Chapter IV: , VII (24)

The fatal folly of the long war was an expedition against the
distant city of Syracuse (B. C. 415-413), into which the
Athenians were enticed by the restless and unscrupulous
ambition of Alcibiades. The entire force sent to Sicily
perished there, and the strength and spirit of Athens were
ruinously sapped by the fearful calamity. She maintained the
war, however, until 404 B. C., when, having lost her fleet in
the decisive battle of Ægospotami, and being helplessly
blockaded by sea and land, the city was surrendered to the
Spartan general Lysander. Her walls and fortifications were
then destroyed and her democratic government was overthrown,
giving place to an oligarchy known as the "thirty tyrants."
The democracy soon suppressed the thirty tyrants and regained
control, and Athens, in time, rose somewhat from her deep
humiliation, but never again to much political power in
Greece. In intellect and cultivation, the superiority of the
Attic state was still maintained, and its greatest productions
in philosophy and eloquence were yet to be given to the world.

Spartan and Theban Ascendancy.

After the fall of Athens, Sparta was dominant in the whole of
Greece for thirty years and more, exercising her power more
oppressively than Athens had done. Then Thebes, which had been
treacherously seized and garrisoned by the Spartans, threw off
their yoke (B. C. 379) and led a rising, under her great and
high-souled citizen, Epaminondas, which resulted in bringing
Thebes to the head of Greek affairs. But the Theban ascendancy
was short-lived, and ended with the death of Epaminondas in
362 B. C.

Macedonian Supremacy.

Meantime, while the city-states of Hellas proper had been
wounding and weakening one another by their jealousies and
wars, the semi-Greek kingdom of Macedonia, to the north of
them, in their own peninsula, had been acquiring their
civilization and growing strong. And now there appeared upon
its throne a very able king, Philip, who took advantage of
their divisions, interfered in their affairs, and finally made
a practical conquest of the whole peninsula, by his victory at
the battle of Chæronea (B. C. 338). At Athens, the great
orator Demosthenes had exerted himself for years to rouse
resistance to Philip. If his eloquence failed then, it has
served the world immortally since, by delighting and
instructing mankind.

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King Philip was succeeded by his famous son, Alexander the
Great, who led an army of Macedonians and Greeks into Asia (B.
C. 334), overthrew the already crumbling Persian power,
pursued his conquests through Afghanistan to India, and won a
great empire which he did not live to rule. When he died (B.
C. 323), his generals divided the empire among them and fought
with one another for many years. But the general result was
the spreading of the civilization and language of the Greeks,
and the establishing of their intellectual influence, in
Egypt, in Syria, in Asia Minor, and beyond.

In Greece itself, a state of disturbance and of political
confusion and weakness prevailed for another century. There
was promise of something better, in the formation, by several
of the Peloponnesian states, of a confederacy called the
Achaian League, which might possibly have federated and
nationalized the whole of Hellas in the end; but the Romans,
at this juncture, turned their conquering arms eastward, and
in three successive wars, between 211 and 146 B. C., they
extinguished the Macedonian kingdom, and annexed it, with the
whole peninsula, to the dominions of their wonderful republic.

The Romans.

The Romans, as stated already, are believed to have been
originally near kindred to the Greeks. The same movement, it
is supposed, in the successive outswarmings of Aryan peoples,
deposited in one peninsula the Italian tribes, and in the next
peninsula, eastward, the tribes of the Hellenes. Among the
Italian tribes were Latins, Umbrians, Sabines, Samnites, etc.,
occupying the middle and much of the southern parts of the
peninsula, while a mysterious alien people, the Etruscans,
whose origin is not known, possessed the country north of them
between the Arno and the Tiber. In the extreme south were
remnants of a primitive race, the Iapygian, and Greek colonies
were scattered there around the coasts. From the Latins sprang
the Romans, at the beginning of their separate existence; but
there seems to have been a very early union of these Romans of
the primitive tradition with a Sabine community, whereby was
formed the Roman city-state of historical times. That union
came about through the settlement of the two communities,
Latin and Sabine, on two neighboring hills, near the mouth of
the river Tiber, on its southern bank. In the view of some
historians, it is the geographical position of those hills,
hardly less than the masterful temper and capacity of the race
seated on them, which determined the marvellous career of the
city founded on that site. Says Professor Freeman: "The whole
history of the world has been determined by the geological
fact that at a point a little below the junction of the Tiber
and the Anio the isolated hills stand nearer to one another
than most of the other hills of Latium. On a site marked out
above all other sites for dominion, the centre of Italy, the
centre of Europe, as Europe then was, a site at the junction
of three of the great nations of Italy, and which had the
great river as its highway to lands beyond the bounds of
Italy, stood two low hills, the hill which bore the name of
Latin Saturn, and the hill at the meaning of whose name of
Palatine scholars will perhaps guess for ever. These two
hills, occupied by men of two of the nations of Italy, stood
so near to one another that a strait choice indeed was laid on
those who dwelled on them. They must either join together on
terms closer than those which commonly united Italian leagues,
or they must live a life of border warfare more ceaseless,
more bitter, than the ordinary warfare of Italian enemies.
Legend, with all likelihood, tells us that warfare was tried;
history, with all certainty, tells us that the final choice
was union. The two hills were fenced with a single wall; the
men who dwelled on them changed from wholly separate
communities into tribes of a single city."

The followers of Romulus occupied the Palatine Mount, and the
Sabines were settled on the Quirinal. At subsequent times, the
Cœlian, the Capitoline, the Aventine, the Esquiline and the
Viminal hills were embraced in the circumvallation, and the
city on the seven hills thus acquired that name.

