Chapter V: Preface (5)

For many centuries the Romans were water-drinkers. Little wine was made in Italy, and that of inferior quality: commonly not even the rich were wont to drink it daily; many used it only as medicine during illness; women were never to take it. For a long time, any woman in Rome who used wine inspired a sense of repulsion, like that excited in Europe up to a short time ago by any woman who smoked. At the time of Polybius, that is, toward the middle of the second century B.C., ladies were allowed to drink only a little _passum_,--a kind of sweet wine, or syrup, made of raisins. About the women too much given to the beverage of Dionysos, there were terrifying stories told. It was said, for instance, that Egnatius Mecenius beat his wife to death, because she secretly drank wine; and that Romulus absolved him (Pliny, _Nat. Hist._, bk. 14, ch. 13). It was told, on the word of Fabius Pictor, who mentioned it in his annals, that a Roman lady was condemned by the family tribunal to die of hunger, because she had stolen from her husband the keys of the wine-cellar. It was said the Greek judge Dionysius condemned to the loss of her dower a wife who, unknown to her husband, had drunk more than was good for her health: this story is one which shows that women began to be allowed the use of wine as a medicine. It was for a long time the vaunt of a true Roman to despise fine wines. For example, ancient historians tell of Cato that, when he returned in triumph from his proconsulship in Spain, he boasted of having drunk on the voyage the same wine as his rowers; which certainly was not, as we should say now, either Bordeaux or Champagne!

Cato, it is true, was a queer fellow, who pleased himself by throwing in the face of the young nobility's incipient luxury a piece of almost brutal rudeness; but he exaggerated, not falsified, the ideas and the sentiments of Romanism. At that time, it was a thing unworthy of a Roman to be a practised admirer of fine wines and to show too great a propensity for them. Then not only was the vine little and ill cultivated in Italy, but that country almost refused to admit its ability to make fine wines with its grapes. As wines of luxury, only the Greek were then accredited and esteemed--and paid for, like French wines to-day; but, though admiring and paying well for them, the Romans, still diffident and saving, made very spare use of them. Lucullus, the famous conqueror of the Pontus, told how in his father's house--in the house, therefore, of a noble family--Greek wine was never served more than once, even at the most elegant dinners. Moreover, this must have been a common custom, because Pliny says, speaking of the beginning of the last century of the Republic, "Tanta vero vino græco gratia erat ut singulæ potiones in convitu darentur"; that is, translating literally, "Greek wine was so prized that only single potions of it were given at a meal." You understand at once the significance of this phrase; Greek wine was served as to-day--at least on European tables--Champagne is served; it was too expensive to give in quantity.

This condition of things began to change after Rome became a world power, went outside of Italy, interfered in the great affairs of the Mediterranean, and came into more immediate contact with Greece and the Orient. By a strange law of correlation, as the Roman Empire spread about the Mediterranean, the vineyard spread in Italy; gradually, as the world politics of Rome triumphed in Asia and Africa, the grape harvest grew more abundant in Italy, the consumption of wine increased, the quality was refined. The bond between the two phenomena--the progress of conquest and the progress of vine-growing--is not accidental, but organic, essential, intimate. As, little by little, the policy of expansion grew, wealth and culture increased in Rome; the spirit of tradition and of simplicity weakened; luxury spread, and with it the appetite for sensations, including that of the taste for intoxicating beverages.

We have but to notice what happens about us in the modern world--when industry gains and wealth increases and cities grow, men drink more eagerly and riotously inebriating beverages--to understand what happened in Italy and in Rome, as gradually wars, tribute, blackmailing politics, pitiless usury, carried into the peninsula the spoils of the Mediterranean world, riches of the most numerous and varied forms. The old-time aversion to wine diminished; men and women, city-dwellers and countrymen, learned to drink it. The cities, particularly Rome, no longer confined themselves to slaking their thirst at the fountains; as the demand and the price for wine increased, the land-owners in Italy grew interested in offering the cup of Bacchus, and as they had invested capital in vineyards, they were drawn on by the same interest to excite ever the more the eagerness for wine among the multitude, and to perfect grape-culture and increase the crop, in imitation of the Greeks. The wars and military expeditions to the Orient not only carried many Italians, peasants and proprietors, into the midst of the most celebrated vineyards of the world, but also transported into Italy slaves and numerous Greek and Asiatic peasants who knew the best methods of cultivating the vine, and of making wines like the Greek, just as the peasants of Piedmont, of the _Veneto_, and of Sicily, have in the last twenty years developed grape-culture in Tunis and California.

Pliny, who is so rich in valuable information on the agricultural and social advances of Italy, tells us that it opened its hills and plains to the triumphal entrance of Dionysus between 130 and 120 B.C., about the time that Rome entered into possession of the kingdom of Pergamus, the largest and richest part of Asia Minor, left to it by bequest of Attalus. Thenceforward, for a century and a half, the progress of grape-growing continued without interruption; every generation poured forth new capital to enlarge the inheritance of vineyards already grown and to plant new ones. As the crop increased, the effort was redoubled to widen the sale, to entice a greater number of people to drink, to put the Italian wines by the side of the Greek.

