Chapter XVIII: The Retirement at Capreæ 418 (2)

While the Roman Electorate was thus outgrowing all possible organization, and the constitution of a city state was breaking down in every direction under the weight of burdens which it was not constructed to carry, the minds of liberal statesmen at Rome were unhappily occupied largely with city constitutions. The enlightened circle of the Roman nobility, which was represented by such men as Scipio Æmilianus, studied the Greek political writers rather than the events which were going on around them, and were tempted to see in the creation of a really democratic constitution the remedy for the disorders which were only too obvious. They were liberal in one sense, but it was in terms of the city state, which no longer existed.

We have had an analogous process in our own history. The expansion of England for a long time escaped the notice of men, who, frightened by the French Revolution, were concerned in demonstrating the incomparable merit of representative government, and of establishing the fact that the English constitution had always contained in it the democratic principle. One of these men rewrote for us the history of Greece in terms of the praise of democracy; another proclaimed the merits of liberty and representative government; a whole school of historians is interested in showing the popular share in such events as the extortion of Magna Charta from an unwilling King, and in the constitution of the Parliament summoned in the King’s name by Simon de Montfort; as the result of the labours of these and other men our attention was drawn for many years exclusively to problems of domestic government; the far greater problem, the relations of England to her colonies and dependencies, and the necessary modifications in her internal constitution, escaped notice.

At Rome the first important act of the new Liberal school was the attempted agrarian legislation of Tiberius Gracchus; Rome was to deal with her conquered territory in the terms of a city state; conquered land was public land; in such states it had always belonged to the whole people, and had been shared between them; Rome had neglected this salutary arrangement; her public land had passed into the possession of the wealthy few; it must be resumed, and redivided. The proposal was about as practical as an attempt to restore all the common lands to the English peasantry would be at present; it failed; the originator was assassinated.

Ten years later his brother proposed further liberal schemes; he was less of a dreamer; he looked forward rather than back; he saw that Rome must provide for her time-expired soldiers, and must give non-Roman Italians who had fought under her standards a larger share in her conquests; but he was before his time, and was in his turn assassinated; a similar fate befell a leader from the ranks of the Conservative nobility, a Livius Drusus, who a few years later advanced the same political programme. The expansion of Rome to include Italy had thus become part of the policy of a definite party at Rome; but this party was not always a popular party, for the men who idled about the streets of Rome, living on the profits of citizenship, were no more disposed than the great families to add to the number of the partners.

During the second century before the Christian era, the forms of popular government were maintained at Rome ready to become more than forms when an organization was also ready to use them. The most important effect of the political work of the Gracchi was to breathe fresh life into the popular assembly; but this was no sooner done than the constitution proved to be unworkable; then followed a period of anarchy in Rome itself, which lasted for seventy years; during this period one party, the party of Greater Rome, steadily grew, and eventually left the constitution so modified that the local politics of the capital no longer had a predominant weight in the Empire. The first great step towards this end was made in the period during which C. Marius had an overpowering influence in Roman politics. Marius is represented to us by the historians from an unfriendly point of view; it is not easy to get at the real man through the mass of legend which obscures his real story. We see him a capable general who reorganized the Roman Army; we also see him incapable as a politician; he figures as the rough brutal demagogue whose violence stands in unpleasing contrast to the suave manners of Sulla; but whatever he may have been personally he represented definite political tendencies. The Marian party survived Marius, and found its most distinguished representative in the great Cæsar, who was a nephew of Marius.

A significant fact about Marius is that he was not a Roman; he came from the small town of Arpinum. Technically he was a Roman citizen, for Arpinum was a community which had enjoyed for nearly a century the privileges of Roman citizenship; but his connexion with Rome was not the connexion of a Cornelius or an Æmilius. He was one of the many men from Italian towns who used their Roman citizenship to push a career at Rome; Cicero, also from Arpinum, and Pompeius from Picenum are well-known examples of the same class of men.

Each of these three men failed as a politician at Rome, and in much the same way each of them transferred to the wide arena of Roman politics the limitations imposed by the traditions of a small city state. Marius could not manage the Electorate nor the Senate; Pompeius could not manage the Senate; Cicero saw in Rome a magnified Arpinum. Of the three, Marius, in spite of the clumsiness which defeated his own purposes, had grasped the one political idea which was to conquer all others in the end; he saw that the men who fought in the armies of the Empire must have a share in the government of the Empire; he contributed to this end, perhaps unconsciously, by his reorganization of the Army. The reforms of Marius in military organization were in the first place technical, and unfortunately we cannot assign the several details to their responsible authors. We do not know exactly what was done by Marius himself, what by his successors; but we do know that his administration marks the period at which the Roman Army took the form of a professional standing army as distinct from a militia. The change had been long in progress, military necessities had imposed it; occasional service had been practically replaced by continuous service. Marius substituted in fact, if not in every form, a military organization in the army for a civil organization; the change was forced upon the Roman by the dangerous invasions from the north which had found the Government unprepared. Marius dispersed the invaders; he stood forth as the saviour not only of Rome, but of Italy, and he was able to reorganize the army in terms not of the Roman constitution but of military necessities. The Roman Armies at this date were not recruited exclusively or even in the greater proportion from Rome herself; not only was each legion supported by auxiliaries, such as cavalry and light armed skirmishers, drawn from non-Italian territories, but the legion itself was recruited from the allies in Italy as well as from Rome, and the balance of military strength was against the capital.

