Chapter IV: Part 4

The earliest Roman provinces were _Sicily_, acquired by conquest in the First Punic War, 241 B.C., then _Corsica_ and _Sardinia_, annexed in the diplomatic intrigues which followed. Spain, or rather “_the Spains_.” Further and Hither, were the fruit of the Second Punic War (201). After the Third Punic War (146) the territory of Carthage became a province under the name of _Africa_. At the same time the Macedonian Wars gave Rome the province of _Macedonia_. To complete the list so far as the Roman Republic is concerned: Attalus III. bequeathed his kingdom to Rome in 133, and this became the province of _Asia_. In 121 the conquest of Southern Gaul gave Rome _Gallia Narbonensis_. In 103 the prevalence of piracy on the southern coasts of Asia Minor compelled the Romans to make _Cilicia_ a province. In 81 a legislative act of Sulla brought the already conquered _Cisalpine Gaul_ into the same category. The King of _Bithynia_ imitated Attalus in bequeathing his kingdom to Rome. _Cyrene_ also was bequeathed to Rome and united in one province with _Crete_ in 63. In 64 Pompeius the Great deposed the King of _Syria_ and annexed his kingdom. About the same time, on the death of Mithradates, _Pontus_ was added to Bithynia as a united province. In 51 Julius Cæsar completed the conquest of Gaul and added it as _Gallia Comata_ to the old province of Narbonensian Gaul. Finally in 31 Octavianus added _Egypt_ to the list.

It was not the Roman way to think a situation out with the logic and directness of a Greek or a Frenchman. More like the Englishman, he took things as they came and made the best of them with as little derangement as possible of his pre-existing system and preconceived ideas. The Roman Empire was not governed on a system as it was not acquired by a policy. When Sicily came into the Roman hands, it came piecemeal in the course of the war. Various cities accepted Roman “alliance” on various terms. Rome had never been able to grant full citizenship to Greek states, because their inhabitants, speaking a foreign language, could not give the equivalent in military service. If Sicily had been Italian it would no doubt have entered the Roman alliance as a collection of municipia; as it was, the sixty-five or so separate Sicilian states continued to enjoy for the most part their previous constitutions under various agreements with Rome. Some were “free,” some were “free and confederate”; similarly of kings who yielded to Rome, some were styled “allies,” some “allies and friends.” The cities would have their charters and the kings would have their personal treaties with Rome which lapsed with their death. But in a region conquered in war most of the tribes or states were simply “stipendiary,” that is, tribute-paying. The _stipendium_ paid was originally, and in theory, an indemnity or a contribution for the maintenance of a military force by people who were unqualified to give personal service. It was generally settled by a commission of ten members of the senate, who went out to organise a newly acquired territory. Even these tributary states had their charters from Rome. The _stipendium_ was by no means extortionate. In Macedonia, for example, the people only paid to Rome half as much as they had previously paid to their kings. In Sicily and Sardinia the tillers of the soil paid a tithe, generally in kind (that is, in corn), to the Roman treasury, and the town-dwellers probably paid a poll-tax. It was an error of the jurists, who confused this tithe with the tenth paid by occupants of Roman public land, which afterwards led to the dangerous legal theory that Rome had acquired the whole soil of the country conquered by her arms and leased it back for a consideration to the original proprietors. As a matter of fact, few of the provinces were remunerative to the Roman state. Spain, where warfare was incessant, was certainly a heavy loss. Macedonia was no source of profit. Sicily, largely owing to the Roman Peace, became the granary of the capital, but Asia alone was a source of great wealth to the treasury. There were, of course, harbour dues for the provinces as for Italy herself.

On the whole, it is fair to say that local autonomy was generally preserved. Either through policy or, more probably, because the Romans habitually took things as they found them, the previous laws and constitutions of conquered units, whether cities or tribes, remained in force. In Syracuse, for example, the law of King Hiero remained, and it was much better for the Sicilians to pay their taxes to Rome than to be subject to the personal extortions of a monster like Agathocles. In law-suits between citizens of one Sicilian state the trial was to be held in that state by a native judge and according to the native laws--possibly with a right of appeal to the Roman governor. In suits between Romans and Sicilians the judge was to be a native of the defendant’s state. So far the Roman sway is the mildest, the most benevolent system of government which has ever been imposed by an empire upon conquered subjects. Athens, it will be remembered, had grown rich and beautiful by misapplying the contributions of allies which she had converted into the tribute of subjects. Sparta had put garrisons into every conquered city. So had Carthage. No modern power allows as much local autonomy to conquered territories as Rome granted to hers.

But in every conquered territory it was necessary to have an armed force, large or small according to circumstances, and for the soldiers a general. As all the Roman magistrates were military in the first instance, but also judicial and executive--as, in fact, the nature of Roman ideas of _imperium_ implied an unlimited competence in every department of rule, the provincial general was also, necessarily, a provincial judge and administrator free from all control during his year of office. No doubt the Romans, if they had possessed the wisdom and retrospective foresight so lavishly displayed by their modern critics, would, in sending officers to distant parts, have revised their notions of _imperium_ and defined the spheres of duty which they entrusted to their generals. If they had studied political science they might have learnt that it is wise to separate the legal functions from the administrative, and both from the military. Or if they had made historical researches, they might have discovered that the Persian administrative system of three independent functionaries in each satrapy was the best that had yet been discovered. But they did none of these things: they simply blundered on in the old Roman way, _more maiorum_. They did not foresee the demoralising effect of absolute power in an alien and subject land. They did not foresee the necessity for central control in a Roman Colonial Office; there was not even any Latin equivalent for the Franco-Grecian term “bureaucracy.” Thus they were compelled to trust to the honour and sense of justice which was, when this colossal experiment began, still believed to exist in the heart of a Roman officer and gentleman, unaware that corruption was beginning even then to taint the whole body of their aristocracy.

