Chapter V: Part 5

He proposed to enforce the old Licinian laws by which no individual citizen could claim a large holding of public land. Then presently, in his childlike ignorance of the tenacity of property, annoyed at the resistance he encountered, he further proposed to make his measure retrospective, so as to evict thousands of noble land-grabbers. The land thus escheated to the state he proposed to lease on nominal terms as small holdings to the poorer citizens of Rome. The distribution was to be carried out by a commission of three. Very unwisely, but probably because there were no men of standing in the senate whom he could trust, he made this commission a family party consisting of himself, his father-in-law, and his young brother. Property was immediately up in arms against him. The liberal senators discovered, as even liberals are apt to do, that one’s own property has a sanctity far superior to other people’s. Accordingly, they took the Roman constitutional method of putting up another tribune to veto the proposals of Tiberius. Thereupon Tiberius, with his fantastic notions of the people and the people’s rights, declared that a tribune who opposed the people was no tribune, and so had Octavius deposed. The senate’s answer was the only constitutional answer left to them, a threat of prosecution when the tribunate should be over. That, of course, made it necessary for Tiberius to perpetuate his office. He gathered a band of followers sworn to protect his life, proposed a string of attractive measures to secure popular support, and stood for a second term of office. The senate put up more tribunes to veto his election. Thus the state was at a deadlock; there were no more resources for such a situation within constitutional limits, so the senators simply girt up their togas and, led by a Scipio, marched down into the forum to settle the question of reform in a truly Roman manner. Tiberius Gracchus was murdered, and his followers left for judicial assassination.

Ten years later Gaius Gracchus, with a similar programme and the added motive of piety to his brother’s memory, took up the campaign afresh. The senate, indeed, having slain the author of reform, had been forced to allow the reforms themselves at any rate to start. Some lands had been redistributed, and when another Scipio got a decree passed to stop the work of the land commission, he too was assassinated. It is clear that by this time the agrarian agitation had been largely appeased; what follows is political merely. The reformers had got the constitution altered to permit the re-election of tribunes, and in 123 Gaius was elected to that office; he was rather more practical, and therefore far more dangerous, than his brother, but the passion for vengeance against the stubborn and brutal nobility had no doubt blinded his judgment. Coupled with the land-agitation there was now a loud demand for political rights by the Italians, who were debarred even from the elementary rights of market and marriage with each other.

The platform upon which Gaius Gracchus stood was a radical one. Henceforth every poor citizen was to be supplied with cheap corn at less than half price, about 4_d._ a bushel. The land commission was to be restored. The Assembly was to be reorganised upon a new basis, which would destroy the preponderant voting power of the nobility. New colonies were to be founded, including one at Carthage--a most salutary measure. Easier terms of military service were to be granted, including free equipment and the right of appeal. By these measures, some of them wise and just, some of them mere vote-catching devices, Gaius won the support of the people. Then he turned to the second estate--the capitalist Equites. To buy their favour he took up their demand that the taxes of “Asia,” as the Romans called their new province bequeathed to them by King Attalus III., should be put up for auction not locally but in Rome. It seemed to the Romans that since the Asiatics were bound to be plundered in any case, as indeed the inhabitants of Asia Minor always had and always have been plundered, the proceeds might as well flow straight into the pockets of Roman capitalists. To this he added the proposition that the jury-lists should henceforth be drawn from the Equestrian order and the senators excluded. It was probably more iniquitous that money-lenders and governors should be tried by a jury of money-lenders exclusively than that they should come before a jury of governors past and future. Neither would seem to us or to the provincials an ideal arrangement.

Much of this policy, we have to admit, was pure demagogy, but for that the conservative nobles, who cared nothing for the welfare of the state, and were impervious to anything but force, are directly responsible. Gracchus got his measures through the comitia, and secured his re-election for the next year. Feeling that his policy had secured him a large and faithful party of supporters, he now prepared to introduce a measure which he knew to be necessary for the salvation of his country, but which he must equally well have known to be unpopular at Rome, namely, the grant of citizen rights to the Italians. By this we see that Gaius Gracchus, if he sometimes stooped to the arts of the demagogue, was also capable of real statesmanship. The progressive grant of burgess rights as soon as subject peoples were sufficiently Romanised to be fit for them was the old Roman policy, which had made the city great in the past, and kept her safe in the shock of invasion. But the Romans had now become jealous and exclusive. The proposal was detested in Rome. Each side organised its gangs of roughs; there were daily riots in the streets, and at last the senatorial party once more charged down into the forum and slaughtered the second reformer as they had slaughtered the first. In the prosecutions that followed no fewer than 3000 of his partisans were executed.

