The greatness and decline of Rome

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface To The First Edition

These two volumes contain a history of the age of Caesar, from the death of Sulla to the Ides of March. They cover 'the critical years in which Roman imperialism definitely asserted its sway over the civilised world — ^when, by the conversion of the Mediterranean into an Italian lake, Italy entered upon her historic task as intermediary between the Hellenised East and barbarous Europe.

Prefixed to the work are five introductory chapters giving a somewhat lengthy summary of Roman history down to the moment when the detailed narrative begins. Despite the many defects to which this style of writing is obviously exposed, I would beg my readers to study these chapters with patience and goodwill ; for they are a necessary introduction to the fuU description and understanding of Caesar's own age.

Human history, like all other phenomena of life and motion, is the unconscious product of an infinity of small and unnoticed efforts. Its work is done, spasmodically and in disorder, by single individuals or groups of individuals, acting generally from immediate motives, with results which always transcend the knowledge and intentions of contemporaries, and are but seldom revealed, darkly and for a moment, to succeeding generations. To find a clue to the immediate, accidental, and transitory motives which have pricked on the men of the past to their labours ; to describe vividly and whole-heartedly their vicissitudes and anxieties, their struggles and illusions, as they pursued their work ; to discover how and why, through this work, the men of one generatio^i have often, not satisfied the passions which spurred them to action, but effected some lasting transformation in the life of their society — this should be, in my opinion, the unfailing inspiration of the historian's task.

vi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

I hope that my book has enabled me to demonstrate that the Roman world-conquest, one of those amazing spectacles in history which, seen from a distance, seem to defy both comparison and explanation, was in reality the effect, remarkable, indeed, for its special conditions of place and time, of an internal transformation which is continually being re-enacted in the history of societies on a larger or a smaller scale, promoted by the same causes and with the same resultant confusion and suffering— the growth of a nationalist and industrial democracy on the ruins of a federation of agricultural aristocracies.

My intention is to continue the narrative, in succeeding volumes, down to the break-up of the Empire. We shall watclx, in the generation between Augustus and Nero, the appearance of a new aristocracy out of the industrial democracy of Caesar's age ; we shall watch this aristocracy,, all-powerful in a peaceful empire, crumble slowly to pieces through its own prosperity, while Christianity and the Oriental worships undermine its spiritual foundations ; and finally we shall watch it as^ it is engulfed anew, and takes down with it into the deeps all that was most ancient and revered in Graeco-Latin civilisation. Thus the book includes in its survey the entire course of one of the most remarkable societies in history, from its birth to its death — from the far-distant morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled the forests on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the tragic hour in which the sun of Graeco-Latin civilisation set over the deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant, and brutalised peoples of Latin Europe.

Turin; December i, 1901.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Small Beginnings of a Great Empire . . i II. The First Military and Commercial Expansion

OF Rome in the Mediterranean Basin . . i8

Chapter I The Small Beginnings Of A Great Empire

Italy in the second half of the fifth century B.C. — The warfare between the small republics, and its causes — Rome as a small aristocratic and agricultural State — Its condition amid this warfare — The famUy organisation — Conservative spirit of the nobility — Rigidly aristocratic and republican government and institutions — Rome's early wars at the head of the Latin Confederacy, fifth and fourth centuries B.C. — Their results — Increase of territory, foundation of colonies, conclusion of alliances, increase of State and private resources — Abundance of slaves, diffusion of prairie pasturage, increase of precious metals— Gradual growth of luxury, fidelity to old ways of life, consolidation of the old landlord aristocracy — The victorious wars of the fourth and third centuries — Rome wins the political supremacy of Italy — Rural and aristocratic society at its zenith — Its virtues and defects — Conquest of Magna Grascia^ — First Punic War and conquest of Sicily — First signs of the trading spirit — The first middlemen-contractors — The nobility begin to engage in speculation — Beginnings of literature — First appearance of a democratic party — Caius Flaminius and the conquest of the Po Valley — ^The invasion of Haimibal — Strength and weakness, losses and gains, of Rome in the Second Punic War.