At the distance of centuries, these vine-growing interests do not appear even in history; but they actually were a most important factor in the Roman policy, a force that helps us explain several main facts in the history of Rome. For example, vineyards were one of the foundations of the imperial authority in Italy. That political form which was called with Augustus the principality, and from which was evolved the monarchy, would not have been founded if in the last century of the Republic all Italy had not been covered with vineyards and olive orchards. The affirmation, put just so, may seem strange and paradoxical, but the truth of it will be easy to prove.

The imperial authority was gradually consolidated, because, beginning with Augustus, it succeeded in pacifying Italy after a century of commotion and civil wars and of foreign invasions, to which the secular institutions of the Republic had not known how to oppose sufficient defence; so that, little by little, right or wrong, the authority of the _Princeps_, as supreme magistrate, and the power of the Julian-Claudian house, which the supreme magistrate had organised, seemed to the Italian multitude the stable foundation of peace and order. But why was Italy, beginning with the time of Cæsar, so desperately anxious for peace and order? It would be a mistake to see in this anxiety only the natural desire of a nation, worn by anarchy, for the conditions necessary to a common social existence. The contrast of two episodes will show you that during the age of Cæsar annoyance at disorder and intolerance of it had for a special reason increased in Italy. Toward the end of the third century B.C., Italy had borne on its soil for about seventeen years the presence of an army that went sacking and burning everywhere--the army of Hannibal--without losing composure, awaiting with patience the hour for torment to cease. A century and a half later, a Thracian slave, escaping from the chain-gang with some companions, overran the country,--and Italy was frightened, implored help, stretched out its arms to Rome more despairingly than it had ever done in all the years of Hannibal.

What made Italy so fearful? Because in the time of Hannibal it had chiefly cultivated cereals and pastured cattle, while in the days of Spartacus a considerable part of its fortune was invested in vineyards and olive groves. In pastoral and grain regions the invasion of an army does relatively little damage; for the cattle can be driven in advance of the invader, and if grain fields are burned, the harvest of a year is lost but the capital is not destroyed. If, instead, an army cuts and burns olive orchards and vineyards, which are many years in growing, it destroys an immense accumulated capital. Spartacus was not a new Hannibal, he was something much more dangerous; he was a new species of _Phylloxera_ or of _Mosca olearia_ in the form of brigand bands that destroyed vines and olives, the accumulated capital of centuries. Whence, the emperor became gradually a tutelary deity of the vine and the olive, the fortune of Italy. It was he who stopped the barbarians still restless and turbulent on the frontiers of Italy, hardly over the borders; it was he who kept peace within the country between social orders and political parties; it was he who looked after the maintenance and guarding of the great highways of the peninsula, periodically clearing them of robbers and the evil-disposed that infested them; and the land-owners, who held their vineyards and olive groves more at heart than they did the great republican traditions, placed the image of the Emperor among those of their Lares, and venerated him as they had earlier revered the Senate.

Still more curious is the influence that this development of Italian viticulture exercised on the political life of Rome; for example, in the barbarous provinces of Europe, wine was an instrument of Romanisation, the effectiveness of which has been too much disregarded. In Gaul, in Spain, in Helvetia, in the Danube provinces, Rome taught many things: law, war, construction of roads and cities, the Latin language and literature, the literature and art of Greece; more, it also taught to drink wine. Whoever has read the _Commentaries_ of Cæsar will recall that, on several occasions, he describes certain more barbarous peoples of Gaul as prohibiting the importation of wine because they feared they would unnerve and corrupt themselves by habitual drunkenness. Strabo tells us of a great Gæto-Thracian empire that a Gætic warrior, Borebiste by name, founded in the time of Augustus beyond the Danube, opposite Roman possessions; while this chieftain sought to take from Greek and Latin civilisation many useful things, he severely prohibited the importation of wine. This fact and others similar, which might be cited, show that these primitive folk, exactly like the Romans of more ancient times, feared the beverage which so easily intoxicates, exactly as in China all wise people have always feared opium as a national scourge, and so many in France would to-day prohibit the manufacture of absinthe.

This hesitation and fear disappeared among the Gauls, after their country was annexed to the Empire; disappeared or was weakened among all the other peoples of the Danube and Rhine regions, and even in Germany, when they fell under Roman dominion; even also while they preserved independence, as little by little the Roman influence intensified in strength. By example, with the merchants, in literature, Rome poured out everywhere the ruddy and perfumed drink of Dionysos, and drove to the wilds and the villages, remote and poor, the national mead--the beverage of fermented barley akin to modern beer.

The Italian proprietors who were enlarging their vineyards--especially those of the valley of the Po, where already at the time of Strabo the grape-crop was very abundant--soon learned that beyond the Alps lived numerous customers. Under Augustus, Arles was already a large market for wines, both Greek and Italian; during the same period, there passed through Aquileia and Leibach considerable trade in Italian wine with the Danube regions. In the Roman castles along the Rhine, among the multitudes of Italians who followed the armies, there was not wanting the wine-dealer who sought with his liquor to infuse into the torpid blood of the barbarian a ray of southern warmth. Everywhere the Roman influence conquered national traditions; wine reigned on the tables of the rich as the lordly beverage, and the more the Gauls, the Pannonians, the Dalmatians, drank, the more money Italian proprietors made from their vineyards.

