these productions, in great part model efforts of schoolmasters, were excellently adapted to be lessons for model scholars. Thus the Alexandrian poems took a permanent place in Italian scholastic instruction, especially as trial-themes, and certainly promoted knowledge, although at the expense of taste and of discretion. The same unhealthy appetite for culture moreover impelled the Roman youths to derive their Hellenism as much as possible from the fountain-head. The courses of the Greek masters in Rome sufficed only for a first start; every one who wished to be able to converse heard lectures on Greek philosophy at Athens, and on Greek rhetoric at Rhodes, and made a literary and artistic tour through Asia Minor, where most of the old art-treasures of the Hellenes were still to be found on the spot, and the cultivation of the fine arts had been continued, although after a mechanical fashion; whereas Alexandria, more distant and more celebrated as the seat of the exact sciences, was far more rarely the point whither young men desirous of culture directed their travels.
Latin Instruction
The advance in Latin instruction was similar to that of Greek. This in part resulted from the mere reflex influence of the Greek, from which it in fact essentially borrowed its methods and its stimulants. Moreover, the relations of politics, the impulse to mount the orators’ platform in the Forum which was imparted by the democratic doings to an ever-widening circle, contributed not a little to the diffusion and enhancement of oratorical exercises; “wherever one casts his eyes,” says Cicero, “every place is full of rhetoricians.” Besides, the writings of the sixth century, the farther they receded into the past, began to be more decidedly regarded as classical texts of the golden age of Latin literature, and thereby gave a greater preponderance to the instruction which was essentially concentrated upon them. Lastly the immigration and spreading of barbarian elements from many quarters and the incipient Latinizing of extensive Celtic and Spanish districts, naturally gave to Latin grammar and Latin instruction a higher importance than they could have had, so long as Latium only spoke Latin; the teacher of Latin literature had from the outset a different position in Comum and Narbo than he had in Praeneste and Ardea. Taken as a whole, culture was more on the wane than on the advance. The ruin of the Italian country towns, the extensive intrusion of foreign elements, the political, economic, and moral deterioration of the nation, above all, the distracting civil wars inflicted more injury on the language than all the schoolmasters of the world could repair. The closer contact with the Hellenic culture of the present, the more decided influence of the talkative Athenian wisdom and of the rhetoric of Rhodes and Asia Minor, supplied to the Roman youth just the very elements that were most pernicious in Hellenism. The propagandist mission which Latium undertook among the Celts, Iberians, and Libyans—proud as the task was— could not but have the like consequences for the Latin language as the Hellenizing of the east had had for the Hellenic. The fact that the Roman public of this period applauded the well arranged and rhythmically balanced periods of the orator, and any offence in language or metre cost the actor dear, doubtless shows that the insight into the mother tongue which was the reflection of scholastic training was becoming the common possession of an ever-widening circle. But at the same time contemporaries capable of judging complain that the Hellenic culture in Italy about 690 was at a far lower level than it had been a generation before; that opportunities of hearing pure and good Latin were but rare, and these chiefly from the mouth of elderly cultivated ladies; that the tradition of genuine culture, the good old Latin mother wit, the Lucilian polish, the cultivated circle of readers of the Scipionic age were gradually disappearing. The circumstance that the term -urbanitas-, and the idea of a polished national culture which it expressed,
Germs of State Training-Schools
Thus the previous culture of youth remained substantially unchanged, except that—not so much from its own deterioration as from the general decline of the nation—it was productive of less good and more evil than in the preceding epoch. Caesar initiated a revolution also in this department. While the Roman senate had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture, the government of the new Italo-Hellenic empire, whose essence in fact was -humanitas-, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it after the Hellenic fashion. If Caesar conferred the Roman franchise on all teachers of the liberal sciences and all the physicians of the capital, we may discover in this step a paving of the way in some degree for those institutions in which subsequently the higher bilingual culture of the youth of the empire was provided for on the part of the state, and which form the most significant expression of the new state of -humanitas-; and if Caesar had further resolved on the establishment of a public Greek and Latin library in the capital and had already nominated the most learned Roman of the age, Marcus Varro, as principal librarian, this implied unmistakeably the design of connecting the cosmopolitan monarchy with cosmopolitan literature.
Language
The Vulgarism of Asia Minor
The development of the language during this period turned on the distinction between the classical Latin of cultivated society and the vulgar language of common life. The former itself was a product of the distinctively Italian culture; even in the Scipionic circle “pure Latin” had become the cue, and the mother tongue was spoken, no longer in entire naivete, but in conscious contradistinction to the language of the great multitude. This epoch opens with a remarkable reaction against the classicism which had hitherto exclusively prevailed in the higher language of conversation and accordingly also in literature—a reaction which had inwardly and outwardly a close connection with the reaction of a similar nature in the language of Greece. Just about this time the rhetor and romance-writer Hegesias of Magnesia and the numerous rhetors and literati of Asia Minor who attached themselves to him began to rebel against the orthodox Atticism. They demanded full recognition for the language of life, without distinction, whether the word or the phrase originated in Attica or in Caria and Phrygia; they themselves spoke and wrote not for the taste of learned cliques, but for that of the
Roman Vulgarism
Hortensius
Reaction
The Rhodian School
Yet this new style found its way also into the Latin world. When the Hellenic fashionable rhetoric, after having at the close of the previous epoch obtruded into the Latin instruction of youth,(4) took at the beginning of the present period the final step and mounted the Roman orators’ platform in the person of Quintus Hortensius (640-704), the most celebrated pleader of the Sullan age, it adhered closely even in the Latin idiom to the bad Greek taste of the time; and the Roman public, no longer having the pure and chaste culture of the Scipionic age, naturally applauded with zeal the innovator who knew how to give to vulgarism the semblance of an artistic performance. This was of great importance. As in Greece the battles of language were always waged at first in the schools of the rhetoricians, so in Rome the forensic oration to a certain extent even more than literature set the standard of style, and accordingly there was combined, as it were of right, with the leadership of the bar the prerogative of giving the tone to the fashionable mode of speaking and writing. The Asiatic vulgarism of Hortensius thus dislodged classicism from the Roman platform and partly also from literature. But the fashion soon changed once more in Greece and in Rome. In the former it was the Rhodian school of rhetoricians, which, without reverting to all the chaste severity of the Attic style, attempted to strike out a middle course between it and the modern fashion: if the Rhodian masters were not too particular as to the internal correctness of their thinking and speaking, they at least insisted on purity of language and style, on the careful selection of words and phrases, and the giving thorough effect to the modulation of sentences.
Ciceronianism
In Italy it was Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who, after having in his early youth gone along with the Hortensian manner, was brought by hearing the Rhodian masters and by his own more matured taste to better paths, and thenceforth addicted himself to strict purity of language and the thorough periodic arrangement and modulation of his discourse. The models of language, which, in this respect he followed, he found
The New Roman Poetry
They soon went farther. What Cicero did in prose, was carried out in poetry towards the end of the epoch by the new Roman school of poets, which modelled itself on the Greek fashionable poetry, and in which the man of most considerable talent was Catullus. Here too the higher language of conversation dislodged the archaic reminiscences which hitherto to a large extent prevailed in this domain, and as Latin prose submitted to the Attic rhythm, so Latin poetry submitted gradually to the strict or rather painful metrical laws of the Alexandrines; e. g. from the time of Catullus, it is no longer allowable at once to begin a verse and to close a sentence begun in the verse preceding with a monosyllabic word or a dissyllabic one not specially weighty.
Grammatical Science
At length science stepped in, fixed the law of language, and developed its rule, which was no longer determined on the basis of experience, but made the claim to determine experience. The endings of declension, which hitherto had in part been variable, were now to be once for all fixed; e. g. of the genitive and dative forms hitherto current side by side in the so-called fourth declension (-senatuis- and -senatus-, -senatui-, and -senatu-) Caesar recognized exclusively as valid the contracted forms (-us and -u). In orthography various changes were made, to bring the written more fully into correspondence with the spoken language; thus the -u in the middle of words like -maxumus- was replaced after Caesar’s precedent by -i; and of the two letters which had become superfluous, -k and -q, the removal of the first was effected, and that of the second was at least proposed. The language was, if not yet stereotyped, in the course of becoming so; it was not yet indeed unthinkingly dominated by rule, but it had already become conscious of it. That this action in the department of Latin grammar derived generally its spirit and method from the Greek, and not only so, but that the Latin language was also directly rectified in accordance with Greek precedent, is shown, for example, by the treatment of the final -s, which till towards the close of this epoch had at pleasure passed sometimes as a consonant, sometimes not as one, but was treated by the new-fashioned poets throughout, as in Greek, as a consonantal termination. This regulation of language is the proper domain of Roman classicism; in the most various ways, and for that very reason all the more significantly, the rule is inculcated and the offence against it rebuked by the coryphaei of classicism, by Cicero, by Caesar, even in the poems of Catullus; whereas the older generation expresses itself with natural keenness of feeling respecting the revolution which had affected the field of language as remorselessly as the field of politics.(5) But while the new classicism—that is to say, the standard Latin governed by rule and as far as possible placed on a parity with the standard Greek— which arose out of a conscious reaction against the vulgarism intruding into higher society and even into literature, acquired literary fixity and systematic shape, the latter by no means evacuated the field. Not only do we find it naively employed in the works of secondary personages who have drifted into the ranks of authors merely by accident, as in the account of Caesar’s second Spanish war, but we shall meet it also with an impress more or less distinct in literature proper, in the mime, in the semi-romance, in the aesthetic writings of Varro; and it is a significant circumstance, that it maintains itself precisely in the most national departments of literature, and that truly conservative men, like Varro, take it into protection. Classicism was based on the death of the Italian language as
Literary Effort
Greek Literati in Rome
In the literature of this period we are first of all struck by the outward increase, as compared with the former epoch, of literary effort in Rome. It was long since the literary activity of the Greeks flourished no more in the free atmosphere of civic independence, but only in the scientific institutions of the larger cities and especially of the courts. Left to depend on the favour and protection of the great, and dislodged from the former seats of the Muses(6) by the extinction of the dynasties of Pergamus (621), Cyrene (658), Bithynia (679), and Syria (690) and by the waning splendour of the court of the Lagids—moreover, since the death of Alexander the Great, necessarily cosmopolitan and at least quite as much strangers among the Egyptians and Syrians as among the Latins— the Hellenic literati began more and more to turn their eyes towards Rome. Among the host of Greek attendants with which the Roman of quality at this time surrounded himself, the philosopher, the poet, and the memoir-writer played conspicuous parts by the side of the cook, the boy-favourite, and the jester. We meet already literati of note in such positions; the Epicurean Philodemus, for instance, was installed as domestic philosopher with Lucius Piso consul in 696, and occasionally edified the initiated with his clever epigrams on the coarse-grained Epicureanism of his patron. From all sides the most notable representatives of Greek art and science migrated in daily-increasing numbers to Rome where literary gains were now more abundant than anywhere else. Among those thus mentioned as settled in Rome we find the physician Asclepiades whom king Mithradates vainly endeavoured to draw away from it into his service; the universalist in learning, Alexander of Miletus, termed Polyhistor; the poet Parthenius from Nicaea in Bithynia; Posidonius of Apamea in Syria equally celebrated as a traveller, teacher, and author, who at a great age migrated in 703 from Rhodes to Rome; and various others. A house like that of Lucius Lucullus was a seat of Hellenic culture and a rendezvous for Hellenic literati almost like the Alexandrian Museum; Roman resources and Hellenic connoisseurship had gathered in these halls of wealth and science an incomparable collection
Extent of the Literary Pursuits of the Romans
In the same measure as the pursuits of the Greek literati prospered in Rome, literary activity and literary interest increased among the Romans themselves. Even Greek composition, which the stricter taste of the Scipionic age had totally set aside, now revived. The Greek language was now universally current, and a Greek treatise found a quite different public from a Latin one; therefore Romans of rank, such as Lucius Lucullus, Marcus Cicero, Titus Atticus, Quintus Scaevola (tribune of the people in 700), like the kings of Armenia and Mauretania, published occasionally Greek prose and even Greek verses. Such Greek authorship however by native Romans remained a secondary matter and almost an amusement; the literary as well as the political parties of Italy all coincided in adhering to their Italian nationality, only more or less pervaded by Hellenism. Nor could there be any complaint at least as to want of activity in the field of Latin authorship. There was a flood of books and pamphlets of all sorts, and above all of poems, in Rome. Poets swarmed there, as they did only in Tarsus or Alexandria; poetical publications had become the standing juvenile sin of livelier natures, and even then the writer was reckoned fortunate whose youthful poems compassionate oblivion withdrew from criticism. Any one who understood the art, wrote without difficulty at a sitting his five hundred hexameters in which no schoolmaster found anything to censure, but no reader discovered anything to praise. The female world also took a lively part in these literary pursuits; the ladies did not confine themselves to dancing and music, but by their spirit and wit ruled conversation and talked excellently on Greek and Latin literature; and, when poetry laid siege to a maiden’s heart, the beleaguered fortress not seldom surrendered likewise in graceful verses. Rhythms became more and more the fashionable plaything of the big children of both sexes; poetical epistles, joint poetical exercises and competitions among good friends, were of common occurrence, and towards the end of this epoch institutions were already opened in the capital, at which unfledged Latin poets might learn verse-making for money. In consequence of the large consumption of books the
The Classicists and the Moderns
The literary tendency of this age was varied and could not be otherwise, for the age itself was divided between the old and the new modes. The same tendencies which came into conflict on the field of politics, the national-Italian tendency of the conservatives, the Helleno-Italian or, if the term be preferred, cosmopolitan tendency of the new monarchy, fought their battles also on the field of literature. The former attached itself to the older Latin literature, which in the theatre, in the school, and in erudite research assumed more and more the character of classical. With less taste and stronger party tendencies than the Scipionic epoch showed, Ennius, Pacuvius, and especially Plautus were now exalted to the skies. The leaves of the Sibyl rose in price, the fewer they became; the relatively greater nationality and relatively greater productiveness of the poets of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch of thoroughly developed Epigonism, which in literature as decidedly as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall. No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic of the conservatism of this age in general; and here too there was no want of trimmers. Cicero for instance, although in prose one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency, revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic constitution and the augural discipline; “patriotism requires,” we find him saying, “that we should rather read a notoriously wretched translation of Sophocles than the original.” While thus the modern literary tendency cognate to the democratic monarchy numbered secret adherents enough even among the orthodox admirers of Ennius, there
The Greek Alexandrinism
We cannot avoid saying at least so much respecting this remarkable winter-garden of Hellenic language and art, as is requisite for the understanding of the Roman literature of this and the later epochs. The Alexandrian literature was based on the decline of the pure Hellenic idiom, which from the time of Alexander the Great was superseded in daily life by an inferior jargon deriving its origin from the contact of the Macedonian dialect with various Greek and barbarian tribes; or, to speak more accurately, the Alexandrian literature sprang out of the ruin of the Hellenic nation generally, which had to perish, and did perish, in its national individuality in order to establish the universal monarchy of Alexander and the empire of Hellenism. Had Alexander’s universal empire continued to subsist, the former national and popular literature would have been succeeded by a cosmopolitan literature Hellenic merely in name, essentially denationalized and called into life in a certain measure by royal patronage, but at all events ruling the world; but, as the state of Alexander was unhinged by his death, the germs of the literature corresponding to it rapidly perished. Nevertheless the Greek nation with all that it had possessed— with its nationality, its language, its art—belonged to the past. It was only in a comparatively narrow circle not of men of culture— for such, strictly speaking, no longer existed—but of men of erudition that the Greek literature was still cherished even when dead; that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and that, possibly, the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition was elevated into a semblance of productiveness. This posthumous productiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism. It is essentially similar to that literature of scholars, which, keeping aloof from the living Romanic nationalities and their vulgar idioms, grew up during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries among a cosmopolitan circle of erudite philologues—as an artificial aftergrowth of the departed antiquity; the contrast between the classical and the vulgar Greek of the period of the Diadochi is doubtless less strongly marked, but is not, properly speaking, different from that between the Latin of Manutius and the Italian of Macchiavelli.
