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(added by transcriber)
RUINS OF A ROMAN TOWN
POMPEII
ANCIENT ROME
The Lives of Great Men
told by
MARY AGNES HAMILTON
Brutus and Tarquin · Lucretia · Mucius · Cloelia · Regulus
Marcus Curtius · Coriolanus · Volumnia · Pyrrhus
Fabricius · Hamilcar · Hannibal · Flaminius · Fabius
Marcellus · The Scipios · The Gracchi · Cato · Marius
Drusus · Sulla · Mithridates · Lucullus · Pompeius
Crassus · Cicero · Caesar
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen
New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town
Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Humphrey Milford
1922
ROME AND THE TIBER
(added by transcriber)
INTRODUCTORY: The People and City of Rome
The Early Heroes
The Great Enemies of Rome
The Scipios
The Gracchi
Cato the Censor
Caius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla
The New Rome
Lucius Licinius Lucullus
Cnaeus Pompeius
Marcus Licinius Crassus
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Caius Julius Caesar
PAGE
Ruins of a Roman Town—Pompeii
Rome and the Tiber
The Hills round Horace’s Farm. From a drawing by E. Lear
Lar, or Household God
Etruscan Soldier. (British Museum)
Roman Legionary. (British Museum)
Lacus Curtius. Restored. (From C. Huelsen, Das Forum
Romanum. Maglioni and Strini, Rome)
Pyrrhus. (From a photograph by Richter & Co.,
Naples)
The Desolation of Carthage To-day. (From a photograph by Prof.
J. L. Myres)
Carthaginian Priestess. (From The Carthage of the
Phoenicians, by permission of Mr. W. Heinemann)
Pictures from Pompeii of a Mimic Naval Battle
,
Great St. Bernard Pass. (From a photograph by F. J.
Hall)
Trasimene. (From a photograph by Alinari)
Helmet found on the Field of Cannae. (British Museum)
A Coin of Victory
Scipio Africanus
Tragic and Comic Masks
Costume. The Roman Toga. (British Museum)
Elaborate Lamp. To show the luxury of later times
The Tomb of a Roman Family, to show simplicity of dress. (From a
photograph by Alinari)
Ploughing. A Terra-cotta Group. (Journal of Hellenic
Studies)
The Shrine of the Lar, from a House in Pompeii
The Aristocrat distributing Largesse; The Fisherman; The Rich
Matron; The Shepherdess. (Capitoline Museum)
Trophy of Victory. (Capitoline Museum)
Sulla, from a coin
Mithridates, from a coin
A Boar Hunt. (Capitoline Museum)
Scene from a tragedy. Terra-cotta relief
Cutler’s Forge and Cutler’s Shop. (From the gravestone of L.
Cornelius Atimetus, a Roman Cutler)
,
Writing Materials. (British Museum)
Pompeius
A Vase in the shape of a Galley
A Triumph, from a relief of the Empire. (Capitoline
Museum)
A Roman Villa on the Coast
A Thracian Gladiator
Orodes the Parthian
Cicero
Arpinum, Cicero’s birthplace. (From a photograph by
Alinari)
Julius Caesar. (From a gem in the British Museum)
Julius Caesar. (From a bust in the British Museum)
Submission of Tribes, from a relief. (Capitoline Museum)
Roman Legionary Helmet found in Britain. (British
Museum)
The Heights of Alesia
Marcus Antonius, from a coin
Cleopatra, from a coin
A Roman Coin celebrating the *** of Caesar
A Cinerary Urn
A Roman Water-carrier with his Water-skin on his Back
THE HILLS ROUND HORACE’S FARM
from a drawing by E. Lear
INTRODUCTORY
The People and City of Rome
More than two thousand years ago, at
a time when the people in the British Isles and in most parts of Western
Europe were living the lives of savages, occupied in fighting, hunting,
and fishing, dwelling in rude huts, clad in skins, ignorant of
everything that we call civilization, Rome was the centre of a world in
many ways as civilized as ours is now, over which the Roman people
ruled. The men who dwelt in this one city, built on seven hills on the
banks of the river Tiber, gradually conquered all Italy. Then they
became masters of the lands round the Mediterranean Sea: of Northern
Africa and of Spain, of Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor and the Near East, and
of Western Europe. The greatness of Rome and of the Roman people does
not lie, however, in their conquests. In the end their conquests ruined
them. It lies in the character, mind, and will of the Romans
themselves.
In the history of the ancient world the Romans played the part that
men of our race have played in the history of the modern world. They
knew, as we claim to know, how to govern: how to govern themselves, and
how to govern other people. To this day much in our laws and in our
system of government bears a Roman stamp. They were great soldiers and
could conquer: they could also hold and keep their conquests and impress
the Roman stamp on all the peoples over whom they ruled. Their stamp is
still upon us. Much that belongs to our common life to-day comes to us
from them: in their day they lived a life not much unlike ours now. And
in many respects the Roman character was like the British. We can see
the faults of the Romans, if we cannot see our own; we can also see the
virtues. We can see, too—looking back at them over the distance
of time, judging them by their work and by what is left to us of their
writings—how the mixture of faults in their virtues explains the
fall as well as the rise of the great power of Rome.
LAR, or
Household God
The Romans were men of action, not dreamers. They were more
interested in doing things than in understanding them. They were men of
strong will and cool mind, who looked out upon the world as they saw it
and, for the most part, did not wonder much about how and why it came to
be there. It was there for them to rule. That was what interested them.
Ideas they mostly got from other people, especially from the Greeks.
When they had got them they could use them and turn them to something of
their own. But they were not distracted by puzzling over ideas. Their
religion was that of a practical people. In the later days of Rome few
educated men believed in the gods. But all the ceremonies and festivals
were dedicated to them; and magnificent temples in their honour were
erected in which their spirits were supposed to dwell. In the old days
every Roman household had its particular images—the Lares and
Penates which the head of the family tended and guarded. Connected with
this office was the sacred authority of the head of the family—the
paterfamilias. His word was law for the members of the household. And
the City of Rome stood to its citizens in the place of the
paterfamilias. The first laws of a Roman’s life were his duty to his
father and to the State. They had an absolute claim on him for all that
he could give. The Roman’s code of honour, like the Englishman’s, rested
on this sense of duty. A man must be worthy of his ancestors and of
Rome. His own life was short, and without honour nothing; the life of
Rome went on.
