No More Learning

" 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 did affect them at length. The govern ment became unsteady and vacillating; they allowed the reins which they had just grasped to slacken and almost to
slip from their hands. The guardian-regent of Syria was murdered at Laodicea ; the rejected pretender Demetrius escaped from Rome and, setting aside the youthful prince, seized the government of his ancestral kingdom under the bold pretext that the Roman senate had fully empowered
him to do so (592). Soon afterwards war broke out between 162. the kings of Egypt and Cyrene respecting the possession of
the island of Cyprus, which the senate had assigned first to the elder, then to the younger; and in opposition to the most recent Roman decision it finally remained with Egypt Thus the Roman government, in the plenitude of its power and during the most profound inward and out ward peace at home, had its decrees derided by the impo tent kings of the east ; its name was misused, its ward and its commissioner were murdered. Seventy years before, when the Illyrians had in a similar way laid hands on Roman envoys, the senate of that day had erected a
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.
To the west of these began the kingdom of Asia, which, al though 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
Decline of the king dom of Asia.
284 THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES BOOK IV
monument to the victim in the market-place, and had with an army and fleet called the murderers to account The senate of this period likewise ordered a monument to be raised to Gnaeus Octavius, as ancestral custom prescribed ; but instead of embarking troops for Syria they recognized Demetrius as king of the land. They were forsooth now so powerful, that it seemed superfluous to guard their own honour. In like manner not only was Cyprus retained by Egypt in spite of the decree of the senate to the contrary,
146. but, when after the death of Philometor (608) Euergetes succeeded him and so reunited the divided kingdom, the senate allowed this also to take place without opposition.
chap, I THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES 385
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 north-east 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 (ii. 473). 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
Although it was true that his kingdom 175-184. 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
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.
One consequence of this policy was, that the inhabitants The Jew*
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 167. 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
(579-590).
throughout
The aapto,
386 THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES book iv
Egypt was at any rate for the interest of Rome, it made no difficulty in at once recognizing the freedom and autonomy 181. 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 by the heroic family of the Maccabees and the internal dissension in the Syrian empire did more for them than the letters of their powerful allies ; during the strife between the Syrian kings Trypho and Demetrius Nicator autonomy and exemption from tribute were formally accorded to the
142. Jews (612); and soon afterwards the head of the Macca- baean house, Simon son of Mattathias, was even formally acknowledged by the nation as well as by the Syrian great- king as high priest and prince of Israel (61s). 1
Of still more importance in the sequel than this insurrec- tion 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 Jeru salem, 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
1 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 th» insurgents in the time of Hadrian.
189.
CHAP. I THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES 287
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 250. 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 176-1M. 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, sup
ported 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, as was also the capital with its unruly and refractory populace resembling that of Rome or Alexandria. The
288 THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES book iv
whole pack of neighbouring kings — those
Armenia, Cappadocia, Pergamus —incessantly
the affairs of Syria and fostered disputes as to the succes sion, so that civil war and the division of the sovereignty dt
facto among two or more pretenders became almost standing calamities of the country. The Roman protecting power, if it did not instigate these neighbours, was an inactive
In addition to all this the new Parthian empire from the eastward pressed hard on the aliens not merely with its material power, but with the whole superiority of its national language and religion and of its national military and political organization. This is not yet the place for a description of this regenerated empire of Cyrus ; it is sufficient to mention generally the fact that powerful as was the influence of Hellenism in its composition, the Parthian state, as compared with that of the Seleucids, was based on a national and religious reaction, and that the old Iranian language, the order of the Magi and the worship of Mithra, the Oriental feudatory system, the cavalry of the desert and the bow and arrow, first emerged there in re newed and superior opposition to Hellenism. The position of the imperial kings in presence of all this was really
The family of the Seleucids was by no means so enervated as that of the Lagids for instance, and individuals among them were not deficient in valour and ability ; they reduced, it may be, one or another of those numerous rebels, pretenders, and intermeddlers to due bounds ; but their dominion was so lacking in a firm foundation, that they were unable to impose even a temporary check on anarchy. The result was inevitable. The eastern provinces of Syria under their unprotected or even insurgent satraps fell into subjection to the Parthians ; Persia, Babylonia, Media were for ever severed from the Syrian empire ; the new state of the Parthians reached on both sides of the great desert from the Oxus and the Hindoo Coosh to the Tigris and the
spectator.
of Egypt, interfered in
pitiable.
chap, I THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES 389
Arabian desert—once more, like the Persian empire and all the older great states of Asia, a pure continental monarchy, and once more, just like the Persian empire, engaged in perpetual feud on the one side with the peoples of Turan, on the other with the Occidentals. The Syrian state embraced at the most Mesopotamia in addition to the region of the coast, and disappeared, more in consequence of its internal disorganization than of its diminished size, for ever from the ranks of the great states. If the danger—which was repeatedly imminent —of a total subjugation of the land by the Parthians was averted, that result must be ascribed not to the resistance of the last Seleucids and still less to the influence of Rome, but rather to the manifold internal disturbances in the Parthian empire itself, and above all to the incursions of the peoples of the Turanian steppes into its eastern provinces.