If modern students and thinkers, throwing light on the
puzzling legends and traditions of early Rome from many
sources, in language and archæology, have construed their
meaning lightly, then great importance attaches to those first
unions or incorporations of distinct settlements in the
forming of the original city-state. For it was the beginning
of a process which went on until the whole of Latium, and then
the whole of Italy, and, finally, the whole Mediterranean
world, were joined to the seven hills of Rome. "The whole
history of Rome is a history of incorporation"; and it is
reasonable to believe that the primal spring of Roman
greatness is found in that early adoption and persistent
practice of the policy of political absorption, which gave
conquest a character it had never borne before. At the same
time, this view of the creation of the Roman state contributes
to an understanding of its early constitutional history. It
supposes that the union of the first three tribes which
coalesced—those of the Palatine, the Quirinal and Capitoline
(both occupied by the Sabines) and the Cœlian hills—ended the
process of incorporation on equal terms. These formed the
original Roman people—the "fathers," the "patres," whose
descendants appear in later times as a distinct class or
order, the "patricians"—holding and struggling to maintain
exclusive political rights, and exclusive ownership of the
public domain, the "ager publicus," which became a subject of
bitter contention for four centuries. Around these heirs of
the "fathers" of Rome arose another class of Romans, brought
into the community by later incorporations, and not on equal
terms. If the first class were "fathers," these were children,
in a political sense, adopted into the Roman family, but without
a voice in general affairs, or a share in the public lands, or
eligibility to the higher offices of the state. These were the
"plebeians" or "plebs" of Rome, whose long struggle with the
patricians for political and agrarian rights is the more
interesting side of Roman history throughout nearly the whole
of the prosperous age of the republic.

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At Rome, as at Athens, there was a period of early kingship,
the legends of which are as familiar to us all as the stories
of the Bible, but the real facts of which are almost totally
unknown. It is surmised that the later kings—the well known
Tarquins of the classical tale—were Etruscan princes (it is
certain that they were Etruscans), who had broken for a time
the independence of the Romans and extended their sovereignty
over them. It is suspected, too, that this period of Etruscan
domination was one in which Roman civilization made a great
advance, under the tuition of a more cultivated people. But if
Rome in its infancy did know a time of subjugation, the
endurance was not long. It ended, according to Roman
chronology, in the 245th year of the city, or 509 B.C., by the
expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, the last of the kings.

The Roman Republic.

The Republic was then founded; but it was an aristocratic and
not a democratic republic. The consuls, who replaced the
kings, were required to be patricians, and they were chosen by
the landholders of the state. The senate was patrician; all
the important powers of government were in patrician hands,
and the plebs suffered grievous oppression in consequence.
They were not of a tamely submissive race. They demanded
powers for their own protection, and by slow degrees they won
them—strong as the patricians were in their wealth and their
trained political skill.

Precisely as in Athens, the first great effort among the
common people was to obtain relief from crushing burdens of
debt, which had been laid upon them in precisely the same
way—by loss of harvests while in military service, and by the
hardness of the laws which creditors alone had framed. An army
of plebs, just home from war, marched out of the city and
refused to return until magistrates of their own choosing had
been conceded to them. The patricians could not afford to lose
the bone and sinew of their state, and they yielded the point
in demand (B. C. 494). This first "secession of the plebs"
brought about the first great democratic change in the Roman
constitution, by calling into existence a powerful
magistracy—the Tribunes of the Plebs—who henceforth stood
between the consuls and the common people, for the protection
of the latter.

From this first success the plebeian order went forward, step
by step, to the attainment of equal political rights in the
commonwealth, and equal participation in the lands which Roman
conquest was continually adding to the public domain. In 450
B. C., after ten years of struggle, they secured the
appointment of a commission which framed the famous Twelve
Tables of the Law, and so established a written and certain
code. Five years later, the caste exclusiveness of the
patricians was broken down by a law which permitted marriages
between the orders. In 367 B. C. the patrician monopoly of the
consular office was extinguished, by the notable Licinian
Laws, which also limited the extent of land that any citizen
might occupy, and forbade the exclusive employment of slave
labor on any estate. One by one, after that, other
magistracies were opened to the plebs; and in 287 B. C. by the
Lex Hortensia, the plebeian concilium, or assembly, was made
independent of the senate and its acts declared to be valid
and binding. The democratic commonwealth was now completely
formed.

Roman Conquest of Italy.

While these changes in the constitution of their Republic were
in progress, the Romans had been making great advances toward
supremacy in the peninsula. First they had been in league with
their Latin neighbors, for war with the Æquians, the
Volscians, and the Etruscans. The Volscian war extended over
forty years, and ended about 450 B. C. in the practical
disappearance of the Volscians from history. Of war with the
Æquians, nothing is heard after 458 B. C., when, as the tale
is told, Cincinnatus left his plow to lead the Romans against
them. The war with the Etruscans of the near city of Veii had
been more stubborn. Suspended by a truce between 474 and 438
B. C., it was then renewed, and ended in 396 B. C., when the
Etruscan city was taken and destroyed. At the same time the
power of the Etruscans was being shattered at sea by the
Greeks of Tarentum and Syracuse, while at home they were
attacked from the north by the barbarous Gauls or Celts.

