Chapter VIII: Part 8

The triumph of the great Constantine established the security of the Christian Church from the attacks of the pagans. Converted in 306, Constantine, as soon as he had achieved the conquest of Italy, issued the Edict of Milan (313), declaring that the places of worship which had been confiscated should be restored to the Church without dispute, without delay, and without expense. Though himself never received by baptism into the Church, until his last moments, his powerful patronage of the Christians, and his edicts of toleration, removed all the temporal disadvantages which had hitherto retarded the progress of Christianity.

The faith of Christ became the national religion of the empire. The soldiers bore upon their helmets and upon their shields the sacred emblem of the Cross. All the machinery of government was employed to propagate the faith, not only within the empire, but beyond its borders. Confirmed in his new religion by the miraculous vision of the Cross, Constantine, who was the master of the world, consented to recognise the superiority of the ecclesiastical orders in all spiritual matters, while retaining himself the temporal power.

The persecution of heresy was carried out by Constantine with all the ardour of a convert. An edict confiscated the public property of the heretics to the use either of the revenue or the Catholic Church, and the penal regulations of Diocletian against the Christians were now employed against the schismatics. The Donatists, who maintained the apostolic succession of Donatus, primate of Carthage, as opposed to Cæcilian, were suppressed in Africa, and a general synod attempted to regulate the faith of the Church.

The subject of the nature of the divine Trinity had early given rise to discussion. Of the three main heretical views, that of Arius and his disciples was the most prevalent. He held in effect that the Son, by whom all things were made, though He had been begotten before all worlds, yet had not always existed. He shone only with the reflected light of His Almighty Father, and, like the sons of the Roman emperors, who were invested with the titles of Cæsar or Augustus. He governed the universe.

The Tritheists advocated a system which seemed to establish three independent deities, while the Sabellian theory allowed only to the man Jesus the inspiration of the divine wisdom. The consubstantiality of the Father and of the Son had been established by the Council of Nicæa in 325, but the East ranged itself for the most part under the banner of the Arian heresy. At first indifferent, Constantine at last persecuted the Arians, who later, under Constantius, were received into favour.

Constantinople, which for forty years was the stronghold of Arianism, was converted to the orthodox faith under Theodosius by Gregory Nazianzen.

_IV.--The Conversion of the World_

The pagan religion was finally destroyed about the year 390, and the faintest vestiges of it were not visible thirty years later. Its influence, however, might be observed in many of the ceremonies which were introduced into the Church, and the worship of martyrs and relics seemed to revive a system of polytheism by the worship of a hierarchy of saints. Among the most famous of the dignitaries of the Church at this period was the Archbishop of Constantinople, who was distinguished by the epithet of Chrysostom, or the Golden Mouth. He attempted to purify the eastern empire, excited the animosity of the Empress Eudoxia, and died in exile in 407.

The monastic system had been founded by Antony, an illiterate youth, in the year 305, by the establishment on Mount Cobyim, near the Red Sea, of a colony of ascetics, who renounced all the business and pleasures in life as the price of eternal happiness. A long series of hermits, monks, and anachorets propagated the system and, patronised by Athanasius, it spread to all parts of the world.

The monastic profession was an act of voluntary devotion, and the inconstant fanatic was threatened with the eternal vengeance of the God whom he deserted. The monks had to give a blind submission to the commands of their abbot, however absurd, and the freedom of the mind, the source of every generous and rational sentiment, was destroyed by the habits of credulity and submission. In their dress and diet they preserved the most rigorous simplicity, and they subsisted entirely by their own manual exertions. But in the course of time this simplicity vanished, and, enriched by the offerings of the faithful, they assumed the pride of wealth, and at last indulged in the luxury of extravagance.

The conversion of the barbarians followed upon their invasion of the Roman world; but they were involved in the Arian heresy, and from their advocacy of that cause they were characterised by the name of heretics, an epithet more odious than that of barbarian. The bitterness engendered by this reproach confirmed them in their faith, and the Vandals in Africa persecuted the orthodox Catholic with all the vigour and cruel arts of religious tyranny.

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Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--IV

_I.--Theodoric the Ostrogoth_

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, an interval of fifty years, until the memorable reign of Justinian, is faintly marked by the obscure names and imperfect annals of Zeno, Anastasius, and Justin, who successively ascended the throne of Constantinople. During the same period Italy revived and nourished under the government of a Gothic king, who might have deserved a statue among the best and bravest of the ancient Romans.

Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the fourteenth in lineal descent of royal line of the Amali, was born (455) in the neighbourhood of Vienna two years after the death of Attila. The murmurs of the Goths, who complained that they were exposed to intolerable hardships, determined Theodoric to attempt an adventure worthy of his courage and ambition. He boldly demanded the privilege of rescuing Italy and Rome from Odoacer, and at the head of his people forced his way, between the years 488 and 489, through hostile country into Italy. In three battles he triumphed over Odoacer, forced that monarch to capitulate on favourable terms at Ravenna (493), and after pretending to allow him to share his sovereignty of Italy, assassinated him in the same year.

The long reign of Theodoric (493-526) was marked by a transient return of peace and prosperity to Italy. His domestic and foreign policy were dictated alike by wisdom and necessity. His people were settled on the land, which they held by military tenure. A series of matrimonial alliances secured him the support of the Franks, the Burgundians, the Visigoths, the Vandals, and the Thuringians, and his sword preserved his territory from the incursions of rival barbarians and the two disastrous attacks (505 and 508) that envy prompted the Emperor Anastasius to attempt.