This revolution in the relations of the peoples in the Reaction of interior of Asia is the turning-point in the history of anti- "V"**. quity. The tide of national movement, which had hitherto Wert, poured from the west to the east and had found in Alex
ander 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 Con stantinople. 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
vol. in
84
tfaAbm
ago THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES book iv
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.
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
Piracy.
\ /
salutary decision, and had in
supremacy in the east by a maritime police energetically handled for the general good 216), the complete nullity of this police at the very beginning of this period as distinctly betokens the fearfully rapid decline of the aristo- cratic government. Rome no longer possessed fleet of her own she was content to make requisitions for ships, when 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, in the Adriatic and Tyrrhene seas. The expeditions directed against the
particular
introduced their
it
;
I
"> (
\.
a
(ii.
chap. : THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES 391
Dalmatian and Ligurian coasts at this epoch aimed
especially at the suppression of piracy in the two Italian seas; for the same reason the Balearic islands were occupied in 631 233). But in the Mauretanian and 123. Greek waters the inhabitants along the coast and the mariners were left to settle matters with the corsairs in
one way or another, as they best could for Roman policy adhered to the principle of troubling itself as little as
about these more remote regions. The dis organized and bankrupt commonwealths in the states along the coast thus left to themselves naturally became places of refuge for the corsairs and there was no want of such, especially in Asia.
A bad pre-eminence in this respect belonged to Crete, Cret* 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 inde pendence. 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 fate had left liberty to the Cretans only in order to show what was the result of Hellenic independence. was dreadful picture. The old Doric rigour of the Cretan institutions had become, just as in Tarentum, changed into licentious democracy, and the chivalrous spirit of the inhabitants into
wild love of quarrelling and plunder; respectable Greek himself testifies, that in Crete alone nothing was accounted disgraceful that was lucrative, and even the Apostle Paul
'uotes with approval the saying of Cretan poet, Kpfjrtt del ifitOmu, mcuti Bripla, yaffrtpet ipycU.
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
possible
a
a
;
a
a
a
It
if
;
(p.
*9* THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES book iv
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
— expended its last energies in the wars which found itself compelled to wage against the Cretans for the suppression of piracy
160. (about 600), and which the Romans sought to mediate, but without earnestness and apparently without success.
CIHda. ,^p Along with Crete, Cilicia soon began to become 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
146-189. risen from slave to be king of Syria (608-615), encouraged by all means in his chief seat, the rugged or western
Cilicia, with view to strengthen his throne 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, which the very govern ments shared at least inaction. The evil was so serious
143. 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 fleet in these waters, and for this the Roman government lacked energy and persever ance. 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
;
;
; a
by
in
it
by
5)
it
a a
a
in
(ii.
5 1
chap, i THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES 293
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.