They might, one would think, have realised the super-human temptations in the path of a Roman governor. He went out, with a company of his own friends, chiefly ambitious young men, for a staff, with a senatorial legate chosen by himself, and a juvenile quæstor as his subordinate to keep accounts, if he could: for there was no competitive examination in book-keeping. The governor went for a year only among a people whose traditions, laws, and even language, were probably quite unknown to him. He left an austere and barbarous republic to act as monarch among flattering Greeks or cringing Asiatics. No power on earth could even criticise him while he held the _imperium_: afterwards he might be impeached, it is true, but before a court of his own friends. He had just completed a civic magistracy, and these were won and held by means of lavish bribes and public entertainments. Opportunities to recoup himself were irresistible.

True to the _mos maiorum_, the Romans invented no new magistracy for the provinces. Already as early as the Samnite Wars they had found it necessary sometimes to break down the annual system by proroguing a magistrate’s term of office in order that he might finish a campaign. If he were prætor or consul, he continued for another year as proprætor or proconsul. When Sicily was conquered the Romans added another prætor to the two functionaries already existing, another for Sardinia, and two more for Spain; but after that the new provinces were entrusted to proprætors and proconsuls, or, in case of a war, to the consuls themselves during the latter part of their year of office. The senate decided what the magisterial provinces should be, which of them should be consular, and then generally the qualified officers balloted for them.

The same want of elasticity in the Roman system spoilt their good intentions in the matter of finance. As we have seen, the State imposed no crushing burdens upon its vassals. Had the _stipendium_ been honestly collected by official emissaries under proper control, the provincials would have had little cause of complaint. But the Romans here again provided no new functionaries for the new duty. In some cases they allowed the subject communities to collect their own taxes and forward the required aggregate to Rome, and in such cases there was a great deal of peculation on the way. But where this was impossible the senate farmed out the collection of taxes under contract to certain individuals who bought them at auction. The _publicani_ quickly grew into a regular institution, grouping themselves into capitalist syndicates which combined tax-farming with money-lending. Banks were established in every provincial centre. This capitalist class soon established itself as a political body at Rome, where it exerted a powerful and sinister influence over public policy. Just below the senatorial order were the _equites_. Of old they had been real cavalry, for it was only the rich who could afford to maintain a horse and the necessary equipment; now it was mainly a titular distinction, implying a certain income. It was here that the bankers of Rome and the financial interests were grouped in a single powerful class. For a time these “horsemen” actually secured control of the jury courts which tried charges of extortion. Then the lot of the provincials was wretched indeed: to pay their greedy and extortionate tax-gatherers they had often to borrow from the same individuals in their capacity of usurers, and then, if they ventured to journey to Rome with a complaint, they would meet the same evil class in the very judges who heard their complaints. This was how “publican and sinner” came to be an appropriate conjunction.

The corruption, as we shall see later, began to be serious with the acquisition of Asia. At first the incompetence due to the inexperience of the governors and their staffs was the chief failing of the system. But when Asia with its stored-up capital, its possibilities of exploitation, and its extreme helplessness, fell to Rome, traders and money-lenders swarmed down upon it, so that there were 80,000 Italians there when Mithradates ordered his famous massacre. Thus money poured into the capital, and there was an unseemly scramble for wealth. But for the present we are only concerned with the system of provincial government as it was in the beginning. I think we may conclude that it started with the best intentions, but with two inherent defects, both due to the conservatism of the Roman character. Their constitution was municipal and their outlook parochial. Their empire-building was precisely of the narrow-minded, well-intentioned character that one would expect if the Marleybone Borough Council suddenly found itself presented with Ireland, France, and half Spain, and asked to govern them.

THE IMPERIAL CITY

A poor man cannot become a millionaire without at least altering his way of living, and a little backward provincial town cannot find itself the mistress of a great empire without undergoing very profound modifications. In 208 B.C. Rome was struggling for her life with a foreign enemy raging at her gates. Fifty years later she was mistress in the Mediterranean, and owner of more land than she could conceive.