_II.--Justinian the Great_

The death of the Emperor Anastasius had raised to the throne a Dardanian peasant, who by his arts secured the suffrage of the guards, despoiled and destroyed his more powerful rivals, and reigned under the name of Justin I. from 518 to 527. He was succeeded by his nephew, the great Justinian, who for thirty-eight years directed the fortunes of the Roman Empire.

The Empress Theodora, who before her marriage had been a theatrical wanton, was seated, by the fondness of the emperor, on the throne as an equal and independent colleague in the sovereignty. Her rapacity, her cruelty, and her pride were the subject of contemporary writings, but her benevolence to her less fortunate sisters, and her courage amidst the factions and dangers of the court, justly entitle her to a certain nobility of character.

Constantinople in the age of Justinian was torn by the factions of the circus. The rival bands of charioteers, who wore respectively liveries of green and blue, created in the capital of the East, as they had created in Rome, two factions among the populace. Justinian's support of the blues led to a serious sedition in the capital. The two factions were united by a common desire for vengeance, and with the watchword of "Nika" (vanquish) (January 532), raged in tumult through Constantinople for five days. At the command of Theodora 3,000 veterans who could be trusted marched through the burning streets to the Hippodrome, and there, supported by the repentant blues, massacred the unresisting mob.

The Eastern Empire, after Rome was barbarous, still embraced the nations whom she had conquered beyond the Adriatic, and as far as the frontiers of Ethiopia and Persia. Justinian reigned over 64 provinces and 935 cities. The arts and agriculture flourished under his rule, but the avarice and profusion of Justinian oppressed the people. His expensive taste for building almost exhausted the resources of the empire. Heavy custom tolls, taxes on the food and industry of the poor, the exercise of intolerable monopolies, were not excused or compensated for by the parsimonious saving in the salaries of court officials, and even in the pay of the soldiers. His stately edifices were cemented with the blood and treasures of his people, and the rapacity and luxury of the emperor were imitated by the civil magistrates and officials.

The schools of Athens, which still kept alight the sacred flame of the ancient philosophy, were suppressed by Justinian. The academy of the Platonics, the Lyceum of the Peripatetics, the Portico of the Stoics, and the Garden of the Epicureans had long survived.

With the death of Simplicius and his six companions, who terminate the long list of Grecian philosophers, the golden chain, as it was fondly styled, of the Platonic succession was broken, and the Edict of Justinian (529) imposed a perpetual silence on the schools of Athens.

The Roman consulship was also abolished by Justinian in 541; but this office, the title of which admonished the Romans of their ancient freedom, still lived in the minds of the people. They applauded the gracious condescension of successive princes by whom it was assumed in the first year of their reign, and three centuries elapsed after the death of Justinian before that obsolete office, which had been suppressed by law, could be abolished by custom.

The usurpation by Gelimer (530) of the Vandalic crown of Africa, which belonged of right to Hilderic, first encouraged Justinian to undertake the African war. Hilderic had granted toleration to the Catholics, and for this reason was held in reproach by his Arian subjects. His compulsory abdication afforded the emperor of the East an opportunity of interfering in the cause of orthodoxy. A large army was entrusted to the command of Belisarius, one of those heroic names which are familiar to every age and to every nation. Proved in the Persian war, Belisarius was given unlimited authority. He set sail from Constantinople with a fleet of six hundred ships in June 533. He landed on the coast of Africa in September, defeated the degenerate Vandals, reduced Carthage within a few days, utterly vanquished Gelimer, and completed the conquest of the ancient Roman province by 534. The Vandals in Africa fled beyond the power or even the knowledge of the Romans.

_III.--Gothic Italy_

Dissensions in Italy excited the ambition of Justinian. Belisarius was sent with another army to Sicily in 535, and after subduing that island and suppressing a revolt in Africa, he invaded Italy in 536. Policy dictated the retreat of the Goths, and Belisarius entered Rome (December 536). In March, Vitiges, the Gothic ruler, returned with a force of one hundred and fifty thousand men. The valour of the Roman general supported a siege of forty-one days and the intrigues of the Pope Silverius, who was exiled by his orders; and, finally, with the assistance of a seasonable reinforcement, Belisarius compelled the barbarians to retire in March of the following year. The conquests of Ravenna and the suppression of the invasion of the Franks completed the subjugation of the Gothic kingdom by December 539.

The success of Belisarius and the intrigues of his secret enemies had excited the jealousy of Justinian. He was recalled, and the eunuch Narses was sent to Italy, as a powerful rival, to oppose the interests of the conqueror of Rome and Africa. The infidelity of Antonina, which excited her husband's just indignation, was excused by the Empress Theodora, and her powerful support was given to the wife of the last of the Roman heroes, who, after serving again against the Persians, returned to the capital, to be received not with honour and triumph, but with disgrace and contempt and a fine of $600,000.

The incursions of the Lombards, the Slavonians, and the Avars and the Turks, and the successful raids of the King of Persia were among the number of the important events of the reign of Justinian. To maintain his position in Africa and Italy taxed his resources to their utmost limit. The victories of Justinian were pernicious to mankind; the desolation of Africa was such that in many parts a stranger might wander whole days without meeting the face of either a friend or an enemy.

The revolts of the Goths, under their king, Totila (541), once more demanded the presence of Belisarius, and, a hero on the banks of the Euphrates, a slave in the palace of Constantinople, he accepted with reluctance the painful task of supporting his own reputation and retrieving the faults of his successors. He was too late to save Rome from the Goths, by whom it was taken in December 546; but he recovered it in the following February. After his recall by his envious sovereign in September 548, Rome was once more taken by the Goths. The successful repulse of the Franks and Alemanni finally restored the kingdom to the rule of the emperor. Belisarius died on March 13, 565.