Courage, devotion to duty, strength of will, a great power of
silence, a sense of justice rather than any sympathy in his
dealings with other men: these were the characteristic Roman virtues.
The Roman was proud: he had a high idea of what
was due from himself. This was the groundwork out of which his other
qualities grew, good and bad. Proud men are not apt to understand the
weakness of other people or to appreciate virtues different from their
own. The defects of the Romans were therefore hardness, sometimes
amounting to cruelty both in action and in judgement; lack of
imagination; a blindness to the things in life that cannot be seen
or measured. They were just rather than generous. They trampled on the
defeated and scorned what they could not understand. They worshipped
success and cared little for human suffering. About this, however, they
were honest. Sentimentalism was not a Roman vice, nor hypocrisy. When
great wealth poured into the city, after the Eastern conquests of
Lucullus and Pompeius, the simplicity of the old Roman life was
destroyed and men began to care for nothing but luxury, show, and all
the visible signs of power. They were quite open about it: they did not
pretend that they really cared for other things, or talk about the
‘burden of Empire’.
The heroes of Roman history are men of action. As they pass before
us, so far as we can see their faces, hear their voices, know their
natures from the stories recorded by those who wrote them down at the
time or later, these men stand out in many respects astonishingly like
the men of our own day, good and bad. Centuries of dust lie over them.
Their bones are crumbled to the dust. Yet in a sense they live still and
move among us. Between them and us there lie not only centuries but the
great tide of ruin that swept the ancient world away: destroyed it so
that the men who came after had to build the house of civilization,
stone by stone anew, from the foundation. The Roman world was blotted
out by the barbarians. For hundreds of years the kind of life men had
lived in Rome disappeared altogether and the very records of it seemed
to be lost. Gradually, bit by bit, the story has been pieced together,
and the men of two thousand years ago stand before us: we see them
across the gulf. The faces of those belonging to the earliest story of
Rome are rather dim. But they, too, help us to understand what the
Romans were like. We learn to know a people from the men it
chooses as its heroes; about whom fathers tell stories to their
children. They show what are the deeds and qualities they admire: what
kind of men they are trying to be.
The Early Heroes
The oldest Roman stories give a
description of the coming of the people who afterwards inhabited the
city, from across the seas. They tell of the founding of the first
township round the Seven Hills, and of the kings, especially of the last
seven, who ruled over the people until, for their misdeeds, they were
driven out and the very name of King became hateful in Roman ears. Then
there are many tales of the wars between the people of Rome and the
neighbours dwelling round them on the plains of Latium and among the
hills of Etruria and Samnium; and the fierce battles fought against the
Gauls who, from time to time, swept down on Italy from the mountains of
the north.
These stories do not tell us much that can be considered as actual
history. But they do help us to understand what the Romans wished to be
like, by showing us the sort of pictures they held up before
themselves.
In later times the Romans learned to admire intensely all that came
from Greece. The Greeks had been a great ruling people when the Roman
State hardly existed: and from them much in Roman life and thought was
borrowed. They liked to think that the first settlers on the Tiber bank
came from an older finer world than that of the other tribes dwelling in
Italy. So they told how, after the great siege of Troy by the Greek
heroes, Aeneas, one of the Trojan leaders, fled from his ruined city
across the seas, bearing his father and his household gods upon his
shoulders, and after many adventures, and some time passed in the great
city of Carthage, on the African coast, came with a few trusty
companions to the shores of Latium and there founded a new home.
The descendants of Aeneas ruled over their people as kings. In later
days, however, the Romans, who held that all citizens
were free and equal, hated the name of King. Rome was a republic: its
government was carried on by men elected by the citizens from among
themselves, and by assemblies in which all citizens could take part. The
first duty of every citizen was to the republic: its claim on him stood
before all other claims.
The story of the fall of the last king and of Lucius Junius Brutus,
one of the first Consuls, as the chief magistrates of the new republic
were called, shows clearly how far the idea of duty to the republic
could go in the minds of Romans.
Brutus and Tarquin
The last King of Rome was Tarquin the Proud. His misrule, and the
insolent heartlessness of his family, especially of his son Sextus,
brought about their expulsion from Rome and the end of the kingship.
Sextus had, by guile, got into the town of Gabii but was at a loss how
to make himself master there. He managed to send out a messenger to his
father. It was summer. In the garden where the King was walking,
poppies—white and purple—were growing in long ranks. Tarquin
said nothing to the messenger: only as he walked he struck off with his
staff the heads of the tallest poppies, one after another, without
saying a word. Sextus, when the messenger came back and described to him
his father’s action, understood. Pitilessly he put the leading men of
Gabii to the sword.
It was the misdeeds of this Sextus that brought the proud house of
Tarquin to the ground. He tried to force his brutal love on the fair
Lucretia, the wife of his cousin Collatinus, and so shamed her that,
after telling her husband how she had been wronged, Lucretia killed
herself before his eyes and those of his friend Brutus. Stirred to
deepest wrath, Collatinus and Brutus then swore a great oath to drive
the house of Tarquin from Rome and henceforth allow no king to rule over
the free people of the city. When they had told their fellow citizens
how Sextus had wronged Lucretia, a daughter of one of the proudest
families in the city, and reminded them of the oppression and injustice
they had all suffered at the hands of his family, the leading men of
Rome rose up and drove the Tarquins out. The city was
proclaimed for ever a republic to be ruled not by any one man but by the
will and for the good of all free men who dwelt in it. Some there were,
however, who took the side of Tarquin and tried to bring him back. Among
them were the two sons of Brutus. They were captured and brought up for
judgement, and like the others condemned to death. Brutus was the judge.
Though they were his sons and he loved them he condemned them
unflinchingly. Without any sign of feeling he saw them go to their
death. An action for which he would have sentenced another man seemed to
him no less wrong when committed by his own children.
The Death of Lucretia
They tried to soothe her grief, laying the blame, not on the unwilling
victim, but on the perpetrator of the offence. ‘It is the mind,’ they
said, ‘not the body that sins. Where there is no intention, there is no
fault,’ ‘It is for you,’ she replied, ‘to consider the punishment that
is his due; I acquit myself of guilt, but I do not free myself from
the penalty; no woman who lives after her honour is lost shall appeal to
the example of Lucretia,’ Then she took a knife which she had hidden
under her dress, plunged it into her heart, and dropping down soon
expired. Her husband and father made the solemn invocation of the
dead.