^| C
I '
We have followed the transformation of the outward General relations of Rome and the Romano-Hellenic world generally result- 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 con venience, caprice, collateral advantage, or accident led them
to do so; whereas the greater portion of the territory
under clientship either remained in the intolerable uncer
tainty 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 another, and merely transacting the current business as exigency required. They were stern masters towards the weak. When the
city of Mylasa in Caria sent to Publius Crassus, consul in 623, a beam for the construction of a battering-ram different 181. from what he had asked, the chief magistrate of the town
I
was scourged for it ; and Crassus was not a bad man, and a strictly upright magistrate. On the other hand sternness was wanting in those cases where it would have been in place, as in dealing with the barbarians on the frontiers and with the pirates. When the central
( '
provinces to confine itself to the part of a mere onlooker, the law of nations was directly trampled under foot by the Roman governors ; and the honour of Rome was perma nently dragged in the mire by a faithlessness and treachery without parallel, by the most wanton trifling with capitula tions and treaties, by massacring people who had submitted and instigating the assassination of the generals of the enemy. Nor was this all ; war was even waged and peace concluded against the expressed will of the
294 THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES book iv
government renounced all superintendence and all oversight of pro
vincial affairs, it entirely abandoned not only the interests of the subjects, but also those of the state, to the governor of the day. The events which occurred in Spain, unimpor tant in themselves, are instructive in this respect. In that
/ country, where the government was less able than in other
supreme authority in Rome, and unimportant incidents, such as the disobedience of the Numantines, were developed by a
rare combination of perversity and folly into a crisis of fatal
moment for the state. And all this took place without any / effort to visit it with even a serious penalty in Rome. Not only did the sympathies and rivalries of the different coteries in the senate contribute to decide the filling up of the most important places and the treatment of the most
momentous political questions; but even thus early the money of foreign dynasts found its way to the senators of Rome. Timarchus, the envoy of Antiochus Epiphanes
ISA. king of Syria (t 590), is mentioned as the first who attempted with success to bribe the Roman senate; the bestowal >f presents from foreign kings on influential senators on became so common, that surprise was excited
/
chap, I THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES 195
when Scipio Aemilianus cast into the military chest the gifts from the king of Syria which reached him in camp before Numantia. The ancient principle, that rule was its own sole reward and that such rule was as much a duty and a burden as a privilege and a benefit, was allowed to
fall wholly into abeyance. Thus there arose the new state- economy, which turned its eyes away from the taxation of the burgesses, but regarded the body of subjects, on the other hand, as a profitable possession of the community, which it partly worked out for the public benefit, partly handed over to be worked out by the burgesses. Not only was
free scope allowed with criminal indulgence to the un scrupulous greed of the Roman merchant in the provincial administration, but even the commercial rivals who were disagreeable to him were cleared away by the armies of the state, and the most glorious cities of neighbouring lands were sacrificed, not to the barbarism of the lust of power,
but to the far more horrible barbarism of speculation. By ,. , the ruin of the earlier military organization, which certainly imposed heavy burdens on the burgesses, the state, which
was solely dependent in the last resort on its military superiority, undermined its own support. The fleet was allowed to go to ruin ; the system of land warfare fell into the most incredible decay. The duty of guarding the Asiatic and African frontiers was devolved on the subjects ;
and what could not be so devolved, such as the defence of
the frontier in Italy, Macedonia, and Spain, was managed after the most wretched fashion. The better classes began
to disappear so much from the army, that it was already difficult to raise the necessary number of officers for the Spanish armies. The daily increasing aversion to the Spanish war-service in particular, combined with the par tiality shown by the magistrates in the levy, rendered it necessary in 602 to abandon the old practice of leaving the 168. selection of the requisite number of soldiers from the men
161. 136.
496 THE SUBJECT COUNTRIES book iv
liable to serve to the free discretion of the officers, and to substitute for it the drawing lots on the part of all the men liable to service — certainly not to the advantage of the military esprit de corps, or of the warlike efficiency of the individual divisions. The authorities, instead of acting with vigour and sternness, extended their pitiful flattery of the people even to this field ; whenever a consul in the discharge of his duty instituted rigorous levies for the Spanish service, the tribunes made use of their constitu- tional right to arrest him (603, 616); and it has been already observed, that Scipio's request that he should be allowed a levy for the Numantine war was directly rejected by the senate. Accordingly the Roman armies before Carthage or Numantia already remind one of those Syrian armies, in which the number of bakers, cooks, actors, and other non-combatants exceeded fourfold that of the so-called
soldiers ; already the Roman generals are little behind their Carthaginian colleagues in the art of ruining armies, and the wars in Africa as in Spain, in Macedonia as in Asia, are regularly opened with defeats ; the murder of Gnaeus Octavius is now passed over in silence ; the assassination of Viriathus is now a masterpiece of Roman diplomacy ; the conquest of Numantia is now a great achievement How completely the idea of national and manly honour was already lost among the Romans, was shown with epigrammatic point by the statue of the stripped and bound Mancinus, which he himself, proud of his patriotic devoted- ness, caused to be erected in Rome. Wherever we turn our eyes, we find the internal energy as well as the external power of Rome rapidly on the decline. The ground won in gigantic struggles is not extended, nor in fact even maintained, in this period of peace. The government of the world, which it was difficult to achieve, it was still more difficult to preserve ; the Roman senate had mastered the former task, but it broke down under the latter.