One of the effects of the change was a prodigious influx of wealth into the city. In war indemnities alone six or seven millions sterling must have flowed into the coffers of a state which had till recently conducted its business with lumps of copper. In loot Rome was said to have gained above two millions in the Syrian War, and about the same in the Third Macedonian. Vast tracts of public land were gained, and there was a steady influx of tributary corn and money: public mines, such as those in Spain, must be added. There never had been regular direct taxation in the city: a Roman paid his dues in the form of personal service, and a _tributum_ was the mark of defeat. But now all taxation ceased at Rome except an indirect tariff on salt and the customs at the ports. Henceforth Rome was living on her empire and growing fat upon it. It is true that expenditure was also increasing. In the earliest days there had been no public finance. A war was conducted by a citizen army, who marched out for a few days’ campaigning in the neighbourhood, wearing their own armour and carrying a commissariat provided by their wives. The only public expense was the religious duty of providing beasts for sacrifice, and even that was largely defrayed by fines paid to the treasury. But now expeditions cost money, armies soldiering for months in distant lands had to be fed and maintained, ships had to be built, equipment and machines provided. Nevertheless, with wise financial administration the treasury ought to have had a decent surplus. But wisdom in finance was lacking: although we are assured that book-keeping was one of the points in which the old Roman paterfamilias especially took pride, yet the public treasury of Rome, which had the temple of Saturn for its bank, was managed by the quæstors, the lowest grade of Roman official life, consisting of young men just beginning a public career. That fact alone will show how far more important the Romans regarded warfare than finance, and how far wrong are those historians who make Roman greatness dependent upon economic advantages. The maladministration of finance was not due to dishonesty at first: Polybius, the Greek historian, who was brought up in the heart of Greek politics under Aratus, the cunning chief of the Achæan League, and came to Rome in the second century as a hostage, was genuinely astonished at Roman honesty. Their financial errors were due to sheer inexperience in the handling of large sums of money.

Little of this vast influx of money was spent upon public works. To begin with, there was not the taste for fine architecture at Rome, nor indeed for art of any sort. The private houses were still mainly built of unbaked bricks or tiles, often with thatched or shingled roofs: the interiors of the bare simplicity of a country farm-house. And then Roman religion, which, as we have seen, was always somewhat cold towards the high Olympian gods, offering its real devotion to obscurer rustic powers, made little claim for temples and stately shrines. Temples had been built under the Etruscan domination in the fifth century B.C. But thereafter for a period of four centuries there is an almost complete blank in the annals of Roman archæology. If anything was built between Tarquin and Sulla it was generally of wood and brick or rubble with no architectural pretensions. Augustus swept it all away with contempt. Of course it was the fashion for Cato and the old Roman party to say they preferred good old Roman temples with the painted terra-cotta ornaments to all the new-fashioned fripperies of Greece; but that is only the spleen of the outraged Philistine. These centuries of growth are empty of art.

What the _nouveaux riches_ of the second century B.C. found to spend their money on it is hard to say. In 218 B.C. the people passed a resolution as the Lex Claudia forbidding senators to engage in foreign commerce. It is very unlikely that the senate would have allowed that if they had already been deeply involved in business. But this enactment checked the only fruitful use of wealth: it turned, and was possibly intended to turn, the money of the great houses into land speculation. This was followed by disastrous results. The Punic Wars had thrown millions of acres out of cultivation. That land which had belonged to rebels passed to the Roman state as public land and the scramble for it was the cause of momentous political conflicts in the succeeding generation. But rich senators acquired enormous estates without any deep interest in their economic productiveness. Like the old English squire the old Roman senator was not a professional nor even a very serious landowner, and moreover he was an absentee. Thus large tracts of Central Italy became the estates of rich men who added park to park and villa to villa rather as a hobby than for any good reason. The common notion of Italy before the Punic Wars as a vast smiling cornfield, dotted with little farm-houses and country cottages full of stalwart husbandmen, is both unhistorical and ungeographical. The Italian farmer lived--like the mediæval European farmer--mostly in townships which he called “cities,” and it was only the plain-land in the vicinity of a town which was regularly ploughed and sown. A glance at the map will show how little of Central Italy is suited for cereal cultivation. But, if the records are true, 400 Italian townships had been destroyed in the great wars and that meant, perhaps, 400,000 acres out of cultivation. And what had become of their inhabitants? Thousands, of course, had left their bones on Roman battlefields, but thousands more, when their term of service was done, went to swell the proletariat of Rome. There they herded in ill-built, ill-drained quarters on the low ground of the city. Physically and morally they declined. What is perhaps worse, they could not perpetuate their breed under the new conditions. It takes generations for the human animal to adapt itself to new conditions. Modern Europe has seen the enormous influx into towns accompanied by a decline in the birth-rates, and the swollen town-populations are only maintained by constant influx from the country. It has truly been said that the future rests with the race which can most readily adapt itself to such new conditions. But the Romans never could. The humbler quarters of the city, though they grew more and more populous, grew, it seems, by immigration and not by natural increase. Thus the populace of Rome became more and more cosmopolitan, less and less Roman. These generalisations are apparently well founded, but it must not be forgotten that we know scarcely anything of the free poor at Rome. A nation of orators generally forgets to speak of the butcher, the baker, and his colleagues. It is as impossible to believe that all trade and industry at Rome was carried on by slaves as that the poor of a city can live by bread alone. “Bread and the circus” is a respectable phrase, as true as epigrams ever are, but it cannot be the whole truth.

As we have seen in the case of Greece, all ancient city-states undertook duties which the modern individualistic community regards, up to the present at least, as private and not public. The city-state regarded it as part of its business to see that its shareholders did not starve, therefore the supply of corn and the price of it was always a matter of state supervision. From the earliest days of Roman history there had been officers charged with the duty of securing the city’s corn-supply at reasonable charges. Now the corn was beginning to arrive in the form of tribute from Sicily and Africa. Soon we shall have the agrarian laws and all the disorder that resulted from them. But it is important to observe that the depopulation of the Italian countryside resulted from war and politics as well as from economic causes. Of course economic causes kept it depopulated. Nature never intended Central Italy for a wheat-growing land; the vine, the olive, and the fig are its best products. Now that the seas were open for free imports it no longer paid to plough and sow the stony upland farms.