The emperor survived his death only eight months, and passed away, in the eighty-third year of his life and the thirty-eighth of his reign, on November 14, 565. The most lasting memorial of his reign is to be found neither in his victories nor his monuments, but in the immortal works of the Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes, in which the civil jurisprudence of the Romans was digested, and by means of which the public reason of the Romans has been silently or studiously transfused into the domestic institutions of the whole of Europe.

_IV.--Gregory the Great_

Justinian was succeeded by his nephew, Justin II., who lived to see the conquest of the greater part of Italy by Alboin, king of the Lombards (568-570), the disaffection of the exarch, Narses, and the ruin of the revived glories of the Roman world.

During a period of 200 years Italy was unequally divided between the king of the Lombards and the exarchate of Ravenna. Rome relapsed into a state of misery. The Campania was reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness. The stagnation of a deluge caused by the torrential swelling of the Tiber produced a pestilential disease, and a stranger visiting Rome might contemplate with horror the solitude of the city. Gregory the Great, whose pontificate lasted from 590 to 604, reconciled the Arians of Italy and Spain to the Catholic Church, conquered Britain in the name of the Cross, and established his right to interfere in the management of the episcopal provinces of Greece, Spain, and Gaul. The merits of Gregory were treated by the Byzantine court with reproach and insult, but in the attachment of a grateful people he found the purest reward of a citizen and the best right of a sovereign.

The short and virtuous reign of Tiberius (578-582), which succeeded that of Justin, made way for that of Maurice. For twenty years Maurice ruled with honesty and honour. But the parsimony of the emperor, and his attempt to cure the inveterate evil of a military despotism, led to his undoing, and in 602 he was murdered with his children. A like fate befell the Emperor Phocas, who succumbed in 610 to the fortunes of Heraclius, the son of Crispus, exarch of Africa. For thirty-two years Heraclius ruled the Roman world. In three campaigns he chastised the rising power of Persia, drove the armies of Chosroes from Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, rescued Constantinople from the joint siege of the Avars and Persians (626), and finally reduced the Persian monarch to the defence of his hereditary kingdom. The deposition and murder of Chosroes by his son Siroes (628) concluded the successes of the emperor.

A treaty of peace was arranged, and Heraclius returned in triumph to Constantinople, where, after the exploits of six glorious campaigns, he peacefully enjoyed the sabbath of his toils. The year after his return he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to restore the true Cross to the Holy Sepulchre. In the last eight years of his reign Heraclius lost to the Arabs the same provinces which he had rescued from the Persians.

Heraclius died in 612. His descendants continued to fill the throne in the persons of Constantine III. (641), Heracleonas (641), Constans II. (641), Constantine IV. (668), Justinian II. (685), until 711, when an interval of six years, divided into three reigns, made way for the rise of the Isaurian dynasty.

_V.--The New Era of Charlemagne_

Leo III. ascended the throne on March 25, 718, and the purple descended to his family, by the rights of heredity, for three generations. The Isaurian dynasty is most notable for the part it played in ecclesiastical history.

The introduction of images into the Christian Church had confused the simplicity of religious worship. The education of Leo, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with Jews and Arabs, had inspired him with a hatred of images. By two edicts he proscribed the existence, as well as the use, of religious pictures. This heresy of Leo and of his successors and descendants, Constantine V. (741), Leo IV. (775), and Constantine VI. (780), whose blinding by his mother Irene is one of the most tragic stories of Roman history, justified the popes in rebelling against the authority of the emperor, and in restoring and establishing the supremacy of Rome.

Gregory II. saved the city from the attacks of the Lombards, who had seized Ravenna and extinguished the series of Greek exarchs in 751. He secured the assistance of Pepin, and the real governor of the French monarchy--Charles Martel, who, by his signal victory over the Saracens, had saved Europe from the Mohammedan yoke. Twice--in 754 and 756--Pepin marched to the relief of the city. His son Charlemagne, in 774, seemed to secure the permanent safety of the ancient capital by the conquest of Lombardy, and for twenty-six years he ruled the Romans as his subjects. The people swore allegiance to his person and his family, and the elections of the popes were examined and authorised by him. The senate exercised its rights by proclaiming him patrician and of the power of the emperor; nothing was lacking except the title.

A document, known as the Forged Decretals, which assigned the free and perpetual sovereignty of Rome, Italy, and the provinces of the West to the popes by Constantine, was presented by Pope Hadrian I. to Charlemagne. This document served to absolve the popes from their debt of gratitude to the French monarch, and excused the revolt of Rome from the authority of the eastern empire.

Though Constantinople returned, under Irene, to the employment of images, and the seventh general council of Nicæa, September 24, 787, pronounced the worship of the Greeks as agreeable to scripture and reason, the division between the East and the West could not be avoided. The pope was driven to revive the western empire in order to secure the gift of the exarchy, to eradicate the claims of the Greeks, and to restore the majesty of Rome from the debasement of a provincial town. The emperors of the West would receive their crown from the successor of St. Peter, and the Roman Church would require a zealous and respectable advocate.

Inspired by these motives, Pope Leo, who had nearly fallen a victim to a conspiracy (788), and had been saved and reinstated by Charlemagne, took the opportunity presented by the French king's visit to Rome to crown him emperor. On the festival of Christmas (800), in the church of St. Peter, Leo, after the celebration of the Holy Mysteries, suddenly placed a precious crown on his head. The dome resounded with the acclamations of the people, his head and body were consecrated with the royal unction, and he was saluted, or adored, by the pontiff after the example of the Cæsars.

