External and internal bankruptcy of the Roman state

We have traversed a period of ninety years—forty years of internal profound peace, fifty of an almost constant revolution. It is the most inglorious epoch known in Roman history. It is true that the Alps were crossed both in an easterly and westerly direction (P. 168, 177), and the Roman arms reached in the Spanish peninsula as far as the Atlantic Ocean (P. 18) and in the Macedono-Grecian peninsula as far as the Danube (P. 177); but the laurels thus gained were as cheap as they were barren. The circle of the “extraneous peoples under the will, sway, dominion, or friendship of the Roman burgesses,” was not materially extended; men were content to realize the gains of a better age and to bring the communities attached to Rome in laxer forms of dependence more and more into full subjection. Behind the brilliant screen of provincial reunions was concealed a very sensible decline of Roman power. While the whole ancient civilization was daily more and more distinctly embraced in the Roman state and received in it a more general recognition, the nations excluded from it began simultaneously beyond the Alps and beyond the Euphrates to pass from defence to aggression. On the battle-fields of Aquae Sextise and Vercellae, of Chseronea and Orchomenus, were heard the first peals of that thunder-storm, which the Germanic tribes and the Asiatic hordes were destined to bring upon the Italo-Grecian world, and the last dull rolling of which has reached almost to our own times. But in internal development also this epoch bears the same character. The old organization collapses irretrievably.

The Subjects

On the abolition of the Macedonian monarchy, the supremacy of Rome was not only an established fact from the Pillars of Hercules to the mouths of the Nile and the Orontes, but, as if it were the final decree of fate, pressed on the nations with all the weight of an inevitable necessity, and seemed to leave them merely the choice of perishing in hopeless resistance or in hopeless endurance. If history were not entitled to insist that the earnest reader should accompany her through good and evil days, through landscapes of winter as well as of spring, the historian might be tempted to shun the cheerless task of tracing the manifold and yet monotonous turns of this struggle between power and weakness, both in the Spanish provinces already annexed to the Roman empire and in the African, Hellenic, and Asiatic territories which were still treated as clients of Rome. But, however unimportant and subordinate the individual conflicts may appear, they possess collectively a deep historical significance; and, in particular, the state of things in Italy at this period is only intelligible in the light of the reaction which the provinces exercised over the mother-country.

Spain

In addition to the territories which may be regarded as natural appendages of Italy—in which, however, the natives were still far from being completely subdued, and Ligurians, Sardinians, and Corsicans were, not greatly to the credit of Rome, continually furnishing occasion for “village-triumphs”—the formal sovereignty of Rome at the commencement of this period was established only in the two Spanish provinces, which embraced the larger eastern and southern portions of the peninsula beyond the Pyrenees.

Vacancy in the government

The new structure, which Gaius Gracchus had reared, became on his death a ruin. His death indeed, like that of his brother, was primarily a mere act of vengeance; but it was at the same time a very material step towards the restoration of the old constitution, when the person of the monarch was taken away from the monarchy just as it was on the point of being established. It was all the more so in the present instance, because after the fall of Gaius and the sweeping and bloody prosecutions of Opimius there existed at the moment absolutely no one, who, either through relationship to the fallen chief of the state or through pre-eminent ability, could feel himself warranted in even attempting to occupy the vacant place. Gaius had departed from the world childless, and the son whom Tiberius had left behind him died before reaching manhood; the whole popular party, as it was called, was literally without any one who could be named as leader. The Gracchan constitution resembled a fortress without a commander; the walls and garrison were uninjured, but the general was wanting, and there was no one to take possession of the vacant place save the very government which had been overthrown.

There stored aristocracy

So it accordingly happened. After the decease of Gaius Gracchus without heirs, the government of the senate as it were spontaneously resumed its sway; and this was the more natural, that it had not been, in the strict sense, formally abolished by Gaius Gracchus, but had only been reduced to a nullity in point of fact by his exceptional proceedings.

Relations of Rome to the north

From the close of the sixth century the Roman community ruled over the three great peninsulas projecting from the northern continent into the Mediterranean, at least taken as a whole. Even there however—in the north and west of Spain, in the valleys of the Ligurian Apennines and the Alps, and in the mountains of Macedonia and Thrace—tribes wholly or partially free continued to defy the negligent Roman government. Moreover the continental communication between Spain and Italy as well as between Italy and Macedonia was very superficially provided for, and the countries beyond the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Balkan chain—the great river-basins of the Rhone, the Ehine, and the Danube—in the main lay beyond the political horizon of the Romans. We have now to set forth what steps were taken on the part of Rome to secure and to round oif her empire in this direction, and how at the same time the great masses of peoples, who were ever moving to and fro behind that mighty mountain-screen, began to beat at the gates of the northern mountains and rudely to remind the Græco-Roman world that it was mistaken in believing itself the sole possessor of the earth.