In all this it is evident that the Roman political system had completely broken down. The constitution had always been incredibly ill-defined. There is no doubt that sovereignty legally belonged to the people, and that senatorial government was a usurpation, as the Gracchi called it. By calling the citizen body of Rome a mob or a rabble you do not alter the rights of the case. It was largely the fault of the Government that they had been allowed to become so selfish, so disorderly, and so corrupt. The extraordinary machinery of the tribunate--ten magistrates, each with an absolute veto upon all government--had made it impossible to find any constitutional method of reform. The policy of Gaius Gracchus was the only possible one if Rome was to be saved, and as a matter of plain fact it was the policy which after a century of unceasing bloodshed Rome eventually adopted. It was to be a disguised monarchy, like that of Pericles at Athens, working on the basis of the tribunician powers. The old ascendancy of the Senate could not stand a challenge; not only did it rest upon no legal title, but it had lost whatever claim to respect it ever possessed on the score of patriotism or statesmanship. For the agrarian problem it had no policy but to hold fast to its ill-gotten lands; to the demands of the Italian allies it had nothing but a miserly “no.” It watched with indifference the ruin of Italy, the degeneracy of Rome, and the oppression of the provincial world. The policy of the Gracchi may have included dreams and nightmares, but it did look forward and hold out hopes. The Gracchi had now definitely started a party system. They had laid the foundation of a democratic movement, and it is Rome’s misfortune that this foundation was built of such rotten materials. The democracy had been bought by bribes, but it had failed to exhibit a spark of disinterested statesmanship. If ever a state needed a master that state was Rome. Henceforth until a master came the condition of Rome and Italy and the provinces was simply deplorable. Nothing could be done in politics without a hired gang of bravos.

MARIUS

The next conspicuous attempt at reform comes from a genuine son of the people, one of the very few peasants who emerge into the light of history at Rome. In the wretchedly mismanaged Jugurthan war Gaius Marius had shouldered his way to the front by sheer courage and capacity for war through a crowd of cowardly and incompetent aristocrats, who almost openly trafficked with the foreign enemy of Rome. The course of this business requires a brief sketch if we are to understand the condition of Roman government at this period.

The king of the client state of Numidia dying divided his realm between two legitimate sons and one illegitimate, the latter being Jugurtha. This amiable bastard straightway murdered one of his brothers and attacked the other, who fled to the Roman province and appealed to the senate for protection. Jugurtha, already knowing the ropes of senatorial policy, sent envoys with well-filled purses, and easily convinced the senate of his innocence and good intentions. The senate decided to send out a commission to divide the kingdom equitably between Jugurtha and his half-brother. The result of its labours was that Adherbal got the desert and the capital, while Jugurtha got all the fertile part of the country, and the commission returned home rich and happy. Jugurtha had now only to obtain the capital, but as Adherbal refused to fight and kept appealing to Rome, there was nothing for it but to besiege Cirta. Numerous envoys came to Jugurtha from the senate in the course of the siege, but he easily assured them of his pacific intentions. As soon as he had taken the city he put his rival to death with torture, and massacred the entire male population, including a great number of Italian and Roman citizens.

The senate did not feel that this course of action was entirely meritorious, but it required the stimulus of a democratic agitation and another troublesome tribune to induce them to declare war. The senate sent out two of its best men in Bestia and Scaurus; the latter especially was generally reputed to be a veritable Aristides, for he had ventured to protest against the former iniquities. When the Roman army arrived, Jugurtha knew better ways than fighting. He submitted at discretion, surrendered the Roman deserters, whom of course he did not want to keep, and a few elephants, which he soon afterwards repurchased privately. In return he was permitted to retain his kingdom. Once more there were outcries at Rome, voiced by the same democratic tribune Memmius, who insisted that Jugurtha should be summoned to Rome to answer for his sins. Meekly but with bulging moneybags Jugurtha arrived. As soon as Memmius began to cross-examine him another tribune interposed his veto. During his visit Jugurtha was able to purchase a strong party in the senate; he also had time to procure the assassination of an obnoxious fellow-countryman in the city itself. This outrage, combined with the ambition of the new consul, Spurius Albinus, led to another declaration of war, Jugurtha himself being allowed to go home and prepare for it. As he departed he uttered the famous words, “Ah, Rome! Venal city! She would sell herself if she could find a purchaser.”

When Albinus led out the second army, he found it utterly incapable of fighting. It was a band of cowardly brigands, who spent their time in plundering their own province; and when the consul’s brother conceived the spirited project of seizing the king’s treasury for himself, instead of waiting for the more tedious and uncertain profits of bribery, he led the Roman army into an ambush. It surrendered readily. It was forced to go under the yoke, and agree to evacuate all Numidia.

This was a little too much. Another tribune--in all this period we observe the tribunes acting as the heads of popular opposition quite in the Gracchan manner--proposed a special inquiry to investigate the matter, and bring the offenders to justice. Three of the worst--Spurius Albinus, Bestia, and L. Opimius, the destroyer of G. Gracchus--were banished, but the incorruptible Scaurus escaped condemnation by sitting on the bench. The treaty of peace was cancelled, and its author--following the usual Roman custom when armies in awkward places surrendered--was given up to the enemy.

In the third campaign the senate really tried to do its best. Q. Metellus, the new general, belonged to the party of liberal nobles who were in favour of moderate reform. He began well by choosing his officers for military skill--somewhat of an innovation. Among others he chose a brave young farmer, G. Marius. Arrived in Africa, Metellus had first to reduce the Roman army to order, and then, having failed to get his enemy assassinated, marched out to fight him. Jugurtha was beaten in battle (for the Roman army could still fight under decent leadership), and henceforth was driven to guerilla warfare, in which he displayed such remarkable skill that the war soon came to a standstill.