Europe dates a new era from his restoration of the western empire.

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THEODOR MOMMSEN

History of Rome

Theodor Mommsen was born at Garding in Schleswig on November
30, 1817. He studied at Kiel University for three years,
examined Roman inscriptions in France and Italy from 1844 to
1847, and attained his first professorship at Leipzig in 1848,
and the Berlin Chair of Ancient History in 1858. His greatest
work was the "History of Rome," published in 1854, and its
successor, the "Roman Provinces." On this work he brought to
bear a research and a scholarship of almost unparalleled range
and completeness. He was a man capable of vehement and
occasionally unreasonable partisanship, and a strict and
cold-blooded impartiality would have tempered the enthusiasm
of some of his portraits and the severity of others. These
defects, however, are less obvious when his history is
condensed in small compass. There are cases in which his
judgments are open to adverse criticism. But at the present
day it may safely be affirmed that there is no extant history
of Rome down to the establishment of the empire which can be
regarded as rivalling that here presented. Upwards of 900
separate publications remain as a monument of Mommsen's
industry. He died on November 1, 1903.

Iapygians, Etruscans, and Italians, the last certainly Indo-Europeans, are the original stocks of Italy proper. Of the Italians there are two divisions, the Latin and the Umbro-Sabellian. Central Italy was occupied by the Latins, who were established in cantons formed of village groups; which cantons at an early age formed themselves into the loose Latin League, with Alba at its head.

The Roman canton, on both banks of the Tiber, concentrated itself on the city earlier than others. The citizens consisted of the families which constituted the larger groups of clans or gentes, formed into those tribes. The remainder of the population were their dependents or slaves. At the head of the family was the father, and the whole community had its king, standing to it in the same relation as the father to the family. His power, within the law, was absolute; but he could not override it or change it on his own authority. This required the formal assent of the assembled citizens. The heads of the clans formed a separate body--the Senate--which controlled the appointment of the king, and could veto legislation.

By admission of aliens and absorption of other communities, swelling the number of dependents, was gradually created a great body of plebeians, non-citizens, who began to demand political rights; and whom it was necessary to organise for military purposes which was done by the "Servian Constitution." Gradually Rome won a supremacy in the Latin League, a position of superiority over the aggregate of the other cantons.

In this community arose three political movements: (1) On the part of the full citizen, patricii, to limit the power not of the state, but of the kings; (2) of the non-citizens, to acquire political rights; (3) of antagonism between the great landholders and the land-interests opposed to them. The first resulted in the expulsion of the monarchs, and the substitution of a dual kingship held for one year only. But in many respects their joint power was curtailed as compared with that of the monarch, while for emergencies they could appoint a temporary dictator. The change increased the power of the General Assembly, to which it became necessary to admit the non-citizen freeholders who were liable to military duties. The life tenure of the members of the Senate greatly increased the powers of that body, and intensified the antagonism of the patriarch and the plebeians.

At the same time, a landed nobility was developing; and when fresh land was acquired by the state, the Patricians claimed to control it. But the great agricultural population could not submit to this process of land absorption, and the consequent strife took the form of a demand for political recognition, which issued in the appointment of Tribunes of the Plebs, with power of administrative veto.

The struggle over privileges lasted for two hundred years. First the Canuleian law made marriage valid between patricians and plebeians, and instituted for a time military tribunes. The Licinian law, eighty years later, admitted plebeians to the consulship, and also required the employment of free labour in agriculture. The decisively democratic measure was the Horticunian law, after another seventy years, giving the exclusively plebeian assembly full legislative power. The practical effect of the changes was to create a new aristocracy, semi-plebeian in origin, and to reduce the personal power of the chief officers of state, while somewhat increasing that of the remodelled Senate; rendering it a body selfish indeed in internal matters, but essentially patriotic as well as powerful.

_I.--The Description of Italy_

During the period of this long constitutional struggle, Rome and her kinsfolk had first been engaged in a stubborn and ultimately successful contest with the non-Aryan Etruscan race; and then Italy had been attacked by the migrating Aryan hordes of the Celts, known as Gauls, who sacked Rome, but retired to North Italy; events giving birth to many well-known stories, probably in the main mythical. But the practical effect was to impose a greater solidarity of the Latin and kindred races, and a more decisive acceptance of Roman hegemony.

That hegemony, however, had to be established by persistent compulsion, and there were three stages in its completion. First, the subjection of the Latins and Campanians; then the struggle of Rome with the Umbrian-Samnites; finally, the decisive repulse of the Epirote invader Pyrrhus--in effect a Hellenic movement. The Roman supremacy established through the exhaustion of the valiant Samnites required to be confirmed by stern repression of attempts to recover liberty. But the Hellenic element in Italy, antagonistic to the growing Roman power, in effect invited the intervention of the Epirote chief. But his scheme was not that of an imperial statesman, but of a chivalrous and romantic warrior. His own political blunders and the iron determination of the Romans, destroyed his chances of conquest. His retirement left Rome undisputed lord of Italy; which in part shared full citizenship, in part possessed only the more restricted Latin rights, and in part only rights conceded under varying treaties.

A sense of common Italian nationality was developing. But if Rome was queen of Italy, Carthage was queen of the seas. Maritime expansion was precluded, though Rome's position fitted her for it. Carthage was the one Phoenician state which developed political as well as commercial power. The commercial cities of North Africa were in subordination to her, in the Western Mediterranean she had no rivals, her domestic government was oligarchical.