CHAP. II THE REFORM MOVEMENT
atf
CHAPTER n
THE REFORM MOVEMENT AND TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna the The Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by Rom,B
a ripple here and there on the surface. Its dominion ment extended over the three continents ; the lustre of the before th«
v^
Roman power and the glory of the Roman name were con- stantly 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. "
period of the GraccTM"
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,
Spread of ecay'
998
THE REFORM MOVEMENT BOOK r»
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 incom parable tenacity of purpose and power of heroic self- sacrifice, just as in seasons of tranquillity it will be short sighted, 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 politic ally 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 in ternal affairs they were, if possible, still more disposed to let the ship drive before the wind : if we understand by internal government more than the transaction of current business, there was at this period no government in Rome at alL The single leading thought of the governing cor poration was the maintenance and, if possible, the increase of their usurped privileges. It was not the state that had a title to get the right and best man for its supreme magis tracy ; but every member of the coterie had an inborn title to the highest office of the state—a title not to be pre judiced either by the unfair rivalry of men of his own class
chap, ii AND TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
399
or by the encroachments of the excluded. Accordingly \ the clique proposed to itself, as its most important political
aim, the restriction of re-election to the consulship and the exclusion of " new men " ; and in fact it succeeded in obtaining the legal prohibition of the former about 603,1 151. and in sufficing with a government of aristocratic nobodies. Even the inaction of the government in its outwardN relations was doubtless connected with this policy of the nobility, exclusive towards commoners, and distrustful towards the individual members of their own order. By
no surer means could they keep commoners, whose deeds were their patent of nobility, aloof from the pure circles of the aristocracy than by giving no opportunity to any one to perform deeds at all; to the existing government of general mediocrity even an aristocratic conqueror of
> I
Syria or Egypt would have proved extremely inconvenient.
It is true that now also there was no want of opposition, Attempts
and it was even to a certain extent effectual. The p^^,, administration of justice was improved. The administrative criminal 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 149. proposal of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, a standing senatorial
1 1° 537 the 'aw restricting re-election to the consulship was suspended 217, during the continuance of the war in Italy, that is, down to 551 (p. 14 ; 203. Ijv. xxvii. 6). But after the death of Marcellus in 546 re-elections to the 208. consulship, if we do not include the abdicating consuls of 59a, only occurred in the years 547, 534, 560, 579, 585, 586, 591, 596, 599, 60a j 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 402) and beyond doubt the singular election of Marcus Marcellus who was consul in 588 and 599 to 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 was supported by Cato (p. 55,
Jordan).
858-844.
188, 155. 152.
149.
; it
(i.
•
;
JOO
THE REFORM MOVEMENT BOOK IV
commission (quaestio ordinarid) 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 189. the elections of magistrates by the Gabinian law (615), then 187. for the public tribunals by the Cassian law (617), lastly for the voting on legislative proposals by the Papirian law
181. 129. (623). In a similar way soon afterwards (about 625) the
Exclusion senators were by decree of the people enjoined on ad
Vote by ballot.
of the senators from the equestrian centuries.
mission to the senate to surrender their public horse, and thereby to renounce their privileged place in the voting of the eighteen equestrian centuries These measures, directed to the emancipation of the electors from the ruling aristocratic order, may perhaps have seemed to the party which suggested them the first steps towards re generation of the state in fact they made not the slightest change in the nullity and want of freedom of the legally supreme organ of the Roman community that nullity indeed was only the more palpably evinced to all whom
did or did not concern. Equally ostentatious and equally empty was the formal recognition accorded to
the independence and sovereignty of the burgesses
The public elections.
But this hostility between the formal sovereignty of the people and the practically subsisting constitution was in great part semblance. Party phrases were in free circula tion of the parties themselves there was little trace in matters really and directly practical. Throughout the whole seventh century the annual public elections to the civil magistracies, especially to the consulship and censorship, formed the real standing question of the day and the focus
the transference of their place of assembly from the old 145. Comitium below the senate-house to the Forum (about 609).
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of political agitation ; but it was only in isolated and rare instances that the different candidates represented opposite political principles; ordinarily the question related purely to persons, and it was for the course of affairs a matter of indifference whether the majority of the votes fell to a Caeci- lian or to a Cornelian. The Romans thus lacked that which outweighs and compensates all the evils of party-life —the free and common movement of the masses towards what they discern as a befitting aim—and yet endured all those evils solely for the benefit of the paltry game of the ruling coteries.
It was comparatively easy for the Roman noble to enter on the career of office as quaestor or tribune of the people ; but the consulship and the censorship were attainable by him only through great exertions prolonged for years.
