XXVI. THE PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER OF CÆSAR
But yesterday the word of Cæsar might Have stood against the world; now lies he there, And none so poor to do him reverence.
--SHAKESPEARE.
Cæsar was assassinated in his fifty-sixth year. He fell pierced with twenty-three wounds, only one of which, as the physician who examined his body affirmed, was in itself mortal. In early life his health had been delicate, and at a later period he was subject to fits of epilepsy, which attacked him in the campaign of Africa, and again before the battle of Munda. Yet the energy and habitual rapidity of all his movements seem to prove the robustness of his constitution, at least in middle life. It may be presumed that if he had escaped the dagger of the assassin, he might, in the course of nature, have attained old age; and against any open attack his position was impregnable. He might have lived to carry out himself the liberal schemes which he was enabled only to project. But it was ordained, for inscrutable reasons, that their first originator should perish, and leave them to be eventually effected by a successor, within a quarter of a century.
The judgment of the ancients upon this famous deed varied according to their interests and predilections. If, indeed, the republic had been permanently re-established, its saviour would have been hailed, perhaps, with unmingled applause, and commanded the favour of the Romans to a late posterity. Cicero, though he might have shrunk from participating in the deed, deemed it expedient to justify it, and saluted its authors in exulting accents, as tyrannicides and deliverers. But the courtiers of the later Cæsars branded it as a murder, or passed it over in significant silence. Virgil, who ventures to pay a noble compliment to Cato, and glories in the eternal punishment of Catiline, bestows not a word on the exploit of Brutus. Even Lucan, who beholds in it a stately sacrifice to the gods, admits the detestation with which it was generally regarded. Augustus, indeed, wisely tolerant, allowed Messalla to speak in praise of Cassius; but Tiberius would not suffer Cremutius to call him with impunity the last of the Romans. Velleius, Seneca, and, above all, Valerius Maximus, express their abhorrence of the murder in energetic and manly tones. It was the mortification, they said, of the conspirators at their victim’s superiority, their disappointment at the slowness with which the stream of honours flowed to them, their envy, their vanity, anything rather than their patriotism, that impelled them to it. The Greek writers, who had less of prejudice to urge them to extenuate the deed, speak of it without reserve as a monstrous and abominable crime. Again, while Tacitus casts a philosophic glance on the opinions of others, and abstains from passing any judgment of his own, Suetonius allows that Cæsar was, indeed, justly slain, but makes no attempt to absolve his assassins. From Livy and Florus, and the epitomiser of Trogus, we may infer that the sentiments expressed by Plutarch were the same which the most reasonable of the Romans generally adopted; he declared that the disorders of the body politic required the establishment of monarchy, and that Cæsar was sent by providence, as the mildest physician, for its conservation. On the whole, when we consider the vices of the times and the general laxity of principle justly ascribed to the later ages of Greek and Roman heathenism, it is interesting to observe how little sympathy was extended by antiquity to an exploit which appealed so boldly to it.[b]
The following extract from Suetonius’ Lives of the Cæsars is our chief source of knowledge as to Cæsar’s personality.
He is said to have been tall, of a fair complexion, round limbed, rather full faced, with eyes black and lively, very healthful, except that, towards the end of his life, he would suddenly fall into fainting-fits, and be frightened in his sleep. He was likewise twice seized with the falling sickness in the time of battle. He was so nice in the care of his person that he had not only the hair of his head cut and his face shaved with great exactness, but likewise had the hair on other parts of the body plucked out by the roots, a practice with which some persons upbraidingly charged him. His baldness gave him much uneasiness, having often found himself upon that account exposed to the ridicule of his enemies. He therefore used to bring forward his hair from the crown of his head; and of all the honours conferred upon him by the senate and people, there was none which he either accepted or used with greater pleasure than the right of wearing constantly a laurel crown. It is said that he was particular in his dress. For he used the latus clavus[129] with fringes about the wrists, and always had it girded about him but loosely. This circumstance gave origin to the expression of Sulla, who often advised the nobility to beware of “the loose-coated boy.”
He first lived in Subura in a small house; but, after his advancement to the pontificate, in a house belonging to the state in the Sacred way. Many writers say that he affected neatness in his person, and niceness in his entertainments: that he entirely took down again a country-seat, near the grove of Aricia, which he erected from the foundation, and finished at a vast expense, because it had not exactly suited his fancy, though he was at that time poor and in debt; and that he carried about in his expeditions marble pavement for his tent.
They likewise report that he invaded Britain in hopes of finding pearls, the bigness of which he would compare together, and examine the weight by poising them in his hand; that he would purchase at any cost gems, carved works, and pictures, executed by the eminent masters of antiquity; and that he would give for handsome young slaves a price so extravagant that he was ashamed to have it entered in the diary of his expenses.
The same authors inform us that he constantly kept two tables in the provinces, one for the officers of the army, or the gentlemen of the provinces, and the other for such of the Roman gentry as had no commission in the troops, and provincials of the first distinction. He was so very exact in the management of his domestic affairs, both small and great, that he once put a baker in fetters, for serving him with a finer sort of bread than his guests; and put to death a freedman, and a particular favourite, for debauching the lady of a Roman knight, though no complaint had been made to him of the affair.
It is admitted by all that he was much addicted to women, as well as very expensive in his intrigues with them, and that he debauched many ladies of the highest quality; among whom were Postumia the wife of Servius Sulpicius, Lollia the wife of Aulus Gabinius, Tertulla the wife of M. Crassus, and likewise Mucia the wife of Cn. Pompeius. For it is certain that the Curios, father and son, and many others, objected to Pompey in reproach, “that to gratify his ambition, he married the daughter of a man upon whose account he had divorced his wife, after having had three children by her, and whom he used, with a heavy sigh, to call Ægisthus.” But the mistress whom of all he most loved was Servilia, the mother of M. Brutus; for whom he purchased in his consulship, next after the commencement of their intrigue, a pearl which cost him six millions of sesterces; and in the Civil War, besides other presents, consigned to her, for a trifling consideration, some valuable estates in land, which were exposed to public auction. When many persons wondered at the lowness of the price, Cicero facetiously observed, “To let you know how much better a purchase this is than ye imagine, Tertia is deducted”; for Servilia was supposed to have prostituted her daughter Tertia to Cæsar.
That he had intrigues likewise with married women in the provinces appears from a distich, which was much repeated in the Gallic triumph.
In the number of his mistresses were also some queens, such as Eunoe, a Moor, the wife of Bogudes, to whom and her husband he made, as Naso reports, many large presents. But his greatest favourite was Cleopatra, with whom he often revelled all night till daybreak, and would have gone with her through Egypt in a pleasure-boat, as far as Ethiopia, had not the army refused to follow him. He afterwards invited her to Rome, whence he sent her back loaded with honours and presents, and gave her permission to call by his name a son, who, according to the testimony of some Greek historians, resembled Cæsar both in person and gait. Mark Antony declared in the senate that Cæsar had acknowledged the child as his own; and that C. Matius, C. Oppius, and the rest of Cæsar’s friends knew it to be true. On which occasion Oppius, as if it had been an imputation which he was called upon to refute, published a book to show that the child which Cleopatra fathered upon Cæsar was not his. Helvius Cinna, tribune of the commons, told several persons as a fact that he had a bill ready drawn up, which Cæsar had ordered him to get enacted in his absence, that, with the view of procuring issue, he might contract marriage with any one female, or as many as he pleased.
It is acknowledged even by his enemies that in respect of wine he was abstemious. A remark is ascribed to M. Cato, “that he was the only sober man amongst all those who were engaged in a design to subvert the government.” For in regard to diet, C. Oppius informs us, he was so indifferent for his own part, that when a person in whose house he was entertained had served him, instead of fresh oil, with oil which had some sort of seasoning in it, and which the rest of the company would not touch, he alone ate very heartily of it, that he might not seem to tax the master of the house with inelegance or want of attention.
He never discovered any great regard to moderation, either in his command of the army, or civil offices; for we have the testimony of some writers that he requested money of the proconsul his predecessor in Spain, and the Roman allies in that quarter, for the discharge of his debts; and some towns of the Lusitanians, notwithstanding they attempted no resistance to his arms and opened to him their gates, upon his arrival before them he plundered in a hostile manner. In Gaul, he rifled the chapels and temples of the gods, which were filled with rich presents; and demolished cities oftener for the sake of plunder than for any offence they had given him. By this means gold became so plentiful with him that he exchanged it through Italy and the provinces of the empire for three thousand sesterces the pound. In his first consulship he stole out of the Capitol three thousand pounds’ weight of gold, and placed in the room of it the same weight of gilt brass. He bartered likewise to foreign nations and princes, for gold, the titles of allies and kings; and squeezed out of Ptolemy alone near six thousand talents, in the name of himself and Pompey. He afterwards supported the expense of the Civil Wars and of his triumphs and public shows, by the most flagrant rapine and sacrilege.
In point of eloquence and military achievements, he equalled at least, if he did not surpass, the greatest men. After his prosecution of Dolabella, he was indisputably esteemed among the most distinguished pleaders. Cicero, in recounting to Brutus the famous orators, declares “he does not see that Cæsar was inferior to any one of them; that he had an elegant, splendid, noble, and magnificent vein of eloquence.” And in a letter to C. Nepos, he writes of him in the following terms: “What! which of all the orators, who, during the whole course of their lives, have done nothing else, can you prefer before him? Which of them is ever more pointed in expression, or more often commands your applause?” In his youth he seems to have chosen Strabo Cæsar as his model; out of whose oration for the Sardinians he has transcribed some passages literally into his Divinatio. He is said to have delivered himself with a shrill voice, and an animated action which was graceful. He has left behind him some speeches, among which are a few not genuine; as that for Q. Metellus. These Augustus supposes, and with reason, to be the production of blundering writers of shorthand, who were not able to follow him in the delivery, rather than anything published by himself. For I find in some copies the title is not “for Metellus,” but “what he wrote to Metellus”; whereas the speech is delivered in the name of Cæsar, vindicating Metellus and himself from the aspersions cast upon them by their common defamers. The speech addressed “to his soldiers in Spain,” Augustus considers likewise as spurious. Under this title we meet with two; one made, as is pretended, in the first battle, and the other in the last; at which time Asinius Pollio says, he had not leisure to address the soldiers, on account of the sudden assault of the enemy.
He has likewise left commentaries of his own transactions both in the Gallic and the civil war with Pompey; for the author of the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish wars is not known with any certainty. Some think they are the production of Oppius, and some of Hirtius; the latter of whom composed the last book, but an imperfect one, of the Gallic War. Of those memoirs of Cæsar, Cicero in his Brutus speaks thus: “He wrote his memoirs in a manner that greatly deserves approbation; they are plain, precise, and elegant, without any affectation of ornament. In having thus prepared materials for such as might be inclined to compose his history, he may perhaps have encouraged some silly creatures to enter upon such a work, who will needs be dressing up his actions in all the extravagance of bombast; but he has discouraged wise men from ever attempting the subject.” Hirtius delivers his opinion of the same memoirs in the following terms: “So great is the approbation with which they are universally perused, that, instead of exciting, he seems to have precluded the efforts of any future historian. Yet with regard to this subject, we have more reason to admire him than others; for they only know how well and correctly he has written, but we know likewise how easily and quickly he did it.” Pollio Asinius thinks that they were not drawn up with much care, or with a due regard to truth: for he insinuates that Cæsar was too hasty of belief with respect to what was performed by others under him; and that, in respect of what he transacted in person, he has not given a very faithful account--either with design, or through a defect of memory; expressing at the same time an opinion that Cæsar intended a new and more correct production on the subject.
He has left behind him likewise two books of analogy, with the same number under the title of Anti-Cato, and a poem entitled The Journey. Of these books he composed the first two in his passage over the Alps, as he was returning to his army from holding the assizes in Hither Gaul; the second work about the time of the battle of Munda; and the last during the four-and-twenty days he was upon his expedition from Rome to Further Spain. There are extant some letters of his to the senate, written in a manner never practised by any before him, for they are divided into pages in the form of a pocket-book; whereas the consuls and generals, till then, used constantly in their letters to continue the line quite across the sheet, without any folding or distinction of pages. There are extant likewise some letters from him to Cicero, and others to his friends concerning his domestic affairs; in which, if there was occasion for secrecy, he used the alphabet in such a manner that not a single word could be made out. The way to decipher those epistles was to substitute “d” for “a” and so of the other letters respectively. Some things likewise pass under his name, said to have been written by him when a boy or a very young man; as the Encomium of Hercules, a tragedy entitled Œdipus, and a collection of apophthegms; all which Augustus forbid to be published, in a short and plain letter to Pompeius Macer, whom he had appointed to direct the arrangement of his libraries.
He was a perfect master of his weapons, a complete horseman, and able to endure fatigue beyond all belief. Upon a march, he used to go at the head of his troops, sometimes on horseback, but oftener on foot, with his head bare in all kinds of weather. He would travel in a post-chaise at the rate of a hundred miles a day, and pass rivers in his way by swimming, or supported with leathern bags filled with wind, so that he often prevented all intelligence of his approach.
In his expeditions, it is difficult to say whether his caution or boldness was most conspicuous. He never marched his army by a route which was liable to any ambush of the enemy, without having previously examined the situation of the places by his scouts. Nor did he pass over into Britain, before he had made due inquiry respecting the navigation, the harbours, and the most convenient access to the island. But when advice was brought to him of the siege of a camp of his in Germany, he made his way to his men, through the enemy’s guards, in a Gallic habit. He crossed the sea from Brundusium and Dyrrhachium, in the winter, through the midst of the enemy’s fleets; and the troops which he had ordered to follow him not making that haste which he expected, after he had several times sent messengers to expedite them, in vain, he at last went privately, and alone, aboard a small vessel in the night-time, with his head muffled up; nor did he discover who he was, or suffer the master to desist from prosecuting the voyage, though the wind blew strong against them, until they were ready to sink.
He was never discouraged from any enterprise, nor retarded in the prosecution of it, by any ill omens. When a victim which he was about to offer in sacrifice had made its escape, he did not therefore defer his expedition against Scipio and Juba. And happening to fall, upon stepping out of the ship, he gave a lucky turn to the omen, by exclaiming, “I hold thee fast, Africa.” In ridicule of the prophecies which were spread abroad, as if the name of the Scipios was, by the decrees of fate, fortunate and invincible in that province, he retained in the camp a profligate wretch, of the family of the Cornelii, who, on account of his scandalous life, was surnamed Salutio.
He engaged in battle not only upon previous deliberation, but upon the sudden when an occasion presented itself; often immediately after a march, and sometimes during the most dismal weather, when nobody could imagine he would stir. Nor was he ever backward in fighting, until towards the end of his life. He then was of opinion that the oftener he had come off with success, the less he ought to expose himself to new hazards; and that he could never acquire so much by any victory as he might lose by a miscarriage. He never defeated an enemy whom he did not at the same time drive out of their camp; so warmly did he pursue his advantage that he gave them no time to rally their force. When the issue of a battle was doubtful, he sent away all the officers’ horses, and in the first place his own, that being deprived of that convenience for flight they might be under the greater necessity of standing their ground.
He rode a very remarkable horse, with feet almost like those of a man, his hoofs being divided in such a manner as to have some resemblance to toes. This horse he had bred himself, and took particular care of, because the soothsayers interpreted those circumstances into an omen that the possessor of him would be master of the world. He backed him too himself, for the horse would suffer no other rider; and he afterwards erected a statue of him before the temple of Venus Genitrix.
He often alone, by his courage and activity, restored the fortune of a battle; opposing and stopping such of his troops as fled, and turning them by the jaws upon the enemy; though many of them were so terrified that a standard bearer, upon his stopping him, made a pass at him; and another, upon a similar occasion, left his standard in his hand.
The following instances of his resolution are equally, and even more remarkable. After the battle of Pharsalia, having sent his troops before him into Asia, as he was passing the Hellespont in a ferry boat, he met with L. Cassius, one of the opposite party, with ten ships of war; whom he was so far from avoiding, that he advanced close up to him; when, advising him to surrender, and the other complying, he took him into the boat.
At Alexandria, in the attack of a bridge, being forced by a sudden sally of the enemy into a boat, and several hurrying in with him, he leaped into the sea, and saved himself by swimming to the next ship, which lay at the distance of two hundred paces; holding up his left hand out of the water, for fear of wetting some papers which he held in it; and pulling his general’s cloak after him with his teeth, lest it should fall into the hands of the enemy.
He never estimated a soldier by his manners or fortune, but by his strength alone; and treated them with equal severity and indulgence; for he did not always keep a strict hand over them, except when an enemy was near. Then indeed he was so rigorous an exactor of discipline, that he would give no notice of march or battle until the moment he was to enter upon them; that the troops might hold themselves in readiness for any sudden movement; and he would frequently draw them out of the camp, without any necessity for it, especially in rainy weather, and upon holy days. Sometimes, giving them warning to watch him, he would suddenly withdraw himself by day or night, and would oblige them to long marches, on purpose to tire them, if they were tardy.
When at any time his soldiers were discouraged by reports of the great force of the enemy, he recovered them, not by denying the truth of what was said, or by diminishing the fact, but on the contrary by exaggerating every particular. Accordingly, when his troops were under great apprehensions of the arrival of King Juba, he called them together, and said, “I have to inform you that in a very few days the king will be here, with ten legions, thirty thousand horse, a hundred thousand light-armed foot, and three hundred elephants. Let none therefore presume to make any further inquiry, or to give their opinion upon the subject, but take my word for what I tell you, which I have from undoubted intelligence; otherwise I shall put them aboard a crazy old vessel, and leave them exposed to the mercy of the winds.”
He neither took notice of all their faults, nor proportioned his punishments to the nature of them. But after deserters and mutineers he made the most diligent inquiry, and punished them severely; other delinquencies he would connive at. Sometimes, after a successful battle, he would grant them a relaxation from all kinds of duty, and leave them to revel at pleasure; being used to boast that his soldiers fought nothing the worse for being perfumed. In his speeches, he never addressed them by the title of “soldiers,” but by the softer appellation of “fellow-soldiers”; and kept them in such fine condition that their arms were ornamented with silver and gold, not only for the purpose of making the better appearance, but to render the soldiers more tenacious of them in battle, from their value. He loved his troops to such a degree that, when he heard of the disaster of those under Titurius, he neither cut his hair nor shaved his beard until he had revenged it upon the enemy; by which means he engaged extremely their affection, and rendered them to the last degree brave.
Upon his entering into the Civil War, the centurions of every legion offered each of them to maintain a horseman at his own expense, and the whole army agreed to serve gratis, without either corn or pay; those amongst them who were rich charging themselves with the maintenance of the poor. No one of them, during the whole course of the war, went over to the enemy; and most of those who were made prisoners, though they were offered their lives upon the condition of bearing arms against him, refused to accept the terms. They endured want, and other hardships, not only when themselves were besieged, but when they besieged others, to such a degree that Pompey, when blocked up in the neighbourhood of Dyrrhachium, upon seeing a sort of bread, made of an herb, which they lived upon, said, “I have to do with wild beasts,” and ordered it immediately to be taken away; because, if his troops should see it, they might be impressed with a dangerous apprehension of the hardiness and desperate resolution of the enemy. With what bravery they fought, one instance affords sufficient proof; which is, that after an unsuccessful engagement at Dyrrhachium, they desired him to punish them; insomuch that their general found it more necessary to comfort than punish them.
In other battles, in different parts, they defeated with ease immense armies of the enemy, though they were much inferior to them in number. To conclude, one battalion of the sixth legion held out a fort against four legions belonging to Pompey, during several hours; being almost every one of them wounded, by the vast number of arrows discharged against them, and of which there were found within the ramparts a hundred and thirty thousand. This is no way surprising, when we consider the behaviour of some individuals amongst them; such as that of Cassius Scæva, or C. Acilius a common soldier. Scæva, after he had an eye struck out, was run through the thigh and the shoulder, and had his shield pierced in a hundred and twenty places, maintained obstinately the guard of a gate in a fort, with the command of which he was intrusted. Acilius, in the sea fight at Marseilles, having seized a ship of the enemy with his right hand, and that being cut off, in imitation of that memorable instance of resolution in Cynægirus amongst the Greeks leaped into the ship, bearing down all before him with the boss of his shield.
They never once mutinied during all the ten years of the Gallic War, but were sometimes a little refractory in the course of the Civil War. They always however returned quickly to their duty, and that not through the compliance but the authority of their general; for he never gave ground, but constantly opposed them on such occasions. The whole ninth legion he dismissed with ignominy at Placentia, though Pompey was at that time in arms; and would not receive them again into his service, until not only they had made the most humble submission and entreaty, but that the ringleaders in the mutiny were punished.
When the soldiers of the tenth legion at Rome demanded their discharge and rewards for their service, with great threats, and no small danger to the city, though at that time the war was warmly carried on against him in Africa, he immediately, notwithstanding all the efforts of his friends, who endeavoured to prevent him from taking such a measure, came up to the legion and disbanded it. But addressing them by the title of “quirites,” instead of “soldiers,” he by this single word so thoroughly regained their affections that they immediately cried out they were his “soldiers,” and followed him into Africa, though he had refused their service. He nevertheless punished the most seditious amongst them, with the loss of a third of their share in the plunder and the land which had been intended for them.
In the service of his clients, while yet a young man, he evinced great zeal and fidelity. He defended the cause of a noble youth, Masintha, against King Hiempsal, so strenuously that in a wrangle which happened upon the occasion he seized by the beard the son of King Juba; and upon Masintha being declared tributary to Hiempsal, while the friends of the adverse party were violently carrying him off, he immediately rescued him by force, kept him concealed in his house a long time, and when, at the expiration of his prætorship, he went to Spain, he carried him with him in his litter, amidst his sergeants, and others who had come to attend and take leave of him.
He always treated his friends with that good nature and kindness, that when C. Oppius, in travelling with him through a forest, was suddenly taken ill, he resigned to him the only place there was to lodge in at night, and lay himself upon the ground, and in the open air. When he had come to have in his own hands the whole power of the commonwealth, he advanced some of his faithful adherents, though of mean extraction, to the highest posts in the government. And when he was censured for this partiality, he openly said, “Had I been assisted by robbers and cut-throats in the defence of my honour, I should have made them the same recompense.”
He never in any quarrel conceived so implacable a resentment as not very willingly to renounce it when an opportunity occurred. Though C. Memmius had published some extremely virulent speeches against him, and he had answered him with equal acrimony, yet he afterwards assisted him with his vote and interest, when he stood candidate for the consulship. When C. Calvus, after publishing some scandalous epigrams against him, endeavoured to effect a reconciliation by the intercession of friends, he wrote of his own accord the first letter. And when Valerius Catullus, who had, as he himself observed, in his verses upon Mamurra put such a stain upon his character as never could be obliterated, begged his pardon, he invited him to supper the same day; and continued to take up his lodging with his father occasionally, as he had been accustomed to do.