Roman intervention in the affairs of Sicily, where Carthage was the dominant power, produced the rupture between the two great states which was bound to come sooner or later. Sicily itself was the scene of the initial struggle, which taught Rome that her victories on land were liable to be nullified by the Carthaginian sea power. She resolved to build a navy, on the plan of adopting boarding tactics which would assimilate a naval engagement to a battle on land. These tactics were successful enough to equalise the fighting value of the respective fleets. The Romans were enabled to land an invading army under Regulus in Africa.

Though superior on land, the general's blundering led to a disaster, and for some time misfortune by sea and failure by land dogged the Romans. But Carthage failed to use her opportunity; she did not attempt to strike a crushing blow when she could have done so. But the private energy of Roman patriots at last placed on the seas a fleet which once more turned the scale, whereas it was on land that the brilliant Carthaginian Hamilcar had displayed his genius and daring. The first Punic War gave Rome predominance in Sicily, and a position of maritime equality. Sardinia was added to the Roman dominion, and her provincial administration came into being.

She was carrying her expansion farther over Celtic regions, when Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, hurled himself against her, and came near to destroying her. Hamilcar had conceived the idea of imperial expansion, and given it shape by creating a dominion in Spain; he had looked forward to the life-and-death struggle with Rome that was destined to his son; for which Spain was to be the base. Hannibal, left in control in Spain, deliberately challenged Rome to war.

The challenge was accepted, war was declared, and Hannibal accomplished the amazing feat of leading an army of 60,000 men from Spain and effecting the passage of the Alps, while the Romans were landing an army in Spain. In a brilliant campaign, he defeated the stubborn Roman legions at Vercellæ and the Trebia.

But success depended not on the winning of victories by an isolated force, but on the disruption of Italy. His superiority in the field was again demonstrated at Trasimenus, but no Italian allies came in. He outwitted Fabius, and then utterly shattered at Cannæ a Roman force of double his own numbers. For a moment it seemed that Italian cohesion was weakening; but the Roman Senate and people were stirred only to a more dogged resolution.

Cannæ failed to break up the Roman confederation. Generalship unaided could accomplish no more. In Spain, where young Scipio was soon winning renown, the Roman arms were in the ascendant, and in Sicily. No effective aid was coming from Macedon, though war was declared between her and Rome. Hannibal's activities began to be paralysed; by slow degrees he was forced into the south. Hannibal succeeded in crossing the Alps with fresh forces, but by a brilliant operation was annihilated on the Metaurus. The time had come when Scipio could disregard Hannibal and strike at Carthage herself. Even Hannibal's return could not save her. The victory of Zama decided the issue. Carthage became virtually a tributary and subject state. Spain was a Roman province, and North Africa a sort of protectorate.

The threatening extension of Macedonian power now demanded the protecting intervention of Rome; an honest act of liberation for the Greeks, but entailing presently the war with Antiochus of Syria. Antiochus had left Phillip and Macedon in the lurch; now he sought to impose his own yoke in place of theirs. The practical outcome was his decisive overthrow at the battle of Magnesia, and the cession to Rome of Asia Minor. Pergamus, under the house of Actalus, was established as a protected kingdom, as Numidia under Masinissa had been. The Greek states, however, were becoming conscious that their freedom was hardly more than a name; Perseus of Macedon once more challenged Rome, not without Greek support. Macedon was finally crushed by Aemilius Paullus at Pydna. From that moment, Rome dropped the policy of maintaining free states beyond the seas, which had manifestly failed. Virtually, the known world was divided into subjects and dependencies of Rome, so vast was the change in the forty years between the battles of the Metaurus and Pydna.

Rapid extension of dominion by conquest had demoralising results; the ruling race was exposed to strong temptations in the provinces, and the city remained the seat of government, while the best of the burgesses were distributed elsewhere. Hence, the popular assembly became virtually the city mob, while the ruling families tended more and more to form a close and greedy and plutocratic oligarchy. The demoralisation was very inadequately checked by the austerity of the censorship as exercised by Cato.

In the provinces, the Spanish natives revolted, and were only repressed after severe fighting. In Greece, Asia and Africa, the Roman rule gave neither freedom nor strong government. In Africa, the disturbances led to the wiping out of Carthage; in Greece to the complete subjection of the dependent states; in the Far East, a new Parthian power arose under Mithridates. The Mediterranean was allowed to be infested by pirates. Revolution was at hand. Politics had become reduced to a process of intrigue for office emoluments, involving a pandering to the city mob for its suffrages.

_II.--The Revolution_

Socially, the most patent evil was the total disappearance of the free agricultural class, the absorption of all the land into huge estates under slave labour. The remedy proposed by Tiberius Gracchus was the partial state resumption of land and its re-allotment. He adopted unconstitutional methods for carrying his proposals, and was murdered in a riot led by the oligarchs. Appeals to the Roman populace were not, unfortunately, appeals to the Roman nation.

His brother, Gaius, deliberately designed a revolution. He proposed to work through the antagonism of the aristocrats and the wealthy non-senatorial equestrian order; and by concentrating power in the hands of the tribunate, hitherto checked by the restrictions on re-election. In effect, he meant to destroy the oligarchy by making the Tribune a perpetual dictator, and thus to carry through social reforms; to establish also legal equality first for the Italians, then for the provinces also. But these reforms were not particularly attractive to the city mob, and the other side could play the demagogue. The condition of Cæsarism is the control of physical force; Gaius Gracchus fell because he had not that essential control. The oligarchy remained supreme. The plans of Gracchus for planting colonies and distributing allotments were nullified.

