Chapter II: Roman Political Evolution (2)

Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of class egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social problem in the older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off domestic strife by colonies, by empire, and by doles,[78] and was already near the economic stage reached only centuries later by the Roman Empire. Save for Rome, her polity might have endured on the imperialist basis for centuries; but, as it was, it was socially exhausted relatively to the task and the danger, depending as it did on hired foreign troops and coerced allies. It is idle to speak, as men still do, of Hannibal's stay in Capua as a fatal mistake.[79] Had Hannibal taken Rome, the ultimate triumph of the Romans would have been just as certain. Their State was bound to outlast the other, so long as it maintained to any extent its old basis of a fecund rural population of free cultivators, supplying a zealous soldiery, headed by a specialised class equally dependent on conquest for all advancement. For the trading Carthaginians, war was, beyond a certain point, a mere act of self-defence; they could not have held and administered Italy had they taken it. The supreme general could last only one lifetime; the nation of warriors still yielded a succession of captains, always learning something more of war, and raising the standard of capacity as the progress of machinery widens the scope of all engineers.

The author of a recent and meritorious _History of Rome_, Mr.
Shuckburgh, is satisfied to quote (p. 231) from Polybius, as
explaining the fall of Carthage, the generalisation that "Italians
as a nation are by nature superior to Phoenicians and Libyans,
both in strength of body and courage of soul"; and to add: "That is
the root of the matter, from which all else is a natural growth."
This only leaves us asking: "What was the natural root of the
alleged physiological superiority?" There must have been reasons.
If they were "racial" or climatic, whence the later implied
degeneration of the Romans in body or soul, or both? We are driven
to the explanation lying in polity and institutions, which it
should have been Mr. Shuckburgh's special aim to give, undertaking
as he does to deal with "the state of the countries conquered by
the Romans." And such explanations are actually offered by Polybius
(vi, 53).

§ 6

And yet the deterioration of the Roman State is visibly as sure a sequence as its progress. Nothing that men might then have proposed could save it. In Cicero's day the Senate had become a den of thieves. The spectacle of the wealth of Lucullus, taken in Napoleonic fashion from the opulent East, set governor after governor elsewhere upon a course of ruthless extortion which depraved Rome as infallibly as it devastated the subject States.

Roman exploitation of conquest began in the relatively moderate fashion of self-supporting victors willing to live and let live. Sicily was at first (210) taxed by Marcellus in a fashion of which Livy makes boast;[80] and after the suppression of the slaves' revolt in 131 B.C., the system was further reformed. Seventeen towns, retaining their lands, paid a fixed tax to the Republic; eight were immune, save for an annual contribution of 800,000 _modius_ of wheat for free doles in Rome; and the rest of the island paid a tenth of all produce, as under Hiero.[81] Later, the realms of the kings of Macedonia, Pergamos, and Bithynia, and the lands of Cyrene and Cyprus, were made the public patrimony of the conquering State. Sardinia, Spain, North Africa, and Asia were in general taxed a tenth of their produce of all kinds. As the exploitation went on, individual governors added to all this regular taxation a vast irregular plunder on their own account; and nearly every attempt to impeach them was foiled by their accomplices in the Senate.[82] Verres in Sicily, Fonteius in Southern Gaul, Piso in Macedonia, Appius in Cilicia, Flaccus in Asia Minor, wrung infinite gold and loot immeasurable from the victim races by every device of rapacious brigandage, trampling on every semblance of justice, and then devised the ironic infamy of despatching corrupted or terrorised deputations of citizens to Rome to testify to the beneficence of their rule.[83]