His disposition was naturally averse to severity in retaliation. After he had made the pirates, by whom he had been taken, prisoners, because he had sworn he would crucify them, he did so indeed; but previously to the execution of that sentence, ordered their throats to be cut. He could never bear the thought of doing any harm to Cornelius Phagita, who had kidnapped him in the night, with the design of carrying him to Sulla; and from whose custody, not without much difficulty and a large bribe likewise, he had been able to extricate himself. Philemon, his secretary, who had made a promise to his enemies to poison him, he put to death only, without torture. When he was summoned as a witness against P. Clodius, his wife Pompeia’s gallant, who was prosecuted for a pollution of religious ceremonies, he declared he knew nothing of the affair, though his mother Aurelia and his sister Julia gave the court an exact and full account of the transaction. And being asked why then he had divorced his wife: “Because,” said he,“I would have those of my family untainted, not only with guilt, but with the suspicion of it likewise.”
Both in the administration of government and his behaviour towards the vanquished party in the Civil War, he showed a wonderful moderation and clemency. And whilst Pompey declared that he would consider all those as enemies who did not take arms in defence of the republic, he desired it to be understood that he should regard all those who remained neuter as his friends. In respect of all those to whom he had, on Pompey’s recommendation, given any command in the army, he left them at perfect liberty to go over to him, if they pleased. When some proposals were made at Ilerda for a surrender, which gave rise to a free communication between the two camps, and Afranius and Petreius, upon a sudden change of resolution, had put to the sword all Cæsar’s men that were found in the camp, he scorned to imitate the base treachery which they had practised against himself. In the field of Pharsalia, he called out to the soldiers “to spare their fellow-citizens,” and afterwards gave liberty to every man in his army to save an enemy. None of them, so far as appears, lost their lives but in battle, excepting only Afranius, Faustus, and young Lucius Cæsar; and it is thought that even they were put to death without his consent. Afranius and Faustus had borne arms against him, after their pardon had been granted them; and L. Cæsar had not only in the most cruel manner destroyed with fire and sword his freedmen and slaves, but cut to pieces the wild beasts which he had prepared for the entertainment of the people. And finally, a little before his death, he granted liberty to all whom he had not before pardoned, to return into Italy, and admitted them to a capacity of bearing offices both civil and military.
He even erected again the statues of Sulla and Pompey, which had been thrown down by the populace. And any machinations against him, or reflections upon him, he chose rather to put a stop to than punish. Accordingly, with regard to any conspiracies against him which were discovered, or nightly cabals, he went no further than to intimate by a proclamation that he knew of them; and as to those who indulged themselves in the liberty of reflecting severely upon him, he only warned them in a public speech not to persist in their obloquy. He bore with great moderation a virulent libel written against him by Aulus Cæcina, and the abusive lampoons of Pitholaus, most highly reflecting on his reputation.
His other actions and declarations, however, with regard to the public, so far outweigh all his good qualities, that it is thought he abused his power and was justly cut off. For he not only accepted of excessive honours, as the consulship every year successively, the dictatorship for life, and the superintendency of the public manners, but likewise the titles of “imperator,” and “father of his country,” besides a statue amongst the kings, and a throne in the place allotted to the senators in the theatre. He even suffered some things to be decreed for him that were unsuitable to the greatest of human kind; such as a golden chair in the senate house and upon the bench when he sat for the trial of causes, a stately chariot in the Circensian procession, temples, altars, images near the gods, a bed of state in the temples, a peculiar priest, and a college of priests, like those appointed in honour of Pan, and that one of the months should be called by his name. He indeed both assumed to himself, and granted to others, every kind of distinction at pleasure. In his third and fourth consulship he had only the title of the office, being content with the power of dictator, which was conferred upon him at the same time; and in both years he substituted other consuls in his room, during the three last months; so that in the intervals he held no assemblies of the people for the election of magistrates, excepting only tribunes and ædiles of the commons; and appointed officers, under the name of prefects, instead of the prætors, to administer the affairs of the city during his absence. The honour of the consulship, which had just become vacant by the sudden death of one of the consuls, he instantly conferred, the day before the 1st of January, upon a person who requested it of him, for a few hours.
With the same unwarrantable freedom, regardless of the constant usage of his country, he nominated the magistrates for several years to come. He granted the insignia of the consular dignity to ten persons of prætorian rank. He called up into the senate some who had been made free of the city, and even natives of Gaul, who were little better than barbarians. He likewise appointed to the management of the mint and the public revenue of the state some of his own servants; and entrusted the command of three legions, which he left at Alexandria, to an old catamite of his, the son of his freedman Rufinus.
He gave way to the same extravagance in his public conversation, as T. Ampius informs us; according to whom he said: “The commonwealth is nothing but a name, without substance, or so much as the appearance of any. Sulla was an illiterate fellow to lay down the dictatorship. Men ought to be more cautious in their converse with me, and look upon what I say as a law.” To such a pitch of arrogance did he proceed that, when a soothsayer brought him word that the entrails of a victim opened for sacrifice were without a heart, he said: “The entrails will be more favourable when I please; and it ought not to be regarded as any ill omen if a beast should be destitute of a heart.”
But what brought upon him the greatest and most invincible odium was his receiving the whole body of the senate sitting, when they came to wait upon him before the temple of Venus Genitrix, with many honourable decrees in his favour. Some say, as he attempted to rise, he was held down by C. Balbus. Others say he did not attempt it at all, but looked somewhat displeased at C. Trebatius, who put him in mind of standing up. This behaviour appeared the more intolerable in him because, when one of the tribunes of the commons, Pontius Aquila, would not rise up to him, as in his triumph he passed by the place where they sat, he was so much offended, that he cried out, “Well then, master tribune, take the government out of my hands.” And for some days after, he never promised a favour to any person, without this proviso, “if Pontius Aquila will allow of it.”
To this extraordinary affront upon the senate, he added an action yet more outrageous. For when, after the sacrifice of the Latin festival, he was returning home, amidst the incessant and unusual acclamations of the people, one of the crowd put upon a statue of him a laurel crown, with a white ribbon tied round it, and the tribunes of the commons, Epidius Marullus and Cæsetius Flavus, ordered the ribbon to be taken away and the man to be carried to prison; being much concerned either that the mention of his advancement to regal power had been so unluckily made, or, as he pretended, that the glory of refusing it had been thus taken from him, he reprimanded the tribunes very severely, and dismissed them both from their office. From that day forward, he was never able to wipe off the scandal of affecting the name of king; though he replied to the people, when they saluted him by that title, “My name is Cæsar, not King.” And at the feast of the Lupercalia, when the consul Antony in the rostra put a crown upon his head several times, he as often put it away, and sent it into the Capitol to Jupiter. A report was extremely current that he had a design of removing to Alexandria or Ilium, whither he proposed to transfer the strength of the empire, and to leave the city to be administered by his friends. To this report it was added that L. Cotta, one of the fifteen commissioners entrusted with the care of the Sibyl’s books, would make a motion in the house that, as there was in those books a prophecy that the Parthians should never be subdued but by a king, Cæsar should have that title.[130] This was why the conspirators precipitated the execution of their design.[c]
APPIAN COMPARES CÆSAR WITH ALEXANDER
“Happy in all things, magnificent; and with just reason comparable to Alexander; for they were both beyond measure ambitious, warlike, ready in the execution of what they had resolved and hardy in dangers; they spared not their bodies; and in war relied not so much upon their conduct, as upon their bravery and good fortune. The one went a long journey in a country without water to go to Ammon, happily crossed over the bottom of the Pamphylian Gulf, the sea being retired as if his genius had locked up the waters; as another time marching in the champian, it caused it to cease from raining. He navigated an unknown sea; being in the Indies, he first scaled the walls of a city, and leaped down alone into the midst of his enemies, receiving thirteen wounds; was always victorious; and whatever war he was engaged in, he ended it in one or two battles.
“In Europe he subdued many barbarous people, and reduced them under his obedience, together with the Grecians, a fierce people, and lovers of liberty, who never before obeyed any person but Philip; who commanded them for some time under the honourable title of general of the Greeks. He carried his arms almost through all Asia with an incredible celerity. And to comprise in a word the happiness and power of Alexander, all the countries he saw he conquered; and as he was designing to conquer the rest, he died.
“As for Cæsar, passing the Ionian Sea in the midst of winter, he found it calm, as well as the British Ocean, which he passed without any knowledge of it in a time when his pilots, driven by storm against the English rocks, lost their ships; another time embarking alone by night in a little boat, and rowing against the waves, he commanded the pilot to hoist sail and rather to consider the fortune of Cæsar than the sea. He threw himself more than once all alone into the midst of his enemies, when his men were all struck with panic fear; and is the only general of the Romans that ever fought thirty times in pitched battle against the Gauls, and subdued in Gaul forty nations, before so dreadful to the Romans, that in the law dispensing with priests and old men from going to war, the wars against the Gauls are excepted, and the priests and all men obliged to bear arms. Before Alexandria, seeing himself alone enclosed upon a bridge, he laid down his purple, threw himself into the sea, and pursued by his enemies, swam a long time under water, only by intervals lifting up his head to take breath; till coming near his ships, he held up his hands, was known, and so saved.
“For the civil wars, which he neither undertook out of fear (as he himself says), or out of ambition, he had to deal with the greatest generals of the age, fighting at the head of many great armies; not barbarian, but Romans, encouraged by their former actions, and by their good fortune, yet he defeated them all; and not one of them but he ruined in a fight or two. But we cannot say of him as of Alexander, that he was never overcome; for he suffered once a great loss against the Gauls, under the conduct of Titurius and Cotta, his lieutenants. In Spain his army was so near blocked up by Petreius and Afranius, that he wanted but little of being besieged. At Dyrrhachium and in Africa they turned their backs; and in Spain, against the young Pompeius they fled. But for Cæsar himself, he was always undaunted; and whatever war he engaged in, came off in the end victorious; and the Roman Empire, which now extends itself by sea and land, from the Euphrates to the Atlantic Ocean, was brought under his power, partly by his valour, and partly by his clemency. He settled himself much better than Sulla, and governed himself with more moderation; for being king in effect, in spite of all the world, he took not that name.
“At last, making his preparations for other wars, he was surprised by death as well as Alexander. Their armies were also alike; for the soldiers of both were cheerful in fight and hardy, but stubborn and mutinous when over-wrought with labour. The deaths of both of them were equally mourned and lamented by their armies, who attributed to them divine honours. They were both well made in body and of noble aspect; both descended from Jupiter; one by Eacus and Hercules, and the other by Anchises and Venus. Though they were inflexible when resisted, they were easier to pardon and be reconciled, and likewise to do good to such as they had vanquished; contented themselves with the victory.
“Hitherto the comparison is just, save only that their beginnings were not equal; for Alexander began with the quality of a king, in which he had been before instructed by his father Philip; but Cæsar was only a private man; and though he were of an illustrious race, yet his fortunes were much encumbered. They both despised the presages that threatened them, without injuring those divines who foretold their death; and almost the same signs happened to them, and a like event; for in the sacrifices made by one and the other twice, they found not the chief of the entrails of the victims; the first time they were only threatened with great danger. Alexander’s happened when besieging the Oxydracæ, being mounted first upon the wall, and the too great weight breaking the ladders behind him, he beheld himself deserted by his men, and threw himself into the midst of his enemies, where having received many wounds on his breast and a great blow on the neck, he was ready to die, when the Macedonians, touched with shame, broke open the gates and relieved him.
“The like happened to Cæsar in Spain in the fight between him and young Pompeius; where, seeing his men went on trembling, he advanced betwixt the two armies, received two hundred darts on his buckler, till such time as fear having given place to shame, all the army ran in and secured him from the danger. Thus the first entrails without the chief threatened only danger of death, but the second were certain presage of death itself. Pythagoras the divine, after having sacrificed, said to Apollodorus, who feared Alexander and Hephæstion, that he need fear nothing, for they both should shortly die. Hephæstion, dying some time after, Apollodorus, doubting lest there might be some conspiracy formed against the king, gave him notice of the prediction; he only laughed at it; and informing himself of Pythagoras what those presages meant, he told him it was a sign of death; whereupon he again laughed, praising Apollodorus’ love and the divine’s freedom.
“As for Cæsar, the last time he went to the senate, as we have said a little before, the same presage presenting, he said, smiling, he had seen the like in Spain, to which the augur answering that he was then in danger, but now the sign was mortal, he yielded in some measure to that advice, and offered another sacrifice; but tired with the length of the ceremony, entered the palace and perished. There happened to Alexander the same thing; for when he returned from the Indies to Babylon with his army, being come nigh the city, the Chaldeans counselled him to defer his entry; to whom having given this verse for answer,
‘Who promises most good’s the best divine,’
they besought him at last that he would not let his army enter with their faces to the west; but would fetch a compass, that in entering they might see the rising sun and the city. It is said he would have obeyed them in this; but in marching about he met with a marshy ground, which made him slight the second as well as the first advice, so that he entered the city with his face to the west. Some time after embarking upon the Euphrates, and going down to the river Pallakopas, which receives the Euphrates and carries its waters into marshes and pools which might happen to drown all Assyria, he resolved to make a dam; and it is said that going down the river he laughed at the Chaldeans because he had gone into Babylon and come out of it again in a boat without any harm; but death attended him at his return from this voyage.
“Cæsar’s raillery with the augur, who told him the ides of March were fatal to him, was much alike; he answered him jeering, the ides were come, and yet he was killed the same day. So that herein there was great agreement between them, both in the presages they received from the divines without being offended, their raillery, and the event of the prediction. They were likewise great lovers of the sciences, as well of their own country as strangers’. Alexander conferred with the Brachmanes, who were esteemed the most subtile and sagacious of the Indians, as the Magi are of the Persians. Cæsar did the like with the Egyptians when he re-established Cleopatra in her kingdom, which occasioned him when the peace was made to reform many things amongst the Romans; and that after the example of the Egyptians he regulated the year by the course of the sun, which before was governed by the moon; and so till then were unequal, by reason of the intercalary days. It happened to him likewise that one of those who conspired his death escaped, but were all punished as they deserved by his son, and as the murderers of Philip were by Alexander.”[e]
From this we turn to what is probably the most masterly estimate of Cæsar’s character and abilities ever penned by a student of Roman history. It is the estimate of one who is an enthusiastic admirer of Cæsar’s genius, but also a keen historical critic.
MOMMSEN’S ESTIMATE OF CÆSAR’S CHARACTER
The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole extent of Roman and Hellenic civilisation, Caius Julius Cæsar was in his fifty-sixth year--he was born the 12th of July, 100 B.C.--when the battle of Thapsus, the last of the long chain of victories which led to such important consequences, gave the decision of the world’s future into his hands. Few men’s quality has been so severely tested as that of this creative genius, the only one that Rome and the last that the ancient world produced--that world which was to continue to march in the paths he had marked out for it, till the time of its own downfall.
A scion of one of the oldest of the noble families of Latium, which traced its genealogy back to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and even as far as Venus Aphrodite, a goddess common to both nations, the years of his boyhood and young manhood had gone by as those of the noble youths of that epoch were wont to pass. He too had tasted both the froth and the lees of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had occupied his leisure with the pursuit of literature and the making of verses, had dallied with every species of love-making, and had been initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, hair-curling, and ruffles, which belonged to the science of dress as understood at that period, besides the far more difficult art of always borrowing and never paying. But the pliant steel of that nature resisted even these shallow and ruinous courses; Cæsar’s bodily vigour remained unimpaired, as did the temper of his mind and heart. In fencing and riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible speed with which he travelled, generally by night so as to gain time,--a direct contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompey moved from one place to another,--was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least important factor in his success.
As his body, so was his spirit. His marvellous insight revealed itself in the sureness and practical character of all his arrangements even when he gave orders without personal investigation. His memory was incomparable and it was easy for him to carry on several affairs concurrently and with equal precision. Gentleman, genius, and monarch, he still had a heart. As long as he lived he preserved the purest reverence for his excellent mother Aurelia, his father having died early; on his wife, and more especially on his daughter Julia, he bestowed a worthy affection which was not without its effect on politics. In their several ways the ablest and worthiest men of his time both of higher and lower rank stood to him in relations of mutual trust. As he never abandoned his adherents in Pompey’s ungenerous and heartless fashion, but stood by his friends unshaken in good and evil days, and this not merely from calculation, so also many of them, like Aulus Hirtius and Caius Matius, gave noble witness of their attachment to him even after his death.
If in a nature so harmoniously organised one particular side may be dwelt upon as characteristic, it is this that anything of an ideological or visionary character was far removed from it. It is needless to say that Cæsar was a passionate man, for there is no genius without passion; but his passions were never stronger than he. He had been young, and song, love, and wine had played their part in his joyous existence; but they did not penetrate the inmost heart of his being. Literature attracted his long and earnest attention; but if the Homeric Achilles kept Alexander awake, Cæsar in his sleepless hours prepared considerations on the inflections of Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses, as every one did at that time, but they were feeble; on the other hand he was interested in astronomical subjects and in those of physical science.
If for Alexander wine was and remained the dispeller of care, the temperate Roman entirely avoided it after the period of his youthful revels. Like all those who have been surrounded in youth by the full glow of the love of women, its imperishable glamour still rested on him; even in later years love adventures and successes with women still came in his way, and he still retained a certain dandyism in his outward bearing, or, more correctly, a joyous consciousness of the masculine beauty of his own appearance. The laurel wreaths with which he appeared in public in later years were carefully disposed so as to cover the baldness of which he was painfully sensible, and he would doubtless have given many of his victories if that could have brought back his youthful locks.
But however gladly he may have played the monarch amongst the women, he was only amusing himself with them and allowed them no influence over him; even his much-talked-of relations with Queen Cleopatra were only entered into for the purpose of masking a weak point in his political position. Cæsar was thoroughly matter-of-fact and a true realist; and what he attempted and performed was carried through and effected by that coolness which was his most essential quality and itself a manifestation of genius. To it he owed the power of living actively in the present and undisturbed by memory and expectation, as well as the ability to act at each moment with all his force and to apply his full genius to the smallest and most casual beginnings. He owed to it also the versatility with which he grasped and mastered whatever the understanding can seize and the will compel, the confident carelessness with which he commanded his words and sketched his plans of campaign, the “marvellous joyousness” which remained faithful to him in good and evil days, and the complete self-dependence which allowed no favourite nor mistress, nor even a friend to exercise power over him.
But it is to this perspicacity that we may also trace the fact that Cæsar never deluded himself concerning the power of fate and human capabilities; for him the kindly veil was lifted which hides from man the insufficiency of his toil. However cleverly he might lay his plans and weigh all the possibilities, there was always present with him a feeling that in all things fortune, that is chance, must contribute the largest part; and with this may be connected the fact that he so often gave odds to fate, and in particular again and again hazarded his person with foolhardy indifference. As men of unusual intelligence have betaken themselves to games of pure chance, so too there was in Cæsar’s rationalism a point where in a certain sense he came in touch with mysticism.
From such materials a statesman could not fail to be produced. Cæsar was a statesman from his earliest youth and in the deepest sense of the word, and his aim was the highest which a man may set before himself--the political, military, intellectual, and moral revival of his own deeply fallen nation and that still more deeply fallen Hellenic people which was so closely allied with his own. The hard school of thirty years’ experience had changed his views concerning the means by which this goal was to be attained; his aim remained the same in the days of hopeless depression as in the fullness of unlimited power, in the days when as a demagogue and conspirator he glided to it by obscure paths and in those in which as participant of the highest power and then as monarch, he created his works in the full sunshine before the eyes of a world. All the measures of a permanent character which originated with him at the most various times ranged themselves in their appropriate places in the great scheme. Strictly, therefore, we should not speak of solitary performances of Cæsar; he created nothing solitary.
Cæsar the orator has been justly praised for his virile eloquence, which made a mock of all the advocate’s art and like the clear flame gave light and warmth at the same time. Cæsar the writer has been justly admired for the inimitable simplicity of his composition, the singular purity and beauty of his language. The greatest masters in the military art in all periods have justly praised Cæsar the general who, emancipated as no other has been from the entanglements of routine and tradition, always managed to find that method of warfare by which in a particular case the enemy might be vanquished and which is consequently the right one in that case. With the certainty of a diviner he found the right means for every purpose, after defeat stood like William of Orange ready for battle, and ended every campaign without exception with victory. He applied in unsurpassed perfection that principle of warfare whose employment distinguishes military genius from the ability of an ordinary officer--namely, the principle of the swift movement of masses; and found security for victory not in great numbers but in swift movement, not in long preparations but in swift and even rash action even with inadequate resources.
But with Cæsar all this is only subsidiary; he was indeed a great orator, writer, and general, but he only became each of these because he was an accomplished statesman. The soldier in him, in particular, plays an entirely incidental rôle, and one of the most remarkable peculiarities which distinguishes him from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon is that in him not the commander but the demagogue was the starting-point of his political activity. According to his original plan he had intended to attain his goal as Pericles and Caius Gracchus had done, without having recourse to arms; and as leader of the popular party he had moved for the space of eighteen years exclusively in the sphere of political plans and intrigues, before, unwillingly convinced of the necessity of military support, he placed himself at the head of an army at a time when he was already forty years old. It was explicable enough that at a later period he should have still remained more statesman than general; as Cromwell also transformed himself from leader of the opposition into a military chief and democratic king and, on the whole, little as the puritan prince may seem to resemble the dissolute Roman, he is of all statesmen perhaps the one who is most closely allied to Cæsar both in his development and in his aims and achievements.
Even in Cæsar’s manner of warfare his impromptu generalship is still clearly recognisable; the lieutenant of artillery who had risen to be general is not more distinctly apparent in Napoleon’s enterprises against England and Egypt than is the demagogue metamorphosed into a general in the like undertakings of Cæsar. A trained officer would hardly have laid aside the most important military considerations for political reasons of a not very imperative nature, as Cæsar frequently did, the most astonishing instance being the occasion of his landing in Epirus. Individual proceedings of his are consequently blameworthy in a military sense. But the general loses only what the statesman gains.
The statesman’s task, like Cæsar’s genius, is of a universal character; though he turns his attention to the most complex and diverse affairs, yet they all without exception have their bearing on the one great goal which he serves with boundless fidelity and consistency; and of all the numerous phases and directions of his great activity he never gave the preference to one above another. Although a master of the military art, he nevertheless, with a statesman’s foresight, did his utmost to avoid civil war, and even when he began it to earn no bloody laurels. Although the founder of a military monarchy, he exerted an energy unexampled in history to prevent the formation of either a hierarchy of marshals or a prætorian government. He preferred the sciences of arts and peace to those of war.