The Roman Alexandrinism
Italy had hitherto been in the main disinclined towards Alexandrinism. Its season of comparative brilliance was the period shortly before and after the first Punic war; yet Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius and generally the whole body of the national Roman authors down to Varro and Lucretius in all branches of poetical production, not excepting even the didactic poem, attached themselves, not to their Greek contemporaries or very recent predecessors, but without exception to Homer, Euripides, Menander and the other masters of the living and national Greek literature. Roman literature was never fresh and national; but, as long as there was a Roman people, its authors instinctively sought for living and national models, and copied, if not always to the best purpose or the best authors, at least such as were original. The Greek literature originating after Aexander found its first Roman imitators—for the slight initial attempts from the Marian age(7) can scarcely be taken into account—among the contemporaries of Cicero and Caesar; and now the Roman Alexandrinism spread with singular rapidity. In part this arose from external causes. The increased contact with the Greeks, especially the frequent journeys of the Romans into the Hellenic provinces and the assemblage of Greek literati in Rome, naturally procured a public even among the Italians for the Greek literature of the day, for the epic and elegiac poetry, epigrams, and Milesian tales current at that time in Greece. Moreover, as we have already stated(8) the Alexandrian poetry had its established place in the instruction of the Italian youth; and thus reacted on Latin literature all the more, since the latter continued to be essentially dependent at all times on the Hellenic school-training. We find in this respect even a direct connection of the new Roman with the new Greek literature; the already-mentioned Parthenius, one of the better known Alexandrian elegists, opened, apparently about 700, a school for literature and poetry in Rome, and the excerpts are still extant in which he supplied one of his pupils of rank with materials for Latin elegies of an erotic and mythological nature according to the well-known Alexandrian receipt. But it was by no means simply such accidental occasions which called into existence the Roman Alexandrinism; it was on the contrary a product—perhaps not pleasing, but thoroughly inevitable— of the political and national development of Rome. On the one hand, as Hellas resolved itself into Hellenism, so now Latium resolved itself into Romanism; the national development of Italy outgrew itself, and was merged in Caesar’s Mediterranean empire, just as the Hellenic development in the eastern empire of Alexander. On the other hand, as the new empire rested on the fact that the mighty streams of Greek and Latin nationality, after having flowed in parallel channels for many centuries, now at length coalesced, the Italian literature
Dramatic Literature
Tragedy and Comedy Disappear
Nowhere was the prospect more lamentable than in dramatic literature. Tragedy and comedy had already before the present epoch become inwardly extinct in the Roman national literature. New pieces were no longer performed. That the public still in the Sullan age expected to see such, appears from the reproductions— belonging to this epoch—of Plautine comedies with the titles and names of the persons altered, with reference to which the managers well added that it was better to see a good old piece than a bad new
The Mime
Laberius
In the “picture of life” or mime alone the last still vigorous product of the national literature, the Atellan farce, became engrafted with the ethological offshoots of Greek comedy, which Alexandrinism cultivated with greater poetical vigour and better success than any other branch of poetry. The mime originated out of the dances in character to the flute, which had long been usual, and which were performed sometimes on other occasions, e. g. for the entertainment of the guests during dinner, but more especially in the pit of the theatre during the intervals between the acts. It was not difficult to form out of these dances—in which the aid of speech had doubtless long since been occasionally employed— by means of the introduction of a more organized plot and a regular dialogue little comedies, which were yet essentially distinguished from the earlier comedy and even from the farce by the facts, that the dance and the lasciviousness inseparable from such dancing continued in this case to play a chief part, and that the mime, as belonging properly not to the boards but to the pit, threw aside all ideal scenic effects, such as masks for the face and theatrical buskins, and—what was specially important—admitted of the female characters being represented by women. This new mime, which first seems to have come on the stage of the capital about 672, soon swallowed up the national harlequinade, with which it indeed in the most essential respects coincided, and was employed as the usual interlude and especially as afterpiece along with the other dramatic performances.(9) The plot was of course still more indifferent, loose, and absurd than in the harlequinade; if it was only sufficiently chequered, the public did not ask why it laughed, and did not remonstrate with the poet, who instead of untying the knot cut it to pieces. The subjects were chiefly of an amorous nature, mostly of the licentious sort; for example, poet and public without exception took part against the husband, and poetical justice consisted in the derision of good morals. The artistic charm depended wholly, as
Dramatic Spectacles
With the worthlessness of dramatic literature the increase of scenic spectacles and of scenic pomp went hand in hand. Dramatic representations obtained their regular place in the public life not only of the capital but also of the country towns; the former also now at length acquired by means of Pompeius a permanent theatre (699;(12)), and the Campanian custom of stretching canvas over the theatre for the protection of the actors and spectators during the performance, which in ancient times always took place in the open air, now likewise found admission to Rome (676). As at that time in Greece it was not the—more than pale-Pleiad of the Alexandrian dramatists, but the classic drama, above all the tragedies of Euripides,
Metrical Annals
In recitative poetry metrical annals after the model of those of Ennius seem not to have been wanting; but they were perhaps sufficiently criticised by that graceful vow of his mistress of which Catullus sings—that the worst of the bad heroic poems should be presented as a sacrifice to holy Venus, if she would only bring back her lover from his vile political poetry to her arms.
Lucretius
Indeed in the whole field of recitative poetry at this epoch the older national-Roman tendency is represented only by a single work of note, which, however, is altogether one of the most important poetical products of Roman literature. It is the didactic poem of Titus Lucretius Carus (655-699) “Concerning the Nature of Things,” whose author, belonging to the best circles of Roman society, but taking no part in public life whether from weakness of health or from disinclination, died in the prime of manhood shortly before the outbreak of the civil war. As a poet he attached himself decidedly to Ennius and thereby to the classical Greek literature. Indignantly he turns away from the “hollow Hellenism” of his time, and professes himself with his whole soul and heart to be the scholar of the “chaste Greeks,” as indeed even the sacred earnestness of Thucydides has found no unworthy echo in one of the best-known sections of this Roman poem. As Ennius draws his wisdom from Epicharmus and Euhemerus, so Lucretius borrows the form of his representation from Empedocles, “the most glorious treasure of the richly gifted Sicilian isle”; and, as to the matter, gathers “all the golden words together from the rolls of Epicurus,” “who outshines other wise men as the sun obscures the stars.” Like Ennius, Lucretius disdains the mythological lore with which poetry was overloaded by Alexandrinism, and requires nothing from his reader but a knowledge of the legends generally current.(16) In spite of the modern purism which rejected foreign words from poetry, Lucretius prefers to use, as Ennius had done, a significant Greek word in place of a feeble and obscure Latin one. The old Roman alliteration, the want of due correspondence between the pauses of the verse and those of the sentence, and generally the older modes of expression and composition, are still frequently found in Lucretius’ rhythms, and although he handles the verse more melodiously than Ennius, his hexameters move not, as those of the modern poetical school, with a lively grace like the rippling brook, but with a stately slowness like the stream of liquid gold. Philosophically and practically also Lucretius leans throughout on Ennius, the only indigenous poet whom his poem celebrates. The confession of faith of the singer of Rudiae(17)—
-Ego deum genus esse semper dixi
et dicam caelitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid
agat humanum genus-:—
describes completely the religious standpoint of Lucretius, and not unjustly for that reason he himself terms his poem as it were the continuation of Ennius:—
-Ennius ut noster cecinit, qui primus
amoeno
Detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde
coronam,
Per gentis Italas hominum quae clara
clueret-.
Once more—and for the last time—the poem of Lucretius is resonant with the whole poetic pride and the whole poetic earnestness of the sixth century, in which, amidst the images of the formidable Carthaginian and the glorious Scipiad, the imagination of the poet is more at home than in his own degenerate age.(18) To him too his own song “gracefully welling up out of rich feeling” sounds, as compared with the common poems, “like the brief song of the swan compared with the cry of the crane";—with him too the heart swells, listening to the melodies of its own invention, with the hope of illustrious honours—just as Ennius forbids the men to whom he “gave from the depth of the heart a foretaste of fiery song,” to mourn at his, the immortal singer’s, tomb.
It is a remarkable fatality, that this man of extraordinary talents, far superior in originality of poetic endowments to most if not to all his contemporaries, fell upon an age in which he felt himself strange and forlorn, and in consequence of this made the most singular mistake in the selection of a subject. The system of Epicurus, which converts the universe into a great vortex of atoms and undertakes to explain the origin and end of the world as well as all the problems of nature and of life in a purely mechanical way, was doubtless somewhat less silly than the conversion of myths into history which was attempted by Euhemerus and after him by Ennius; but it was not an ingenious or a fresh system, and the task of poetically unfolding this mechanical view of the world was of such a nature that never probably did poet expend life and art on a more ungrateful theme. The philosophic reader censures in the Lucretian didactic poem the omission of the finer points of the system, the superficiality especially with which controversies are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions, with quite as good reason as the poetical reader frets at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part of the poem absolutely unreadable. In spite of these incredible defects, before which every man of mediocre talent must inevitably have succumbed, this poet might justly boast of having carried off from the poetic wilderness a new chaplet such as the Muses had not yet bestowed on any; and it was by no means merely the occasional similitudes, and the other inserted descriptions of mighty natural phenomena and yet mightier passions, which acquired for the poet this chaplet. The genius which marks the view of life as well as the poetry of Lucretius depends on his unbelief, which came forward and was entitled to come forward with the full victorious power of truth, and therefore with the full vigour of poetry, in opposition to the prevailing hypocrisy or superstition.
-Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret In terris oppressa gravi sub religione, Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans, Primum Graius homo mortalis tendere contra Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra. Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque-.
The poet accordingly was zealous to overthrow the gods, as Brutus had overthrown the kings, and “to release nature from her stern lords.” But it was not against the long ago enfeebled throne of Jovis that these flaming words were hurled; just like Ennius, Lucretius fights practically above all things against the wild foreign faiths and superstitions of, the multitude, the worship of the Great Mother for instance and the childish lightning-lore of the Etruscans. Horror and antipathy towards that terrible world in general, in which and for which the poet wrote, suggested his poem. It was composed in that hopeless time when the rule of the oligarchy had been overthrown and that of Caesar had not yet been established, in the sultry years during which the outbreak of the civil war was awaited with long and painful suspense. If we seem to perceive in its unequal and restless utterance that the poet daily expected to see the wild tumult of revolution break forth over himself and his work, we must not with reference to his view of men and things forget amidst what men, and in prospect of what things, that view had its origin. In the Hellas of the epoch before Alexander it was a current saying, and one profoundly felt by all the best men, that the best thing of all was not to be born, and the next best to die. Of all views of the world possible to a tender and poetically organized mind in the kindred Caesarian age this was the noblest and the most ennobling, that it is a benefit for man to be released from a belief in the immortality of the soul and thereby from the evil dread of death and of the gods which malignantly steals over men like terror creeping over children in a dark room; that, as the sleep of the night is more refreshing than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods of the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal blessed rest; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life, but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress worn at home, rather to remain in the ranks of those that obey than to press into the confused crowd of candidates for the office of ruler, rather to lie on the grass beside the brook than to take part under the golden ceiling of the rich in emptying his countless dishes. This philosophico-practical tendency is the true ideal essence of the Lucretian poem and is only overlaid,
The Hellenic Fashionable Poetry
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”
Catullus
Those poets alone of this school constitute an original and pleasing exception, who knew how to combine with its neatness and its versatility of form the national elements of worth still existing in the republican life, especially in that of the country-towns. To say nothing here of Laberius and Varro, this description applies especially to the three poets already mentioned above(20) of the republican opposition, Marcus Furius Libaculus (652-691), Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) and Quintus Valerius Catullus (667-c. 700). Of the two former, whose writings have perished, we can indeed only conjecture this; respecting the poems of Catullus we can still form a judgment. He too depends in subject and form on the Alexandrians. We find in his collection translations of pieces of Callimachus, and these not altogether the very good, but the very difficult. Among the original pieces, we meet with elaborately-turned fashionable poems, such as the over-artificial Galliambics in praise of the Phrygian Mother; and even the poem, otherwise so beautiful, of the marriage of Thetis has been artistically spoiled by the truly Alexandrian insertion of the complaint of Ariadne in the principal poem. But by the side of these school-pieces we meet with the melodious lament of the genuine elegy, the festal poem in the full pomp of individual and almost dramatic execution, above all, the freshest miniature painting of cultivated social life, the pleasant and very unreserved amatory adventures of which half the charm consists in prattling and poetizing about the mysteries of love, the delightful life of youth with full cups and empty purses, the pleasures of travel and of poetry, the Roman and still more frequently the Veronese anecdote of the town, and the humorous jest amidst the familiar circle of friends. But not only does Apollo touch the lyre of the poet, he wields also the bow; the winged dart of sarcasm spares neither the tedious verse-maker nor the provincial who corrupts the language, but it hits none more frequently and more sharply than the potentates by whom the liberty of the people is endangered. The short-lined and merry metres, often enlivened by a graceful refrain, are of finished art and yet free from the repulsive smoothness of the manufactory. These poems lead us alternately to the valleys of the Nile and the Po; but the poet is incomparably more at home in the latter. His poems are based on Alexandrian art doubtless, but at the same time on the self-consciousness of a burgess and a burgess in fact of a rural town, on the contrast of Verona with Rome, on the contrast of the homely municipal with the high-born lords of the senate who usually maltreat their humble friends—as that contrast was probably felt more vividly than anywhere else in Catullus’ home, the flourishing and comparatively vigorous Cisalpine Gaul. The most beautiful of his poems reflect the sweet pictures of the Lago di Garda, and hardly at this time could
Poems in Prose
Romances
Lastly, poetry in a prose form begins in this epoch. The law of genuine naive as well as conscious art, which had hitherto remained unchangeable—that the poetical subject-matter and the metrical setting should go together—gave way before the intermixture and disturbance of all kinds and forms of art, which is one of the most significant features of this period. As to romances indeed nothing farther is to be noticed, than that the most famous historian of this epoch, Sisenna, did not esteem himself too good to translate into Latin the much-read Milesian tales of Aristides—licentious fashionable novels of the most stupid sort.
Varro’s Aesthetic Writings
A more original and more pleasing phenomenon in this debateable border-land between poetry and prose was the aesthetic writings of Varro, who was not merely the most important representative of Latin philologico-historical research, but one of the most fertile and most interesting authors in belles-lettres. Descended from a plebeian gens which had its home in the Sabine land but had belonged for the last two hundred years to the Roman senate, strictly reared in antique discipline and decorum,(21) and already at the beginning of this epoch a man of maturity, Marcus Terentius Varro of Reate (638-727) belonged in politics, as a matter of course, to the institutional party, and bore an honourable and energetic part in its doings and sufferings. He supported it, partly in literature—as when he combated the first coalition, the “three-headed monster,” in pamphlets; partly in more serious warfare, where we found him in the army of Pompeius as commandant of Further Spain.(22) When the cause of the republic was lost, Varro was destined by his conqueror to be librarian of the library which was to be formed in the capital. The troubles of the following period drew the old man once more into their vortex, and it was not till seventeen years after Caesar’s death, in the eighty-ninth year of his well-occupied life, that death called him away.
Varros’ Models
The aesthetic writings, which have made him a name, were brief essays, some in simple prose and of graver contents, others humorous sketches the prose groundwork of which was inlaid with various poetical effusions. The former were the “philosophico-historical dissertations” (-logistorici-), the latter the Menippean Satires. In neither case did he follow Latin models, and the -Satura- of Varro in particular was by no means based on that of Lucilius. In fact the Roman -Satura- in general was not properly a fixed species of art, but only indicated negatively the fact that the “multifarious poem” was not to be included under any of the recognized forms of art; and accordingly the -Satura-poetry assumed in the hands of every gifted poet a different and peculiar character. It was rather in the pre-Alexandrian Greek philosophy that Varro found the models for his more severe as well as for his lighter aesthetic works; for the graver dissertations, in the dialogues of Heraclides of Heraclea on the Black Sea (d. about 450), for the satires, in the writings of Menippus of Gadara in Syria (flourishing about 475). The choice was significant. Heraclides, stimulated as an author by Plato’s philosophic dialogues, had amidst the brilliance of their form totally lost sight of the scientific contents and made the poetico-fabulistic dress the main matter; he was an agreeable and largely-read author, but far from a philosopher. Menippus was quite as little a philosopher, but the most genuine literary representative of that philosophy whose wisdom consisted in denying philosophy and ridiculing philosophers the cynical wisdom of Diogenes; a comic teacher of serious wisdom, he proved by examples and merry sayings that except an upright life everything is vain in earth and heaven, and nothing more vain than the disputes of so-called sages. These were the true models for Varro, a man full of old Roman indignation at the pitiful times and full of old Roman humour, by no means destitute withal of plastic talent but as to everything which presented the appearance not of palpable fact but of idea or even of system, utterly stupid, and perhaps the most unphilosophical among the unphilosophical Romans.(23) But Varro was no slavish pupil. The impulse and in general the form he derived from Heraclides and Menippus; but his was a nature too individual and too decidedly Roman not to keep his imitative creations essentially independent and national.