At this point G. Marius, who had achieved popularity and renown through his valour, conceived the ambitious plan of standing for the consulship. It is hard to guess how such an audacious idea can have entered his head, for such an application from a man of no family was entirely without precedent. Somebody at Rome must have whispered the idea. When he asked his consul for permission to go to Rome for the purpose, Metellus was vastly diverted, and suggested that Marius had better wait until his general’s little boy was grown up, in order that he might have a Metellus for a colleague. Probably Marius had little sense of humour, for he did go to Rome, just in time, and was elected consul. Moreover, a special decree entrusted him with command of the army in Africa.

Among his officers was the young legate, L. Cornelius Sulla, and though Marius undoubtedly displayed vigour and competence, it was very largely the luck and diplomacy of Sulla which procured the seizure and surrender of the Numidian king. Marius, however, reaped the glory. Jugurtha graced his triumph (104 B.C.), and soon afterwards perished in a Roman dungeon.

Simultaneously with the Jugurthan war the Romans were called upon to face a far more serious affair, one of those great folk-wanderings from the north which occur periodically in the course of Mediterranean history. The Cimbri and Teutons, who may have numbered ancestors of our own among them, came down from the shores of the Baltic, travelling with their households in a train of waggons which took six days in defiling past the onlooker. These barbarians were terrible to the Romans, with their strange aspect, their long iron swords and savage war-cries, their fair hair and giant stature. But of course they were savages compared to the Romans, and they should never have inflicted more than one defeat on intelligent generals of disciplined armies. As it was, they had to face mutinous legions and incompetent consuls. First they defeated Carbo and overran Gaul; then coming south into the province they beat Silanus and Scaurus; and then, united with the Helvetians, they inflicted a frightful disaster on Longinus, when a Roman legate had to surrender, and another Roman army was sent under the yoke. In 105 a worse thing happened: the great defeat of Arausio (Orange) seemed more fatal even than Cannæ in the extent of its losses. There was a panic in Italy, which seemed helplessly exposed to the fury of the northmen, but fortunately the aimless barbarians wandered off into the west and spent their strength on the warlike Spanish tribes.

As before, popular indignation at Rome, diverted from the real cause of the mischief, the rotten system of cliques which governed them, wasted its fury on individuals. Senators were mobbed and stoned. A proconsul was actually deposed from office. There was only one man deemed capable of dealing with the peril--Marius, the man of the people, the triumphant conqueror of Jugurtha. So, despite laws forbidding re-election, Marius became consul for a second time and a third--five times consul. This was symptomatic of a changed Rome. It was, however, necessary. Amateur generals had had a long trial. From 104 to 100 Marius was continuously chief magistrate of the state, as well as generalissimo of its armies. He did his work. First he had to get his army in hand, and accustom them to the sight of the terrible barbarians. Then he dealt two smashing blows at the Teutons and Cimbri near Aquæ Sextiæ and on the Raudine Plain. It was the misfortune of the Roman system of imperium that no general could attain to eminence in war without at the same time acquiring political importance. Hence Marius in 100 B.C. found himself absolutely first in the Roman state without education or even common sense in politics. He presents a pathetic figure in the turbulent world of Roman statecraft, a war-scarred veteran, the indubitable saviour of Rome, called upon to play the part of a statesman, and yet a mere puppet in the hands of unscrupulous intriguers. First he fell into the hands of two shameless demagogues--Saturninus and Glaucia--who used him to revive the Gracchan revolution. Marius became consul for the sixth time, and a new reform programme was drawn up, including an agrarian law to divide the land conquered from the Cimbri, and incidentally all the land they had conquered, into small holdings for the Marian veterans, Latins and Italians alike. Marius was to have personal charge of the distribution, and this task would make him master of Rome for many years to come. Secondly, there was to be a still further cheapening of corn; and, thirdly, new colonies were to be founded and the Italian allies to have a share in them. Of course there was violent opposition. The senate tried all its old stratagems, tribunician veto, portents, and lastly bludgeons. To meet the latter, Marius whistled his veteran soldiers to his side, and the “Appuleian Laws” were carried, with the addition of a very obnoxious clause that each senator was to take an oath of allegiance to the new legislation within five days on pain of forfeiting his seat. Q. Metellus alone had the courage to prefer exile.

Then, it seems, the senate found it necessary to beguile the great general over to the side of aristocracy. Marius was a child in their hands. He actually boggled at taking the oath to his own laws, and added the remarkable proviso, “So far as they are valid.” Saturninus and Glaucia in their turn tried violence, and Marius led the forces of the senate against them. There was a battle in the forum, the demagogues were slain, and four magistrates of the Roman people put to death without trial. Once more reaction had triumphed. For the time being Marius was politically defunct.