I have said that Rome diffused at once its wine and its literature: it also diffused its wine through its literature, a fact upon which I should like to dwell a moment, since it is odd and interesting for diverse reasons. We always make a mistake in judging the great literary works of the past. Two or three centuries after they were written, they serve only to bring a certain delight to the mind; consequently, we take for granted they were written only to bring us this delight. On the contrary, almost all literary works, even the greatest, had at first quite another office; they served to spread or to counteract among the author's contemporaries certain ideas and sentiments that the interests of certain directing forces favoured or opposed; indeed very often the authors were admired and remunerated far more for these services rendered to their contemporaries than for the lofty beauty of the literary works themselves.

This is the case with the odes of Horace. To understand all that they meant to say to contemporaries, one must imagine Roman society as it was then, hardly out of a century of conquests and revolutions, in disorder, unbalanced, and still crude, notwithstanding the luxuries and refinements superficially imitated from the Orient; a society eager to enjoy, yet still ill educated to exercise upon itself that discipline of good taste, without which civilisation and its pleasures aggravate more than restrain the innate brutality of men. During the first period of peace, arrived after so great disturbance, that poetry so perfect in form, which analysed and described all the most exquisite delights of sense and soul, infused a new spirit of refinement into habits, and co-operated with laborious education in teaching even the stern conquerors of the world to enjoy all the pleasures of civilisation, alike literature and love, the luxury of the city and the restfulness of the villa, fraternal friendship and good cookery. It taught, too--this master poetry of the senses--to enjoy wine, to use the drink of Dionysos not to slake the thirst, but to colour, with an intoxication now soft, now strong, the most diverse emotions: the sadness of memories, the tendernesses of friendship, the transports of love, the warmth of the quiet house, when without the furious storm and the bitter cold stiffen the universe of nature.

In the poetry of Horace, therefore, wine appears as a proteiform god, which penetrates not only the tissues of the body but also the inmost recesses of the mind and aids it in its every contingency, sad or gay. Wine consoles in ill fortune (i., 7), suffuses the senses with universal oblivion, frees from anxiety and the weariness of care, fills the empty hours, and warms away the chill of winter (i., 9). But the wine that has the power to infuse gentle forgetfulness into the veins, has also the contrasting power of rousing lyric fervour in the spirit, the fervour heroic, divining, mystic (iii., 2). Finally, wine is also a source of power and heroism, as well as of joy and sensuous delight; a principle of civilisation and of progress (ii., 14).

I wish I could repeat to you all the Dionysic verse of this old poet from Venosa, whose subjects and motives, even though expressed in the choicest forms, may seem common and conventional in our time and to us, among whom for centuries the custom of drinking wine daily with meals has been a general habit. But these poems had a very different significance when they were written, in that society in which many did not dare drink wine commonly, considering it as a medicine, or as a beverage injurious to the health, or as a luxury dangerous to morals and the purse; in that time when entire nations, like Gaul, hesitated between the invitations of the ruddy vine-crowned Bacchus, come with his legions victorious, and the desperate supplications of Cervisia, the national mead, pale and fleeing to the forests. In those times and among those men, Horace with his dithyrambics affected not only the spirit but the will, uniting the subtle suggestion of his verses to all the other incentives and solicitations that on every side were persuading men to drink. He corroded the ancient Italian traditions, which opposed with such repugnance and so many fears the efforts of the vintners and the vineyard labourers to sell wine at a high price; in this way he rendered service to Italian viticulture.

The books of Horace, while he was still living, became what we might call school text-books; that is, they were read by young students, which must have increased their influence on the mind. Imagine that to-day a great European poet should describe and extol in magnificent verses the sensuous delight of smoking opium; should deify, in a mythology rich in imagery, the inebriating virtues of this product. Imagine that the verses of this poet were read in the schools: you may then by comparison picture to yourself the action of the poems of Horace.

The political and military triumph of Rome in the Mediterranean world signified therefore the world triumph of wine. So true is this, that in Europe and America to-day the sons of Rome drink wine as their national daily beverage. The Anglo-Saxons and Germans drink it in the same way as the Romans of the second century B.C., on formal occasions, or as a medicine. When you see at an European or American table the gold or the ruby of the fair liquor gleaming in the glasses, remember that this is another inheritance from the Roman Empire and an ultimate effect of the victories of Rome; that probably we should drink different beverages if Cæsar had been overcome at Alesia or if Mithridates had been able decisively to reconquer Asia Minor from Rome. It astonishes you to see between politics and enology, between the great historical events and the lot of a humble plant, so close a bond.

I can show you another aspect of this phenomenon, even stranger and more philosophical. I have already said that at the beginning of the first century before Christ, although Italy had already planted many vineyards and gathered generous crops, Italian wines were still little sought after, while the contrary was true of the Greek. Pliny writes:

The wines of Italy were for long despised.... Foreign wines
had great vogue for some time even after the consulate of
Opimius [121 B.C.], and up to the times of our grandfathers,
although then Falernian was already discovered.