So the land passed out of cultivation. As in England, grazing was found to be cheaper, easier, and more profitable than agriculture. Oxen were used for ploughing or reserved for sacrifice. The Italians, like the Greeks, seldom ate meat and then little but smoked bacon, but as all Romans wore the woollen toga sheep-farming was profitable. In summer the sheep grazed on the Sabine hills, in winter on the Latin plain among the stubble of the cornfields or beneath the olive-trees. Wild slave-shepherds tended them.

Slavery was the canker at the root of ancient civilisation. It assumed more awful proportions at Rome than in Greece owing to the hard materialism of the Roman character. Of course it had existed from the earliest times as the common lot of the prisoner of war. The sturdy Roman farmer, so dear to Roman rhetoric, was after all little more than a sturdy slave-driver. The actual field labour had always been in the hands of slaves. As early as 367 B.C., if we may believe the records of that age, legislation had attempted to fix a certain proportion of free labour on country estates. From the first, too, the slave had been the merest chattel, a colleague of the dog, a little lower even than the wife or daughter of the Roman house-father. It was cheaper to buy slaves than to let them breed, cheaper to sell them for what they would fetch when they grew old than to keep them. You could dodge the gods, who enjoined holidays even for slaves, by giving your slaves work indoors on feast-days--such are some of the maxims of the venerable Cato, who is the type of the old Roman squire, and who personally attended to the scourging of his slaves after dinner. Now slaves were becoming more numerous and cheaper than ever--you might have to pay as much as £1000 for a pretty boy or girl--but a wild Sardinian or Gaul or Spaniard cost very little. Hence began the really pernicious system of specialised slavery. A wealthy Roman moved neither hand nor foot for himself. To have only ten slaves was contemptible poverty. Each slave was trained simply for one special task--cook, barber, footman, bearer, lacquey, or schoolmaster. The shepherds and gladiators might retain their manhood, as indeed they did, and showed it in frightful revolts during this and the succeeding generation. But the domestic slaves of the capital had no hope but to cringe and wheedle their way into favour by flattering and corrupting their masters. One alleviation of the slave’s lot there was: it was easier for a slave to earn his freedom at Rome than in Greece. But this type of person when liberated, and his children after him, made the worst type of citizen, and tended still further to corrupt the tone of the proletariat. Worse than domestic slavery was the plantation system, which during all this period was growing in the country. At its worst it meant huge slave barracks, in which the slaves lived in dungeons underground and worked by day in gangs, chained night and day. It was a profitable system of agriculture and it rapidly ousted free labour. In the city too, in the merchant ships and the mines, a cruel and vicious system of servitude was destroying free industry. Truly the hollowest of historic frauds was the eighteenth-century view of an idealised Roman republic of citizens, free, equal, and fraternal. It inspired the Convention and coloured the periods of Mirabeau, but so far as the records prove, the virtuous and liberal old Roman never existed.

Equality beyond the name was certainly unknown at Rome. All government was in the hands of a close circle of aristocrats whose stronghold was in the senate. By virtue of the client system the great houses of the Claudii, the Cornelii, the Fabii, the Livii, the Flaminii, the Julii, and a dozen others kept the high offices of state exclusively in their hands. By this time the censors drew up the senate-lists chiefly from the ranks of ex-magistrates, and the magistracies became a graduated course. It required extraordinary pushfulness or wealth or patronage for a new man to insinuate himself into the charmed circle. The old patriciate had gone, politically at least, and only survived for religious purposes, but Rome still remained a thrall to aristocracy of a far more dangerous type, an aristocracy of office. One of the troubles of Rome lay in the fact that this aristocracy was daily becoming less warlike and less competent.

A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the luxury of the Romans as one of the causes of their decline. Even Mommsen relates with shocked emotion that they imported anchovies from the Black Sea and wine from Greece. Two hot meals a day they had and “frivolous articles” including bronze-mounted couches. There were professional cooks, and actually bakers’ shops began to appear about 171 B.C. It is true that all this luxury would pale into insignificance before the modern artisan’s breakfast-table with bread from Russia, bacon from America, tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, sugar from Jamaica, and eggs from Denmark. Cato would have swooned at the sight of our picture-frames coated with real gold, for he publicly stigmatised a senator who had £30 worth of silver plate. The truth is that Rome having grown rich was just beginning to grow civilised. It is the everlasting misfortune of Rome that events occurred in that order.