Varro’s Philosophico-Historical Essays
For his grave dissertations, in which a moral maxim or other subject of general interest is handled, he disdained, in his framework to approximate to the Milesian tales, as Heraclides had done, and so to serve up to the reader even childish little stories like those of Abaris and of the maiden reawakened to life after being seven days dead. But seldom he borrowed the dress from the nobler myths of the Greeks, as in the essay “Orestes or concerning
Varros’ Menippean Satires
The Menippean satire was handled by Varro with equal originality of form and contents; the bold mixture of prose and verse is foreign to the Greek original, and the whole intellectual contents are pervaded by Roman idiosyncrasy—one might say, by a savour of the Sabine soil. These satires like the philosophico-historical essays handle some moral or other theme adapted to the larger public, as is shown by the several titles—–Columnae Herculis-, —peri doxeis—; —Euren ei Lopas to Poma, peri gegameikoton—, -Est Modus Matulae-, —peri metheis—; -Papiapapae-, —peri egkomios—. The plastic dress, which in this case might not be wanting, is of course but seldom borrowed from the history of his native country, as in the satire -Serranus-, —peri archairesion—. The Cynic-world of Diogenes on the other hand plays, as might be expected, a great part; we meet with the —Kounistor—, the —Kounorreiton—, the ’Ippokouon, the —’Oudrokouon—, the —Kounodidaskalikon— and others of a like kind. Mythology is also laid under contribution for comic purposes; we find a -Prometheus Liber-, an -Ajax Stramenticius-, a -Hercules Socraticus-, a -Sesqueulixes-who had spent not merely ten but fifteen years in wanderings. The outline of the dramatic or romantic framework is still discoverable from the fragments in some pieces, such as the -Prometheus Liber-, the -Sexagessis-, -Manius-; it appears that Varro frequently, perhaps regularly, narrated the tale as his own experience; e. g. in the -Manius- the dramatis personae go to Varro and discourse to him “because he was known to them as a maker of books.” as to the poetical value of this dress we are no longer allowed to form any certain judgment; there still occur in our fragments several very charming sketches full of wit and liveliness—
-Postremo, nemo aegrotus quicquam
somniat
Tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat
philosophus-.
It is ludicrous to observe how a Long-beard—by which is meant an etymologizing Stoic—cautiously weighs every word in goldsmith’s scales; but there is nothing that surpasses the genuine philosophers’ quarrel—a Stoic boxing-match far excels any encounter of athletes. In the satire -Marcopolis-, —peri archeis—, when Marcus created for himself a Cloud-Cuckoo-Home after his own heart, matters fared, just as in the Attic comedy, well with the peasant, but ill with the philosopher; the -Celer- — -di’-enos- -leimmatos-logos—, son of Antipater the Stoic, beats in the skull of his opponent— evidently the philosophic -Dilemma—–with the mattock.
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.
Historical Composition
Sisenna
The critical writing of history, after the manner in which the Attic authors wrote the national history in their classic period and in which Polybius wrote the history of the world, was never properly developed in Rome. Even in the field most adapted for it— the representation of contemporary and of recently past events— there was nothing, on the whole, but more or less inadequate attempts; in the epoch especially from Sulla to Caesar the not very important contributions, which the previous epoch had to show in this field— the labours of Antipater and Asellius—were barely even equalled. The only work of note belonging to this field, which arose in the present epoch, was the history of the Social and Civil Wars by Lucius Cornelius Sisenna (praetor in 676). Those who had read it testify that it far excelled in liveliness and readableness the old dry chronicles, but was written withal in a style thoroughly impure and even degenerating into puerility; as indeed the few remaining fragments exhibit a paltry painting of horrible details,(28) and a number of words newly coined or derived from the language of conversation. When it is added that the author’s model and, so to speak, the only Greek historian familiar to him was Clitarchus, the author of a biography of Alexander the Great oscillating between history and fiction in the manner of the semi-romance which bears the name of Curtius, we shall not hesitate to recognize in Sisenna’s celebrated historical work, not a product of genuine historical criticism and art, but the first Roman essay in that hybrid mixture of history and romance so much a favourite with the Greeks, which desires to make the groundwork of facts life-like and interesting by means of fictitious details and thereby makes it insipid and untrue; and it will no longer excite surprise that we meet with the same Sisenna also as translator of Greek fashionable romances.(29)
Annals of the City
That the prospect should be still more lamentable in the field of the general annals of the city and even of the world, was implied in the nature of the case. The increasing activity of antiquarian research induced the expectation that the current narrative would be rectified from documents and other trustworthy sources; but this hope was not fulfilled. The more and the deeper men investigated, the more clearly it became apparent what a task it was to write a critical history of Rome. The difficulties even, which opposed themselves to investigation and narration, were immense; but the most dangerous obstacles were not those of a literary kind. The conventional early history of Rome, as it had now been narrated and believed for at least ten generations; was most intimately mixed up with the civil life of the nation; and yet in any thorough and honest inquiry not only had details to be modified here and there, but the whole building had to be overturned as much as the Franconian primitive history of king Pharamund or the British of king Arthur. An inquirer of conservative views, such as was Varro for instance, could have no wish to put his hand to such a work; and if a daring freethinker had undertaken it, an outcry would have been raised by all good citizens against this worst of all revolutionaries, who was preparing to deprive the constitutional party even of their past Thus philological and antiquarian research deterred from the writing of history rather than conduced towards it. Varro and the more sagacious men in general evidently gave up the task of annals as hopeless; at the most they arranged, as did Titus Pomponius Atticus, the official and gentile lists in unpretending tabular shape—a work by which the synchronistic Graeco-Roman chronology was finally brought into the shape in which it was conventionally fixed for posterity. But the manufacture of city-chronicles of course did not suspend its activity; it continued to supply its contributions both in prose and verse to the great library written by ennui for ennui, while the makers of the books, in part already freedmen, did not trouble themselves at all about research properly so called. Such of these writings as are mentioned to us—not one of them is preserved—seem to have been not only of a wholly secondary character, but in great part even pervaded by interested falsification. It is true that the chronicle of Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius (about 676?) was written in an old-fashioned but good style, and studied at least a commendable brevity in the representation of the fabulous period. Gaius Licinius Macer (d. as late praetor in 688), father of the poet Calvus,(30) and a zealous democrat, laid claim more than any other chronicler to documentary research and criticism, but his -libri lintei- and other matters peculiar to him are in the highest degree suspicious, and an interpolation of the whole annals in the interest of democratic tendencies— an interpolation of a very extensive kind, and which has passed over in part to the later annalists—is probably traceable to him.
Valerius Antias
Lastly, Valerius Antias excelled all his predecessors in prolixity as well as in puerile story-telling. The falsification of numbers was here systematically carried out down even to contemporary history, and the primitive history of Rome was elaborated once more from one form of insipidity to another; for instance the narrative of the way in which the wise Numa according to the instructions of the nymph Egeria caught the gods Faunus and Picus; with wine, and the beautiful conversation thereupon held by the same Numa with the god Jupiter, cannot be too urgently recommended to all worshippers of the so-called legendary history of Rome in order that, if possible, they may believe these things—of course, in substance. It would have been a marvel if the Greek novel-writers of this period had allowed such materials, made as if for their use, to escape them. In fact there were not wanting Greek literati, who worked up the Roman history into romances; such a composition, for instance, was the Five Books “Concerning Rome” of the Alexander Polyhistor already mentioned among the Greek literati living in Rome,(31) a preposterous mixture of vapid historical tradition and trivial, principally erotic, fiction. He, it may be presumed, took the first steps towards filling up the five hundred years, which were wanting to bring the destruction of Troy and the origin of Rome into the chronological connection required by the fables on either side, with one of those lists of kings without achievements which are unhappily familiar to the Egyptian and Greek chroniclers; for, to all appearance, it was he that launched into the world the kings Aventinus and Tiberinus and the Alban gens of the Silvii, whom the following times accordingly did not neglect to furnish in detail with name, period of reigning, and, for the sake of greater definiteness, also a portrait.
Thus from various sides the historical romance of the Greeks finds its way into Roman historiography; and it is more than probable that not the least portion of what we are accustomed nowadays to call tradition of the Roman primitive times proceeds from sources of the stamp of Amadis of Gaul and the chivalrous romances of Fouque—an edifying consideration, at least for those who have a relish for the humour of history and who know how to appreciate the comical aspect of the piety still cherished in certain circles of the nineteenth century for king Numa.
Universal History
Nepos
A novelty in the Roman literature of this period is the appearance of universal history or, to speak more correctly, of Roman and Greek history conjoined, alongside of the native annals. Cornelius Nepos from Ticinum (c. 650-c. 725) first supplied an universal chronicle (published before 700) and a general collection of biographies—arranged according to certain categories—of Romans and Greeks distinguished in politics or literature or of men at any rate who exercised influence on the Roman or Greek history.
The historiography of this period is certainly remarkable and in a high degree characteristic, but it is as far from pleasing as the age itself. The interpenetration of Greek and Latin literature is in no field so clearly apparent as in that of history; here the respective literatures become earliest equalized in matter and form, and the conception of Helleno-Italic history as an unity, in which Polybius was so far in advance of his age, was now learned even by Greek and Roman boys at school. But while the Mediterranean state had found a historian before it had become conscious of its own existence, now, when that consciousness had been attained, there did not arise either among the Greeks or among the Romans any man who was able to give to it adequate expression. “There is no such thing,” says Cicero, “as Roman historical composition”; and, so far as we can judge, this is no more than the simple truth. The man of research turns away from writing history, the writer of history turns away from research; historical literature oscillates between the schoolbook and the romance. All the species of pure art—epos, drama, lyric poetry, history—are worthless in this worthless world; but in no species is the intellectual decay of the Ciceronian age reflected with so terrible a clearness as in its historiography.
Literature Subsidiary to History
Caesar’s Report
The minor historical literature of this period displays on the other hand, amidst many insignificant and forgotten productions, one treatise of the first rank—the Memoirs of Caesar, or rather the Military Report of the democratic general to the people from whom he had received his commission. The finished section, and that which alone was published by the author himself, describing the Celtic campaigns down to 702, is evidently designed to justify as well as possible before the public the formally unconstitutional enterprise of
Correspondence
Of a kindred nature were the letters interchanged between the statesmen and literati of this period, which were carefully collected and published in the following epoch; such as the correspondence of Caesar himself, of Cicero, Calvus and others. They can still less be numbered among strictly literary performances; but this literature of correspondence was a rich store-house for historical as for all other research, and the most faithful mirror of an epoch in which so much of the worth of past times and so much spirit, cleverness, and talent were evaporated and dissipated in trifling.
News-Sheet
A journalist literature in the modern sense was never formed in Rome; literary warfare continued to be confined to the writing of pamphlets and, along with this, to the custom generally diffused at that time of annotating the notices destined for the public in places of resort with the pencil or the pen. On the other hand subordinate persons were employed to note down the events of the day and news of the city for the absent men of quality; and Caesar as early as his first consulship took fitting measures for the immediate publication of an extract from the transactions of the senate. From the private journals of those Roman penny-a-liners and these official current reports there arose a sort of news-sheet for the capital (-acta diurna-), in which the resume of the business discussed before the people and in the senate, and births, deaths, and such like were recorded. This became a not unimportant source for history, but remained without proper political as without literary significance.
Speeches
Decline of Political Oratory
To subsidiary historical literature belongs of right also the composition of orations. The speech, whether written down or not, is in its nature ephemeral and does not belong to literature; but it may, like the report and the letter, and indeed still more readily than these, come to be included, through the significance of the moment and the power of the mind from which it springs, among the permanent treasures of the national literature. Thus in Rome the records of orations of a political tenor delivered before the burgesses or the jurymen had for long played a great part in public life; and not only so, but the speeches of Gaius Gracchus in particular were justly reckoned among the classical Roman writings. But in this epoch a singular change occurred on all hands. The composition of political speeches was on the decline like political speaking itself. The political speech in Rome, as generally in the ancient polities, reached its culminating point in the discussions before the burgesses; here the orator was not fettered, as in the senate, by collegiate considerations and burdensome forms, nor, as in the judicial addresses, by the interests—in themselves foreign to politics—of the accusation and defence; here alone his heart swelled proudly before the whole great and mighty Roman people hanging on his lips. But all this was now gone. Not as though there was any lack of orators or of the publishing of speeches delivered before the burgesses; on the contrary political authorship only now waxed copious, and it began to become a standing complaint at table that the host incommoded his guests by reading before them his latest orations. Publius Clodius had his speeches to the people issued as pamphlets, just like Gaius Gracchus; but two men may do the same thing without producing the same effect. The more important leaders even of the opposition, especially Caesar himself, did not often address the burgesses, and no longer published the speeches which they delivered; indeed they partly sought for their political fugitive writings another form than the traditional one of -contiones-, in which respect more especially the writings praising and censuring Cato(33) are remarkable. This is easily explained. Gaius Gracchus had addressed the burgesses; now men addressed the populace; and as the audience, so was the speech. No wonder that the reputable political author shunned a dress which implied that he had directed his words to the crowd assembled in the market-place of the capital.
Rise of A Literature of Pleadings
Cicero
While the composition of orations thus declined from its former literary and political value in the same way as all branches of literature which were the natural growth of the national life, there began at the same time a singular, non-political, literature of pleadings. Hitherto the Romans had known nothing of the idea that the address of an advocate as such was destined not only for the judges and the parties, but also for the literary edification of contemporaries and posterity; no advocate had written down and published his pleadings, unless they were possibly at the same time political orations and in so far were fitted to be circulated as party writings, and this had not occurred very frequently. Even Quintus Hortensius (640-704), the most celebrated Roman advocate in the first years of this period, published but few speeches and these apparently only such as were wholly or half political. It was his successor in the leadership of the Roman bar, Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who was from the outset quite as much author as forensic orator; he published his pleadings regularly, even when they were not at all or but remotely connected with politics. This was a token, not of progress, but of an unnatural and degenerate state of things. Even in Athens the appearance of non-political pleadings among the forms of literature was a sign of debility; and it was doubly so in Rome, which did not, like Athens, by a sort of necessity produce this malformation from the exaggerated pursuit of rhetoric, but borrowed it from abroad arbitrarily and in antagonism to the better traditions of the nation. Yet this new species of literature came rapidly into vogue, partly because it had various points of contact and coincidence with the earlier authorship of political orations, partly because the unpoetic, dogmatical, rhetorizing temperament of the Romans offered a favourable soil for the new seed, as indeed at the present day the speeches of advocates and even a sort of literature of law-proceedings are of some importance in Italy.
His Character
Thus oratorical authorship emancipated from politics was naturalized in the Roman literary world by Cicero. We have already had occasion several times to mention this many-sided man. As a statesman without insight, idea, or purpose, he figured successively as democrat, as aristocrat, and as a tool of the monarchs, and was never more than a short-sighted egotist. Where he exhibited the semblance of action, the questions to which his action applied had, as a rule, just reached their solution; thus he came forward in the trial of Verres against the senatorial courts when they were already set aside; thus he was silent at the discussion on the Gabinian, and acted as a champion of the Manilian, law; thus he thundered against Catilina when his departure was already settled, and so forth. He was valiant in opposition to sham attacks, and he knocked down many walls of pasteboard with a loud din; no serious
Ciceronianism
If there is anything wonderful in the case, it is in truth not the orations, but the admiration which they excited. As to Cicero every unbiassed person will soon make up his mind: Ciceronianism is a problem, which in fact cannot be properly solved, but can only be resolved into that greater mystery of human nature—language and the effect of language on the mind. Inasmuch as the noble Latin language, just before it perished as a national idiom, was once more as it were comprehensively grasped by that dexterous stylist and deposited in his copious writings, something of the power which language exercises, and of the piety which it awakens, was transferred to the unworthy vessel. The Romans possessed no great Latin prose-writer; for Caesar was, like Napoleon, only incidentally an author. Was it to be wondered at that, in the absence of such an one, they should at least honour the genius of the language in the great stylist? And that, like Cicero himself, Cicero’s readers also should accustom themselves to ask not what, but how he had written? Custom and the schoolmaster then completed what the power of language had begun.
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.
The Artificial Dialogue Applied to the Professional Sciences Cicero’s Dialogues
Lastly there sprang up in the aesthetic literature of this period the artistic treatment of subjects of professional science in the form of the stylistic dialogue, which had been very extensively in use among the Greeks and had been already employed also in isolated cases among the Romans.(37) Cicero especially made various attempts at presenting rhetorical and philosophical subjects in this form and making the professional manual a suitable book for reading. His chief writings are the -De Oratore- (written in 699), to which the history of Roman eloquence (the dialogue -Brutus-, written in 708) and other minor rhetorical essays were added by way of supplement; and the treatise -De Republica- (written in 700), with which the treatise -De Legibus- (written in 702?) after the model of Plato is brought into connection. They are no great works of art, but undoubtedly they are the works in which the excellences of the author are most, and his defects least, conspicuous. The rhetorical writings are far from coming up to the didactic chasteness of form and precision of thought of the Rhetoric dedicated to Herennius, but they contain instead a store of practical forensic experience and forensic anecdotes of all sorts easily and tastefully set forth, and in fact solve the problem of combining didactic instruction with amusement. The treatise -De Republica- carries out, in a singular mongrel compound of history and philosophy, the leading idea that the existing constitution of Rome is substantially the ideal state-organization sought for by the philosophers; an idea indeed just as unphilosophical as unhistorical, and besides not even peculiar to the author, but which, as may readily be conceived, became and remained popular. The scientific groundwork of these rhetorical and political writings of Cicero belongs of course entirely to the Greeks, and many of the details also, such as the grand concluding effect in the treatise -De Republica- the Dream of Scipio, are directly borrowed from them; yet they possess comparative originality, inasmuch as the elaboration shows throughout Roman local colouring, and the proud consciousness of political life, which the Roman was certainly entitled to feel as compared with the Greeks, makes the author even confront his Greek instructors with a certain independence. The form of Cicero’s dialogue is doubtless neither the genuine interrogative dialectics of the best Greek artificial dialogue nor the genuine conversational tone of Diderot or Lessing; but the great groups of advocates gathering around Crassus and Antonius and of the older and younger statesmen of the Scipionic circle furnish a lively and effective framework, fitting channels for the introduction of historical references and anecdotes, and convenient resting-points for the scientific discussion. The style is quite as elaborate and polished as in the best-written orations, and so far more pleasing than these, since the author does not often in this field make a vain attempt at pathos.
