obj-d>Srstes Rapitel. 262 – 247

obj-d>srstesRapitel

From the time that the number and personal importance of plebeians in the senate had become great and went on increasing, and as in like manner the number of nobleminded patricians was ever extending, who were heartily tired of the vexatious conduct of their unmanageable brother-patricians, and along with the leaders of the plebeians strove joyfully onward,—there must have arisen an important and mischievous discord between the majority of the patres conscripti and the common council of the patres, the curies. It was sure to be the case, that the majority in the latter, possessing no experience gained by the management of public affairs, without any responsibility for their success, and lamenting the times, when the senate represented their claims to their ancient privileges, raised protestations on all occasions, and gave themselves up to great exasperation, especially against the sensible members of their own order, and decried them as apostates. It was necessary that such a state of things should be done away with, in which a faction, that was daily sinking in relative power and importance, disturbed the senate in its vocation as the government.

That this was not the party feeling of one order against the other, but the rational feeling of the good citizens and the friends of their country towards the contemptible disturbers of the peace, is plain even from the fact, that it was a patrician of one of the very first houses, the consul Tiberius Æmilius, who, when the conclusion of the campaign of 411 (416) afforded leisure, invested his collegue Q. Publilius Philo with the power of the dictatorship, in order to remove the evil by laws, which, if proposed by tribunes, would have taken a far more stormy course.

The fall of Rhegium had deprived the Mamertines of Messana of the only allies whom these robbers could have had. Uniting with them for the prize of the booty, they supported their expeditions in Sicily, in which they no more respected the protection of the Carthaginians than they spared the Greek towns: and the vengeance of the two states which ruled over the island, now rose against them.

It was Hiero of Syracuse, who longed to punish the outrages they had committed for many years. He had now come to the possession of the kingly dignity by a series of prudent actions, which are celebrated by the Greeks, and most of which were praiseworthy: by a regular, though unavoidable election of the people: an election, which the Syracusans never regretted during his reign of fifty years. For he was never charged with any despotic act, and under his unassuming simplicity, which surrounded itself with no splendour of royal etiquette, the Syracusans enjoyed all the advantages of liberty, which they had allowed to escape from them quickly under a republican constitution. His memory long remained sacred: under him Syracuse recovered from the misfortunes, which had prest it down for more than a century, and his government was the last period of prosperity, which a part of Sicily at least has enjoyed.

When Niebuhr with sad feelings finisht the second volume of his history of Rome, he exprest in that remarkable preface his longing for some rest to enable him to hasten to the completion of the third volume. Four months later he was called to eternal rest, and left behind him the work which immortalises his name, in the form which he there intimates, “what was comprehended within the limits of the original second volume, was already planned, the remainder down to the first Punic war only wanted a last revision.” It was not granted him to bring it to completion. There remained then for his nearest friends, to whom the last will of the deceast had confided the care of his manuscripts, only the melancholy duty of preserving this precious bequest in its purity, and of giving it to our age and posterity as the only possible compensation for the irreparable loss of the complete history of Rome. The honorable charge of undertaking the business of editor was conferred on me by those revered persons. They thought that the circumstance of my having been closely connected in love and veneration with the deceast during the last four years preceding his death, which forms the greatest happiness of my life, rendered me worthy of such great confidence. If my love and veneration for the memory of Niebuhr could justify their confidence, I might hope to possess some claim to it.

Livy and Dion, the latter of whom is entirely independent of the opinions of the former, being much more careful in investigating the connexion of events, had expressly represented this war in the same connexion with those in southern Italy, as Gellius Egnatius had made war upon the Romans in the north. Zonaras mentions the Tarentines as those who had stirred up the Etruscans, Gauls, Samnites and others against Rome, although they themselves did not come forward. An extract from Dion himself relates, that the Tarentines and others by embassadors persuaded the Etruscans, Umbrians and Gauls to revolt from Rome: Orosius states, that the Lucanians, Bruttians and Samnites allied themselves with the Gauls and Etruscans. Better authority for a connexion which is highly probable, cannot be sought for a period like this; nevertheless, although the Lucanian war must have broken out earlier than the Senonian, I shall defer mention of the former, till I shall have treated of the last efforts of Etruria for its independence.

I have already remarkt that the Volsinians, sometimes supported by a part of the western towns, but abandoned by Tarquinii, Perusia, Cortona, and Arretium, seem to have laid down their arms only during short intervals throughout the whole of this period. The prospect of a general war in southern Italy must have given them new courage; it seemed at last, as if all that were still left would rise against the enemies of all: but the most important point was the participation of the Gauls.