These last named people, having crossed the Alps from Gaul and
Switzerland and occupied northern Italy, were now pressing
upon the more civilized nations to the south of the Po. The
Etruscans were first to suffer, and their despair became so
great that they appealed to Rome for help. The Romans gave
little aid to them in their extremity; but enough to provoke
the wrath of Brennus, the savage leader of the Gauls. He
quitted Etruria and marched to Rome, defeating an army which
opposed him on the Allia, pillaging and burning the city (B.
C. 390) and slaying the senators, who had refused to take
refuge, with other inhabitants, in the capitol. The defenders
of the capitol held it for seven months; Rome was rebuilt,
when the Gauls withdrew, and soon took up her war again with
the Etruscan cities. By the middle of the same century she was
mistress of southern Etruria, though her territories had been
ravaged twice again by renewed incursions of the Gauls. In a
few years more, when her allies of Latium complained of their
meager share of the fruits of these common wars, and demanded
Roman citizenship and equal rights, she fought them fiercely
and humbled them to submissiveness (B. C. 339-338), reducing
their cities to the status of provincial towns.

And now, having awed or subdued her rivals, her friends, and
her enemies, near at hand, the young Republic swung into the
career of rapid conquest which subdued to her will, within
three-fourths of a century, the whole of Italy below the mouth
of the Arno.

In 343 B. C. the Roman arms had been turned against the
Samnites at the south, and they had been driven from the
Campania. In 327 B. C. the same dangerous rivals were again
assailed, with less impunity. At the Caudine Forks, in 321 B.
C., the Samnites inflicted both disaster and shame upon their
indomitable foes; but the end of the war (B. C. 304) found
Rome advanced and Samnium fallen back. A third contest ended
the question of supremacy; but the Samnites (B. C. 290)
submitted to become allies and not subjects of the Roman
state.

In this last struggle the Samnites had summoned Gauls and
Etruscans to join them against the common enemy, and Rome had
overcome their united forces in a great fight at Sentinum.
This was in 295 B. C. Ten years later she annihilated the
Senonian Gauls, annexed their territory and planted a colony
at Sena on the coast. In two years more she had paralyzed the
Boian Gauls by a terrible chastisement, and had nothing more
to fear from the northward side of her realm. Then she turned
back to finish her work in the south.

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War with Pyrrhus.

The Greek cities of the southern coast were harassed by
various marauding neighbors, and most of them solicited the
protection of Rome, which involved, of course, some surrender
of their independence. But one great city, Tarentum, the most
powerful of their number, refused these terms, and hazarded a
war with the terrible republic, expecting support from the
ambitious Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, on the Greek coast opposite
their own. Pyrrhus came readily at their call, with dreams of
an Italian kingdom more agreeable than his own. Assisted in
the undertaking by his royal kinsmen of Macedonia and Syria,
he brought an army of 25,000 men, with 20 elephants—which
Roman eyes had never seen before. In two bloody fights (B. C.
280-279), Pyrrhus was victorious; but the cost of victory was
so great that he dared not follow it up. He went over to
Sicily, instead, and waged war for three years (B. C. 278-276)
with the Carthaginians, who had subjugated most of the island.
The Epirot king brought timely aid to the Sicilian Greeks, and
drove their Punic enemies into the western border of the
island; but he claimed sovereignty over all that his arms
delivered, and was not successful in enforcing the claim. He
returned to Italy and found the Romans better prepared than
before to face his phalanx and his elephants. They routed him
at Beneventum, in the spring of 275 B. C. and he went back to
Epirus, with his dreams dispelled. Tarentum fell, and Southern
Italy was added to the dominion of Rome.

Punic Wars.

During her war with Pyrrhus, the Republic had formed an
alliance with Carthage, the powerful maritime Phœnician city
on the African coast. But friendship between these two cities
was impossible. The ambition of both was too boundless and too
fierce. They were necessarily competitors for supremacy in the
Mediterranean world, from the moment that a narrow strait
between Italy and Sicily was all that held them apart. Rome
challenged her rival to the duel in 264 B. C., when she sent
help to the Mamertines, a band of brigands who had seized the
Sicilian city of Messina, and who were being attacked by both
Carthaginians and Syracusan Greeks. The "First Punic War,"
then begun, lasted twenty-four years, and resulted in the
withdrawal of the Carthaginians from Sicily, and in their
payment of an enormous war indemnity to Rome. The latter
assumed a protectorate over the island, and the kingdom of
Hiero of Syracuse preserved its nominal independence for the
time; but Sicily, as a matter of fact, might already be looked
upon as the first of those provinces, beyond Italy, which Rome
bound to herself, one by one, until she had compassed the
Mediterranean with her dominion and gathered to it all the
islands of that sea.