In the second half of the fifth century before Christ Rome was Rome in still an aristocratic community of free peasants, occupying an *^°"''"' area of nearly 400 square miles,* with a population, certainly not exceeding 150,000,! almost entirely dispersed over the

* Cf. Beloch, I. B., 29 ff. 69.

t It is true that according toLivy.iii. 24, thecensusof 459B.c.couhted 117,319 citizens, which would give a free population of about 400,000. But these figures do not seem to me probable, for the following reasons : (l) If Rome had at that time had as many as 120,000 soldiers, she would not have experienced so much difficulty in conquering the small neighbouring peoples. (2) A population of over 1000 inhabitants to the square mile could not possibly have subsisted, no matter how poor, at a time when Rome lived entirely on the produce of the land. (3) These figures do not agree with others which are more certain. If there were 165,000 citizens on a territory of 1045 square miles in 339 B.C., and 260,321 citizens on 1606 square miles in 293 b.c.

I I A

450-400 B.C. countryside and divided into seventeen districts or rural Tribes. Most of the families had a small holding and cottage of their own, where father and sons lived and worked together, growing corn for the most part, with here and there a strip of vine or olive. Their few head of cattle were kept at pasture on the neighbouring common land ; their clothes and simple implements of husbandry they made for themselves at home. Only at rare intervals and on special occasions would they make their way into the fortified town which was the centre at once of their religion and their government. Here were the temples of the gods, the houses of the wealthy, and the shops of the artisans and traders, where corn, oil or wine could be bartered in small quantities for salt or rough tools and weapons of iron. Every Roman landowner was assigned according to his means to one of five classes, which were further subdivided into Centuries ; by contributing his vote to the vote of his Century, which counted for one in the Assembly of the Centuries or Comitia Centuriata, he took part in legislation and in the election of the chief magistrates of the Republic.

Tte Yet although all the State oflSces were elective the con-

?Al>rici&ns he knights stitution of Rome was doubly aristocratic. As they an thepUbs. jgcended from the poorer to the richer classes, the Centuries contained a proportionately smaller number of electors ; and the higher magistracies were by a hereditary privilege reserved for a small number of patrician families, who could boast the possession of wider lands, more numerous herds and a certain number of slaves. The sons of Senators, together with plebeians of sufficient wealth and distinction, formed a separate order, intermediate between nobility and plebs. They were recognised by the State as Knights, and amongst their other privileges was that of serving in the cavalry in time of war. The plebeians too had organisations and privileges of their own. They held local meetings in their districts for the discussion of their particular interests : and every year they appointed Tribunes of the People, whose persons were inviolable, and who had the

(Beloch. I. B. 89), assuming the density of population to have been the same, Rome in 459 B.C. would have numbered some 60,000 citizens and 190,000 free men. But the density must have been less, as the country was poorer and less civilised : it follows, therefore, that we cannot account at the outside limit for more than 150,000 men and 45,000 citizens, which would give an army slightly larger than the 20,000 suggested by Mommsen. Any higher estimate seems improbable.

power of putting a veto upon any action of the magistrates. 450-400 b.c. Moreover, the Assembly of the Centuries had a rival in the Assembly of the Tribes, a body consisting of all who were enrolled in the seventeen rural Tribes and in the four city Tribes which comprised the scanty voting population of Rome.* The Tribes superseded the Centuries, not only for the election of some of the less important magistrates, but for the transaction of current affairs. The chief power, however, still rested with the patricians, who were peasants like their fellows, and not above handling the pick and the plough.t The ordinary patrician dweUing was small and rude, their fare homely, and their clothes of the simplest ; they possessed little of the precious metals, and almost everything that they needed, both in food and clothing, was made at home by their womenfolk and slaves.