While these rhetorical and political writings of Cicero with a philosophic colouring are not devoid of merit, the compiler on the other hand completely failed, when in the involuntary leisure of the last years of his life (709-710) he applied himself to philosophy proper, and with equal peevishness and precipitation composed in a couple of months a philosophical library. The receipt was very simple. In rude imitation of the popular writings of Aristotle, in which the form of dialogue was employed chiefly for the setting forth and criticising of the different older systems, Cicero stitched together the Epicurean, Stoic, and Syncretist writings handling the same problem, as they came or were given to his hand, into a so-called dialogue. And all that he did on his own part was, to supply an introduction prefixed to the new book from the ample collection of prefaces for future works which he had beside him; to impart a certain popular character, inasmuch as he interwove Roman examples and references, and sometimes digressed to subjects irrelevant but more familiar to the writer and the reader, such as the treatment of the deportment of the orator in the -De Officiis-; and to exhibit that sort of bungling, which a man of letters, who has not attained to philosophic thinking or even to philosophic knowledge and who works rapidly and boldly, shows in the reproduction of dialectic trains of thought. In this way no doubt a multitude of thick tomes might very quickly come into existence—“They are copies,” wrote the author himself to a friend who wondered at his fertility; “they give me little trouble, for I supply only the words and these I have in abundance.” Against this nothing further could be said; but any one who seeks classical productions in works so written can only be advised to study in literary matters a becoming silence.
Professional Sciences.
Latin Philology
Varro
Of the sciences only a single one manifested vigorous life, that of Latin philology. The scheme of linguistic and antiquarian research within the domain of the Latin race, planned by Silo, was carried out especially by his disciple Varro on the grandest scale. There appeared comprehensive elaborations of the whole stores of the language, more especially the extensive grammatical commentaries of Figulus and the great work of Varro -De Lingua Latina-; monographs on grammar and the history of the language, such as Varro’s writings on the usage of the Latin language, on synonyms, on the age of the letters, on the origin of the Latin tongue; scholia on the older literature, especially on Plautus; works of literary history, biographies of poets, investigations into the earlier drama, into the scenic division of the comedies of Plautus, and into their genuineness. Latin archaeology, which embraced the whole older history and the ritual law apart from practical jurisprudence, was comprehended in Varro’s “Antiquities of Things Human and Divine,” which was and for all times remained
The Other Professional Sciences
Alongside of this extraordinary stir in the field of philology The small amount of activity in the other sciences is surprising. What appeared of importance in philosophy—such as Lucretius’ representation of the Epicurean system in the poetical child-dress of the pre-Socratic philosophy, and the better writings of Cicero— produced its effect and found its audience not through its philosophic contents, but in spite of such contents solely through its aesthetic form; the numerous translations of Epicurean writings and the Pythagorean works, such as Varro’s great treatise on the Elements of Numbers and the still more copious one of Figulus concerning the Gods, had beyond doubt neither scientific nor formal value.
Even the professional sciences were but feebly cultivated. Varro’s Books on Husbandry written in the form of dialogue are no doubt more methodical than those of his predecessors Cato and Saserna— on which accordingly he drops many a side glance of censure— but have on the whole proceeded more from the study than, like those earlier works, from living experience. Of the juristic labours of Varro and of Servius Sulpicius Rufus (consul in 703) hardly aught more can be said, than that they contributed to the dialectic and philosophical embellishment of Roman jurisprudence. And there is nothing farther here to be mentioned, except perhaps the three books of Gaius Matius on cooking, pickling, and making preserves— so far as we know, the earliest Roman cookery-book, and, as the work of a man of rank, certainly a phenomenon deserving of notice. That mathematics and physics were stimulated by the increased Hellenistic and utilitarian tendencies of the monarchy, is apparent from their growing importance in the instruction of youth (41) and from various practical applications; under which, besides the reform of the calendar,(42) may perhaps be included the appearance of wall-maps at this period, the technical improvements in shipbuilding and in musical instruments, designs and buildings like the aviary specified by Varro, the bridge of piles over the Rhine executed by the engineers of Caesar, and even two semicircular stages of boards arranged for being pushed together, and employed first separately as two theatres and then jointly as an amphitheatre. The public exhibition of foreign natural curiosities at the popular festivals was not unusual; and the descriptions of remarkable animals, which Caesar has embodied in the reports of his campaigns, show that, had an Aristotle appeared, he would have again found his patron-prince. But such literary performances as are mentioned in this department are essentially associated with Neopythagoreanism, such as the comparison of Greek and Barbarian, i. e. Egyptian, celestial observations by Figulus, and his writings concerning animals, winds, and generative organs. After Greek physical research generally had swerved from the Aristotelian effort to find amidst individual
Art
Architecture
If, in fine, we cast a glance at art, we discover here the same unpleasing phenomena which pervade the whole mental life of this period. Building on the part of the state was virtually brought to a total stand amidst the scarcity of money that marked the last age of the republic. We have already spoken of the luxury in building of the Roman grandees; the architects learned in consequence of this to be lavish of marble—the coloured sorts such as the yellow Numidian (Giallo antico) and others came into vogue at this time, and the marble-quarries of Luna (Carrara) were now employed for the first time—and began to inlay the floors of the rooms with mosaic work, to panel the walls with slabs of marble, or to paint the compartments in imitation of marble—the first steps towards the subsequent fresco-painting. But art was not a gainer by this lavish magnificence.
Arts of Design
In the arts of design connoisseurship and collecting were always on the increase. It was a mere affectation of Catonian simplicity, when an advocate spoke before the jurymen of the works of art “of a certain Praxiteles”; every one travelled and inspected, and the trade of the art-ciceroni, or, as they were then called, the -exegetae-, was none of the worst. Ancient works of art were formally hunted after—statues and pictures less, it is true, than, in accordance with the rude character of Roman luxury, artistically wrought furniture and ornaments of all sorts for the room and the table. As early as that age the old Greek tombs of Capua and Corinth were ransacked for the sake of the bronze and earthenware vessels which had been placed in the tomb along with the dead. for a small statuette of bronze 40,000 sesterces (400 pounds) were paid, and 200,000 (2000 pounds) for a pair of costly carpets; a well-wrought bronze cooking machine came to cost more than an estate. In this barbaric hunting after art the rich amateur was, as might be expected, frequently cheated by those who supplied him; but the economic ruin of Asia Minor in particular so exceedingly rich in artistic products brought many really ancient and rare ornaments and works of art into the market, and from Athens, Syracuse, Cyzicus, Pergamus, Chios, Samos, and other ancient seats of art, everything that was for sale and very much that was not migrated to the palaces and villas of the Roman grandees. We have already mentioned
Dancing and Music
The importance of music and dancing increased in public as in domestic life. We have already set forth how theatrical music and the dancing-piece attained to an independent standing in the development of the stage at this period;(43) we may add that now in Rome itself representations were very frequently given by Greek musicians, dancers, and declaimers on the public stage— such as were usual in Asia Minor and generally in the whole Hellenic and Hellenizing world.(44) To these fell to be added the musicians and dancing-girls who exhibited their arts to order at table and elsewhere, and the special choirs of stringed and wind instruments and singers which were no longer rare in noble houses. But that even the world of quality itself played and sang with diligence, is shown by the very adoption of music into the cycle of the generally recognized subjects of instruction;(45) as to dancing, it was, to say nothing of women, made matter of reproach even against consulars that they exhibited themselves in dancing performances amidst a small circle.
Incipient Influence of the Monarchy
Towards the end of this period, however, there appears with the commencement of the monarchy the beginning of a better time also in art. We have already mentioned the mighty stimulus which building in the capital received, and building throughout the empire was destined to receive, through Caesar. Even in the cutting of the dies of the coins there appears about 700 a remarkable change; the stamping, hitherto for the most part rude and negligent, is thenceforward managed with more delicacy and care.
Conclusion
We have reached the end of the Roman republic. We have seen it rule for five hundred years in Italy and in the countries on the Mediterranean; we have seen it brought to ruin in politics and morals, religion and literature, not through outward violence but through inward decay, and thereby making room for the new monarchy of Caesar. There was in the world, as Caesar found it, much of the noble heritage of past centuries and an infinite abundance of pomp and glory, but little spirit, still less taste, and least of all true delight in life. It was indeed an old world; and even the richly-gifted patriotism of Caesar could not make it young again. The dawn does not return till after the night has fully set in and run its course. But yet with him there came to the sorely harassed peoples on the Mediterranean a tolerable evening after the sultry noon; and when at length after a long historical night the new day dawned once more for the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-movement commenced their race towards new and higher goals, there were found among them not a few, in which the seed sown by Caesar had sprung up, and which owed, as they still owe, to him their national individuality.
1. IV. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts, 527
2. It is a significant trait, that a distinguished teacher of literature, the freedman Staberius Eros, allowed the children of the proscribed to attend his course gratuitously.
3. IV. X. Proscription-Lists
4. IV. IX. Pompeius
5. IV. IV. Administration under the Restoration
6. IV. IV. Livius Drusus
7. IV. IX. Government of Cinna
8. IV. IX. Pompeius
9. IV. IX. Sertorius Embarks
10. IV. VII. Strabo, iv. IX. Dubious Attitude of Strabo
11. IV. IX. Carbo Assailed on Three Sides of Etruria
12. IV. VII. Rejection of the Proposals for an Accomodation
13. IV. X. Reorganization of the Senate
14. It is usual to set down the year 654 as that of Caesar’s birth, because according to Suetonius (Caes. 88), Plutarch (Caes. 69), and Appian (B. C. ii. 149) he was at his death (15 March 710) in his 56th year; with which also the statement that he was 18 years old at the time of the Sullan proscription (672; Veil. ii. 41) nearly accords. But this view is utterly inconsistent with the facts that Caesar filled the aedileship in 689, the praetorship in 692, and the consulship in 695, and that these offices could, according to the -leges annales-, be held at the very earliest in the 37th-38th, 40th-41st, and 43rd-44th years of a man’s life respectively. We cannot conceive why Caesar should have filled all the curule offices two years before the legal time, and still less why there should be no mention anywhere of his having done so. These facts rather suggest
In the Life of Caesar by Napoleon iii (B. 2, ch. 1) it is objected to this view, first, that the -lex annalis- would point for Caesar’s birth-year not to 652, but to 651; secondly and especially, that other cases are known where it was not attended to. But the first assertion rests on a mistake; for, as the example of Cicero shows, the -lex annalis- required only that at the entering on office the 43rd year should be begun, not that it should be completed. None of the alleged exceptions to the rule, moreover, are pertinent. When Tacitus (Ann. xi. 22) says that formerly in conferring magistracies no regard was had to age, and that the consulate and dictatorship were entrusted to quite young men, he has in view, of course, as all commentators acknowledge, the earlier period before the issuing of the -leges annales—–the consulship of M. Valerius Corvus at twenty-three, and similar cases. The assertion that Lucullus received the supreme magistracy before the legal age is erroneous; it is only stated (Cicero, Acad. pr. i. 1) that on the ground of an exceptional clause not more particularly known to us, in reward for some sort of act performed by him, he had a dispensation from the legal two years’
15. IV. IX. Spain
16. At least the outline of these organizations must be assigned to the years 674, 675, 676, although the execution of them doubtless belonged, in great part, only to the subsequent years.
17 IV. IX. The Provinces
18. The following narrative rests substantially on the account of Licinianus, which, fragmentary as it is at this very point, still gives important information as to the insurrection of Lepidus.
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
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.
21. III. IV. Hannibal’s Passage of the Alps
22. In the recently found fragments of Sallust, which appear to belong to the campaign of 679, the following words relate to this incident: -Romanus [exer]citus (of Pompeius) frumenti gra[tia r]emotus in Vascones i... [it]emque Sertorius mon... e, cuius multum in[terer]it, ne ei perinde Asiae [iter et Italiae intercluderetur].
1. IV. VIII. New Difficulties
2. IV. VIII. Preliminaries of Delium, iv. VIII. Peace at Dardanus
3. IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates
4. IV. I. Cilicia
5. IV. I. Piracy
6. IV. I. Crete
7. The foundation of the kingdom of Edessa is placed by native chronicles in 620 (iv. I. The Parthian Empire), but it was not till some time after its rise that it passed into the hands of the Arabic dynasty bearing the names of Abgarus and Mannus, which we afterwards find there. This dynasty is obviously connected with the settlement of many Arabs by Tigranes the Great in the region of Edessa, Callirrhoe, Carrhae (Plin. H. N. v. 20, 85; ax, 86; vi. 28, 142); respecting which Plutarch also (Luc. 21) states that Tigranes, changing the habits of the tent-Arabs, settled them nearer to his kingdom in order by their means to possess himself of the trade. We may presumably take this to mean that the Bedouins, who were accustomed to open routes for traffic through their territory and to levy on these routes fixed transit-dues (Strabo, xvi. 748), were to serve the great-king as a sort of toll-supervisors, and to levy tolls for him and themselves at the passage of the Euphrates. These “Osrhoenian Arabs” (-Orei Arabes-), as Pliny calls them, must also be the Arabs on Mount Amanus, whom Afranius subdued (Plut. Pomp. 39).
8. The disputed question, whether this alleged or real testament proceeded from Alexander I (d. 666) or Alexander ii (d. 673), is usually decided in favour of the former alternative. But the reasons are inadequate; for Cicero (de L. Agr. i. 4, 12; 15, 38; 16, 41) does not say that Egypt fell to Rome in 666, but that it did so in or after this year; and while the circumstance that Alexander I died abroad, and Alexander ii in Alexandria, has led some to infer that the treasures mentioned in the testament in question as lying in Tyre must have belonged to the former, they have overlooked that Alexander ii was killed nineteen days after his arrival in Egypt (Letronne, Inscr, de I’Egypte, ii. 20), when his treasure might still very well be in Tyre. On the other hand the circumstance that the second Alexander was the last genuine Lagid is decisive, for in the similar acquisitions of Pergamus, Cyrene, and Bithynia it was always by the last scion of the legitimate ruling family that Rome was appointed heir. The ancient constitutional law, as it applied at least to the Roman client-states, seems to have given to the reigning prince the right of ultimate disposal of his kingdom not absolutely, but only in the absence of -agnati- entitled to succeed. Comp. Gutschmid’s remark in the German translation of S. Sharpe’s History of Egypt, ii. 17.
Whether the testament was genuine or spurious, cannot be ascertained, and is of no great moment; there are no special reasons for assuming a forgery.
9. IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates
10. IV. VIII. Cyrene Roman
11. V. I. Collapse of the Power of Sertorius
12. IV. IV. The Provinces
13. IV. VIII. Lucullus and the Fleet on the Asiatic Coast
14. IV. VIII. Flaccus Arrives in Asia
15. III. V. Attitude of the Romans, iii. Vi. The African Expedition of Scipio
16. That Tigranocerta was situated in the region of Mardln some two days’ march to the west of Nisibis, has been proved by the investigation instituted on the spot by Sachau ("-Ueber die Lage von Tigranokerta-,” Abh. der Berliner Akademie, 1880), although the more exact fixing of the locality proposed by Sachau is not beyond doubt. On the other hand, his attempt to clear up the campaign of Lucullus encounters the difficulty that, on the route assumed in it, a crossing of the Tigris is in reality out of the question.
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.
18. V. II. Preparations of Mithradates, 328, 334
19. V. II. Invasion of Pontus by Lucullus
20. V. II. Roman Preparations
21. V. I. Want of Leaders
22. V. II. Maritime War
23. IV. I. Crete
24. IV. II. The First Sicilian Slave War, iv. IV. Revolts of the Slaves
25. These enactments gave rise to the conception of robbery as a separate crime, while the older law comprehended robbery under theft.
26. V. II. The Pirates in the Mediterranean
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).