The "Second Punic war," called sometimes the "Hannibalic war,"
was fought with a great Carthaginian, rather than with
Carthage herself. Hamilcar Barca had been the last and ablest
of the Punic generals in the contest for Sicily. Afterwards he
undertook the conquest of Spain, where his arms had such
success that he established a very considerable power, more
than half independent of the parent state. He nursed an
unquenchable hatred of Rome, and transmitted it to his son
Hannibal, who solemnly dedicated his life to warfare with the
Latin city. Hamilcar died, and in due time Hannibal found
himself prepared to make good his oath. He provoked a
declaration of war (B. C. 218) by attacking Saguntum, on the
eastern Spanish coast—a town which the Romans "protected."
The latter expected to encounter him in Spain; but before the
fleet bearing their legions to that country had reached
Massilia, he had already passed the Pyrenees and the Rhone,
with nearly 100,000 men, and was crossing the Alps, to assail
his astounded foes on their own soil. The terrific barrier was
surmounted with such suffering and loss that only 20,000 foot
and 6,000 horse, of the great army which left Spain, could be
mustered for the clearing of the last Alpine pass. With this
small following, by sheer energy, rapidity and precision of
movement—by force, in other words, of a military genius never
surpassed in the world—he defeated the armies of Rome again
and again, and so crushingly in the awful battle of Cannæ (B.
C. 216) that the proud republic was staggered, but never
despaired. For fifteen years the great Carthaginian held his
ground in southern Italy; but his expectation of being joined
by discontented subjects of Rome in the peninsula was very
slightly realized, and his own country gave him little
encouragement or help. His brother Hasdrubal, marching to his
relief in 207 B. C., was defeated on the river Metaurus and
slain. The arms of Rome had prospered meantime in Sicily and
in Spain, even while beaten at home, and her Punic rival had
been driven from both. In 204 B. C. the final field of battle
was shifted to Carthaginian territory by Scipio, of famous
memory, thereafter styled Africanus, because he "carried the
war into Africa." Hannibal abandoned Italy to confront him,
and at Zama, in the autumn of 202 B. C., the long contention
ended, and the career of Carthage as a Power in the ancient
world was forever closed. Existing by Roman sufferance for
another half century, she then gave her implacable conquerors
another pretext for war, and they ruthlessly destroyed her
(B.C. 146).

Roman Conquest of Greece.

In that same year of the destruction of Carthage, the conquest
of Greece was finished. The first war of the Romans on that
side of the Adriatic had taken place during the Second Punic
war, and had been caused by an alliance formed between
Hannibal and King Philip of Macedonia (B. C. 214). They
pursued it then no further than to frustrate Philip's designs
against themselves; but they formed alliances with the Greek
states oppressed or menaced by the Macedonian, and these drew
them into a second war, just as the century closed. On
Cynoscephalæ, Philip was overthrown (B. C. 197), his kingdom
reduced to vassalage, and the freedom of all Greece was
solemnly proclaimed by the Roman Consul Flaminius.

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And now, for the first time, Rome came into conflict with an
Asiatic power. The throne of the Syrian monarchy, founded by
one of the generals of Alexander the Great, was occupied by a
king more ambitious than capable, who had acquired a large and
loosely jointed dominion in the East, and who bore the
sounding name of Antiochus the Great. This vainglorious King,
having a huge army and many elephants at his disposal, was
eager to try a passage at arms with the redoubtable men of
Rome. He was encouraged in his desire by the Ætolians in
Greece, who bore ill-will to Rome. Under this encouragement,
and having Hannibal—then a fugitive at his court—to give him
counsel, which he lacked intelligence to use, Antiochus
crossed the Ægean and invaded Greece (B. C. 192). The Romans
met him at the pass of Thermopylæ; drove him back to the
shores from which he came; pursued him thither; crushed and
humbled him on the field of Magnesia, and took the kingdoms
and cities of Asia Minor under their protection, as the allies
(soon to be subjects) of Rome.

Twenty years passed with little change in the outward
situation of affairs among the Greeks. But discontent with the
harshness and haughtiness of Roman "protection" changed from
sullenness to heat, and Perseus, son of Philip of Macedonia,
fanned it steadily, with the hope of bringing it to a flame.
Rome watched him with keen vigilance, and before his plans
were ripe her legions were upon him. He battled with them
obstinately for three years (B. C. 171-168); but his fate was
sealed at Pydna. He went as a prisoner to Rome; his kingdom
was broken into four small republics; the Achæan League was
stricken by the captivity of a thousand of its chief men; the
whole of Greece was humbled to submissiveness, though not yet
formally reduced to the state of a Roman province. That
followed some years later, when risings in Macedonia and
Achaia were punished by the extinction of the last semblance
of political independence in both (B. C. 148-146).

The Zenith of the Republic.

Rome now gripped the Mediterranean (the ocean of the then
civilized world) as with four fingers of a powerful hand: one
laid on Italy and all its islands, one on Macedonia and
Greece, one on Carthage, one on Spain, and the little finger
of her "protection" reaching over to the Lesser Asia. Little
more than half a century, since the day that Hannibal
threatened her own city gates, had sufficed to win this vast
dominion. But the losses of the Republic had been greater,
after all, than the gains; for the best energies of its
political constitution had been expended in the acquisition,
and the nobler qualities in its character had been touched
with the incurable taints of a licentious prosperity.

Beginning of Decline.

A century and a half had passed since the practical ending of
the struggle of plebeians with patricians for political and
agrarian rights. In theory and in form, the constitution
remained as democratic as it was made by the Licinian Laws of
367 B. C., and by the finishing touch of the Hortensian Law of
287 B. C. But in practical working it had reverted to the
aristocratic mode. A new aristocracy had risen out of the
plebeian ranks to reinforce the old patrician order. It was
composed of the families of men who had been raised to
distinction and ennobled by the holding of eminent offices,
and its spirit was no less jealous and exclusive than that of
the older high caste.

The Senate and the Mob.

Thus strengthened, the aristocracy had recovered its
ascendancy in Rome, and the Senate, which it controlled, had
become the supreme power in government. The amazing success of
the Republic during the last century just reviewed—its
successes in war, in diplomacy, and in all the sagacious
measures of policy by which its great dominion had been
won—are reasonably ascribed to this fact. For the Senate had
wielded the power of the state, in most emergencies, with
passionless deliberation and with unity and fixity of aim.