It was little enough, therefore, that Rome required to buy Early Roman from abroad. Terracottas for the decoration of her public buildings and some imports of metal came in from Etruria, Phoenicia and Carthage, besides ivory work and ornaments, perfumes for funerals, purple for the ceremonial robes of the magistrates, and a few slaves. It was not difficult to pay for these in exports ; timber for shipbuilding and salt practically made up the list. J The city itself was small and poor : even the rich patricians spent most of their time in the country, and came to town only for their official duties or to attend the sittings of the Senate, of which past magistrates, on the nomination at first of the Consuls and later of the Censors, were made life members. The power of the Senate included the superintendence of the magistrates, the administration of the treasure, the ratification of the laws and elections made by the Assemblies of the Centuries and the Tribes,§ and the discussion of the not infrequent question of peace and war.

For the whole of Italy, up to Liguria, Emilia, and the Warfare Romagna, which were still, like the Po Valley, peopled by '° "^^'

* Cf. the observations of Mommsen, R. F., i. 185, on the enactments of the Valerio-Horatian Laws of 449.

+ Val. Max., iv.4 and 5. PUny, H. N., xviii. 3,19. C/. Marquardt, V. P. R. 2, 194.

X SchiUer-Voigt, 291. Voigt. J. N. 2, 552, 557 ; Ciccotti, T. S., 146 ff.

§ I need not here deal with the question of the auctoritas senaius over the Assembly of the Tribes in the earliest times, a matter which is still sub jiidice. It is a detail of no great impdrtance in a rapid account of ancient Rome, and one which it would be unprofitable to discuss at length.

[Tarentum.] [Neapolis.]

450-400 B.C. tribes of savage Celts and Ligurfans, was dotted with fortified strongholds similar to Rome itself, guarding the course of the rivers, keeping watch over the countryside from their rough hill-tops, barring the clefts of the mountains, or standing up as far-seen landmarks to the trader in his small vessel out at sea. The constitution of these small hill-communities was sometimes aristocratic and sometimes popular, but very seldom monarchical ; each possessed a certain extent of territory ; and many of them formed part of confederations drawn together by race or langauge — such as that of the Osco-Sabellians in the South, of the Latins, Etruscans and Umbrians in Central Italy, and of the groups of Greek colonies along the coast, with their centres at Ancona, Taranto and Naples. But these forms of union were of little avail to keep the peace. AH through the peninsula, from township to township, between the upland and the plain, the river valleys and the sea, there was a continual warfare between tribe and tribe. It was fed by all the incitements that rouse savage races to arms in every age — the demand for more land and slaves, the desire for precious metals, the spirit of adventure and ambition among the chiefs or a fighting temper among the people, and the urgent necessity for aggression as a security against attack and annihilation.

Like the townships all round her, Rome too had become involved in this interminable contest. Indeed, she was exposed to even greater dangers than the majority of her neighbours. Though she had succeeded in grouping about her in a confederation the small rural republics of Latium which shared her Latin tongue, she still remained in a condition of perilous weakness. Her army consisted simply of her small proprietors in arms, under the command of their wealthier neighbours : for the man who owned no land had not the right to be a soldier. All landowners between the ages of seventeen and forty-six — and these at the middle of the fifth century B.C. must have numbered about 30,000 — were obUged to present themselves before the Consul whenever a levy was proclaimed, ready to be grouped into legions and to take the field under the orders of their patrician magistrates.

Debt-slavery. But a bitter hostihty was gradually growing up between rich and poor. The population of their small territory was increasing too fast, and continual wars brought ruin and devastation in their train,, while the excessive cultivation of cereals was slowly exhausting the richness of the soil.

The Roman military system and its results.

Moreover, the unfortunate small landowners were being 450-400 b.c. burdened with debt ; while the nobility, whose numbers were increasing at an equal rate, continued to appropriate to themselves the best of the lands taken from the enemy, and to increase their herds of cattle on the pubHc pastures, till they gradually deprived the poor altogether of their use. They had also been tempted into a practice which led to far-reaching abuses ; they lent money at usury to the poorer proprietors and then reduced them to slavery on non-payment, in accordance with the ancient law of nexum. There was enmity too between the rich plebeians and the patricians ; for the plebeians were still jealously excluded from the magistracies. All this led to constant quarrels and rioting between the different factions, sometimes even to a temporary split in the State, which not even the imminence of war was always able to appease.