The most noteworthy characteristic of his work as a statesman is its perfect harmony. In fact all the necessary qualifications for this most difficult of all human tasks were united in Cæsar. Realist through and through, he never allowed consecrated tradition and the images of the past to trouble him; nothing was of any importance to him in politics save the living present and intelligent law, as in the character of a grammarian he set aside historical and antiquarian inquiry and only recognised, on the one hand the usages of the living language, on the other the laws of conformity. A born ruler, he swayed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds, and compelled the most diverse characters to abandon themselves to him--the simple citizen and the rough soldier, the noble ladies of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and Mauretania, the brilliant cavalry leader and the calculating banker.
His talent for organisation was wonderful; Cæsar forced his coalition and his legions into close union and held them firmly together as no other statesman ever did with his allies, nor any general with an army composed of unruly and conflicting elements; never did ruler judge his instruments with so keen an eye and put each in its appropriate place. He was a monarch, but he never played the king. Even as absolute master of Rome he retained the bearing of a party leader; perfectly pliant and complaisant, easy and agreeable in conversation and courteous to all, he appeared to desire to be nothing more than the first among his equals. Cæsar entirely avoided the mistake of so many men otherwise as great as he--that of carrying the spirit of the military commander into politics; however great the temptation arising from his vexatious relations with the senate, he never had recourse to such acts of brute force as that of the 18th Brumaire. Cæsar was a monarch, but he was never caught by the glamour of tyranny. He is perhaps the only one among the Lord’s mighty ones, who in great things as in small never acted in response to fancy or caprice but in all cases in accordance with his duty as a ruler, and who, when he looked back on his life, might indeed deplore miscalculations but could repent of none of the errors of passion. There is nothing in the story of Cæsar’s life which can compare even in a small degree with those ebullitions of poetic sensuality, with the murder of Clitus or the burning of Persepolis, of which the history of his great predecessor in the East has to tell. Finally he is perhaps the only one of those mighty ones who preserved to the very end of his career a statesman-like sense of the possible and impossible and who did not shipwreck on the great problem which is the hardest of all for natures of the grand order, the problem of recognising the natural limits of success even at its very pinnacle.
What was practicable he performed, and never neglected the attainable good for the sake of the impossible better; never disdained at least to mitigate an incurable evil by some palliative. But where he perceived that fate had spoken he always listened. Alexander at the Hypanis, Napoleon in Moscow turned back because they were compelled to do so, and reproached fate because she granted only limited success. Cæsar at the Thames and the Rhine retired of his own free will, and at the Danube and Euphrates laid no extravagant schemes for the conquest of the world, but merely planned the execution of some carefully considered frontier regulations.
Such was this singular man whom it seems so easy and is so hopelessly difficult to describe. His whole nature is pellucidly clear, and concerning him tradition has preserved more abundant and vivid details than of any of his peers in the ancient world. Such a personality might indeed be conceived as shallower or more profound but not really in different ways; to every not wholly perverse inquirer this lofty figure has appeared with the same essential traits, and yet none has succeeded in restoring it in clear outline. The secret lies in its completeness. Humanly and historically speaking Cæsar stands at that point of the equation at which the great conflicting principles of life neutralise one another. Possessing the greatest creative force and yet at the same time the most penetrating intelligence, no longer a youth but not yet an old man, highest in will and highest in achievement, filled with republican ideals and yet a born king, a Roman to the deepest core of his being and again destined to reconcile and unite Roman and Hellenic civilisations both externally and in their inward relations--Cæsar is the complete and perfect man. This is why in him more than in any other historical personality we miss the so-called characteristic traits, which are really nothing else than deviations from the natural human development. What are taken for these at the first superficial glance reveal themselves on closer inspection, not as individual qualities, but as the peculiarities of the period of civilisation or of the nation; thus as his youthful adventures are common to him and to all his gifted contemporaries who were similarly situated, so his unpoetic but energetic and logical nature is mainly Roman.
Besides this it is in accordance with Cæsar’s perfectly human character that he was in the highest degree dependent on time and place; for there is no such thing as humanity pure and simple; the living man can but exhibit the qualities of a given nation and a particular stamp of civilisation. Cæsar was a perfect man only because he had placed himself, as none other had done, in the central stream of the tendencies of his day, and because more than any other he possessed the essential characteristic of the Roman nation, the true citizen quality in its perfection; while his Hellenism also was only that which had long since become closely intertwined with the national spirit of the Italians.
But herein lies the difficulty, we might perhaps say the impossibility, of giving a distinct portrait of Cæsar. As the artist can paint anything save perfect beauty, so also the historian, where once in a thousand years he encounters perfection, can only be silent before it. For the rule may indeed be laid down, but we have only a negative idea of the absence of defect; nature’s secret, of uniting the normal and the individual in their fullest manifestations, cannot be expressed. Nothing is left us but to duly appreciate those who saw this perfection and to obtain a dim idea of the imperishable reflection which rests on the works created by this great nature. It is true that these also show the mark of his age. The Roman himself might be compared with his young Greek predecessor not merely as an equal but as a superior; but the world had grown old since then and its youthful lustre had grown dim. Cæsar’s work was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous effort to advance towards the immeasurable distance; he was engaged in construction, and that from ruins, and was satisfied to work as profitably and securely as possible in the wide but defined sphere already indicated. The fine poetic sense of the nations is therefore justified in paying no heed to the unpoetic Roman, while it has surrounded the son of Philip with all the golden splendour of poetry and all the rainbow colours of legend. But with equal justice the political life of nations has for thousands of years returned again and again to the lines which Cæsar traced, and if the peoples to whom the world belongs still apply his name to the chiefest of their monarchs, there is in this a profound warning and one, unfortunately, also calculated to rouse feelings of shame.
MOMMSEN’S ESTIMATE OF CÆSAR’S WORK
Cæsar had been a leader of the popular party from a very early period and as it were by hereditary right, and for thirty years he had upheld its shield without ever changing or even hiding his colours; even as monarch he was still a democrat. As he entered into the entire inheritance of his party, of course with the exception of the wrong-headed notions of Catiline and Clodius, cherished the bitterest and even a personal hatred towards the aristocracy and the true aristocrats, and retained unaltered the principal watchwords of the Roman democracy--namely, the amelioration of the position of debtors, foreign colonization, the gradual abolition of the existing differences of privilege between the various classes in the state and the emancipation of the executive power from the senate; so his monarchy also was so little in conflict with the democracy that, on the contrary, it was through it that the latter first attained completion and fulfilment. For this monarchy was no oriental despotism by the grace of God, but a monarchy such as Caius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded--the representation of the people by the man who possessed its supreme and unlimited trust. Thus the ideas which underlie Cæsar’s work were not exactly new; but their development, in the last instance always the main thing, belongs to him, and to him the grandeur of the realisation which might have surprised even the originating genius could he have seen it, and which has inspired and will ever inspire all who have encountered it in actual operation or in the mirror of history, whatever the historical period or political complexion to which they may belong, with deeper and deeper emotion and wonder according to the measure of their capacity for comprehending human and historical greatness.
This is perhaps the right place to expressly declare what the historian always tacitly assumes and to enter a protest against the custom common alike to simplicity and dishonesty, the custom of employing the praise and blame of history independent of the special conditions, as phrases of general application, in this case of transforming the verdict on Cæsar into a judgment on so-called Cæsarism. In truth the history of past centuries should be the teacher of that in progress, but not in the common sense, as though men could read the junctures of the present in the records of the past and in those on the art of political diagnosis and prescriptions could read up the symptoms and their remedies; but history is only instructive in so far as the study of ancient civilisations reveals the general organic conditions of civilisation itself, with those primary forces which are everywhere the same and those combinations which are everywhere different, and in so far as, instead of producing unthinking imitation, it guides and inspires independent creations on old lines. In this sense the history of Cæsar and the Roman Cæsarship, with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master workman and all the historical necessity of the work, is verily a keener criticism of modern autocracy than the hand of man could write.
By the same law of nature in accordance with which the most insignificant organism is infinitely superior to the most cunning machine, any constitution, however defective, which allows free play for the spontaneous action of a majority of citizens is infinitely superior to absolutism, even though conducted with the greatest amount of humanity and genius; for the former is capable of development, and is therefore living, the latter remains what it is, that is it is dead. This law of nature also asserted itself in the case of the absolute military monarchy of Rome, and only the more completely because under the inspired guidance of its creator and in the absence of any real complications with foreign countries the development of that monarchy was less hampered and limited than any similar government. From the time of Cæsar, as Gibbon long ago pointed out, the Roman Empire had only an external cohesion and was only extended in mechanical fashion, whilst inwardly it wholly withered and expired with himself. If at the commencement of the autocracy and especially in Cæsar’s own mind there still prevailed a sanguine hope of a union of free popular development with absolute rule, even the government of the highly gifted emperors of the Julian line soon taught in terrible fashion how far it is possible to mingle fire and water in one vessel.
Cæsar’s work was necessary and beneficial, not because it did or could of itself bring blessing, but because an absolute military monarchy was the least of evils and the logical and necessary conclusion determined by the ancient organisation, founded as it was on slavery and entirely alien to republican and constitutional representation, and by the legal constitution of the city, which in the course of five hundred years had ripened into an oligarchical absolutism. But history will not consent to diminish the honour of the true Cæsar because where there are spurious Cæsars a similar device may bewilder simplicity and furnish evil with an opportunity for lying and fraud. History too is a bible, and if it no more than the latter can defend itself from being misunderstood by the fool or quoted by the devil, it too will be in a position to endure and render his due to each.[d]
FOOTNOTES
[129] The latus clavus was a broad stripe of purple, in the form of a ribbon, sewed to the tunic on the fore part. There were properly two such; and it was broad, to distinguish it from that of the equites, who wore a narrow one.
[130] [This interesting extract contains, of course, much unfounded gossip. In general we should set down as historical those acts and sayings only which could be known to the public or which were immediately recorded.]
XXVII. THE LAST DAYS OF THE REPUBLIC
The noble Brutus Hath told you Cæsar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault; And grievously hath Cæsar answered it.
--SHAKESPEARE.
While the conspirators were at their bloody work, the mass of the senators rushed in confused terror to the doors; and when Brutus turned to address his peers in defence of the deed, the hall was well-nigh empty. Cicero, who had been present, answered not, though he was called by name; Antony had hurried away to exchange his consular robes for the garb of a slave. Disappointed of obtaining the sanction of the senate, the conspirators sallied out into the Forum to win the ear of the people. But here too they were disappointed. Not knowing what massacre might be in store, every man had fled to his own house; and in vain the conspirators paraded the Forum, holding up their blood-stained weapons and proclaiming themselves the liberators of Rome. Disappointment was not their only feeling; they were not without fear. They knew that Lepidus, being on the eve of departure for his province of Narbonese Gaul, had a legion encamped on the island of the Tiber; and if he were to unite with Antony against them, Cæsar would quickly be avenged. In all haste, therefore, they retired to the Capitol. Meanwhile three of Cæsar’s slaves placed their master’s body upon a stretcher, and carried it to his house on the south side of the Forum with one arm dangling from the unsupported corner. In this condition the widowed Calpurnia received the lifeless clay of him who had lately been sovereign of the world.
Lepidus moved his troops to the Campus Martius. But Antony had no thoughts of using force; for in that case probably Lepidus would have become master of Rome. During the night he took possession of the treasure which Cæsar had collected to defray the expenses of his Parthian campaign, and persuaded Calpurnia to put into his hands all the dictator’s papers. Possessed of these securities, he barricaded his house on the Carinæ, and determined to watch the course of events.
In the evening Cicero, with other senators, visited the self-styled liberators in the Capitol. They had not communicated their plot to the orator, through fear (they said) of his irresolute counsels; but now that the deed was done, he extolled it as a godlike act. Next morning, Dolabella, Cicero’s son-in-law, whom Cæsar had promised to make his successor in the consulship, assumed the consular fasces and joined the liberators; while Cinna, son of the old Marian leader, and therefore brother-in-law to Cæsar, threw aside his prætorian robes, declaring he would no longer wear the tyrant’s livery. Dec. Brutus, a good soldier, had taken a band of gladiators into pay, to serve as a bodyguard of the liberators. Thus strengthened, they ventured again to descend into the Forum. Brutus mounted the tribune, and addressed the people in a dispassionate speech, which produced little effect. But when Cinna assailed the memory of the dictator, the crowd broke out into menacing cries, and the liberators again retired to the Capitol.
That same night they entered into negotiations with Antony, and the result appeared next morning, the second after the murder. The senate, summoned to meet, obeyed the call in large numbers. Antony and Dolabella attended in their consular robes, and Cinna resumed his prætorian garb. It was soon apparent that a reconciliation had been effected; for Antony moved that a general amnesty should be granted, and Cicero seconded the motion in an animated speech. It was carried; and Antony next moved that all the acts of the dictator should be recognised as law. He had his own purposes here, but the liberators also saw in the motion an advantage to themselves; for they were actually in possession of some of the chief magistracies, and had received appointments to some of the richest provinces of the empire. This proposal, therefore, was favourably received; but it was adjourned to the next day, together with the important question of Cæsar’s funeral.
CÆSAR’S WILL AND FUNERAL
On the next day, Cæsar’s acts were formally confirmed, and among them his will was declared valid, though its provisions were yet unknown. After this, it was difficult to reject the proposal that the dictator should have a public burial. Old senators remembered the riots that attended the funeral of Clodius, and shook their heads. Cassius opposed it. But Brutus, with imprudent magnanimity, decided in favour of allowing it. To seal the reconciliation, Lepidus entertained Brutus at dinner, and Cassius was feasted by Mark Antony.
The will was immediately made public. Cleopatra was still in Rome, and entertained hopes that the boy Cæsarion would be declared the dictator’s heir, for though he had been married thrice there was no one of his lineage surviving. But Cæsar was too much a Roman, and knew the Romans too well, to be guilty of this folly. Young C. Octavius was declared his heir. C. Octavius was the son of his niece Atia, and therefore his grand-nephew. He was born, as we have noted, in the memorable year of Catiline’s conspiracy, and was now in his nineteenth year. From the time that he had assumed the garb of manhood his health had been too delicate for military service. Notwithstanding this, he had ventured to demand the mastership of the horse from his uncle. But he was quietly refused, and sent to take his first lessons in the art of war at Apollonia, where a large and well-equipped army had been assembled.
Legacies were left to all Cæsar’s supposed friends, among whom were several of those who had assassinated him. His noble gardens beyond the Tiber were devised to the use of the public, and every Roman citizen was to receive a donation of three hundred sesterces (between £2 and £3). The effect of this recital was electric. Devotion to the memory of the dictator and hatred for his murderers at once filled every breast.
Two or three days after this followed the funeral. The body was to be burned and the ashes deposited in the Campus Martius near the tomb of his daughter Julia. But it was first brought into the Forum upon a bier inlaid with ivory and covered with rich tapestries, which was carried by men high in rank and office. There Antony, as consul, rose to pronounce the funeral oration. He ran through the chief acts of Cæsar’s life, recited his will, and then spoke of the death which had rewarded him. To make this more vividly present to the excitable Italians, he displayed a waxen image marked with the three-and-twenty wounds, and produced the very robe which he had worn, all rent and blood-stained. Soul-stirring dirges added to the solemn horror of the scene. But to us the memorable speech which Shakespeare puts into Antony’s mouth will give the liveliest notion of the art used and the impression produced. That impression was instantaneous. The senator friends of the liberators who had attended the ceremony looked on in moody silence. Soon the menacing gestures of the crowd made them look to their safety. They fled; and the multitude insisted on burning the body, as they had burned the body of Clodius, in the sacred precincts of the Forum. Some of the veterans who attended the funeral set fire to the bier; benches and firewood heaped round it soon made a sufficient pile.
From the blazing pyre the crowd rushed, eager for vengeance, to the houses of the conspirators. But all had fled betimes. One poor wretch fell a victim to the fury of the mob--Helvius Cinna, a poet who had devoted his art to the service of the dictator. He was mistaken for L. Cornelius Cinna the prætor, and torn to pieces before the mistake could be explained.[131]
Antony was now the real master of Rome. The treasure which he had seized gave him the means of purchasing good will, and of securing the attachment of the veterans stationed in various parts of Italy. He did not, however, proceed in the course which, from the tone of his funeral harangue, might have been expected. He renewed friendly intercourse with Brutus and Cassius, who were encouraged to visit Rome once at least, if not oftener, after that day; and Dec. Brutus, with his gladiators, was suffered to remain in the city. Antony went still further. He gratified the senate by passing a law to abolish the dictatorship forever. He then left Rome, to win the favour of the Italian communities and try the temper of the veterans.
Meanwhile another actor appeared upon the scene. This was young Octavius.[b]
THE ACTS OF THE YOUNG OCTAVIUS
[Sidenote: [44-43 B.C.]]
Julius Cæsar had in truth determined to take his great-nephew with him to the war against the Parthians, for which he was already eagerly preparing. As his legions were collected in Macedonia he sent on Caius Octavius in October of 45 B.C. to Apollonia to complete there his education in the science of warfare and rhetoric. As companions Cæsar gave him two of his contemporaries, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and Quintus Salvidienus, members of no distinguished family it must be admitted, but men who by their military services had done credit to Cæsar’s penetration in judging men. During the preparations for the Parthian War Roman troops were constantly in Apollonia, single detachments from time to time were ordered off from the army in Macedonia to enable the young Octavius to take part in their manœuvres and gain closer access to their leaders; in short, no effort was spared to make him popular with the army.
While the soldiers were making strenuous preparations for the Parthian War and eagerly looking forward to the arrival of their leader as soon as the favourable time of the year should be upon them, they were suddenly confronted with the news of his assassination. It was evening when the intelligence of the ides of March was delivered in Apollonia. An immediate resolution was imperative, as it was impossible as yet to know whether the lives of Cæsar’s friends and relatives were not also in jeopardy. Some one even hazarded the wild suggestion that the Macedonian legions should be led against Rome; such a plan, that admitted of no preparations and at once exposed its originator to the danger of failing at its inception, and so making it wholly impracticable if the legions remained faithful to their sworn duty, was in direct antagonism to the character of Octavius, and was duly rejected.
Taking leave of the leaders of the army he returned home to Italy, as a private man. He did not dare land at a great port like Brundusium; on the contrary, he took care to select a harbour as little known as that of Lupiæ. Here he received more direct intelligence from Rome, particularly on the subject of his adoption. With the firm determination to claim his inheritance he turned to Brundusium, where he was immediately hailed as Cæsar by Cæsar’s adherents and veterans. Many joined his side, it would seem, there and then, accompanying him to Naples. Cicero, who was taking a journey into lower Italy at the time, wrote to Atticus on the 11th of April, full of curiosity and dread anticipation: “But I would fain know what the arrival of Octavius portends? Does the multitude flock to him? Is there danger of a revolution? I don’t think so myself; but whatever is the case I should like to know it.” Arrived at his villa at Puteoli he writes to the same friend, apparently quite as an after-thought, that Octavius too came to Naples on the 18th of April; but the next day he again recurs to this subject: “Octavius, too, has come here, and occupies the villa of my neighbour Philippus. He is quite my humble servant.” Close upon this he writes on the 22nd of April: “Octavius treated me with great consideration and friendliness at his visit. His household, it is true, are accustomed to address him as Cæsar, but his stepfather does not follow suit, nor do I. I cannot allow that he is a good citizen. There are too many in his neighbourhood who threaten our party with death. He describes the present position of affairs as not to be endured. Yes, but what think you will happen when this boy comes to Rome?”
The boy was not in such a hurry to come to Rome. He was in the very neighbourhood of Italy in which Cæsar had most endeared himself to his veterans. These negotiations were entered into even at this time with the object of ascertaining the colour of their minds. Young Cæsar then conducted his journey slowly to Tarracina and thence to Rome which he entered in the opening days of May before Antony had had time to return. We still possess to-day in the Museo Chiaramonti a marble bust in a fit condition to bring before our present eye the impression made by the man who was to be so mighty a ruler. The features are distinguished and fine, but energetic too; almost even disquieting.
His first steps in Rome concerned the will of Cæsar. Although his family, and notably his stepfather, strongly dissuaded him, he declared fearlessly, with a premature confidence in his determination that is striking, that his intention was to bid for Cæsar’s inheritance, and this in the presence of Caius Antonius who had taken over the affairs of a town prætor since the flight of Brutus; shortly after this, in about the middle of May, he was presented to the people as Cæsar by the people’s tribune, Lucius Antonius, a brother of Caius. The young Cæsar hereby pledged himself to the Roman people to exclude his adoptive father’s legates, nor could he hope that Mark Antony would be prepared to deliver up to him that adoptive father’s treasure.
Mark Antony indeed after his return did everything in his power to load young Cæsar’s position with difficulty. His conduct to the son of his friend was loveless it is true, yet we can hardly deny that it is explicable. Two things there were especially which separated their interests: Antony would not and could not pay back Cæsar’s treasure to the legitimate heir--equally impossible was it for him to divide the conduct of his party with a boy of nineteen. At the very first personal encounter between the two in the gardens of Pompey, which were then occupied by Antony, the incompatibility of aims which separated them came clearly to light, and the attempts of friends common to them both to bring the two rivals closer to each other could not avail to avert an open breach.
Rightly did Antony oppose the illegal bid of his rival for the tribunate of the people, but nothing but petty spite was the source of his refusal to allow the confirmation by the curiæ of the perfectly valid adoption by Cæsar. Moreover, the young Cæsar, in order to curry favour with the people, had declared his readiness to fulfil a vow of the dictator and to grant games in honour of the victory of Cæsar. Caius Matius and other friends of the dictator gave him every support at these games, from the 20th to the 30th of July; but Mark Antony, who had no power to prohibit games, succeeded in preventing a golden chair with a coronal from being publicly set up in honour of Julius Cæsar. To the friend of Cæsar this Cæsar worship appeared at once of doubtful taste, a worship which his youthful rival sought to organise with all the outward show of an agitator; and before the decisive sentence of the consul the private man had at last to yield. But the later Augustus tells with peculiar satisfaction in his memoirs that, suddenly, in the course of the games, a mighty comet with a long tail was seen, and that it was greeted by the multitude as the star of Cæsar. The star of the Julii was again in the ascendant; and the son who had reared a brazen statue, surmounted with a star of gold, to his father in the temple of Venus, the mother of his stock, secretly hoped to attract the rays from this auspicious talisman upon his own future. A comet always stirs up the imagination of the people mightily, it signifies war; so a contemporary poet mourns: Comets full of foreboding never shone so frequent. This time the people were right; the figure of Nemesis for the murder of Cæsar stood in the doorway.