The institutions, which manifestly point to the division of the earliest Roman people into three tribes, attest just as clearly, that these original tribes of the patrician houses were not equal among one another: nay the inequality of the third tribe (of the gentes minores) always continued to exist in some points, probably because there was no legal form of remedying it after the abolition of the kingly dignity.

Probably each tribe had one of the three higher flamens, who always remained patricians: the Quirinalis was added to the Dialis and Martialis, both of whom had existed previously and rankt higher: the relation which the six priestesses of Vesta bore to the tribes, is acknowledged, and has only been applied too artificially to their subdivisions also. Originally there were only two; to these two more were added by the union of the Sabines with the Ramnes, whereby the senate also was increast to two hundred, and two kings reigned: at a much later time the third pair was added from the lower houses. This completion is ascribed to Tarquinius Priscus, in the same way as the admission of the third hundred into the senate from the same gentes; with less consistency by others to Servius Tullius, because the legislation which bears his name, does not affect the patrician institutions.

The peace, which terminated the third Samnite war, seems to have placed the Lucanians in a more favorable position: the hostages, which Rome never took from her subjects except during transitory circumstances, must have been restored to them. Without the dissolution of this bond they would scarcely have ventured upon wars displeasing to Rome, although it does not prevent rebellion in case of direct oppression.

For upwards of forty years, since the death of Alexander of Epirus, the Lucaniaus had almost disappeared from history: according to their ancient custom they now availed themselves of the independence they had recovered, to make war against the Thurians, in the same way as after the second Samnite war they had immediately taken up arms against the Tarentines. A hundred years before, Thurii, after it had risen to an almost incredible degree of prosperity and population in scarcely sixty years from its foundation, had received a blow from the Lucanians in the battle of Laos, from which it never recovered. From that time Magna Græcia had been exhausted through the enterprises of the Sicilian tyrants, through the attacks of the Lucanians and Bruttians, and even through the wars which checkt these their hereditary foes: several Greek towns were entirely destroyed or had become barbarous: Thurii seems never to have been taken during the whole of this period, but it certainly endeavoured to save itself, like the other towns of this coast, by treaties sometimes with the tyrants of Sicily and sometimes with the Italican barbarians.

In several years of this period there appear symptoms of the patricians not having yet renounced the foolish dream, of winning back by stubbornness the privileges irrecoverably lost: their attempts, though tormenting and vexatious, did not endanger the peace, because, though they were inflexible enough to renew the contest continually, they were still not so rash as to venture upon extremes, when they encountered the resistance which they dreamt had ceast. Many were still alive in the vigour and maturity of their age, who retained the ineffaceable recollection of their old exclusive dominion and indignation at being conquered: it was necessary for another generation to step into their place, which knew of the olden time only as a matter of tradition, before there could be peace; and few of their grandchildren would have been so blind as to wish, even if it had been possible, to recover then what had been lost, and to take it in exchange for that which had arisen for them and for all: but the undertaking could not have succeeded, and the wiser descendants of both parties must have regarded it as the greatest good fortune, that irrational strife did not annihilate the equipoise in the republic by injuring the aristocracy.

The same feeling is manifested by a dictator being appointed for some time almost every year to hold the comitia for elections; but a plebeian raised to this dignity was compelled by absurd pretexts to lay it down; and after this fourteen interrexes followed, as on a former occasion five, before the election of the consuls was completed.

When all the troops and transport-vessels were assembled, which had come from Tarentum, the king hastened to embark, although the stormy season of the year was not yet over: and scarcely had the fleet set sail, when a storm broke out from the north, which cast most of the ships upon the wide sea, drove many upon the beach, and sunk several. Pyrrhus himself scarcely escaped alive from the shipwreck, and arrived at Tarentum with an insignificant force. Now the king allowed the Tarentines to act as they pleased, until the ships which the storm had spared, were collected near Tarentum: but when his troops were assembled, he laid claim to dictatorial power, without which the objects of those Greeks could be no more attained, than he himself could exist with his honour and his army. It was not the Tarentines alone who refused to engage in military service, but all the inhabitants of the Greek towns of that time did the same, since it had for more than a hundred years become the calling of the soldiery: and if, which rarely happened, a civic militia was employed, things went on lamentably: but in the phalanx every one was useful who had strong limbs; if Pyrrhus was to make any use of the population of Tarentum for the infantry, it was necessary to have them levied and enrolled among his foot-soldiers, and he had to fill up immediately the gaps which had arisen in consequence of the shipwreck.