The State at once found itself confronted with a difficult problem: what was to be done with the professional soldiers when their time of service had expired? Men who had served for a term of years found their previous employments closed to them. Alongside with the expansion of the Empire went the depression of Italian agriculture; the food supplies of the capital were increasingly drawn from Sicily, Africa and Sardinia; soldiers who had been free agricultural labourers found their places taken by the captives whom they had themselves reduced to slavery. The remedy that suggested itself was to assign lands to the soldiers; they could either be sent to form military colonies in conquered territory, or be provided with land in Italy confiscated on various pretexts, or simply taken without further excuse. This remedy was not in all respects successful. Men who had become used to the excitements of war and the pleasures of looting, did not settle down readily to the drudgery of farming; some parted with their farms, others in cases where the farm had been one appropriated by the State, allowed the proprietor who had been defrauded to retain possession on condition of paying a rent; some of these men re-enlisted, others went to swell the mob of the capital and enjoy its amusements. The Roman people of Cicero’s days largely consisted of men drawn from many parts of Italy, who had been, or still were, soldiers, and who had no objection to being bribed to give their votes; if they had any political convictions they were Italian rather than Roman; if they resisted any further extension of the privileges of citizenship it was from interested motives, and not because they loved the Conservative party in the Senate. As Rome was the only place in which votes could be given, the tendency was for all Italians possessing the status of Roman citizens to drift into Rome, if they had no occupations to detain them elsewhere. Men who aspired to be political leaders had to win the favour of this increasing multitude.

The Roman people so constituted had no particular affection for Rome, and none for the Senate of Rome as a body; its affections were centred on those who could promote its own interests, on those who were lavish in providing it with amusements and distributing doles, on generals who promised large rewards to their soldiers, on orators who flattered the vanity of the mob; if it had any genuine political sympathies they were with the Army, and with Italy rather than with the hierarchy at Rome. The greatness of the Roman statesmen lies in this, that though nominally the magistrates were elected and laws passed by this rabble, and the whole administration lay at its mercy, outside Italy the Roman Government steadily grew in strength; the love of order and faith in law were so deeply implanted in the Roman character that the administration was not shattered by years of apparent anarchy, in which the constitution seemed to have fallen into abeyance, and the fate of the civilized world to depend upon the caprices of a mob or the loyalty of soldiers to their leaders. The Roman resembled the Englishman in being able to make the best of a bad government or no government; disorder called his reserve of moral strength into action; the executive was always superior to the constitution; however unruly the city, the Roman citizen in the provinces preserved the qualities which had made Rome the ruling power in the Mediterranean.

The character of the Roman people having changed, the mass of citizens being no longer Romans and nothing else, the ruling classes at Rome did their best to organize the numbers who filled the streets. All the methods by which elections may be controlled were resorted to: political clubs were formed, the great families looked up their clients, some of them provided themselves with armed bands of retainers, bribery was systematic and constant; but all efforts to introduce order into the unwieldy body of the Roman people alike failed. It is possible that if the popular assembly had had no further voice in public affairs than to elect magistrates, a way might have been found out of the difficulty; but the mob was not only the electorate, it was also the legislative body, or rather a legislative body. It could not only pass laws, but it could prevent through its representatives, the tribunes, any laws being passed, or any business being conducted. The rule of the Roman people under these conditions was simply authorized anarchy, and the deeply lamented fall of the Republic with which school histories are apt to close, was the restoration of order. In fact just at the time when the history of Rome became the history of the civilized world, there was no longer any political meaning in the term “the Roman People”; it was a survival from previous conditions. The attempt to call to life the forms of popular government resulted, as it was bound to result, not in government, but in anarchy.

III

The Senate

If the Roman people acquired a political significance in the later days of the Republic only to show that it was an unmanageable part of the constitution, the Roman Senate had always been an organized power. Had it pursued the comparatively liberal policy which prevailed in its councils immediately after the second Punic War, the Empire would probably have come, but it might have come without the intervening period of revolution; this, however, was not to be; the temptations of wealth and power were too strong. While, however, we are at liberty to condemn the Senate as it is revealed to us by the transactions with Jugurtha and other scandalous incidents, we must not forget that the same body which failed so deplorably at one period of its career produced the men by whom the Empire was made. It was the embodiment of all that was politically good in the Roman character, as well as of much that was evil; its faults were the faults inherent to a close corporation of nobles enjoying vast responsibilities which it did not altogether comprehend; its virtues have impressed themselves upon subsequent history.