The nearer things came to a crisis the blacker grew Cæsar’s situation. Antony had contemptuously rejected a confederacy with him; an apparent reconciliation on the Capitol had no enduring consequences. By the outbreak of a civil war, in which a Cæsar could not (even if he would) remain neutral, the young man could only rank himself as a bond fellow of the senate, of the very men who had murdered Cæsar. The thought was so intolerable to him that he did not shrink from an attempt to free himself of his opponent by assassination. Luckily for Cæsar’s cause the attempt failed, and Antony was free a few days later to make away to his legions at Brundusium. Had the attempted assassination succeeded, the young Cæsar, whose security grew more and more perilous would, in all probability, not have been in a position to reap the benefit of this bloody deed. When we take into account the prudence of Cæsar’s conduct on every other occasion but this, we can only explain this folly by the light of that systematic opposition with which Antony had met all his aspirations. To the murderers of Cæsar and the senate he behaved with somewhat greater caution.[f]
Still Antony remained in possession of all actual power. The senate voted, on his demand, that the provinces of Macedonia and Syria, though granted to Brutus and Cassius by the act of Cæsar, should be given to C. Antonius and Dolabella, and that the coveted province of Cisalpine Gaul should be transferred from Dec. Brutus to Antony himself. The news of these arbitrary acts convinced the liberators that they had nothing to hope at Rome. Dec. Brutus immediately left the city and took possession of his province by force. But M. Brutus and Cassius still dallied. Their vacillating conduct during this time gives us an unfavourable impression of their fitness for any enterprise of mark. Cicero, not himself remarkable for political firmness, in this crisis displayed a vigour worthy of his earlier days, and was scandalised by the unworthy bickerings of his friends. At length they set sail from Velia for Greece. This was in the month of September. Cicero also had at one moment made up his mind to retire from public life and end his days at Athens, in learned leisure. In the course of this summer he continued to employ himself on some of his most elaborate treatises. His works on The Nature of the Gods and on Divination, his Offices, his Dialogue on Old Age, and several other essays belong to this period and mark the restless activity of his mind. But though he twice set sail from Italy, he was twice driven back to port at Velia, where he found Brutus and Cassius. Here he received letters from A. Hirtius, and other friends of Cæsar, which gave him hopes that, in the name of Octavius, they might successfully oppose Antony, and restore constitutional government. He determined to return, and announced his purpose to Brutus and Cassius, who commended him, and went their way to the East to raise armies against Antony; he repaired to Rome to fight the battles of his party in the senate.
Meanwhile Antony had been running riot. In possession of Cæsar’s papers, with no one to check him, he produced ready warrant for every measure which he wished to carry, and pleaded the vote of the senate which confirmed all the acts of Cæsar. When he could not produce a genuine paper, he interpolated or forged what was needful.
On the day after Cicero’s return (September 1st) there was a meeting of the senate. But the orator did not attend, and Antony threatened to send men to drag him from his house. Next day Cicero was in his place, but now Antony was absent. The orator rose and addressed the senate in what is called his First Philippic. This was a measured attack upon the government and policy of Antony, but personalities were carefully eschewed. But Antony, enraged at his boldness, summoned a meeting for the 19th of September, which Cicero did not think it prudent to attend. He then attacked the absent orator in the strongest language of personal abuse and menace. Cicero sat down and composed his famous Second Philippic, which is written as if it were delivered on the same day, in reply to Antony’s invective. At present, however, he contented himself with sending a copy of it to Atticus, enjoining secrecy.
Matters quickly drew to a head between Antony and Octavius. The latter had succeeded in securing a thousand men of his uncle’s veterans who had settled at Campania, and by great exertions in the different towns of Italy had levied a considerable force. Meantime four of the Epirot legions had just landed at Brundusium, and Antony hastened to attach them to his cause. But the largess which he offered them was only a hundred denarii a man, and the soldiers laughed in his face. Antony, enraged at their conduct, seized the ringleaders, and decimated them. But this severity only served to change their open insolence to sullen anger, and emissaries from Octavius were ready to draw them over to the side of their young master. They had so far obeyed Antony as to march northwards to Ariminum, while he repaired to Rome. But as he entered the senate house, he heard that two of the four legions had deserted to his rival, and in great alarm he hastened to the camp just in time to keep the remainder of the troops under his standard by distributing to every man five hundred denarii.
The persons to hold the consulship for the next year had been designated by Cæsar. They were both old officers of the Gallic army, C. Vibius Pansa and A. Hirtius, the reputed author of the eighth book of the History of the Gallic War. Cicero was ready to believe that they had become patriots, because, disgusted with the arrogance of Antony, they had declared for Octavius and the senate. Antony began to fear that all parties might combine to crush him. He determined, therefore, no longer to remain inactive; and about the end of November, having collected all his troops at Ariminum, he marched along the Æmilian road to drive Dec. Brutus out of Cisalpine Gaul. Decimus was obliged to throw himself into Mutina (Modena), and Antony blockaded the place. As soon as his back was turned, Cicero published the famous Second Philippic, in which he lashed the consul with the most unsparing hand, going through the history of his past life, exaggerating the debaucheries, which were common to Antony with a great part of the Roman youth, and painting in the strongest colours the profligate use he had made of Cæsar’s papers. Its effect was great, and Cicero followed up the blow by the following twelve Philippics, which were speeches delivered in the senate house and Forum, at intervals from December, 44 B.C., to April in the next year.
Cicero was anxious to break with Antony at once, by declaring him a public enemy. But the latter was still regarded by many senators as the head of the Cæsarian party, and it was resolved to treat with him. But the demands of Antony were so extravagant that negotiations were at once broken off, and nothing remained but to try the fortune of arms. The consuls proceeded to levy troops; but so exhausted was the treasury that now, for the first time since the triumph of Æmilius Paulus, it was found necessary to levy a property tax on the citizens of Rome.
[Sidenote: [43 B.C.]]
Octavius and the consuls assembled their forces at Alba. On the first day of the new year (43 B.C.) Hirtius marched for Mutina, with Octavius under his command. The other consul, Pansa, remained at Rome to raise new levies; but by the end of March he also marched to form a junction with Hirtius. Both parties pretended to be acting in Cæsar’s name.
Antony left his brother Lucius in the trenches before Mutina, and took the field against Hirtius and Octavius. For three months the opponents lay watching each other. But when Antony learned that Pansa was coming up, he made a rapid movement southward with two of his veteran legions, and attacked him. A sharp conflict followed, in which Pansa’s troops were defeated, and the consul himself was carried, mortally wounded, off the field. But Hirtius was on the alert, and assaulted Antony’s wearied troops on their way back to their camp, with some advantage. This was on the 15th of April, and on the 27th, Hirtius drew Antony from his entrenchments before Mutina. A fierce battle followed, which ended in the troops of Antony being driven back into their lines. Hirtius followed close upon the flying enemy; the camp was carried by storm, and a complete victory would have been won had not Hirtius himself fallen. Upon this disaster Octavius drew off the troops. The news of the first battle had been reported at Rome as a victory, and gave rise to extravagant rejoicings. The second battle was really a victory, but all rejoicing was damped by the news that one consul was dead and the other dying. No such fatal mischance had happened since the Second Punic War, when Marcellus and Crispinus fell in one day.
After his defeat Antony felt it impossible to maintain the siege of Mutina. With Dec. Brutus in the town behind him, and the victorious legions of Octavius before him, his position was critical. He therefore prepared to retreat, and effected this purpose like a good soldier. His destination was the province of Narbonese Gaul, where Lepidus had assumed the government, and had promised him support. But the senate also had hopes in the same quarter. L. Munatius Plancus commanded in northern Gaul, and C. Asinius Pollio in southern Spain. Sext. Pompeius had made good his ground in the latter country, and had almost expelled Pollio from Bætica. Plancus and Pollio, both friends and favourites of Cæsar, had as yet declared neither for Antony nor Octavius. If they would declare for the senate, Lepidus, a feeble and fickle man, might desert Antony; or, if Octavius would join with Dec. Brutus, and pursue him, Antony might not be able to escape from Italy at all. But these political combinations failed. Plancus and Pollio stood aloof, waiting for the course of events. Dec. Brutus was not strong enough to pursue Antony by himself, and Octavius was unwilling, perhaps unable, to unite the veterans of Cæsar with troops commanded by one of Cæsar’s murderers. And so it happened that Antony effected his retreat across the Alps, but not without extreme hardships, which he bore in common with the meanest soldier. It was at such times that his good qualities always showed themselves, and his gallant endurance of misery endeared him to every man under his command. On his arrival in Narbonese Gaul he met Lepidus at Forum Julii (Fréjus), and here the two commanders agreed on a plan of operations.
The conduct of Octavius gave rise to grave suspicions. It was even said that the consuls had been killed by his agents. Cicero, who had hitherto maintained his cause, was silent. He had delivered his fourteenth and last Philippic on the news of the first victory gained by Hirtius. But now he talked in private of “removing” the boy of whom he had hoped to make a tool. Octavius, however, had taken his part and was not to be removed. Secretly he entered into negotiations with Antony. After some vain efforts on the part of the senate to thwart him, he appeared in the Campus Martius with his legions. Cicero and most of the senators disappeared, and the fickle populace greeted the young heir of Cæsar with applause. Though he was not yet twenty he demanded the consulship, having been previously relieved from the provisions of the Lex Annalis by a decree of the senate, and he was elected to the first office in the state, with his cousin Q. Pedius.[132]
A curiate law passed, by which Octavius was adopted into the patrician gens of the Julii, and was put into legal possession of the name which he had already assumed--C. Julius Cæsar Octavianus. We shall henceforth call him Octavian.
The change in his policy was soon indicated by a law in which he formally separated himself from the senate. Pedius brought it forward. By its provisions all Cæsar’s murderers were summoned to take their trial. Of course none of them appeared, and they were condemned by default. By the end of September Octavian was again in Cisalpine Gaul, and in close negotiation with Antony and Lepidus. The fruits of his conduct soon appeared. Plancus and Pollio declared against Cæsar’s murderers. Dec. Brutus, deserted by his soldiery, attempted to escape into Macedonia through Illyricum; but he was overtaken near Aquileia, and slain by order of Antony.
Italy and Gaul being now clear of the senatorial party, Lepidus as mediator arranged a meeting between Octavian and Antony, upon an island in a small river near Bononia (Bologna). Here the three potentates agreed that they should assume a joint and co-ordinate authority under the name of “triumvirs for settling the affairs of the commonwealth.” Antony was to have the two Gauls, except the Narbonese district, which, with Spain, was assigned to Lepidus; Octavian received Sicily, Sardinia, and Africa. Italy was for the present to be left to the consuls of the year, and for the ensuing year Lepidus, with Plancus, received promise of this high office. In return Lepidus gave up his military force, while Octavian and Antony, each at the head of ten legions, prepared to conquer the eastern part of the empire, which could not yet be divided like the western provinces, because it was in possession of Brutus and Cassius.
THE PROSCRIPTION
But before they began war the triumvirs agreed to follow the example set by Sulla--to extirpate their opponents by a proscription, and to raise money by confiscation. They framed a list of all men’s names whose death could be regarded as advantageous to any of the three, and on this list each in turn pricked a name. Antony had made many personal enemies by his proceedings at Rome, and was at no loss for victims. Octavian had few direct enemies; but the boy despot discerned with precocious sagacity those who were likely to impede his ambitious projects, and chose his victims with little hesitation. Lepidus would not be left behind in the bloody work. The author of the Philippics was one of Antony’s first victims; Octavian gave him up, and took as an equivalent for his late friend the life of L. Cæsar, uncle of Antony. Lepidus surrendered his brother Paulus for some similar favour. So the work went on. The description already given of Sulla’s proscription may be repeated here literally, except that every horror was increased, and the number of victims multiplied. Not fewer than three hundred senators and two thousand knights were on the list. Q. Pedius, an honest and upright man, died in his consulship, overcome by vexation and shame at being implicated in these transactions.
As soon as their secret business was ended, the triumvirs determined to enter Rome publicly. Hitherto they had not published more than seventeen names of the proscribed. They made their entrance severally on three successive days, each attended by a legion. A law was immediately brought in to invest them formally with the supreme authority, which they had assumed. This was followed by the promulgation of successive lists, each larger than its predecessor.[b]
Appian gives a multitude of instances of the terrors of this proscription.
“The proscription being published,” he says, “guards were forthwith placed at the gates and all the avenues of the city, at the seaports, and in the marshes, and in all places where there was any likelihood an unhappy man might shelter himself; besides, centurions were commanded abroad, to make search in the country, which was done all at an instant; so that both within and without the city many persons died suddenly several kinds of deaths. The streets were filled with the sad spectacle of heads carrying to the triumvirs, to receive the reward; and every step some person of quality endeavouring to save himself, was met shamefully disguised; some running down into wells, and others into privies; some hiding themselves in the tops of the chimneys, or under the tiles, where they durst not utter a sigh or a groan; for they stood in more fear of their wives, or children, or freedmen, or slaves, or debtors, or neighbours that coveted some of their goods, than of the murderers themselves.
“All private grudges were now discovered; and it was a strange change to see the prime men of the senate, consulars, prætors, tribunes, or pretenders to these dignities cast themselves at the feet of their slaves with tears in their eyes, begging and caressing them, calling them their saviours and patrons; and, which is most deplorable, not to be able with all these submissions to obtain the least favour. The most pernicious seditions and cruellest of wars never had anything in them so terrible as the calamities wherewith the city was now affrighted; for in war and tumult none but enemies were feared, and domestics were confided in; whereas now domestics were more dreadful than enemies, because having no cause to fear for themselves, as in war or tumult, from familiars they became of a sudden persecutors; either out of a dissembled hate, or out of hope of recompense publicly proposed, or because of some silver or gold hid in the house; so that no person found himself secure in his house, servants being ordinarily more sensible of profit than of the affection they owe to their masters; and though some might be found faithful and kind, yet they durst not assist a proscript, nor conceal him, nor so much as stay with him, for fear of falling into the same misfortune.
“There was now much more danger than when the seventeen first proscribed were fallen upon; for then no person being publicly proscribed, when on a sudden they saw some killed, one man defended another, for fear lest the same should happen to him. But after the proscription was published, those comprised in it were presently forsaken by all the world; some that thought themselves secure, having their minds bent on profit, sought them to deliver them to the murderers, that they might have the reward; others pillaged the houses of those that had been killed, and with the present gain comforted themselves against the public misery.
“The most prudent and moderate surprised at a thing so extraordinary, stood like men astonished, considering that other cities turmoiled with divisions were re-established by the concord of their citizens; whereas the Romans, already afflicted with civil dissensions, completed their ruin by this reconciliation. Some were killed defending themselves; others, who thought themselves not condemned, without any defence; some let themselves die with hunger, or hanged, or drowned themselves, or threw themselves headlong from the tops of houses, or cast themselves into the fire, or ran to meet their murderers; others again sought to protract the time; and either hid themselves, or begged shamefully, or fled, or offered money to save their lives. Many likewise were slain contrary to the intention of the triumvirs, either by mistake, or out of some particular grudge; but the bodies of the proscripts might be known from the others, because they wanted the head, which was cut off, and carried before the tribunal for orations, where they paid the reward. On the other side, wonderful examples were to be seen of the affection of wives, children, brethren and slaves; who found out a thousand inventions to save their husbands, fathers, brethren, or masters; died with them when they were discovered, or killed themselves upon those bodies they were not able to defend.
“Of those that escaped the proscription, some pursued by their ill fortune, perished by shipwreck; others saved beyond all probability, came afterwards to exercise dignities in the city, to have command of armies, and arrive at the honour of triumph. Such wonderful things were to be seen in those days which do not happen in an ordinary city, or in a small kingdom; but in the mistress of the world, as well by sea as land; Providence disposing it so to reduce things to that excellent order wherein you now see them. Not but that Rome felt the same miseries under Sulla, and before him under Marius; and we have in writing of them reported many actions of cruelty, even to the depriving their enemies of burial; but what passed under the triumvirs made much more noise, because of the height of their reputation; and particularly the valour and good fortune of him, who having fixed the foundations of this empire, has left it to those of his race and name, even to this present.”[c]
DEATH OF CICERO
Among the victims far the most conspicuous was Cicero. With his brother Quintus the old orator had retired to his Tusculan villa after the battle of Mutina; and now they endeavoured to escape in the hope of joining Brutus in Macedonia: for the orator’s only son was serving as a tribune in the liberator’s army. After many changes of domicile, they reached Astura, a little island near Antium, where they found themselves short of money, and Quintus ventured to Rome to procure the necessary supply. Here he was recognised and seized, together with his son. Each desired to die first, and the mournful claim to precedence was settled by the soldiers killing both at the same moment.
Meantime Cicero had put to sea. But even in this extremity he could not make up his mind to leave Italy, and put to land at Circeii. After further hesitation, he again embarked, and again sought the Italian shore near Formiæ (Mola di Gaëta). For the night he stayed at his villa near that place; and next morning would not move, exclaiming, “Let me die in my own country,--that country which I have so often saved.” But his faithful slaves forced him into a litter, and carried him again towards the coast. Scarcely were they gone when a band of Antony’s bloodhounds reached his villa, and were put upon the track of their victim by a young man who owed everything to the Cicerones. The old orator from his litter saw the pursuers coming up. His own followers were strong enough to have made resistance; but he desired them to set the litter down. Then, raising himself on his elbow, he calmly waited for the ruffians, and offered his neck to the sword. He was soon despatched.
The chief of the band, by Antony’s express orders, hewed off the head and hands and carried them to Rome. Fulvia, the widow of Clodius and now the wife of Antony, drove her hair pin through the tongue which had denounced the iniquities of both her husbands. The head which had given birth to the Second Philippic, and the hands which had written it, were nailed to the rostra, the home of their eloquence. The sight and the associations raised feelings of horror and pity in every heart.
Cicero died in his sixty-fourth year. He had fallen on evil times; and being eminently a man of peace was constantly called upon to mingle in counsels of civil war. From his first appearance in public during the dictatorship of Sulla to the great triumph of his consulship, he rose with a vigorous and unflagging energy, which gave promise of a man fit to cope with the dangers that were then closing round the constitution. But the performance was not equal to the promise. When once Cicero had joined the ranks of the senatorial nobility, his political conduct is marked by an almost peevish vacillation. His advances were coldly rejected by Pompey. He could not make up his mind to break entirely with Cæsar. His new senatorial associates never heartily welcomed the new man, whose laborious habits contrasted disadvantageously with their own. As the first orator of the day, he thought he had a claim to be considered as equal to the first statesman; and the rejection of this claim even by his own party threw him still more out of harmony with that party.
If we turn from his public to his private character, our commendations need less reserve. None but must admire the vigorous industry with which from early youth he prepared for his chosen profession of advocate, full of the generous belief that every branch of liberal studies must be serviceable to one who is expected to bring out of his treasure things new and old. To mould his multifarious knowledge he possessed a readiness of speech which sometimes betrayed him into verbosity. The advocate with an eye only to his verdict is sometimes forgotten in the orator who desires to display his own powers. When the Forum and the senate house were closed to him, he poured the overflowing abundance of his acquirements into those dialogues and treatises which we still read with delight. He wrote rapidly and fluently as he spoke, rather to amuse and employ his mind in times of enforced idleness than as one who feels a call to instruct or benefit mankind.
His disposition was extremely amiable. He felt no jealousy for rivals; Hortensius was among his intimate friends, and is chiefly known to us by Cicero’s generous praise. No man had more friends. In his family relations he shines brightly amid the darkness of that age. His wife Terentia was one with whom he had little sympathy; her masculine energy was oppressive to his less resolute character. It was a relief, doubtless, to find an excuse for divorcing her in the troubles of the Civil War. But divorces were matters of course in these times. Nor did public opinion condemn him when to mend his broken fortunes he married Publilia, a girl of large property, who was his ward. To his affection for his brother Quintus and for his children there is no drawback. On the whole his character displays much weakness, but very little evil; while the perfect integrity and justice of his life, in an age when such qualities were rare, if they do not compensate for his defects in a political point of view, yet entitle him to the regard and admiration of all good men.
Many of the proscribed escaped their fate, and found refuge, some with Brutus in the East, some in Africa, more still with Sext. Pompeius. This adventurer took advantage of the troubles in Italy to extend his power. He occupied Sicily, and his fleets swept the coasts of Italy to afford assistance to the proscribed. Next year, while Antony was intrusted with the task of levying troops against Brutus and Cassius, Octavian undertook to wrest Sicily from the hands of Sextus. But his fleet was encountered and beaten off by the skilful captains of the enemy; and Octavian was compelled to depart for the East without accomplishing his purpose.
BRUTUS AND CASSIUS
[Sidenote: [44-42 B.C.]]
Brutus and Cassius, when they left Italy in the autumn of 44 B.C., at once repaired to the provinces allotted to them, though by Antony’s influence the senate had transferred Macedonia from Brutus to his own brother Caius, and Syria from Cassius to Dolabella. C. Antonius was already in possession of parts of Macedonia; but Brutus succeeded in dislodging him. Meanwhile Cassius, already well known in Syria for his successful conduct of the Parthian War, had established himself in that province, before he heard of the approach of Dolabella. This worthless man left Italy about the same time as Brutus and Cassius, and at the head of several legions marched without opposition through Macedonia into Asia Minor. Here C. Trebonius had already arrived. But he was unable to cope with Dolabella; and the latter surprised him and took him prisoner at Smyrna. He was put to death with unseemly contumely in Dolabella’s presence. This was in February 43 B.C.; and thus two of Cæsar’s murderers, in less than a year’s time, felt the blow of retributive justice.
When the news of this piece of butchery reached Rome, Cicero, believing that Octavian was a puppet in his hands, was ruling Rome by the eloquence of his Philippics. On his motion, Dolabella was declared a public enemy.[133] Cassius lost no time in marching his legions into Asia, to execute the behest of the senate, though he had been dispossessed of his province by the senate itself. Dolabella threw himself into Laodicea, where he sought a voluntary death.