While the others were occupied in mourning, Brutus drew the knife from
the wound, held it still reeking before him, and exclaimed,
‘I swear by this blood, pure and undefiled before the prince’s
outrage, and I call you, gods, to witness, that I will punish Lucius
Tarquinius Superbus, his impious wife, and all his children with fire
and sword to the utmost of my power, and that I will not allow them or
any other to rule in Rome.’ After this, he handed the knife to
Collatinus, next to Lucretius and Valerius, all amazed at Brutus and
perplexed to account for his new spirit of authority. They took the oath
as he directed and, changing wholly from grief to anger, they obeyed his
summons to follow him and make an immediate end of the royal power.
The body of Lucretia was brought from her house and carried to the
Forum, the people thronging round, as was natural, in wonder at this
strange and cruel sight, and loud in condemning the crime of Tarquinius.
They were deeply moved by the father’s sorrow, and still more by the
words of Brutus, who rebuked their tears and idle laments, urging them
to act like men and Romans by taking up arms against the common
enemy.
Livy, i. 58. 9-59. 4.
Mucius and Cloelia
ETRUSCAN SOLDIER
from a Brit. Mus. bronze
The same spirit was shown by Caius Mucius and the maiden Cloelia and
many others in the long and bitter wars that followed. Tarquin found refuge with
Lars Porsena, King of the Etruscans, who pretended to be eager to
restore him while he really wanted to submit the Roman people to his own
rule. Porsena laid siege to the city and the people were reduced to the
hardest straits. A young man named Caius Mucius determined to kill
Lars Porsena. He succeeded in passing through the enemy’s lines and made
his way into their camp. There he saw a man clad in purple whom he took
to be Lars Porsena. In his heart he plunged the dagger he had hidden
under the folds of his toga. The man fell dead. But he was not the King.
Mucius was carried before Lars and to him he said, ‘I am a Roman,
my name Caius Mucius. There are in Rome hundreds of young men resolved,
as I was, to take your life or perish in the attempt. You may slay me
but you cannot escape them all.’ Porsena demanded the names of the
others: Mucius refused to speak. When Porsena said he would compel him
to speak by torture Mucius merely smiled. On the altar a flame was
burning. To prove to the ally of Tarquin of what stuff the young men of
Rome were made, he thrust his right arm into the flame and held it so
without flinching until the flesh was charred away. Such, his action
showed the King, was the spirit of Rome.
Mucius: The Spirit of Rome
ROMAN LEGIONARY
from a Brit. Mus. bronze
Mucius was escaping through the scared throng, that fell away before his
bloody dagger, when, summoned by the shouts, the King’s guards seized
him and dragged him back. Standing helpless before the throne, but even
in such desperate position more formidable than afraid, he cried out,
‘I am a Roman citizen; my name is Caius Mucius. My purpose was to
kill an enemy of my country; I have as much courage to die as I had
to slay; a Roman should be ready for great deeds and great
suffering. Nor have I alone been emboldened to strike this blow; behind
me is a long line of comrades who seek the same honour. Therefore, if
you choose, prepare for a struggle in which you will fight for your life
every hour of the day and have the sword of an enemy at your palace
door. Such is the war that we, the youth of Rome, proclaim against you.
You need not fear armies and battles; by yourself you will meet us one
by one.’ When the King, enraged and terrified, was threatening to have
him thrown into the flames unless he explained the hints of
assassination thus vaguely uttered, he replied, ‘See how worthless the
body is to those whose gaze is fixed on glory.’ With these words he laid
his right hand on a brazier already lighted for the sacrifice and let it
burn, too resolute, as it seemed, to feel pain. Then Porsena, astounded
at the sight, ordered Mucius to be removed from the altar and exclaimed,
‘Begone, your own desperate enemy more than mine. I would wish well
to your valour, if that valour was on the side of my country. As it is,
I send you hence unharmed and free from the penalties of war.’
Livy, ii. 12. 8-14.
Later in the same war the Romans were compelled to give hostages,
twenty-four men and maidens. Cloelia, a highborn maiden sent among
them, escaped at night and on horseback swam across the foaming Tiber to
Rome. But since she had been given as a hostage and faith once given was
sacred, the Roman leaders sent her back.
Cloelia’s Heroism
This reward granted to the heroism of Mucius inspired women also with
ambition to win honour from the people. The maiden Cloelia, one of the
hostages, escaped the sentries of the Etruscan camp, which had been
pitched near the Tiber, and amid a shower of missiles swam across the
river, leading a band of maidens whom she brought back safe to their
families in Rome. When Porsena heard of it, he was at first enraged, and
sent envoys to the city with a demand for the return of his hostage
Cloelia; he made no great account of the others. Afterwards, his anger
being changed to admiration, he said that her exploit surpassed anything
done by Horatius or Mucius, and declared that he would consider the
treaty broken if the hostage was not surrendered, but that if she was,
he would send her back unharmed to her people. Faith was kept on both
sides; the Romans returned the guarantee of peace in accordance with the
terms of the treaty, and the King not only protected but honoured the
heroine, making her a present of half the hostages and bidding her
choose as she pleased. The story is that when they were brought before
her, she picked out the youngest, a choice at once creditable to
her modesty and approved by the unanimous wish of the rest that those
whose age made them most helpless should be liberated first. After the
restoration of peace the Romans recognized this unexampled heroism in a
woman with the honour, also unexampled, of an equestrian statue. It was
placed at the top of the Sacred Way, a maiden sitting on a
horse.
Livy, ii. 13. 6-11.
This same high temper and unflinching sense of honour was shown two
hundred years later in an even more splendid way by Atilius Regulus.
Regulus
In the first war against Carthage (255 B.C.) Regulus, a Roman general, was heavily
defeated and taken prisoner with a large part of his army. Shortly
afterwards the Roman fleet was destroyed by a terrible storm.