But one side of his work was lasting and fraught with momentous consequences for the Roman state. It was Marius, the first professional general, who formed the first professional army. We noticed that Greece, even before the end of the fifth century, had already begun to use paid and trained soldiers, partly owing to the unwillingness of her comfortable or busy citizens to engage in annual campaigns, but still more because it was found that the more highly trained and better disciplined mercenaries were far more efficient at their business. So for many centuries Rome had now been the only power in the Mediterranean world to rely upon a citizen militia. That citizen militia had indeed conquered the world; but certainly in dealing with the trained troops of Pyrrhus and Hannibal, the Roman forces had always begun with disaster and slowly been schooled to their trade by defeat. So it was now in the Jugurthan and Cimbric wars: the generals had to train their armies in the face of the enemy, and while that is no doubt the best training ground it is terribly dangerous and expensive. It implies, too, an almost inexhaustible stock of recruits to fall back upon. With the decline of Italian agriculture and the growth of city life the stock of recruits was no longer inexhaustible. Moreover the art of war was becoming more intricate. Rome found it necessary to appoint a genuine soldier for her general against Jugurtha in view of the disastrous failures of aristocratic amateurs. In the same way Marius found it necessary to overhaul the Roman fighting machine, and by the end of his five years of successive consulship he had organised a professional army on much the same system as our own. Rome like England required a highly trained expeditionary force and behind it a large reserve. The principal change instituted by Marius seemed at first a small one and required no legislative sanction. Hitherto the army had consisted only of the propertied classes, the infantry of those who could afford a suit of arms, and the cavalry of the richest citizens who could maintain one of the state horses. The minimum property for a Roman soldier is said to have been £115. The poorest had originally formed a light-armed support, the three middle classes were the line, and the richest the cavalry. But the three classes of the line had by now come to be drawn up not according to property but according to length of service. This was the traditional battle formation of the Roman infantry maniples:

with the cavalry upon the wings. But social changes were changing the army. As wealth increased and the gulf between rich and poor grew wider the comfortable burgesses were no longer obedient or willing soldiers. Bad discipline--a monstrous violation of the old Roman spirit--had begun to appear in the ranks as early as the Macedonian wars. In the Jugurthan wars it was deplorably rife. The equestrian class as the richest was also the most mutinous: as early as the third century the knights had refused to work in the trenches alongside of the legionaries. By 140 B.C. they had ceased to act as a military force and become merely a grade of honour, or rather of income, in the state, though the younger knights continued to form a corps of noble guards to the general. As for the army as a whole, the theory down to the time of Marius was still that of the annual spring campaign; each consul levied his own army for a specific purpose. This levy had become more and more difficult. The simple innovation which Marius introduced was that in the process of holding his levy he began by asking for volunteers and enrolling those first. There was generally a distinct promise of rewards on discharge. Thus instead of the moneyed classes Marius filled his ranks with the poorest and hardiest inhabitants of Rome and Italy. Of course the obligation to serve still remained part of the condition of certain subject peoples. The auxiliary ranks were now supplied by foreign experts--cavalry from the Numidian deserts or the Ligurian hills, slingers from the Balearic Islands, and presently archers from Crete. Having thus professionalised his army Marius proceeded to abolish all distinctions in the ranks. All the men of the line now had a uniform equipment supplied by the state, and instead of a bewildering variety of insignia all the legionaries now fought under that emblem destined to be carried in victory to the four corners of Europe--the silver eagle. The eagle was the standard of the legion and it was regarded as sacred. In camp it rested in a special shrine and terrible was the disgrace attaching to its loss in battle. Hitherto legions had been gathered for each campaign and disbanded at its close. Now a legion had a permanent existence, a fixed number, a tradition and an _esprit de corps_ of its own. It was now a larger unit of 6000 men; for while the maniple or company of 120 men still remained, the maniples were grouped into cohorts or battalions, which now became the regular tactical unit, and ten cohorts formed the legion.

Beside the body-armour consisting of helmet, cuirass, and cylindrical shield,[14] the uniform equipment of the legionary included the pilum, a short heavy javelin for throwing (it is interesting to notice that whereas Marius had the point loosely attached to the shaft so as to break off in the shield or body of the enemy, Julius Cæsar actually invented what may fairly be called a “Dum-Dum pilum” with a soft nose for stopping the rush of barbarians), and the short broad-bladed sword[15] which had been copied from the Spanish swordsmen in the Second Punic War. The latter was a very handy little weapon only about thirty inches long including the hilt, with two edges as well as a point, though the thrust was always advocated in preference to the cut. Marius now introduced a new drill which included lessons in fencing given in the first instance by masters from the gladiatorial schools. Though bloodshed be abhorrent to the learned, many a scholar would like to have witnessed the combat between the Roman _gladius_ and the Cimbrian claymore. It must be repeated that the Roman maniple, unlike the close Greek phalanx, stood in open order with a six-foot square of space for each man so that there was room for individual prowess in swordsmanship. Lastly, Marius still further professionalised his army by introducing a system of bounties on discharge which made the army a really attractive career for poor citizens. He promised them each a farm at the end of the war and his example was followed by other generals. In fact a veteran soldier came to expect a handsome pension on retirement.