In conquering Macedon Rome had become acquainted with civilisation. At that date civilisation meant Hellenism slightly tinctured with Orientalism, a culture which, though still alive and still original and creative, was certainly past its prime. The Hellenistic period of Greek art has been unjustly depreciated in comparison with the more youthful and virile age of Pericles. But it could still boast of great scholars, scientists, and philosophers, both at Alexandria and Athens. Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus form a group of original poets who are really great, and an art that could produce the lovely Aphrodite of Melos cannot with justice be termed decadent. Politically, morally, and physically Greece was no doubt long past the vigour of her youth, but intellectually she was still well qualified to play the part of schoolmistress to the lusty young barbarian of the West. We have seen that in very remote times Rome had come under Etruscan influences which were closely akin to Greek. There had been some interchange, if tradition may be trusted, of Greek and Etruscan art and artists. Greek painters had worked in Rome at a very early date. Then came perhaps two centuries of relapse in the cultural sense while Rome was busy with warfare and conquest. In 300 B.C. she was almost entirely destitute of accomplishments, and even, if we may except law, politics, and military skill, of civilisation. The war with Pyrrhus, the conquest of Tarentum and then of Sicily brought in Greek slaves, and semi-Greek South-Italian citizens who were bound to have some influence. Then came direct dealings with Greece in the three Macedonian wars, and every Roman who had fought with Flamininus or Paulus returned to Rome if not an apostle of culture at any rate a man who had seen civilisation with his own eyes and could no longer regard old Roman ways as sufficient for man’s happiness. How could eyes that had seen the Zeus of Pheidias at Olympia glowing with ivory and gold be content with the old vermilion Jove of his native temple?

Nevertheless it was very slowly that culture filtered in. All through the third century and for the first half of the second Rome was still incessantly occupied with war. Her tastes were brutalised and demoralised by it. When drama painfully began, the dramatists sadly lamented that their audiences would desert the theatre for the sight of a rope-dancer or a beast-baiting or, better still, a pair of gladiators. From the first it was vain to attempt the creation of a national drama for a people whose craving was for the sight of blood. Gladiatoral combats are said to have been of Etruscan origin. They first appeared at Rome in the early part of the third century in connection with funeral displays. From every African expedition wild beasts were brought home to be slaughtered in the Roman amphitheatres. These bloody shows indicate the real tastes of the Romans from the earliest times. They are no spurious growth of the so-called “degenerate Empire.” On one occasion, when the music of some Greek flute-players failed to please a Roman audience, the presiding magistrate ordered the unlucky artists to fight one another, and the hoots of the crowd were instantly transformed to rapturous applause.

All the arts were held in contempt, all were entrusted to slaves or the poorest kind of citizens. Thus Hellenic civilisation was transported to Rome under a double disadvantage. Not only was Greek civilisation itself already past its prime, but it was interpreted largely by slaves. Every Roman of position had Greeks among his retinue--not, of course, the citizens of famous cities like Athens or Alexandria, which were still free, but low-caste, half-barbarian wretches from the great market at Delos or from the southern towns of Italy--for clerks, accountants, scribes, jesters, procurers, physicians, pedagogues, flute-players, philosophers, cooks, concubines, and schoolmasters. We may be sure that it was not the most favourable type of Hellenism that would creep into Rome by such channels as these. But it was precisely in this manner that Roman literature began. The noble general M. Livius Salinator brought from Tarentum in about 275 B.C. a Greek slave named Andronikos, as a tutor for his sons. This man received his liberty, and as Livius Andronicus set up a school. For his school he required books, and as there was no other text-book in Latin but the XII Tables, he undertook the translation of Homer’s Odyssey into the native Italian measure of Saturnian verse. His work was, of course, very indifferently performed, but it remained a primer of education down to the schooldays of Horace. Emboldened by this success he proceeded to supply the Roman stage with translations of Greek tragedies.

Such was the beginning; the sequel was not much more promising. Nævius was a Campanian who translated Greek comedies and tragedies. In the former he attempted the old Greek custom of political allusions, but speedily found that there was no such liberty of speech in Rome as had prevailed in the palmy days of Athenian comedy. An allusion to the Metellus family brought the famous and thoroughly old Roman poetical retort:

dabunt malum Metelli Nævio poetæ,

and was fulfilled by the imprisonment of the dramatist. Thus the beginnings of literature at Rome were by no means easy. The dramatists were hampered by severe police restrictions as well as by the barbarity of their public. It is interesting to note that both these poets also attempted the epic style. Livius Andronicus was actually commissioned by the priests to celebrate the victory of Sena in verse, and Nævius wrote an account of the First Punic War.

For comedy the Romans appear to have had some natural taste. It seems that a very rude and barbaric form of dramatic dialogue mixed with buffoonery was native to Italy in the Fescennine Songs, though even these are said to have been of Etruscan invention. So the Romans at their festivals were content to listen to comedies if the humour was obvious enough, if there was plenty of horseplay. The setting was wretched indeed. Instead of the magnificent marble theatres of Greece, wooden booths were temporarily erected in the amphitheatre, and a noisy disorderly audience listened with good-humoured contempt to the efforts of the actors who tried to amuse them. Sometimes the chorus would be sung by trained musicians, while the actors on the stage illustrated the inaudible words by pantomimic gestures. It was utterly crude and inartistic from beginning to end, and in deplorable contrast to the beginnings of Drama in Greece. There it had been a national service of worship to the gods. Here it was a trivial amusement in the hands of slaves and foreigners.