Nevertheless, the events of the
next year’s campaign went against the Carthaginians. They determined to
offer peace and for this purpose sent an embassy to Rome. With this
embassy Regulus was sent, on the understanding that if he failed to
induce his countrymen to make peace and to agree to an exchange of
prisoners he would return to Carthage, where, as he well knew,
a terrible fate certainly awaited him. Nevertheless, despite the
appeals of his wife and children, Regulus urged his countrymen not to
make peace. His body might belong to the Carthaginians who had captured
it, but his spirit was Roman and no Roman could urge his countrymen to
accept defeat and give up fighting until they had won. True to his vow,
he went back to Carthage and there he was put to dreadful tortures. His
eyelids were cut off and he was then exposed to the full glare of the
sun. But the story of his devotion remained strong in the minds of his
countrymen, and Horace, one of their great poets, later put it into
lines of imperishable verse.
The Honour of Regulus
Such a downfall had the prescient soul of Regulus feared, when he
refused assent to dishonourable terms and maintained that the precedent
would be fatal in time to come if the prisoners did not die unpitied.
‘I have seen’, he said, ‘our eagles hanging on Carthaginian
shrines, and weapons of our soldiers surrendered without bloodshed;
I have seen arms bound behind the back of the free, and gates
thrown open in security, and lands tilled that our armies had wasted.
Think you that the soldier, ransomed with gold, will return the braver?
You do but add loss to disgrace. Wool, tinctured by dye, never regains
its old purity; nor does true courage, if once it is lost, deign to be
restored to the degraded. If the stag fights after being freed from the
meshes of the net, he will be brave who has surrendered to a treacherous
foe, and he will crush the Carthaginians in a second fight who without
resentment has felt the thongs binding his arms, and has feared death.
Such a man, all ignorant of the way to win a soldier’s life, has
confused peace and war. Oh lost honour! Oh mighty Carthage, exalted by
the shameful downfall of Italy!’ It is said that he put from him the
lips of his virtuous wife and his little children, a free citizen
no longer, and with grim resolution turned his eyes to the ground, till
with the weight of advice never given by any before him he strengthened
the wavering purpose of the Fathers, and amid the mourning of
his friends hurried into a noble exile. Yet, though he knew what the
barbarian tormentor had in store for him, he set aside opposing kinsmen
and people that would delay his return as quietly as if he were leaving
the business of some client’s suit at last decided, and were journeying
to his estate in Venefrum or to Tarentum that the Spartan built.
Horace, Od. iii. 5. 13-56.
Marcus Curtius
What were Rome’s most precious possessions? To this question a
splendid answer was given by Marcus Curtius. In the midst of the
Forum—the market-place in the heart of the city where public
business was transacted and men met daily to discuss politics and listen
to speeches—the citizens found one morning that a yawning gulf had
opened. This, so the priests declared, would not close until the most
precious thing that Rome possessed had been thrown into it. Then the
republic would be safe and everlasting. For a time men puzzled and
pondered over the meaning of this dark saying. Marcus Curtius,
a youth who had covered himself with honour in many battles, solved
the riddle. Brave men, he said, had made Rome great: the city had
nothing so precious. Clad in full armour and mounted on his war-horse he
leaped into the gulf. It closed over him at once, nor ever opened
again.
The Devotion of Marcus Curtius
During the same year, as the story goes, a cavern of measureless
depth was opened in the middle of the Forum, either from the shock of an
earthquake or from some other hidden force; and though all did their
best by throwing soil into it, the gulf could not be filled up till,
warned by the gods, the people began to inquire what was Rome’s greatest
treasure. For that treasure, so the prophets declared, must be offered
in it, if the Roman commonwealth was to be safe and lasting. Whereupon
Marcus Curtius, a warrior renowned in war, rebuked them for
doubting whether the Romans had any greater blessing than arms and
valour. Amid a general silence he devoted himself, looking to the
Capitol and the temples of the immortal gods that overhang the Forum,
and stretching out his hands, at one time to the sky, at another to the
yawning chasm that reached to the world below. Then, fully armed and
seated on a horse splendidly caparisoned,
he plunged into its depths, while a crowd of men and women showered corn
and other offerings after him. Thus we may suppose that the Curtian Lake
got its name from him, and not from Curtius Mettus, in old time the
famous soldier of Titus Tatius.
Livy, vii. 6.
LACUS CURTIUS
Restored
In Mucius Scaevola, in Regulus, in Marcus Curtius, and many others
the fine qualities of the old Roman temper, pride, courage, will,
devotion, a love of their country that went beyond all other
feelings, even unto death, stand out. One can see the main lines of the
character that made the Romans what they afterwards became—the
conquerors and law-givers first of a single city, Rome, then of the
whole plain of Latium in which that city stood: then, after driving back
barbarian invaders from the north and Greek invaders from the south, of
all Italy: later of the known world.
Coriolanus
To understand this character better one may look at it from another
angle, studying a man in whom these qualities were spoiled by the faults
that belong to them. Courage may become cruelty: pride fall into
arrogance: high contempt for others will grow to selfishness and
hardness; even a high devotion to one’s country may be spoiled if it
comes to mean a devotion to one’s own idea of what that country should
be like and how it should treat oneself. It may then be mere
selfishness. Many men love their country not as it is but as they think
it ought to be. This may be a good and helpful feeling if what they
think it
ought to be depends not on their own private wishes and welfare only,
but on that of the people as a whole. A love of country of this
kind makes men strive incessantly to make it better. But some Romans
forgot the welfare of the people as a whole. The men belonging to the
old families, men who claimed to be descended from the early settlers,
who called themselves ‘patricians’, that is, the fathers of the State,
were apt to consider that what they thought must be so: that they alone
knew what was right and good. The welfare of the State depended on them.
They were the leaders in the army and in the government. They had no
patience with those who said that they should not settle everything in
Rome, that their idea of what was right and patriotic was not the end of
the matter; men who said that Rome was not this class or that but the
whole people. The city was growing fast; new settlers had come in, men
not counted as citizens, but men whose happiness and comfort depended on
the way the State treated them. These people, the ‘plebs’ as they were
called, were despised by many patricians. They looked upon them not as
Romans, but as creatures who could be made into soldiers when the city
needed soldiers, but at other times should keep quiet.
The faults and virtues of the patricians—and nearly all the
heroes of Roman story belong to patrician families—are well shown
in the life of Caius Marcius, called Coriolanus in honour of his victory
outside the town of Corioli.