It is surely unnecessary to emphasise the meaning of all this. An army was now a trained corps against which no levy of recruits could stand for an instant. Hitherto it had been the chief guarantee against usurpation by a general that new armies could be summoned from the soil at any time. Now there was a weapon in the hands of a successful general against which the feeble safeguards of the republican constitution were powerless. As with the first trained army in English history, the general of such a force became master of the destinies of the state so long as the allegiance of the soldiers was personal rather than patriotic. The Roman soldier’s allegiance had always been personal and now it became more so. Moreover the Roman constitution had never sought to distinguish military from civil power. Hence that day in 100 B.C., when the Appuleian code was carried under threat of the legions of Marius, was of evil omen for the constitution. Less than twenty years were to elapse before a Roman army entered Rome in triumph to support the political enactments of Sulla. It is in reality henceforward one long state of civil war, open or concealed, between rival generals, until at last a permanent military monarchy was established. It only required a bold free spirit like that of Julius Cæsar to discern the real facts of the case. Marius, as we have already seen, had not sufficient intellect to play a political part with success; Sulla attained what was really a monarchical position but retired when he had won it. Pompeius never had the courage to face the situation. Cæsar had, but he was sacrificed to the republican tradition. Finally the diplomatic Augustus realised the long inevitable fact.

Henceforth, then, it is merely a question of who shall be Emperor of Rome. The causes of the end of Rome’s incoherent constitutional system, called by us a Republic, are already clear. There are the constitutional causes--above all the inelasticity of the Roman system, which made legitimate reform impossible, provided no machinery to express the will of the people, and rendered it inevitable that rioting should accompany every change. It was a constitution essentially municipal and the tribunate was the centre of mischief. Then there are the economic causes, now working more banefully than ever, and causing the decay of the agricultural population, the rise of a dangerous uneducated city proletariat, and the corruption of the governing aristocracy. There was the political fact that the government of a vast ill-organised empire destroyed the Republican spirit and further increased corruption, while it denationalised the Roman temper. Lastly, there is the military cause, namely, the professionalisation of the army, putting excessive power into the hands of the general and replacing patriotism by _esprit de corps_.

It strikes the onlooker that no one of these evils, nor even the accumulation of them, need have been fatal to the republican system if there had been a genuine spirit of patriotic enthusiasm determined to overcome them. For instance, if the great men of Rome had been loyal and patriotic there is no reason why the excessive power of the generals should have led to high treason. And again, though the provincial system was misbegotten it might have been corrected and reformed. But it was the spirit that failed. Was not that just because Roman power had outstripped Roman civilisation? For the upper-class Roman, faith was dead or dying, and there were no high interests of the mind to replace it. Fighting was their sole inherited interest and their tastes were correspondingly brutal and bloody. The last agony of the Republic in the period we are now considering is painful enough, but the wise will surely regard it as the period in which a new and much more hopeful order of things was gradually evolved.

SULLA

On the extinction of Marius there arose Sulla. Sulla was the aristocrat of talent, almost of genius, who tried to save the state by reaction. He tried, vainly and foolishly enough, to bolster up the rickety structure of senatorial ascendancy, but had not the patience or the wisdom to attempt even that with any thoroughness. L. Cornelius Sulla was of the class of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belong, but an inferior specimen of the class. Though of noble birth he had risen from poverty and obscurity by his own talents. He was clever--and he did the most foolish acts in history. He was handsome--and his face in later life is described as “a mulberry speckled with meal.” He was brave and successful in war; half lion and half fox, they said, and the fox was the more dangerous of the two. He secured the affections of his soldiers by giving them free licence to plunder or to murder unpopular officers. He was a rake and a gambler, reckless of bloodshed as he was careless of praise or blame, and he had that fatal belief in a star which has led better men than him to follow will-o’-the-wisps. He might have stood where Cæsar stands. He would have made a very typical bad emperor, and whatever it was that made him decline to be one, it was not patriotism. He was as cultured as Nero, and showed it by sacking Athens, plundering Delphi, and looting a famous library. Like Nero, but unlike the majority of his fellow-countrymen, he had a sense of humour.

After the shelving of Marius and the destruction of his democratic associates the governing clique pursued its old course of headlong folly. For one thing the aristocrats soon fell out with the capitalists, which is always an unwise thing for aristocrats to do. The equestrian jury-courts established by Gracchus acted with brutal simplicity on behalf of their tax-gathering and tax-farming brothers against whatever honest governors proceeded from the senate. Men were condemned for honest administration in those days. For another thing the bitter cry of the Italian “allies,” who bore all the hard knocks of the Roman service, and in return got nothing but servitude, was persistently and contemptuously ignored. In 95 a consular law flatly prohibited them from ever claiming the franchise. But presently there came forward a new reformer in M. Livius Drusus. This remarkable man might be described as a third Gracchus, only that he saw the futility of the so-called democracy of Rome, and adopted other means to attain his ends. On the one hand he was a champion of the senate against the knights, and on the other hand he was resolved to give the Italians their rights. He seems to have promoted a widespread secret organisation among the Italians. He then proposed four measures: the inevitable vote-catching corn law and agrarian law, the jury-courts to be restored to the senate, the senate for that purpose to be enlarged by the inclusion of three hundred knights, and, lastly, citizenship for the allies. The first three were carried, not without violence, but the fourth was his stumbling-block. The Italians were by now so clamorous that civil war was inevitable if it were refused, and no man denied the justice of their claim. But neither justice nor expediency had any power to move the dead weight of senatorial conservatism. Drusus was murdered and his laws repealed. That was the signal for the long and terrible Social War which completed the ruin of Italy and caused grave alarm for the very existence of Rome herself. In the course of this struggle and in fear for her existence Rome yielded in fact, if not openly, to the demand of the Italians. Some states received the franchise as a reward for fidelity and others as a bait for submission. By a law of 89 all Italians who applied to the prætor within sixty days received the citizenship, and this belated concession had its effect. The face of Italy had been covered with mourning to secure it. Even so the governing clique succeeded in nullifying the political value of the concession by confining the Italians along with the Roman freedmen to a few of the tribes so that their votes were almost useless.

