Modern character of Italian culture.

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 (although it were 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 lost in oblivion; for it is in this field of research alone that we acquire some idea of the breadth of the gulf which separates our modes of thinking and feeling from those of the civilized nations of antiquity. Tradition, with its confused mass of national names and its dim legends, resembles withered leaves which we with difficulty recognize to have once been green. Instead of threading that dreary maze, and attempting to classify those offscourings of humanity, the Chones and Œnotriaus, the Siculi and the Pelasgi, it will be more to the purpose to inquire how the life of the people in ancient Italy expressed itself, practically, in their jurisprudence and, ideally, in their religion; how they farmed and how they traded; and whence the several nations there derived the art of writing and other elements of culture.

Indo-Germanic migrations.

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 north-western 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 such connection there was, 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 stocts 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 to all appearance, that region has been the cradle of agriculture and of the culture of the vine. Barley, spelt, and wheat are indigenous in Mesopotamia, and the vine to the south of the Caucasus and of the Caspian Sea: there too, the plum, the walnut, and others of the more easily transplanted fruit trees, are native.

State of Sicily

Campanian mercenaries

For upwards of a century the feud between the Carthaginians and the rulers of Syracuse had devastated the beautiful 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 aristocraticorepublican 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 were employed to fight their battles—by Timoleon and Agathocles, as well as by the Phoenician generals. And as like means were employed on both sides, so the conflict had been waged on both with a disregard of honour and a perfidy unexampled in the history of the west. The Syracusans were the weaker party. In the peace of 440, Carthage had still limited her claims to the third of the island to the west of Heraclea Minoa and Himera, and had expressly recognized the hegemony of the Syracusans over all the cities to the eastward. The expulsion of Pyrrhus from Sicily and Italy (479) left by far the larger half of the island, and especially the important city of Agrigentum, in the hands of Carthage; the Syraeusans retained nothing but Tauromenium and the south-east of the island. 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 mer cenaries.

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.

Agriculture.

It has been already observed (P. 20) 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 laying out of a new town 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 body of freeholders as the pith and marrow of the community.

The gods.

The Roman world of gods, as we have already indicated (P. 28), was a higher counterpart, an ideal reflection, of the earthly Rome, in which the little and the great were alike reproduced with painstaking exactness. The state and the clan, the individual phenomena of nature as well as the individual operations of mind, 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 strict as was the distinction between the burgess and non-burgess, between the Roman and the foreign god, both foreign men and foreign divinities might 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.

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 Helleno-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 enabled them to retain what the king had won; and under the protection of the sarissœ, Greek civilization peacefully domiciled itself everywhere throughout the ancient empire of the Achæmenidæ. The officers, who divided the heritage of the great commander, gradually settled their differences, and a system of equilibrium was established, the very oscillations of which 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 military state compact in form, and 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.

Relations between the East and West.

After Rome had acquired the undisputed mastery of the 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 Macedon died at Babylon on the 11th of June, 431. As it was not very 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 be 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 provided with soldiers and ships experiences in setting limits to his warlike career. It was an enterprise worthy of a great Greek 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, 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 contracting relations with it.

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 01. 6, 3 and the first eight of 01. 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 (= 327·46 grammes) of gold, equal to 4000 sesterces, has thus according to the ratio of gold to silver 1: 15.5 been reckoned at 286 Prussian thalers (about £41).

Kiepert's map will give a clearer idea of the military consolidation of Italy than can be conveyed by any description.

The art of measuring brings the world into subjection to man; the art of writing prevents his knowledge from perishing 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.

Italian measures.

Measurement necessarily presupposes the development of the several ideas of units of time, of space, and of weight, and of a whole as 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 lingers; 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.

In requesting English scholars to receive with indulgence this first portion of a translation of Dr. Mommsen's “Römische Gesehichte,” 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.

Dissatisfaction of Philip with Rome

Philip of Maćedon 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 no 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, diligently sought, 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 Macedon. 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 Ætolians; but in Thessaly the confederacy of the Magnetes alone had formally joined the Ætolians, while those towns which Philip had wrested from the Ætolians in two of the other Thessalian confederacies—the Thessalian in its narrower sense, and the Perrhæbian—were reclaimed by the latter on the ground that Philip had only liberated these towns, and not conquered them. The Athamanes conceived that they might request their freedom; and Eumenes demanded the maritime cities which Antiochus had possessed in Thrace proper, especially Ænus and Maronea, although in the peace with Antiochus the Thracian Chersonese alone had been expressly promised to him.

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 Carthage largest portion of Sicily now flowed into the enemy's chequer instead ot the Carthagniian treasury, was the least part of their loss. They felt a far keener regret, when they found that they had to abandon the hope of monopolizing all the lines of traffic between the eastern and the western Mediterranean, just as that hope seemed on the eve of fulfilment. They now beheld 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 Phœnicians. Nevertheless the peaceful Sidonians might perhaps have been disposed to acquiesce in this result. They had met with similar blows already; they had been obliged to share with the Massiliots, the Etruscans, and the Sicilian Greeks what they had previously possessed alone; even now the possessions which they retained, Africa, Spain, and the gates of the Atlantic Ocean, were sufficient to confer power and prosperity. But in truth, where was their security that these at least would continue in their hands?

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 grave and severe life, was his glory. Neither more nor less was expected of a Roman than that he should keep his household in good order and unflinchingly 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 citizen 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 sense of collective dignity in the noble families of Rome swelled into that mighty pride of Roman citizenship, to which the earth has never perhaps witnessed a parallel, and the traces of which, as singular as they are grand, seem to us whenever we meet them to belong as it were to another world.

Political and social distinctions in Rome.

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 perhaps by the enemies of the land, but was not less heavily felt by its citizens. Abuse and oppression could not fail to ensue from it, and, as a necessary consequence, efforts were made to accomplish its limitation. It was, however, the grand distinction of the efforts after reform and the revolutions in Rome, that there was no attempt 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. Prom 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 ought, on the contrary, to be governed.

That struggle developed itself within the burgess-body. Side by side with it ran another movement, the cry of the non-burgesses for equality of political privileges.

Ancient history.

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 Aramæan 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 twinpeoples, the Hellenes and Italians, who received as their heritage the countries bordering on its European shores. 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 peculiar career.

The Roman national festival.

The growth of art, and of poetic art especially, in antiquity was intimately associated with the development of national festivals. The extraordinary thanksgiving-festival of the Roman community which, had been organized in the previous period mainly under Greek influence, the ludi maximi, or Romani (P. 235), 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.

The Roman stage.

A still more important circumstance was, that, probably on the institution of the eurule ædileship (387) which was from the first intrusted with the preparation and oversight, of the festival (P. 306), 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 annual festivals. Nevertheless the government adhered to the rule of allowing the proper spectacle, namely the chariot-race which was its principal feature, 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 been connected with the fixing and prolongation of the festival that took place shortly before.

Etrusco-Carthaginian maritime supremacy.

In the previous chapters we have presented an outline of 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 in the Tyrrhene Sea. Although Massilia, amidst continual and severe struggles, maintained her independence, the sea-ports of Campania and of the Volscian land, and, after the battle of Alalia, Corsica also (P. 153), 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 Phosnicians retained their told on the western half without meeting with effectual 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 Etruia

By land also their power seemed to be on the increase. Subjugation To acquire possession of Latium was an object of most decisive importance to, which was separated by the Latins alone from the Volscian towns which 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.