The country between the Alphs and Pyrenees

Let us first glance at the region between the western Alps and the Pyrenees. The Romans had for long commanded this part of the coast of the Mediterranean through their client city of Massilia, one of the oldest, most faithful, and most powerful of the allied communities dependent on Rome.

The restoration

About the time when the first pitched battle was fought between Romans and Romans, in the night of the 6th July 671, the venerable temple, which had been erected by the kings, dedicated by the youthful republic, and spared by the storms of five hundred years—the temple of the Roman Jupiter in the Capitol—perished in the flames. It was no augury, but it waa an image of the state of the Roman constitution. That, too, lay in ruins and needed reconstruction. The revolution was no doubt vanquished, but the victory was far from implying, as a matter of course, the restoration of the old government. The mass of the aristocracy certainly was of opinion that now, after the death of the two revolutionary consuls, it would be sufficient to make arrangements for the ordinary supplemental election and to leave it to the senate to take such steps as should seem further requisite for the rewarding of the victorious army, for the punishment of the most guilty revolutionists, and perhaps also for the prevention of similar outbreaks. But Sulla, in whose hands the victory had concentrated for the moment all power, formed a more correct judgment of things and of men. The aristocracy of Rome in its best epoch had not risen above an adherence—partly noble and partly narrow—to traditional forms. How could the clumsy collegiate government of this period be expected to carry out with energy and thoroughness a comprehensive reform of the state?

The Roman government before the period of the Gracchi

For, a whole generation after the battle of Pydna the Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by a ripple here and there on the surface. Its dominion extended over the three continents; the lustre of the Roman power and the glory of the Roman name were constantly on the increase; all eyes rested on Italy, all talents and all riches flowed thither; it seemed as if a golden age of peaceful prosperity and intellectual enjoyment of life had there begun. The Orientals of this period told each other with astonishment of the mighty republic of the West, “which subdued kingdoms far and near, so that every one who heard its name trembled; but which 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 glittered in purple dress; but they obeyed whomsoever from year to year they made their master, and there was among them neither envy nor discord.”

Spread of decay

So it seemed at a distance; matters wore a different aspect on a closer view. The government of the aristocracy was in full train to destroy its own work. Not that the sons and grandsons of the vanquished at Cannae and the victors of 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.

State of the East

The state of breathless excitement, in which the revolution the East, kept the Roman government by perpetually renewing the alarm of fire and the cry to quench it, made them lose sight of provincial matters generally; and that most of all in the case of the Asiatic East, whose remote and unwarlike nations did not thrust themselves so directly on the attention of the government as Africa, Spain, and the neighbouring Transalpine peoples. After the annexation of the kingdom of Attalus, which took place contemporaneously with the outbreak of the revolution, for a whole generation there is hardly any evidence of Rome's taking a serious part in Oriental affairs—with the exception of the establishment of the province of Cilicia in 652 (P. 139), to which the Romans were driven by the boundless audacity of the Cilician pirates, and which was in reality nothing more than the institution of a permanent station for a small division of the Roman army and fleet in the eastern waters. It was not till the down-fall of Marius in 654 had in some measure consolidated the government of the restoration, that the Roman authorities began anew to bestow some attention on the events in the East.

Egypt

In many respects matters still stood as they had done thirty years ago. The kingdom of Egypt with its two appendages of Cyrene and Cyprus was broken up, partly de jure, partly de facto, on the death of Euergetes II. (637). Cyrene went to his natural son, Ptolemseus Apion, and was for ever separated from Egypt.

The changes, which the Author has had occasion to make in the new edition of the third and fourth volumes of this work, have chiefly arisen out of the recent discovery of the Fragments of Licinianus, which have supplemented our defective information as to the epoch from the battle of Pydna to the revolt of Lepidus in various not unimportant points, but have also suggested various fresh difficulties.