The pressure of this war and of the great Mithradatic war which began simultaneously in Asia led to a serious economic crisis at Rome. Debt and usury were the symptoms, and when a prætor tried to meet it by reviving the old laws against usury he was murdered in his priestly robes at sacrifice. Now we begin to hear the ominous cry of “Novæ tabulæ”--the clean slate for debtors. A popular orator named Sulpicius Rufus, whose programme included the exclusion of all bankrupts from the senate, protected his valuable person with a bodyguard of 3000 hired roughs, and organised a mock senate of 300 high-spirited young bloods. Then, since Sulla with his army threatened opposition, he passed a decree giving the command of the great army destined to fight Mithradates to the old Marius. During the Social War both these generals had held command with some success, but on the whole the reputation of Marius had declined while that of Sulla had increased. Without hesitation Sulla now marched his army into Rome, and won a battle in the streets of the city. Sulpicius was of course executed, his head was nailed to the rostra, and Marius escaped under circumstances of romantic adventure. Sulla was thus in the year 88 completely master of Rome.

At this moment his real ambition was for more fighting. Mithradates, King of Pontus,[16] was then in full career of rebellion against the Roman dominion in Asia, where 80,000 Roman traders and money-lenders were murdered in a sudden mutiny. Sulla saw in Mithradates a worthy foeman, and much preferred glory on the fields of Asia to Roman politics; and besides, his army was clamouring for plunder. So he hastily flung out a series of constitutional reforms designed to restore the senate to more than its ancient predominance, and then set out for the East, heedless or ignorant of the fact that he had not really changed anything. On the contrary he had left at Rome in sole charge the new consul, Cinna, the worst and most dangerous of all the demagogues. Sulla--most innocent of reprobates--seems to have fancied that an oath to obey his constitution would restrain such a man at such a time.

Consequently as soon as his back was turned a fresh revolution broke out. Cinna also brought an army to Rome and invited Marius to return. Then the old general, furious with all his disappointments, began a fearful debauch of bloodshed. Every distinguished senator left in Rome, including statesmen like L. Cæsar, soldiers like Catulus, orators like Antonius and Crassus, were butchered by his slaves and their heads displayed in the forum. In 86 Marius gained the goal of his ambition, that seventh consulship which had been promised him long ago by a prophet. In the same year he died. Now for four years Cinna ruled as monarch at Rome. Year after year he assumed the consulship and nominated the other magistrates at his own choice without the formality of election. He repealed the laws of Sulla, equalised all the citizens in the tribes, and reduced all debts by 75 per cent. It is the last measure which is truly typical of Roman democracy. Meanwhile, of course, the reckoning was in preparation across the seas. Sulla was winning glorious victories in Greece and Asia, and at length in 84, drove Mithradates to surrender temporarily,[shld be.] Cinna, who does not seem to have understood that a Roman army belonged not to the republic but to its general, audaciously set out to supersede Sulla, and was murdered by the troops.

Sulla, having offered terms which the government very foolishly declined, came home in 83 after five years’ absence bearing not peace but a sword. He had five veteran legions of his own, the exiled aristocrats joined him, and among them a young man called Pompeius with three more legions. The lead of the democratic party had now fallen into the hands of a young Marius, and he having no troops to oppose the returning veterans decided to join the Samnite rebels who remained unconquered from the Social War. Before leaving the city they ordered a final and still more bloody massacre of the surviving aristocrats; practically all the men of distinction left in the city suffered death. Sulla had to fight 40,000 Samnites at the Colline Gate of Rome, and after a desperate struggle was victorious. The young Marius committed suicide. Thus Sulla was once more master of Rome. His 8000 Samnite prisoners were slaughtered in the Circus. Of the Roman democrats, 80 senators, 3600 equites, and over 2000 private citizens were proscribed, and their heads nailed up in the forum. In Spain, Sertorius, an honest and valorous democrat, maintained a gallant struggle by the aid of a miraculous deer, and a native Spanish army trained on the Roman model, until at last he fell by treachery.

For two years Sulla was monarch at Rome. For the purpose he invented a sort of revival of the obsolete dictatorship, without limit of time and without a colleague. If we care for the term, Sulla was at that time as much “Emperor” as Augustus. He enacted a whole constitution of his own--which it is scarcely necessary to recount since scarcely anything of it survived--all destined to put the senate on its throne again, and then simply abdicated and retired into private life. I think he was bored with Rome and politics. It is generally admitted that he had a sense of humour. It was a very foolish thing to do. But Sulla’s star was with him and he died in his bed. His dying moments were comforted by the apparition of his deceased wife (he had had five) and son, who invited him to join them in the land of peace and bliss beyond the grave.