In the second half of the last century of the Republic and the first half of the first century B.C., this condition of things changed; Italian wines rose to great fame and demand, and took from the Greek the pre-eminence they so long had held. Finally, this pre-eminence formed one of the spoils of world conquest, and that not one of the meagrest. Pliny, writing in the second half of the first century, says (bk. 14, ch. 11):

Among the eighty most celebrated qualities of wine made in all
the world, Italy makes about two thirds; therefore in this it
outdoes other peoples.

The first wines that came into note seem to have been those of southern Italy, especially Falernian, and Julius Cæsar seems to have done much to make it known. Pliny tells us (bk. 14, ch. 15) that, in the great popular banquet offered to celebrate his triumph after his return from Egypt, he gave to every group of banqueters a cask of Chian and an _amphora_ of Falernian, and that in his third consulate he distributed four kinds of wine to the populace, Lesbian, Chian, Falernian, and Mamertine; two Greek qualities and two Italian. It is evident that he wished officially to recognise national wines as equal to the foreign, in favour of Italian vintners; so that Julius Cæsar, that universal man, has a place not only in the history of the great Italian conquests, but also in that of Italian viticulture.

The wines of the valley of the Po were not long in making place for themselves after those of southern Italy. We know that Augustus drank only Rhetian wine; that is, of the Valtellina, one of the valleys famous also to-day for several delicious wines; we know that Livia drank Istrian wine.

I have said that Italy exported much wine to Gaul, to the Danube regions, and to Germany; to this may be added another remark, both curious and interesting. _The Periplus of the Erytrian Sea_, attributed to Arrianus, a kind of practical manual of geography, compiled in the second century A.D., tells us that in that century Italian wine was exported as far as India; so far had its fame spread! There is no doubt that the wealth in the first and second century A.D., which flowed for every section of Italy, came in part from the nourishing vineyards planted upon its hills and plains; and that the Italians, who had gone to the Orient for reasons political and financial, had fallen upon yet greater fortune in contrabanding Bacchus from the superb vineyards of the Ægean islands, and transporting him to the hills of Italy; a new seat whereon the capricious god of the vine rested for two centuries, until he took again to wandering, and crossed the Alps.

We may at this juncture ask ourselves if this enologic pre-eminence of Italy was the result only of a greater skill in cultivating the vine and pressing the grapes. I think not. It does not seem that Italy invented new methods of wine-making; it appears, instead, that it restricted itself to imitating what the Greeks had originated. On the other hand, it is certain, at least in northern and central Italy, that, although the vine grows, it does so less spontaneously and prosperously than in the Ægean islands, Greece, and Asia Minor, because the former regions are relatively too cold.

The great fame of the Italian wines had another cause, a political: the world power and prestige of Rome. This psychological phenomenon is found in every age, among all peoples, and is one of the most important and essential in all history. What is beautiful and what is ugly? What is good and what is bad? What is true and what is false? In every period men must so distinguish between things, must adopt or repudiate certain ideas, practise or abandon certain habits, buy certain objects and refuse others; but one should not believe that all peoples make these discernments spontaneously, according to their natural inclination. It always happens that some nations succeed, by war, or money, or culture, in persuading the lesser peoples about them that they are superior; and strong in this admiration, they impose upon their susceptible neighbours, by a kind of continuous suggestion, their own ideas as the truest, their own customs as the noblest, their own arts as the most perfect.

For this reason chiefly, wars have often distant and complicated repercussions on the habits, the ideas, the commerce of nations. War, to which so many philosophers would attribute a divine spirit, so many others a diabolic, appears to the historian as above all a means--allow me the phrase, a bit frivolous, but graphic--of noisy _réclame_, advertisement for a people; because, although a more civilised people may be conquered by one more barbarous, less cultured, less moral; although, also, the superiority in war may be relative, and men are not on the earth merely to give each other blows, but to work, to study, to know, to enjoy; yet the majority of men are easily convinced that he who has won in a war is in everything, or at least in many things, superior to him who has lost. So it happened, for example, after the late Franco-Prussian War, that not only the armies organised or reorganised after 1870 imitated even the German uniform, as they had earlier copied the French, but in politics, science, industry, even in art, everything German was more generously admired. Even the consumption of beer heavily increased in the wine countries, and under the protection of the Treaty of Frankfurt, the god Gambrinus has made some audacious sallies into the territories sacred to Dionysos.

The same thing occurred in regard to wine in the ancient world. Athens and Alexander the Great had given to Greek wine the widest reputation, all the peoples of the Mediterranean world being persuaded that that was the best of all. Then the centre of power shifted to the west, toward the city built on the banks of the Tiber, and little by little as the power of Rome grew, the reputation of its wine increased, while that of Greece declined; until, finally, with world empire, Italy conquered pre-eminence in the wine market, and held it with the Empire; for while Italy was lord, Italian wine seemed most excellent and was paid for accordingly.

This propensity of minor or subject peoples to imitate those dominant or more famous, is the greatest prize that rewards the pre-eminent for the fatigue necessary to conquer that place of honour; it is the reason why cultured and civilised nations ought naturally to seek to preserve a certain political, economic, and military supremacy, without which their intellectual superiority would weaken or at least lose a part of its value. The human multitude in the vast world are not yet so intelligent and refined as to prize that which is beautiful and grand for its own sake; and they are readily induced to admire as excellent what is but mediocre, if behind it there is a force to be feared or to impose it. Indeed, we may observe in the modern world a phenomenon analogous to that in historic Italy. What, in succeeding centuries, have been the changes in the enologic superiority conquered by Rome?