Yet once at the head of the Latin Confederation, Rome Early Roman gradually brought the other towns and confederations of Italy *"*"*''■ within her power. The cause of her success lay in the vigorous discipline of her Constitution, which was strong enough to control that spirit of self-indulgence which is the most powerful solvent of national life. It was this that maintained a pure and simple morality among her rich and powerful class, which would have been the first to succumb to the vanity and vice that too frequently attend on the pride of conquest.

The Romans were a primitive people without the defects peculiar to a primitive people. This was what enabled them to conquer nations more civihsed than themselves which had been weakened by the temptations incident to their superior culture. Ancient Roman society may perhaps fitly be compared to life in one of the monastic orders in the middle ages. Both systems display the same methodical combination of example and precept, of mutual vigilance and unremitting discipline. Both show us a community in which the individual is entirely at the mercy of the feelings and opinions of his fellows, and where it is impossible for him to become emancipated from the tyranny of the group. Both succeeded in drawing out from their members, in the narrow sphere allotted to their labours, an energy, a devotion and a self-control far greater than could be expected from any one of them in his individual capacity. In early Rome, everything conspired to maintain and increase among the upper classes the influence of this powerful and minutely organised system. We find it in the distribution of wealth, in religion, in the

The Roman family.

450-400 B.C. public institutions, in the severity of the legal code : we find it in a public opinion which demanded a relentless exercise of authority by fathers against their children or by husbands against their wives. We find it above all in the family, which gave the earliest and most deep-felt lessons in this stern and difficult discipline of the spirit.

The Roman family was at this time in many ways stiU a rehc of the patriarchal age ; each household was a miniature absolutism that had survived the incoming of the aristocratic republic and adapted itself to the new needs of the age. Much of the effort required to maintain the moral and political order of society could be exerted, more efficiently than by the official magistrates, within the narrow circle of family authority. Thus, in fact if not in name, the household was a real and very necessary organ of government. The father was an absolute monarch in his own house ; he alone could buy or sell, hold property or make contracts. He could exact as full an obedience from his son as from his servant, whatever the age or office he had attained. He could turn a rebeUious child from his door, reduce him to penury, sell him as a slave or condemn him to work in the fields ; he could claim childlike obedience from a Consul who returned home from a victorious campaign. He was supreme judge over wife, children, grandchildren and slaves ; and the stern ordinance of custom might even require him to send them to their death for an offence against the family, or a neighbour, or the State.*

With powers such as these it was for a long time easy for parents, as each new generation grew up, to repress that youthful spirit of innovation which is in all ages the main source both of perversion and of progress ; to train up their children in their own image and likeness ; to accustom the boys to reverence and purity, to labour and sobriety, to the careful observance of laws and customs and of a narrow but tenacious patriotism, and to instruct them in the main precepts of domestic economy and agriculture ; to teach the girls to live always under the authority of a man, whether father, husband or guardian, without the right to possess property, not even a dowry, to be gentle, obedient, and chaste, attentive only to housework and children ; and to inculcate, in boys and girls alike, a scrupulous reverence for tradition, a loyal devotion

* Dion. Hal., ii. 25-27. Bonfante, D. R., 1 5 1 ff. Fustel de Coulanges, C. A„ 100-105. Lange, R. A., i., 95 £f. Cf. the interesting case of C; Flaminius, Cic. de Inv., ii. 17, 52 ; Val. Max., v. 45.

Early Roman education.

to the old morality, and a horror of all innovation or luxury. 450-400 b.c.