Marius

Gaius Marius, the son of a poor day-labourer, was born in 599 at the village of Cereatæ then belonging to Arpinum, which afterwards obtained municipal rights as Cereatse Marianæ and still at the present day bears the name of “Marius’ Home” (Casamare). He was reared at the plough, in circumstances so mean that they seemed to preclude him from access even to the magistracies of Arpinum: he learned early—what he practised afterwards even when a general—to bear hunger and thirst, the heat of summer and the cold of winter, and to sleep on the hard ground. As soon as his age allowed him, he had entered the army, and in the severe school of the Spanish wars had rapidly raised himself to the position of an officer. In Scipio's Numantine war he, at that time twenty-three years of age, attracted the notice of the stern general by the neatness with which he kept his horse and his accoutrements, as well as by his bravery in combat and his propriety of demeanour in camp. He had returned home with honourable scars and warlike distinctions, and with the ardent wish to make himself a name in the career on which he had gloriously entered; but, as matters then stood, a man of even the highest merit could not attain those political offices, which alone led to the higher military posts, without wealth and without connections. The young officer acquired both by fortunate commercial speculations and by his union with a maiden of the ancient patrician gens of the Julii.

Romans and Italians

From the time when the defeat of Pyrrbus had put an end to the last war which the Italians had waged for their independence—or, in other words, for nearly two hundred years—the Roman primacy had now subsisted in Italy, without having been once shaken in its foundations even under circumstances of the utmost peril. Vainly had the heroic family of the Barcides, vainly had the successors of Alexander the Great and of the Achæmenidæ, endeavoured to rouse the Italian nation to contend with the too powerful capital; it had obsequiously appeared in the fields of battle on the Guadalquivir and on the Mejerdah, at the pass of Tempe and at Mount Sipylus, and with the best blood of its youth had helped its masters to achieve the subjugation of three continents. Its own position meanwhile had changed, but had deteriorated rather than improved. In a material point of view, no doubt, it had in general not much ground to complain. Though the small and intermediate landholders throughout Italy suffered in consequence of the injudicious Roman corn-laws, the larger landlords and still more the mercantile and capitalist class were flourishing, for the Italians enjoyed, as respected the financial profits of the provinces, substantially the same protection and the same privileges as Roman burgesses, and thus shared to a great extent in the material advantages of the political ascendancy of the Romans.

Literary reaction

The sixth century was, both in a political and a literary point of view, a vigorous and great age. It is true that we do not find in the field of authorship any more than in that of politics a man of the first rank; Nævius, Ennius, Plautus, Cato, gifted and lively authors of distinctly-marked individuality, were not in the highest sense men of creative talent; nevertheless we perceive in the soaring, stirring, bold straiu of their dramatic, epic, and historic attempts, that these are based on the gigantic struggles of the Punic wars. Much is only artificially transplanted, there are various faults in delineation and colouring, the form of art and the language are deficient in purity of treatment, Greek and national elements are quaintly conjoined; the whole performance betrays the stamp of its scholastic origin and wants independence and completeness; yet there exists in the poets and authors of that age, if not the full power to reach their high aim, at any rate the courage to compete with and the hope of rivalling the Greeks. It is otherwise in the epoch before us. The morning mists fell; what had been begun in the fresh feeling of the national strength hardened in war, with youthful want of insight into the difficulty of the undertaking and into the measure of their own talent, but also with youthful delight in and love to the work, could not be carried further now, when on the one hand the dull sultriness of the approaching revolutionary storm began to fill the air, and on the other hand the eyes of the more intelligent were gradually opened to the incomparable glory of Greek poetry and art and to the very moderate artistic endowments of their own nation.

Primitive races of Italy.

We have no information, not even a tradition, concerning the first migration of the human race into Italy. It was the universal belief of antiquity that in Italy, as well as elsewhere, the first population had sprung from the soil. We leave it to the province of the naturalist to decide the question of the origin of different races, and of the influence of climate in producing their diversities. In a historical point of view it is neither possible, nor is it of any importance, to determine whether the oldest recorded population of a country were autochthones or immigrants. But it is incumbent on the historical inquirer to bring to light the successive strata of population in the country of which he treats, in order to trace, from as remote an epoch as possible, the gradual progress of civilization to more perfect forms, and the suppression of races less capable of, or less advanced in, culture by nations of higher standing.

Italy is singularly poor in memorials of the primitive period, and presents in this respect a remarkable contrast to other fields of civilization. The results of Germanic antiquarian research lead to the conclusion that in England, France, the North of Germany and Scandinavia, before the settlement of the Indo-Germans in those lands, there must have dwelt, or rather roamed, a people, perhaps of Mongolian race, gaining their subsistence by hunting and fishing, making their implements of stone, clay, or bones, adorning themselves with the teeth of animals and with amber, but unacquainted with agriculture and the use of the metals.

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.