Of the three great comedians, Plautus, though a genuine free Italian of Umbria, had been reduced by poverty to the position almost of a slave; Cæcilius was a prisoner of war from the neighbourhood of Milan, who had been brought to Rome as a slave and then set free; Terence was a Carthaginian by birth, belonging as a slave to the Senator Terentius Lucanus, and subsequently being liberated became a friend of the younger Scipio. Ennius, the “father” of epic verse and tragedy, was a client of the elder Scipio and a Greek-speaking Calabrian by birth. Pacuvius, the best of the early tragedians, was a native of Brundisium, and therefore more Greek than Roman; he too belonged to the Scipionic circle. The activity of these writers belongs mainly to the first half of the second century. Not one of them was a Roman by origin, still less was there anything distinctively Roman in their work. Except from the linguistic point of view there is little to be said about any of them. The comic dramatists were engaged in translating the work of the Greek comedians of the third phase, especially Menander and Philemon. To meet the demand for more plot, more action, with less dialogue and less poetry, they would generally make a patchwork of two or three Greek plays. From the artistic point of view the work was clumsily done. There was little pretence of Romanising the characters or the scenes, generally they were frankly Greek with strange intrusions from Roman life. The source from which they drew was by now a stereotyped comedy of manners with stock characters--the heavy father, either an indulgent debauchee or a stingy curmudgeon; the old woman, generally a procuress; the gay and profligate young hero; the fair heroine, generally a _meretrix_, and a background of parasites, bullies, pandars, slave-dealers, and scoundrelly slaves, who came in for recurrent beatings to the great entertainment of the audience. The situations are also “taken from stock,” facial resemblances, disguised strangers, mistaken identities, veiled women and so forth. The “love interest,” such as it is, almost invariably centres round the desire of a young profligate for a courtesan. The atmosphere is generally brutal and immoral. There is often a ludicrous want of dramatic imagination in the stage management. Yet the comedies of Plautus and Terence have played a larger part in monasteries and schoolrooms than any other literature in the world, and through Shakespeare and Molière have had a decisive influence in the history of the drama. We do not possess enough of the original Greek sources to say very definitely how much was contributed by the Roman dramatists of their own. Where we do get passages for comparison the Latin version has generally lost a great deal in wit and neatness of expression. The prologues, so far as they are genuine, are at any rate in the case of Plautus extremely bald and crude. “Now I will tell you why I have come forward here and what I intend in order that you may know the name of this play. For so far as the story goes it is a short one. Now I will tell you what I was anxious to inform you of: the name of this play in Greek is _Onagos_--Demophilus (or Diphilus?) composed it, Maccius turned it into Latin. He wishes it called _Asinaria_, if you please.” And so he proceeds to unwind his plot and relate how the young spendthrift Argyrripus won the favours of the courtesan Philenium by duping her mother, the procuress, and cheating _his_ mother, a shrew, out of twenty minæ by the co-operation of his immoral old father who hoped to secure the young woman for himself.

It would be wrong, however, to underrate the literary merits of Plautus and Terence. These authors reveal to us something of the natural speech of the Roman--Plautus in particular, for Terence is already far more “classical” in his language. It is not always easy to say how far the amusement which we get from them is legitimate, or how far it is laughter at the expense of their antique artlessness and clumsiness. But Plautus has a rich vein of simple humour and an irresistible sly appeal to his audience which often makes one unconscious of the garbage in which he is dealing. Terence has a polish, a graceful way of putting the obvious, and a purity of diction which sometimes makes his young men seem almost gentlemen and his young women almost virtuous. There is a great deal of sound worldly morality in Terence and some pure sentiment. But it is necessary here to lay stress upon the fact that the literary arts of Rome never possessed the fresh innocence or even the simple coarseness of youth. It was little harm, perhaps, that the gladiators, the rope-dancers, the bear-baiters, and the charioteers won the day in the affections of Roman audiences.

Father Ennius, too, in his tragedies was little more than a translator. He was employed consciously by the great Scipio to educate and broaden the Roman taste. He had learnt of the Greek philosophers to disbelieve in the gods, or rather he had learnt the deadly Euhemerist doctrine that the gods of Olympus are but the memories of long dead human heroes, or that they sit, as Epicurus also taught,

“On the hills ... together careless of mankind.”

“ego deum genus esse dixi et dicam semper cælitum,
sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus,
nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest.”

At the age of fifty Ennius set himself to relate the whole of Roman history in eighteen books of epic verse. No one claims for him the rank of a great poet, but he shaped for Vergil’s hand that magnificent instrument the Latin hexameter, and many scholars believe that he vitally affected the literary language of Rome by preserving the terminal inflexions which were dropping out of current speech. All the fragments of Ennius that have survived, though often rough and ugly, yet possess a massive dignity of their own, and often a most solemn majesty of cadence, as in the lines with which I have headed this chapter. But here again we must notice that the rugged father of Latin poetry had already taken over the scepticism of the declining religion of Greece.

For many generations now Roman religion had been losing its native character and becoming cosmopolitan and denationalised. As we have seen, its genuinely native elements were mainly rural and now the Roman was a townsman with a townsman’s light scepticism and craving for novelty and sensation. Jupiter and Minerva and the other high gods had from the first been largely foreigners; at any rate few discernibly Latin ideas appear in the cults or personalities. As early as 204 B.C., that is, in the throes of the Great Punic War, the worship of Cybele--the Great Mother of Phrygian ritual--had been introduced along with its begging eunuch priests. Apollo with appropriate athletic games had arrived a few years earlier. New gods multiplied, old gods became hellenised, Roman priesthoods became more and more political, being simply obtained by popular election like any other public office, or crack dining-clubs for the aristocracy. As the gods multiplied faith declined. In 186 B.C. the Senate discovered a whole system of secret nocturnal orgies which under the name of Bacchic mysteries had spread with extraordinary rapidity throughout Italy. Ten thousand men were arrested and condemned, mostly to death, but the associations flourished unchecked.