It was the family which taught even the richer Roman, from

the days of his youth, to be content with small enjoyments,

to keep pride and vanity in check, to own submission, not to

another man like himself— for monarchy he abhorred with a

fanatical loathing — but to the impersonal authority of law

and custom. It was the family too which taught him how to

enjoy, and guided him safely through the years of early manhood,

when man makes his selection among the pleasures of life

according to the accidents of education and character, holding

fast] later to the life he has chosen with a contempt born of

ignorance for all that he has rejected. And woe betide

the disobedient or rebellious! Father and family tribunal

would chastise son or wife without mercy : since both tradition

and example counselled strictness, and it is easy for a judge to

be severe when from the days of his own childhood he has

known but little indulgence.*

After this education, the noble Roman, still in his early The Roman's manhood, gained his first experience of war through service in '^"^"■ the cavalry : and before long he married a wife who brought him a small dowry and was to bear him many children. Then he began his long and gradual career of public Hfe, coming before the people as a candidate for the diflterent elective offices, according to the order prescribed by law. But no one could hope to win the suffrages of the people or the subsequent approval of the Senate unless he were known to be a respecter of tradition. And even in office his power was strictly circumscribed. If every Roman magistrate held important prerogatives, kept a numerous retinue under his orders, and was treated with solemn and ceremonial respect, yet the governing power was divided amongst a large number of individuals, all offices were unpaid and temporary, generally lasting a year, and every holder of office was given a colleague, his equal in rank and authority, for mutual supervision : while above and controlling them all was the Senate. Thus no magistrate coidd violate a law or a tradition without serious cause ; all were obliged to yield in turn the obedience they had claimed ; and on their return to private hfe they could be called to account for their pubhc actions. From the cradle to the grave a Roman was spied on without ceasing ; and when, at the death

* Fathers not infrequently went so far as to condemn their own children to death. Cf. Dion. Hal., -viii. 79. See Di Marzo, S. P. C. R., i. 27.

The £rst annexations.

[Gives sine sufiragio.]

[Municipes.]

The allied States.

[Pernsia.] [Arretium,]

of his father, the son became in his turn the absolute ruler of the household, he soon found that in the Forum, the Assembly and the Senate he was exposed to a supervision no less exacting than at home. The Censors might strike him off the roll of Senators for evil living, the people might refuse to elect him to office, and every individual citizen was a potential accuser.

Thanks to this disciphne of her upper classes, Rome was able to succeed where the Etruscans had failed, and to rise little by little above the other States of Italy. In the second half of the fifth century, and the early decades of the fourth century B.C., Rome, at the head of the Latin League, engaged in a series of wars against the .^qui, Volsci and Etruscans, which enabled her, not only, in 387, to institute four new tribes on her enlarged territory, but also to found several Latiti colonies on 270,000 acres of good land taken from the enemy,* In this way many young men of the middle class, whose means might otherwise have debarred them from marriage, became citizens and proprietors in a new city, governed by laws of its own on the Roman model, and subject only to the obhgation that her citizens should serve with the Roman legions. Encouraged by these first successes Rome was led on, during the end of the fourth and the first half of the third century, to undertake campaigns against the Samnites, Etruscans and Sabines, against the rebellious members of the Latin League, against the Gauls on the Adriatic coast, and the Greek mercenaries of Pyrrhus called in by Taranto. She thus annexed a vast territory of nearly 10,500 square miles,t including the whole of Latium, part of the eastern and western districts of Tuscany, the greater part of Umbria, the Marches and Campania, reducing the cities to municifia and their inhabitants to citizens obliged to provide military service and the tributum or war tax without the privilege of a vote.

But her influence extended far beyond this area. During the whole of this time she was increasing her hold over cities and tribes in more distant parts oFthe peninsula. Alliances were contracted, sometimes by persuasion, sometimes by force : with Naples in 326, with Camerino, Cortona, Perugia, Arezzo, in 310, with the Marrucini, the Marsi, the Paeligni and the Frentani, in 305, with the Vestini, in 302, and afterwards vnth Ancona and Taranto. By the terms of these treaties the towns

SMAI.L BEGINNINGS OF A GREAT EMPIRE 9

and tribes, while preserving their own laws and institutions, 450-2 50 b.c. undertook to supply Rome with military contingents and to consult the Roman Senate in the case of all disputes with other States.