Naturally I cannot recount the whole story, although it would be interesting; but will only observe that contemporary civilisation confirms the law by which predominance in the Latin world and the pre-eminence of wine are indissolubly bound together in history.

Paris is the modern Rome, the metropolis of the Latin world. France continues, as far as can be done in modern times, the ancient sway of Rome, irradiating round so much of the globe, by commerce, literature, art, science, industry, dominance of political ideas, the influence of the Latin world, making tributaries to Latin culture of barbarous peoples, and nations too young for leadership or grown too old; and France has inherited the pre-eminence in wines, although it lies at the farthest confines of the vine-bearing zone, beyond which the tree of Bacchus refuses to live. Do you realise that in all the wide belt of earth where vineyards flourish, only the dry hills of Champagne ripen the delicious effervescent wine that refigures in modern civilisation--at least for those who are fond of wine--the nectar of the gods? And this, while effervescent wines are made in innumerable parts of the world and many are so good that one wonders if it were not possible for them, manufactured with care, placed in sightly bottles, and sold at as high a price as the most famous French Champagne, to dispute a part of the admiration that the devotees of Bacchus render to the French wine. Ah, they do not scintillate before the eyes of the world as symbols of gay intoxication like the others, for through those bottles passes no ray of the glory and prestige of France! An historian fond of paradoxes might affirm, and with great likelihood, what does not appear at first glance: that the great brands of French Champagne would not be sold so dear if the French Revolution had been suppressed by the European coalition, and if France, overcome in the terrible trial, had been enchained by the absolute monarchies of Europe like a dangerous beast. It would even be possible to declare that the reputation of Champagne is rooted, not only in the ground where the grapes are cultivated, and preserved in the vast cellars where the precious crops are stored, but in all the historic tradition of France, in all that which has given France worldly glory and power: the victorious wars, the distant conquests, the colonies, the literature, the art, the science, the money capital, and the spirit--cosmopolitan, expansive, dynamic--of its history. It would be possible to declare that it makes and pours into all the world its precious wine by that same virtue, intimate, national, and historic, by which it created the encyclopædia and made the Revolution, let Napoleon loose on Europe and founded the Empire, wrote so many famous books and built on the banks of the Seine the marvellous universal city, where all the forces of modern civilisation are gathered together and hold each other in equilibrium: aristocracy and democracy, the cosmopolite spirit and the spirit of nationality, money and science, war and fashion, art and religion. If France had not had its great history, Champagne would have remained an effervescing wine of modest household use that the peasants place every year in barrels for their own family consumption or to sell in the vicinity of the city of Rheims.

Social Development of the Roman Empire.

Augustus died the twenty-third of August of the year 14 A.D., saying to Livia, as she embraced him: "Adieu, Livia, remember our long life." Suetonius adds that, before dying, he had asked the friends who had come to salute him, if he seemed to them "_mimum vitæ commode transegisse"_--to have acted well his life's comedy. In this famous phrase many historians have seen a confession, an acknowledgment of the long rôle of deceit that the unsurpassable actor had played to his public. What a mistake! If Augustus did pronounce that famous sentence, he meant to say quite another thing. An erudite German has demonstrated with the help of many texts that the ancient writers, and especially the stoic philosophers, commonly compared life to a theatrical representation, divided into different acts and with an inevitable epilogue, death, without intending to say that it was a thing little serious or not true. They only meant that life is an action, which has a natural sequence from beginning to end, like a theatrical representation. There is then no need to translate the expression of Augustus "the play"--that is, the deceit--"is ended," but rather "the drama"--the work committed by destiny--"is finished."

The drama was ended, and what a drama! It is difficult to find in history a longer and more troubled career than that known by Augustus for nearly sixty years, from the far-away days when, young, handsome, full of ambition and daring, he had come to Rome, throwing himself head first into the frightful turmoil let loose by the murder of Cæsar, to that tranquil death, the death of a great wise man, in the midst of the _pax Romana_, now spread from end to end of the Empire! After so many tragic catastrophies had struck his class and his family, _Euthanasia_--the death of the happy--descended for the first time since the passing of Lucullus, to close the eyes of a great Roman.

There is no better means of giving an idea of the mission of the Roman Empire in the world than to summarise the life and work of this famous personage. Augustus has been in our century somewhat the victim of Napoleon I. The extraordinary course of events at the beginning of the nineteenth century made so vivid an impression on succeeding generations, that for the whole of the century people have been able to admire only the great agitators, men whose lives are filled with storm and clamorous action. Compared with that of Napoleon or of Cæsar, the figure of Augustus is simple and colourless. The Roman peace, in the midst of which he died, was his work only very indirectly. Augustus had wearied his whole life in reorganising the finances and the army, in crushing the revolts of the European provinces, in defending the boundaries of the Rhine and the Danube, in making effective in Rome, as far as he could, the old aristocratic constitution. All intent on this service, a serious and difficult one, he never dreamed of regenerating the Empire by a powerful administration. Even if he had wished it, he would not have had the means--men and money.