The Capture of Corioli
One of the leading men in the camp was C. Marcius, who afterwards
received the name of Coriolanus, a youth of equal vigour in counsel
and in action. The Roman army was besieging Corioli and, occupied with
its people shut up behind their walls, had no fear of attack from
without, when the Volscian troops from Antium swept down upon it, and at
the same time the enemy sallied out of the town. Marcius happened to be
on duty, and with some picked troops not only repelled the sally, but
fearlessly rushed in through the open gate and, after slaughtering the
enemy in the neighbourhood, chanced to come across some lighted brands
and flung them on to the buildings that adjoined the wall. Then the
cries of the townsmen, mingled with the
shrieks of women and children that quickly arose, as usual, when the
alarm was given, encouraged the Romans and dismayed the Volscians,
inasmuch as they found that the city which they had come to help was in
the hands of the enemy. Thus the Volscians from Antium were routed and
Corioli was taken.
Livy, ii. 33. 5-9.
Caius Marcius belonged to one of the oldest and proudest families in
the Republic. A member of this family had been one of the Seven
Kings. His father died when Caius was but a boy and he was left in the
charge of his mother Volumnia. Volumnia was a woman of noble character
and fine mind. Her house was admirably ordered: everything in it was
beautiful and yet simple. She brought up her son well: he excelled in
all manly exercises, was of a courage that nothing could shake, scorned
idleness, luxury, and wealth: believed that the one life for a Roman was
a life of service to the death. But Volumnia did not succeed, as a
father might have done, in curbing the faults of the lad’s character.
Caius grew up headstrong, obstinate, and excessively proud. Personally
highly gifted in mind and body, he was disposed to look down upon others
less firm and resolute. He set, for himself, a high standard of
uprightness and courage, and cared nothing for what other people thought
of him. Among the youths with whom he grew up he was the natural leader:
his will brooked no contradiction. Few dared to criticize or oppose him.
Those less firm in mind, less brave in action, less indifferent to the
opinion of others, he despised. Any one who failed in courage,
endurance, or devotion he condemned without sympathy.
When but a lad he won, for bravery in battle, the crown of oak leaves
given to soldiers who saved the life of a comrade in action. In all the
fighting of the hard years in which Rome was defending itself against
the other Italian peoples, Marcius was ever to the fore. He shrank from
no fatigue, no danger: he was always in the hottest of the fight: first
as a simple soldier, then as a general. In the field his soldiers adored
him because he shared all their hardships and always led them to
victory. Always, too, he refused to take any reward in money or riches.
But when these same soldiers got back to Rome Coriolanus had
no sympathy with them. Fighting was life to him: he did not see why it
should not satisfy every one or understand the hardships of the common
man whose wife and children were left behind in wretched poverty. There
were indeed many things Coriolanus did not see. His harsh mind condemned
without understanding the complaints of the poor. To him it seemed that
they thought of themselves, instead of thinking about Rome. He did not
realize that their hard lot compelled them to do so. His wealth and
birth made him free, but they were not free.
All the land belonged to the patricians. Wars made them richer
because the things their land produced fetched high prices, but the poor
family starved while the father was away at the wars, unable to earn,
and they had no money with which to purchase things. They had to pay
taxes—and wars always mean heavy taxes. They fell into debt and,
under the harsh Roman law, a debtor could be first imprisoned and
then, unless some one helped him by paying off what he owed, sold as a
slave. Even a man serving in the army might have his house and all the
poor household goods he had left at home seized because he or his wife
had got into debt. This harsh law finally produced a mutiny. The whole
army marched out of Rome and, taking up a position on the Sacred Mount
outside, stayed there until the Senate (this was the ruling body of the
State, at the time composed only of patricians) agreed first to change
the harsh laws about debt, and second to give to the poorer people a
body of men to look after their interests. These were the Tribunes. The
appointment of these tribunes angered many patricians, and especially
Coriolanus. Not understanding the sufferings of the people—he had
always been far removed himself from any such difficulties, belonging as
he did to a family of wealth and dignity—he thought that their
discontents were created by talk and idleness. And since there were men
in Rome who got a cheap popularity by perpetually reminding the people
of their wrongs, he sometimes seemed to be right. The tribunes he
regarded as noxious busybodies, whose loose talk was dividing Rome into
two parties. In fact there were two parties. Coriolanus could not see
that the real cause of the division was not what the tribunes said but
what the people suffered. He could see no right but his own, and all his
powerful will was set to driving that right through. To yield seemed to
him pusillanimous. There was bound to be a fierce struggle and it soon
came. Coriolanus made bitter scornful speeches, which enraged the
people. They smarted under his biting words and forgot all his great
deeds. He became more and more unpopular. This unpopularity only made
him despise the people, who judged men by words and not by deeds. At
last the tribunes accused him of trying to prevent their receiving the
corn that had been sent to them by the city of Syracuse and of aiming at
making himself ruler in the city. Finally they demanded that he should
be banished. Coriolanus scorned to defend himself. Instead of that he
attacked the tribunes and abused the people in terms of cruel scorn and
contempt. When the vote banishing him was carried he turned on them,
declaring that they made him despise not only them but Rome. He banished
them: there was a world elsewhere.
But though Coriolanus had always declared that he cared more for Rome
than for anything and desired not his own greatness but that of the city
and now pretended to scorn the people and the sentence they had passed
upon him, his actions showed how far his bitterness had eaten into his
own soul. He turned his back on Rome and betook himself to the camp of
Tullus Aufidius, the leader of the people of Antium, then engaged in war
against the Republic, and prepared to assist him in order to punish the
ungrateful Romans.