By the end of 43 B.C., therefore, the whole of the East was in the hands of Brutus and Cassius. But instead of making preparations for war with Antony, the two commanders spent the early part of the year 42 B.C. in plundering the miserable cities of Asia Minor. Brutus demanded men and money of the Lycians; and, when they refused, he laid siege to Xanthus, their principal city. The Xanthians made the same brave resistance which they had offered five hundred years before to the Persian invaders. They burned their city, and put themselves to death rather than submit. Brutus wept over their fate, and abstained from further exactions. But Cassius showed less moderation; from the Rhodians alone, though they were allies of Rome, he demanded all their precious metals. After this campaign of plunder, the two chiefs met at Sardis and renewed the altercations which Cicero had deplored in Italy. It is probable that war might have broken out between them, had not the preparations of the triumvirs waked them from their dream of security. It was as he was passing over into Europe that Brutus, who continued his studious habits amid all disquietudes, and limited his time of sleep to a period too small for the requirements of health, was dispirited by the vision which Shakespeare, after Plutarch, has made famous. It was no doubt the result of a diseased frame, though it was universally held to be a divine visitation. As he sat in his tent in the dead of the night, he thought a huge and shadowy form stood by him; and when he calmly asked, “What and whence art thou?” it answered, or seemed to answer, “I am thine evil genius, Brutus; we shall meet again at Philippi.”
PHILIPPI
[Sidenote: [42 B.C.]]
Meantime Antony’s lieutenants had crossed the Ionian Sea, and penetrated without opposition into Thrace. The republican leaders found them at Philippi. The army of Brutus and Cassius amounted to at least eighty thousand infantry, supported by twenty thousand horse; but they were ill supplied with experienced officers. For M. Valerius Messalla, a young man of twenty-eight, held the chief command after Brutus and Cassius; and Horace, who was but three-and-twenty, the son of a freedman, and a youth of feeble constitution, was appointed a legionary tribune. The forces opposed to them would have been at once overpowered, had not Antony himself opportunely arrived with the second corps of the triumviral army. Octavian was detained by illness at Dyrrhachium, but he ordered himself to be carried on a litter to join his legions. The army of the triumvirs was now superior to the enemy; but their cavalry, counting only thirteen thousand, was considerably weaker than the force opposed to it. The republicans were strongly posted upon two hills, with entrenchments between; the camp of Cassius upon the left next the sea, that of Brutus inland on the right. The triumviral army lay upon the open plain before them in a position rendered unhealthy by marshes; Antony, on the right, was opposed to Cassius; Octavian, on the left, fronted Brutus. But they were ill supplied with provisions, and anxious for a decisive battle. The republicans, however, kept to their entrenchments, and the other party began to suffer severely from famine.
Determined to bring on an action, Antony began works for the purpose of cutting off Cassius from the sea. Cassius had always opposed a general action, but Brutus insisted on putting an end to the suspense, and his colleague yielded. The day of the attack was probably in October. Brutus attacked Octavian’s army, while Cassius assaulted the working parties of Antony. Cassius’ assault was beaten back with loss, but he succeeded in regaining his camp in safety. Meanwhile, Messalla, who commanded the right wing of Brutus’ army, had defeated the host of Octavian, who was still too ill to appear on the field, and the republican soldiers penetrated into the triumvir’s camp. Presently, his litter was brought in stained with blood, and the corpse of a young man found near it was supposed to be Octavian. But Brutus, not receiving any tidings of the movements of Cassius, became so anxious for his fate that he sent off a party of horse to make inquiries, and neglected to support the successful assault of Messalla.
Cassius, on his part, discouraged at his ill success, was unable to ascertain the progress of Brutus. When he saw the party of horse, he hastily concluded that they belonged to the enemy, and retired into his tent with his freedman, Pindarus. What passed there we know not for certain. Cassius was found dead, with the head severed from the body. Pindarus was never seen again. It was generally believed that Pindarus slew his master in obedience to orders; but many thought that he had dealt a felon blow. The intelligence of Cassius’ death was a heavy blow to Brutus. He forgot his own success, and pronounced the eulogy of Cassius in the well-known words, “There lies the last of the Romans.” The praise was ill-deserved. Except in his conduct of war against the Parthians, Cassius had never played a worthy part.
After the first battle of Philippi, it would still have been politic in Brutus to abstain from battle. The triumviral armies were in great distress, and every day increased their losses. Reinforcements coming to their aid by sea were intercepted--a proof of the neglect of the republican leaders in not sooner bringing their fleet into action. Nor did Brutus ever hear of this success. He was ill fitted for the life of the camp, and after the death of Cassius he only kept his men together by largesses and promises of plunder. Twenty days after the first battle he led them out again. Both armies faced each other. There was little manœuvring. The second battle was decided by numbers and force, not by skill; and it was decided in favour of the triumvirs.
Brutus retired with four legions to a strong position in the rear, while the rest of his broken army sought refuge in the camp. Octavian remained to watch them, while Antony pursued the republican chief. Next day Brutus endeavoured to rouse his men to another effort, but they sullenly refused to fight, and Brutus withdrew with a few friends into a neighbouring wood. Here he took them aside one by one, and prayed each to do him the last service that a Roman could render to his friend. All refused with horror; till at nightfall a trusty Greek freedman, named Strato, held the sword, and his master threw himself upon it.[134] Most of his friends followed the sad example. The body of Brutus was sent by Antony to his mother. His wife Porcia, the daughter of Cato, refused all comfort; and being too closely watched to be able to slay herself by ordinary means, she suffocated herself by thrusting burning charcoal into her mouth. Messalla, with a number of other fugitives, sought safety in the island of Thasos, and soon after made submission to Antony.
[Sidenote: [42-41 B.C.]]
The name of Brutus has, by Plutarch’s beautiful narrative, sublimed by Shakespeare, become a by-word for self-devoted patriotism. This exalted opinion is now generally confessed to be unjust. Brutus was not a patriot, unless devotion to the party of the senate be patriotism. Towards the provincials he was a true Roman, harsh and oppressive. He was free from the sensuality and profligacy of his age, but for public life he was unfit. His habits were those of a student. His application was great, his memory remarkable. But he possessed little power of turning his acquirements to account; and to the last he was rather a learned man than a man improved by learning. In comparison with Cassius, he was humane and generous; but in all respects his character is contrasted for the worse with that of the great man, from whom he accepted favours, and whose murderer he then became.
The battle of Philippi was in reality the closing scene of the republican drama. But the rivalship of the triumvirs prolonged for several years the divided state of the Roman world; and it was not till after the crowning victory of Actium that the imperial government was established in its unity.
The hopeless state of the republican, or rather the senatorial party was such that almost all hastened to make submission to the conquerors; those whose sturdy spirit still disdained submission resorted to Sext. Pompeius in Sicily. Octavian, still suffering from ill health, was anxious to return to Italy; but before he parted from Antony, they agreed to a second distribution of the provinces of the empire. Antony was to have the eastern world; Octavian the western provinces. To Lepidus, who was not consulted in this second division, Africa alone was left. Sext. Pompeius remained in possession of Sicily.
Antony at once proceeded to make a tour through western Asia, in order to exact money from its unfortunate people. About midsummer (41 B.C.) he arrived at Tarsus, and here he received a visit which determined the future course of his life and influenced Roman history for the next ten years.
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
[Sidenote: [41 B.C.]]
Antony had visited Alexandria fourteen years before, and had been smitten by the charms of Cleopatra, then a girl of fifteen. She became Cæsar’s paramour, and from the time of the dictator’s death Antony had never seen her. She now came to meet him in Cilicia. The galley which carried her up the Cydnus was of more than oriental gorgeousness; the sails of purple; oars of silver, moving to the sound of music; the raised poop burnished with gold. There she lay upon a splendid couch, shaded by a spangled canopy; her attire was that of Venus, around her flitted attendant Cupids and Graces. At the news of her approach to Tarsus, the triumvir found his tribunal deserted by the people. She invited him to her ship, and he complied. From that moment he was her slave. He accompanied her to Alexandria, exchanged the Roman garb for the Græco-Egyptian costume of the court, and lent his power to the queen to execute all her caprices.
Meanwhile, Octavian was not without his difficulties. He was so ill at Brundusium that his death was reported at Rome. The veterans, eager for their promised rewards, were on the eve of mutiny. In a short time Octavian was sufficiently recovered to show himself. But he could find no other means of satisfying the greedy soldiery than by a confiscation of lands more sweeping than that which followed the proscription of Sulla. The towns of Cisalpine Gaul were accused of favouring Dec. Brutus, and saw nearly all their lands handed over to new possessors. The young poet Virgil lost his little patrimony, but was reinstated at the instance of Pollio and Mæcenas, and showed his gratitude in his first Eclogue. Other parts of Italy also suffered--Apulia, for example, as we learn from Horace’s friend Ofella, who became the tenant of the estate which had formerly been his own.
But these violent measures deferred rather than obviated the difficulty. The expulsion of so many persons threw thousands loose upon society, ripe for any crime. Many of the veterans were ready to join any new leader who promised them booty. Such a leader was at hand.
Fulvia, wife of Antony, was a woman of fierce passions and ambitious spirit. She had not been invited to follow her husband to the East. She saw that in his absence imperial power would fall into the hands of Octavian. Lucius, brother of Mark Antony, was consul for the year, and at her instigation he raised his standard at Præneste. But L. Antonius knew not how to use his strength; and young Agrippa, to whom Octavian intrusted the command, obliged Antonius and Fulvia to retire northwards and shut themselves up in Perusia. Their store of provisions was so small that it sufficed only for the soldiery. Early in the next year Perusia surrendered, on condition that the lives of the leaders should be spared. The town was sacked; the conduct of L. Antonius alienated all Italy from his brother.
ANTONY MEETS WITH REVERSES
While his wife, his brother, and his friends were quitting Italy in confusion, the arms of Antony suffered a still heavier blow in the eastern provinces which were under his special government. After the battle of Philippi, Q. Labienus, son of Cæsar’s old lieutenant Titus, sought refuge at the court of Orodes, king of Parthia. Encouraged by the proffered aid of a Roman officer, Pacorus the king’s son led a formidable army into Syria. Antony’s lieutenant was entirely routed; and while Pacorus with one army poured into Palestine and Phœnicia, Q. Labienus with another broke into Cilicia. Here he found no opposition; and, overrunning all Asia Minor even to the Ionian Sea, he assumed the name of Parthicus, as if he had been a Roman conqueror of the people whom he served.
These complicated disasters roused Antony from his lethargy. He sailed to Tyre, intending to take the field against the Parthians; but the season was too far advanced, and he therefore crossed the Ægean to Athens, where he found Fulvia and his brother, accompanied by Pollio, Plancus, and others, all discontented with Octavian’s government. Octavian was absent in Gaul, and their representation of the state of Italy encouraged him to make another attempt. Late in the year (41 B.C.) Antony formed a league with Sext. Pompeius; and while that chief blockaded Thurii and Consentia, Antony assailed Brundusium. Agrippa was preparing to meet this new combination; and a fresh civil war was imminent. But the soldiery was weary of war; both armies compelled their leaders to make pacific overtures, and the new year was ushered in by a general peace, which was rendered easier by the death of Fulvia. Antony and Octavian renewed their professions of amity, and entered Rome together in joint ovation to celebrate the restoration of peace. They now made a third division of the provinces, by which Scodra (Scutari) in Illyricum was fixed as the boundary of the west and east. Lepidus was still left in possession of Africa. It was further agreed that Octavian was to drive Sext. Pompeius, lately the ally of Antony, out of Sicily; while Antony renewed his pledges to recover the standards of Crassus from the Parthians. The new compact was sealed by the marriage of Antony with Octavia, his colleague’s sister, a virtuous and beautiful lady, worthy of a better consort. These auspicious events were celebrated by the lofty verse of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, styled The Pollio.
[Sidenote: [41-39 B.C.]]
Sext. Pompeius had reason to complain. By the Peace of Brundusium he was abandoned by his late friend to Octavian. He was not a man to brook ungenerous treatment. Of late years his possession of Sicily had given him command of the Roman corn market. During the winter which followed the Peace of Brundusium (40-39 B.C.), Sextus blockaded Italy so closely that Rome was threatened with a positive dearth. Riots arose; the triumvirs were pelted with stones in the Forum; and they deemed it prudent to temporise by inviting Pompeius to enter their league. He met them at Misenum, and the two chiefs went on board his ship to settle the terms of alliance. It is said that one of his chief officers, a Greek named Menas or Menodorus, suggested to him the expediency of putting to sea with the great prize, and then making his own terms. Sextus rejected the advice with the characteristic words: “You should have done it without asking me.” It was agreed that Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica should be given up to his absolute rule, and that Achaia should be added to his portion; so that the Roman world was now partitioned amongst four--Octavian, Antony, Lepidus, and Sext. Pompeius. On their return the triumvirs were received with vociferous applause.
Before winter, Antony sailed for Athens in company with Octavia, and for the time seems to have banished Cleopatra from his thoughts. But he disgusted all true Romans by assuming the attributes of Grecian gods, and indulging in Grecian orgies.
[Sidenote: [39-36 B.C.]]
He found the state of things in the East greatly changed since his departure. He had commissioned P. Ventidius Bassus, an officer who had followed Fulvia from Italy, to hold the Parthians in check till his return. Ventidius was son of a Picenian nobleman of Asculum, who had been brought to Rome as a captive in the Social War. In his youth he had been a contractor to supply mules for the use of the Roman commissariat. But in the civil wars which followed, men of military talent easily rose to command; and such was the lot of Ventidius. While Antony was absent in Italy, he drove Q. Labienus into the defiles of Taurus, and here that adventurer was defeated and slain. The conqueror then marched rapidly into Syria, and forced Pacorus also to withdraw to the eastern bank of the Euphrates.
In the following year (38 B.C.) he repelled a fresh invasion of the Parthians, and defeated them in three battles. In the last of these engagements Pacorus himself was slain on the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Crassus. Antony found Ventidius laying siege to Samosata, and displaced him, only to abandon the siege and return to Athens. Ventidius repaired to Rome, where he was honoured with a well-deserved triumph. He had left it as a mule jobber; he returned with the laurel round his brows. He was the first, and almost the last, Roman general who could claim such a distinction for victory over the Parthians.
The alliance with Sext. Pompeius was not intended to last, and it did not last. Antony refused to put him in possession of Achaia; and to avenge himself for this breach of faith Pompeius again began to intercept the Italian corn fleets. Fresh discontent appeared at Rome; and Octavian equipped a second fleet to sail against the naval chief; but after two battles of doubtful result the fleet was destroyed by a storm, and Sextus was again left in undisputed mastery of the sea. Octavian, however, was never daunted by reverses, and he gave his favourite Agrippa full powers to conduct the war against Pompeius. This able commander set about his work with that resolution that marked a man determined not to fail. As a harbour for his fleet he executed a plan of the great Cæsar--namely, to make a good and secure harbour on the coast of Latium, which then, as now, offered no shelter to ships. For this purpose he cut a passage through the narrow necks of land which separated Lake Lucrinus from the sea and Lake Avernus from Lake Lucrinus, and faced the outer barrier with stone. This was the famous Julian Port. In the whole of the two years 38 and 37 B.C., Agrippa was occupied in this work and in preparing a sufficient force of ships. Every dockyard in Italy was called into requisition. A large body of slaves were set free that they might be trained to serve as rowers.
On the 1st of July, 36 B.C., the fleet put to sea. Octavian himself, with one division, purposed to attack the northern coast of Sicily, while a second squadron was assembled at Tarentum for the purpose of assailing the eastern side. Lepidus, with a third fleet from Africa, was to assault Lilybæum. But the winds were again adverse; and, though Lepidus effected a landing on the southern coast, Octavian’s two fleets were driven back to Italy with great damage. But the injured ships were refitted, and Agrippa was sent westward towards Panormus, while Octavian himself kept guard near Messana. Off Mylæ, a place famous for having witnessed the first naval victory of the Romans, Agrippa encountered the fleet of Sext. Pompeius; but Sextus, with the larger portion of his ships, gave Agrippa the slip, and sailing eastward fell suddenly upon Octavian’s squadron off Tauromenium. A desperate conflict followed, which ended in the complete triumph of Sextus, and Octavian escaped to Italy with a few ships only. But Agrippa was soon upon the traces of the enemy. On the 3d of September, Sextus was obliged once more to accept battle near the Straits of Messana, and suffered an irretrievable defeat. His troops on land were attacked and dispersed by an army which had been landed on the eastern coast by the indefatigable Octavian; and Sextus sailed off to Lesbos, where he had found refuge as a boy during the campaign of Pharsalia, to seek protection from the jealousy of Antony.
Lepidus had assisted in the campaign; but after the departure of Sextus he openly declared himself independent of his brother triumvirs. Octavian, with prompt and prudent boldness, entered the camp of Lepidus in person with a few attendants. The soldiers deserted in crowds, and in a few hours Lepidus was fain to sue for pardon, where he had hoped to rule. He was treated with contemptuous indifference. Africa was taken from him; but he was allowed to live and die at Rome in quiet enjoyment of the chief pontificate.
It was fortunate for Octavian that during this campaign Antony was on friendly terms with him. In 37 B.C. the ruler of the East again visited Italy, and a meeting between the two chiefs was arranged at Tarentum. The five years for which the triumvirs were originally appointed were now fast expiring; and it was settled that their authority should be renewed by the subservient senate and people for a second period of the same duration. They parted good friends; and Octavian undertook his campaign against Sext. Pompeius without fear from Antony. This was proved by the fate of the fugitive. From Lesbos Sextus passed over to Asia, where he was taken prisoner by Antony’s lieutenants, and put to death.
Hitherto Octavia had retained her influence over Antony. But presently, after his last interview with her brother, the fickle triumvir abruptly quitted a wife who was too good for him, and returned to the fascinating presence of the Egyptian queen, whom he had not seen for three years. From this time forth he made no attempt to break the silken chain of her enchantments. During the next summer, indeed, he attempted a new Parthian campaign.[b] It has been described by Florus as follows:
“Such was the excessive vanity of the man, that being desirous from a love of distinction, to have Araxes and Euphrates read under his statues, he suddenly quitted Syria and made an inroad on the Parthians, and that without any cause or reason, or even pretended proclamation of war, as if it were among a general’s accomplishments to surprise people by stealth. The Parthians, who, besides having confidence in their arms, are crafty and subtle, pretended to be alarmed, and to retreat across the plains. Antony, as if already victorious, instantly pursued, when a body of the enemy, not very numerous, rushed suddenly forth like a storm of rain upon the Romans, who, as it was evening, were tired with the day’s march. Discharging their arrows from all sides, they overwhelmed two legions.
“But this was nothing in comparison with the destruction that would have met them on the following day, had not the mercy of the gods interposed. One of the Romans who had survived the overthrow of Crassus, rode up to the camp in a Parthian dress, and having saluted the soldiers in Latin, and thus gained credit with them, told them of the danger which threatened them; saying that the king would soon come up with all his forces; that they ought therefore to retreat and take shelter in the mountains; and that possibly, even if they did so, enemies would not be wanting. In consequence, a smaller number of enemies overtook them than had been intended. Overtake them, however, they did; and the rest of the army would have been destroyed, had not the soldiers, while the arrows were falling on them like hail, fortunately sunk down, as if they had been taught, upon their knees, holding up their shields above their heads, and making it appear as if they were killed. The Parthians then refrained from shooting.
“When the Romans afterwards rose up, the proceeding appeared so like a miracle, that one of the barbarians exclaimed: ‘Go! and fare ye well, Romans; fame deservedly speaks of you as the conquerors of nations, since you have escaped death from the arrows of the Parthians.’ After this, there was no less endured from want of water, than at the hands of the enemy. The country, in the first place, was deadly from its drought; the river, too, with its brackish and bitter water, was more deadly to some; and besides, even good water was pernicious to many, being drunk greedily when they were in a weak condition. Subsequently the heat of Armenia, the snows of Cappadocia, and the sudden change in climate from one to the other, was as destructive as a pestilence. Scarce the third part, therefore, of sixteen legions being left, the excellent general, begging death from time to time, at the hands of a gladiator of his, escaped at last into Syria, where, by some unaccountable perversion of mind, he grew considerably more presuming than before, as if he had conquered because he had escaped.”[e]
[Sidenote: [36-35 B.C.]]
In the next year he contented himself with a campaign in Armenia, to punish the king of that country for alleged treachery in the last campaign. The king fell into his hands; and with this trophy Antony returned to Alexandria, where the Romans were disgusted to see the streets of a Græco-Egyptian town honoured by a mimicry of a Roman triumph. For the next three years he surrendered himself absolutely to the will of the enchantress.[135]
To this period belong those tales of luxurious indulgence which are known to every reader. The brave soldier who in the perils of war could shake off all luxurious habits, and could rival the commonest man in the cheerfulness with which he underwent every hardship, was seen no more. He sank into an indolent voluptuary, pleased by childish amusements. At one time he would lounge in a boat at a fishing party, and laugh when he drew up pieces of salt fish, which by the queen’s order had been attached to his hook by divers. At another time she wagered that she would consume ten million sesterces at one meal, and won her wager by dissolving in vinegar a pearl of unknown value. While Cleopatra bore the character of the goddess Isis, her lover appeared as Osiris. Her head was placed conjointly with his own on the coins which he issued as a Roman magistrate. He disposed of the kingdoms and principalities of the East by his sole word. By his influence Herod, son of Antipater, the Idumæan minister of Hyrcanus, the late sovereign of Judea, was made king to the exclusion of the rightful heir. Polemon, his own son by Cleopatra, was invested with the sceptre of Armenia. Encouraged by the absolute submission of her lover, Cleopatra fixed her eye upon the Capitol, and dreamed of winning by means of Antony that imperial crown which she had vainly sought from Cæsar.
[Sidenote: [35-32 B.C.]]
While Antony was engaged in voluptuous dalliance, Octavian was resolutely pursuing the work of consolidating his power in the west. His patience, his industry, his attention to business, his affability, were winning golden opinions and rapidly obliterating all memory of the bloody work by which he had risen to power. He had won little glory in war; but so long as the corn fleets arrived duly from Sicily and Africa, the populace cared little whether the victory had been won by Octavian or by his generals. In Agrippa he possessed a consummate captain, in Mæcenas a wise and temperate minister. It is much to his credit that he never showed any jealousy of the men to whom he owed so much. He flattered the people with the hope that he would, when Antony had fulfilled his mission of recovering the standards of Crassus, engage him to join in putting an end to their sovereign power and restoring constitutional liberty. In point of fidelity to his marriage vows Octavian was little better than Antony. He renounced his marriage with Clodia, the daughter of Fulvia, when her mother attempted to raise Italy against him. He divorced Scribonia, when it no longer suited him to court the favour of her kinsman. To replace this second wife, he forcibly took away Livia from her husband, Ti. Claudius Nero, though she was at that time pregnant of her second son. But in this and other less pardonable immoralities there was nothing to shock the feelings of Romans.
OCTAVIAN AGAINST ANTONY; THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM
But Octavian never suffered pleasure to divert him from business. If he could not be a successful general, he resolved at least to show that he could be a hardy soldier. While Antony in his Egyptian palace was neglecting the Parthian War, his rival led his legions in more than one dangerous campaign against the barbarous Dalmatians and Pannonians, who had been for some time infesting the province of Illyricum. In the year 33 B.C. he announced that the limits of the empire had been extended northward to the banks of the Savus.