The evils of slave labour multiplied, and issued in servile insurrections. In Numidia, the able Masimissa had been succeeded by Micipsa. On Micipsa's death, the rule was usurped by his illegitimate nephew Jugurtha, whose story has been told by Sallust. The war was at least terminated less by the low-born general in command, Marius, than his brilliant lieutenant Sulla. But Marius re-organised the army on the basis which was to make a military despotism practicable, as it made a professional instead of a citizen army.

But now a new foe appears; the first Teutonic (not Celtic) hordes of the Cimbri and Teutones; to meet with an overwhelming check at the hands of Marius at Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ. The successful soldier allied himself with the popular leader Saturninus; the programme of Gaius Gracchus was resuscitated. But Marius, a political incapable, separated from the demagogues, and by helping to crush them, effaced himself. Livius Drusus attempted to carry out the Gracchan social reform, with the senate instead of the tribunate as the controlling power; the senatorial party themselves wrecked his schemes, and the antagonistic power of the equestrian order was advanced.

But the immediate outcome was the revolt of the Italians, the _socii_ (whence the name social war). They were not citizens, not on an equal footing with the citizens before the law. The revolt was suppressed, but the legions were completely out of hand. The attempt of Sulpicius to head the reform movement was answered by Sulla, who for the first time led a Roman army against Rome, crushed Sulpicius, prescribed some of his adherents, and placed the power of the senate on a stronger footing by legal enactment. Then he went to the East, to conduct the war against Mithridates.

While Sulla was conducting his operations, military and diplomatic, with skill and success in the East, his arrangements at Rome had left discontent and disappointment seething. There was another revolution, led by Cinna, Marius and Sertorius; it mastered Rome. Marius spilt seas of blood, but soon died. For three years Cinna was supreme, but he had no constructive policy.

But now Sulla had finished his work in the East. He was returning at the head of a body of veterans devoted to him; and his diplomacy won over half Italy to his side. The struggle with the revolutionary government was not greatly prolonged, and it was decisive.

In plain terms, the Roman constitution had gone utterly to wreck; Sulla was in something of the same position as Oliver Cromwell. He had to reconstruct under conditions which made a constitutional restoration impracticable; but his control of the efficient military force gave him the necessary power. That any system introduced must be arbitrary and find its main sanction in physical force--that it should partake of terrorism--was inevitable.

Sulla obtained the formal conferment on himself of absolute power. He began by applying this rule of terror not vindictively, but with impersonal mercilessness, against the lives and property of the opposition. In the constitution which he promulgated the senatorial body was alone recognised as a privileged class; the senate itself was increased, it recovered full control of the judiciary and of legislation; no power was left of cancelling membership. The tribunician power was curtailed.

The civil and military functions of consuls and prætors were separated. They were to hold civil power in Italy proper during their year of office; they were then to have a second year in military control of a province. The planting of military colonies provided numerous garrisons whose interests were associated with the new constitution. When Sulla had done his work, he resigned his extraordinary powers with entire indifference. In a little more than a year he died.

The Sullan constitution saved the Roman empire from imminent collapse; but it was impossible that it should be more than a makeshift, like Cromwell's protectorate. There were huge classes with perpetual grievances; the removal of the military forces to the provinces left the city of Rome without adequate governors of the provinces themselves. And there was no man of the hour of supreme ability to carry on work demanding a master.

_III.--Pompey and Cæsar_

The young Graccus Pompeius was the most distinguished of the Sullan party; Crassus was the wealthiest and most powerful of the Equestrian group; Lepidus was the popular leader. A popular insurrection which he headed was suppressed, and he disappeared, but Sertorius, once an associate of Marius, had obtained a remarkable personal ascendancy in Spain, and, in league with the Mediterranean pirates, threatened to be a formidable foe of the new constitution. For some years he maintained a gradually waning resistance against the arms of Pompeius, but finally was assassinated.

Meanwhile Tigranes, King of Armenia, had been developing a powerful monarchy; and mutual distrust had brought on another war with Mithridates, successfully conducted by Lucullus. Out of this war arose a struggle with Tigranes, on whom an overwhelming defeat was inflicted at Tigranocerta. But the brilliant achievements of Lucullus were nullified by the mutinous conduct of the troops, and the factious conduct of the home government. The gross inefficiency of that government was shown by the immense extension of organised piracy, and by the famous slave revolt under Spartacus, which seriously endangered the state.

Pompeius on his return from Spain was barred on technical grounds from the triumph and the consulship which he demanded. He was thus driven into an alliance with the democratic party, and with Crassus. The result was the fall of the Sullan constitution, and the restoration of checks on the power of the senate. Pompeius might have grasped a military despotism; he did not, but he did receive extraordinary powers for dealing with the whole Eastern question, and when that work was settled successfully, he would be able to dictate his own terms.

Pompeius began his task by a swift and crushing blow against the pirate cities and fleets, which broke up the organisation. He crushed Mithridates in one campaign, and received the submission of Tigranes; Mithridates soon after fell by his own hand, the victim of an insurrection. Anarchy in Syria warranted Pompeius in annexing the Seleucid dominion. The whole of the nearer East was now a part of the Roman empire; and was thenceforth ruled not as protectorates, but as a group of provinces. Egypt alone was not incorporated.

Meanwhile, the democratic party at Rome were dominant, though their policy was inconsistent and opportunist. Probably the leading men, such as Crassus and the rising Gaius, Julius Cæsar, stood aside from the wilder schemes, such as the Catilinarian conspiracies, but secretly fostered them. Catiline's projects were betrayed, and the illegal execution of the captured conspirators by the consul Cicero was hailed by Cato and the senatorial party as a triumph of patriotic statesmanship. Catiline himself was crushed in the field.