The prizes were many, but those really worth having were few ; the competitors ran, as a Roman poet once said, as it were over a racecourse wide at the starting-point but gradually narrowing its dimensions. This was right, so long as the magistracy was —what it was called —an "honour" and men of military, political, or juristic ability were rival com- petitors for the rare chaplets ; but now the practical close
ness 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 depend ents and freedmen — to come and wait on their patron early in the morning, and to appear publicly in his train. But the mob also is a great lord, and desires as such to receive
'
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ya THE REFORM MOVEMENT book iv
attention. The rabble began to demand as its right that the future consul should recognize and honour the sovereign people in every ragged idler of the street, and that every candidate should in his " going round " (ambitus) salute every individual voter by name and press his hand. The world of quality readily entered into this degrading canvass. The true candidate cringed not only in the palace, but also on the street, and recommended himself to the multitude by flattering attentions, indulgences, and civilities more or less refined. Demagogism and the cry for reforms were sedulously employed to attract the notice and favour of the public ; and they were the more effective, the more they attacked not things but persons. It became the custom
for beardless youths of genteel birth to introduce themselves with eclat into public life by playing afresh the part of Cato with the immature passion of their boyish eloquence, and by constituting and proclaiming themselves state-attorneys, if possible, against some man of very high standing and very great unpopularity; the Romans suffered the grave
institutions of criminal justice and of political police to become a means of soliciting office. The provision or, what was still worse, the promise of magnificent popular amusements had long been the, as it were legal, prerequisite to the obtaining of the consulship (p. 40) ; now the votes of the electors began to be directly purchased with money, as is shown by the prohibition issued against this about
169. 595. Perhaps the worst consequence of the continual courting of the favour of the multitude by the ruling aris tocracy was the incompatibility of such a begging and fawning part with the position which the government should right fully occupy in relation to the governed. The government was thus converted from a blessing into a curse for the people. They no longer ventured to dispose of the property and blood of the burgesses, as exigency required, for the
good of their country. They allowed the burgesses to
chap. II AND TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
303
become habituated to the dangerous idea that they were legally exempt from the payment of direct taxes even by way of advance—after the war with Perseus no further ad- vance had been asked from the community. They allowed their military system to decay rather than compel the bur gesses to enter the odious transmarine service ; how it fared with the individual magistrates who attempted to carry out the conscription according to the strict letter of the law, has already been related
oligarchy and democracy still undeveloped but already pL,,,! ,^ cankered in the bud were interwoven in 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
296).
In the Rome of this epoch the two evils of degenerate
* V
/
Optimata
but in fact there was in the Rome of true aristocracy nor truly self-determin
of the community
that day neither
ing community.
and numbered in their ranks none but enthusiasts or
hypocrites.
Both parties contended alike for shadows,
Both were equally affected by political corrup tion, 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 change of party was
change of political tactics more than of political sentiments. The commonwealth would beyond doubt have been gainer, either the aristocracy had directly introduced hereditary rotation instead of election by the burgesses, or the democracy had produced from within real dema gogic government. But these Optimates and these Popu lares of the beginning of the seventh century were far too indispensable for each other to wage such internecine war
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Social crisis.
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.
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 distribu tion of domains for which these wars gave facilities. It has already been shown (pp. 75-82) that in the same age, which renewed the distinction between patricians and plebeians under altered names, the disproportionate accumulation of capital was preparing a second assault on the farming system. It is true that the method was different. Formerly the small farmer had been ruined by advances of money, which practically reduced him to be the steward of his creditor ; now he was crushed by the competition of transmarine, and especially of slave-grown, corn. The capitalists kept pace with the times ; capital, while waging war against labour or in other words against the liberty of the person, of course, as it had always done, under the strictest form of law, waged
304
THE REFORM MOVEMENT book iv
chap. II AND TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
305
it no longer in the unseemly fashion which converted the free man on account of debt into a slave, but, throughout, with slaves legitimately bought and paid ; the former usurer of the capital appeared in a shape conformable to the times as the owner of industrial plantations. But the ultimate result was in both cases the same —the depreciation of the Italian farms ; the supplanting of the petty husbandry, first in a part of the provinces and then in Italy, by the farming of large estates ; the prevailing tendency to devote the latter in Italy to the rearing of cattle and the culture of the olive and vine ; finally, the replacing of the free labourers in the provinces as in Italy by slaves. Just as the nobility was more dangerous than the patriciate, because the former could not, like the latter, be set aside by a change of the
constitution ; so this new power of capital was more dan gerous than that of the fourth and fifth centuries, because nothing was to be done against it by changes in the law of the land.