Morality, public and private, was equally unsound. Publicly we have sufficient stories of bribery by candidates for office--not to mention the systematic corruption of the electorate by corn-doles and shows--to prove that political uncleanness was of very old standing in Rome. As for private virtue it may be that the world of pimps and prostitutes which flits across the Plautine stage is borrowed from Athens, but it was certainly familiar at Rome and rapidly domesticated itself. Slavery had always existed there, and immorality is inseparable from slavery. Now with a mob of retired soldiers gathered promiscuously and without employment in the capital immorality was multiplied in every class. As early as 234 B.C. there was public complaint of the unwillingness of the Roman men of good family to face the responsibilities of marriage. Already, as in the case of C. Calpurnius Piso, there were horrible domestic tragedies in great houses. Divorce was already common. As usual the Pharisees of the day strove to combat immorality with prudishness. Cato the Censor punished a Roman senator for kissing his wife in the presence of their daughter.

* * * * *

Now, let it be remembered that this very age of which we are speaking, the age of conquest in the Punic and Greek wars, is the heroic age of Roman history, the age to which poets and historians of the empire looked back as golden. We do not rely upon satirists or gossip-dealers for this gloomy picture of Rome in her palmy days. The facts upon which it is based are beyond dispute. What inference are we to draw? Reviewing those facts and especially noticing the dates, we see that all the vicious features of Roman society, the cruelty, the idleness, the debauchery, the political corruption, the lack of artistic taste, the immorality and crime in the noble houses, the injustice and oppression of the poor and helpless, are no products of the Empire, but deeply engrained in the Roman character and entwined about the roots of her history. In our pursuit of old Roman virtue we may go to the furthest bounds of historical record in vain. No doubt, before Rome began to be a city and long before she began to have a history, there were simple laborious rustics on the Latin plains, who possessed, for want of opportunity, the virtuous abstinences of the poor. But it is manifestly false to ascribe degeneration either to the fall of the Republican system of government or to the introduction of civilisation. If one cause more than another is to be assigned for the rapid growth of evil tendencies it is the exhaustion consequent upon incessant warfare and the brutality engendered by continual life in camp. The only thing that could mitigate the latter was surely education and culture. Instead, then, of Greek civilisation being the cause of degeneracy at Rome we may more truthfully assert that it came to save her from ruin at a time when she was threatened with internal decay. Had it come earlier or been accepted more willingly it might have done more to brighten the darker pages of Roman history. It was their starved souls, empty of ideals, devoid even of reasonable occupation for their leisure or harmless use for their wealth, which rendered the aristocracy of Rome so utterly vulgar and debased.

III

THE LAST CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC

urbem uenalem et mature perituram si emptorem inuenerit.
Jugurtha in SALLUST

There is no doubt that many of the disquieting symptoms which we have just noted as afflicting Roman society in the second century B.C. might have been allayed, and possibly even the causes removed, by a wise and foreseeing government. In dealing with the allies and subjects who formed her vast and growing empire any modern politician could have told the senate that they had to choose one of two courses--either centralisation or devolution of power, either a just and firm system of control or a liberal grant of autonomous rights. But the senate had no policy. It left things to shape themselves. Again, the agrarian difficulty of a deserted countryside and an idle, disorderly city proletariat could easily have been solved if it had been taken early, before the habit of city-life grew upon the discharged warriors. Again the senate did nothing till it was too late. Then, having acquired an overseas empire all over the Mediterranean, the senate, if it had not been blind, should have seen that it was necessary to maintain a strong navy and police the seas in the interests of commerce. But again the government neglected its duty. For these and many other sins of negligence there was a heavy reckoning to be paid. It required no oracle to foretell disaster.

While the mass of the senate sat by inert and helpless, allowing the helm of state to sway from side to side in their nerveless fingers, two small parties in the state had policies of their own. There was Cato (it is difficult to find a party for him to lead), who believed that by repeating the mystic words _mos maiorum_ he could put the clock back to the days of Cincinnatus, if not of Numa, mistaking symptoms for diseases and hoping, like many another revivalist, to make people virtuous by making them uncomfortable, a task doomed to failure from the start.

Over against these were set a party who may almost be termed liberals, in that they were prepared to go forward hopefully in company with the spirit of their age. Their foremost representatives were the Scipios, who acted as patrons to many of the literary circle we have just described, and were themselves eager to accept the new culture. Unfortunately there was very little wisdom or foresight among them, and, above all, there was an aristocratic pride which would have rendered them impossible as leaders even if they had had any idea of a destination. As a family the Scipios were by no means uniformly competent, and most of them subsisted on the glamour of the name, which itself had been very largely due to the good luck and opportunity of Scipio Africanus, the Elder and the Younger.