But it maintained its ascendancy by an increasing employment
of means which debased and corrupted all orders alike. The
people held powers which might paralyze the Senate at any
moment, if they chose to exercise them, through their
assemblies and their tribunes. They had seldom brought those
powers into play thus far, to interfere with the senatorial
government of the Republic, simply because they had been
bribed to abstain. The art of the politician in Rome, as
distinguished from the statesman, had already become
demagoguery. This could not well have been otherwise under the
peculiar constitution of the Roman citizenship. Of the
thirty-five tribes who made up the Roman people, legally
qualified to vote, only four were within the city. The
remaining thirty-one were "plebs urbana." There was no
delegated representation of this country populace—citizens
beyond the walls. To exercise their right of suffrage they
must be personally present at the meetings of the "comitia
tributa"—the tribal assemblies; and those of any tribe who
chanced to be in attendance at such a meeting might give a
vote which carried with it the weight of their whole tribe.
For questions were decided by the majority of tribal, not
individual, votes; and a very few members of a tribe might act
for and be the tribe, for all purposes of voting, on occasions
of the greatest possible importance. It is quite evident that
a democratic system of this nature gave wide opportunity for
corrupt "politics." There must have been, always, an
attraction for the baser sort among the rural plebs, drawing
them into the city, to enjoy the excitement of political
contests, and to partake of the flatteries and largesses which
began early to go with these. And circumstances had tended
strongly to increase this sinister sifting into Rome of the
most vagrant and least responsible of her citizens, to make
them practically the deputies and representatives of that
mighty sovereign which had risen in the world—the "Populus
Romanus." For there was no longer either thrift or dignity
possible in the pursuits of husbandry. The long Hannibalic War
had ruined the farming class in Italy by its ravages; but the
extensive conquests that followed it had been still more
ruinous to that class by several effects combined. Corn
supplies from the conquered provinces were poured into Rome at
cheapened prices; enormous fortunes, gathered in the same
provinces by officials, by farmers of taxes, by money-lenders,
and by traders, were largely invested in great estates,
absorbing the small farms of olden time; and, finally,
free-labor in agriculture was supplanted, more and more, by
the labor of slaves, which war and increasing wealth combined
to multiply in numbers. Thus the "plebs urbana" of Rome were a
depressed and, therefore, a degenerating class, and the same
circumstances that made them so impelled them towards the
city, to swell the mob which held its mighty sovereignty in
their hands.

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So far, a lavish amusement of this mob with free games, and
liberal bribes, had kept it generally submissive to the
senatorial government. But the more it was debased by such
methods, and its vagrancy encouraged, the more extravagant
gratuities of like kind it claimed. Hence a time could never
be far away when the aristocracy and the senate would lose
their control of the popular vote on which they had built
their governing power.

Agrarian Agitations.

But they invited the quicker coming of that time by their own
greediness in the employment of their power for selfish and
dishonest ends. They had practically recovered their monopoly
of the use of the public lands. The Licinian law, which
forbade any one person to occupy more than five hundred jugera
(about three hundred acres) of the public lands, had been made
a dead letter. The great tracts acquired in the Samnite wars,
and since, had remained undistributed, while the use and
profit of them were enjoyed, under one form of authority or
another, by rich capitalists and powerful nobles.

This evil, among many that waxed greater each year, caused the
deepest discontent, and provoked movements of reform which
soon passed by rapid stages into a revolution, and ended in
the fall of the Republic. The leader of the movement at its
beginning was Tiberius Gracchus, grandson of Scipio Africanus
on the side of his mother, Cornelia. Elected tribune in 133 B.
C., he set himself to the dangerous task of rousing the people
against senatorial usurpations, especially in the matter of
the public domain. He only drew upon himself the hatred of the
senate and its selfish supporters; he failed to rally a
popular party that was strong enough for his protection, and
his enemies slew him in the very midst of a meeting of the
tribes. His brother Caius took up the perilous cause and won
the office of tribune (B. C. 123) in avowed hostility to the
senatorial government. He was driven to bid high for popular
help, even when the measures which he strove to carry were
most plainly for the welfare of the common people, and he may
seem to modern eyes to have played the demagogue with some
extravagance. But statesmanship and patriotism without
demagoguery for their instrument or their weapon were hardly
practicable, perhaps, in the Rome of those days, and it is not
easy to find them clean-handed in any political leader of the
last century of the Republic. The fall of Caius Gracchus was
hastened by his attempt to extend the Roman franchise beyond
the "populus Romanus," to all the freemen of Italy. The mob in
Rome was not pleased with such political generosity, and
cooled in its admiration for the large-minded tribune. He lost
his office and the personal protection it threw over him, and
then he, like his brother, was slain (B. C. 121) in a melee.

Jugurthine War.

For ten years the senate, the nobility, and the capitalists
(now beginning to take the name of the equestrian order), had
mostly their own way again, and effaced the work of the
Gracchi as completely as they could. Then came disgraceful
troubles in Numidia which enraged the people and moved them to
a new assertion of themselves. The Numidian king who helped
Scipio to pull Carthage down had been a ward of Rome since
that time. When he died, he left his kingdom to be governed
jointly by two young sons and an older nephew. The latter,
Jugurtha, put his cousins out of the way, took the kingdom to
himself, and baffled attempts at Rome to call him to account,
by heavy bribes. The corruption in the case became so flagrant
that even the corrupted Roman populace revolted against it, and
took the Numidian business into its own hands. War was
declared against Jugurtha by popular vote, and, despite
opposing action in the Senate, one Marius, an experienced
soldier of humble birth, was elected consul and sent out to
take command. Marius distinguished himself in the war much
less than did one of his officers, Cornelius Sulla; but he
bore the lion's share of glory when Jugurtha was taken captive
and conveyed to Rome (B. C. 104). Marius was now the great
hero of the hour, and events were preparing to lift him to the
giddiest heights of popularity.