It was a riot of robbery in which no public virtue could live. To moralise on the scarcity of Catos is an ill way of spending time if it be not recognised that Catos had latterly become as impossible as eaters of acorns in the upper grades of the ever-plundering State. Cato himself is a product of the last vestiges of the stage before universal conquest; and he begins to show in his own later years all the symptoms of the period of lawless plutocracy. To yearn for a series of such figures is to ask that men shall be capable of holding doggedly by an ethic of honest barbarism while living the lives of pirates and slavers, according no moral sympathy to the larger world of aliens and slaves, yet cherishing a high public spirit for the small world of the patrician State. The man himself was a mere moral anomaly; and in Cato the Younger, dreaming to the last of a loyal republican life, but always ready at his fellow-citizens' behest to go and beat down the rights or liberties of any other State,[84] we have the paternal bias reproduced in an incurable duality. He sought for honour among thieves, himself being one. Concerning the Catonic attitude towards the "degeneration" of Roman patrician life in the age of conquest, it has been truly said that "the policy of shameless selfishness which was pursued by the Roman Senate during this period, and reached its climax in their abominable conduct towards the unhappy, prostrate city of Carthage--the frivolous wars, tending to nothing but aggrandisement and enrichment, waged by Rome continuously after the second Punic War--destroyed the old Roman character[85] far more effectually than Grecian art and philosophy could ever have done. Henceforth there was a fearful increase in internal corruption, immorality, bribery, an insatiable eagerness for riches, disregarding everything else and impudently setting aside laws, orders of the Senate, and legal proceedings, making war unauthorised, celebrating triumphs without permission, plundering the provinces, robbing the allies."[86] And the ideal of conquest inspired it all.

We have only to ask ourselves, What was the administrative class to do? in order to see the fatality of its course. The State must needs go on seeking conquest, by reason alike of the lower-class and the upper-class problem. The administrators must administer, or rust. The moneyed men must have fresh plunder, fresh sources of profit. The proletaries must be either fed or set fighting, else they would clamour and revolt. And as the frontiers of resistance receded, and new war was more and more a matter of far-reaching campaigns, the large administering class at home, men of action devoid of progressive culture, ran to brutal vice and frantic sedition as inevitably as returned sailors to debauch; while the distant leader, passing years of camp life at the head of professional troops, became more and more surely a power extraneous to the Republic. When a State comes to depend for its coherence on a standing army, the head of the army inevitably becomes the head of the State. The Republic passed, as a matter of course, into the Empire, with its army of mercenaries, the senatorial class having outlived the main conditions of its health and energetic stability; the autocracy at once began to delete the remaining brains by banishing or slaying all who openly criticised it;[87] and the Empire, even while maintaining its power by the spell of its great traditional organisation, ran through stage after stage of civic degeneration under good and bad emperors alike, simply because it had and could have no intellectual life commensurate with its physical scope. Its function involved moral atrophy. It needs the strenuous empiricism of a Mommsen to find ground for comfort in the apparition of a Cæsar in a State that must needs worsen under Cæsars even more profoundly than it did before its malady gave Cæsar his opportunity.

Not that the Empire could of itself have died as an organism. There are no such deaths in politics; and the frequent use of the phrase testifies to a hallucination that must greatly hamper political science. The ancient generalisation[88] to the youth, maturity, and decrepitude and death of States is true only in respect of their variations of relative military and economic strength, which follow no general rule.

The comparison of the life of political bodies to that of
individuals was long ago rightly rejected as vicious by Volney
(_Leçons d'Histoire_, 1794, 6ième Séance), who insisted that
political destruction occurred only through vices of polity,
inasmuch as all polities have been framed with one of the three
intentions of _increasing_, _maintaining_, or _overthrowing_. The
explanation is obscure, but the negation of the old formula is
just. The issue was taken up and pronounced upon to the same effect
in the closing chapter of C.A. Walckenaer's _Essai sur l'histoire
de l'espèce humaine_, 1798. (Professor Flint, in his _History of
the Philosophy of History_, cites Walckenaer, but does not mention
Volney's _Leçons_.) Le Play, in modern times, has put the truth
clearly and strongly: "At no epoch of its history is a people
fatally doomed either to progress or decline. It does not
necessarily pass, like an individual, from youth to old age" (cited
by H. Higgs in _American Quarterly Journal of Economics_, July,
1890, p. 428). It is to be regretted that Dr. Draper should have
adhered to the fallacy of the necessary decay and death of nations
in his suggestive work on the _Intellectual Development of Europe_
(ed. 1875, i, 13-20; ii, 393-98). He was doubtless influenced by
the American tendency to regard Europe and Asia as groups of "old
countries." The word "decay" may of course be used with the
implication of mere "sickness," as by Lord Mahon in the opening
sentence of his _Life of Belisarius_; but even in that use it gives
a lead to fallacy.