Sulla was hardly dead before another consul had marched against Rome with his army and suffered defeat in the city. But these were mere episodes. The streets of the sacred city were in a perpetual state of war: every serious politician had to organise his gang of roughs, and when the very senate-house was burnt down in one such encounter it only seemed an excessive display of political zeal. Of constitutional government there was little pretence. The seas were swarming with pirates, no longer isolated rovers who preyed upon commerce, but an organised pirate-state with head-quarters in Cilicia, and a great fleet consisting of all the broken men and desperate outlaws of the unhappy Mediterranean world. They sailed the high seas in fleets under admirals who voyaged in state like princes. For their homes they had impregnable citadels among the creeks of the Cilician and Dalmatian coasts where they stored their families and their plunder. They were not afraid to march inland to sack a city or loot a rich temple. Commerce at sea was ruined, even the food-supply of the capital was occasionally cut off. On land and even in Italy things were not much better. All through Republican history (but seldom afterwards) we hear of risings among the slaves of Italy. Now, under the plantation system, the inaccessible Apennine highlands were swarming with desperate runaways who constantly committed minor acts of brigandage. In 73 they found a leader in Spartacus, the gladiator who was said to be of royal descent in Thrace. Starting as a mere handful the band swelled in the course of a few months to 40,000. Roman armies one after another and ten in all marched against them in vain. Two consuls were defeated, many eagles were captured, Italy was at their mercy. Respectable towns like Thurii and Nola were seized, their prisoners were crucified like slaves or forced with grim irony to fight one another to the death like gladiators. Thus the most frightful form of civil war was devastating Italy. It was necessary to raise an army of eight legions to crush the slaves, and the command was entrusted to Marcus Crassus, who even then had to decimate a legion before he could get his cowardly troops to stand and fight. After several stubborn battles, and aided by the want of discipline which was even more conspicuous among the slaves than among the Romans, Crassus accomplished his task. Six thousand crucified slaves who lined the road from Capua to Rome testified to the restoration of order.

Abroad matters were little better. The war against Mithradates, which had provided so many Roman triumphs and had so often been proclaimed at an end, actually lasted for twenty-five years, and its duration was due rather to the ineptitude of the government than to the prowess of the unmilitary Asiatics. In Spain it took ten years to defeat Sertorius with his native troops, and even then the result was only accomplished by assassination. If a Hannibal had entered Italy in these latter days the state could not have survived. But there was only one military power of any consequence left in the world in those days, the Parthians. Here there were half-hellenised despots ruling over tribes of warriors only lately descended from the Caucasian and Armenian highlands, and still nursing a fierce mountain spirit though they occupied the rich plains of Mesopotamia. Crassus, the victor over the slaves, was sent to fight them with a great army, but the millionaire displayed wretched ignorance of strategy and especially of the perils of Eastern warfare. He blundered on into the wilderness and tried to meet the terrible horse-bowmen and mail-clad lancers of the East with his legions in a hollow square. The result was the great disaster of Carrhæ in 53, a defeat which amid all the shameful ignominies of this period rankled continually owing to the loss of the eagles and the tragic fate of the leader. Marcus Crassus himself was an almost wholly repulsive character, who had amassed a fortune, colossal even in those days of millionaires, by the most discreditable method. The foundations of his millions had been laid by speculating in the property of the victims of Sulla’s proscriptions. He had been a slave-trainer on a large scale and at one time he had organised a private fire-brigade which he used for acquiring house-property cheaply by blackmail. By lending money to the young spendthrifts of the aristocracy he obtained great influence at Rome, and indeed figures in the wretched politics of his day as a statesman on equality with really great men like Cæsar and Pompeius. But he had no policy and was only of importance through his wealth and influence.

POMPEIUS AND CÆSAR

So we come to the final phase of the Republic--the great struggle between the giants Cæsar and Pompeius, with figures like Cicero, Cato, and Clodius in the background. I do not propose to linger over this period, because on the one hand it is so thoroughly well known as the period of fullest evidence in all Roman history, and therefore would require a volume for adequate treatment, and on the other hand because it has been such a battle-ground for partisan historians of all times that it is difficult in such a summary as this to do justice without detailed argument.

Gneius Pompeius the Great[17] had first come into prominence as a supporter of Sulla. He was of high official family and was a born soldier. That is really the secret of his career. Like Marius he was a general and no statesman, but he was a very great general, and one of the few honest men, one might almost say one of the few gentlemen, of his period. The tragedy of his life was to be born in such a period. He had disdained the minor offices of state, and relying on his military renown but in defiance of the law, he stood for the consulship in 70 B.C. As the official aristocracy objected he went over to the democrats, and allied himself with Crassus. These two, elected under threat of Pompeius’s army, straightway repealed most of the Sullan constitution, and restored the balance of power to the knights and the assembly. At the end of the year Pompeius retired into private life. This was characteristic of him; he was capable of grandiose schemes but he lived in fear of public opinion, and he was really moved when orators spoke of illegality. Meanwhile there was a loud demand for some comprehensive scheme of attack upon the pirates. No ordinary consular command would do. Even the Roman senate was by this time convinced that it was useless to send legions and cavalry against pirate ships. Accordingly a Gabinian Law of 67 gave to Pompeius a command of unprecedented magnitude. Millions of money were voted to him, he was to be supreme over all the seas and all the coasts for fifty miles inland for three years, with a staff of twenty-five legates, and all governors were to obey his orders. The price of corn fell at once: Pompeius discovered abundance of it in the granaries of the Sicilian corn trust. Then he began a systematic drive of the seas, and in about three months had cleared them. Thousands of pirates were caught and crucified. All this made Pompeius the most powerful and the most dangerous man in Rome.