1. IV. X. Assignations to the Soldiers
2. V. I. Pompeius
3. IV. X. Abolition of the Gracchan Institutions
4. V. II. The Insurrection Takes Shape
5. V. III. Attacks on the Senatorial Tribunals
6. V. I. Insurrection of Lepidus
7. IV. X. Co-optation Restored in the Priestly Colleges
8. V. II. Mutiny of the Soldiers
9. IV. IV. Marius Commander-in-Chief
10. The extraordinary magisterial power (-pro consule-, -pro praetore-, -pro quaestore-) might according to Roman state-law originate in three ways. Either it arose out of the principle which held good for the non-urban magistracy, that the office continued up to the appointed legal term, but the official authority up to the arrival of the successor, which was the oldest, simplest, and most frequent case. Or it arose in the way of the appropriate organs—especially the comitia, and in later times also perhaps the senate—nominating a chief magistrate not contemplated in the constitution, who was otherwise on a parity with the ordinary magistrate, but in token of the extraordinary nature of his office designated himself merely “instead of a praetor” or “of a consul.” To this class belong also the magistrates nominated in the ordinary way as quaestors, and then extraordinarily furnished with praetorian or even consular official authority (-quaestores pro praetore- or -pro consule-); in which quality, for example, Publius Lentulus Marcellinus went in 679 to Cyrene (Sallust, Hist. ii. 39 Dietsch), Gnaeus Piso in 689 to Hither Spain (Sallust, Cat. 19), and Cato in 696 to Cyprus (Vell. ii. 45). Or, lastly, the extraordinary magisterial authority was based on the right of delegation vested in the supreme magistrate. If he left the bounds of his province or otherwise was hindered from administering his office, he was entitled to nominate one of those about him as his substitute, who was then called -legatus pro praetore-(Sallust, lug. 36, 37, 38), or, if the choice fell on the quaestor, -quaestor pro praetore- (Sallust, Iug. 103). In like manner he was entitled, if he had no quaestor, to cause the quaestorial duties to be discharged by one of his train, who was then called -legatus pro quaestore-, a name which is to be met with, perhaps for the first time, on the Macedonian tetradrachms of Sura, lieutenant of the governor of Macedonia, 665-667. But it was contrary to the nature of delegation and therefore according to the older state-law inadmissible, that the supreme magistrate should, without having met with any hindrance in the discharge of his functions, immediately upon his entering on office invest one or more of his subordinates with supreme official authority; and so far the -legati pro praetore-of the proconsul Pompeius were an innovation, and already similar in kind to those who played so great a part in the times of the Empire.
11. V. III. Attempts to Restore the Tribunician Power
12. According to the legend king Romulus was torn in pieces by the senators.
13. IV. II. Further Plans of Gracchus
1. V. III. Senate, Equites, and Populares
2. V. II. Metellus Subdues Crete
3. [Literally “twenty German miles”; but the breadth of the island does not seem in reality half so much.—Tr.]
4. V. II. Renewal of the War
5. Pompeius distributed among his soldiers and officers as presents 384,000,000 sesterces (=16,000 talents, App. Mithr. 116); as the officers received 100,000,000 (Plin. H. N. xxxvii. 2, 16) and each of the common soldiers 6000 sesterces (Plin., App.), the army still numbered at its triumph about 40,000 men.
6. V. II. Sieges of the Pontic Cities
7. V. II. All the Armenian Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans
8. V. II. Syria under Tigranes
9. V. II. Syria under Tigranes
10. IV. I. The Jews
11. V. II. Siege and Battle of Tigranocerta
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
15. Pompeius spent the winter of 689-690 still in the neighbourhood of the Caspian Sea (Dio, xxxvii. 7). In 690 he first reduced the last strongholds still offering resistance in the kingdom of Pontus, and then moved slowly, regulating matters everywhere, towards the south. That the organization of Syria began in 690 is confirmed by the fact that the Syrian provincial era begins with this year, and by Cicero’s statement respecting Commagene (Ad Q. fr. ii. 12, 2; comp. Dio, xxxvii. 7). During the winter of 690-691 Pompeius seems to have had his headquarters in Antioch (Joseph, xiv. 3, 1, 2, where the confusion has been rectified by Niese in the Hermes, xi. p. 471).
16. III. V. New Warlike Preparations in Rome
17. III. IV. War Party and Peace Party in Carthage
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.
19. V. II. Renewal of the War, V. IV. Variance between Mithradates and Tigranes
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.
23. IV. VIII. Pontus
24. V. IV. Battle at Nicopolis
25. V. II. Defeat of the Romans in Pontus at Ziela
26. V. IV. Pompeius Take the Supreme Command against Mithradates
27. IV. VIII. Weak Counterpreparations of the Romans ff.
28. V. II. Egypt not Annexed
29. V. IV. Urban Communities
1. V. III. Renewal of the Censorship
2. IV. Vi. Political Projects of Marius
3. IV. X. Co-optation Restored in the Priestly Colleges
4. IV. VII. The Sulpician Laws
5. IV. X. Permanent and Special -Quaestiones-
6. IV. Vi. And Overpowered
7. IV. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts
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.
11. V. IV. Pompeius Proceeds to Colchis
12. V. III. Attacks on the Senatorial Tribunals, V. III. Renewal of the Censorship
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-.
14. This cannot well be expressed more naively than is done in the memorial ascribed to his brother (de pet. cons. i, 5; 13, 51, 53; in 690); the brother himself would hardly have expressed his mind publicly with so much frankness. In proof of this unprejudiced persons will read not without interest the second oration against Rullus, where the “first democratic consul,” gulling the friendly public in a very delectable fashion, unfolds to it the “true democracy.”
15. His epitaph still extant runs: -Cn. Calpurnius Cn. f. Piso quaestor fro pr. ex s. c. proviniciam Hispaniam citeriorem optinuit-.
16. V. V. Failure of the First Plans of Conspiracy
17. V. III. Continued Subsistence of the Sullan Constitution
18. IV. XII. Priestly Colleges
19. IV. VII. Economic Crisis
20. V. V. Rehabilitation of Saturninus and Marius
21. Such an apology is the -Catilina- of Sallust, which was published by the author, a notorious Caesarian, after the year 708, either under the monarchy of Caesar or more probably under the triumvirate of his heirs; evidently as a treatise with a political drift, which endeavours to bring into credit the democratic party— on which in fact the Roman monarchy was based—and to clear Caesar’s memory from the blackest stain that rested on it; and with the collateral object of whitewashing as far as possible the uncle of the triumvir Marcus Antonius (comp. e. g. c. 59 with Dio, xxxvii. 39). The Jugurtha of the same author is in an exactly similar way designed partly to expose the pitifulness of the oligarchic government, partly to glorify the Coryphaeus of the democracy, Gaius Marius. The circumstance that the adroit author keeps the apologetic and inculpatory character of these writings of his in the background, proves, not that they are not partisan treatises, but that they are good ones.
22. V. XII. Greek Literati in Rome
1. V. IV. Aggregate Results
2. The impression of the first address, which Pompeius made to the burgesses after his return, is thus described by Cicero (ad Att. i. 14): -prima contio Pompei non iucunda miseris (the rabble), inanis improbis (the democrats), beatis (the wealthy) non grata, bonis (the aristocrats) non gravis; itaque frigebat-.
3. IV. X. Regulating of the Qualifications for Office
4. V. V. New Projects of the Conspirators
5. V. Vi. Pompeius without Influence
6. IV. IX. Government of Cinna, iv. X. Punishments Inflicted on Particular Communities
7. IV. XII. Oriental Religions in Italy
8. V. V. Transpadanes
9. IV. X. Cisalpine Gaul Erected into a Province
10. V. IV. Cyprus Annexed
11. IV. Vi. Violent Proceedings in the Voting
12. V. IV. Cyprus Annexed
1. IV. I. The Callaeci Conquered
2. IV. IX. Spain
3. V. I. Renewed Outbreak of the Spanish Insurrection
4. V. I. Pompeius in Gaul
5. V. I. Indefinite and Perilous Character of the Sertorian War
6. V. V. Conviction and Arrest of the Conspirators in the Capital
7. V. I. Pompeius Puts and End to the Insurrection
8. IV. II. Scipio Aemilianus
9. There was found, for instance, at Vaison in the Vocontian canton an inscription written in the Celtic language with the ordinary Greek alphabet. It runs thus: —segouaros ouilloneos tooutious namausatis eiorou beileisamisosin nemeiton—. The last word means “holy.”
10. An immigration of Belgic Celts to Britain continuing for a considerable time seems indicated by the names of English tribes on both banks of the Thames borrowed from Belgic cantons; such as the Atrebates, the Belgae, and even the Britanni themselves, which word appears to have been transferred from the Brittones settled on the Somme below Amiens first to an English canton and then to the whole island. The English gold coinage was also derived from the Belgic and originally identical with it.
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
That, moreover, every such attempt to make up by combinations for the statistical basis, in which ancient history is especially deficient, must be received with due caution, will be at once apprehended by the intelligent reader, while he will not absolutely reject it on that account.
12. “In the interior of Transalpine Gaul on the Rhine,” says Scrofa in Varro, De R. R. i. 7, 8, “when I commanded there, I traversed some districts, where neither the vine nor the olive nor the fruit-tree appears, where they manure the fields with white Pit-chalk, where they have neither rock—nor sea-salt, but make use of the saline ashes of certain burnt wood instead of salt.” This description refers probably to the period before Caesar and to the eastern districts of the old province, such as the country of the Allobroges; subsequently Pliny (H. N. xvii. 6, 42 seq.) describes at length the Gallo-Britannic manuring with marl.
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).
14. We are led to this conclusion by the designation of the trading or “round” as contrasted with the “long” or war vessel, and the similar contrast of the “oared ships” (—epikopoi veies—) and the “merchantmen” (—olkades—, Dionys. iii. 44); and moreover by the smallness of the crew in the trading vessels, which in the very largest amounted to not more than 200 men (Rhein. Mus. N. F. xi. 625), while in the ordinary galley of three decks there were employed 170 rowers (iii. II. The Romans Build A Fleet). Comp. Movers, Phoen. ii. 3, 167 seq.
15. IV. V. Transalpine Relations of Rome
16. IV. V. Defeat of Longinus
17. IV. V. Transalpine Relations of Rome
18. This remarkable word must have been in use as early as the sixth century of Rome among the Celts in the valley of the Po; for Ennius is already acquainted with it, and it can only have reached the Italians at so early a period from that quarter. It is not merely Celtic, however, but also German, the root of our “Amt,” as indeed the retainer-system itself is common to the Celts and the Germans. It would be of great historical importance to ascertain whether the word—and so also the thing—came to the Celts from the Germans, or to the Germans from the Celts. If, as is usually supposed, the word is originally German and primarily signified the servant standing in battle “against the back” (-and-= against, -bak- = back) of his master, this is not wholly irreconcileable with the singularly early occurrence of this word among the Celts. According to all analogy the right to keep -ambacti-, that is, —doouloi misthotoi—, cannot have belonged to the Celtic nobility from the outset, but must only have developed itself gradually in antagonism to the older monarchy and to the equality of the free commons. If thus the system of -ambacti- among the Celts was not an ancient and national, but a comparatively recent institution, it is—looking to the relation which had subsisted for centuries between the Celts and Germans, and which is to be explained farther on—not merely possible but even probable that the Celts, in Italy as in Gaul, employed Germans chiefly as those hired servants-at-arms. The “Swiss guard” would therefore in that case be some thousands of years older than people suppose. Should the term by which the Romans, perhaps after the example of the Celts, designate the Germans as a nation-the name -Germani—–be really of Celtic origin, this obviously accords very well with that hypothesis.—No doubt these assumptions must necessarily give way, should the word -ambactus- be explained in a satisfactory way from a Celtic root; as in fact Zeuss (Gramm. p. 796), though doubtfully, traces it to -ambi- = around and -aig- = -agere-, viz. one moving round or moved round, and so attendants, servants. The circumstance that the word occurs also as a Celtic proper name (Zeuss, p. 77), and is perhaps preserved in the Cambrian -amaeth- = peasant, labourer (Zeuss, p. 156), cannot decide the point either way,
19. From the Celtic words -guerg- = worker and -breth- = judgment.
20. IV. V. Transalpine Relations of Rome
21. The position which such a federal general occupied with reference to his troops, is shown by the accusation of high treason raised against Vercingetorix (Caesar, B. G. vii. 20).
22. IV. V. The Cimbri
23. II. IV. The Celts Assail the Etruscans in Northern Italy
24. V. VII. Art and Science
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
28. IV. V. Teutones in the Province of Gaul
29. The arrival of Ariovistus in Gaul has been placed, according to Caesar, i. 36, in 683, and the battle of Admagetobriga (for such was the name of the place now usually, in accordance with a false inscription, called Magetobriga), according to Caesar i. 35 and Cicero Ad. Att. i. 19, in 693.
30. V. VII. Wars and Revolts There
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.
32. IV. V. Inroad of the Helvetii into Southern Gaul
33. According to the uncorrected calendar. According to the current rectification, which however here by no means rests on sufficiently trustworthy data, this day corresponds to the 16th of April of the Julian calendar.
34. IV. V. The Cimbri, Teutones, and Helvetii Unite
35. -Julia Equestris-, where the last surname is to be taken as in other colonies of Caesar the surnames of sextanorum, decimanorum, etc. It was Celtic or German horsemen of Caesar, who, of course with the bestowal of the Roman or, at any rate, Latin franchise, received land-allotments there.
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
37. This seems the simplest hypothesis regarding the origin of these Germanic settlements. That Ariovistus settled those peoples on the middle Rhine is probable, because they fight in his army (Caes. i. 51) and do not appear earlier; that Caesar left them in possession of their settlements is probable, because he in presence of Ariovistus declared himself ready to tolerate the Germans already settled in Gaul (Caes. i. 35, 43), and because we find them afterwards in these abodes. Caesar does not mention the directions given after the battle concerning these Germanic settlements, because he keeps silence on principle regarding all the organic arrangements made by him in Gaul.
38. IV. V. The Cimbri, Teutones, and Helvetii Unite
39. III. II. The Romans Build a Fleet
40. V. I. Pompeius in Gaul
41. V. VII. The Germans on the Lower Rhine
42. The nature of the case as well as Caesar’s express statement proves that the passages of Caesar to Britain were made from ports of the coast between Calais and Boulogne to the coast of Kent. A more exact determination of the localities has often been attempted, but without success. All that is recorded is, that on the first voyage the infantry embarked at one port, the cavalry at another distant from the former eight miles in an easterly direction (iv. 22, 23, 28), and that the second voyage was made from that one of those two ports which Caesar had found most convenient, the (otherwise not further mentioned) Portus Itius, distant from the British coast 30 (so according to the MSS. of Caesar v. 2) or 40 miles (=320 stadia, according to Strabo iv. 5, 2, who doubtless drew his account from Caesar). From Caesar’s words (iv. 21) that he had chosen “the shortest crossing,” we may doubtless reasonably infer that he crossed not the Channel but the Straits of Calais, but by no means that he crossed the latter by the mathematically shortest line. It requires
43. That Cotta, although not lieutenant-general of Sabinus, but like him legate, was yet the younger and less esteemed general and was probably directed in the event of a difference to yield, may be inferred both from the earlier services of Sabinus and from the fact that, where the two are named together (iv. 22, 38; v. 24, 26, 52; vi. 32; otherwise in vi. 37) Sabinus regularly takes precedence, as also from the narrative of the catastrophe itself. Besides we cannot possibly suppose that Caesar should have placed over a camp two officers with equal authority, and have made no arrangement at all for the case of a difference of opinion. the five cohorts are not counted as part of a legion (comp. vi. 32, 33) any more than the twelve cohorts at the Rhine bridge (vi. 29, comp. 32, 33), and appear to have consisted of detachments of other portions of the army, which had been assigned to reinforce this camp situated nearest to the Germans.
44. V. VII. Subjugation of the Belgae
45. IV. V. War with the Allobroges and Arverni
46. V. VII. Cantonal Constitution
47. This, it is true, was only possible, so long as offensive weapons chiefly aimed at cutting and stabbing. In the modern mode of warfare, as Napoleon has excellently explained, this system has become inapplicable, because with our offensive weapons operating from a distance the deployed position is more advantageous than the concentrated. In Caesar’s time the reverse was the case.
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.
49. The question so much discussed of late, whether Alesia is not rather to be identified with Alaise (25 kilometres to the south of Besancon, dep. Doubs), has been rightly answered in the negative by all judicious inquirers.
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.
51. This indeed, as may readily be conceived, is not recorded by Caesar himself, but an intelligible hint on this subject is given by Sallust (Hist. i. 9 Kritz), although he too wrote as a partisan of Caesar. Further proofs are furnished by the coins.