A peculiarity of the Roman constitution in the later centuries of the Republic is that it was practically unworkable even as a city government, unless everybody was agreed to exercise forbearance, and not to push constitutional powers to their legitimate extremes. Two chief magistrates were elected every year, each of whom could neutralize the work of the other; all public business could be stopped at a moment’s notice on religious grounds; the magistrates elected by the popular assembly could impose their veto upon the action of all other magistrates. As long as the Senatorial families worked together, and abandoned their mutual differences in the presence of external pressure, the popular element in the constitution could be disregarded; but when the Senate became divided against itself, or when individual Senators chose to ignore the traditional checks by which the whole body was enabled to work in the interests of the order rather than of the individuals composing the order, it was possible to paralyze the Government without departing from the strict letter of the constitution.

The Senate was a strictly aristocratical body, practically a co-optative body, for every five years the Censor, himself a Senator, revised the list of the Senate. It was in his power to remove members, who had in various ways disgraced themselves, or who had fallen below the property qualification demanded of a Senator; he could summon new members, and though, after Sulla had passed a decree to that effect, he was bound to summon all men who had held the elective office of Quæstor, so long as the Senate was united, it could control the elections, and take care that no undesirable politician should in this way effect his admission to the order. This quality of an Aristocratical Order still hung about the Senate in the early days of the Empire; it was felt even then to be a public misfortune that a Senatorial family should be unequal to maintaining its position, and such families were occasionally subsidised by the Emperors.

The Senate was chiefly composed of men who belonged to an aristocracy by birth, and it admitted new men very unwillingly; a Marius with the power of the Army behind him could force his way into the Senate; a useful advocate like Cicero, or general like Pompeius, could be summoned to its ranks, but such men were unwelcome; they were accepted as a disagreeable necessity; all three learned at different times by bitter experience, that they were, at the best, tolerated.

An indication of the aristocratic nature of the Senate is afforded by the fact that Senators were forbidden to engage in trade, a prohibition which however they contrived to evade.

The school of writers which is interested in representing all forms of government, which have been successful as democratic, has done its best both in ancient and modern times to minimise the aristocratic character of the Roman Senate no less than its legislative supremacy; but the whole tone of Roman history is against them. A Roman Senator was distinctly a nobleman. Inside the Senate rank went by office; those Senators who had held the higher offices took precedence of others according to dignity of office; those families were most highly honoured who could show the greatest number of dignitaries among their ancestors, but the qualification of birth co-existed with rank, derived from office or a long ancestry of office holders. Long after the distinction between patrician and plebeian had ceased to have any meaning except in reference to certain priesthoods and religious ceremonies, the distinction between patrician and plebeian families was remembered, and occasionally reasserted itself practically; and it was some time before the official rank of Senator conferred by an Emperor was respected unless the recipient was entitled to Senatorial rank by descent. Among the few acts of the early Emperors which win the respect of contemporary historians, purgations of the Senate are included. Julius Cæsar tried to make the Senate a council of the Empire by enrolling in it non-Italians; but he was before his time, and his astute successor acted in a contrary spirit.

During all the constitutional changes of the last centuries of the Republic, the position of the Roman Senate remained unchanged in two particulars: it was the fountain head of Roman religion and of Roman law, and though the former might be held to be of transitory importance, the latter was undeniably permanent in its effects.

The Roman Senate did not alone make law, though it alone through the Prætors interpreted law. As a legislative body it shared its functions with the popular assemblies; its decrees were rather administrative than legislative, but it has never been rivalled, except, perhaps, by the English judges, in its power of expanding the application of existing laws and creating a legal system. This peculiarity of the Roman mind, its conservatism combined with a capacity for readjustment, gave us the Roman Empire; without it the Roman conquests would have gone for nothing. The Greek, far quicker witted than the Roman, was ready to change his laws at a moment’s notice. It was to him an open question whether his state should be democratic or oligarchic; the question could be settled according to convenience, by voting or by force; a new constitution could be framed to suit new emergencies. The Roman mind worked differently; with the Roman the new had, if possible, to be read into the old. The Roman did not become a constitution maker till he had passed under Greek influence, and he was remarkably unsuccessful in the task. He soon abandoned it, but he never failed in his casuistry; there was no conceivable adjustment of human relations which the Roman jurisconsult could not refer back to the Twelve Tables; he never troubled himself as to what was to the advantage of the greatest number, or as to the precise definition of justice; he simply took his law, his precedents, his authorised interpretations, and worked the new circumstances into line with the old forms.