Next the tribune Manilius, in whose favour that rising _novus homo_ the friend of our youth, Marcus Tullius Cicero, pronounced an oration, gave to Pompeius another huge commission against Mithradates, the irrepressible rebel of Asia. Pompeius succeeded where all his predecessors, from Sulla to Lucullus, had failed, and the wicked old king was driven to suicide. Then Pompeius proceeded to organise the East like an Alexander, but always in perfect loyalty to Rome.

While Pompeius was absent the so-called democracy, which mostly consisted of hired ruffians in the pay of discontented nobles, ruled the streets of the city. Among the young nobles who took this side was one more dissolute and more foppish than the rest, a notorious adulterer and spendthrift, Gaius Julius Cæsar. Though of the highest birth--the goddess Venus by her marriage with the father of Æneas was among his ancestors--he was also by lineage associated with the democracy. His aunt was the wife of Marius, and his wife was a daughter of Cinna. He began his public career quaintly enough as _pontifex maximus_. When Julia the widow of Marius died, young Cæsar had the audacity to display images and utter an oration in praise of Marius. This, as was intended, set all the gossips talking, and his amazing extravagance kept him well in the public eye. On one occasion he exhibited three hundred gladiators in silver armour, although he was known to be penniless. Probably Crassus was his financier all along.

At this time there was another of the frequently recurring financial crises at Rome. Everybody was deeply in debt, and loud rose the cry for the clean slate, as part of the democratic programme--the only intelligible part. This was the cause of the famous conspiracy of Catiline, who, if Cicero may be trusted, proposed to seize and burn Rome by the aid of the discontented Sullan colonists in Etruria. Both Cæsar and Crassus are said to have favoured the plot, but it is exceedingly difficult to see what a large owner of Roman house property had to gain by it. Cicero was the consul for the year 63, and though it is the fashion just now to sneer at Cicero, he seems to have displayed courage and promptitude in dealing with the conspirators. Unfortunately his arrest and execution of Catiline was technically illegal. Cicero himself, as a parvenu, was naturally an aristocrat, and his policy, though futile, was intelligible. Briefly, it was to unite the senate with the capitalist class in what he called the “union of the orders” against the democratic elements of disorder. Pompeius came home from the East to find the conspiracy crushed. He and his legions were not wanted. With incredible folly and ingratitude the senate, led by Cicero, refused even to grant the lands he had promised to his veterans.

Cæsar had gone as prætor to Spain, and there began to win military renown--much to the surprise of his friends--and money. He wanted the consulship for the next year, and therefore required the support of Pompeius, who had now been driven away from the aristocratic party to which he belonged by sympathy. Crassus came in as Cæsar’s creditor and as the necessary millionaire. Thus was formed the Triumvirate of the year 60, and in 59 Cæsar became consul. By this time he had conceived high, possibly the highest, ambitions. Marius and Sulla, not to mention Alexander and Æneas, had always been much in his mind. For the present his object was to acquire a lasting office and secure the allegiance of a trained army. Cæsar’s colleague in the consulship was a certain Bibulus, who tried to stop the dangerous proceedings of the democrat by seeing omens in the heavens every day, but no one, least of all Cæsar, took any notice of him. The only serious opposition came from Cato the Younger, who represented the genuine and respectable aristocracy. This Cato was a queer anachronism at Rome, an honest man. He was also, if biography may be trusted, a bigot and a priggish eccentric. He was the sort of man to go about Africa without a hat, or to sit on the judicial bench without shoes, because such was the _mos maiorum_. He tried to revive the ways which had been styled old-fashioned in his grandfather. Nevertheless he was upright and brave, a good soldier, and a man with a clear though impossible policy. Once again it is the fault of rhetorical history that all the good men of Rome appear as prigs and eccentrics. This man most courageously opposed his veto to the proceedings of Cæsar, though he was hustled and beaten by the democratic hirelings, then organised under that most notorious scoundrel Clodius. But the result was that though Cæsar’s laws might pass, they could afterwards be declared illegal, and Cæsar would be liable to prosecution as soon as he became a private citizen. However, he had no immediate intention of becoming a private citizen. He secured the province of Gaul for five years with four legions.

Now Gaul was not reckoned an important province. It was only the peaceful plain of Upper Italy to which the senate had added Narbonensian Gaul, a southern strip of France, chiefly considered as a step on the road to Spain. Four legions was a small consular army for those days; no one supposed that he would have much fighting. But either Cæsar had received secret intelligence or else he had very good luck. At the outset he was called to deal with a great immigration of the barbarian Helvetii, who were migrating out of Switzerland into Gaul and threatening the province.