52. Thus we read on a -semis- which a Vergobretus of the Lexovii (Lisieux, dep. Calvados) caused to be struck, the following inscription: -Cisiambos Cattos vercobreto; simissos (sic) publicos Lixovio-. The often scarcely legible writing and the incredibly wretched stamping of these coins are in excellent harmony with their stammering Latin.
53. V. VII. Caesar and Ariovistus
54. V. VII. The Helvetii Sent Back to Their Original Abodes
55. V. VII. Beginning of the Struggle
56. IV. V. Taurisci
1. This is the meaning of -cantorum convitio contiones celebrare-(Cic. pro Sest. 55, 118).
2. V. Vi. Clodius
3. IV. V. The Victory and the Parties
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.
5. -Me asinum germanum fuisse- (Ad Att. iv. 5, 3).
6. This palinode is the still extant oration on the Provinces to be assigned to the consuls of 699. It was delivered in the end of May 698. The pieces contrasting with it are the orations for Sestius and against Vatinius and that upon the opinion of the Etruscan soothsayers, dating from the months of March and April, in which the aristocratic regime is glorified to the best of his ability and Caesar in particular is treated in a very cavalier tone. It was but reasonable that Cicero should, as he himself confesses (Ad Att. iv. 5, 1), be ashamed to transmit even to intimate friends that attestation of his resumed allegiance.
7. This is not stated by our authorities. But the view that Caesar levied no soldiers at all from the Latin communities, that is to say from by far the greater part of his province, is in itself utterly incredible, and is directly refuted by the fact that the opposition-party slightingly designates the force levied by Caesar as “for the most part natives of the Transpadane colonies” (Caes. B. C. iii. 87); for here the Latin colonies of Strabo
8. V. VII. Fresh Violations of the Rhine-Boundary by the Germans
9. The collection handed down to us is full of references to the events of 699 and 700 and was doubtless published in the latter year; the most recent event, which it mentions, is the prosecution of Vatinius (Aug. 700). The statement of Hieronymus that Catullus died in 697-698 requires therefore to be altered only by a few years. From the circumstance that Vatinius “swears falsely by his consulship,” it has been erroneously inferred that the collection did not appear till after the consulate of Vatinius (707); it only follows from it that Vatinius, when the collection appeared, might already reckon on becoming consul in a definite year, for which he had every reason as early as 700; for his name certainly stood on the list of candidates agreed on at Luca (Cicero, Ad. Att. iv. 8 b. 2).
10. The well-known poem of Catullus (numbered as xxix.) was written in 699 or 700 after Caesar’s Britannic expedition and before the death of Julia:
-Quis hoc potest videre, quis potest pati, Nisi impudicus et vorax et aleo, Mamurram habere quod comata Gallia Habebat ante et ultima Britannia-? etc.
Mamurra of Formiae, Caesar’s favourite and for a time during the Gallic wars an officer in his army, had, presumably a short time before the composition of this poem, returned to the capital and was in all likelihood then occupied with the building of his much-talked-of marble palace furnished with lavish magnificence on the Caelian hill. The Iberian booty mentioned in the poem must have reference to Caesar’s governorship of Further Spain, and Mamurra must even then, as certainly afterwards in Gaul, have been found at Caesar’s headquarters; the Pontic booty presumably has reference to the war of Pompeius against Mithradates, especially as according to the hint of the poet it was not merely Caesar that enriched Mamurra.
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:
-Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli-, etc.
11. V. VIII. Clodius
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.
13. -Consul- signifies “colleague” (i. 318), and a consul who is at the same time proconsul is at once an actual consul and a consul’s substitute.
14. II. III. Military Tribunes with Consular Powers
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).
3. V. IV. Ptolemaeus in Egypt Recognized, but Expelled by His Subjects
4. V. IV. Military Pacification of Syria
5. V. VII. Repulse of the Helvetii, V. VII. Expeditions against the Maritime Cantons
6. V. VII. Cassivellaunus
7. V. VII. The Carnutes ff.
8. V. II. Renewal of the War
9. V. IV. Difficulty with the Parthians
10. IV. I. War against Aristonicus
11. V. VII. Insurrection
12. V. VIII. Humiliation of the Republicans
13. V. VIII. Changes in the Arrangement of Magistrates and the Jury-System
14. V. VIII. Humiliation of the Republicans
15. V. VIII. The Aristocracy Submits ff.
16. V. VIII. Changes in the Arrangement of Magistrates and the Jury-System
17. V. VIII. The Senate under the Monarchy
18. V. II. Mutiny of the Soldiers, V. III. Reappearance of Pompeius
19. V. VII. Alpine Peoples
20. V. IX. Dictatorship of Pompeius
21. -Homo ingeniosissime nequam- (Vellei. ii. 48).
22. V. IX. Debates as to Caesar’s Recall
23. IV. X. The Restoration
24. V. II. Beginning of the Armenian War
25. To be distinguished from the consul having the same name of 704; the latter was a cousin, the consul of 705 a brother, of the Marcus Marcellus who was consul in 703.
26. V. IX. Debates ss to Caesar’s Recall ff.
27. II. II. Intercession
1. V. V. Transpadanes
2. V. V. Transpadanes
3. A centurion of Caesar’s tenth legion, taken prisoner, declared to the commander-in-chief of the enemy that he was ready with ten of his men to make head against the best cohort of the enemy (500 men; Dell. Afric. 45). “In the ancient mode of fighting,” to quote the opinion of Napoleon I, “a battle consisted simply of duels; what was only correct in the mouth of that centurion, would be mere boasting in the mouth of the modern soldier.” Vivid proofs of the soldierly spirit that pervaded Caesar’s army are furnished by the Reports—appended to his Memoirs—respecting the African and the second Spanish wars, of which the former appears to have had as its author an officer of the second rank, while the latter is in every respect a subaltern camp-journal.
4. V. IX. Debates as to Caesar’s Recall
5. IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates
6. V. IV. The New Relations of the Romans in the East, V. IV. Galatia
7. V. IV. Ptolemaeus in Egypt Recognized, but Expelled by His Subjects
8. V. VII. Wars and Revolts There
9. V. IX. Repulse of the Parthians
10. V. IX. Counter-Arrangements of Caesar
11. V. VIII. Settlement of the New Monarchial Rule
12. V. VIII. Changes in the Arrangement of Magistracies and the Jury-System
13. This number was specified by Pompeius himself (Caesar, B.C. i. 6), and it agrees with the statement that he lost in Italy about 60 cohorts or 30,000 men, and took 25,000 over to Greece (Caesar, B.C. iii. 10).
14. V. VII. With the Bellovaci
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.
16. IV. IX. Pompeius
17. IV. XI. Italian Revenues
18. V. VII. Caesar in Spain
19. V. VII. Venetian War ff.
20. III. Vi. Scipio Driven Back to the Coast
21. V. X. Caesar Takes the Offensive
22. V. VII. Illyria
23. As according to formal law the “legal deliberative assembly” undoubtedly, just like the “legal court,” could only take place in the city itself or within the precincts, the assembly representing the senate in the African army called itself the “three hundred” (Bell. Afric. 88, 90; Appian, ii. 95), not because it consisted of 300 members, but because this was the ancient normal number of senators (i. 98). It is very likely that this assembly recruited its ranks by equites of repute; but, when Plutarch makes the three hundred to be Italian wholesale dealers (Cato Min. 59, 61), he has misunderstood his authority (Bell. Afr. 90). Of a similar kind must have been the arrangement as to the quasi-senate already in Thessalonica.
24. V. X. Indignation of the Anarchist Party against Caesar
25. V. X. The Pompeian Army
26. V. IV. And Brought Back by Gabinius
27. V. X. Caesar’s Fleet and Army in Illyricum Destroyed
28. According to the rectified calendar on the 5th Nov. 705.
29. V. X. Result of the Campaign as a Whole
30. The exact determination of the field of battle is difficult. Appian (ii. 75) expressly places it between (New) Pharsalus (now Fersala) and the Enipeus. Of the two streams, which alone are of any importance in the question, and are undoubtedly the Apidanus and Enipeus of the ancients—the Sofadhitiko and the Fersaliti—the former has its sources in the mountains of Thaumaci (Dhomoko) and the Dolopian heights, the latter in mount Othrys, and the Fersaliti alone flows past Pharsalus; now as the Enipeus according to Strabo (ix. p. 432) springs from mount Othrys and flows past Pharsalus, the Fersaliti has been most justly pronounced by Leake (Northern Greece, iv. 320) to be the Enipeus, and the hypothesis followed by Goler that the Fersaliti is the Apidanus is untenable. With this all the other statements of the ancients as to the two rivers agree. Only we must doubtless assume with Leake, that the river of Vlokho formed by the union of the Fersaliti and the Sofadhitiko and going to the Peneius was called by the ancients Apidanus as well as the Sofadhitiko; which, however, is the more natural, as while the Sofadhitiko probably has, the Fersaliti has not, constantly water (Leake, iv. 321). Old Pharsalus, from which the battle takes its name, must therefore have been situated between Fersala and the Fersaliti. Accordingly the battle was fought on the left bank of the Fersaliti, and in such a way that the Pompeians, standing with their faces towards Pharsalus, leaned their right wing on the river (Caesar, B. C. iii.
31. III. VIII. Battle of Cynoscephalae
32. With this is connected the well-known direction of Caesar to his soldiers to strike at the faces of the enemy’s horsemen. the infantry—which here in an altogether irregular way acted on the offensive against cavalry, who were not to be reached with the sabres—were not to throw their -pila-, but to use them as hand-spears against the cavalry and, in order to defend themselves better against these, to thrust at their faces (Plutarch, Pomp. 69, 71; Caes. 45; Appian, ii. 76, 78; Flor. ii. 12; Oros. vi. 15; erroneously Frontinus, iv. 7, 32). The anecdotical turn given to this instruction, that the Pompeian horsemen were to be brought to run away by the fear of receiving scars in their faces, and that they actually
33. V. I. Indefinite and Perilous Character of the Sertorian War
34. [I may here state once for all that in this and other passages, where Dr. Mommsen appears incidentally to express views of religion or philosophy with which I can scarcely be supposed to agree, I have not thought it right—as is, I believe, sometimes done in similar cases—to omit or modify any portion of what he has written. The reader must judge for himself as to the truth or value of such assertions as those given in the text.—Tr.]
35. V. IX. Passive Resistance of Caesar
36. V. X. The Armies at Pharsalus
37. V. IV. And Brought Back by Gabinius
38. V. X. Caesar’s Fleet and Army in Illyricum Destroyed
39. V. IV. Aggregate Results
40. V. IV. Ptolemaeus in Egypt Recognized, but Expelled by His Subjects
41. V. IV. Cyprus Annexed
42. The loss of the lighthouse-island must have fallen out, where there is now a chasm (B. A. 12), for the island was in fact at first in Caesar’s power (B. C. iii. 12; B. A. 8). The mole, must have been constantly in the power of the enemy, for Caesar held intercourse with the island only by ships.
43. V. IV. Robber-Chiefs
44. V. IV. Robber-Chiefs
45. V. X. Caesar’s Fleet and Army in Illyricum Destroyed
46. V. VIII. And in the Courts
47. Much obscurity rests on the shape assumed by the states in northwestern Africa during this period. After the Jugurthine war Bocchus king of Mauretania ruled probably from the western sea to the port of Saldae, in what is now Morocco and Algiers (iv. IV. Reorganization of Numidia); the princes of Tingis (Tangiers)—probably from the outset different from the Mauretanian sovereigns—who occur even earlier (Plut. Serf. 9), and to whom it may be conjectured that Sallust’s Leptasta (Hist. ii. 31 Kritz) and Cicero’s Mastanesosus (In Vat. 5, 12) belong, may have been independent within certain limits or may have held from him as feudatories; just as Syphax already ruled over many chieftains of tribes (Appian, Pun. 10), and about this time in the neighbouring Numidia Cirta was possessed, probably however under Juba’s supremacy, by the prince Massinissa (Appian, B. C. iv. 54). About 672 we find in Bocchus’ stead a king called Bocut or Bogud (iv. 92; Orosius, v. 21, 14), the son of Bocchus. From 705 the kingdom appears divided between king Bogud who possesses the western, and king Bocchus who possesses the eastern half, and to this the later partition of Mauretania into Bogud’s kingdom or the state of Tingis and Bocchus’ kingdom or the state of Iol (Caesarea) refers (Plin. H. N. v. 2, 19; comp. Bell. Afric. 23).
48. IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates
49. V. V. Resumption of the Conspiracy
50. V. X. Reorganization of the Coalition In Africa
51. IV. IV. Reorganization of Numidia
52. The inscriptions of the region referred to preserve numerous traces of this colonization. The name of the Sittii is there unusually frequent; the African township Milev bears as Roman the name -colonia Sarnensis-(C. I. L. viii. p. 1094) evidently from the Nucerian river-god Sarnus (Sueton. Rhet. 4).
1. V. X. Insurrection in Alexandria
2. The affair with Laberius, told in the well-known prologue, has been quoted as an instance of Caesar’s tyrannical caprices, but those who have done so have thoroughly misunderstood the irony of the situation as well as of the poet; to say nothing of the -naivete- of lamenting as a martyr the poet who readily pockets his honorarium.
3. The triumph after the battle of Munda subsequently to be mentioned probably had reference only to the Lusitanians who served in great numbers in the conquered army.
4. Any one who desires to compare the old and new hardships of authors will find opportunity of doing so in the letter of Caecina (Cicero, Aa. Fam. vi. 7).
5. V. Vi. Second Coalition of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar
6. When this was written—in the year 1857—no one could foresee how soon the mightiest struggle and most glorious victory as yet recorded in human annals would save the United States from this fearful trial, and secure the future existence of an absolute self-governing freedom not to be permanently kept in check by any local Caesarism.
7. V. IX. Preparation for Attacks on Caesar
8. On the 26th January 710 Caesar is still called dictator IIII (triumphal table); on the 18th February of this year he was already -dictator perpetuus- (Cicero, Philip, ii. 34, 87). Comp. Staatsrecht, ii. 3 716.
9. IV. X. Executions
10. The formulation of that dictatorship appears to have expressly brought into prominence among other things the “improvement of morals”; but Caesar did not hold on his own part an office of this sort (Staatsrecht, ii. 3 705).
11. Caesar bears the designation of -imperator- always without any number indicative of iteration, and always in the first place after his name (Staatsrecht, ii. 3 767, note 1).
12. V. V. Rehabilitation of Saturninus and Marius
13. During the republican period the name Imperator, which denotes the victorious general, was laid aside with the end of the campaign; as a permanent title it first appears in the case of Caesar.
14. That in Caesar’s lifetime the -imperium- as well as the supreme pontificate was rendered by a formal legislative act hereditary for his agnate descendants—of his own body or through the medium of adoption—was asserted by Caesar the Younger as his legal title to rule. As our traditional accounts stand, the existence of such a law or resolution of the senate must be decidedly called in question; but doubtless it remains possible that Caesar intended the issue of such a decree. (Comp, Staatsrecht, ii. 3 787, 1106.)
15. The widely-spread opinion, which sees in the imperial office of Imperator nothing but the dignity of general of the empire tenable for life, is not warranted either by the signification of the word or by the view taken by the old authorities. -Imperium-is the power of command, -Imperator- is the possessor of that power; in these words as in the corresponding Greek terms —kratos—, —autokrator— so little is there implied a specific military reference, that it is on the contrary the very characteristic of the Roman official power, where it appears purely and completely, to embrace in it war and process—that is, the military and the civil power of command—as one inseparable whole. Dio says quite correctly (liii. 17; comp, xliii. 44; lii. 41) that the name Imperator was assumed by the emperors “to indicate their full power instead of the title of king and dictator (—pros deilosin teis autotelous sphon exousias, anti teis basileos tou te diktatoros epikleiseos—); for these other older titles disappeared in name, but in reality the title of Imperator gives the same prerogatives (—to de dei ergon auton tei tou autokratoros proseigoria bebaiountai—), for instance the right of levying soldiers, imposing taxes, declaring war and concluding peace, exercising the supreme authority over burgess and non-burgess in and out of the city and punishing any one at any place capitally or otherwise, and in general of assuming the prerogatives connected in the earliest times with the supreme imperium.” It could not well be said in plainer terms, that Imperator is nothing at all but a synonym for rex, just as imperare coincides with regere.
16. When Augustus in constituting the principate resumed the Caesarian imperium, this was done with the restriction that it should be limited as to space and in a certain sense also as to time; the proconsular power of the emperors, which was nothing but just this imperium, was not to come into application as regards Rome and Italy (Staatsrecht, ii. 8 854). On this element rests the essential distinction between the Caesarian imperium and the Augustan principate, just as on the other hand the real equality of the two institutions rests on the imperfection with which even in principle and still more in practice that limit was realized.