The special feature which distinguishes the age which we have now to consider--that is, roughly, the hundred years from 146 B.C. onwards--is that the historian’s attention now begins to be focussed on a series of personal biographies. One might almost say it is already clear that some individual must dominate this ill-constructed imperial city, and the only question left is who it shall be. In the true polity of the city-state the influence of personality is reduced to a minimum, and various devices, such as the lot at Athens or the double and annual consulship at Rome, are employed to prevent that individual predominance which so easily turns to despotism. It is not due so much to envy as to an instinct of self-preservation that republics are notoriously ungrateful to their great men. But personal eminence, if it is dangerous to the liberty of a republic, is almost essential to the government of a great empire and the control of huge armies. The incompetence of the annual generals, now that warfare was on a large scale and conducted far from the overseeing eye of the administration, became more noticeable. Already in the Third Macedonian War it had been disgracefully apparent. Now the long campaigns against Viriathus in Spain and Jugurtha in Africa reveal pitiful ineptitude, coupled with shameless dishonesty, in the republican generals of the aristocracy. Roman armies are no longer invincible in the field, they are not even disciplined.

THE GRACCHI

But first we have to recall a futile attempt at reform of the economic distresses of the imperial city. It is not so much the actual schemes of the brothers Gracchus which interest us--for the schemes themselves were unworkable and contained as much folly as wisdom--as the manner in which reform was proposed and defeated. The Gracchi themselves, though of plebeian origin, belonged by numerous ties to the liberal aristocracy. Their famous mother, Cornelia--one of the many Roman women who by their influence help to make Roman history so different from Greek--was the daughter of Scipio Africanus. Tiberius, the elder brother, was married to a Claudia; among his friends were Scævola and Crassus. Thus on all sides he belonged to the circle of progressive nobles. His education had been such as one would expect from such surroundings. As their father had died at an early age, it was Cornelia’s task to make her two “jewels” worthy of her glorious name. Accordingly she employed the most eminent Greeks for their tutors. The boys were trained, no doubt, in Greek oratory to declaim in praise of liberty and tyrannicides, in Greek history and political science to divide constitutions up into monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies, and to believe that in the latter all power belongs to the people. At the same time their military training was not neglected; in horsemanship and feats of arms they outshone all their comrades. Their prospects were in every way brilliant and hopeful. While still a youth of about sixteen, Tiberius was elected augur. The proud aristocrat, Appius Claudius, as it is related by Plutarch, offered him the hand of his daughter, and, having secured it, rushed home to announce her betrothal. As soon as his wife heard of it she exclaimed: “Why in such a hurry unless you have got Tiberius Gracchus for our daughter?” It is the misfortune of rhetorical history that all its good characters appear to be prigs and all its bad ones scoundrels; but it is certain that if Tiberius had been content with the easy road to fame which stretched before him in youth, he might without trouble have had the world at his feet. He accompanied his brother-in-law, the younger Africanus, in the last expedition against Carthage. In camp he was the most distinguished of the young officers, and the first to scale the walls of the city. He served his quæstorship in Spain, and there showed all the diplomatic skill of the Cornelian family. He saved an army of 20,000 men from destruction at Numantia. The Spaniards loved him no less for his name than for his uprightness. Thus at the age of thirty-one he had his future assured. A brilliant orator with distinguished public service behind him, he was obviously destined for the consulship in the near future, and then for a huge province, for wealth, fame, and honour.

Call him a prig and a doctrinaire, if you will, for not being content with that prospect. In passing through, on his way to Spain, he had seen the pleasant lands of Tuscany lying forlorn and desolate, chained gangs of foreign slaves working in the fields or tending the flocks of absentee Roman landlords, while the sturdy peasants who should have been in their place were loafing in the streets of Rome. The public land, conquered in war, had sometimes been simply embezzled by Roman politicians; sometimes granted to veteran soldiers only to fall into the hands of speculators. The old Licinian land-law, which had limited the amount of land which might be held in one hand, was openly flouted, and leases were treated as freeholds.

Seeing these things, the young man was filled with a passion for reform, and deliberately devoted his life to that task. The modern historians who call him prig and demagogue do not deny the awful mischief which he set himself to repair. It is hard to know what he should have done to please them. The senate, by now an entrenched stronghold of property dishonestly acquired and privilege dishonestly maintained, could obviously never be converted. Filled with Greek ideas, Tiberius determined to appeal to the _demos_. That of course was a mistake. There was no such thing as a _demos_ at Rome, and there never had been. The relation between Senate and Comitia was not in the least the same as that between Council and Assembly in Greece. At Rome the Senate deliberated and the Comitia ratified; at Athens the Council prepared business for the Assembly to discuss and decide. It is not that the letter of the constitution really matters--when people are hungry it does not--but that there was lacking at Rome the very elements of democracy, an articulate commons, an organised will of the people. Failing that, any attempt to pose as champion of the people must be a fraud, conscious or unconscious. But it is grossly unfair to Gracchus to suppose that it was conscious. He thought that he was living in a democracy, he thought that a tribune of the plebs might fairly claim to be champion of the people, unaware that the plebs was now an anachronism, and the tribunate merely a clumsy brake on the wheels of the state. In 133 B.C. Tiberius had himself elected as one of the ten tribunes, and immediately prepared to introduce the millennium by legislative process.