Before we attempt to describe the course of this second Slavery
*** H
great conflict between labour and capital, it is necessary to
give here some indication of the nature and extent of the quence*. 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
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 the system of slavery on great scale, which in the Roman state, as formerly the Carthaginian, grew out of the ascendency of capital. While the captives taken in war and the hereditary transmission of slavery sufficed to
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THE REFORM MOVEMENT book iv
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 fur nishing fresh masses to the slave-market were not sufficient to cover the deficit. No country where this species of game could be hunted remained exempt from visitation ; even in Italy it was a thing by no means unheard of, that the poor freeman was placed by his employer among the slaves. But the Negroland of that period was western Asia,1 where the Cretan and Cilician corsairs, the real pro fessional slave-hunters and slave-dealers, robbed the coasts of Syria and the Greek islands ; and where, emulating their feats, the Roman revenue-farmers instituted human hunts in the client states and incorporated those whom they captured among their slaves. This was done to such an extent, that
100. about 650 the king of Bithynia declared himself unable to furnish the required contingent, because all the people cap able of labour had been dragged off from his kingdom by the revenue-farmers. At the great slave-market in Delos, where the slave-dealers of Asia Minor disposed of their wares to Italian speculators, on one day as many as 10,000 slaves are said to have been disembarked in the morning and to have been all sold before evening—a proof at once how
enormous was the number of slaves delivered, and how, notwithstanding, the demand still exceeded the supply. It was no wonder. Already in describing the Roman economy of the sixth century we have explained that it was based, like all the large undertakings of antiquity generally, on the employment of slaves (pp. 68/, 82). In whatever direction
1 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. 54a) commends the Syrians : gtnus qtad fatuntiaimum at kominum.
chap, ii AND TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
307
speculation applied itself, its instrument was without excep
tion man reduced in law to a beast of burden. Trades
were in great part carried on by slaves, so that the proceeds
fell to the master. The levying of the public revenues in
the lower grades was regularly conducted by the slaves of
the associations that leased them. Servile hands performed
the operations of mining, making pitch, and others of a similar kind ; it became early the custom to send herds of slaves to the Spanish mines, whose superintendents readily received them and paid a high rent for them. The vine
and olive harvest in Italy was not conducted by the people
on the estate, but was contracted for by a slave-owner.
The tending of cattle was universally performed by slaves.
We have already mentioned the armed, and frequently mounted, slave-herdsmen in the great pastoral ranges of Italy (p. 74); and the same sort of pastoral husbandry soon became in the provinces also a favourite object of Roman speculation —Dalmatia, for instance, was hardly acquired (599) when the Roman capitalists began to prosecute the 168. rearing of cattle there on a great scale after the Italian fashion. But far worse in every respect was the plantation- system proper—the cultivation of the fields by a band of slaves not unfrequently branded with iron, who with shackles on their legs performed the labours of the field under overseers during the day, and were locked up together by night in the common, frequently subterranean, labourers' prison. This plantation- system had migrated from the east to Carthage 138), and seems to have been brought by the Carthaginians to Sicily, where, probably for this reason, appears developed earlier and more completely than in any other part of the Roman dominions. 1 We find
The hybrid Greek name for the workhouse (ergastulum,ftom (pydfofuu, after the analogy of stabulum, operculum) an indication that this mode of management came to the Romans from region where the Greek language was used, but at a period when a thorough Hellenic culture was not yet attained.
is a
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the territory of Leontini, about 30,000 jugera of arable land, which was let on lease as Roman domain (ii. 313) by the censors, divided some decades after the time of the Gracchi among not more than 84 lessees, to each of whom there thus fell on an average 360 jugera, and among whom only
one was a Leontine ; the rest were foreign, mostly Roman, speculators. We see from this instance with what zeal the Roman speculators there walked in the footsteps of their predecessors, and what extensive dealings in Sicilian cattle and Sicilian slave-corn must have been carried on by the
Roman and non-Roman speculators who covered the fair island with their pastures and plantations. Italy however still remained for the present substantially exempt from this worst form of slave-husbandry. Although in Etruria, where the plantation-system seems to have first emerged in Italy, and where it existed most extensively at least forty years afterwards, it is extremely probable that even now ergastula were not wanting ; yet Italian agriculture at this epoch was still chiefly carried on by free persons or at any rate by non-fettered slaves, while the greater tasks were frequently let out to contractors. The difference between Italian and Sicilian slavery is very clearly apparent from the fact, that the slaves of the Mamertine community, which lived after the Italian fashion, were the only slaves who did not take
186-132. part in the Sicilian servile revolt of 619-622.
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 govern ment in confronting them. It is plain that this proletariate was not called into existence by the government and could
char H AND TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
309
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
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.
property
The servile conspiracies and servile wars, breaking out everywhere, illustrate their management as respects police. Jj^j^— In Italy the scenes of disorder, which were among the immediate painful consequences of the Hannibalic war
102), 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). 133. Still worse, as may be conceived, was the state of the
Insurreo-
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 war of the landholders against the revolted
slaves 278). But worst of all, naturally, was the con-
dition of Sicily, the chosen land of the plantation system, g^3^. Brigandage had long been standing evil there, especially
in the interior began to swell into insurrection. Damophilus, 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 greater scale. The slaves rose in body against their masters, killed or enslaved them, and summoned to the head of the already considerable insurgent army juggler
provinces.