The definite fact emerged, that neither the senatorial nor the democratic party could establish a strong government; that would be possible only for a military monarchy--a statesman with a policy and an irresistible, force at his back. But Pompeius lacked the courage and skill. Cæsar, as yet, lacked the military force. Pompeius, on his return from the East, again allied himself with Crassus and Cæsar, whose object was to acquire for himself the opportunity which Pompeius would not grasp. The alliance gave Pompeius the land allotments he required for his soldiers, and to Cæsar the consulship followed by a prolonged governorship of Gaul.

The conquest and organisation of Gaul was an end in itself, a necessary defence against barbarian pressure. Cæsar's operations there were invaluable to the empire; incidentally, they enabled him to become master of it. Cæsar has left his own record. Gaul was transformed into a barrier against the Teutonic migration. But Pompeius, nominally holding a far greater position, proved incapable of controlling the situation in Rome; he could not even suppress the demagogue Clodius, while the prestige of his military exploits was waning. Fear of the power of the Triumvirate was driving moderate men to the senatorial part; that party, without an efficient leader, began to find in Pompeius rather in ally against the more dangerous Cæsar than an enemy.

But they would not concede him the powers he required; which might yet be turned to the uses of his colleagues in the Triumvirate; he could not afford to challenge Cæsar; and Cæsar adroitly used the situation to secure for himself a prolongation of his Gallic command. The completion of his work there was to have precedence of his personal ambitions. Crassus was sent to the Eastern command; and Pompeius remained in Italy, while nominally appointed to Spain.

Pompeius, indeed, attained a predominance in Rome which enabled him to secure temporarily dictatorial powers which were employed to counteract the electoral machinery of the republican party; but he had not the qualifications or the inclination to play the demagogue, and could not unite his aspirations as a restorer of law and order with effective party leadership. Crassus disappeared; his armies in the East met with a complete disaster at Carrhæ, and he took his own life. Cæsar and Pompeius were left; Pompeius was not content that Cæsar should stand on a real equality with him, and the inevitable rupture came.

In effect Pompeius used his dictatorship to extend his own military command and to curtail Cæsar's. The position resolved itself into a rivalry between the two; Cæsar declaring as always for the democracy, Pompeius now assuming the championship of the aristocracy, and the guardianship of the constitution.

For Cæsar the vital point now was that his own command should not terminate till he exchanged it for a fresh consulship. As the law now stood, he could not obtain his election without resigning his command beforehand. But he succeeded in forcing Pompeius to break the law; and in making the official government responsible for declaring war. He offered a compromise, perhaps, in the certainty that it would be rejected--as it was. He was virtually declared a public enemy; and he struck at once.

At the head of his devotedly loyal veterans he crossed the Rubicon. His rapid and successful advance caused Pompeius to abandon Italy and fall back on the Eastern Provinces. The discipline preserved, and the moderation displayed by Cæsar won him unexpected favour. Having secured Italy, he turned next on Spain, and secured that. Swift and decisive action was pitted against inertness. When Cæsar entered Epirus the odds against him on paper were enormous; but the triumphant victory of Phansalus shattered the Pompeian coalition. Pompeius hurried to Egypt, but was assassinated while landing. The struggle, however, was not over till after the battle of Thapsus nearly two years after Phansalus.

Cæsar was now beyond question master of the whole Roman world. He had made himself one of the mightiest of all masters of the art of war; but he was even more emphatically unsurpassed as a statesman. In the brief time that was left him he laid the foundation of the new monarchy which replaced the ancient Republic of Rome.

* * * * *

Mediæval History

EDWARD GIBBON

The Holy Roman Empire

The third of Gibbon's divisions of his great history was
devoted to that period which is comprised between the
establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 and the final
extinction of the Eastern Empire with the conquest of
Constantinople by Mahomet II. in 1453. Although this was the
longest period, Gibbon devoted much less space to it than to
the preceding parts of his history. This fact was partly due
to the gradual diminution of Roman interests, for the
dominions of the empire became contracted to the limits of a
single city, and also to the fact that the material which the
most painstaking search placed at his disposal was distinctly
limited. But though the conquest of the Normans, to instance
one section, has been dealt with inadequately in the light of
modern research, the wonderful panorama that Gibbon's genius
was able to present never fails in its effect or general
accuracy. The Holy Roman Empire is, of course, properly
classified under Mediæval History, which accounts for its
separation from the rest of Gibbon's work.

_I.--Birth and Sway of the Empire_

The Western Empire, or Holy Roman Empire, as it has been called, which was re-established by Charlemagne (and lasted in shadow until the abdication of Francis II. under the pressure of Napoleon in 1806), was not unworthy of its title.

The personal and political importance of Charlemagne was magnified by the distress and division of the rest of Europe. The Greek emperor was addressed by him as brother instead of father; and as long as the imperial dignity of the West was usurped by a hero, the Greeks respectfully saluted the _august_ Charlemagne with the acclamations of "Basileus" and "Emperor of the Romans." Lewis the Pious (814-840) possessed the virtue of his father but not the power. When both power and virtue were extinct, the Greeks despoiled Lewis II. of his hereditary title, and with the barbarous appellation of _Rex_ degraded him amongst the crowd of Latin princes.