Till the Greek influence modified Roman habits the education of the young Roman noblemen was largely legal; while the Greek youth was discussing morality speculatively, the Roman youth was being instructed in the application of law. He sat at the feet of some Mucius Scævola, and heard his solutions of knotty entanglements; the oratory in which he was trained was not the florid rhetoric, which may be addressed successfully to a mob, but forensic oratory addressed to trained intelligence.

With the legal temperament, the Roman combined the religious temperament, the habit of looking to authority rather than to speculation as a guide for his actions. The Sibylline books continued to be consulted in form, if not in fact, on occasions of emergency, long after the cultivated Roman had become familiar with the rationalistic speculations of the Greeks and the mathematicians.

The Senate might under these influences have easily degenerated into a futile subservience to stereotyped forms and habits which would have rendered expansion impossible; it might have opposed a Chinese rigidity to necessary innovations; but the destinies of Rome had ordained that from the beginning the principle of modification should exist alongside with a strong conservative tendency. It may be left to the antiquaries to decide exactly how much truth survives in the legends which form the chief part of early Roman history, but even if it were not demonstrable that the population of Rome was a composite population at a very early time, the fact would remain that the Romans themselves believed it to be composed of three elements: they believed that Latins, Sabines and Etruscans had been welded together under the Kings, and that the titular distinction between patrician and plebeian families survived from a further process of incorporation of aliens; thus there was ancient authority for innovation in such an important matter as the admission of new citizens. Athens was in this respect more conservative than Rome; the citizens of the most democratic state of the ancient world boasted of their pure native descent, while the conservative Roman found in his history a continuous process of immigration to the hills by the Tiber, repeated coalition, continued absorption.

While the Roman Senate was in one aspect a body of trained lawyers, in another it was a body of priests. The evolution of the priesthood as a separate profession is a comparatively modern process. In the history of Rome we see the first step in the process, the changes by which the men appointed to maintain the state religion or to conduct the ceremonial observances paid to particular gods became elected officials, after having been the representatives of certain families upon whom those obligations rested. The duties of religion which had previously been family duties became state duties; but this change did not relieve the Senate of its charge of the national religion. Just as the Senator was an expert in law, so he was an expert in ritual; he did not discuss questions of faith, but he decided points of ceremonial. Though the Colleges of Pontiffs and Augurs were not in the later days of the Republic necessarily drawn from the Senators, and though for a short period a restricted form of public election was applied to the former, practically the Senatorial families held these offices in their own hands, and the power which they thus wielded could only be taken from them by the expedient of combining in the person of the chief of the State the functions of chief Pontifex and chief Augur. Any public business could be suspended by the declaration of a Pontifex or Augur, that it was contrary to established ritual, or that the gods had by means of recognized signs and omens signified the occasion to be unfavourable.

The Senate was also an assembly of heads of families; when a Roman youth of Senatorial descent came of age, his father presented him to the Senate. Though inside his family the father was omnipotent, the Senate decided what actually was the family law; and in this respect the Senate dealt with the family, not with the individual. If the head of the family failed to rule his family properly, and thereby occasioned scandal, he might be marked by the Censor and degraded from his rank. In the family were included many persons whom we consider to be outside the family; slaves, freedmen and certain clients had rights as well as duties; the father of a family who contravened the regulations of the Senate in his relations with such persons caused a scandal, no less than in irregular relations with his wife or children. We are frequently surprised in reading the history of the early Emperors by the freedom with which they appeal to the Senate for commiseration in their private misfortunes, by their habit of assuming that the Senate is interested in their family affairs, but in this they were only acting as any other Senator would act. The point of view may be well illustrated from the procedure in divorce; divorce was a purely family affair with the Romans; a wife guilty of misconduct was divorced by her husband without any appeal to a law court. With ourselves a man is at liberty to apply for a divorce; if under certain circumstances he does not do so, we may admire his forbearance or despise his laxity, but there is no constituted authority which can force him to start an action; whereas a Roman Senator who permitted flagrantly scandalous conduct on the part of his wife could be, and sometimes was, degraded by the Censor, the good order of the State being imperilled by the irregularities in his family; cruelty to slaves or neglect of freedmen and clients were in the same way matters that came under the observation of the Senate, and of the Emperors as the leaders of the Senate.

These characteristics of the Roman Senate, that it was broadly speaking an assembly of lawyers, priests and heads of families, of which any individual might and often did combine all three functions in his own person, were most strongly marked in the period during which it commanded the respect of Polybius and Judas Maccabæus; the policy of Augustus was to restore these characteristics; they were partly in abeyance during the period of the greatest prosperity of the Republic, when the attention of the individual Senator of Rome was irresistibly drawn to the administration of her conquered territories, and to the regulation of her relations with potentates on the confines of her Empire.