From this dreadful action he was saved by his mother Volumnia. Her
patriotism was truer and more unselfish than his. With his wife and his
young children she came to the camp, clad in the garb of deepest
mourning, dust scattered upon her grey hairs, and went on her knees to
her son to implore him not to dishonour himself by fighting against his
country. At last the true nobleness in the soul of Coriolanus made its
way through the anger and bitterness that had darkened it: he acceded to
Volumnia’s prayers, though he well knew what the price for himself would
be. Rome was saved from a great danger, since the city had no
general to equal Coriolanus. He himself, however, was assassinated by
the orders of Aufidius, who soon afterwards was badly defeated in the
field. Coriolanus said to his mother, when she at last persuaded him to
yield, that she had won a noble victory for Rome, but one that was fatal
to her son. He was right. His very words showed that in some part of his
mind he realized how wrong and really unpatriotic his action had been;
in joining with the enemies of Rome he had shown clearly that what he
loved was not his country but his own pride. In the end, thanks to
Volumnia, he bent his head. The lesson to the Romans was a clear one:
and in the years that followed it was not forgotten. Coriolanus was
remembered as a hero, but also as a warning. When real danger threatened
Rome the people stood unshaken from without and from within. In the
Roman camp there were never any traitors.
The Mother’s Appeal
Distracted by the sight of his mother, Coriolanus leapt wildly from his
seat and was advancing to embrace her when, turning from supplication to
anger, she exclaimed, ‘Before I allow your embrace, let me know whether
I have come to an enemy or a son, whether I am a prisoner or a mother in
your camp. Has a long life and helpless old age brought me to such a
pass that I see you, first as an exile, and afterwards as an enemy?
Could you bear to devastate this land that bore and nurtured you?
However hostile and threatening the spirit in which you came, did not
your anger fail when you crossed its border? When Rome was in sight, did
you not reflect, “Inside those walls are my home and its gods, my
mother, wife, and children?” If I had not been a mother, as it seems,
Rome would not have been besieged; if I had not a son, I should
have died free in a free country. But as for me, I can no longer
suffer anything that will add to my wretchedness or to your disgrace
and, wretched though I am, it will not be for long. These younger ones
have the claim upon you, for, if you persist, you will bring them to a
premature death or to a life of slavery.’ Then his wife and children
embraced him, and the wailing that arose from all the throng of women,
and lamentations for themselves and their country, at length broke his
resolution. He embraced them and sent them away, and at once withdrew
his forces from the city.
Livy, ii. 40. 5-10.
A Happy Victory
Coriolanus.
O, mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold! the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at. O my mother! mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But, for your son, believe it, O! believe it,
Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d,
If not most mortal to him. But let it come.
Aufidius, though I cannot make true wars,
I’ll frame convenient peace. Now, good Aufidius,
Were you in my stead, would you have heard
A mother less, or granted less, Aufidius?
Auf. I was mov’d withal.
Cor.
I dare be sworn you were:
And, sir, it is no little thing to make
Mine eyes to sweat compassion. But, good sir,
What peace you’ll make, advise me: for my part,
I’ll not to Rome, I’ll back with you; and pray you,
Stand to me in this cause.
Shakespeare, Coriolanus, V. iii.
The Great Enemies of Rome
The early history of Rome is a
history of war. Its heroes are soldiers. When the city was founded and
throughout its early life Italy was divided among different peoples,
ruling over different parts of the country. With these peoples—the
Latins, the Etruscans, the Volscians, the Samnites—the Romans
fought. War with one or other of them was always going on. Its fortune
varied, but in the end the Roman spirit and the Roman organization told.
One by one the other Italian tribes submitted and accepted Roman
overlordship. This was a long and slow business, extending over hundreds
of years. While it was still going on the Romans had to meet another
danger: the danger of invasion from without. Again and again the Gauls
swept down upon Italy from the north. Once (390) they actually occupied
parts of the city of Rome itself. After that they
were finally driven out and defeated by Camillus. Later, though they
came again across the northern hills, they were always beaten and driven
back. When on the march, their armies were dangerous; but the Gauls had
no plan of permanent conquest: after a defeat, they retired to their
northern plains and hills.
Within the space of a hundred years, in the third century before the
birth of Christ, the Romans had to meet two invaders of a very different
and far more dangerous kind: invaders with a settled plan of conquest,
who came against them in order to subdue and rule Rome and Italy. These
were Pyrrhus and Hannibal. Had either of them succeeded, the whole
history of Rome and of the world might have been different. In a very
real sense Pyrrhus and Hannibal are heroes in the story of Rome. They
were the greatest enemies the Roman people ever had to meet. They were
defeated because of qualities in the Roman people as a whole, rather
than by the genius of any single general. No single Roman leader at the
time was a first-rate commander like Pyrrhus, still less a genius like
Hannibal, a much greater man than he. It is during their struggle
with Pyrrhus, in the war with Carthage that followed Pyrrhus’s defeat,
and in the long war with Hannibal that ended in his defeat and the
destruction of Carthage as a great power that we can see the Roman
character at its best. We can appreciate it and understand it only by
understanding the enemies whom it met and broke.
Pyrrhus
At the time of his attack upon Italy Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, was the
most brilliant soldier of his day: and his ambition was to rule, like
Alexander, over a world greater than that of his own Greek kingdom. From
babyhood he breathed and grew up amid storm and adventure, all his life
he was most at home in camps and on the battlefield. His father was
killed in battle when Pyrrhus was but five years old: he himself was
only saved from death by a faithful slave who carried him to the house
of the King of the Illyrians and laid him at his feet. The baby Pyrrhus
clasped the knees of the monarch who, looking into his
face, could not resist the appeal of the child’s eyes, but kept him safe
till he was twelve years old and then helped to put him on his father’s
throne. Though only a boy, Pyrrhus held it for five years. He was driven
out, but later he recovered his kingdom again. As he grew up he studied
the art of war constantly and wrote a handbook on tactics. As Plutarch,
who wrote his life, puts it, ‘he was persuaded that neither to annoy
others nor be annoyed by them was a life insufferably languishing and
tedious’. Pyrrhus’s appearance expressed the strong, generous simplicity
and directness of his character and his singleness of aim. The most
remarkable feature in his face was his mouth, for his front teeth were
formed of a continuous piece of bone, marked only with small lines
resembling the divisions of a row of teeth. Fear was absolutely unknown
to him. His weakness was that he did not understand men: though a
brilliant soldier he knew nothing about government. He was a soldier
only. He could win battles but not rule men.
PYRRHUS
Pyrrhus came to Italy on the invitation of the people of Tarentum.