For the past century, the vastness and power of the administration that governed the Empire has been greatly admired. Without discussing many things possible on this point, it must be observed that this judgment does not apply to the times of Augustus and Tiberius, because then this administration did not exist. During the first fifty years of the Empire, the provinces were all governed, as under the Republic, by proconsuls or proprætors, each accompanied by a quæstor, a few subordinate officials, freedmen, friends, and slaves. A few dozen of men governed the provinces, as vast as states. Augustus added to this rudimentary administration but one organ, the procurator, chosen from freedmen or knights, charged with overseeing the collection of tribute and expenses; that is, caring for the interests, not of the provinces, but of Rome. Consequently, the government was weak and inactive in all the provinces.

Whoever fancies the government of Rome modelled after the type of modern governments, invading, omnipotent, omnipresent, deceives himself. There were sent into the provinces nobles belonging to rich and noted families, who had therefore no need to rob the subjects too much; and these men ruled, making use of the laws, customs, institutions, families of nobles, of each place, exactly as England now does in many parts of its Empire. As in general these governors were not possessed of any great activity, they did not meddle much in the internal affairs of the subject peoples. To preserve the unity of the Empire and the supremacy of Italy against all enemies, within and without; to exploit reasonably this supremacy; for the rest, to let every people live as best pleased it: such was the policy of Augustus and of Tiberius, the policy of the first century A.D. In short, this was but the idea of the old aristocratic party, adapted to the new times.

So the Roman Government gave itself little concern at this time for the provinces, nor did it build in them any considerable public work. It did not construct roads, nor canals, nor harbours, except when they were necessary to the metropolis; for example, Agrippa made the network of Gallic roads; Augustus opened the first three great highways that crossed the Alps. It would be a mistake to suppose that these important constructions were designed to favour the progress of Gallic commerce; they were strategic highways made to defend the Rhine. As gradually Gaul grew rich, Rome had to recognise that the weak garrisons, set apart in the year 27 for the defence of the Rhine and the Danube, were insufficient. It would have been necessary to increase the army, but the finances were in bad condition. Augustus then thought to base defence on the principle that the immense frontiers could not all be assailed at the same time, and therefore he constructed some great military roads across the Alps and Gaul, to be able to collect the soldiery rapidly from all parts of the Empire at any point menaced, on the Rhine or on the Danube.

The imperial policy of Augustus and that of Tiberius, who applied the same principles with still greater vigour, was above all a negative policy. Accordingly, it could please only those denying as useful to progress another kind of men, the great agitators of the masses. Shall we therefore conclude that Augustus and Tiberius were useless? So doing, we should run the risk of misunderstanding all the history of the Roman conquest. By merely comprehending the value of the apparent inactivity of Augustus and Tiberius, one can understand the essence of the policy of world expansion initiated by the Roman aristocracy after the Second Punic War. At the beginning, this policy was pre-eminently destructive. Everywhere Rome either destroyed or weakened, not nations or peoples, but republics, monarchies, theocracies, principalities--that is, the political superstructures that framed the different states, great or small; everywhere it put in place of these superstructures the weak authority of its governors, of the Senate, of its own prestige; everywhere it left intact or gave greater freedom to the elementary forms of human association, the family, the tribe, the city.

So for two centuries Rome continued in Orient and Occident to suppress bureaucracies, to dismiss or reduce armies, to close royal palaces, to limit the power of priestly castes or republican oligarchies, substituting for all these complicated organisations a proconsul with some dozens of vicegerent secretaries and attendants. The last enterprise of this policy, which I should be tempted to call "state-devouring," was the destruction of the dynasty of the Ptolemies, in Egypt. Without doubt, the suppression of so many states, continued for two centuries, could not be accomplished without terrible upheavals. It would be useless to repaint here the grim picture of the last century of the Republic; sufficient to say, the grandiosity of this convulsion has hindered most people from seeing that the state-devouring policy of Rome included in itself, by the side of the forces of dissolution, beneficent, creative forces, able to bring about a new birth. If this policy had not degenerated into an unbridled sacking, it could have effectuated everywhere notable economies in the expenses of government that were borne by the poorer classes, suppressing as it did so many armies, courts, bureaucracies, wars. It is clear that Rome would have been able to gather in on all sides, especially in the Orient, considerable tribute, merely by taking from the various peoples much less than the cost of their preceding monarchies and continuous wars. Moreover, Rome established with the conquests throughout the immense Empire what we would call a régime of free exchange; made neighbours of territories formerly separated by constant wars, unsafe communication, and international anarchy; and rendered possible the opening up of mines and forests hitherto inaccessible.

The apparent inactivity of Augustus and Tiberius was simply the ultimate and most beneficent phase of the state-devouring policy of Rome, that in which, the destructive forces exhausted, the creative forces began to act. Augustus and Tiberius only prolonged indefinitely by means of expedients that mediocre order and that partial tranquillity re-established after Actium by the general weariness; but exactly for this reason were they so useful to the world. In this peace, in this mediocre order, the policy of expansion of Rome, finally rid of all the destructive forces, matured all the benefits inherent within it. Finally, after a frightful crisis, the world was able to enjoy a liberty and an autonomy such as it had never previously enjoyed and which perhaps it will never again in an equal degree of civilisation and in so great an extension.