At the beginning of the first century before the Christian era, the Senate was divided into parties evolved by the new responsibilities, and the changes in opinion caused by the influx of Greek ideals. The most important problem was the administration of the provinces, but along with it there had to be considered the organization of the internal constitution of the city itself. Thus there were two groups of reformers, those who were chiefly concerned in the adjustment of the relations between the city and the Empire, and those who were more actively interested in the reorganization of her local constitution. The questions which presented themselves to the individual Senator were three in number: first, were the provinces to be governed rigorously as conquered territories, or were they to be admitted to a share in their own government and the government of the Empire? secondly, if they were to be governed by Rome and for Rome, was the administration to continue to be exclusively in the hands of the Senate? thirdly, whatever might be Rome’s relations with her provinces, was it not necessary to give reality to those germs of popular government which existed in the Roman constitution, and to make the Senate directly or indirectly an elected assembly of notable men?

Thus a Senator might be Conservative with reference to the provinces, but liberal with reference to the city, or he might hold that the Senate must be the centre of government, and yet be capable of such internal reforms as to make it the best protector of provincial interests; or he might say that the rule of the Senate was good for the city, but unworkable in the provinces.

Outside the Senate there was the Equestrian Order representing both the Civil Administration of the Empire, and non-Roman as well as Roman financiers, supporting any man or group in the Senate which seemed favourable to its interests; there was also the body of Roman citizens partly composed of men who were still bound by various ties to individual members of the Senate, and partly of men who had served in the Roman armies, and supported the policy of distinguished generals by whom they were organized and in various ways paid for their help.

A peculiar quality of the Roman Senate was the romantic affection with which it was regarded by its members and adherents; it was no mere house of representatives; it was a dynasty. Men not only in Rome, but in the provinces, tolerated its scandalous misgovernment after the third Punic War, as men have tolerated the government of a bad King without losing their faith in monarchy and their affection for the institution. Hard-headed politicians may see in the suicide of Cato at Utica nothing but contemptible weakness; to them the Roman Senate is only one of many political organizations; but Cato’s act was otherwise regarded in antiquity. To find a parallel we have to search among those adherents of the Stuart Dynasty in England and Scotland, to whom the cause for which they fought was not merely a political cause, but a religion. We do not condemn men who committed political suicide after 1715, and abstained from public affairs, or even left their country; we feel that, for men believing as they did, no other course was open; it was precisely in this light that the death of Cato appeared to his contemporaries.

The resistance of the Senate to the various reforms pressed upon it from 131 B.C. onwards has been represented as simply a resistance of vested interests; that it was so in some measure even at first, and increasingly so as time went on, is indisputably true, but Cato did not kill himself as a martyr to the cause of vested interests. The Senatorial position was that of a monarch by divine right; the Senate could not accept reforms in deference to external pressure without in a measure abdicating; it was in itself both Church and Crown; it could no more make terms with a Gracchus or a Livius Drusus than could Charles I. with a Pym or a Cromwell.

This point has been largely concealed from us by the Greek influences under which the history of Rome has been written; we are tempted to think of the Roman Senate as of the Athenian Boulé, as of an Upper House, whose powers and privileges could be curtailed or prescribed at the will of a popular assembly; but to concede that point was to concede everything. The bad faith of the Roman Senate, its desperate expedients to maintain its position alike against the rising power of the Army, the organization of the Equestrians, the body of Roman citizens, or the reformers within its ranks, become in a measure respectable when we reflect that the Senate believed itself to rule by divine right.

Similarly faith in the detestation of monarchy ascribed to the Senate is the result, in some measure, of giving undue weight to Greek prejudices, and to the words of men who were unconsciously enthralled by them.

The Senate so arranged matters that no member of the oligarchy should acquire a preponderant position, and disturb the equality which in theory prevailed between individual Senators; hence various enactments as to the intervals between holding the Consulate twice over, the limited period of a provincial appointment and the disbanding of a Consul’s army outside Rome. In the decadence of the Senate piracy was not quelled in the Mediterranean, and inadequate provision was made to repel the Teutonic invasion from the North, because the immense power wielded by the man to whom either of these enterprises was entrusted threatened to overbalance the constitution. The Senate felt, and rightly felt, that its greatness had been achieved by the relatively unselfish co-operation of its members; when the sentiment, which had rendered that unselfish co-operation possible, had given way before the immense opportunities offered by provincial governorships and the successful command of Roman armies, the Senate endeavoured to restore the effects of that sentiment by insisting more and more strongly upon regulations which tended to equality; but this was something different from the Greek antipathy to the tyrant. Equality between its members was a fundamental theory of the Senate, but it had so little antipathy to monarchy as to provide for the rule of one man in the event of great dangers. The Dictatorship, so long as it lasted, was an absolute monarchy; to the Greek a Dictator was the negation of civil order; hence in a Greek town the assumption of the supreme power by one man, however great the emergency, was a revolutionary proceeding; at Rome the appointment of a Dictator was a recognized constitutional expedient.