Tarentum was a wealthy and flourishing city in the south. Originally a
Greek settlement, its people were famous for the luxury and elegance of
their houses and lives, and scorned the rude, hardy, and simple Romans
as untutored barbarians. When some Roman ships appeared in their harbour
they were sunk by the Tarentines, who thought that as the Romans were at
that time busy—the Gauls had swept down from the north and they
were engaged with a war against the Samnites—Tarentum was safe
from them. But the Romans at once declared war (281). The Tarentines
took fright: they had no mind for fighting themselves and looked about
for some one who would do it for them. Thus they called to
Pyrrhus to save the Greeks in Italy. Pyrrhus saw in their appeal his
chance of realizing what for the great Alexander had remained a
dream—an empire in the West. He took sail at once. He was indeed
so eager that he started in mid-winter despite the storms, and lost part
of his fleet on the way. Nevertheless he brought a great army with him:
Macedonian foot soldiers, then considered the best in the world,
horsemen, archers, and slingers; and elephants, never before seen in
Italy. In Tarentum he found nothing ready. His first task was to make
the idle, luxurious city into a camp. The inhabitants, who cared for
nothing but feasting, drinking, and games, did not like this, but it was
too late to be sorry. Pyrrhus had come, and since no other towns in
Italy gave any sign of joining him, he had to make the most of Tarentum.
The Tarentines, who had been used to having all their fighting done for
them by slaves, now had to go into training themselves.
In the spring the Roman army took the field and marched south against
the invader. When Pyrrhus surveyed from a hill the Roman camp and line
of battle he exclaimed in surprise: ‘These are no barbarians!’ In the
end he won a victory at Heraclea (280), partly by reason of the panic
caused among the Roman soldiers by the elephants—they had never
seen such beasts before—but the victory was a very expensive one.
Pyrrhus’s own losses were so heavy that he said, ‘One more victory like
this and I shall be ruined.’ As he walked over the field at night and
saw the Roman dead, all their wounds in front, lying where they had
fallen in their own lines, he cried: ‘Had I been king of these people I
should have conquered the world.’
A deep impression was made on him by the envoy Fabricius. Plutarch
tells the story:
Pyrrhus and Fabricius
Presently envoys came to negotiate about the fate of the prisoners, and
among them Gaius Fabricius, who was famed among the Romans, as Cineas
told the King, for uprightness and military talent, and for extreme
poverty as well. Therefore
Pyrrhus received him kindly, apart from the rest, and urged him to
accept a present, of course not corruptly, but as a so-called token of
friendship and intimacy. When Fabricius refused, the King did no more
for the moment, but next day, wishing to try his nerves as he had never
seen an elephant, he had the largest of these beasts put behind a
curtain close to them as they conversed. This was done, and at a signal
the curtain was drawn aside, and the beast suddenly raised its trunk and
held it over the head of Fabricius, uttering a harsh and terrifying cry.
Undisturbed, he turned round and, smiling, said to Pyrrhus, ‘Yesterday
your gold did not move me, nor does your elephant to-day.’
At dinner all sorts of subjects were discussed, and as a great deal was
said about Greece and its philosophers, Cineas happened to mention
Epicurus and explained the doctrines of his disciples about the gods and
service to the state and the chief end of life. This last, as he said,
they identified with pleasure, while they avoided service to the state
as interrupting and marring their happiness, and banished the gods far
away from love and anger and care for mankind to an untroubled life of
ceaseless enjoyment. Before he had finished, Fabricius interrupted him
and said, ‘By Hercules, I hope that Pyrrhus and the Samnites will
hold these doctrines as long as they are at war with us.’
This filled Pyrrhus with such admiration of his high spirit and
character that he was more anxious than before to be on terms of
friendship instead of hostility with the Romans, and he privately urged
Fabricius to arrange a peace and to take service with him and live as
the first of all his comrades and generals. It is said that he quietly
replied, ‘O king, you would gain nothing; for these very men who
now honour and admire you will prefer my rule to yours if they once get
to know me.’ Such were his words; and Pyrrhus did not receive them with
anger or in a spirit of offended majesty, but he actually told his
friends of the nobility of Fabricius and gave him sole charge of the
prisoners on the understanding that, if the Senate refused the peace,
they should be sent back after greeting their friends and keeping the
festival of Saturn. As it happened, they were sent back after the
festival, the Senate ordaining the penalty of death for anyone who
stayed behind.
Plutarch, ***. 20.
He was yet more deeply impressed by the strength of the Roman
character a little later. When he found that none of the Latins were
going to join him Pyrrhus sent an ambassador
to the Senate, offering terms of peace. This ambassador was loaded with
costly presents for the leading Romans and their wives. All these gifts
were refused. Then Pyrrhus’s envoy came before the Senate, to see
whether eloquence could not do what bribes had failed to effect. He had
been a pupil of the great Demosthenes, the most wonderful orator of
Greece, and his golden words moved many of the senators; they thought it
would be wise to make terms. But old Appius Claudius, one of the most
distinguished men in Rome, the builder of the great military road known
as the Appian way, had been carried into the Senate House by his sons
and servants, for he was very old and nearly blind. He now rose to his
feet and his speech made these senators ashamed of themselves.
‘Hitherto’, he cried, ‘I have regarded my blindness as a
misfortune; but now, Romans, I wish I had been deaf as well as
blind, for then I should not have heard these shameful counsels. Who is
there who will not despise you and think you an easy conquest, if
Pyrrhus not only escapes unconquered but gains Tarentum as a reward for
insulting the Romans?’ His words stirred the senators deeply. They voted
as one man to continue the war. Pyrrhus’s ambassador was told to tell
his master that the Romans could not treat so long as there was an enemy
on Italian soil. He told Pyrrhus that the Senate seemed to him an
assembly of kings.
The firm mind of the Romans did not change when Pyrrhus marched
north. Though he got within forty miles of the city there was no panic:
only a rush of men to join the armies standing outside the walls to
guard it. He had to retire south again. Even after another victory in
the next campaign—at Asculum (279)—Rome was not shaken: the
Italians stood firm. Pyrrhus knew that to win battles was not enough; he
could not conquer Rome unless he could shake the solid resistance of a
whole people. This he could not do. Nor did he know how to appeal to the
Italians and unite them against Rome. To the Italians Pyrrhus was a
foreigner, called in by the Tarentine Greeks whom they rightly despised.
Against him they rallied round Rome. And the Romans never wavered for an
instant.