Teutones and Cimbri.

Hitherto, the barbarians of wild Europe whom the Romans had
met were either the Aryan Celts, or the non-Aryan tribes found
in northern Italy, Spain and Gaul. Now, for the first time,
the armies of Rome were challenged by tribes of another grand
division of the Aryan stock, coming out of the farther North.
These were the Cimbri and the Teutones, wandering hordes of
the great Teutonic or Germanic race which has occupied Western
Europe north of the Rhine since the beginning of historic
time. So far as we can know, these two were the first of the
Germanic nations to migrate to the South. They came into
collision with Rome in 113 B. C., when they were in Noricum,
threatening the frontiers of her Italian dominion. Four years
later they were in southern Gaul, where the Romans were now
settling colonies and subduing the native Celts. Twice they
had beaten the armies opposed to them; two years later they
added a third to their victories; and in 105 B. C. they threw
Rome into consternation by destroying two great armies on the
Rhone. Italy seemed helpless against the invasion for which
these terrible barbarians were now preparing, when Marius went
against them. In the summer of 102 B. C. he annihilated the
Teutones, near Aquæ Sextiæ (modern Aix), and in the following
year he destroyed the invading Cimbri, on a bloody field in
northern Italy, near modern Vercellæ.

Marius.

From these great victories, Marius went back to Rome, doubly
and terribly clothed with power, by the devotion of a reckless
army and the hero-worship of an unthinking mob. The state was
at his mercy. A strong man in his place might have crushed the
class-factions and accomplished the settlement which Cæsar
made after half a century more of turbulence and shame. But
Marius was ignorant, he was weak, and he became a mere
blood-stained figure in the ruinous anarchy of his time.

{1001}

Optimates and Populares.

The social and political state of the capital had grown
rapidly worse. A middle-class in Roman society had practically
disappeared. The two contending parties or factions, which had
taken new names—"optimates" and "populares"—were now
divided almost solely by the line which separates rich from
poor. "If we said that 'optimates' signified the men who
bribed and abused office under the banner of the Senate and
its connections, and that 'populares' meant men who bribed and
abused office with the interests of the people outside the
Senatorial pale upon their lips, we might do injustice to many
good men on both sides, but should hardly be slandering the
parties" (Beesly). There was a desperate conflict between the
two in the year 100, B. C. and the Senate once more recovered
its power for a brief term of years.

The Social War.

The enfranchisement of the so-called "allies"—the Latin and
other subjects of Rome who were not citizens—was the burning
question of the time. The attempt of Caius Gracchus to extend
rights of citizenship to them had been renewed again and
again, without success, and each failure had increased the
bitter discontent of the Italian people. In 90 B. C. they drew
together in a formidable confederation and rose in revolt. In
the face of this great danger Rome sobered herself to action
with old time wisdom and vigor. She yielded her full
citizenship to all Italian freemen who had not taken arms, and
then offered it to those who would lay their arms down. At the
same time, she fought the insurrection with every army she
could put into the field, and in two years it was at an end.
Marius and his old lieutenant, Sulla, had been the principal
commanders in this "Social War," as it was named, and Sulla
had distinguished himself most. The latter had now an army at
his back and was a power in the state, and between the two
military champions there arose a rivalry which produced the
first of the Roman Civil Wars.

Marius and Sulla.

A troublesome war in the East had been forced upon the Romans
by aggressions of Mithridates, King of Pontus. Both Marius and
Sulla aspired to the command. Sulla obtained election to the
consulship in 88 B. C. and was named for the coveted place.
But Marius succeeded in getting the appointment annulled by a
popular assembly and himself chosen instead for the Eastern
command. Sulla, personally imperilled by popular tumults, fled
to his legions, put himself at their head, and marched back to
Rome—the first among her generals to turn her arms against
herself. There was no effective resistance; Marius fled; both
Senate and people were submissive to the dictates of the
consul who had become master of the city. He "made the tribes
decree their own political extinction, resuscitating the
comitia centuriata; he reorganized the Senate by adding three
hundred to its members and vindicating the right to sanction
legislation; conducted the consular elections, exacting from
L. Cornelius Cinna, the newly elected consul, a solemn oath
that he would observe the new regulations, and securing the
election of Cn. Octavius in his own interest, and then, like
'a countryman who had just shaken the lice off his coat,' to
use his own figure, he turned to do his great work in the
East."

(Horton).

Sulla went to Greece, which was in revolt and in alliance with
Mithridates, and conducted there a brilliant, ruthless
campaign for three years (B. C. 87-84), until he had restored
Roman authority in the peninsula, and forced the King of
Pontus to surrender all his conquests in Asia Minor. Until
this task was finished, he gave no heed to what his enemies
did at Rome; though the struggle there between "Sullans" and
"Marians" had gone fiercely and bloodily on, and his own
partisans had been beaten in the fight. The consul Octavius,
who was in Bulla's interest, had first driven the consul Cinna
out of the city, after slaying 10,000 of his faction. Cinna's
cause was taken up by the new Italian citizens; he was joined
by the exiled Marius, and these two returned together, with an
army which the Senate and the party of Sulla were unable to
resist. Marius came back with a burning heart and with savage
intentions of revenge. A horrible massacre of his opponents
ensued, which went on unchecked for five days, and was
continued more deliberately for several months, until Marius
died, at the beginning of the year 86 B. C. Then Cinna ruled
absolutely at Rome for three years, supported in the main by
the newly-made citizens; while the provinces generally
remained under the control of the party of the optimates. In
83 B. C. Sulla, having finished with carefulness his work in
the East, came back into Italy, with 40,000 veterans to attend
his steps. He had been outlawed and deprived of his command,
by the faction governing at the capital; but its decrees had
no effect and troubled him little. Cinna had been killed by
his own troops, even before Bulla's landing at Brundisium.
Several important leaders and soldiers on the Marian side,
such as Pompeius, then a young general, and Crassus, the
millionaire, went over to Sulla's camp. One of the consuls of
the year saw his troops follow their example, in a body; the
other consul was beaten and driven into Capua. Sulla wintered
in Campania, and the next spring he pressed forward to Rome,
fighting a decisive battle with Marius the younger on the way,
and took possession of the city; but not in time to prevent a
massacre of senators by the resentful mob.