Thus the divine right of the Senate did not exclude the possibility of making one of their own number supreme executive magistrate; and monarchy was abhorrent to the Senator, not because it was a thing contrary to nature, as some Greek philosophers held, but because it disturbed the balance of the Senatorial constitution.

By laying undue stress on the Senatorial objection to the rule of one man, writers of the school of Cicero have concealed the real position of an orthodox Roman Senator. Cæsar was hated by the old Senatorial party, less because he was in fact King than because he had changed the constitution of the Senate, and endeavoured to make it a council of the Empire by inviting provincials to its ranks.

There is this essential difference between the suicide of Cato and the subsequent suicide of Brutus: the former was a legitimist, to whom the defeat of his cause meant the destruction of all that was holy, the final collapse of law and order and religion; the latter, if an honest man at all, was a fanatical doctrinaire who had been disappointed in his expectation of regenerating society; Cato died because he could not live under the new conditions, Brutus partly because he was disgusted with his failure, partly because he preferred death by his own hand to death at the hands of the ruffians of Antonius.

The conservative Senator objected to a King, it is true, but he objected no less and perhaps even more to such a reconstitution of the Senate as commended itself to Cicero and other reformers, who wished to remodel the political arrangements of Rome in terms of the Athenian Constitution or of some less extravagant ideal republic than that imagined by Plato.

While the Senate contained a party of irreconcilables whom we may call the Legitimists, it also contained a party who believed in the possibility of a genuine reform, and adaptation of the Senatorial constitution to the needs of the Empire; there was a liberal tradition as well as a conservative tradition inside the Senate; the men who had gradually broken down the barriers between Patrician and Plebeian in the early days of the Republic, and who had gone some distance in admitting the allies to a place in the constitution, had been succeeded by the men who had recognized the claims of the Equestrian order, and saw that some equitable distribution of the rewards of victory among the rank and file of the army was necessary to the well being of the State. The names of the men who took the lead in forcing reforms upon the Senate are Senatorial names, Glaucia, Fimbria, Saturninus, Livius Drusus, Cinna, no less than the Gracchi were Senators; and though they were ill advised in mistaking the Roman mob for a constitutional party, they were not demagogues in the sense that Danton was a demagogue; they belonged to the body which they wished to reform; their methods were injudicious, as was proved by the result, but it is not easy to see what other methods were open to them. After Cicero had pledged himself to the cause of the Conservative party in the Senate, he spoke of these men and other men who had proposed and passed measures of reform in terms of unmeasured reprobation, but we are no more bound to accept his condemnation as historically accurate than we are at liberty to accept the current terminology of political abuse in our own day as indicating anything more than the malignity of the speaker. Even the moderate reformer is stigmatized as a demagogue by those who object to his reforms.

Had Marius been as capable a politician as he was a general, it is possible that the reform party in the Senate might have brought about a gradual transition from the rule of the Senate to the inevitable monarchy, but the incapacity of Marius gave the reins to violence, and brought on the proscription of Cinna to be followed by the reaction and yet more violent proscription of Sulla.

Constitutional reform failed, but the breed of constitutional reformers was not extinguished even by the second proscription. Sulla had recognized this party, and had adopted two of its projects of reform; he had, in a measure, unified Italy, and he had provided for a quasi-representative constitution of the Senate by ordaining that men who had held the elective office of Quæstor should after their term of office pass into the Senatorial ranks; this did not exclude other means of admission to the Senate, but it partly broke down the exclusive system of co-optation through the Censor, and it gave a capable and pushing man from an Italian municipality, such as Cicero, a better chance of attaining the highest position at Rome.

The party of moderate reform was divided into two sections, the section which recognized the Empire, and the section which thought in the first place of the city; the former became the mainstay of Cæsar, the latter soon ceased to have any practical weight except in literature. When the great crisis came, it ranged itself for the most part with the Pompeians; but the former section was not able to accept Cæsar’s radical reforms, and became after his death anti-Cæsarian, till after being frightened by the extravagance of Antonius and the brigandage of Sextus Pompeius, it was won over by the moderate and cautious policy of Octavian. These were the men who fought beside Brutus and Cassius, and joined Lucius Antonius in the Perusine war, but when they saw that the choice was between anarchy and Octavian, gave their adhesion finally to his cause; the reign of Augustus bears the impress of their influence throughout. Among them were two men of note, Livius Drusus, father of Livia and grandfather of Tiberius, and Tiberius Nero, the father of the future Emperor.