The first
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THE REFORM MOVEMENT book iv
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 292). 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 daring bandit, followed the example which had been set and occupied Agrigentum and, when the leaders came to 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
134-182. 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 impreg nable position with the determination of men who despair of deliverance or of pardon the consuls Lucius Calpurnius Piso and Publius Rupilius lay before for two years, and reduced at last more by famine than arms. 1
Even now there are not unfrequently found in front of Castrogiovanni, •t the point where the ascent least abrupt, Roman projectiles with the
188. name of the consul of 6ai L. Pitt L. f. cot.
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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 inexhaust ible 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 discre tion; 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 on 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 care of the government for the elevation of free The labour, and by consequence for the restriction of the slave-
312
THE REFORM MOVEMENT book iv
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
Now at the suggestion of the government Punic treatise on agriculture (ii. 151), doubtless giving instructions in the system of plantation after the Carthaginian mode, was translated into Latin for the use and benefit of Italian specu lators — the first and only instance of literary undertaking suggested the Roman senate The same tendency showed itself in 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 recollection of the course of the first social crisis in Rome, to perceive that the only real remedy against an agricultural proletariate consisted in comprehensive and duly-regulated system of emigration 391); for which the external relations of Rome offered the most favourable opportunity. Until nearly the close of the sixth century, fact, the continuous diminution of the small landholders of Italy was counter
acted by the continuous establishment of new farm-allot ments (p. 48). This, true, was no means done to the extent to which might and should have been done not only was the domain-land occupied from ancient times
private persons 344) not recalled, but further occupa tions of newly-won land were permitted and other very important acquisitions, such as the territory of Capua, while not abandoned to occupation, were yet not brought into distribution, but were let on lease as usufructuary domains. Nevertheless the assignation of land had operated beneficially —giving help to many of the sufferers and hope to all. But
177. after the founding of Luna (577) no trace of further assigna tions of land to be met with for long time, with the exception of the isolated institution of the Picenian colony
381).
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313
of Auximum (Osimo) in 597. The reason is simple. After 167 the conquest of the Boii and Apuani no new territory was acquired in Italy excepting the far from attractive Ligurian valleys ; therefore no other land existed for distribution there except the leased or occupied domain-land, the laying hands
on which was, as may easily be conceived, just as little agree able to the aristocracy now as it was three hundred years before. The distribution of the territory acquired out of Italy appeared for political reasons inadmissible ; Italy was to remain the ruling country, and the wall of partition between the Italian masters and their provincial servants was not to be broken down. Unless the government were will ing to set aside considerations of higher policy or even the interests of their order, no course was left to them but to remain spectators of the ruin of the Italian farmer-class ; and this result accordingly ensued. The capitalists continued to buy out the small landholders, or indeed, if they remained obstinate, to seize their fields without title of purchase ; in which case, as may be supposed, matters were not always
amicably settled. A peculiarly favourite method was to eject the wife and children of the farmer from the homestead, while he was in the field, and to bring him to compliance by means of the theory of "accomplished fact. " The landlords continued mainly to employ slaves instead of free labourers, because the former could not like the latter be called away to military service ; and thus reduced the free proletariate to the same level of misery with the slaves. They continued to supersede Italian grain in the market of the capital, and to lessen its value over the whole peninsula, by selling Sicilian slave-corn at a mere nominal price. In Etruria the old native aristocracy in league with
the Roman capitalists had as early as 620 brought matters 184. to such a pass, that there was no longer a free farmer there.
It could be said aloud in the market of the capital, that
the beasts had their lairs but nothing was left to the bur-
314
THE REFORM MOVEMENT book iv
gesses save the air and sunshine, and that those who were styled the masters of the world had no longer a clod that they could call their own. The census lists of the Roman burgesses furnished the commentary on these words. From
189. the end of the Hannibalic war down to 595 the numbers of the burgesses were steadily on the increase, the cause of which is mainly to be sought in the continuous and con-
169- siderable distributions of domain-land 101) after 595 again, when the census yielded 328,000 burgesses capable of bearing arms, there appears regular falling-off, for the
161 147. list in 600 stood at 324,000, that in 607 at 322,000, that
181.
ideas of orm'
Sdpie
nni 184-129.