17. II. I. Collegiate Arrangements
18. On this question there may be difference of opinion, whereas the hypothesis that it was Caesar’s intention to rule the Romans as Imperator, the non-Romans as Rex, must be simply dismissed. It is based solely on the story that in the sitting of the senate in which Caesar was assassinated a Sibylline utterance was brought forward by one of the priests in charge of the oracles, Lucius Cotta, to the effect that the Parthians could only be vanquished by a “king,” and in consequence of this the resolution was adopted to commit to Caesar regal power over the Roman provinces. This story was certainly in circulation immediately
19. II. III. Union of the Plebeians
20. II. I. The New Community
21. IV. X. Abolition of the Censorial Supervision of the Senate
22. According to the probable calculation formerly assumed (iv. 113), this would yield an average aggregate number of from 1000 to 1200 senators.
23. This certainly had reference merely to the elections for the years 711 and 712 (Staatsrecht, ii. a 730); but the arrangement was doubtless meant to become permanent.
24. I. V. The Senate as State-Council, ii. I. Senate
25. V. X. Pacification of Alexandria
26. V. VIII. Changes in the Arrangement of Magistracies and the Jury-System
27. I. V. The King
28. Hence accordingly the cautious turns of expression on the mention of these magistracies in Caesar’s laws; -cum censor aliusve quis magistratus Romae populi censum aget (L. Jul. mun. l. 144); praetor isve quei Romae iure deicundo praerit (L. Rubr. often); quaestor urbanus queive aerario praerit- (L. Jul. mun. l. 37 et al.).
29. V. III. New Arrangement as to Jurymen
30. V. VIII. And in the Courts
31. -Plura enim multo-, says Cicero in his treatise De Oratore (ii. 42, 178), primarily with reference to criminal trials, -homines iudicant odio aut amore aut cupiditate aut iracundia aut dolore aut laetitia aut spe aut timore aut errore aut aliqua permotione mentis, quam veritate aut praescripto aut iuris norma aliqua aut iudicii formula aut legibus-. On this accordingly are founded the further instructions which he gives for advocates entering, on their profession.
32. V. VIII. And in the Courts
33. V. VII. Macedonia ff.
34. V. VII. The Gallic Plan of War
35. V. III. Overthrow of the Senatorial Rule, and New Power of Pompeius
36. With the nomination of a part of the military tribunes by the burgesses (iii. XI. Election of Officers in the Comitia) Caesar— in this also a democrat—did not meddle.
37. V. VII. The New Dacian Kingdom
38. IV. Vi. Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform
39. IV. Vi. Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform
40. V. V. Total Defeat of the Democratic Party
41. Varro attests the discontinuance of the Sicilian -decumae-in a treatise published after Cicero’s death (De R. R. 2 praef.) where he names—as the corn—provinces whence Rome derives her subsistence—only Africa and Sardinia, no longer Sicily. The -Latinitas-, which Sicily obtained, must thus doubtless have included this immunity (comp. Staatsrecht, iii. 684).
42. V. X. Field of Caesar’s Power
43. III. XI. Italian Subjects
44. V. VIII. Clodius
45. III. XIII. Increase of Amusements
46. In Sicily, the country of production, the -modius- was sold within a few years at two and at twenty sesterces; from this we may guess what must have been the fluctuations of price in Rome, which subsisted on transmarine corn and was the seat of speculators.
47. IV. XII. The Finances and Public Buildings
48. It is a fact not without interest that a political writer of later date but much judgment, the author of the letters addressed in the name of Sallust to Caesar, advises the latter to transfer the corn-distribution of the capital to the several -municipia-. There is good sense in the admonition; as indeed similar ideas obviously prevailed in the noble municipal provision for orphans under Trajan.
49. V. XI. The State-Hierarchy
50. III. XII. The Management of the Land and Its Capital
51. The following exposition in Cicero’s treatise De officiis (i. 42) is characteristic: -Iam de artificiis et quaestibus, qui liberales habendi, qui sordidi sint, kaec fere accepimus. Primum improbantur ii quaestus, qui in odia hominum incurrunt, ut portitorum, ut feneratorum. Illiberales autem et sordidi quaestus mercenariorum omnium, quorum operae, nonaries emuntur. Est autem in illis ipsa merces auctoramentum servitutis. Sordidi etiam putandi, qui mercantur a mercatoribus quod statim vendant, nihil enim proficiant, nisi admodum mentiantur. Nec vero est quidquam turpius vanitate. Opificesque omnes in sordida arte versantur; nec enim quidquam ingenuum habere potest officina. Minimeque artes eae probandae, quae ministrae sunt voluptatum,
“Cetarii, lanii, coqui, fartores, piscatores,”
ut ait Terentius. Adde huc, si placet, unguentarios, saltatores, totumque ludum talarium. Quibus autem artibus aut prudentia maior inest, aut non mediocris utilitas quaeritur, ut medicina, ut architectura, ut doctrina rerum honestarum, eae sunt iis, quorum ordini conveniunt, honestae. Mercatura autem, si tenuis est, sordida putanda est; sin magna et copiosa, multa undique apportans, multaque sine vanitate impertiens, non est admodum vituperanda; atque etiam, si satiata
52. IV. IV. Administration under the Restoration
53. We have still (Macrobius, Hi, 13) the bill of fare of the banquet which Mucius Lentulus Niger gave before 691 on entering on his pontificate, and of which the pontifices—Caesar included—the Vestal Virgins, and some other priests and ladies nearly related to them partook. Before the dinner proper came sea-hedgehogs; fresh oysters as many as the guests wished; large mussels; sphondyli; fieldfares with asparagus; fattened fowls; oyster and mussel pasties; black and white sea-acorns; sphondyli again; glycimarides; sea-nettles; becaficoes; roe-ribs; boar’s-ribs; fowls dressed with flour; becaficoes; purple shell-fish of two sorts. The dinner itself consisted of sow’s udder; boar’s-head; fish-pasties; boar-pasties; ducks; boiled teals; hares; roasted fowls; starch-pastry; Pontic pastry.
These are the college-banquets regarding which Varro (De R. R. iii. 2, 16) says that they forced up the prices of all delicacies. Varro in one of his satires enumerates the following as the most notable foreign delicacies: peacocks from Samos; grouse from Phrygia; cranes from Melos; kids from Ambracia; tunny fishes from Chalcedon; muraenas from the Straits of Gades; bleak-fishes (? -aselli-) from Pessinus; oysters and scallops from Tarentum; sturgeons (?) from Rhodes; -scarus—fishes (?) from Cilicia; nuts from Thasos; dates from Egypt; acorns from Spain.
54. IV. VII. Economic Crisis, iv. IX. Death of Cinna
55. III. X. Greek National Party
56. IV. XI. Capitalist Oligarchy
57. III. XIII. Luxury
58. IV. XII. Practical Use Made of Religion
59. III. XIII. Cato’s Family Life, iv. 186 f.
60. IV. I. Achaean War
61. IV. XII. Mixture of Peoples
62. V. Vi. Caesar’s Agrarian Law
63. V. XI. Dolabella
64. This is not stated by our authorities, but it necessarily follows from the permission to deduct the interest paid by cash or assignation (-si quid usurae nomine numeratum aut perscriptum fuisset-; Sueton. Caes. 42), as paid contrary to law, from the capital.
65. II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes
66. V. V. Preparations of the Anarchists in Etruria
67. IV. VII. Economic Crisis
68. The Egyptian royal laws (Diodorus, i. 79) and likewise the legislation of Solon (Plutarch, Sol. 13, 15) forbade bonds in which the loss of the personal liberty of the debtor was made the penalty of non-payment; and at least the latter imposed on the debtor in the event of bankruptcy no more than the cession of his whole assets.
69. I. XI. Manumission
70. II. III. Continued Distress
71. At least the latter rule occurs in the old Egyptian royal laws (Diodorus, i. 79). On the other hand the Solonian legislation knows no restrictions on interest, but on the contrary expressly allows interest to be fixed of any amount at pleasure.
72. V. Vi. Caesar’s Agrarian Law
73. V. Vi. Caesar’s Agrarian Law
74. IV. II. Tribunate of Gracchus, iv. II. The Domain Question Viewed in Itself, iv. IV. The Domain Question under the Restoration
75. IV. XII. Carneades at Rome, V. III. Continued Subsistence of the Sullan Constitution
76. IV. X. The Roman Municipal System
77. Of both laws considerable fragments still exist.
78. V. XI. Diminution of the Proletariate
79. V. VII. Gaul Subdued
80. As according to Caesar’s ordinance annually sixteen propraetors and two proconsuls divided the governorships among them, and the latter remained two years in office (p. 344), we might conclude that he intended to bring the number of provinces in all up to twenty. Certainty is, however, the less attainable as to this, seeing that Caesar perhaps designedly instituted fewer offices than candidatures.
81. This is the so-called “free embassy” (-libera legatio-), namely an embassy without any proper public commission entrusted to it.
82. V. II. Piracy
83. V. XI. In The Administration of the Capital
84. V. XI. Foreign Mercenaries
85. V. IX. In the Governorships
86. V. XI. Financial Reforms of Caesar
87. V. I. Organizations of Sertorius
88. V. XI. Robberies and Damage by War
89. V. XI. The Roman Capitalists in the Provinces
90. V. I. Transpadanes, V. VIII. Settlement of the New Monarchial Rule
91. Narbo was called the colony of the Decimani, Baeterrae of the Septimani, Forum Julii of the Octavani, Arelate of the Sextani, Arausio of the Secundani. The ninth legion is wanting, because it had disgraced its number by the mutiny of Placentia (p. 246). That the colonists of these colonies belonged to the legions from which they took their names, is not stated and is not credible; the veterans themselves were, at least the great majority of them, settled in Italy (p. 358). Cicero’s complaint, that Caesar “had confiscated whole provinces and districts at a blow” (De Off. ii. 7, 27; comp. Philipp. xiii. 15, 31, 32) relates beyond doubt, as its close connection with the censure of the triumph over the Massiliots proves, to the confiscations of land made on account of these colonies in the Narbonese province and primarily to the losses of territory imposed on Massilia.
92. IV. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts
93. V. XI. Other Magistracies and Attributions
94. We are not expressly informed from whom the Latin rights of the non-colonized townships of this region and especially of Nemausus proceeded. But as Caesar himself (B. C. i. 35) virtually states that Nemausus up to 705 was a Massiliot village; as according to Livy’s account (Dio, xli. 25; Flor. ii. 13; Oros. vi. 15) this very portion of territory was taken from the Massiliots by Caesar; and lastly as even on pre-Augustan coins and then in Strabo the town appears as a community of Latin rights, Caesar alone can have been the author of this bestowal of Latinity. As to Ruscino (Roussillon near Perpignan) and other communities in Narbonese Gaul which early attained a Latin urban constitution, we can only conjecture that they received it contemporarily with Nemausus.
95. V. VII. Indulgence toward Existing Arrangements
96. II. V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League
97. V. X. The Leaders of the Republicans Put to Death
98. That no community of full burgesses had more than limited jurisdiction, is certain. But the fact, which is distinctly apparent from the Caesarian municipal ordinance for Cisalpine Gaul, is a surprising one—that the processes lying beyond municipal competency from this province went not before its governor, but before the Roman praetor; for in other cases the governor is in his province quite as much representative of the praetor who administers justice between burgesses as of the praetor who administers justice between burgess and non-burgess, and is thoroughly competent to determine all processes. Beyond doubt this is a remnant of the arrangement before Sulla, under which in the whole continental territory as far as the Alps the urban magistrates alone were competent, and thus all the processes there, where they exceeded municipal competency, necessarily came before the praetors in Rome. In Narbo again, Gades, Carthage, Corinth, the processes in such a case went certainly to the governor concerned; as indeed even from practical considerations the carrying of a suit to Rome could not well be thought of.
99. It is difficult to see why the bestowal of the Roman franchise on a province collectively, and the continuance of a provincial administration for it, should be usually conceived as contrasts excluding each other. Besides, Cisalpine Gaul notoriously obtained the -civitas- by the Roscian decree of the people of the 11th March 705, while it remained a province as long as Caesar lived and was only united with Italy after his death (Dio, xlviii. 12); the governors also can be pointed out down to 711. The very fact that the Caesarian municipal ordinance never designates the country as Italy, but as Cisalpine Gaul, ought to have led to the right view.
100. IV. II. The First Sicilian Slave War
101. The continued subsistence of the municipal census-authorities speaks for the view, that the local holding of the census had already been established for Italy in consequence of the Social war (Staatsrecht, ii. 8 368); but probably the carrying out of this system was Caesar’s work.
102. II. VII. Intermediate Fuctionaries, iii. III. Autonomy
103. III. XI. Supervision of the Senate Over the Provinces and Their Governors
104. I. XI. Character of the Roman Law
105. IV. XIII. Philology
106. I. XI. Clients and Foreigners
107. V. XI. Usury Laws
108. V. V. Transpadanes
109. I. XIV. Italian Measures ff.
110. III. XII. Coins and Moneys
111. Weights recently brought to light at Pompeii suggest the hypothesis that at the commencement of the imperial period alongside of the Roman pound the Attic mina (presumably in the ratio of 3: 4) passed current as a second imperial weight (Hermes, xvi. 311).
112. The gold pieces, which Sulla (iv. 179) and contemporarily Pompeius caused to be struck, both in small quantity, do not invalidate this proposition; for they probably came to be taken solely by weight just like the golden Phillippei which were in circulation even down to Caesar’s time. They are certainly remarkable, because they anticipate the Caesarian imperial gold just as Sulla’s regency anticipated the new monarchy.
113. IV. XI. Token-Money
114. It appears, namely, that in earlier times the claims of the state-creditors payable in silver could not be paid against their will in gold according to its legal ratio to silver; whereas it admits of no doubt, that from Caesar’s time the gold piece had to be taken as a valid tender for 100 silver sesterces. This was just at that time the more important, as in consequence of the great quantities of gold put into circulation by Caesar it stood for a time in the currency of trade 25 per cent below the legal ratio.
115. There is probably no inscription of the Imperial period, which specifies sums of money otherwise than in Roman coin.
116. Thus the Attic -drachma-, although sensibly heavier than the -denarius-, was yet reckoned equal to it; the -tetradrachmon- of Antioch, weighing on an average 15 grammes of silver, was made equal to 3 Roman -denarii-, which only weigh about 12 grammes; the -cistophorus- of Asia Minor was according to the value of silver above 3, according to the legal tariff =2 1/2 -denarii-; the Rhodian half -drachma- according to the value of silver=3/4, according to the legal tariff = 5/8 of a -denarius-, and so on.
117. III. III. Illyrian Piracy
118. The identity of this edict drawn up perhaps by Marcus Flavius (Macrob. Sat. i. 14, 2) and the alleged treatise of Caesar, De Stellis, is shown by the joke of Cicero (Plutarch, Caes. 59) that now the Lyre rises according to edict.
We may add that it was known even before Caesar that the solar year of 365 days 6 hours, which was the basis of the Egyptian calendar, and which he made the basis of his, was somewhat too long. the most exact calculation of the tropical year which the ancient world was acquainted with, that of Hipparchus, put it at 365 d. 5 h. 52’ 12”; the true length is 365 d. 5 h. 48’ 48”.
119. Caesar stayed in Rome in April and Dec. 705, on each occasion for a few days; from Sept. to Dec. 707; some four months in the autumn of the year of fifteen months 708, and from Oct. 709 to March 710.
1. V. VIII. Clodius
2. III. XIV. Cato’s Encyclopedia
3. These form, as is well known, the so-called seven liberal arts, which, with this distinction between the three branches of discipline earlier naturalized in Italy and the four subsequently received, maintained their position throughout the middle ages.
4. IV. XII. Latin Instruction
5. Thus Varro (De R. R. i. 2) says: -ab aeditimo, ut dicere didicimus a patribus nostris; ut corrigimur ab recenlibus urbanis, ab aedituo-.
6. The dedication of the poetical description of the earth which passes under the name of Scymnus is remarkable in reference to those relations. After the poet has declared his purpose of preparing in the favourite Menandrian measure a sketch of geography intelligible for scholars and easy to be learned by heart, he dedicates—as Apollodorus dedicated his similar historical compendium to Attalus Philadelphus king of Pergamus
—athanaton aponemonta
dexan Attalo
teis pragmateias epigraphein eileiphoti—
—
his manual to Nicomedes iii king (663?-679) of Bithynia:
—ego d’ akouon, dioti ton non basileon monos basilikein chreistoteita prosphereis peiran epethumeis autos ep’ emautou labein kai paragenesthai kai ti basileus est’ idein, dio tei prothesei sumboulon exelexamein ... ton Apollena ton Didumei... ou dei schedon malista kai pepeismenos pros sein kata logon eika (koinein gar schedon tois philomathousin anadedeichas) estian—.