The Empire then covered Spain, France, Belgium, a part of Germany and Austria, Switzerland and Italy, the Balkanic countries, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, a part of Arabia, Egypt, and all northern Africa. I do not believe that the political _personnel_ that made up the central government of this enormous Empire ever comprised more than 2000 men. The army charged with defending so many territories numbered about 200,000 men--fewer than the present army of Italy alone. The effects of this order of things were soon to be seen; in all the Mediterranean basin there began a rapid and universal economic expansion, which, on a smaller scale, might remind one of what Europe and America have seen in the nineteenth century. New lands were cultivated, new mines opened, new wares manufactured, exports sent into regions formerly closed or unknown; and every new source of wealth, creating new riches, made labour and commerce progress.

Foremost among all nations of the Empire, at the centre, Italy rapidly consolidated its fortune and its domination. After the mad plundering of the times of Cæsar, followed methodical exploiting. Italy attracted to itself by the power of political leadership the precious metals and wares of luxury from every part of the Empire; the largest quantity of these things passed through Rome, before being scattered throughout the peninsula in exchange for the agricultural and industrial products of Italy, consumed in the capital. Consequently the middle classes and many cities grew rich, especially the cities of the Campania, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Naples, Pozzuoli, through which passed all the trade between Italy and Egypt. In addition, Italy found an abundant source of income in the exportation of wine and oil.

In short, having at last emerged from revolution, the peoples of Italy rallied around Rome and the imperial power, united and relatively content. At the same time, the provinces began among themselves, about Italy, a great interchange of merchandise, men, ideas, customs, across the Mediterranean. Rome and Italy were invaded by a crowd of Orientals, slaves, freedmen, merchants, artisans, _litterati_, artists, acrobats, poets, adventurers; and contemporaneously with Rome and Italy, the agricultural provinces of the West, especially those along the Danube. Rome did not conquer the barbarous provinces of Europe for itself alone; it conquered them also for the East, which, in Mesia, Dalmatia, Pannonia, among those barbarians growing civilised and eager to live in cities, found customers for their industries in articles of luxury, for their artists, teachers of literature, and propagandists of religion.

We are therefore able to explain to ourselves why, beginning from the time of Augustus, all the industrial cities of the Orient--Pergamon, Laodicea, Ephesus, Ierapolis, Tyre, Sidon, Alexandria--entered upon an era of new and refulgent prosperity. Finally, we add the singular enriching of two nations, whose names return anew united for the last time, Egypt and Gaul. To all the numerous sources of Gallic wealth there is to be added yet another, the importance of which is easier to understand after what I have said on the development of the Empire. Pliny tells us that all Gaul wove linen sails. The progress of navigation, a consequence of the progress of commerce, much increased the demand for linen sail-cloth, something that explains the spread of flax cultivation in Gaul and the profit derived from it.

As to Egypt, it not only found in the pacified empire new outlets for its old industries, but also succeeded in engaging a large part of the new commerce with the extreme Orient, which was at this time greatly on the increase. From India and China were imported pearls, diamonds, silk fabrics; for the use of these wares gained largely during this century, as it has done in recent times in Europe and America; perfumes were also imported, and rice, which served as a medicament and to prepare dishes of luxury.

The unity of the Empire was due far more to this great economic development that began under Augustus than to the political action of the early emperors. Little by little, imperial interests became so numerous and so considerable that Rome saw the effort necessary to keep up the unity diminish. Everywhere, even in the most distant regions, powerful minorities formed that worked for Rome and against old separating, anti-uniting forces, against old traditions and local patriotism alike. The wealthy classes everywhere became in a special way wholly favourable to Rome. Therefore there is no more serious mistake than regarding the Roman Empire as the exclusive work of a government: it was in truth created by two diverse forces, operating one after the other--each in its own time, for both were necessary: a force of destruction--the state-devouring policy of Rome; a force of reconstruction--the economic unification. The annihilation of states, without which there would have been no economic unification, was the work of the government and the armies. It was the politicians of the Senate that destroyed so many states by wars and diplomatic intrigues; but the economic unification was made chiefly by the infinitely little--the peasant, the artisan, the educated man--the nameless many, that lived and worked and passed away, leaving hardly trace or record. These unknown that laboured, each seeking his own personal happiness, contributed to create the Empire as much as did the great statesmen and generals. For this reason I can never regard without a certain emotion the mutilated inscriptions in the museums, chance salvage from the great shipwreck of the ancient world, that have preserved the name of some land-owner, or merchant, or physician, or freedman. Lo! what remains of these generations of obscure workers, who were the indispensable collaborators of the great statesmen and diplomatists of Rome, and without whom the political world of Rome would have been but a gigantic enterprise of military brigandage!

The great historic merit of Augustus and of Tiberius is that they presided over the passage from the destructive to the reorganising phase with their wise, prudent, apparently inactive policy. The transition, like all transitions, was difficult; the disintegrating forces were not yet exhausted; the upbuilding forces were still very weak; the world of the time was in unstable equilibrium, violent perturbations certainly yet possible. Without doubt, it is hard to say what would have happened if, instead of being governed by the policy of Augustus, the world had fallen into the hands of an adventurous oligarchy like that which gathered around Alexander the Great; but we can at least affirm that the sagacity and prudence of Augustus, which twenty centuries afterward appear as inactivity, did much to avoid such disturbances, the consequences of which, in a world so exhausted, would have been grave.