Had there been no swarming and aggressive barbarians, standing to later Rome as Rome had done to Carthage--collectively exigent of moral equality as Romans had once been, and therefore conjunctly mighty as against the morally etiolated Italians--the Western Roman Empire would have gone on just as the Eastern[89] so long did, just as China has so long done--would have subsisted with little or no progress, most factors of progress being eliminated from its sphere. It ought now to be unnecessary to point out that Christianity was no such factor, but rather the reverse, as the history of Byzantium so thoroughly proves. No Christian writer of antiquity, save perhaps Augustine[90] in a moment of moral aspiration, shows any perception of the political causation of the decay and fall of the Empire.[91] The forces of intellectual progress that did arise and collapse in the decline and the Dark Ages were extra-Christian heretical forces--Sabellian, Arian, Pelagian, anti-ritualistic, anti-monastic, Iconoclastic. These once deleted, Christianity was no more a progressive force among the new peoples than it was among the old; and the later European progress demonstrably came from wholly different causes--new empire, forcing partial peace; Saracen contact, bringing physics, chemistry, and mathematics; new discovery, making new commerce; recovery of pagan lore, making new speculation; printing, making books abundant; gunpowder, making arms a specialty; and the fresh competition and disruption of States, setting up fruitful differences, albeit also preparing new wars. To try to trace these causes in detail would be to attempt a complete sociological sketch of European history, a task far beyond the scope of the present work; though we shall later make certain special surveys that may suffice to illustrate the general law. In the meantime, the foregoing and other bird's-eye views of some ancient developments may illustrate those of modern times.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Cp. A. Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, 1853, i, 610-615; Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_, 1893, p. 25. When Professor Ferrero (_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans. 1907, i, 5) pronounces that "The Romans were a primitive people without the defects peculiar to a primitive people," he sets up a needless mystification. They had the defects of their own culture stage, which was far beyond that of "primitives" in the general sense of the term. They were "semi-civilised barbarians," with a long past of institutional life.]

[Footnote 13: It might be an interesting inquiry whether a grouping by threes could have arisen from a primary union of two exogamous clans.]

[Footnote 14: Schwegler, i, 616. The origin of _tribus_ from _three_ is not an accident special to the Romans. Among the Spartans and Dorians likewise there were three stocks (cp. K.O. Müller, _The Dorians_, Eng. tr. 1830, i, 35-37; Fustel de Coulanges, _La Cité antique_, 8e édit. p. 135, note 2); and the great number of Greek epithets in which "three" or "thrice" enters is a proof of the special importance anciently attached to the number. Cp. K.D. Hüllmann, _Ursprung der römischen Verfassung durch Vergleichungen erläutert_, 1835, p. 24.]

[Footnote 15: Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, 1901, p. 1.]

[Footnote 16: Pelham, p. 20; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 132, _sq._; Schwegler, i, 610, 615; Ihne, _Early Rome_, 1897, p. 108; Ortolan, _Hist. de la Législation romaine_, ed. Labbé, 1880, pp. 35, 36.]

[Footnote 17: Schwegler, i, 611, following Dionysius. Cp. Meyer, ii, 514.]

[Footnote 18: Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 13, 24, 132, 179; Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 1889, pp. 245, 247, 251, etc.; Jevons, _Introd. to the History of Religion_, ch. xii.]

[Footnote 19: Cp. Schwegler, i, 628; Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 107; Dupond, _Magistratures romaines sous la République_, 1877, p. 19. The source of the plebs is one of the vexed points of Roman origins; and the view that they were primarily a conquered population is not yet generally accepted. See Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 44. The true solution seems to be that the plebs were always being added to in various ways--by aliens, by "broken men," by discarded clients, and by fugitives. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, p. 279.]

[Footnote 20: Schwegler, i, 621-28, 636-38; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 277. Note the expression _populo plebique_ in Livy, xxix, 27; Cicero, _Pro Murena_, i; Macrobius, _Saturnalia_, i, 17. Ortolan (endorsed by Labbé) argues (work cited, p. 31) that _populus plebsque_ no more implies separation than _senatus populusque_. But this argument destroys itself. The Senate as such _was_ distinct from the populus, as having _auctoritas_, while the populus had only _potestas_. The phrase then was not a pleonasm. By this very analogy _populus plebsque_ implies a vital legal distinction. Niebuhr, who first made the facts clear (cp. his _Lectures_, Eng. trans. ed. 1870, p. 107), followed Vico, who was led to the true view by knowledge of the separateness of the _popolo_ from the _commune_ in the Italian republics.]

[Footnote 21: Schwegler, i, 619; E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxvii. Yet the constant tradition is that not only did the mass of the people live mainly on farinaceous food and vegetables, but the upper classes also in the early period ate meat only on festival days. Cp. Guhl and Koner, _The Life of the Greeks and Romans_, Eng. trans., pp. 501-2; Pliny, _H.N._, xviii, 3, 19; Ramsay, _Roman Antiquities_, 1851, p. 437. The cattle then were presumably sold to the people of the Etruscan and Campanian cities. Professor Ferrero leaves this problem in a state of mystery. The early Romans, he writes, had "few head of cattle" (i, 2); but land capture, he admits, meant increase (p. 5); and at the time of the Roman Protectorate over all Italy (266 B.C.) he recognises "vast wandering herds of oxen and sheep, without stable or pen" (p. 9), conducted by slave shepherds. On such lands there must have been a considerable amount of cattle-breeding at a much earlier period. On the other hand, noting that the Romans early imported terracottas and metals from Etruria, Phoenicia, and Carthage, "besides ivory-work and ornaments, perfumes for funerals, purple for the ceremonial robes of the magistrates, and a few slaves" (p. 3), Professor Ferrero lightly affirms that "it was not difficult to pay for these in exports: timber for shipbuilding, and salt, practically made up the list."]

[Footnote 22: Cp. Schwegler, i, 451, 617-19; ii, 108; E.W. Robertson, _Historical Essays in connection with the Land, the Church, etc._, 1872, pp. xxvi-vii, 244.]

[Footnote 23: E.W. Robertson, as cited, pp. 243-44; Schwegler, i, 617-19.]

[Footnote 24: E.W. Robertson, p. xxv.]

[Footnote 25: Schwegler, i, 619, and refs.; Robertson, pp. 244-45; Ferrero, i, 9; Greenidge, _Rom. Pub. Life_, p. 35.]

[Footnote 26: Cp. E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxv.]

[Footnote 27: Schwegler, i, 629; Robertson, p. xxvii.]

[Footnote 28: Schwegler, i, 620 and refs.]

[Footnote 29: Mommsen (ch. xiii. i, 200) puts this point in some confusion, making the patricians live mostly in the country. Meyer (ii, 521) seems to put a quite contrary view. Greenidge (_History of Rome_, 1904, p. 11) agrees with Mommsen, putting town houses as a development of the second century B.C.]

[Footnote 30: According to Niebuhr (_Lectures_, xv; Eng. trans. ed. 1870, p. 81) and Mommsen (ch. iv), the Palatine and the Quirinal. (But cp. Greenidge, p. 2.) The Palatine was probably the first occupied by Romans. Schwegler, i, 442. Cp. Merivale, _General History of Rome_, 5th ed. p. 3, as to its special advantages. The Quirinal was held by the Sabines. Cp. Koch, _Roman History_, Eng. trans. p. 2.]

[Footnote 31: Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 82.]

[Footnote 32: Presumably "Pelasgian." Cp. K.O. Müller, _The Dorians_, Eng. trans. i, 15; Schwegler, i, 155 _sq._]

[Footnote 33: Perhaps the result of a partial conquest. Cp. Mommsen, vol. i, ch. 6, _ad init._, as to the precedence of the Palatine priests over those of the Quirinal.]

[Footnote 34: So Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 5.]

[Footnote 35: Cp. Pelham, ch. iii. Ihne, who argues that the narratives concerning the Etruscan kings are no more trustworthy than those as to their predecessors, recognises that Pliny's record of the humiliating conditions of peace imposed on the Romans by Porsenna "would not have been made if the fact of the subjugation of Rome by an Etruscan king had not been incontestable" (_Early Rome_, p. 79; cp. pp. 85-86).]

[Footnote 36: Cp. Mérimée, _Études sur l'histoire romaine_, t. i, _Guerre sociale_, 1844, p. 352 _sq._; Mommsen, B. ii, ch. i (i, 265).]

[Footnote 37: Cicero (_De Officiis_, ii, 12) and Sallust (cited by Augustine, _De Civ. Dei_, iii, 16) preserved the belief (accepted by Niebuhr) that the oppression of the poor by the rich had been restrained under the kings. Cp. Mahaffy (_Problems in Greek History_, pp. 81-83; Social _Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 83) and Wachsmuth (_Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks_, Eng. tr. i, 416) as to Greek despots. And see Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, ii, 203, as to the weakness of Rome through class-strifes after the expulsion of the kings.]

[Footnote 38: Greenidge, pp. 47-48; Mommsen, i, 72.]

[Footnote 39: Greenidge, pp. 147, 262, 273.]

[Footnote 40: Niebuhr, _Lect._ xxv, 3rd Eng. ed. p. 134. So Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 80; and also Schwegler, ii, 200. Mommsen takes the traditional view. Cp. Shuckburgh (_History of Rome_, p. 71), who remarks that the battle was at least not a decisive victory. Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 812) gives no verdict.]

[Footnote 41: The demand for the admission of plebeians to the consulate was thus met on the patrician plea that religion vetoed it. Only in 367 was it enacted that one of the two consuls should always be a plebeian.]

[Footnote 42: Plebeians first admitted to the Quæstorship, 421 B.C.; to the Military Tribuneship, 400; to the Consulate, 367; to the Dictatorship, 356; to the Censorship, 351; to the Prætorship, 337. This left the patricians in possession of the important privilege of membership of the sacred colleges. But that, in turn, was opened to plebeians in 300 or 296.]

[Footnote 43: _De Officiis_, i, 22, 30.]

[Footnote 44: _Ad Atticum_, i, 19.]

[Footnote 45: _De Officiis_, ii, 21.]

[Footnote 46: See Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, iv, 272-76, for some interesting details; and refs. in Mérimée, _Guerre Sociale_, p. 22.]

[Footnote 47: Livy, iv, 25.]

[Footnote 48: A writer in many respects instructive (W. Warde Fowler, _The City State of the Greeks and Romans_, 1893, p. 194), in pursuance of the thesis that "the Romans" had an "innate political wisdom" and an "inborn genius" for accommodation, speaks of the process of democratic self-assertion and aristocratic concession as "leaving no bad blood behind," this when social disease was spreading all round. The theorem of "national genius" will suffice to impair any exposition, however judicious otherwise. And this is the fundamental flaw in the argument of Bagehot in _Physics and Politics_. Though he notes the possibility of the objection that he is positing "occult qualities" (p. 24), he never eliminates that objection, falling back as he does on an assumed "gift" in "the Romans" (p. 81), instead of asking how an activity was evoked and fostered.]

[Footnote 49: Cp. the _Politics_, i, 6.]

[Footnote 50: Cp. Professor Pelham's _Outline of Roman History_, 1893, p. 197; Mérimée, _Guerre Sociale_, pp. 217, 220.]

[Footnote 51: _Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains, et de leur décadence_, ch. xi. He refers to the many cases in point in modern European history.]

[Footnote 52: Dio Cassius, xlvii, 14; xlviii, 6; Appian, _Bell. Civ._ iv, 3; v, 5, 22.]

[Footnote 53: See below, p. 30, as to Carthage.]

[Footnote 54: Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, i, 269.]

[Footnote 55: _Idem_, i, 272-73.]

[Footnote 56: See Livy, xxxiii, 36, as to the _conjuratio servorum_ throughout Etruria in 557 A.U.C.]

[Footnote 57: Schwegler, i, 270, 275.]

[Footnote 58: Compare the slave wars of Rome in Sicily with the modern disorders (1892) in the same region, and with Aristotle's testimony as to the constant tendency of the slave populations in Greece to conspire against their owners (_Politics_, ii, 9).]

[Footnote 59: Juvenal, _Sat._ vi, 368, 593-96; Ovid, _Amor_. 1. ii, elegg. 13, 14. It is uncertain whether among the ancients any prudential preventive check was thought of. On the whole question see Malthus' fourteenth chapter. Malthus, however, omits to notice that the Romans probably learned the arts of abortion from the Greeks, Egyptians, and Syrians.]

[Footnote 60: Ovid speaks of the many women killed, _Amor._ ii. xiv, 38.]

[Footnote 61: Malthus cites Tacitus, _De Mor. Germanorum_, c. 19; Minucius Felix, c. 30; Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xxix, 4.]

[Footnote 62: Cp. Shaftesbury, _Characteristics_, Treatise ii, pt. iii, § 2 (i, 114). Guizot seems to find the process surprising: "Singulier phénomène! C'est au moment où l'Empire se brise et disparaît, que l'Eglise chrétienne se rallie et se forme définitivement. L'unité politique périt, l'unité religieuse s'élève" (_Histoire de la civilisation en France_, éd. 1874, i, 339). He does not recognise the case as one of cause and effect. Of course, the fall of the State is not necessary to set up new combinations. It suffices that men should be without political influence or national consciousness--_e.g._, the secret societies of China in recent times.]

[Footnote 63: An inquiry, or series of inquiries, into the physiological side of social and political development is obviously necessary, and must be made before sociology can on this side attain much scientific precision. I know, however, no general treatise on the subject except an old essay on _Changes Produced in the Nervous System by Civilisation_, by Dr. Robert Verity (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1839). This is suggestive, but, of course, tentative. Cp. Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans, i, 298-99.]

[Footnote 64: Livy, xxxix, 8-18. See below, pt. iii. ch. iii.]

[Footnote 65: Cp. Salverte, _De la Civilisation_, p. 52.]

[Footnote 66: The subject is discussed in the author's essay on Mithraism in _Pagan Christs_.]

[Footnote 67: M. Hochart (_Études d'histoire religieuse_, 1890, ch. ix) argues that Constantine was never really converted to Christianity; and this is perhaps the best explanation of his long postponement of his baptism.]

[Footnote 68: Compare episodes in the history of the Salvation Army in England (1890), where that body was seen prepared to practise continuous fighting. It had no thought of "Christian" conciliation.]

[Footnote 69: Various causes, the chief being probably Greek piracy, had caused in pre-Roman Etruria a decay of the original seaports. See Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, i, 273.]

[Footnote 70: On this cp. Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 6; and Mommsen, ch. iv.]

[Footnote 71: This may have been set up in imitation of the Carthaginian institution of _Suffetae_, which would be well known to the Etruscans of the monarchic period, who had much traffic with Carthage. E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 701. But it may also be explained by the simple fact that the original army was divided into two legions (_id._ ii, 812).]

[Footnote 72: On this see Montesquieu, _Grandeur des Romains_, c. 1. No one has elucidated so much of Roman history in so little space as Montesquieu has done in this little book, which Buckle rightly set above the _Esprit des Lois_. (Cp. the eulogy of Taine, in his _Tite-Live._) Its real insight may perhaps best be appreciated by comparing it with the modern work of M. Charles Gouraud, _Histoire des Causes de la Grandeur de l'Angleterre_ (1856), in which it will be hard to find any specification of real causes.]

[Footnote 73: The specification of this detail is one of the items of real explanation in Mr. Warde Fowler's scholarly and sympathetic account of the development of the Roman City-State (work cited, c. viii). He credits the Romans with an "innate genius" for combination and constitutionalism as compared with the Greeks, not noticing the fact that Roman unity was in the main a matter of conquest of non-Romans by Romans; that the conquest was furthered by the Roman institutions; that the institutions were first, so to speak, fortuitously shaped in favour of systematic war and conquest by the revolt against kingship; that war and conquest, again, were taken to almost inevitably as the main road to wealth; and that the accommodations of later times were forced on the upper classes by the career of warfare, to which domestic peace was indispensable. (Cp. Hegel as to the element of coercion and patrician policy in the Roman social system. _Philos. der Gesch._, Theil iii, Abschnitt i, Kap. i.) See below, § 6, as to the very different conditions of the Greek City-States.]

[Footnote 74: E.S. Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 16.]

[Footnote 75: See below, ch. iii, _end_; ch. iv, § 2 (_c_).]

[Footnote 76: Cp. Livy, viii, 3-5.]

[Footnote 77: Cp. Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans, i, 240.]

[Footnote 78: Cp. Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 11; vi, 5.]

[Footnote 79: Already in Montesquieu's _Grandeur des Romains_ it is pointed out that for Hannibal's soldiers, loaded with plunder, anywhere was Capua. Montesquieu rightly observes that the stock phrase on that head is one of the things everybody says because it has once been said. And it is repeated still.]

[Footnote 80: Livy, xxv, 40.]

[Footnote 81: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 6; iv, 65; v, 21, 22.]

[Footnote 82: Sallust, _Bell. Jugurth._, c. 36.]

[Footnote 83: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 20, 38, 81; v, 34; _In Pisonem_,34-36; _Pro Flacco_, 12; _Pro Fonteio_, 5; _Pro lege Manilia_, 13. See the record in Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_, 1840, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 8. Cp. Ferrero, i, 113-14, 183.]

[Footnote 84: Cp. Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, ii. 78-81, and Merivale, _General History of Rome_, pp. 299-300, as to the plunder and annexation of Cyprus. "Whether the annals of British India contain so foul a crime," writes Long, "I leave those to determine who know more of Indian affairs than I do."]

[Footnote 85: An admission that national "character" is not a connatural or fixed bias, but a simple function of variables.]

[Footnote 86: Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Literature_, ed. Schwabe, Eng. trans. i, 122 (§ 91).]

[Footnote 87: See the process traced in W.A. Schmidt's _Geschichte der Denk und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums_, 1847.]

[Footnote 88: Polybius, vi, 51. See below, ch. iv, § 1 (11).]

[Footnote 89: I am aware that Mr. Bury protests against this division; but his own difficulty in calling the middle (Byzantine) Empire the "later Roman Empire," while implicitly accepting the "Holy" Empire as _another_ "later Roman Empire," is the best proof that the established nomenclature is the most convenient. Nobody is misled by it. A compromise might perhaps be made on the form "Greek Empire," contended for by M. Sathes (_Monumenta Historiæ Hellenicæ_, i, pref. p. 5), following on M. Rambaud.]

[Footnote 90: As cited below, pt. v, ch. i.]

[Footnote 91: Salvian, for instance, sees in the barbarian irruption a punishment of Christian sins; he never dreams of asking the cause of the Christian and pre-Christian corruption. Prudentius, again, is a thorough imperialist. See the critique and citations of M. Boissier, _La Fin du Paganisme_, ii, 136-141,407. Origen had set the note a century before Constantine (_Contra Celsum_, viii, 68-72).]