Octavian now began to feel that any appearance of friendship with Antony was a source of weakness rather than of strength at Rome. Misunderstandings had already broken out. Antony complained that Octavian had given him no share in the provinces wrested from Sext. Pompeius and Lepidus. Octavian retorted by accusing his colleague of appropriating Egypt and Armenia, and of increasing Cleopatra’s power at the expense of the Roman Empire. Popular indignation rose to its height when Plancus and Titius, who had been admitted to Antony’s confidence, passed over to Octavian, and disclosed the contents of their master’s will. In that document Antony ordered that his body should be buried at Alexandria, in the mausoleum of Cleopatra. Men began to fancy that Cleopatra had already planted her throne upon the Capitol. These suspicions were sedulously encouraged by Octavian.
Before the close of 32 B.C., Octavian, by the authority of the senate, declared war nominally against Cleopatra. Antony, roused from his sleep by reports from Rome, passed over to Athens, issuing orders everywhere to levy men and collect ships for the impending struggle. At Athens he received news of the declaration of war, and replied by divorcing Octavia. His fleet was ordered to assemble at Corcyra; and his legions in the early spring prepared to pour into Epirus. He established his headquarters at Patræ on the Corinthian Gulf.
But Antony, though his fleet was superior to that of Octavian, allowed Agrippa to sweep the Ionian Sea, and to take possession of Methone, in Messenia, as a station for a flying squadron to intercept Antony’s communications with the East, nay even to occupy Corcyra, which had been destined for his own place of rendezvous. Antony’s fleet now anchored in the waters of the Ambracian Gulf, while his legions encamped on a spot of land which forms the northern horn of that spacious inlet. But the place chosen for the camp was unhealthful; and in the heats of early summer his army suffered greatly from disease. Agrippa lay close at hand watching his opportunity. In the course of the spring Octavian joined him in person.
[Sidenote: [31-30 B.C.]]
Early in the season Antony had repaired from Patræ to his army, so as to be ready either to cross over into Italy or to meet the enemy if they attempted to land in Epirus. At first he showed something of his old military spirit, and the soldiers, who always loved his military frankness, warmed into enthusiasm; but his chief officers, won by Octavian or disgusted by the influence of Cleopatra, deserted him in such numbers that he knew not whom to trust, and gave up all thoughts of maintaining the contest with energy. Urged by Cleopatra, he resolved to carry off his fleet and abandon the army. All preparations were made in secret, and the great fleet put to sea on the 28th of August. For the four following days there was a strong gale from the south. Neither could Antony escape, nor could Octavian put to sea against him from Corcyra. On the 2nd of September, however, the wind fell, and Octavian’s light vessels, by using their oars, easily came up with the unwieldy galleys of the eastern fleet. A battle was now seen to be inevitable.
Antony’s ships were like impregnable fortresses to the assault of the slight vessels of Octavian; and, though they lay nearly motionless in the calm sea, little impression was made upon them. But about noon a breeze sprang up from the west; and Cleopatra, followed by sixty Egyptian ships, made sail in a southerly direction. Antony immediately sprang from his ship of war into a light galley and followed. Deserted by their commander, the captains of Antony’s ships continued to resist desperately; nor was it till the greater part of them were set on fire that the contest was decided. Before evening closed the whole fleet was destroyed; most of the men and all the treasure on board perished. A few days after, when the shameful flight of Antony was made known to his army, all his legions went over to the conqueror.
DEATH OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
[Sidenote: [30-29 B.C.]]
It was not for eleven months after the battle of Actium that Octavian entered the open gates of Alexandria. He had been employed in the interval in founding the city of Nicopolis to celebrate his victory on the northern horn of the Ambracian Gulf, in rewarding his soldiers, and settling the affairs of the provinces of the East. In the winter he returned to Italy, and it was midsummer, 30 B.C., before he arrived in Egypt.
When Antony and Cleopatra arrived off Alexandria they put a bold face upon the matter. Some time passed before the real state of the case was known; but it soon became plain that Egypt was at the mercy of the conqueror. The queen formed all kinds of wild designs. One was to transport the ships that she had saved across the Isthmus of Suez and seek refuge in some distant land where the name of Rome was yet unknown. Some ships were actually drawn across, but they were destroyed by the Arabs, and the plan was abandoned. She now flattered herself that her powers of fascination, proved so potent over Cæsar and Antony, might subdue Octavian. Secret messages passed between the conqueror and the queen; nor were Octavian’s answers such as to banish hope.
Antony, full of repentance and despair, shut himself up in Pharos, and there remained in gloomy isolation.
In July, 30 B.C., Octavian appeared before Pelusium. The place was surrendered without a blow. Yet, at the approach of the conqueror, Antony put himself at the head of a division of cavalry, and gained some advantage. But on his return to Alexandria he found that Cleopatra had given up all her ships; and no more opposition was offered. On the 1st of August (Sextilis as it was then called) Octavian entered the open gates of Alexandria. Both Antony and Cleopatra sought to win him. Antony’s messengers the conqueror refused to see; but he still used fair words to Cleopatra. The queen had shut herself up in a sort of mausoleum built to receive her body after death, which was not approachable by any door; and it was given out that she was really dead. All the tenderness of old times revived in Antony’s heart. He stabbed himself, and in a dying state ordered himself to be laid by the side of Cleopatra.
The queen touched by pity, ordered her expiring lover to be drawn up by cords into her retreat, and bathed his temples with her tears. After he had breathed his last, she consented to see Octavian. Her penetration soon told her that she had nothing to hope from him. She saw that his fair words were only intended to prevent her from desperate acts, and reserve her for the degradation of his triumph. This impression was confirmed when all instruments by which death could be inflicted were found to have been removed from her apartments. But she was not to be so baffled. She pretended all submission; but when the ministers of Octavian came to carry her away, they found her lying dead upon her couch, attended by her faithful waiting-women, Iras and Charmion. The manner of her death was never ascertained; popular belief ascribed it to the bite of an asp, which had been conveyed to her in a basket of fruit.
Cleopatra was an extraordinary person. At her death she was but thirty-eight years of age. Her power rested not so much on actual beauty as on her fascinating manners and her extreme readiness of wit. In her follies there was a certain magnificence, which excites even a dull imagination. We may estimate the real power of her mental qualities by observing the impression her character made upon the Roman poets of the time. No meditated praises could have borne such testimony to her greatness as the lofty strain in which Horace celebrates her fall, and congratulates the Roman world on its escape from the ruin which she was threatening to the Capitol.
Octavian dated the years of his imperial monarchy from the day of the battle of Actium. But it was not till two years after (the summer of 29 B.C.) that he established himself in Rome as ruler of the Roman world. Then he celebrated three magnificent triumphs, after the example of his uncle the great dictator, for his victories in Dalmatia, at Actium, and in Egypt. At the same time the temple of Janus was closed (notwithstanding that border wars still continued in Gaul and Spain) for the first time since the year 235 B.C. All men drew breath more freely, and all except the soldiery looked forward to a time of tranquillity. Liberty and independence were forgotten words. After the terrible disorders of the last century, the general cry was for quiet at any price. Octavian was a person admirably fitted to fulfil these aspirations. His uncle Julius was too fond of active exertion to play such a part well. Octavian never shone in war, while his vigilant and patient mind was well fitted for the discharge of business. He avoided shocking popular feeling by assuming any title savouring of royalty; but he enjoyed by universal consent an authority more than regal.[b]
AN ESTIMATE OF THE PERSONALITY OF ANTONY
We cannot well take leave of the fallen Antony without a few words of characterisation: “He was,” says Liddell, “by nature a genial, open-hearted Roman, a good soldier, quick, resolute, and vigorous, but reckless and self-indulgent, devoid alike of prudence and of principle. The corruptions of the age, the seductions of power, and the evil influence of Cleopatra, paralysed a nature capable of better things. We know him chiefly through the exaggerated assaults of Cicero in his Philippics, and the narratives of writers devoted to Octavian. But after all deductions for partial representation, enough remains to show that Antony had all the faults of Cæsar, with little of his redeeming greatness.”[b] This is scant praise. A more sympathetic estimate is that of Gardthausen who, eloquently summarising the heroic qualities of Antony’s character, sees in him a type of man rare in antiquity. Here is his characterisation:
Antony’s chivalrous bearing and the chivalrous bent of his mind contributed to his success in a manner highly impressive in a character of the antique ages. These can boast of few characters that may be called chivalrous, at the most an occasional Homeric hero, the princely leader of a national army, such as Alexander the Great, Pyrrhus, and Demetrius, the counterfeit presentment to Plutarch’s Antonius; possibly chivalrous standards of life may have been spread among the Greek mercenaries. The chivalrous warrior was a man who was ready at any moment to pledge his person and mindful of the ups and downs of battle to treat his opponent as he himself would be treated were their situations reversed. The small republics of antiquity were not fit soil to nourish such a character as this. The ancients were not soldiers before everything else, their ideals were sought in another region.
Chivalrous as he was, he was ready to credit others with a similar disposition; and his confidence was seldom misplaced. At the head of five ships he defied the warnings of those about him and sailed against the whole fleet of Domitius Ahenobarbus with chivalrous recklessness; he accepted an invitation from Sextus Pompeius the admiral to eat with him on board his vessel; a word would have sufficed to effect his imprisonment or his murder; but this word was never spoken, for his unquestioning reliance on the pledged honour of his foe had disarmed that foe. Where he was deceived, however, as for example later on by that same Domitius Ahenobarbus who went over to the enemy before the battle of Actium, Antony had enough generosity of mind to send over to him into the enemy’s camp his possessions and his slaves. To Sextus Pompeius later on he showed admirable forbearance in Asia Minor and shrank as long as it was possible from believing in the treachery of a man who had stood by his side first as ally and then as supplicant for protection. Even when fate was against him, he assumed the same chivalrous spirit in his foe that he himself would have manifested had the circumstances been reversed. So for instance after the battle of Actium he challenged Cæsar to personal combat although the acceptance of the challenge by his opponent, who was everything rather than chivalrous, was on the face of it very improbable.
As the knight for his lady so Antony in an official despatch declared his constant readiness to die for Cleopatra, and on receiving news of her death he said again that now his last reason for living had fallen away. Even in death he was consoled with the thought that it was as a Roman of Romans that he had been subdued.
In conclusion “chivalrous” is the term that I would apply to that exaggerated sensibility of honour which could not reconcile itself to giving the command for an absolutely indispensable retreat after the Median campaign and so charged a field officer under him with the burden of issuing that command.
To talk of the personal bravery of Antony, which his foes too recognised, were superfluous; like his Herculean frame, it was part of his birthright, not a thing acquired with years through the steady energy of his will. He was equally at home with his men whether on the field of battle or in the young men’s wrestling ring. He was most in his element however at the head of his trusty horsemen, when after a mad ride he could flash unexpected upon the enemy like lightning, reduce them to nothing or take them captive. As an instance of this, take the brilliant cavalry engagement with Servilius in lower Italy and the last victory he won over Cæsar’s horsemen at the hippodrome before Alexandria. His pride was then at the height of its ascension when he could come before Cleopatra as the knight before his lady to demand as the reward of victory, a kiss for himself, for the bravest of his horsemen a golden suit of armour.
Perhaps the foreign trait of faithlessness in him was just a symptom of that sultanic nature which very quickly developed itself in Antony as in many other Romans who ruled the East. Bountiful he had always been even before he possessed anything to give away, but in the East this bounty soon acquired a far more splendid play. In public he felt himself king of kings, bestowing on Monæses the Parthian refugee as the king of the Persians once bestowed on Themistocles, three towns, constantly making a new map of the East and giving provinces to his Egyptian queen, granting Polemon little Armenia as the reward for an embassy, giving his actors the town of Priene, in return for a good luncheon, making his cook as rich as a wealthy Magnesian. We can best see what sort of task he set his cook from a story that was whispered in Plutarch’s circle. At every time in the day the cook had to be in a position to serve a complete luncheon immediately. Eight wild boars were turning on the spit at the same time, because at a given moment one had to be ready roasted to be set instantly upon the table, and in this way all the preparations necessary for a luncheon for not more than twelve persons were conducted. Plutarch’s characteristic anecdote is a proof at once of the costliness of Antony’s court and the irregularity of his mode of life. If the preparation of one daily meal involved such expenditure we hardly need to reckon the crazy wagers with Cleopatra to arrive at an explanation of the immense sums raised and squandered by Antony in the East. His example set the standard for his own people; his eldest son Antyllus was yet a boy when he gave a doctor such a sum for a paradox in medical language that the man did not believe his ears.
But this extravagant expenditure was not all; it belonged to some extent to the maintenance of a sultan, and impressed the eastern imagination. The effect of the East upon the character of Antony was damaging in that it robbed him of requisite elasticity. There are characters that only reach their full altitude under circumstances of prosperity, and in the absence of these wither and fall away as the flower that lacks sunlight; others again will nowhere prove so defective as when exposed to a succession of good fortune; their better self slides out of sight until it is again summoned into activity by dire need which alone can spur them to heroical endeavour. Antony’s was of the latter kind; he required pressure from outside to recover his elasticity and bring out his resources to the full. In the noise and pother of battle, in the dire need of retreat after the defeat of Mutina and the Median campaign he did great deeds, but with the termination of the danger, the activity which it had called forth came also to an end; he sank into Eastern torpidity from which nothing could rouse him. Political questions ceased to exist for him, whole months passed in which not even the current business of administration was despatched.
Labienus might overwhelm Syria and Asia with Parthian horsemen and drive back the Romans upon the islands; at the same time one ugly despatch after another might come from Italy whither he was urged to go and lend succour by his wife, his brother, his legates who struggled vainly with Cæsar’s power; but nothing availed to tear him away from his idle indulgences at Alexandria. At the very crisis of the rupture when all the peoples of the ancient world were arming themselves either for or against him, he withdrew to Samos to live a life of pleasure undisturbed by the clash of arms.
Here are examples enough to prove how he regarded his high place in the world, to what use he in reality put it for the pursuit of his private love affairs, how he accepted the privileges without recognising the responsibilities of his position.
He entirely lacked a sense of responsibility as a prince--the reproach weighs only too heavily upon him--and in a similar way, so little patriotic spirit for Rome survived in him during his life in the East, that he did not want even to leave his ashes to his fatherland. We miss in his indolent nature all joy in business and in those creative strokes that he still made every few years; he followed the impulses of the moment without reflecting what would be their ultimate consequences; this habit grew so natural to him that he followed it at Actium and plunged himself and his followers in ruin.
Paradoxical as it may sound, Antony was no more a genuine commander than a genuine statesman. As a subordinate officer of the dictator he won well-earned encomium. Once in the position of dictator himself and the difference, the great difference, is evident.
Certainly the victory at Philippi was exclusively due to him, but Cæsar’s party owed Philippi to the tactics, not to the strategy of Antony. He had to take battle upon ground chosen by the enemy, and had to thank his own bravery and his legions for victory. From this time forward, as the ancients have already contended, Antony only conquered through his subordinate officers, while, by himself, he was beaten. The honour of a triumph to which the subordinate officers could, strictly speaking, make no claims, was accorded to them, although with a less generous spirit than his colleague Cæsar showed; only in cases of immoderate success was his suspicion aroused and then he was led to thrust aside officers of too conspicuous good fortune like Ventidius. He alone must be made responsible for the disastrous issue of the Medo-Parthian campaign. The conception was wrong, the execution defective, in as much as the best time was over before he commenced operations. Before the last crisis of the war he again let the auspicious moment slip past him.
Instead of making rapid use of the advantage assured to him by the well-filled condition of his military exchequer and the forward condition of his armaments, instead of hurling his force upon Italy which could well have been overpowered in view of the scarcity of money and the deep disaffection that prevailed, he again frittered away the best time with Cleopatra in Samos and at last was compelled to postpone the decisive action, much to his own disadvantage, until the next year, thus losing the advantage in readiness of equipment which he had had over his opponent. Finally one may ask, did ever a general, who deserved the name of general, prematurely pronounce a battle to be lost, in which not only supremacy and life but the destiny of a whole world was at stake? But Antony loved to treat serious issues lightly and trifles as if they were of supreme importance.
In his relations to women his sensual sultanic nature and his chivalrous character unite. We need not here concern ourselves with the foul love stories of his youth. His enemy Cicero speaks frequently of Antony’s men and women friends and also of others about whom it is uncertain whether they should be classed with the former or with the latter. Antony was always regardless of his reputation; he well knew that in this direction he had nothing left to spoil. We will not here intrude upon his innumerable liaisons with beautiful dancers, distinguished Roman ladies and eastern princesses. Cleopatra alone could claim, at all events in their last years, to exercise her dominion over him undivided with any other wife or mistress. This dominion was so absolute and so enduring that in the days of the ancients it was thought impossible to explain it by natural means and recourse was had to the superstition of a magic potion.
Could we have seen Antony on foot with a bevy of eunuchs following the litter of his mistress at the entry into some Egyptian town, we might have concluded him to be a knight doing homage to his lady’s honour. Mediæval worship of women is absolutely foreign to antiquity; but Antony based his descent on Hercules, who after his twelve Labours became a slave of Omphale, and laid aside club and crossbow to help his lady at the spinning-wheel. Antony followed the example of his great ancestor and paid obedience in effeminate sloth where it was within his power and his duty to be sovereign. The sacrifices he made to his lady are without a parallel in the history of the world; and Cleopatra’s thanks were, to betray him first at Actium and then at his death in Alexandria. In a word one may sum up the verdict in the language of the ancients: Nature had intended Mark Antony for a Deuteragonist, chance and misfortune made him Protagonist. But Shakespeare says: “His taints and honours waged equal with him.”[f]
FOOTNOTES
[131] This story is however rendered somewhat doubtful by the manner in which Cinna is mentioned in Virgil’s Ninth Eclogue, which was certainly written in or after the year 40 B.C.
[132] Pedius was son of Cæsar’s second sister, Julia minor, and therefore first cousin (once removed) to Octavius.
[133] He had divorced Tullia, the orator’s daughter, before he left Italy.
[134] [Velleius Paterculus[d] thus contrasts Brutus and Cassius:
“Such was the end assigned by fortune to the party of Marcus Brutus, who was then in his thirty-seventh year, and whose mind had been incorrupt till the day which obscured all his virtues by the rashness of one act. Cassius was as much the better commander, as Brutus was the better man. Of the two, you would rather have Brutus for a friend; as an enemy, you would stand more in dread of Cassius. In the one there was greater ability, in the other greater virtue. Had they been successful, it would have been as much for the interest of the state to have had Brutus for its ruler rather than Cassius, as it was to have Cæsar rather than Antony.”]
[135] [Says Florus[e]: “The madness of Antony, which could not be allayed by ambition, was at last exterminated by luxury and licentiousness. The Egyptian woman demanded of the drunken general, as the price of her favours, nothing less than the Roman Empire. This Antony promised her; as though the Romans had been easier to conquer than the Parthians.”]
XXVIII. THE STATE OF ROME AT THE END OF THE REPUBLIC
A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW OF THE REPUBLICAN CONSTITUTION
Shortly before the year 500 B.C. the change was accomplished which transformed the Roman State from a monarchy or military dictatorship (in which the dictator was confronted by the influence of a powerful council drawn from the ranks of the original burgher families, and by the legal necessity of the concurrence of the whole people, and therefore moved within the limits of a system developed in harmony with customary usages and closely analogous to the organisation of other Latin cities) into an aristocratic-oligarchic republic, with a strong executive authority in the hands of a magistracy annually elected by the people; the substructure of political life keeping in general outline the form into which it had developed and in which it had to a great extent become fixed by the end of the monarchical period.
This constitution was not formulated from the first in any general and fundamental law (any more than the older system had been), nor was it determinately fixed by such a law at any subsequent period, while, by means of particular statutes, some more or less important innovations were by degrees adopted as supplementary to the organisation handed down from primitive times and to the traditional code. Many things were gradually and silently modified by the mere force of altered circumstances. The will of the people was the foundation of all law and all authority in the state, and every man who enjoyed the full rights of citizenship contributed directly, by his vote in the legislative and elective assemblies, to the expression of the popular will; though with varying degrees of influence in individual cases and within the limits of set form and inherited opinion.
The freedom of republican Rome presupposed the existence of a servile population to do the most menial work, a population from which in earlier times the burgher class received only a small accession, invariably unwelcome and regarded with contempt in the first generation of citizenship. At the same time, the ancient usages mos majorum were held by the freemen in high honour, enhanced by a kind of religious reverence, as having come into being by the favour and help of the gods, and having continued to exist under their constant control and in virtue of their intervention (religio).
Among these ancient usages was the classification of burghers according to their wealth and economic independence or their poverty and precarious means of subsistence; a classification which found expression in early times in class divisions and in the application of the same standard to the citizen army, and was even more strikingly manifested in the exclusive employment of wealthy burghers for the special duties of cavalry, with its complement, the formation of an order of knighthood, on the basis of which there arose another class numerically small and a governing body of citizens, to wit, the senate. The majesty of the people (maiestas populi) was recognised by the highest executive power (by the lowering of the symbols of consular authority, fasces submissi, traced back by tradition to Valerius Publicola in the first year of the consulate) and from the people all authority in the state was derived; nemo potestatem habet nisi a populo (Cic. de Leg. Agr. II, 11). In them was vested the right of enacting laws and the right of making war or peace (Polyb. VI, 14); by the popular election of the magistrates they also indirectly determined the composition of the senate and they originally exercised the highest jurisdiction. But their effective action in popular assemblies was dependent on the initiative of the magistrates, which in turn was partly under the control of the senate.
This body (which consisted of life members, and was consequently subject only to gradual change by the infusion of fresh blood, and which maintained its honourable character by the expulsion of unworthy members), as the centre of rule and administration, preserved continuity and balance in the policy of the state by means of special regulations and injunctions set forth within the bounds permitted by express law and ancient custom; but the senate itself could not transact business or pass resolutions except under the presidency and direction of competent magistrates. Moreover, the execution of all decrees and the maintenance of law and order were (like the initiative in legislation and the superintendence of the transactions of the council) in the hands of two or more co-ordinate magistrates elected annually. But these magistrates were chosen solely from among the economically independent burgesses, regard being had to age and to promotion through a fixed course of preliminary steps--requirements which were enforced with more minuteness and exactitude as time went on. From the consulate, that is from the two colleagues invested with the highest authority in matters civil and military (imperium), which they wielded at first with but a limited amount of assistance (from the quæstors), the magisterial authority was gradually split up among a series of officials armed with special powers (potestas) for special functions and departments of the public service. The citizens obeyed the orders of these magistrates with strict subordination and discipline, especially in time of war.