The imperial title of the West remained in the family of Charlemagne until the deposition of Charles the Fat in 884. His insanity dissolved the empire into factions, and it was not until Otho, King of Germany, laid claim to the title, with fire and sword, that the western empire was restored (962). His conquest of Italy and delivery of the pope for ever fixed the imperial crown in the name and nation of Germany. From that memorable era two maxims of public jurisprudence were introduced by force and ratified by time: (1) That the prince who was elected in the German Diet acquired from that instant the subject kingdoms of Italy and Rome; (2) but that he might not legally assume the titles of Emperor and Augustus till he had received the crown from the hands of the Roman pontiff.

The nominal power of the Western emperors was considerable. No pontiff could be legally consecrated till the emperor, the advocate of the Church, had graciously signified his approbation and consent. Gregory VII., in 1073, usurped this power, and fixed for ever in the college of cardinals the freedom and independence of election. Nominally, also, the emperors held sway in Rome, but this supremacy was annihilated in the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century the power derived from his title was still recognised in Europe; the hereditary monarchs confessed the pre-eminence of his rank and dignity.

The persecution of images and their votaries in the East had separated-Rome and Italy from the Byzantine throne, and prepared the way for the conquests of the Franks. The rise and triumph of the Mahometans still further diminished the empire of the East. The successful inroads of the Bulgarians, Hungarians, and Russians, who assaulted by sea or by land the provinces and the capital, seemed to advance the approach of its final dissolution. The Norman adventurers, who founded a powerful kingdom in Apulia and Sicily, shook the throne of Constantinople (1146), and their hostile enterprises did not cease until the year 1185.

_II.--Latin Rulers of Constantinople_

Under the name of the Latins, the subjects of the pope, the nations of the West, enlisted under the banner of the Cross for the recovery or the release of the Holy Sepulchre. The Greek emperors were terrified and preserved by the myriads of pilgrims who marched to Jerusalem with Godfrey of Bouillon (1095-99) and the peers of Christendom. The second (1147) and the third (1189) crusades trod in the footsteps of the first. Asia and Europe were mingled in a sacred war of two hundred years; and the Christian powers were bravely resisted and finally expelled (1291) by Saladin (1171-93) and the Mamelukes of Egypt.

In these memorable crusades a fleet and army of French and Venetians were diverted from Syria to the Thracian Bosphorus; they assaulted the capital (1203), they subverted the Greek monarchy; and a dynasty of Latin princes was seated near three-score years on the throne of Constantine.

During this period of captivity and exile, which lasted from 1204 to 1261, the purple was preserved by a succession of four monarchs, who maintained their title as the heirs of Augustus, though outcasts from their capital. The _de facto_ sovereigns of Constantinople during this period, the Latin emperors of the houses of Flanders and Courtenay, provided five sovereigns for the usurped throne. By an agreement between the allied conquerors, the emperor of the East was nominated by the vote of twelve electors, chosen equally from the French and Venetians. To him, with all the titles and prerogatives of the Byzantine throne, a fourth part of the Greek monarchy was assigned; the remaining portions were equally snared between the republic of Venice and the barons of France.

Under this agreement, Baldwin, Count of Flanders and Hainault, was created emperor (1204-05). The idea of the Roman system, which, despite the passage of centuries devoted to the triumphs of the barbarians, had impressed itself on Europe, was seen in the emperor's letter to the Roman pontiff, in which he congratulated him on the restoration of his authority in the East.

The defeat and captivity of Baldwin in a war against the Bulgarians, and his subsequent death, placed the crown on the head of his brother Henry (1205-16). With him the imperial house of Flanders became extinct, and Peter of Courtenay, Count of Auxerre (1217-19), assumed the empire of the East. Peter was taken captive by Theodore, the legitimate sovereign of Constantinople, and his sons Robert (1221-28) and Baldwin II. (1228-37) reigned in succession. The gradual recovery of their empire by the legitimate sovereigns of the East culminated in the capture of Constantinople by the Greeks (1261). The line of Latin sovereigns was extinct. Baldwin lived the remainder of his life a royal fugitive, soliciting the Catholic powers to join in his restoration. He died in 1272.

From the days of the Emperor Heraclius the Byzantine Empire had been most tranquil and prosperous when it could acquiesce in hereditary succession. Five dynasties--the Heraclian, Isaurian, Amorian, Basilian, and Comnenian families--enjoyed and transmitted the royal patrimony during their respective series of five, four, three, six, and four generations. The imperial house of Comnenius, though its direct line in male descent had expired with Andronicus I. (1185), had been perpetuated by marriage in the female line, and had survived the exile from Constantinople, in the persons of the descendants of Theodore Lascaris.

Michael Palæologus, who, through his mother, might claim perhaps a prior right to the throne of the Comnenii, usurped the imperial dignity on the recovery of Constantinople, cruelly blinded the young Emperor John, the legitimate heir of Theodore Lascaris, and reigned until 1282. His career of authority was notable for an attempt to unite the Greek and Roman churches--a union which was dissolved in 1283--and his instigation of the revolt in Sicily, which ended in the famous Sicilian Vespers (March 30, 1282), when 8,000 French were exterminated in a promiscuous massacre.

He saved his empire by involving the kingdoms of the West in rebellion and blood. From these seeds of discord uprose a generation of iron men, who assaulted and endangered the empire of his son, Andronicus the Elder (1282-1332). Thousands of Genoese and Catalans, released from the wars that Michael had aroused in the West, took service under his successor against the Turks. Other mercenaries flocked to their standard, and, under the name of the Great Company, they subverted the authority of the emperor, defeated his troops, laid waste his territory, united themselves with his enemies, and, finally, abandoning the banks of the Hellespont, marched into Greece. Here they overthrew the remnant of the Latin power, and for fourteen years (1311-1326) the Great Company was the terror of the Grecian states.