The reign of Augustus did not finally conclude the reign of the Senate, but it removed from practical politics the party who could not see beyond the city State, and it definitely concluded the pretensions of the rabble of the streets to act in the capacity of the Roman people. It was only gradually that the Senate became an advisory council to the Emperors, recruited from the distinguished officials of the Empire, or from the legal profession; it retained for a long time its hereditary and domestic character.

It might have been anticipated that there would be a clear division of functions between the officials of Greater Rome and of the city itself, that the Emperor with his staff would manage the concerns of the Empire, and the Senate would govern the city; but it was long before the Government of the city sank to the position of an ordinary municipal Government. The division of the provinces into Senatorial and Imperial ultimately broke down, and was indeed from the beginning formal rather than real; it was a compromise by which the old nobility was conciliated, but the honours conceded to the old aristocracy became more and more titular as time went on; the Roman Senate could not step down, and it refused to accept the position of the city Council of Rome, or even of the Council of Italy. It was never formally disestablished, but it was eventually crowded out, though it was still sufficiently self-conscious, when Tacitus and the younger Pliny were writing, to resent the predominance of the Imperial Household, and to worship the traditions of an omnipotence which it believed to have been the realization of those dreams of liberty so dear to the Greek philosophers. So long as Rome continued to be the centre of the administration of the Empire, the Senate of Rome was always something more than a municipal council, and the name of the body which had once governed the Empire was always dignified by associations which could attach to no other assembly.

IV

Slavery

The politician of to-day is as incapable of imagining a wholesome state of society in which slavery is a recognized and universal institution, as he is of believing that any political constitution can be really good without representative government. The Romans, however, contrived to civilize the world, so far as it was accessible to them, without representative government and with slavery. Slavery is, in fact, a necessary condition in the evolution of civilized society, and was an important factor in the evolution of the Roman Empire. Teuton and Celt, no less than Greek or Roman or Phœnician, equally used and doubtless equally abused the institution; no race can claim to have been at all periods of its history free from the curse.

In order to arrive at a fair conception of slavery as it existed in antiquity, it is necessary to clear our minds once for all of prepossessions created by the conditions of slavery in America or other countries, where the slave and the slave owner have been distinguished by such marked racial differences as exist between the white man and the coloured man, between the highly civilized man and the savage. Even in the department of negro slavery, as practised in America, there are two sides to the question, and _Tom Cringle’s Log_ must be set against _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Mr. T. Booker Washington, an American negro who has done perhaps more for the emancipated black men than any living man, himself born a slave, refuses to join in the wholesale condemnation of American slave owners; to him the mischief of the institution lay less in its injurious effects upon the negro than upon the white man, who despised wholesome industry, and tended to become useless rather than cruel.

The political student has to approach the subject without prejudice, and investigate all the consequences and accompaniments of slavery, not only some of them. It is further necessary in dealing with such a question to discount the antipathy to pain and discomfort which is so marked a feature of modern life. Granted that under certain circumstances slavery resulted in a vast amount of hideous suffering, still slavery was not the only condition in ancient life, or mediaeval life, or even modern life, that has resulted in suffering. Wherever a man finds himself in an irresponsible position towards a number of his fellow creatures, wherever a society or the rulers of a society live in terror of any section of that society whether slave or free, there is always the probability of great cruelty. If all the pain and sorrows of humanity from the beginning of time until now could be reckoned up and estimated, and assigned to their various causes, it is questionable whether slavery would show the blackest record.

Antiquity has left us some notorious instances of cruelty to domestic slaves, and the stories of a few sensational cases have been preserved; but even the English domestic servant in Christian London in the nineteenth century is exposed to cruelty, and if the records of our law courts survive, posterity on the evidence of a few exceptional cases will be able to pass a stern sentence upon English men and women of today. Could we estimate all the pains of all the operatives in modern England, all the lives that are shortened, or rendered intolerable by disordered health, could we arrive at a clear understanding of all that is suffered by puddlers in iron foundries, by stokers on our great ships, by men and women employed in lead works, in brick works, in chemical works, in numberless other dangerous industries, we might well pause before condemning slavery as the one social condition predominantly productive of human suffering. True, the modern operative is free, but free to do or to be what? The chain is there; it is only a different kind of chain.

When St. Paul travelled from Puteoli to Rome, he passed through a country in which a form of slavery was universal, which is commonly held to have been the cruellest known to Italy; he passed by the barracks of the agricultural slaves, and the conditions of travelling were such as to give him every opportunity of making observations; he lived certainly for two years after this date, and possibly much longer, but he nowhere lifts up his voice against slavery in general, or even this particular form of slavery. Not long before St. Paul made this journey, it had been necessary to inspect the slave barracks in the same part of Italy, because free men had acquired the habit of adopting servitude in order to escape military service.