In the records of the first century and a half of the republic the development of the state system and administration from this primary and general basis and the modifications it underwent during the growth (slow at first and then more rapid) of the power and greatness of Rome, are obscured by the fact that a struggle for higher political employment--i.e., over the question whether it should be extended from a close corporation of burgesses (the patricians) to the whole body of citizens--is intermingled with a struggle between aristocracy and democracy for changes in the character of the system and administration itself. This twofold aspect has not been clearly perceived by later writers,[136] and was probably not adequately brought out in the brief historical records of remote antiquity. We shall probably not be wrong in assuming that the patricians, though gradually forced to resign their class privileges, and the institutions and ordinances associated with them, such as the comitia curiata, continued to maintain aristocratic interests and institutions by assuming more and more the position of nobles and allying themselves with the most prominent plebeian families; while the plebeians, as long as they were engaged in the struggle for equal rights, asserted the interests of democracy and extended democratic principles to the whole working of the state.
The first step in the change and development of the older system which had survived the abolition of monarchy, a step which decided the whole subsequent course of the movement, was the creation of an office for the benefit of the less privileged citizens, the tribunate of the plebs (tribunatus plebis), an office which had originally no executive functions but was charged with the protection of the individual citizen and the control of the action of the magistracy. By degrees the tribunate acquired an initiative, first as the medium of the demand of the less privileged citizens for equal rights, and then as the promoter of the interests of the common people and of a general democratic tendency in legislation and administration. The latter function came more decidedly into the foreground when the struggle between patricians and plebeians had been fought out (after 366-300 or 286), though for a considerable time it manifested itself only in constitutional opposition to everything that bore the semblance of encroachment on the part of the senate or of magisterial authority.
But although a twofold initiative had thus come into being in the legislature, that of the consulate in the comitia curiata, relying mainly on the support of the senate, and that of the tribunate in the comitia tributa, legalised by the lex Publilia in 339, the government preserved its aristocratic character during the period between the formation of a confederated state (340-338) and the end of the Punic War, the senate retaining a strong executive authority and an undisturbed supremacy in all affairs, general and particular, without any signal interference on the part of the people beyond what was sanctioned by ancient usage; the reason for this being that only in exceptional cases did the tribunes advance legislative proposals in direct opposition to the will of the senate.
It was not till after the destruction of Carthage, when on the one hand the commons had greatly increased in numbers (in the municipal towns and colonies as well as in Rome) as compared with the ruling or senatorial class, and the poorer portion of the former class had congregated in the capital, and when, on the other hand, discontent was rife in the Italian confederacy; when the senate was falling more and more under the control of a limited number of noble families, who appropriated the major part of the advantages accruing from the enforced exertions of subject provinces, leaving a share in the profits to such members of the knightly class only as came forward in the character of publicani or negotiatores, and to them not enough to satisfy their cupidity--that the tribunate of the plebs assumed the character of an opposition pure and simple, a character which became more strongly marked after the time of the Gracchi. It developed a legislative activity which, however we may judge of the objects that individual statesmen had in view--as to ameliorate the condition of the poorer citizens by the allotment of arable land or the distribution of corn at reduced prices, to limit the arbitrary power of the magistrates or of the senate, to prevent the excessive concentration of government influence and authority, to promote the movement in favour of equal rights among the members of the confederacy, to appoint particular persons for the conduct of public affairs especially in the case of military command--could not but have a pernicious effect, because, forcibly dissociated from the senate, it was by its very nature in the hands of individuals distinguished by the accident of an official tenure liable to annual change and dependent on popular favour.
After a series of conflicts and violent political measures (inaugurated by the Gracchi, Saturninus, and others) and a short-lived victory of the democratic party under Marius and Cinna, a reaction in favour of aristocracy combined with the military dictatorship of an individual set in under Sulla, the ancient boundary lines of state and people having been swept away by the outcome of the Social War. The cardinal points of this reaction were the abolition of the initiative of the tribunate, and the strengthening of senatorial influence by appointing none but senators to magisterial office.
But this reaction, though carried through with ruthless severity, was the less capable of holding its ground from the fact that the old forms in which it was embodied were absolutely unsuited to the dimensions of the state and the geographical distribution of the people under the radical change of conditions brought about by the Social War. After the lapse of ten years the rights of the tribunate were restored. But from that time forth it placed itself at the head of the democratic and turbulent elements in the capital and its immediate neighbourhood, and so became a mere instrument in the hands of individual despots who attempted (sometimes by wealth, but more generally by deeds of arms and popularity with the soldiery) to build up a personal sway before which the tottering authority of the senate was forced to bow, in spite of the resistance offered by the aristocrats who (like Catulus and Hortensius) maintained the principles of Sulla, and of men who (like Cicero) based their influence on services of a peaceful character.
At length, having endured a civil war between the leaders of opposing factions, weary of discord and of struggles in which all political institutions had sunk to the level of empty and impotent forms liable to perpetual violation and abuse, the state found under an autocracy the repose and external order which the vast majority of the inhabitants of Italy were not unwilling to accept in exchange for a political life from participation in which they must have been virtually excluded, to a great extent, by the inadequacy of the forms in which it was embodied.[b]
We have now traced the progress and decline of the Roman constitution through its several stages. We have seen it pass from a monarchy into a patrician oligarchy, from a patrician oligarchy into a limited republic, from a limited republic into an oligarchy of wealth; and now, after a century of civil war, in which the state swayed from one extreme to the other, we close with the contemplation of an absolute despotism.[137] Every page of the latter portion of our narrative shows how inevitably events were tending to this issue. The Roman world had long been preparing for it. At no time had such authority been altogether alien from the minds of the people of Rome. Dictatorships were frequent in their earlier history. In later times the consuls were, by the will of the senate, raised to dictatorial power to meet emergencies, military or civil. The despotic commands conferred upon Sulla and Pompey, the powers seized first by Cæsar, and after him by the triumvirate, were all of the same form as the authority conferred upon Octavian--that is, all were, in form at least, temporary and provisional. The disorders of the state required the intervention of one or more persons of absolute authority. And whether power was vested in a dictator, such as Sulla and Cæsar; in a sole consul, such as Pompey; in a commission of three, such as the triumvirate of Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus; or in an imperator, such as Octavian alone, the constitutional principle was the same. These despotic powers were in every case, except in the cases of Sulla and Cæsar, granted for a definite term; even Cæsar’s first dictatorships were conferred for limited periods. The triumvirate was renewed at intervals of five years, the imperial rule of Octavian at intervals of ten. In theory these powers were conferred exceptionally, for a temporary purpose; and when the purpose was served, the exception was to yield to the rule. Even in the reign of Octavian there were some persons credulous enough to expect a restoration of the republic.
Octavian’s adroitness has often been commended. But he had many examples to warn and to guide him. Above all, the precedent of his uncle, the great dictator, proved that the Romans were not prepared to accept even order and good government at the price of royalty; and he dexterously avoided the danger. The cruelties of the triumviral proscription he was able to throw chiefly upon Antony. But these very cruelties stood him in stead; for they induced men to estimate at more than its real worth the clemency which distinguished his sole government. He avoided jealousy by assuming a power professedly only temporary.
The title by which he liked to be known was that of “prince”; for he revived in his own person the title princeps senatus, which had slept since the death of Catulus. But in fact he absorbed all the powers of the state. As imperator he exercised absolute control over the lives of all Roman citizens not within the limits of the city. As pontifex maximus, an office for which he waited patiently till the death of Lepidus, he controlled the religion of the state. He assumed the censorial power without a colleague to impede his action; thus he was able to revise at pleasure the register of the citizens and the list of the senate, promoting or degrading whom he pleased. He appropriated also the tribunician power; and thus the popular assembly was by a side blow deprived of vitality, for without its tribunes it was naught. Consuls were still elected to give name to the year; and the assembly of the centuries still met for the empty purpose of electing those whom the prince named. Often, indeed, several pairs were elected for one year, after a practice begun by the great dictator.
The name of Italy now at length assumed the significance which it still bears; for all free inhabitants of Cisalpine Gaul obtained the rights of Roman citizens. But little was done to repair the losses and decays of which we have spoken in former chapters. The military colonies planted by Sulla and Octavian had lowered its condition even beyond its former misery. Ancient and respectable citizens made way for reckless and profligate soldiery--such as the centurion who would have slain the poet Virgil. Our pity for the ejected inhabitants is somewhat lessened by the thought that all the civilised world was open to them, for all the world was Roman. Gaul, and Spain, and Sicily, and the provinces of the East, depopulated by long wars, gratefully received families of Italian citizens, who brought them their habits of civilised life, industry, and such property as they had saved from the ruin of their homes. Great as was the injustice of expelling these persons, the actual loss and suffering, after the pain of leaving home was over, must have been incalculably less than we, in the present condition of Europe, are apt to imagine. After the settlement of these colonies, it is probable that what could be done for the welfare of Italy was done by Augustus and his able ministers, Agrippa and Mæcenas. But the evils were too great and too recent to admit of palliation; and Italy probably never recovered from the effects of the Roman wars of conquest, till she received a new population from the north.
The provinces were gainers by the transference of power from the senate to a single man. The most important provinces were governed by deputies appointed by the prince himself;[138] the rest were left to the rule of senatorial proconsuls. The condition of the imperial provinces was preferred; for the taxes exacted were lighter, and the government was under severer control. Instances occur of senatorial provinces requesting as a favour to be transferred to the rule of the emperor. But even the senatorial government was more equitable than of old. The salaries of the proconsuls were fixed; greedy men were no longer left to pay themselves by extortion; and the governors held power for several years, so that they had more temptation to win the good opinion of their subjects. The examples of Pilate and Felix show, indeed, that glaring injustice was still perpetrated; but these very cases show that the governors stood in awe of those whom they governed--for in both cases the iniquity was committed through fear of the Jews, whom these men had misgoverned and whose accusations they feared. It may be added that both these men were severely punished by the Romans for their misgovernment.
The world, therefore, on the whole, was a gainer by the substitution of the imperial rule for the constitution falsely named republican. For nearly two centuries the government was, with two intervals, administered by rulers of great abilities and great energy; and though, no doubt, there was enough of oppression and to spare, yet there was much less than had been common in the times of senatorial dominion.
But if the provinces--that is, the empire at large--continued to be content with a central despotism, in comparison with the old senatorial rule of “every man for himself,” this was not the case at Rome. The educated classes at least, and the senatorial nobility, soon began to regret even the turbulent days of Marius and Pompey. The practice of oratory, in which Romans excelled and took chief delight, was confined to mere forensic pleadings, and lost all that excitement which attached to it when an orator could sway the will of the senate, and calm or rouse the seething passions of the Forum. We cannot wonder at Cicero, notwithstanding his hatred for commotion, throwing himself into the conflict against Antony with the fervid energy which is revealed in the Philippics. He felt that this was the last chance of supporting the old freedom of the Forum, which, with all its turbulence, he loved, partly as the scene of his own glories, partly as a barrier against the crushing force of military despotism. And though the slaughter of the proscription and of the Civil War removed many of the leading senators, men of independent will revolted against the deadening weight of despotic government, as is revealed in the pages of Tacitus.
For a time, however, there was a general disposition, even at Rome, to welcome the tranquillity ensured by the rule of Octavian, and nothing can more strongly show the security that men experienced, even before the battle of Actium, than the sudden burst with which literature and the polite arts rose from their slumbers.
LITERATURE
Since the close of the period of conquest literary pursuits had languished--the natural effect of political excitement and perilous times. Oratory indeed had flourished, as every page of our history indicates; and oratory may be called the popular literature of Rome, as truly as journalism may be called the popular literature of to-day. Cicero, a master of his art both in theory and practice, has left us an account of a host of orators whom he thought worthy of being placed in a national catalogue. Of the Gracchi, of Antonius, of Crassus, of Sulpicius, we have spoken. After their time Cotta was the chief favourite, and then Hortensius rose to be “king of the courts.” He was what we may call an advocate by profession, taking little part in politics till he had made a large fortune by the presents which at that time stood in the place of regular fees; and even in the hot conflicts that distinguished the rise of Pompey’s popularity he took but a languid part. His style of speaking was what Cicero styles Asiatic--that is, florid and decorated beyond what even the liberal judgment of his critic could approve. Cicero considered his own youthful manner to partake of this character, and refers to the brave speech in which he defended Sext. Roscius of Ameria as an example of this style. But that elaborate phraseology and copious flow of language remained with him to the last. It was only when his feelings were strongly excited, or when his time was limited, as when he defended old Rabirius or assailed Catiline in the senate, that he displayed anything of that terrible concentration of speech with which Demosthenes smote his antagonists. So far as we can judge from the scanty remnants preserved, C. Gracchus, more than any other Roman, possessed this fierce earnestness.
The example and criticism of Cicero lead to the conclusion that Roman oratory generally had a tendency to be redundant, if not wordy. This tendency may be ascribed to the prevailing mode in which the young orators of the day sought to acquire skill in speaking. The schools of the rhetorical teachers were thronged by them; and here they were taught to declaim fluently on any subject, without reference to passion or feeling or earnestness of purpose. The Romans of a former generation endeavoured to crush such schools; and it was not at Rome that the most celebrated teachers were to be found. Athens and Rhodes were the fashionable universities, as we may call them, to which the young Romans resorted, when they had finished their schooling at Rome. After learning grammar and reading Latin and Greek poets in their boyhood, they repaired to the more famous haunts of Grecian learning to study a little geometry and a little philosophy; but it was to rhetoric or the acquirement of a facile power of speaking on any given subject that the ambitious youth devoted their chief efforts.
Education in Greek literature led many persons in this period to compose Greek memoirs of the stirring scenes in which they had lived or acted. Examples of this kind had been set as early as the Second Punic War by Cincius and Fabius. It now became very common; but many began to employ the vernacular language. C. Fannius Strabo, who mounted the walls of Carthage by the side of Ti. Gracchus, and his contemporary L. Cælius Antipater, wrote Latin histories famous in their time. Both were thought worthy of abridgment by Brutus. The former is commended by Sallust, the latter was preferred to Sallust by the emperor Hadrian. Even Cicero commended Antipater as an improver of Latin composition; his follower Asellio, says the orator, returned to the meagre dullness of the ancient annalists. Then came L. Cornelius Sisenna, who witnessed the bloody scenes of the Social and First Civil wars and wrote their history. Cicero commends his style; Sallust speaks with praise of his diligence, but hints at his subserviency to Sulla and the senate. But the great men who made history at this epoch also took up the pen to write history. Q. Lutatius Catulus, the colleague of Marius, left an account of the Cimbrian War. The good Rutilius Rufus employed his leisure in penning an historical work. Sulla composed a memoir of his own political life, to which Plutarch often refers; but from the specimens which he gives the dictator seems not to have been scrupulously impartial in his narrative. Lucullus composed similar memoirs. Cicero drew up a Greek notice of his consulate with his own ready pen, and endeavoured to persuade L. Lucceius to undertake a similar task. Even the grim Marius wishes his deeds commemorated.
The Commentaries of Cæsar have been already quoted as illustrating one characteristic of the great dictator’s mind. His pen was taken up by several of his officers--A. Hirtius, who completed the narrative of the Gallic War, C. Oppius, to whom the memoirs of the dictator’s wars in Egypt, Africa, and Spain are often attributed, L. Cornelius Balbus, and others. But the most remarkable prose writer of the late republican era is C. Sallustius Crispus, familiarly known to us as Sallust. The two works that remain to us from the pen of this vigorous writer, the account of the Catilinarian conspiracy and the Jugurthine War, are rather to be styled political pamphlets than histories. Sallust was, as we have mentioned, an ardent partisan of the Marian and Cæsarian party. He had been expelled from the senate. Dislike of the reigning oligarchy appears at every turn, notwithstanding the semblance of impartiality assumed by a man who practised the profligacy which he indignantly denounces. But Sallust’s writings are valuable in a literary point of view, because they disclose the terse and concentrated energy of which the Latin language was capable, qualities little favoured by the oratorical tendencies of the day, but used with marvellous effect in a later age by Tacitus.
Other writers now first endeavoured to hand down in Latin a history of Rome from her foundation, or from early periods of her existence. Such were C. Licinius Macer, Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, and Q. Valerius Antias, all born about the beginning of the last century before the Christian era. The works of these and other annalists were used and swallowed up by the history of Livy, who was born, probably at Padua, in the year 59 B.C., and belongs to the imperial era of Augustus.
Some few writers in this same period began to cultivate grammatical and philological studies. The founder of these pursuits at Rome is reputed to be L. Ælius Stilo, the friend of Q. Metellus Numidicus and his companion in exile. He was closely followed by Aurelius Opilius, a freedman, who attended Rutilius Rufus into exile, as Stilo had attended Metellus. But the man whose name is in this department most conspicuous is M. Terentius Varro of Reate. He was born in 116 B.C., ten years later than Cicero, whose friendship he cultivated to the close of the great orator’s life. Varro was a laborious student, and earned by his successful pursuit of all kinds of knowledge a reputation not deserved by his public life. From the first he adhered to the cause of Pompey. After Pharsalia, Cæsar received him with the same clemency that he had shown to all his foes, and employed him in promoting the plans which he had formed of establishing a public library at Rome. After the death of Cæsar he retired to the country, and confined himself to literary pursuits; but this did not save him from being placed on the proscription list. He escaped, however, to be received into favour by Octavian, and continued his studies in grammar, philology, and agriculture, till he reached the great age of eighty-eight, when he died in peace. Of his great work on the Latin language, originally consisting of twenty-four books, six remain to attest the industry of the man and the infantine state of philological science at the time. His work on agriculture in three books, written when he was eighty years old, is still in our hands, and forms the most accurate account we possess from the Romans of the subject. Fragments of many other writers on all kinds of topics have been handed down to justify the title given to Varro--“the most learned of the Romans.”
We will close this sketch of the prose literature of the last age of the republic with a notice of Cicero’s writings. Of his oratory and of his epistles something has been said in former pages; and it is to these productions that we must attribute the great orator’s place in the commonwealth of letters. Of his poems it were better to say nothing. Of his memoirs and historical writings little is known, unless we count the fragments of The Republic in this class. But his rhetorical and philosophical essays each fill a goodly volume; and the writings have been the theme of warm admiration for ages past. Yet it is to be doubted whether the praises lavished upon them are not chiefly due to the magic influence of the language in which they are expressed. The Brutus doubtless is extremely interesting as containing the judgment of Rome’s greatest orator on all the speakers of his own generation and of foregoing times. The dialogues on The Orator are yet more interesting as furnishing a record of his own professional experience. But the philosophical works of Cicero are of little philosophical value. They were written not so much to teach mankind as to employ his time at moments when he was banished from the city. Their highest merit consists in that lucid and graceful style which seduced the great Italian Latinists at the end of the fifteenth century to abjure all words and phrases which did not rest on Ciceronian authority, and which led Erasmus himself, who resisted this pedantry, to “spend ten years in reading Cicero.”
THE DRAMA
The dramatic art fell more and more into dishonour. We hear, indeed, of two illustrious actors, Æsopus and Roscius, who were highly honoured at Rome, and died in possession of large fortunes. But it was from the great families that their honours and the means of making money came. The theatres, as we have before observed, remained mere temporary buildings till the second consulship of Pompey, when the first stone theatre at Rome was erected by one of his wealthy freedmen. The pieces represented were more of the nature of spectacles. Those in which Roscius and Æsopus acted must have been old plays revived. In this period hardly one name of a dramatic author occurs. It was not in theatres, but in amphitheatres, that Rome and Roman towns sought amusement. Not only is the Flavian amphitheatre the most gorgeous of the remains of imperial Rome, but at all places where Roman remains are preserved, at Verona in Transpadane Gaul, at Arles and Nismes in “the Province,” at Treves on the distant Moselle, it is the amphitheatre that characterises the Roman city, as it is the theatre that marks the Greek.
During this period, indeed, a new kind of dramatic representation was introduced, which enjoyed a short-lived popularity. This was the mime. The name at least was borrowed from the Greeks of Sicily. The Greek mime was a kind of comic dialogue in prose, adapted to the purposes afterwards pursued by the Roman satire. But while the Greek mime in the hands of Sophron assumed a grave and dignified character, so that Aristotle classes him among poets though he wrote in prose, the Roman mime was generally coarse and licentious. Sulla was particularly fond of these productions and their authors. After his time, Dec. Laberius, a knight, strove to give them greater dignity. His mimes, as the fragments show, were in iambic verse, and differed from comedy chiefly in their absence of plot and their relation to the topics of the day. The fame of Laberius was rivalled by Publilius Syrus, a freedman who acted in his own mimes, whereas the knighthood of Laberius forbade this degradation. Cæsar, however, on the occasion of his quadruple triumph, thought fit to order Laberius to enter into a contest with Syrus; and the knight, though a man of sixty years, dared not refuse. His sense of the indignity was strongly marked by a fine passage in the prologue, still preserved:
“The Gods themselves cannot gainsay his might; And how can I, a man, think to gainsay it? So then, albeit I’ve lived twice thirty years Free from all taint of blame, I left my house At morn a Roman knight and shall return At eve a sorry player. ’Faith, my life Is one day longer than it should have been.”
In the course of the dialogue he expressed himself with freedom against the arbitrary power of the great dictator:
“And then, good people, we’ve outlived our freedom.”
And in another line almost ventured to threaten:
“It needs must be That he fears many, whom so many fear.”
Cæsar, however, took no further notice of these caustic sallies than to assign the prize to Syrus.
POETRY
In poetry, the long period from the death of Lucilius to the appearance of Virgil and Horace--a period of about sixty years--is broken only by two names worthy of mention. But it must be admitted that these names take a place in the first ranks of Roman literature. It is sufficient to mention Lucretius and Catullus.
T. Lucretius Carus was a Roman of good descent, as his name shows. All we know of him is that he was born about 95 B.C., and died by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his age. But if little is related of his life, his great poem on The Nature of the Universe is known by name at least to all. It is dedicated to C. Memmius Gemellus, a profligate man and an unscrupulous politician, who sided now with the senatorial party, now with Cæsar, and ended his days in exile at Mytilene. But Memmius had a fine sense in literature, as is evinced by his patronage of Lucretius and of Catullus.
The poem of Lucretius seems to have been published about the time when Clodius was lord of misrule in the Roman Forum, that is, about 58 B.C. Memmius took part against the demagogue, and to this the poet probably alludes in the introduction to the first book, where he regrets the necessity which involved his friend in political struggles.