Sulla's Dictatorship.

Before that year closed, the whole of Italy had been subdued,
the final battle being fought with the Marians and Italians at
the Colline Gate, and Sulla again possessed power supreme. He
placed it beyond dispute by a deliberate extermination of his
opponents, more merciless than the Marian massacre had been.
They were proscribed by name, in placarded lists, and rewards
paid to those who killed them; while their property was
confiscated, and became the source of vast fortunes to Sulla's
supporters, and of lands for distribution to his veterans.

When this terror had paralyzed all resistance to his rule, the
Dictator (for he had taken that title) undertook a complete
reconstruction of the constitution, aiming at a permanent
restoration of senatorial ascendancy and a curbing of the
powers which the people, in their assemblies, and the
magistrates who especially represented them, had gained during
the preceding century. He remodelled, moreover, the judicial
system, and some of his reforms were undoubtedly good, though
they did not prove enduring. When he had fashioned the state
to his liking, this extraordinary usurper quietly abdicated
his dictatorial office (B. C. 80) and retired to private life,
undisturbed until his death (B. C. 78).

{1002}

After Sulla.

The system he had established did not save Rome from renewed
distractions and disorder after Sulla died. There was no
longer a practical question between Senate and people—between
the few and the many in government. The question now, since
the legionaries held their swords prepared to be flung into
the scale, was what one should again gather the powers of
government into his hands, as Sulla had done.

The Great Game and the Players.

The history of the next thirty years—the last generation of
republican Rome—is a sad and sinister but thrilling chronicle
of the strifes and intrigues, the machinations and
corruptions, of a stupendous and wicked game in politics that
was played, against one another and against the Republic, by a
few daring, unscrupulous players, with the empire of the
civilized world for the stake between them. There were more
than a few who aspired; there were only three players who
entered really as principals into the game. These were
Pompeius, called "the Great," since he extinguished the Marian
faction in Sicily and in Spain; Crassus, whose wealth gave him
power, and who acquired some military pretensions besides, by
taking the field against a formidable insurrection of slaves
(B. C. 73-71); and Julius Cæsar, a young patrician, but nephew
of Marius by marriage, who assiduously strengthened that
connection with the party of the people, and who began, very
soon after Sulla's death, to draw attention to himself as a
rising power in the politics of the day. There were two other
men, Cicero and the younger Cato, who bore a nobler and
greater because less selfish part in the contest of that
fateful time. Both were blind to the impossibility of
restoring the old order of things, with a dominant Senate, a
free but well guided populace, and a simply ordered social
state; but their blindness was heroic and high-souled.

Pompeius in the East.

Of the three strong rivals for the vacant dictatorial chair
which waited to be filled, Pompeius held by far the greater
advantages. His fame as a soldier was already won; he had been
a favorite of Fortune from the beginning of his career;
everything had succeeded with him; everything was expected for
him and expected from him. Even while the issues of the great
struggle were pending, a wonderful opportunity for increasing
his renown was opened to him. The disorders of the civil war
had licensed a swarm of pirates, who fairly possessed the
eastern Mediterranean and had nearly extirpated the maritime
trade. Pompeius was sent against them (B. C. 67), with a
commission that gave him almost unlimited powers, and within
ninety days he had driven them from the sea. Then, before he
had returned from this exploit, he was invested with supreme
command in the entire East, where another troublesome war with
Mithridates was going on. He harvested there all the laurels
which belonged by better right to his predecessor, Lucullus,
finding the power of Mithridates already broken down. From
Pontus he passed into Armenia, and thence into Syria, easily
subjugating both, and extinguishing the monarchy of the
Seleucids. The Jews resisted him and he humbled them by the
siege and conquest of their sacred city. Egypt was now the
only Mediterranean state left outside the all-absorbing
dominion of Rome; and even Egypt, by bequest of its late king,
belonged to the Republic, though not yet claimed.

The First Triumvirate.

Pompeius came back to Rome in the spring of 61 B. C. so
glorified by his successes that he might have seemed to be
irresistible, whatever he should undertake. But, either
through an honest patriotism or an overweening confidence, he
had disbanded his army when he reached Italy, and he had
committed himself to no party. He stood alone and aloof, with
a great prestige, great ambitions, and no ability to use the
one or realize the other. Before another year passed, he was
glad to accept offers of a helping hand in politics from
Cæsar, who had climbed the ladder of office rapidly within
four or five years, spending vast sums of borrowed money to
amuse the people with games, and distinguishing himself as a
democratic champion. Cæsar, the far seeing calculator,
discerned the enormous advantages that he might gain for
himself by massing together the prestige of Pompeius, the
wealth of Crassus and his own invincible genius, which was
sure to be the master element in the combination. He brought
the coalition about through a bargain which created what is
known in history as the First Triumvirate, or supremacy of
three.