These wars had, in short, created a Roman Protectorate The process over the whole of Italy, and entailed a considerable increase setuement. in the wealth as well as in the power of Rome. Not only had the State now far greater revenues at its disposal ; it had also acquired a rich domain of fields, pastures and forests aU over the peninsula, part of which was let out or granted in allotments, while the rest was reserved for future needs. Many patrician and plebeian families became wealthy through the purchase of slaves and land, laying large estates under cultivation in all parts of Italy, partly in corn, partly in vine and olive, and employing "families" of slaves under the supervision of a slave foreman, helped at vintage and harvest time by free day-labourers from the nearest town.* Others devoted themselves, more especially on the Common Lands of Southern Italy, to pastoral enterprise on a huge and primi- Praine tive scale, not unlike what may be seen to-day in Texas and P^'^^'^e"- the prairie States of the American Union ; their vast wandering herds of oxen and sheep, without stall or pen, grazing and sleeping under the open sky all the year round, were driven by slave shepherds every summer up to the mountains, and every winter down to the plains.t

Another result of these wars was a very large increase in Trade in the ' the supply of precious metals t and in 269 or 268 b.c. Rome meuis!'' first coibed silver money.§ The precious metals, always eagerly sought after by all peoples, whether barbarous or civilised, either as glittering adornments or as a form of wealth easy to carry and conceal, were in the ancient world by far the most universal object of commerce and barter, and the usual means of exchange between peoples on different levels of civilisation. Thenceforward the Romans were able to take part in international commerce, and to purchase the luxuries of HeUenic civilisation, with which, through the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, they were now brought into closer contact. ||

* Cf. Cato, de Re Rusticadescri, who bes the estates of a rich noble at a time when the transformation of agriculture was just beginning. His book gives some idea of the agricultural management of a rich landlord in the third century B.C.

+ Nitzsch, G. v., 16. X Livy, x. 46. SchiUer-Voigt, 294.

§ Babelon, M. R. R. I,, p. xviii. || SchiUer-Voigt, 287.

oTtbe old order.

450-250 B.C. Thus families of small proprietors multiplied, and lived in increased comfort, on the territory of the colonies.

Consolidation But this increase of wealth did not at first tend to weaken the ancient traditions ; nor was it immediately followed either by a change in manners or by a political revolution. The thrift and simplicity of the old times were still the proudest virtues of every noble family. The growth of prosperity, while it neither refined the mass nor multiphed the enjoyments of the individual, augmented and consolidated the strength of the State, both for peace and for war. It concentrated the power in a strong military aristocracy of rich landowners, fashioned in the mould of the traditional education ; and it helped to conquer new territories and to pepple them with Latin cultivators and Latin soldiers.

Concessions \l No doubt, as the middle ranks of society grew in numbers,

totiiepiebs. > prosperity and influence, the governing class was slowly reconstituted and the State became more democratic ; but the change took place slowly and steadily, without any violent upheaval. By acquiring riches and employing them in the pubHc interest many plebeian families became so influential that the patricians, whose wealth and numbers were now proportionately diminished, were compelled to recover their fortunes and retain their powers by frankly welcoming the rich middle class into their midst, intermarrying with their famihes and allowing them a share in the government. As early as 421 plebeians had been allowed to reach the lowest rung in the ladder of office, the Quaestorship ; they thus received the power, as urban Quaestors, to prosecute all who were accused of capital offences, to administer the pubhc treasure, and keep charge over certain of the pubUc documents ; or, as military Quaestors, to manage the finances of the army and direct the commissariat. In 367 it was further decided that there should be one plebeian among the two Consuls, the first magistrates of the State, who were responsible for convening the Senate and the Assemblies, controlled the elections of the magistrates by the admission or rejection of candidates, and raised the levies and commanded the armies in time of war. In 365 plebeians were admitted to be Curule ^Ediles, to regulate the price and superintend the sale of cereals, to look to the preservation of pubhc monuments, the policing of streets, markets, and open spaces, and the ordering of pubUc festivals. In 350 they were admitted to the Dictatorship and the Censorship. The Dictatorship was an extraordinary