The attempt of Lucretius in his great poem is to show that all creation took place and that all nature is sustained, without the agency of a creating and sustaining God, by the self-operation of the elemental atoms of which all matter is composed and into which all matter may be resolved. The doctrine is the doctrine of Epicurus; but his arguments are in great part borrowed from the early Greek philosophers, who delivered their doctrines in heroic verse of the same majestic kind that extorts admiration from the reader of Lucretius. He professes unbounded reverence for the name of Empedocles; and doubtless if the works of this philosopher, of Anaxagoras, and others were in our hands, we should see, what their fragments indicate, the sources from which Lucretius drew. Mingled with the philosophic argument are passages of noble verse; but here also it may be doubted how far we can believe in his originality. One of the most magnificent passages--the sacrifice of Iphigenia--is taken in every detail from the famous chorus in the Agamemnon of Æschylus. When we see this, and know that the almost universal habit of Latin poets was not to create but to adapt and borrow, we must pause before we give Lucretius credit for originality.
Yet none can rise from the perusal of Lucretius without feeling that he was a true poet. The ingenuity with which he employs Latin, a language unused to philosophical speculation, to express in the trammels of metre the most technical details of natural phenomena, is itself admirable. But more admirable are those majestic outbursts of song with which the philosophical speculations are diversified. The indignant and melancholy passion with which he attacks the superstitious religion of his time cannot but touch us, though we feel that his censure falls not upon superstition only, but upon the sacred form of religion herself. But he was little appreciated at Rome. Cicero speaks of him with that cold praise which is almost worse than censure. Horace never makes mention of his name. Virgil alone showed the true feeling of a poet by his value for Lucretius. He scrupled not to borrow whole lines from his poem; many passages in the Georgics bear witness to the faithful study which he had bestowed on the works of his great predecessor, and in one often-quoted place he confesses his inferiority to the great didactic poet. On the whole, it may be affirmed that Lucretius possessed the greatest genius of all Roman poets.
In striking contrast to the majestic gravity of Lucretius appears the second poet whom we have named. C. or Q. Valerius Catullus (for his first name is variously given) was a native of Verona, or its neighbourhood. He was born about 97 B.C., and is known to have been alive in the consulship of Vatinius (47 B.C.). He was then fifty years of age, and we hear of him no more. His father was a friend of Cæsar, and left his son in the possession of some property. He had a house on the lovely peninsula of Sirmio, at the foot of Lake Benacus, well known from his own description; he had a villa near Tibur, and many of his poems indicate the licentiousness of the life which he led at Rome. He endeavoured to mend his broken fortunes by attending Memmius, the friend of Lucretius, when he went as prætor into Bithynia, but was little satisfied with the result, and bitterly complained of the stinginess of his patron. When he was in Asia, his brother died, and he addressed to Hortalus, son of the orator Hortensius, that beautiful and affecting elegy which alone would entitle him to a foremost place among Roman poets. Fearless of consequences, he libelled Cæsar in language too coarse for modern ears. The great man laughed when he heard the libel, and asked the poet to dinner the same day.
The poems of Catullus range from gross impurity to lofty flights of inspiration. The fine poem called the Atys is the only Latin specimen which we possess of that dithyrambic spirit which Horace repudiated for himself. The elegy to Hortalus is perhaps the most touching piece of poetry that has been left us by the ancients. The imitation of Callimachus is a masterpiece in its way. The little poems on passing events--pièces de circonstance, as the French call them--are the most lively, natural, and graceful products of the Latin muse. To those who agree in this estimate it seems strange that Horace should only notice Catullus in a passing sneer. It is difficult to acquit the judge of jealousy. For Catullus cannot be ranked with the old poets, such as Livius, Ennius, and others, against the extravagant admiration of whom Horace not unjustly protested. His lyric compositions are as finished and perfect as the productions of Horace, who never wrote anything so touching as the elegy to Hortalus, or so full of poetic fire as the Atys.
With Catullus may be mentioned his friend C. Licinius Macer, commonly called Calvus, whom Horace honours by comprehending him in the same condemnation. He was some fifteen years younger, and was probably son of Licinius Macer the historian. He was a good speaker, and a poet (if we believe other authors, rather than Horace) not unworthy to be coupled with Catullus. He died at the early age of thirty-five or thirty-six.
Another poet highly praised by Catullus was C. Helvius Cinna, supposed to be the unlucky man torn to pieces by the rabble after Cæsar’s funeral by mistake for L. Cornelius Cinna.
At the time that the battles of Philippi secured to Italy somewhat of tranquillity, many others began to devote themselves to poetry. Among these were L. Varius Rufus, celebrated by Horace as the epic poet of his time, and the few fragments from his pen which remain do much to justify the praise. He was the intimate friend both of Horace and Virgil.
Furius Bibaculus also may be mentioned here as an epic poet, who attempted to commit to verse the campaign of Cæsar in Gaul. Horace ridicules his pretensions in two well-known passages; but there is reason to think that in the case of Furius also the satirist was influenced by some personal feeling.
But the fame of all other poets was obscured by the brightness which encircled the names of Virgil and Horace. Properly their history belongs to the Augustan or imperial era. But as they both published some of their best works before the battle of Actium, a slight notice of them may be permitted here.
P. Virgilius (or Vergilius) Maro was born at Andes, a village near Mantua, in the famous year 70 B.C., so that he was entering manhood about the time when Lucretius put an end to his own life. From his father he inherited a small estate. After the battle of Philippi, he was among those whose lands were handed over to the soldiery of the victorious triumvirs. But what seemed his ruin brought him into earlier notice than otherwise might have been his lot. He was introduced to Mæcenas by Asinius Pollio, himself a poet, who had been made governor of Cisalpine Gaul, and was reinstated in his property. This happy event, as everyone knows, he celebrates in his first Eclogue. But it appears that when he tried to resume possession he was nearly slain by the rude soldier who had received a grant of the land, and it was some months before he was securely restored. In company with Horace, Varius, and others, he attended Mæcenas in the famous journey to Brundusium (probably in 37 B.C.). He had already (in the year 40 B.C.) written the famous eclogue on the consulship of Pollio, of which we have before spoken; and soon after this he began the Georgics, at the special desire of Mæcenas. They seem to have been published in their complete form soon after the battle of Actium. For the rest of his life, which he closed at Brundusium in the fifty-first year of his age (19 B.C.), he was occupied with his Æneid, which with modest self-depreciation he ordered to be destroyed. But it was revised by his friends Varius and Plotius, and published by order of the emperor, whom he had accompanied in a tour through Greece just before his death.
The character of Virgil was gentle and amiable, his manners simple and unobtrusive, and we hear little from himself of the great men with whom he was associated in friendship. His health was feeble, and his life passed away in uneventful study, of which his poems were the fruit and are the evidence. Nothing can be more finished than the style and versification of Virgil. His phraseology is so idiomatic as often to defy translation; his learning so great, that each page requires a commentary. He bestowed the greatest labour in polishing his writings; his habit being, as is said, to pour forth a vast quantity of verses in the morning, which he reduced to a small number by continual elaboration, after the manner (as he said) of a bear licking her cubs into shape.
It may be said that Cicero, Horace, and Virgil himself, completed the hellenising tendency which had begun with Ennius. Lucretius, though he borrowed his matter from the old Greek philosophers, is much more Roman in his style. Catullus is more Roman still. But Virgil, except in idiom, is Greek everywhere. His Eclogues are feeble echoes of the Doric grace of Theocritus. His Georgics are elaborately constructed from the works of Hellenic writers, tempered in some of the noblest poetic passages with the grave majesty of Lucretius. In his Æneid almost every comparison and description is borrowed from Homer, Apollonius, and other Greek poets. In strength of character his epic fails entirely. No one person in the Æneid excites awe, love, sympathy, or any other strong feeling, unless we except the untimely end of Nisus and Euryalus, the fates of young Lausus and young Pallas, and the death of the heroine Camilla. But, notwithstanding all this, such is the tender grace of his style, such the elaborate beauty of his descriptions, that we read again and yet again with renewed delight.
To give any adequate account of the gay Horace in a page is impossible. Q. Horatius Flaccus was born in the colony of Venusia in the year 65 B.C., two years before the consulship of Cicero. He was therefore nearly six years younger than Virgil, and two years older than Octavian. He died in the fifty-seventh year of his age (8 B.C.), following his friend and patron Mæcenas, who died a month or two before, according to his own prophetic promise. His father was a freedman by birth, and by profession a tax-collector, a good and tender parent, caring above all things for the education of his son. He was at the expense of taking the promising boy to Rome, probably when he was about twelve years old, where he attended the school of Orbilius, known to others besides Horace for his belief in the maxim that the “sparing of the rod spoils the child.” There he learned Greek as well as Latin, by reading Homer and the old Roman poets. About the age of eighteen he went to complete his education at Athens, where Q. Cicero was his fellow-student. He was at Athens when Cæsar was murdered, and became an officer in the army of Brutus. After the battle of Philippi he returned to Rome, and was thrown entirely upon the world. He obtained, we know not how, a clerkship in the treasury, on the proceeds of which he contrived to live in the most frugal manner; vegetables and water formed his truly poetic diet.
But he was not left to languish in poverty. He became acquainted with Varius and Virgil, and was by them introduced to Mæcenas; and we have from his own pen a pleasing narrative of the introduction. For several months, however, he received no sign of the great man’s favour; but before the journey to Brundusium he was evidently established in intimacy as great as Virgil’s. Soon after this he published the first book of the Satires. The second book and the Epodes followed; but in the interval he had received a substantial reward from his patron in the present of the Sabine farm, so prettily described by himself. At a latter period he became master of a cottage at Tibur, distant about fifteen miles from his Sabine villa. But it must be said that, notwithstanding his dependence upon patrons, Horace always maintained a steady determination not to be subservient to any one, emperor or minister. The Epistle to Mæcenas deserves especial notice; for it is written in a tone equally creditable to the poet who would not condescend to flatter the patron, and to the patron who tolerated such freedom in the poet.
Hitherto he had declined the name of poet. But the publication of the three books of his Odes in rapid succession indicated his title to this name, though still he declined to approach subjects of epic grandeur. Before this he had been introduced to Agrippa, and somewhat later to Octavia. The first book of his Epistles seems to have been completed in 21 B.C., when the poet was beginning his forty-fifth year. Then followed the Carmen Seculare, which may be fixed, by the occasion to which it belongs, to the year 17 B.C. After this came the fourth book of Odes and the second book of Epistles, works in great part due to the express request of Augustus.
The popularity of the Odes of Horace has ever been great. He disclaims the title of poet for his other writings; and of the odes he says that he wrote poetry only under the sharp compulsion of poverty. Much is borrowed from the Greek, as we know; and if the works of the Greek lyric poets remained to us in a less fragmentary form, we should doubtless find far more numerous examples of imitation. But the style of Horace is so finished, his sentiments expressed with so much lively precision, and in words so happily chosen, that he deserves the title which he claims of “Rome’s lyric minstrel.” No doubt his poetry was the result of great labour, and every perusal of his odes strengthens the belief that he spoke literally when he compared himself to “the matine bee,” rifling the sweets of many flowers, and finishing his work with assiduous labour. It is in the first book of the Epistles that we must seek the true genius of Horace--the easy man of the world, popular with his great patrons, the sworn friend of his brother poets, good-natured to every one, except the old poets of Rome, whom he undervalued partly (as in the case of Livius) from dislike for a rude and imperfect style, partly (as we must suspect in the case of Catullus and Calvus) from an irrepressible emotion of jealousy.
The elegiac poets, Tibullus and Propertius, with their younger and more famous compeer Ovid, and many writers of lesser note, belong to the imperial era of Augustus.
THE FINE ARTS
A few words may be added on the subject of art generally. With the great fortunes that had been amassed first by senatorial rulers and afterwards by the favourites of the triumvirs, it is natural that art in some shape should be cultivated. But Greek masters still ruled at Rome; and a taste began for collecting ancient works, such as resembles the eagerness with which the pictures of the old masters are sought in modern Europe. In the oration of Cicero against Verres we have an elaborate exposure of the base and greedy arts by which that wholesale plunderer robbed the Sicilians of their finest works of art. It was, no doubt, an extreme case; but Verres would not have dared to proceed to extremities so audacious, unless he had been encouraged by many precedents.
The arts also of the builder and engineer grew with the growing wealth of Rome. It was one of the chief and favourite occupations of C. Gracchus, during his brief reign, to improve the roads and the bridges. The great dictator Cæsar had many projects in view when he was cut off--as, for instance, the draining of the mountain lakes by tunnels, of the Pontine marshes by canal. Many of these works were afterwards executed by Agrippa, who also (as we have said) constructed the Julian harbour, by uniting the Lucrine and Avernian lakes with the sea. In the year 33 B.C. he condescended to act as ædile, and signalised his magistracy by a complete repair of the aqueducts and sewers.
Before this time, also, had begun the adornment of the city with noble buildings of public use. A vast basilica was laid out and begun by M. Æmilius Paulus, consul in 50 B.C. This magnificent work was said to have been erected with money received from Cæsar as the price of the consul’s good services. But the Basilica Æmilia was eclipsed by the splendid plans of the dictator Cæsar. A great space had lately been cleared by the fire kindled at the funeral of Clodius. Other buildings were pulled down, and the Basilica Julia extended on the south of the Forum along the frontage formerly occupied by the Tabernæ Veteres. The great work was completed by Octavian. Still more magnificent edifices were the Thermæ or hot-baths of Agrippa, and the noble temple erected by the same great builder, which still remains under the name of the Pantheon. In this structure the arch, that instrument by which Rome was enabled to give that combination of stability and magnitude which distinguishes all her works, achieved its greatest triumph; and here was seen the first of those great vaulted domes which became the distinctive attribute of the Christian architecture of modern Italy. By these and many other works--politic both because they increased the magnificence and the health of the capital, and also gave constant employment to workmen who might otherwise have been turbulent--the emperor Augustus was enabled to boast that he had “found Rome of brick, and left it of marble.”
But it was not to Rome alone that Augustus, Agrippa, and others confined their labours. Nothing more excites our wonder than to stumble upon costly works, built with a solidity that seems to imply immortality, in the mountain districts of Italy or in remote valleys of Gaul or Asia Minor or Africa. Wherever the Roman went he carried with him his art of building. The aqueduct which was constructed by Agrippa to supply Nemausus (Nismes), a colony of no great note, with water, is a proof of this assertion. The largest modern cities can hardly show a work of public utility so magnificent as the structure which is known to thousands of modern travellers under the name of the Pont du Gard.
SOCIAL CONDITIONS; RELIGION
It is needless here to repeat the dismal tale of corruption and vice which was presented in the life of most of the eminent Romans of the time. Even the rich who were not vicious in their pleasures, such as Lucullus and Hortensius, showed less of taste and good sense in their expenditure than a desire of astonishing by display. The old religion had lost its hold upon the public mind, though superstitious practices lingered among the uneducated classes. Philosophy did little to supply the void. The practical tendencies of the Roman mind attached it to the most practical doctrines of the Hellenic teachers. The moral philosophy of Zeno and Epicurus divided the Roman world; for here were to be found broad and positive principles of action, comprehensible by all. The finer speculations of the academic and peripatetic schools found few votaries among men who were equally downright in their purposes of virtuous or vicious living. In earlier times the stoic doctrines had found a response in the hearts of men who revived the stern simplicity of the old Roman life.
Some of the best men, in the times that followed the Punic Wars, were stoics by practice as well as in profession. Such were Æmilius Paulus and his son the younger Scipio. Notwithstanding the pride and self-sufficiency which was the common result of Zeno’s discipline, there was something ennobling in the principle that a man’s business in life is to do his duty, regardless of pleasure or pain, riches or poverty, honour or disgrace. But nature is too strong for such a system to prevail for many years or over many men. The popular philosophy of the later times was borrowed from the school of Epicurus, but it was an easy and fashionable modification of the morality of that philosopher. Epicurus taught that human happiness could not exist without pleasure, but he added that without the practice of virtue real pleasure could not exist. The former precept was adopted by the sensualists of Rome; the latter was set aside.
Nothing more strongly proves the vicious state of society than the neglect of the marriage tie and the unblushing immorality of the female sex. Cæsar and Octavian, though their own practice was not such as to set example to society, both saw the danger of this state of things, and both exerted themselves to restore at least outward decency. Lawful marriage they endeavoured to encourage or even to enforce by law.
But if religion had given way, superstition was busy at work. Men in general cannot entirely throw aside those sentiments which are unfolded with more or less of strength in every mind and in every state of social existence. There will still be cravings after spiritual things and the invisible world. The ancient oracles had fallen into disrepute, and soon after the fall of the republic (as is well known to Christian students) shrank into ignoble silence. But behind the Hellenic, a new world was now opened to Rome. She became familiar with the mystic speculation and the more spiritual creeds of the East. The fanatical worship of the Egyptian divinities, Isis and Serapis, became common even in Rome, notwithstanding the old feeling against Cleopatra, and notwithstanding many attempts to crush this worship. It became a common practice to seek for revelations of the future by means of the stars. The grim Marius carried about with him a Syrian soothsayer. To consult Babylonian star readers was familiar to the friends of Horace. Magi were the companions of Roman magistrates. One of Juvenal’s most striking pictures is that of the gloomy voluptuary Tiberius sitting in his island palace surrounded by a host of Chaldean astrologers. Nor could the purer and sublimer images of the Hebrew scriptures be unknown. Jews abounded in every populous city of the empire long before they were scattered by the fall of their Holy City, and wherever they went they must soon have made their influence felt. Others sought the presence of God in nature, and confounded the divinity with his works. Man seemed to them such a mass of contradictory meannesses, that they tried to solve the riddle of evil by supposing that he, like the animals and the whole creation, was but a machine animated by the universal and pervading spirit of the deity. Such was the idea of the elder Pliny, who forfeited a life spent in the study of nature to the curiosity which led him to brave the fires of Vesuvius.
Out of this seething mass of doubts and fears, uncertain belief and troubling disbelief, rose an eagerness to find and a readiness to receive the principles of that religion which took root a few years later in Galilee and Judea, and which extended itself with marvellous rapidity over every province of the empire. The purity of its morality attracted those whose hearts were still craving for something better than could be found in the religions or philosophies of the day. Its aspirations offered great attractions to those who were looking with doubt and fear upon all that lay before or behind. The breaking up of national distinctions, the union of all the Mediterranean shore under one strong and central government, the roads and canals which connected countries and provinces under the magnificent rule of the first Cæsars, were potent instruments in assisting the rapid march of the new religion. All things, moral and physical, internal and external, concurred to promote the greatest, but most silent, revolution that has ever passed over the mind of the civilised portion of the world.[c]
FOOTNOTES
[136] It is a marked feature of the representation of the struggle between patricians and plebeians as given by Livy and Dionysius, that the writers constantly waver in their own conception of the plebeians and their leaders,--at times even flatly contradicting themselves,--exhibiting them now as men demanding only right and justice, now as passionate and unscrupulous agitators and partisans; while in the same way the defenders of patrician rights appear now as the supporters of law and order, now as the selfish and arrogant champions of usurped privileges.
[137] [According to Herzog,[d] however, the government of Augustus was by no means an absolute monarchy; it became a despotism by the development of the power of the prince during the period from Augustus to Diocletian.]
[138] Legati or præfecti Cæsaris.
BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS
[The letter [a] is reserved for Editorial Matter.]
I. LAND AND PEOPLE
[b] HENRY G. LIDDELL, A History of Rome from the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Empire.
[c] THEODOR MOMMSEN, Römische Geschichte.
[d] E. MEYER, Geschichte des Alterthums.
II. EARLY LEGENDS OF ROME--ÆNEAS AND ROMULUS
[b] THOMAS ARNOLD, History of Rome.
[c] TITUS LIVIUS, The History of Rome (translated from the Latin by D. Spillan, C. Edmonds, and W. A. M’Devitte).
[d] ALBERT SCHWEGLER, Römische Geschichte.
[e] B. G. NIEBUHR, Lectures on the History of Rome.
[f] P. VIRGILIUS MARO, Æneidos.
III. LEGENDARY HISTORY OF THE KINGS
[b] THOMAS ARNOLD, History of Rome.
[c] TITUS LIVIUS, The History of Rome (translated from the Latin by D. Spillan, C. Edmonds, and W. A. M’Devitte).
[d] DIONYSIUS HALICARNASSENSIS, The Roman Antiquities of (translated from the Greek by Edward Spelman).
IV. THE BANISHMENT OF THE KINGS--CRITICISMS OF MONARCHIAL HISTORY
[b] THOMAS ARNOLD, History of Rome.
[c] ALBERT SCHWEGLER, Römische Geschichte.
[d] OTTO GILBERT, Geschichte und Topographie der Stadt Rom im Alterthum.
[e] PLUTARCH, Κεφαλαίων Καταγραφή (Questiones Romanæ).
[f] B. G. NIEBUHR, Lectures on the History of Rome.
[g] DIONYSIUS HALICARNASSENSIS, The Roman Antiquities of (translated from the Greek by Edward Spelman).
[h] K. W. F. VON SCHLEGEL, Lecture on the Influence of the Greeks over the Romans (in his Lectures on the History of Literature).
V. CIVILISATION OF THE REGAL PERIOD
[b] THOMAS ARNOLD, History of Rome.
[c] B. G. NIEBUHR, The History of Rome.
[d] TITUS LIVIUS, The History of Rome (translated from the Latin by D. Spillan, C. Edmonds, and W. A. M’Devitte).
[e] DIONYSIUS HALICARNASSENSIS, The Roman Antiquities of (translated from the Greek by Edward Spelman).
[f] POLYBIUS, Πραγματεία.
[g] PLINIUS, Historia Naturalis.
[h] E. MEYER, Geschichte des Alterthums.
[i] G. W. BOTSFORD, A History of Rome.
[j] W. J. SOLTAU, Über Entstehung und Zusammensetzung der altrömischen Volksversammlungen.
VI. THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC
[b] G. F. HERTZBERG, Geschichte der Römer im Alterthum.
[c] H. G. LIDDELL, A History of Rome from the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Empire.
[d] WILHELM IHNE, The History of Rome.
[e] DIONYSIUS HALICARNASSENSIS, The Roman Antiquities of (translated from the Greek by Edward Spelman).
[f] EUTROPIUS, Breviarium Historiæ Romanæ.
[g] T. H. DYER, A History of the City of Rome: its Structures and its Monuments: From its Foundation to End of Middle Ages.
[h] TITUS LIVIUS, The History of Rome (translated from the Latin by D. Spillan, C. Edmonds, and W. A. M’Devitte).
[i] PLUTARCH, Βίοι Παράλληλοι.
[m] E. VON HERZOG, Geschichte und System der römischen Staatsverfassung.
[n] JOHN FISKE, Myths and Mythmakers.