Cæsar in Gaul.

Under the terms of the bargain, Cæsar was chosen consul for 59
B. C., and at the end of his term was given the governorship
of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, with command of three
legions there, for five years. His grand aim was a military
command—the leadership of an army—the prestige of a
successful soldier. No sooner had he secured the command than
fortune gave him opportunities for its use in the most
striking way and with the most impressive results. The Celtic
tribes of Gaul, north of the two small provinces which the
Romans had already acquired on the Mediterranean coast, gave
him pretexts or provocations (it mattered little to Cæsar
which) for war with them, and in a series of remarkable
campaigns, which all soldiers since have admired, he pushed
the frontiers of the dominion of Rome to the ocean and the
Rhine, and threatened the nations of Germany on the farther
banks of that stream. "The conquest of Gaul by Cæsar," says
Mr. Freeman, "is one of the most important events in the
history of the world. It is in some sort the beginning of
modern history, as it brought the old world of southern
Europe, of which Rome was the head, into contact with the
lands and nations which were to play the greatest part in
later times—with Gaul, Germany, and Britain." From Gaul
Cæsar crossed the channel to Britain in 55 B. C. and again in
the following year, exacting tribute from the Celtic natives,
but attempting no lodgment in the island.

{1003}

Meantime, while pursuing a career of conquest which excited
the Roman world, Cæsar never lost touch with the capital and
its seething politics. Each winter he repaired to Lucca, the
point in his province which was nearest to Rome, and conferred
there with his friends, who flocked to the rendezvous. He
secured an extension of his term, to enable him to complete
his plans, and year by year he grew more independent of the
support of his colleagues in the triumvirate, while they
weakened one another by their jealousies, and the Roman state
was more hopelessly distracted by factious strife.

End of the Triumvirate.

The year after Cæsar's second invasion of Britain, Crassus,
who had obtained the government of Syria, perished in a
disastrous war with the Parthians, and the triumvirate was at
an end. Disorder in Rome increased and Pompeius lacked energy
or boldness to deal with it, though he seemed to be the one
man present who might do so. He was made sole consul in 52 B.
C.; he might have seized the dictatorship, with approval of
many, but he waited for it to be offered to him, and the offer
never came. He drew at last into close alliance with the party
of the Optimates, and left the Populares to be won entirely to
Cæsar's side.

Civil War.

Matters came to a crisis in 50 B. C., when the Senate passed
an order removing Cæsar from his command and discharging his
soldiers who had served their term. He came to Ravenna with a
single legion and concerted measures with his friends. The
issue involved is supposed to have been one of life or death
to him, as well as of triumph or failure in his ambitions; for
his enemies were malignant. His friends demanded that he be
made consul, for his protection, before laying down his arms.
The Senate answered by proclaiming him a public enemy if he
failed to disband his troops with no delay. It was a
declaration of war, and Cæsar accepted it. He marched his
single legion across the Rubicon, which was the boundary of
his province, and advanced towards Rome.

Pompeius, with the forces he had gathered, retreated
southward, and consuls, senators and nobles generally streamed
after him. Cæsar followed them—turning aside from the
city—and his force gathered numbers as he advanced. The
Pompeians continued their flight and abandoned Italy,
withdrawing to Epirus, planning to gather there the forces of
the East and return with them. Cæsar now took possession of
Rome and secured the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, from
which it drew its supply of food. This done, he proceeded
without delay to Spain, where seven legions strongly devoted
to Pompeius were stationed. He overcame them in a single
campaign, enlisted most of the veterans in his own service,
and acquired a store of treasure. Before the year ended he was
again in Rome, where the citizens had proclaimed him dictator. He
held the dictatorship for eleven days, only, to legalize an
election which made him consul, with a pliant associate. He
reorganized the government, complete in all its branches,
including a senate, partly composed of former members of the
body who had remained or returned. Then (B. C. 48.—January) he
took up the pursuit of Pompeius and the Optimates. Crossing to
Epirus, after some months of changeful fortune, he fought and
won the decisive battle of Pharsalia. Pompeius, flying to
Egypt, was murdered there. Cæsar, following, with a small
force, was placed in great peril by a rising at Alexandria,
but held his ground until assistance came. He then garrisoned
Egypt with Roman troops and made the princess Cleopatra, who
had captivated him by her charms, joint occupant of the throne
with her younger brother. During his absence, affairs at Rome
were again disturbed, and he was once more appointed dictator,
as well as tribune for life. His presence restored order at
once, and he was soon in readiness to attack the party of his
enemies who had taken refuge in Africa. The battle of Thapsus,
followed by the suicide of Cato and the surrender of Utica,
practically finished the contest, though one more campaign was
fought in Spain the following year.

Cæsar Supreme.

Cæsar was now master of the dominions of Rome, and as entirely
a monarch as anyone of his imperial successors, who took his
name, with the power which he caused it to symbolize, and
called themselves "Cæsars," and "Imperators," as though the
two titles were equivalent. "Imperator" was the title under
which he chose to exercise his sovereignty. Other Roman
generals had been Imperators before, but he was the first to
be named Imperator for life, and the word (changed in our
tongue to Emperor) took a meaning from that day more regal
than Rex or King. That Cæsar, the Imperator, first of all
Emperors, ever coveted the crown and title of an
older-fashioned royalty, is not an easy thing to believe.