7. IV. XIII. Historical Composition
8. V. XII. Greek Instruction
9. Cicero testifies that the mime in his time had taken the place of the Atellana (Ad Fam. ix. 16); with this accords the fact, that the -mimi- and -mimae- first appear about the Sullan epoch (Ad Her. i. 14, 24; ii. 13, 19; Atta Fr. 1 Ribbeck; Plin. H. N. vii. 43, 158; Plutarch, Sull. 2, 36). The designation -mimus-, however, is sometimes inaccurately applied to the comedian generally. Thus the -mimus- who appeared at the festival of Apollo in 542-543 (Festus under -salva res est-; comp. Cicero, De Orat. ii. 59, 242) was evidently nothing but an actor of the -palliata-, for there was at this period no room in the development of the Roman theatre for real mimes in the later sense.
With the mimus of the classical Greek period—prose dialogues, in which -genre- pictures, particularly of a rural kind, were presented—the Roman mimus had no especial relation.
10. With the possession of this sum, which constituted the qualification for the first voting-class and subjected the inheritance to the Voconian law, the boundary line was crossed which separated the men of slender means (-tenuiores-) from respectable people. Therefore the poor client of Catullus (xxiii. 26) beseeches the gods to help him to this fortune.
11. In the “Descensus ad Inferos” of Laberius all sorts of people come forward, who have seen wonders and signs; to one there appeared a husband with two wives, whereupon a neighbour is of opinion that this is still worse than the vision, recently seen by a soothsayer in a dream, of six aediles. Caesar forsooth desired— according to the talk of the time—to introduce polygamy in Rome (Suetonius, Caes. 82) and he nominated in reality six aediles instead of four. One sees from this that aberius understood how to exercise the fool’s privilege and Caesar how to permit the fool’s freedom.
12. V. VIII. Attempts of the Regents to Check It
13. V. XI. The Poor
14. IV. XIII. Dramatic Arrangements
15. He obtained from the state for every day on which he acted 1000 -denarii- (40 pounds) and besides this the pay for his company. In later years he declined the honorarium for himself.
16. Such an individual apparent exception as Panchaea the land of incense (ii. 417) is to be explained from the circumstance that this had passed from the romance of the Travels of Euhemerus already perhaps into the poetry of Ennius, at any rate into the poems of Lucius Manlius (iv. 242; Plin. H. N. x. a, 4) and thence was well known to the public for which Lucretius wrote.
17. III. XIV. Moral Effect of Tragedy
18. This naively appears in the descriptions of war, in which the seastorms that destroy armies, and the hosts of elephants that trample down those who are on their own side—pictures, that is, from the Punic wars—appear as if they belong to the immediate present. Comp. ii. 41; v. 1226, 1303, 1339.
19. “No doubt,” says Cicero (Tusc. iii. 19, 45) in reference to Ennius, “the glorious poet is despised by our reciters of Euphorion.” “I have safely arrived,” he writes to Atticus (vii. 2 init.), “as a most favourable north wind blew for us across from Epirus. This spondaic line you may, if you choose, sell to one of the new-fashioned poets as your own” (-ita belle nobis flavit ab Epiro lenissumus Onchesmites. Hunc- —spondeiazonta— -si cui voles —ton neoteron— pro tuo vendito-).
20. V. VIII. Literature of the Opposition
21. “For me when a boy,” he somewhere says, “there sufficed a single rough coat and a single under-garment, shoes without stockings, a horse without a saddle; I had no daily warm bath, and but seldom a river-bath.” On account of his personal valour he obtained in the Piratic war, where he commanded a division of the fleet, the naval crown.
22. V. X. The Pompeians in Spain
23. There is hardly anything more childish than Varro’s scheme of all the philosophies, which in the first place summarily declares all systems that do not propose the happiness of man as their ultimate aim to be nonexistent, and then reckons the number of philosophies conceivable under this supposition as two hundred and eighty-eight. The vigorous man was unfortunately too much a scholar to confess that he neither could nor would be a philosopher, and accordingly as such throughout life he performed a blind dance-not altogether becoming—between the Stoa, Pythagoreanism, and Diogenism.
24. On one occasion he writes, “-Quintiforis Clodii foria ac poemata ejus gargaridians dices; O fortuna, O fors fortuna-!” And elsewhere, “-Cum Quintipor Clodius tot comoedias sine ulla fecerit Musa, ego unum libellum non ‘edolem’ ut ait Ennius?-” This not otherwise known Clodius must have been in all probability a wretched imitator of Terence, as those words sarcastically laid at his door “O fortuna, O fors fortuna!” are found occurring in a Terentian comedy.
The following description of himself by a poet in
Varro’s
—Onos Louras—,
-Pacuvi discipulus dicor, porro
is fuit Enni,
Ennius Musarum; Pompilius clueor-
might aptly parody the introduction of Lucretius (p. 474), to whom Varro as a declared enemy of the Epicurean system cannot have been well disposed, and whom he never quotes.
25. He himself once aptly says, that he had no special fondness for antiquated words, but frequently used them, and that he was very fond of poetical words, but did not use them.
26. The following description is taken from the -Marcipor-("Slave of Marcus"):—
-Repente noctis circiter meridie Cum pictus aer fervidis late ignibus Caeli chorean astricen ostenderet, Nubes aquali, frigido velo leves Caeli cavernas aureas subduxerant, Aquam vomentes inferam mortalibus. Ventique frigido se ab axe eruperant, Phrenetici septentrionum filii, Secum ferentes tegulas, ramos, syrus. At nos caduci, naufragi, ut ciconiae Quarum bipennis fulminis plumas vapor Perussit, alte maesti in terram cecidimus-.
In the —’Anthropopolis— we find the lines:
-Non fit thesauris, non auro pectu’
solutum;
Non demunt animis curas ac relligiones
Persarum montes, non atria diviti’
Crassi-.
But the poet was successful also in a lighter vein. In the -Est Modus Matulae- there stood the following elegant commendation of wine:—
-Vino nihil iucundius quisquam bibit. Hoc aegritudinem ad medendam invenerunt, Hoc hilaritatis dulce seminarium. Hoc continet coagulum convivia-.
And in the —Kosmotonounei— the wanderer returning home thus concludes his address to the sailors:
-Delis habenas animae leni,
Dum nos ventus flamine sudo
Suavem ad patriam perducit-.
27. The sketches of Varro have so uncommon historical and even poetical significance, and are yet, in consequence of the fragmentary shape in which information regarding them has reached us, known to so few and so irksome to study, that we may be allowed to give in this place a resume of some of them with the few restorations indispensable for making them readable.
The satire Manius (Early Up!) describes the management of a rural household. “Manius summons his people to rise with the sun, and in person conducts them to the scene of their work. The youths make their own bed, which labour renders soft to them, and supply themselves with water-jar and lamp. Their drink is the clear fresh spring, their fare bread, and onions as relish. Everything prospers in house and field. The house is no work of art; but an architect might learn symmetry from it. Care is taken of the field, that it shall not be left disorderly and waste, or go to ruin through slovenliness and neglect; in return the grateful Ceres wards off damage from the produce, that the high-piled sheaves may gladden the heart of the husbandman. Here hospitality still holds good; every one who has but imbibed mother’s milk is welcome. the bread-pantry and wine-vat and the store of sausages on the rafters, lock and key are at the service of the traveller, and piles of food are set before him; contented sits the sated guest, looking neither before nor behind, dozing by the hearth in the kitchen. the warmest double-wool sheepskin is spread as a couch for him.
“Here people still as good burgesses obey the righteous law, which neither out of envy injures the innocent, nor out of favour pardons the guilty. Here they speak no evil against their neighbours. Here they trespass not with their feet on the sacred hearth, but honour the gods with devotion and with sacrifices, throw for the house-spirit his little bit of flesh into his appointed little dish, and when the master of the household dies, accompany the bier with the same prayer with which those of his father and of his grandfather were borne forth.”
In another satire there appears a “Teacher of the Old” (—Gerontodidaskalos—), of whom the degenerate age seems to stand more urgently in need than of the teacher of youth, and he explains how “once everything in Rome was chaste and pious,” and now all things are so entirely changed. “Do my eyes deceive me, or do I see slaves in arms against their masters?—Formerly every one who did not present himself for the levy, was sold on the part of the state into slavery abroad; now the censor who allows cowardice and everything to pass is called [by the aristocracy, iii. XI. Separation Of the Orders in the Theatre; iv. X. Shelving of the Censorship, V. III. Renewal of the Censorship; V. VIII. Humiliations of the Republicans] a great citizen, and earns praise because he does not seek to make himself a name by annoying his fellow-citizens.— Formerly
“‘-Ter sub armis malim vitam cernere Quam semel modo parere—.—’
“Formerly the wife was quite content, when the husband once or twice in the year gave her a trip to the country in the uncushioned waggon;” now, he could add (comp. Cicero, Pro Mil. 21, 55), “the wife sulks if her husband goes to his country estate without her, and the travelling lady is attended to the villa by the fashionable host of Greek menials and the choir.” —In a treatise of a graver kind, “Catus or the Training of Children,” Varro not only instructs the friend who had asked him for advice on that point, regarding the gods who were according to old usage to be sacrificed to for the children’s welfare, but, referring to the more judicious mode of rearing children among the Persians and to his own strictly spent youth, he warns against over-feeding and over-sleeping, against sweet bread and fine fare—the whelps, the old man thinks, are now fed more judiciously than the children—and likewise against the enchantresses’ charms and blessings, which in cases of sickness so often take the place of the physician’s counsel. He advises to keep the girls at embroidery, that they may afterwards understand how to judge properly of embroidered and textile work, and not to allow them to put off the child’s dress too early; he warns against carrying boys to the gladiatorial games, in which the heart is early hardened and cruelty learned.—In the “Man of Sixty Years” Varro appears as a Roman Epimenides who had fallen asleep when a boy of ten and waked up again after half a century. He is astonished to find instead of his smooth-shorn boy’s head an old bald pate with an ugly snout and savage bristles like a hedgehog; but he is still more astonished at the change in Rome. Lucrine oysters, formerly a wedding dish, are now everyday fare; for which, accordingly, the bankrupt glutton silently prepares the incendiary torch. While formerly the father disposed of his boy, now the disposal is transferred to the latter: he disposes, forsooth, of his father by poison.
28. “The innocent,” so ran a speech, “thou draggest forth, trembling in every limb, and on the high margin of the river’s bank in the dawn of the morning” [thou causest them to be slaughtered]. Several such phrases, that might be inserted without difficulty in a commonplace novel, occur.
29. V. XII. Poems in Prose
30. V. XII. Catullus
31. V. XII. Greek Literati in Rome
32. That the treatise on the Gallic war was published all at once, has been long conjectured; the distinct proof that it was so, is furnished by the mention of the equalization of the Boii and the Haedui already in the first book (c. 28) whereas the Boii still occur in the seventh (c. 10) as tributary subjects of the Haedui, and evidently only obtained equal rights with their former masters on account of their conduct and that of the Haedui in the war against Vercingetorix. On the other hand any one who attentively follows the history of the time will find in the expression as to the Milonian crisis (vii. 6) a proof that the treatise was published before the outbreak of the civil war; not because Pompeius is there praised, but because Caesar there approves the exceptional laws of 702.(p. 146) This he might and could not but do, so long as he sought to bring about a peaceful accommodation with Pompeius,( p. 175) but not after the rupture, when he reversed the condemnations that took place on the basis of those laws injurious for him.(p. 316) Accordingly the publication of this treatise has been quite rightly placed in 703.
The tendency of the work we discern most distinctly in the constant, often—most decidedly, doubtless, in the case of the Aquitanian expedition (iii. XI. The Censorship A Prop of the Nobility)— not successful, justification of every single act of war as a defensive measure which the state of things had rendered inevitable. That the adversaries of Caesar censured his attacks on the Celts and Germans above all as unprovoked, is well known (Sueton. Caes. 24).
33. V. XI. Amnesty
34. V. XII. The New Roman Poetry
35. V. XI. Caelius and Milo
36. V. IX. Curio, V. X. Death of Curio
37. IV. XIII. Sciences
38. A remarkable example is the general exposition regarding cattle in the treatise on Husbandry (ii. 1) with the nine times nine subdivisions of the doctrine of cattle-rearing, with the “incredible but true” fact that the mares at Olisipo (Lisbon) become pregnant by the wind, and generally with its singular mixture of philosophical, historical, and agricultural notices.
39. Thus Varro derives -facere- from -facies-, because he who makes anything gives to it an appearance, -volpes-, the fox, after Stilo from -volare pedibus- as the flying-footed; Gaius Trebatius, a philosophical jurist of this age, derives -sacellum- from -sacra cella-, Figulus -frater- from -fere alter- and so forth. This practice, which appears not merely in isolated instances but as a main element of the philological literature of this age, presents a very great resemblance to the mode in which till recently comparative philology was prosecuted, before insight into the organism of language put a stop to the occupation of the empirics.
40. V. XII. Grammatical Science
41. V. XI. Sciences of General Culture at This Period
42. V. XI. Reform of the Calendar
43. V. XII. Dramatic Spectacles
44. Such “Greek entertainments” were very frequent not merely in the Greek cities of Italy, especially in Naples (Cic. pro Arch. 5, 10; Plut. Brut. 21), but even now also in Rome (iv. 192; Cic. Ad Fam. vii. 1, 3; Ad Att. xvi. 5, 1; Sueton. Caes. 39; Plut. Brut. 21). When the well-known epitaph of Licinia Eucharis fourteen years of age, which probably belongs to the end of this period, makes this “girl well instructed and taught in all arts by the Muses themselves” shine as a dancer in the private exhibitions of noble houses and appear first in public on the Greek stage (-modo nobilium ludos decoravi choro, et Graeca in scaena prima populo apparui-), this doubtless can only mean that she was the first girl that appeared on the public Greek stage in Rome; as generally indeed it was not till this epoch that women began to come forward publicly in Rome (p. 469).
These “Greek entertainments” in Rome seem not to have been properly scenic, but rather to have belonged to the category of composite exhibitions—primarily musical and declamatory—such as were not of rare occurrence in subsequent times also in Greece (Welcker, Griech. Trag., p. 1277). This view is supported by the prominence of flute-playing in Polybius (xxx. 13) and of dancing in the account of Suetonius regarding the armed dances from Asia Minor performed at Caesar’s games and in the epitaph of Eucharis; the description also of the -citharoedus- (Ad Her. iv. 47, 60; comp. Vitruv. v. 5, 7) must have been derived from such “Greek entertainments.” The combinations of these representations in Rome with Greek athletic combats is significant (Polyb.
45. V. XI. Sciences of General Culture at This Period
* * * * *
TABLE OF CALENDAR EQUIVALENTS
A.U.C.* B.C. B.C. A.U.C. ------------------------------------------------------ 000 753 753 000 025 728 750 003 050 703 725 028 075 678 700 053 100 653 675 078 125 628 650 103 150 603 625 128 175 578 600 153 200 553 575 178 225 528 550 203 250 503 525 228 275 478 500 253 300 453 475 278 325 428 450 303 350 303 425 328 375 378 400 353 400 353 375 378 425 328 350 403 450 303 325 428 475 278 300 453 500 253 275 478 525 228 250 503 550 203 225 528 575 178 200 553 600 153 175 578 625 128 150 603 650 103 125 628 675 078 100 653 700 053 075 678 725 028 050 703 750 003 025 728 753 000 000 753
A. U. C. — Ab Urbe Condita (from the founding of the City of Rome)
***End of the project gutenberg EBOOK the history of Rome (volumes 1-5)***
******* This file should be named 10706.txt or 10706.zip *******
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/0/7/0/10706
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the project gutenberg-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically anything with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
*** Start: Full license ***
The full project gutenberg license
please read this before you
distribute or use this work
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.net/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation” or pglaf), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.net), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits
you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm
works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate
your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of
the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate
royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within
60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally
required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a
user who notifies
you in writing (or by
e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the
terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must
require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of
the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all
use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm
works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3,
a full refund of any
money paid for a work
or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered
and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement
for free
distribution of Project
Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. Limited warranty, disclaimer of damages — Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. You agree that you have no remedies for negligence, strict liability, breach of warranty or breach of contract except those provided in paragraph F3. You agree that the foundation, the trademark owner, and any distributor under this agreement will not be liable to you for actual, direct, indirect, consequential, punitive or incidental damages even if you give notice of the possibility of such damage.
1.F.3. Limited right of replacement or refund — If you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘as-is’, with no other warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of MERCHANTIBILITY or fitness for any purpose.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. Indemnity — You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.net/fundraising/pglaf.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s ein or federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S. Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, ut 84116, (801) 596-1887, email business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s web site and official page at http://www.gutenberg.net/about/contact
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and
Director
gbnewby@pglaf.org
Section 4. Information about Donations to the
Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To send donations or determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.net/fundraising/donate
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways including including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To donate, please visit: http://www.gutenberg.net/fundraising/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
http://www.gutenberg.net
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.