in 623 at 319,000 burgesses fit for service — an alarming result for time of profound peace at home and abroad. If matters were to go on at this rate, the burgess-body would resolve itself into planters and slaves and the Roman state might at length, as was the case with the Parthians, purchase its soldiers in the slave-market
Such was the external and internal condition of Rome, when the state entered on the seventh century of its ex istence. Wherever the eye turned, 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 man temperate and thoroughly
never ailing in body, and never at loss to resolve on the immediate and necessary course of action. Even in his youth he had kept aloof from the usual proceed ings of political novices — the attending in the ante*
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chambers 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 en joyment 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 Alex andrians. His Hellenism was especially recognizable in the delicate irony of his discourse and in the classic purity of his Latin. Although not strictly an author, he yet, like Cato, committed to writing his political speeches —they were, like the letters of his adopted sister the mother of the Gracchi, esteemed by the later litteratores as master pieces of model prose — and took pleasure in surrounding himself with the better Greek and Roman litterati, a plebeian society which was doubtless regarded with no small suspicion by those colleagues in the senate whose noble birth was their sole distinction. A man morally steadfast and trustworthy, his word held good with friend and foe ; he avoided buildings and speculations, and lived with simplicity ; while in money matters he acted not merely honourably and disinterestedly, but also with a tenderness and liberality which seemed singular to the mercantile spirit of his contemporaries. He was an able soldier and officer ; he brought home from the African war the honorary wreath which was wont to be conferred on those who saved the lives of citizens in danger at the
316
THE REFORM MOVEMENT book iv
peril of their own, and terminated as general the war which he had begun as an officer ; circumstances gave him no opportunity of trying his skill as a general on tasks really difficult. Scipio was not, any more than his father, a man of brilliant gifts—as is indicated by the very fact of his predilection for Xenophon, the sober soldier and correct author — but he was an honest and true man, who seemed pre-eminently called to stem the incipient decay by organic reforms. All the more significant is the fact that he did not attempt true that he helped, as he had opportunity and means, to redress or prevent abuses, and laboured in particular at the improve ment of the administration of justice. was chiefly by his assistance that Lucius Cassius, an able man of the old Roman austerity and uprightness, was enabled to carry against the most vehement opposition of the Opti-
mates his law as to voting, which introduced vote ballot for those popular tribunals which still embraced the most important part of the criminal jurisdiction
In like manner, although he had not chosen to take part in boyish impeachments, he himself in his mature years put upon their trial several of the guiltiest of the aristocracy. In like spirit, when commanding before Carthage and Numantia, he drove forth the women and priests to the gates of the camp, and subjected the rabble of soldiers once more to the iron yoke of the old
142. military discipline; and when censor (612), he cleared away the smooth -chinned coxcombs among the world of quality and in earnest language urged the citizens to adhere more faithfully to the honest customs of their fathers. But no one, and least of all he himself, could fail to see that increased stringency in the administration of justice and isolated interference were not even first steps towards the healing of the organic evils under which the state laboured. These Scipio did not touch. Gaius Laeliui
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in 614), Scipio's elder friend and his political 140. instructor and confidant, had conceived the plan of pro posing the resumption of the Italian domain-land which
had not been given away but had been temporarily oc cupied, and of giving relief by its distribution to the visibly decaying Italian farmers ; but he desisted from
the project when he saw what a storm he was going to raise, and was thenceforth named the "Judicious. " Scipio
was of the same opinion. He was fully persuaded of the greatness of the evil, and with a courage deserving of honour he without respect of persons remorselessly as sailed it and carried his point, where he risked himself alone ; but he was also persuaded that the country could
only be relieved at the price of a revolution similar to that which in the fourth and fifth centuries had sprung out of
the question of reform, and, rightly or wrongly, the remedy seemed to him worse than the disease. So with the small circle of his friends he held a middle position between the aristocrats, who never forgave him for his advocacy of the Cassian law, and the democrats, whom he neither satisfied
nor wished to satisfy ; solitary during his life, praised after
his death by both parties, now as the champion of the aris tocracy, now as the promoter of reform. Down to his time
(consul
the censors on laying down their office had called upon the gods to grant greater power and glory to the state : the censor Scipio prayed that they might deign to preserve the state. His whole confession of faith lies in that painful exclamation.
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 hi*
Tiberius GmscIhh
168-18*.
177. 1M. 1W"
3i»
THE REFORM MOVEMENT book iv
aedilician games, not produced without oppressing the dependent communities, had drawn upon him the severe and deserved censure of the senate 31) his inter ference in the pitiful process directed against the Scipios who were personally hostile to him 484) gave proof of his chivalrous feeling, and perhaps of his regard for his own order and his energetic action against the freed- men in his censorship (p. 53) evinced his conservative disposition. As governor, moreover, of the province of the Ebro (ii. 391), by his bravery and above all by his integrity he rendered 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 inter vention, had chosen his former opponent as son-in-law she herself was 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 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 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
by
;
a
a
a
;
;
a
(ii.
;
(p.
chap, ii AND TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
319
circle, and more especially their ideas as to the elevation of
the Italian farmers, j 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 148. censor (618), one of the most respected men in the senate, 136.