In fact that picture of antique slavery which represents it as a scene of whippings and tortures, of rapes and murders, of humiliating or disgusting services exacted by one man from another, and as the exclusive condition under which such things occur, is a false picture.

The importance of slavery as a factor in the life of the ancients does not in fact depend so much upon its moral influence upon individuals as upon its political consequences, which were many and far-reaching in their effects.

The condition of slavery in the ancient world did not in itself involve the same measure of personal degradation with which it is associated in these days; it was only one of many inequalities recognized by society. If a slave could not appear in the law courts of Rome, no more could the resident alien, however rich, however noble in the city from which he came; if the slave could not hold real property, no more could the sons of his master; if he could under certain conditions only acquire personal property, his master’s son was similarly disqualified; the ceremony by which each acquired freedom was the same; neither could make a will, nor work entirely for his own profit; both were included in the family; the domestic disqualifications under which the slave lived were common to him and the children of the house; the political disqualifications he shared with the free citizens of any community not expressly recognized under treaty by the inhabitants of the community in which he lived. Ancient society never contemplated individual independence as the fundamental condition of human existence; it was based on the contrary theory, that individual independence was the exception, and the privilege of the few; only gradually, and as the consequence of established law and habitual order rendering personal security possible for the mean man without the intervention of a powerful protector, did the modern conception of the rights and obligations of the individual human being grow up; and in its perfect development the conception has only very recently been realized.

The slave and his master might be, and commonly were, members of the same race; if they were of different races, the slave might be a more highly civilized man than his master, better educated, more capable in many respects; there were hordes of slaves drawn from less civilized races, and even from savage races, and the work which fell to their share tended to be menial or arduous according to their unfitness for work demanding previous training; but the fact that the slave was by no means universally of an inferior type of humanity to his owner, and frequently quite the reverse, put slavery as an institution on a totally different footing from that which it has held in modern times.

Again, if the slave had to suffer from political disqualifications, he had corresponding immunities; for one thing, he was exempt from military service. One very important consequence of this aspect of slavery was the restriction of the field from which recruits could be drawn for armies; it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the whole of the industrial population of antiquity was not available for military purposes, but the statement is somewhere near the truth; and from this followed a further consequence, which eventually helped to break up the Empire, viz., that the armies were increasingly recruited from the populations on the confines of the Empire, and ceased to be Italian. First Gaul, Spain and Illyria, and Thrace, then the Teutons from Central Europe, sent free recruits to the Roman armies, till the time came when the less civilized military element threw off the traditions of the civil government, and society returned to the conditions which had prevailed before the Roman Empire inaugurated the reign of peace. Agricultural slavery in Italy is sometimes said to have been the cause of the depletion of the Roman armies; ancient authors complain that the hardy breed of peasants from the central hills of Italy disappeared, and that, because their place had been taken by slaves, the recruiting grounds were barren of the right kind of population. The real state of the case was the reverse: the Roman wars had exhausted the Roman free population, which was then replaced by slaves. Between the end of the second Punic War and Cæsar’s campaigns in Gaul, Rome had been continuously draining Italy of her free population; it was inevitable that the sons of the small farmer should be replaced by slaves, and that eventually small farms should be merged in large holdings, and that the slave barrack should stand alone where the scattered homesteads of the peasant proprietor had adorned the landscape.

Two forms of slavery in antiquity have almost monopolized the attention of most writers on the subject--domestic slavery and agricultural slavery; both lend themselves to sensational treatment; but along with these there was industrial slavery in all its forms; where we have free artisans, antiquity had slaves; and it is questionable whether the slaves employed by a great manufacturing firm in antiquity were less well off than the mill hands of a Lancashire town of today; in many industries they were possibly better off than the class of operatives who are “sweated” in East London; the slave of antiquity was at least provided with the necessaries of life by his employer. It is true that the slave operative could be bought and sold and even mortgaged; he could be bequeathed by will, but these mischances commonly happened to him collectively, and no more affected him individually than a change of owners affects the men working in an English manufactory; indeed, the slave had an advantage over the free artisan; he was part of the capital, his value was relatively greater, he occupied the place now taken by the machinery. A body of well trained, well organized slaves stood in much the same relation to capital in ancient times as the plant of a manufactory to the modern capitalist; and a new owner would no more have thought of disbanding or disabling the slaves employed in a publishing establishment, or brick works, than a modern owner would break up the machines in a cotton mill which he had acquired. When we read of the enormous number of slaves owned by some ancient millionaire, we must not think of butlers and grooms and footmen, but of clerks and “hands”; where we now say that such and such a capitalist employs so many thousand men, the ancients said that he owned so many thousand slaves.