Nor is it correct to believe that this policy was easy. Moderation and passivity, even when good for the governed, rust and waste away governments, which must always be doing something, even if it be only making mistakes. In fact, while supreme power usually brings return and much return to him who exercises it, especially in monarchies, it cost instead, and unjustly, to Augustus and Tiberius. Augustus had to offer to the monster, as Tiberius called the Empire, almost all his family, beginning with the beloved Julia, and had to spend for the state almost all his fortune. We know that although in the last twenty years of his life he received by many bequests a sum amounting to a billion and four hundred million sesterces, he left his heirs only one hundred and fifty million sesterces, all the rest having been spent by him for the Republic: this was the singular civil list of this curious monarch, who, instead of fleecing his subjects, spent for them almost all he had. It is vain to speak of Tiberius: the Empire cost him the only thing that perhaps he held dear, his fame. A philosophic history would be wrong in not recognising the grandeur of these sacrifices, which are the last glory of the Roman nobility. The old political spirit of the Roman nobility gave to Augustus and Tiberius the strength to make these sacrifices, and they probably saved ancient civilisation from a most difficult crisis.

It may be observed that Augustus and Tiberius worked for the Empire and the future without realising it. Far from understanding that the economic progress of their time would unify the Empire better than could their laws and their legions, they feared it; they believed that it would everywhere diffuse "corruption," even in the armies, and therefore weaken the imperial power of resistance against the barbarians on the Rhine and the Danube. The German peril--the future had luminously to demonstrate it--was much less than Augustus and Tiberius believed. In other words, the first two emperors thought that the unity of the Empire would be maintained by a vigorous, solid army, while the economic progress, which spread "corruption," appeared to them to put it to risk.

Exactly the opposite happened; the army continued to decay, notwithstanding the desperate efforts of Tiberius, while the inner force of economic interests held the countries well bound together. It is impossible to oppose this course of reasoning, in itself most accurate; but what conclusion is to be drawn from it? In the chaotic conflict of passions and interests that make up the world, the deeds of a man or a party are not useful in proportion to the objective truth of the ideas acted out, or to the success attained. Their usefulness depends upon the direction of the effort, on the ends it proposes, on the results it obtains. There are men and parties of whom one might say, they were right to be wrong, when chimerical ideas and mistakes have sustained their courage to carry out an effective effort; there are others, instead, of whom it might be said that they were wrong to be right, when their clear vision of present and past kept them from accomplishing some painful but necessary duty.

Certainly the old Roman traditions were destined to be overwhelmed by the invasion of Oriental ideas and habits; but what might not have happened if every one had understood this from the very times of Augustus; if then no one had opposed the invasion of Orientalism; if mysticism and the monarchy of divine right had transformed Italy or the Empire within fifty years instead of three centuries? I should not at all hesitate to affirm that certain errors are in certain conjunctions much wiser than the corresponding verities. There is nothing more useful in life than resistance, though apparently futile, against social forces fated to perish, because these, struggling on to the very end, always succeed in imposing a part of themselves on the victorious power, and the result is always better than a complete and unantagonised victory of the opposing force. To the obstinate resistance with which republican principles combated Asiatic monarchy in Rome, we must even to-day render thanks for the fact that Europe was not condemned, like Asia, to carry the eternal yoke of semidivine absolutism, even in dynastic regimes. What social force destined to perish would still have power to struggle if it clearly foresaw its inevitable future dissolution; if it did not fortify itself a little with some deluding vision of its own future?

Augustus and Tiberius were deceived. They wished to reanimate what was doomed; they feared what for the moment was not dangerous. They are the last representatives of the policy initiated by the Scipios and not the initiators of the policy that created the bureaucratic Empire of Diocletian: yet this is exactly their glory. They were right to be wrong; and they rendered to the Empire an immense service, for the very reason that the definite outcome of their efforts was diametrically opposed to the idea that animated them. But we need not dwell on this point. Such were the ideas of the two emperors and the results of their work; the true Empire, known to all, the monarchic, Asiaticised, bureaucratic Empire, grew out of this little-governed beginning that Augustus and Tiberius allowed to live in the freedom of the largest autonomy. How was it formed? This is the great problem that I shall try to solve in the sequence of my work. Naturally, I cannot now résumé all the ideas I mean to develop: I confine myself here to some of the simplest considerations, which seem to me surest.

The picture of the Empire, so brilliant from the economic stand-point, is much less so from the intellectual: here we touch its great weakness. Destroying so many governments, especially in the Orient, Rome had at the same time decapitated the intellectual _élites_ of the ancient world; for the courts of the monarchies were the great firesides of mental activity. Rome had therefore, together with states and governments, destroyed scientific and literary institutions, centres of art, traditions of refinement, of taste, of æsthetic elegance. So everywhere, with the Roman domination, the practical spirit won above the philosophical and scientific, commerce over arts and letters, the middle classes over historic aristocracies. Already weakened by the overthrow of the most powerful Asiatic monarchies, these _élites_ received the final blow on the disappearance of their last protection, the dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt.