Chapter III: Part 3

It is only very dimly that we can trace the outlines of public history as Rome grew to be a power in Italy. We can scarcely hope to trace the lineaments of the individual Roman even in outline. It is sometimes said that even if the earliest history of the city is admitted to be apocryphal, we can draw valuable deductions as to the Roman character from the sort of actions which were regarded as praiseworthy in the earliest times. There is some truth in that view, though it might be objected that most of these stories took literary shape only in the second and first centuries B.C. It might be added that men often admire qualities just because they feel that they themselves cannot claim them. But, on the whole, I think we can get from this period of legendary history some insight into Roman character. There is a remarkable difference between the Roman hero and the Greek. Greek mythology busies itself very largely with stories of cleverness--how Heracles outwitted his foes, smart _équivoques_ by the oracles, ingenious devices of Themistocles, wise sayings of Thales and Solon. It is mainly the intellectual virtues that Greek history of the borderland admires. But the Roman of the same historical area is not clever. Most of the old Roman stories are in praise of courage--for example, the contempt of pain shown by Scævola, who held his right hand in the flames to demonstrate Roman fortitude; the courage of the maiden Clœlia, who swam the river, or of Horatius, who held the bridge against an army; the devotion to his country of Quintus Curtius, who leapt in full armour into the chasm which had opened in the Forum. Many of them celebrate the true Roman virtue of sternness and austere devotion to law, as when the Roman fathers condemned their sons to death for breaking the law under most excusable circumstances. The love of liberty is extolled in Brutus, the love of equality in Valerius and Cincinnatus, called from the plough-tail to supreme command. Austere chastity in females and the strict demand for it in their proprietors is praised in the stories of Lucretia and Virginia. All these we may well set down as the virtues admired and, we hope, practised in early Rome; they form a consistent and quite distinctive picture.

But the early Roman had few accomplishments to embellish his virtues. Art and civilisation either did not exist or have perished without leaving any traces. It is likely enough that all the city’s energies were occupied with the one business of fighting. Some hints of civilising reform hang about the name of Appius Claudius, who was censor about 318-312 B.C. In his time we date some of the military changes mentioned above, and they seem to have accompanied economic changes which point to growing wealth at Rome. Copper gave place to silver as the standard of exchange, and therewith the copper _as_ depreciated in value, so that the Roman unit of historical times, the sestertius of 2½ _as_ value, was a coin worth about _2d._ Land was no longer the sole basis of property; it became possible for a man to become rich by trade, and accordingly landless citizens were now drafted into the ancient tribes for the first time. To this great censor also belongs the first of the famous Roman military roads, the Appian Way, which led southwards to the Greek cities of Campania. Even to-day the Via Appia, flanked with its ruined tombs--for the Romans often buried their dead along the highways--running like a dart across the barren Campagna, is one of the most striking spectacles which modern Rome has to offer.[9]

Of anything which can be dignified with the name of literature we have scarcely a relic. What there is seems ludicrously rustic and uncouth. Consider, for an example, the ancient hymn of the Salii, the jumping priests of Mars. There were twelve of them, all men of patrician family; they dressed in embroidered tunics, with the striped toga, a breastplate of bronze, a conical cap with a spike; they carried each a sacred shield, and as they made their annual processions through the city at the beginning of each campaigning year, they leaped into the air and thumped their shields with sticks; trumpeters preceded them, and they sang this ghostly chant:

ENOS LASES IVVATE (_ter_)
NEVE LVE RVE MARMAR SINS INCVRRERE IN PLEBES (_ter_)
SATVR FV FERE MARS. LIMEN SALI. STA. BERBER (_ter_)
SEMVNIS ALTERNEI ADVOCAPIT CONCTOS. (_ter_)
ENOS MARMOR IVVATO (_ter_)
TRIVMPE (_quinquies_)

which is probably to be translated:

Help us, O Lares (_thrice_)
And, O Mars, let not plague or ruin attack our people (_thrice_)
Be content, fierce Mars. Leap the threshold. Halt. Strike (_thrice_)
In alternate strain call upon all the heroes. (_thrice_)
Help us, Mars (_thrice_)
Leap (_five times_).

EARLY RELIGION

In our quest for the essential Roman we shall find nothing more illuminating than religion. With some people culture takes the place of religion, but it is far commoner to find religion taking the place of culture: it did so with the Hebrews, and it does so to a great extent among the English. The Romans were never a really religious people. Probably they lacked the imagination to be really devout. They had scarcely any native mythology. But they were ritualists and formalists to the heart’s core. If those Salii had jumped only four times at the word “Triumpe,” the whole value of the rite would have been lost: if no worse thing befell them they would have had to begin again from the beginning. Thus religion, always conservative, and generally the richest hunting-ground for the antiquarian in search of prehistoric history, is almost our only source of information as to the mind of the early Roman. Of course, Roman religion is so deeply overlaid with Greek mythology that it takes some digging to discover the real gods of old Rome. But that is being done by the patience and insight of such scholars as Mr. Warde Fowler and Dr. J. G. Frazer, so that we now have a good deal of information about the original Roman religion.

Mr. Warde Fowler makes two important conclusions about the early Romans from his study of the twofold character of Mars, who, in spite of the later primacy of Jupiter, is undoubtedly the true Roman male god: “(1) that their life and habits of thought were those of an agricultural race, and (2) that they continually increased their cultivable land by taking forcible possession in war of that of their neighbours.” This was the Roman method of making agriculture pay. The spring of the year and the month which still bears the name of Mars was not only the season of returning life to nature, but it was also the time when the god and his worshippers buckled on their armour to seek fresh ploughlands, just as did the primitive Germans. It was Europe’s first method of extensive farming, and the habit clung to the Romans long after they had ceased to be farmers. In the spring it was time to look about you and consider where and with whom you should begin to fight this year.

Some of these old Roman festivals are worth a brief description, for they and they alone are the authentic history of the early Romans. For example, on the Ides of March the lower classes streamed out to the Campus Martius on the banks of the river and spent the day in rustic jollity with wine and song in honour of Anna Perenna--the recurring year. On another day there was a ceremony like that of the Hebrew scapegoat. Two dates in the calendar are marked for the king to dissolve the _comitia_. The assembly had to be summoned by the blast of special trumpets of peculiar un-Italian shape (some say Etruscan), and the trumpets had to be purified by a special service on the previous day. Although the Romans abolished their political kingship, religion required the retention of the title for numerous ceremonial purposes. Then there were the Parilia in honour of the old shepherd god Pales, when sheepfolds were garlanded with green, the sheep were purified at the dawn, and rustic sacrifices were paid to avert the wrath of the deity in case you had unwittingly disturbed one of the mysterious powers who dwell in the country--the nymphs and fauns of pool and spring and tree. There was a prayer to this effect of which Ovid has given us the substance, and “this prayer,” adds Mr. Warde Fowler, “must be said four times over, the shepherd looking to the east, and wetting his hands with the morning dew. The position, the holy water, and the prayer in its substance, though now addressed to the Virgin, have all descended to the Catholic shepherds of the Campagna.” There were other primitive agricultural deities, such as Robigus (the red rust on the corn), on whose festival you sacrificed red puppies; Terminus (the boundary god), to whom you slaughtered a sucking-pig on the boundary stone; or Ops Consiva, the deity who protected your buried store of corn. Such names and their attributes indicate a certain poverty of religious imagination. There were more abstract, or, rather, less tangible powers, such as Lares, the spirits of the dead ancestors who figured as guardian angels of the home; the Penates, the spirits who watched over the store-cupboard; the Genius, a man’s luck; the Manes, the kindly dead; or the Lemures, dangerous ghosts of the unburied. The house, like the fields, was full of unseen presences to be appeased with appropriate ritual, which had to be most punctiliously performed. Every year at the Lemuria the master of the house would rise at midnight and, with clean hands and bare feet, walk through the house, making a special sign with his fingers and thumbs to keep off the ghosts. He fills his mouth with black beans and spits them out as he goes, carefully keeping his eyes averted, and saying, “With these I redeem me and mine.” Nine times he speaks these words without looking round, and the ghosts come behind him unseen to gather up the beans. Then the father washes himself again, and clashes the pots together to frighten the spirits away. When he has repeated the words “Depart, ye kindly spirits of our ancestors” nine times, he looks round at last and the ceremony is complete.

The history of Rome, as Mr. Warde Fowler discerns it in religion, begins with an extremely simple rustic worship of natural forms, meteoric stones, sacred trees and animals such as the Mother Wolf or Mars’ woodpeckers; to this stage belong many of the curious spells and charms against ghosts. This sort of worship is not distinctively Roman, but common to the greater part of Central Europe. From these savage local cults we pass to the more centralised worship which belongs to the household, and that household an agricultural one. The father is the priest, and his principal deity is Janus, the god of the doorway; his sons are the subordinate _flamines_; and his daughters have special charge of Vesta, who presides over the family hearth-fire. Their agricultural activities are reflected in the more orderly rural ceremonies in honour of Saturn, Ops, and Vesta. Thirdly, we have a series of cults which indicate the beginnings of a community with the king for chief priest, supported by State Vestals and _flamines_. The Latin Festival marks the participation of Rome in the Latin League, whose presiding deity was Jupiter. In these three stages it is mainly an affair of formless powers or “numina,” deities very scantily realised, with little or no personality, scarcely to be termed anthropomorphic at all. Instead of temples there was nothing but altars, chapels, groves.

If we view these changes in the light of ethnology we shall probably agree that the first of them is the common ground of prehistoric Mediterranean worship. It is what we find in Crete at the earliest period. But we have come to regard the strict monogamous patriarchal family as especially the contribution of the north to the civilisation of Europe. Unfortunately those deities who are most certainly plebeian, such as Ceres, Flora, and Diana, do not seem to belong to the earlier strata of religion.

However that may be, it seems that we can trace in the next succeeding stage a period of public worship connected with clearly anthropomorphic deities who have temples, priests, and probably images of their own. Towards the end of the monarchic period we find those distinctly Etruscan characteristics of which I have already spoken. Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva are an Etruscan trinity. Now begins the pre-eminence of greater gods more or less personified and closely resembling those of the Greeks--such as Mercury, Ceres, and Diana. It is now that the important priestly colleges, pontifices, and augurs are founded, largely replacing, as being more important politically, the old agricultural brotherhood of the Fratres Arvales and the martial fraternity of the Salii.

Thus in religion as in art the Romans were prepared by their Etruscan connections for their subsequent capture by Greek civilisation. It was inevitable that a Greek should recognise Diana as Artemis, Minerva as Pallas, Mercury as Hermes, and Juno as Hera. It was equally inevitable that the Romans should be willing to clothe these bare and chilly abstractions with the charming fabric of Greek mythology. That process, and the simultaneous reception at Rome of Oriental cults, form still later stages in the progress of that strange medley which passed in the Rome of literature for religion.

There is little to elevate or inspire in Roman religion. The only virtue belonging to it was reverence and the strict sense of duty which a Roman called _pietas_, explaining it as “justice towards the gods.” “Religion” meant “binding obligation” to the Romans; its source was fear of the unseen, its issue was mainly punctilious formalism. No doubt the gods would punish disrespect to a parent or rebellion against the state, no doubt a fugitive or a slave had altars and sanctuaries where he might claim mercy; but there is little more than that to connect virtue with religion at Rome. On the other hand, we are not to suppose that when the lascivious rites of Isis and Ashtaroth or the Paphian Venus came to Rome in later days they came to corrupt a race of pious puritans. True Roman deities like Flora, Fortuna Virilis, and Anna Perenna had a native bestiality of their own. The simple rustic is seldom a natural puritan, and we must beware of idealising our Early Roman as a Scottish Covenanter. There was savage cruelty in many of the early rites, such as the Ver Sacrum when all the offspring of men and cattle within a specified period was devoted to the gods, or the Fordicidia when unborn calves were burnt. Human sacrifice looms large in the early religion, and it was probably only a later refinement which limited it to criminals or volunteers.

Mommsen has drawn our attention to the business-like relation between worshipper and god, for that is also typical of the old Roman character. “The gods,” he says, “confronted man just as a creditor confronted a debtor.... Man even dealt in speculation with his god: a vow was in reality as in name a formal contract between the god and the man by which the latter promised to the former for a certain service to be rendered a certain equivalent return.” Nay, he might venture to defraud his god. “They presented to the lord of the sky heads of onions or poppies, that he might launch his lightnings at these rather than at the heads of men. In payment of the offering annually demanded by father Tiber, thirty puppets plaited of rushes were annually thrown into the stream.” It may be true, as Mr. Warde Fowler argues, that the bargain sometimes took the form of a lively sense of favours to come, but a _votum_ was essentially a business transaction.

The deity was very dimly visualised: the cult was everything, the god nothing. The true Latin god does not marry or beget children--did not, at least, till the Greek theologians came over and married them all suitably and provided them with families. Before history began the Romans had forgotten the little they had ever known about their most ancient deities. The rite, perhaps the altar, was preserved, but no one remembered the object of it. This is a typical Roman prayer as we have it in old Cato: “This is the proper Roman way to cut down a grove. Sacrifice with a pig for a peace-offering. This is the verbal formula: Whether thou art a god or a goddess to whom that grove is sacred, may it be justice in thine eyes to sacrifice a pig for a peace-offering in order that the sanctity may be restrained. For this cause, whether I perform the sacrifice or any one else at my orders, may it be rightly done. For that cause in sacrificing this pig for a peace-offering I pray thee honest prayers that thou mayest be kind and propitious to me and my house and my slaves and my children. For these causes be thou blessed with the sacrifice of this pig for a peace-offering.” To misplace a word in this formula would have been fatal. The vagueness of the address is typical: the wood is sacred, no doubt, to some invisible _numen_; the woodman must guard himself against addressing the wrong power. Much of the Roman worship is thus offered “to the Unknown God.”

LAW

It was this quality of precision and formalism which made Rome the lawgiver of Europe. In the battle between law and sentiment the Roman sword has been thrown with decisive effect into the scale of law. All Roman law was originally a series of formulæ, and like all ancient law a part of religion. First the king and then the priests were the only people who knew these formulæ. Thus the king was the sole judge both in private and public right; he might summon a council of advisers or he might delegate his powers to an inferior officer, such as the prætor or the prefect of the city, or the trackers of murder. Both these rights, that of choosing a consilium and of delegating authority, with, however, a right of appeal from the lower to the higher functionary, remained inherent in the Roman magistracy. In all cases, private or public, the king or the magistrate who replaced him had to pronounce the _jus_ first: that is, to state the proper formula for the case in question; then he would send the case for trial of fact, or _judicium_, before judge or jury. The formula would run “if it appears that A. B. has been guilty of---- condemn him to----; if not, acquit him.” _Jus_, human right, was inseparably connected with _fas_, divine right: no layman could properly interpret either. For a long time it was necessary for one of the priests to be present in court to see that the proper formularies of action were observed with strict verbal accuracy. This was, of course, an enormously powerful weapon in the hands of the patricians.

Then in the course of the struggle between the orders came the usual demand for written laws. The famous story of the Decemviri and their commission to Athens in 451 B.C. is unfortunately very dubious history. It is full of romantic elements, it is part of that systematic depreciation of the Claudii in Roman history which Mommsen has traced to its probable source, it has elements which look as if they were borrowed from the story of the thirty tyrants at Athens, and there is no confirmation from the Athenian side. Professor Pais believes that the fifth century is much too early for such a code. There are, it is true, in the fragments of the Twelve Tables which have come down to us, some enactments closely resembling those of the Greek codes--regulations, for example, limiting the expense of funerals--but we find such laws in other codes than that of Solon. One would like to have fuller details about that later Appius Claudius, the famous censor of 312 B.C. It is said that he desired to reduce the now complicated bulk of legal formulæ to writing simply for the benefit of the priests, but that a low-born scribe, one Flavius, whom he employed for the purpose as his clerk, fraudulently revealed these judicial secrets to the public. The whole tendency of the Claudian falsifications is to make out that the Claudii were tyrannical and anti-democratic. It certainly looks as if the dishonesty of the freedman had been put into the story for the purpose of robbing the famous censor of his credit for helping the people to a knowledge of law.

The whole fabric of Roman law was supposed to rest upon the foundation of the Twelve Tables. Only fragments of them have come down to us. They are undoubtedly very ancient and primitive, more so, it would seem, than the Athenian law of 451 B.C. Fines are to be paid in metal by weight. A creditor has the right to carve up the body of his debtor. Plebeian may not intermarry with patrician. But they also carried something of a charter of liberties for the citizens in that capital punishment could not be inflicted without right of appeal to the assembly, and no law could be proposed against an individual. The language of this famous code is of a rugged simplicity and directness that is truly Roman. On the whole Roman law is merciful, considering its strict character: though much of Roman pleading, as we have it in the mouth of Cicero, is full of appeals to sentiment, Roman law itself allows no appeal to anything so vague as abstract justice. The written letter stands, and there can be no pleading without a legal formula.

The character of the ancient Roman is best described by his favourite virtue of _gravitas_. In that word is implied serious purpose, dignified reserve, fidelity to one’s promise, and a sense of duty. Levity is its opposite, and among the things repugnant to true Roman gravity were art, music, and literature. It is on the battlefield, in the senate-house, and the law-courts that the old Roman is most truly at home.

II

CONQUEST

quæ neque Dardanus campis potuere perire
nec quom capta capi, nec quom combusta cremari,
augusto augurio postquam incluta condita Roma est.
ENNIUS.

The great Samnite wars, which had lasted on and off from 343 to 290 B.C., had been the school of Roman valour. In her citizen legions Rome had evolved a fighting machine unequalled, probably, until the Musketeers of Louis XIV. and Marlborough. Also she was learning politics and the art of government. She was now mistress over the greater part of Italy; all, in fact, except the Gallic plain in the north and the Greek cities of the south. The Pyrrhic war which followed after a short breathing-space forms the transition between domestic expansion and foreign conquest. Our business here is not with wars and battles for their own sake, but it will be important to observe in what manner Rome was launched on her career of empire-making. Seeley has shown how the British Empire grew up in a haphazard manner, without any wise policy to direct its growth, with continual neglect of opportunities, and often in contemptuous ignorance of the work that private citizens were undertaking for its honour and advancement. We shall see that it was very much the same with the Roman Empire. One responsibility leads to another, one conquest leads to many entanglements: if the coast is to be held the hinterland must be conquered. Thus power follows capacity, and the doctrine which seems so unjust, “To him that hath shall be given, from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have,” is fulfilled in all the dealings between Providence and imperial peoples. By coming into contact with the Greeks of the south Rome was brought definitely to deal with a superior but declining civilisation. The career of Agathocles, the brigand tyrant of Sicily, had lately shown how easy a thing it was to make empires among the opulent and luxurious cities of the Calabrian and Bruttian shores.

One summer’s day in 282 B.C. the people of Tarentum were seated in their open-air theatre, watching the performance of a tragedy. They looked out above the stage over the blue waters of the Gulf of Calabria, and there they saw a small detachment of the Roman fleet sailing into their harbour. The ships were on a voyage entirely peaceful, but there was an old treaty forbidding the Romans to pass the Lacinian Promontory, and these barbarians had lately been interfering in the affairs of their Greek neighbours, always in favour of oligarchy against democracy. The mob was seized with a sudden access of fury; they rushed down to the harbour, butchered or enslaved the sailors, and put the admiral to death. The Roman Senate met this atrocious insult with calm, even with generosity. But the Tarentine mob would have no peace. Looking abroad for a champion they invited the Prince of Epirus to their aid. Pyrrhus was a young man of charm, ability, and ambition almost equal to that of Alexander the Great, whose career he longed to emulate in the West. He was called the first general of his day, and he brought with him 20,000 infantrymen of the phalanx, 2000 archers, 500 slingers, and 3000 cavalry. Moreover he had twenty Indian war elephants. The boastful Greeks had offered to provide 350,000 infantry, but when it came to the point they would do nothing but hire a few mercenaries. However, Pyrrhus was victorious in the first battle near Heraclea. The victory was won, it is said, by the final charge of the elephants. The simple Romans had never seen an elephant before; they called them “snake-hands” and “Lucanian cows,” and their horses were even more alarmed than they. But the next time the Romans had to meet elephants they provided themselves first with wonderful machines, in which chariots were mysteriously blended with chafing-dishes, and then when these failed, with fiery darts, which converted this heavy cavalry into engines of destruction for their owners. That is rather typical of the simple Roman and his way of encountering monsters.

After the victory of Heraclea, Pyrrhus sent to Rome with overtures of peace a smooth-tongued courtier named Cineas, who was much impressed with the incorruptibility of the political chiefs and their wives. It was he who described the Senate as a “council of kings,” so grave and majestic was their bearing and discourse. Nevertheless the Roman Senate would have made terms if it had not been for the great Censor Appius Claudius, now blind and infirm, who laid down for the first time the celebrated doctrine that Rome never listened to terms while there were foreign troops on Italian soil. Therefore, although the Romans had lost 15,000 men, fresh conscripts eagerly enrolled themselves to make a new army.

Meanwhile Pyrrhus, after another incomplete “Pyrrhic” victory, was proceeding unchecked over the island of Sicily. There he drove the Carthaginians from point to point until they concentrated in their great stronghold of Lilybæum in the west. But all the time his position was desperate. The coalition on which he depended was composed of faithless and useless allies. While his stiff Epirot phalanx was depleted at every victory, fresh levies of Roman citizens seemed to spring from the soil to replace the losses of every defeat. So at length it came to the battle of the Arusine Plain, near Beneventum, in which the Romans were completely victorious. Thus Pyrrhus leaves to history the reputation not of a conqueror but of an adventurer. The Romans had thus faced and overthrown the Greek phalanx at its best, and were now masters of Italy from Genoa to Reggio, with Sicily obviously inviting their next advance. That Rome was now formally accepted among the great powers of the Mediterranean world is shown by an embassy offering alliance with Ptolemy of Egypt.

She had a breathing-space of eleven years before the first of her two great conflicts with the Carthaginians. Carthage, a colony of the Phœnicians of Tyre, had grown rich and prosperous on the fertile soil of the modern Tunis. She was an aristocracy wholly devoted to trade, and living uncomfortably amid a surrounding population of dangerous native subjects. War was not her main business, but when she sought fresh markets she was apt to fight with horrible ferocity, sacrificing her prisoners in hundreds to hideous gods when she was victorious, and impaling her generals when she was not. As a military power she varied greatly: the comparatively puny Greek states of Sicily had been maintaining a fairly equal struggle against her for centuries. But she used the British system of sepoy troops, and thus everything depended on the general. Had it not been for the inexperience of the Romans at sea and the extraordinary genius of Hannibal, Carthage would never have come as near victory as she did. We have no history of the struggle from the Punic side, and Carthage herself must remain somewhat of a mystery even when illuminated by the brilliant imagination of the author of _Salammbô_.

In entering upon this war, which Rome did ostensibly in response to an appeal from a parcel of ruffianly outlaws for whom she had no sympathy whatever, we can for once discover no motive but desire of conquest. Messina, the home of the said ruffians, was for her merely the _tête du pont_ which led from Bruttium into Sicily. The conquest of that rich Greek island was plainly the objective, but she plunged into war without foreseeing the immensity of her undertaking. The chief interest of the First Punic War, which lasted from 264 to 241, lies in the creation of a Roman navy which occurred in the course of it. Although we may agree with Mommsen that “it is only a childish view to believe that the Romans then for the first time dipped their oars in water,” yet tradition says that the Romans constructed a fleet in a great hurry, taking for model a stranded Carthaginian galley. It was at any rate her first war-fleet worth mentioning. The tradition is proved by the lack of seamanship displayed by the Romans, for every storm cost her enormous losses by shipwreck. The device by which she overcame the Punic ships--a sort of grappling gangway on pulleys affixed to her masts, so that her soldiers could fight the enemy as if on shore--was a successful but essentially a landlubberly invention, and no doubt accounts for many of her losses by shipwreck. Her annual consuls, transformed for the occasion into annual admirals, had not even as much opportunity as Colonel Blake to learn their trade. And, though Rome launched fleet after fleet until at length she became mistress of the seas, she never treated her navy with respect. The ships were rowed by slaves and manned chiefly by subject allies, but the real business of fighting was done by the 120 legionaries on each vessel, who came into action when the enemy was grappled and the gangway fast in her deck. So the war dragged on for nearly a generation until at length the Carthaginians made peace, and Rome gained the coveted island. Britain is not the only empire in history which wins victories by “muddling through.”

The peace was clearly nothing more than a respite: the command of the Western Mediterranean was not yet settled. Rome spent the interval in making fresh conquests. First she seized the opportunity, while Carthage was involved with her native rebels, to annex the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, alleging with more ingenuity than geographical exactitude that these were some of the islands between Sicily and Africa which Carthage had agreed to surrender. Here we behold the simple Roman as a diplomat. Then she was compelled to intervene in Illyria in order to clear the Adriatic of piracy, and so acquired territory across the water. Soon afterwards the Gauls of the northern plain began under pressure from their kinsmen across the Alps to threaten invasion; and Rome, after failing to gain the favour of heaven by the pious expedient of burying a male and female Gaul alive in her Forum, marched out to meet them, slaughtered them in thousands, and thus rounded off her control over the peninsula. Much of this looks like conscious empire-building.

In the Second Punic War, which lasted from 218 to the end of the century, Rome was not the aggressor. At Carthage by this time the native rebellion had been put down with a heavy hand. It seems that Carthage had its party system, the democracy, as usual in ancient cities, being for war, and the aristocracy of rich merchants for peace. The democracy was led by the celebrated Barca family, who had long supplied the state with famous generals and now occupied a position of unrivalled eminence. Constitutionally a Carthaginian could rise no further than to be one of the two _shophets_ who corresponded to the Roman consuls, but actually the Barcas were more like a family of dictators. From the first Hamilcar Barca foresaw that Rome was still the enemy, and he is said to have made his little son Hannibal swear an oath at the altar that he would prosecute that enmity to the death. But first it was necessary to acquire resources and an army for the purpose. This he resolved to do, as Julius Cæsar did after him, by foreign conquest. Without orders from home he led his army into Spain, and there began to build up a province and a native army under his absolute control. Though Cadiz was already a Carthaginian market and there was already a Greek colony at Saguntum, and the ships of Tarshish were known even to King Solomon, this is the first real appearance of Spain in history. There was metal to be had from the mines, gold, copper, and silver, and there were hardy warriors in the hills who only needed training to become excellent soldiers. So Carthage began to acquire a western substitute for her lost province of Sicily. Hamilcar died; his son-in-law, Hasdrubal, was assassinated; and then the army chose for its leader Hamilcar’s son Hannibal, then a young man of twenty-nine.

This man, though his history was written exclusively by his enemies, stands out as one of the greatest leaders in history. In strategy he was supreme; in statesmanship he had the gift which Marlborough shared of being able by his personal influence to hold unwilling allies together even in adverse circumstances. He was a cultivated man who spoke and wrote Greek and Latin. He is charged by the jealousy of the Romans with cruelty and perfidy, but in fact history has nothing to substantiate these charges: on the contrary his actions are often magnanimous and honourable. His brilliance as a general largely sprang from his power of entering into the mind of his enemy. This was the man who inherited his father’s deep-laid plans of vengeance, and set out, his heart burning with hatred of Rome, to fulfil them.

We cannot dwell upon his wonderful march over the Alps and his brilliant series of victories on the soil of Italy. Hannibal’s whole plan of campaign was, briefly, to invade Italy by land with a compact striking force and raise the unwilling subjects of Rome against her, while the main force of Carthage attacked Sicily and Italy by sea. But it contained three serious miscalculations which brought it eventually to ruin. First, the southern Gauls on whom Hannibal relied for his communications and his base proved fickle and untrustworthy allies; secondly, he found that Rome’s mild imperial system had not produced unwilling subjects such as Carthage possessed in Africa; and thirdly, he hoped for support from Philip of Macedon, but here he was foiled by Roman diplomacy. Moreover, while the Romans showed a tenacity and power of recuperation unexampled in history, Carthage herself, now in the hands of the commercial oligarchs, gave him grudging and uncertain support. The firmness and courage of the Roman senate and people were amazing. Beaten again and again in the field at the Ticino, the Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannæ, Rome never lost her pride. She refused offers of help from King Hiero of Syracuse, she could find time to order the Illyrian chiefs to pay their tribute, she actually summoned Philip of Macedon to surrender her fugitive rebel Demetrius. She kept an army in Spain; a fleet still cruised in Greek waters; she had an army in Sicily, while four legions besieged Capua; she had troops in Sardinia, three legions in North Italy, two legions as a garrison in the capital--no fewer than 200,000 citizens under arms. When the foolish demagogue Varro returned in defeat and disgrace from the awful disaster at Cannæ, the senate thanked him for not having committed suicide--“for not having despaired of the salvation of his country.”

No doubt Rome owed something, but not as much as her poets and orators pretended, to the cautious tactics of Quintus Fabius. At any rate, he gave her time to grow used to the presence of the invader and to recover from the shock of the three disasters with which the war opened. The Romans had never before been called upon to face a consummate strategist. Pyrrhus had been, within the limitations of Greek warfare, a clever tactician; he had even shown the originality to copy the Roman manipular system in his later battles. But Hannibal was more than a strategist; he was a psychologist who knew when the opposing general was rash and when he was wary, who had spies everywhere and could supplement their intelligence by disguising himself to do his own scouting. Scouting was an art that the Romans had yet to learn by bitter experience. At the Trasimene Lake[10] they blundered straight into the most obvious of natural death-traps. But the Romans were always good learners, and, as usually happens, the amateur patriot army steadily improved during the war while the hired professionals steadily deteriorated. The actual strategy by which Hannibal won most of his battles was simple enough. It was the policy of a long weak centre into which the Roman legions buried themselves deep while the two strong wings of the enemy closed round on their flanks and rear. In his Numidian horsemen Hannibal had the finest light cavalry yet known to European warfare.

For a time all went brilliantly for the invader. Italians, Greeks, and Gauls joined his victorious standard. Rome was on the brink of despair. The very gods began to tremble; their statues sweated blood, two-headed lambs were born with alarming frequency, and cows in Apulia uttered prophetic warnings with human voices; the most horrible of omens portended destruction. But the city and the senate never lost heart and gradually as the years passed by Hannibal began to see that his cause was lost. The Latin allies stood firm for Rome. The Romans were able to hold Sicily and even despatch a brilliant and lucky young general named Scipio to reconquer Spain. Thus the longed-for reinforcements were cut off. The stupid aristocracy of Carthage were jealous of their great soldier, and when at last a reinforcing Punic army from Spain managed to slip through into Italy, Nero caught it at the River Metaurus just before the junction was effected. The first news of that battle came to Hannibal when the Romans tossed over the rampart into his camp the bleeding head of the defeated general, his own brother Hasdrubal. Horace has sung of this tragic episode in his noblest manner:

quid debeas, o Roma, Neronibus
testis Metaurum flumen et Hasdrubal
devictus et pulcer fugatis
ille dies Latio tenebris.

* * * * *

dixitque tandem perfidus Hannibal:
“cerui, luporum præda rapacium,
sectamur ultro quos opimus
fallere et effugere est triumphus

* * * * *

“Carthagini iam non ego nuntios
mittam superbos. occidit, occidit
spes omnis et fortuna nostri
nominis Hasdrubale interempto.”[11]

This was in 207: in 206 Scipio won a decisive victory in Spain and in 205 made a counter-invasion upon the coast of Carthage. It was only “a forlorn hope of volunteers and disrated companies,” but it caused the recall of Hannibal and gained valuable African allies for Rome. The last scene of the duel was the victory of Zama in 202 in which Scipio won his title of Africanus and became the hero and saviour of Rome.[12] Carthage ceded Spain and the Spanish islands, lost her whole war-fleet, came under Roman suzerainty and agreed to pay an enormous indemnity. But her end was not yet. For another fifty years she was permitted to exist on sufferance in humiliation and agony.

Now, frightful as had been the losses of Rome in this seventeen-years’ conflict, and great as was her exhaustion, she proceeded in the very year following the peace with Carthage to enter upon a fresh series of campaigns. The Gauls of the north made a desperate revolt, sacked Piacenza and invested Cremona, but the Romans quickly brought them to reason. The Gauls could not, of course, receive any of the rights of citizenship as yet, but they received back their independence, and were left free of tribute to act as a bulwark against their northern cousins. There was incessant fighting in Spain also. In Sardinia there were perpetual slave-drives, until the market was glutted with slaves, and the phrase was begotten “as cheap as a Sardinian.” How could the senate at such a moment declare a fresh war with the greatest of European powers? Was it under pressure of that greedy commercial party at Rome of which we are beginning to hear so much? The suggestion is absurd. There were hard knocks and little money to be got from Macedon; and it is difficult to conceive how any powerful commercial interests could have arisen at Rome during the seventeen years of the Hannibalic War. If ever there was a nation whose early history declined the economic interpretation it was the Romans. Even when the Romans had conquered Macedon they shut down the famous gold mines because they did not know how to manage them! Nor, I think, was it any large-minded _Welt-politik_ which led Rome into the Second Macedonian War. Doubtless Philip and the Greeks were dangerous and uncomfortable neighbours, and no doubt it was true that Philip of Macedon and Antiochus of Syria had formed a compact to divide up the realms of the boy-king of Egypt. But the war could probably have been postponed for years by negotiation. Philip did not want to fight Rome: he had not even ventured to intervene while she was almost prostrate before Hannibal. The fact is that the Romans were by habits and instinct a fighting people. From the earliest times they had inherited the custom of an annual summer campaign. Peace did not present itself to them, or most of their neighbours, as a desirable condition to be preserved as long as possible. They were soldiers and nought else, and what are soldiers for but for fighting? It is only blind optimism which can believe that nations are even now actuated habitually in their international relations by foresight and policy. “The plain truth is,” said William James, “that people _want_ war. They want it anyhow; for itself, and apart from each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life’s fireworks.” That is certainly true of the Romans: the Roman state, as a whole, needed its customary annual campaign. It was the business of her statesmen and diplomats to choose the enemy and prepare a _casus belli_. To imagine the states of 200 B.C. as always calculating their actions solely on the basis of commercial interest must be unhistorical.

In their attack on Philip the Romans were allied with the most respectable elements in Levantine politics: Rhodes, the commercial republic; Pergamum, the kingdom of the cultivated Attalus; Athens, the ancient home of art and learning; Egypt, the centre of commerce and literature. Elsewhere[13] I have described how the simple Romans comported themselves in this land of higher civilisation. They trod almost reverently into the circle of Greek culture; they were flattered when the Athenians initiated them into the Eleusinian Mysteries, or when the Achæan League permitted them to take part in the Isthmian games. And when they had beaten Philip--not without difficulty, nor without indispensable aid from the Ætolian cavalry--at Cynocephalæ, they made no attempt at annexation. Leaving Philip crippled, they were content. Flamininus, their Philhellenic general, was proud to proclaim the liberty of Greece before he retired. He and many of his officers carried away with them an ineffaceable impression. They were returning to barbarism from a land rich in ancient temples of incredible splendour, crowded with works of art. They had seen the tragedies in the theatres, the runners in the games. They had heard the philosophers disputing in the colonnades, the orators haranguing in the market-place. A world glowing with life undreamt-of, where there were other things to live for than battle, had suddenly flashed upon their eyes.

The next great war was against Philip’s accomplice, Antiochus of Syria. This war was as inevitable as the last. Antiochus, puffed up with the pretensions of an Oriental King of Kings, was eager to match his strength against the _parvenus_ Romans. Rome seemed, and perhaps was, reluctant to undertake the apparently enormous task at this moment, though Pergamum and Rhodes invoked her assistance. One strong cause for war was that Antiochus had given a home to Hannibal, Rome’s hunted but dreaded foe. If the Great King had but had the sense to give Hannibal power over his great host it might yet have gone hard with the Romans. As it was, the battle of Magnesia (190) was one of those tame victories in which Oriental hosts are butchered by superior Western weapons and methods of fighting. But even with the wealth of Syria spread out at her feet, Rome annexed nothing; not out of any spirit of self-denial, for she exacted an indemnity of almost four million sterling, but because she was not prepared to undertake the responsibility of governing regions so vast and so much more civilised than herself.

Actually, of course, the effect of these wars was to give Rome complete command of the Mediterranean coast-lands. Though she did not annex, she accepted suzerainty; that is, she controlled, or attempted to control, foreign policy. Rome is the patron; Macedonia, Syria, Egypt, Pergamum, Rhodes, Bithynia, Athens, the two leagues and all the ancient states of Greece are her clients. The position of policeman and nurse of the Ægean world had been thrust upon Rome because she was strong and just. Even that was a terrific and bewildering responsibility. Every day fresh embassies came to Rome to complain of neighbours and solicit assistance--clever Greeks who would talk your head off with sophistries, and rich Asiatics who would corrupt you with bribes and blandishments. There was no one within reach who would stand up and fight squarely. In the West there were Provinces, in the East allies; it was difficult to know which gave most trouble.

So we come to the next stage, when the Romans began to annex and subjugate. It was the only way. In Macedonia, after Philip had been conquered and pardoned, Perseus arose and rebelled. After Perseus had been crushed and his kingdom dismembered, a bastard pretender arose and headed a revolt, joined by the Greeks. Obviously there was nothing for it but to round off the business by sending a permanent army under a permanent general to Macedonia, and to call it his “province.” Not even yet did the Romans dream of making cities like Athens her subjects. These free cities, however, needed a sharp lesson; and Corinth, as an almost impregnable fortress which had been a centre of Achæan mischief, was selected for destruction and destroyed in 146 B.C.

In the same year came the end of Carthage. During the last fifty years there had been incessant trouble there. Rome had left Carthage prostrate before her dangerous African enemies, and refused all her appeals to be allowed to defend herself. All the time Carthage was undoubtedly recovering financially from her defeat, in spite of her large annual tribute. This sight moved the fears and jealousy of the Romans. It was not sufficient to have ordered the expulsion of Hannibal. The Romans who had grown up under the shadow of the great Punic War had sucked in hate and fear of Carthage with their mother’s milk. Intelligent people like Scipio, who had seen Carthage in the dust, might mock at their fears. It was the Old Roman party, with their spokesman Cato and his stupid parrot-cry of _delenda est Carthago_, who constantly kept their nerves on edge, until at last in sheer panic they obeyed. The long feud between Carthage and the Berber chief Masinissa came to a head in 154. Masinissa appealed to Rome, and Rome ordered Carthage to dismiss her army and burn her fleet. Carthage, now desperate, refused, went to war with Masinissa, and was beaten. Then Rome declared war upon her--the Third Punic War. Two consuls landed with a large army and Carthage offered submission. The consuls demanded complete disarmament. Carthage submitted. Then the consuls demanded that the existing city should be destroyed and the inhabitants settled ten miles inland. That meant not only the destruction of their homes and hearths and temples, but the end of the commerce for which they lived. This preposterous demand shows that Cato’s policy had triumphed. Carthage could not submit to this, and there followed one of those frightful sieges in which the Semitic peoples show their amazing tenacity. Three years it lasted, by favour of the gross incompetence of the Roman generals; until at last a Scipio came to turn the tide once more. Carthage was destroyed utterly with fire and sword, her very site laid bare, and the soil sown with salt, in token that man should dwell there no more.

The destruction of these two cities, Corinth and Carthage, together with other facts such as the unreasonable irritation which Rome displayed against her Greek allies, Rhodes and Pergamum, have been taken by some modern historians to indicate, once more, a policy of commercial jealousy instigating the destruction of rival markets. In the one case, however, it has been proved that Corinth was no longer a great centre of Greek commerce when she was destroyed, and in the case of Carthage it was the party of Cato, who was much more of a farmer than a company-promoter, that urged destruction. A man of business might indeed be foolish enough to want to close the principal markets which bought and sold with him--there are such business men to-day--but he would scarcely be so mad as to have a fine commercial centre with its docks and quays utterly destroyed and cursed for ever. Similarly, when Macedon was conquered her rich gold mines were shut down by order of the senate. The truth is that Rome was tired and exhausted with her colossal wars, irritable and nervous beyond expression with the gigantic task of government which she had found thrust upon her. Surrounded with false friends and secret enemies, she was losing the noble _sang froid_ she had displayed in times of real crisis. Corinth was destroyed as a warning to the Greeks, Carthage as an expiation for the _lemures_ of the unburied Roman dead.

THE PROVINCES

In considering the ancient, imperial, and provincial systems it is necessary for the modern to divest himself of all the geographical notions which spring from the study of maps. The ancients probably had only the most vague notions of territory. Natural frontiers such as mountains, rivers, and coasts were of course familiar to them, from the strategic point of view. Within those were cities great and small, which in the case of civilised people formed the units of life and government. In the case of barbarians there were tribes and nations, seldom sufficiently settled to produce any notion of geographical area. Thus when Rome conquered Sicily she was acquiring not so much one geographical unit, an island, as a collection of states of various types and constitutions. Similarly in the case of Spain; she said and thought that she acquired Spain, although the greater part of the Iberian peninsula remained unconquered for another century and a half. To remember the limitations of ancient geographical knowledge is essential to the understanding of the Roman provincial system. _Provincia_ means in the first instance a sphere of official duty, a man’s _provincia_ might be the feeding of the sacred geese or it might be the control of an army. It was not for a long time that the word came to connote a territorial area. When it did so, the day of the city-state was at an end.