At the darkest hour there had been no break in the will of the whole
people. Pyrrhus saw this: he saw that the Romans would last him out.
After Asculum he crossed to Sicily and defeated the Carthaginians, the
allies of Rome who were gradually capturing the island from Agathocles
the king. But though he soon overran a large part of this island, the
Greeks in Sicily liked his iron rule no better than the Greeks of
Tarentum had done. He returned to Italy, leaving the great fortress of
Lilybaeum still in Carthaginian hands, crying as he sailed away, ‘What a
battleground for Romans and Carthaginians I am leaving.’ In Italy he
fought one more big battle, at Beneventum (275); but it was a defeat.
His hopes were ended. He had won glory for himself, but he had, and this
he knew, helped to unite Italy under Rome; and, as he saw, to prepare
the way for a great struggle between Rome and Carthage. Pyrrhus saw,
sooner than any Roman, the great struggle coming in which the fate of
Rome was to be decided. He had shown the Romans the way: had made their
strength visible to them and turned their eyes beyond Italy, across the
seas.
Carthage
The power of Carthage, to the men of the age of Pyrrhus, seemed
infinitely greater than that of Rome. Rome at that time was but a single
city whose rule did not extend even over the whole of Italy. Carthage
was the head of an empire, built up on a trade which spread its name
over the whole of the known world. The Punic or Phoenician people, as
the ruling race in Carthage was called because of their dark skins, came
from the East. Their earliest homes were in Arabia and Syria. It was
from Tyre and Sidon, great and rich towns when Rome was hardly a
village, that the traders came and settled in North Africa. Their ships,
laden with woven stuffs in silk and cotton, dyed in rich colours, with
perfumes and spices, ivory and gold, ornaments and implements in metal,
sailed all the navigable seas, and brought home from distant places the
goods and raw materials of different lands. At a time when the Romans
had
hardly begun to sail the seas at all, their vessels passed out of the
Mediterranean, through the Straits and up to the little-known lands of
the Atlantic. They brought home tin from distant Cornwall, silver from
Spain, iron from Elba, copper from Cyprus. Carthage itself was a
magnificent city and the richest in the world. Its citizens lived in
wealth and idleness on the labour of others. Trade supplied them with
riches: the hardy tribes of Africa, Numidians and Libyans, were their
slaves, manned their fleets and armies. Their navy ruled the seas. They
had settlements in Spain; Corsica and Sardinia were owned by Carthage;
all the west of Sicily was in their hands.
THE DESOLATION OF CARTHAGE TO-DAY
In Sicily the Carthaginians and the Romans first met. The eastern
part of the island was ruled by King Hiero of Syracuse; but raids on it
were constantly made by the people of Messina. After one of these Hiero
attacked Messina. His force was driven off by the Carthaginians who then
occupied the citadel. The people of the town looked round for assistance
and finally appealed to Rome (265).
Messina was not a Roman city; but the Romans saw that
if the Carthaginians were left in possession they would hold a bridge
from which they could easily cross into Italy. That was the question
that had to be faced when the Senate met to consider whether they should
help the people of Messina. To do so meant war with Carthage at once.
Not to do so might mean war with Carthage later on. The Senate called
upon the people to decide. The people voted for war now.
CARTHAGINIAN
PRIESTESS
No man could then have foreseen how long and severe the war was going
to be. It lasted three and twenty years (264-241); and at the beginning
all the advantage seemed to be on the Carthaginian side. In the first
place Carthage had the strongest navy in the world. The Carthaginian
army was much the larger, though it was composed of paid soldiers of
foreign race. There was no outstanding leader on the Roman side equal to
Hamilcar, who commanded the Carthaginians in its later stages.
When the war began the Romans had no fleet. They had never had more
than a few transport vessels: no fighting ships. They did not know how
they were constructed. This did not daunt them, however.
A Carthaginian man-of-war was driven ashore. Roman carpenters and
shipwrights at once set to work, studying how it was put together, and
thinking out devices by which it could be improved. While the
shipwrights were busy the men practised rowing on dry land. The most
famous improvement invented by the Romans was the ‘crow’. This was an
attachment to the prow, worked by a pulley, consisting of a long pole
with a sharp and strong curved iron spike at the end. As soon as an
enemy ship came within range this pole was swung round so that the spike
caught the vessel and held it in an iron grip. A bridge was
fastened to the pole: the soldiers ran along and boarded, forcing a
hand-to-hand fight. To this the Carthaginian
sailors were not used. They were better navigators than the Romans, but
not such good fighters. In hand-to-hand encounters the Romans got the
best of it. But they did not know so much of wind and weather, and again
and again the storms made havoc with them. Four great fleets were
destroyed or captured in the first sixteen years of the war, which
lasted for twenty-three. In the year 249 Claudius the Consul lost 93
vessels at a stroke in the disastrous battle of Drepana and killed
himself rather than live on under the disgrace. Later in the same year
another great fleet was dashed to pieces in a storm.
PICTURES FROM POMPEII—
The year ended with the Carthaginians masters of the seas and on
land. Four Roman armies had been lost almost to a man. In five years one
man in every six of the population of Rome had perished in battle or on
the sea. After sixteen years’ hard fighting and extraordinary efforts
the end of the war seemed further off than ever, unless the Romans were
to admit defeat. But it was no part of their character to admit defeat.
As Polybius, the great Greek historian who knew them well, said some
years later, ‘The Romans are never so dangerous as when they seem to be
reduced to desperation.’ So it proved. No one had any thought of giving
in. Regulus, captured by the Carthaginians and sent by them to Rome to
urge his countrymen to surrender, urged them to go on fighting, though
he knew he must pay the penalty for such words with his life. Had the
Carthaginians been made of the same metal they might have used the hour
to strike the fatal blow; but they were not. On land they did not trust
the one really great general whom
they had—Hamilcar Barca. For six years nothing serious was done in
Sicily. On sea they let the fleet fall into disrepair because they were
confident that the Romans, after their tremendous losses, could do
nothing much. They did not know the Roman temper. In the coffers of the
State there was no money to build ships. But there were rich men in Rome
who put their country’s needs before their own comfort. A number of
them sold all they had and gave the money for shipbuilding. Shipwrights
and carpenters worked night and day, and in a wonderfully short time a
fleet of 250 vessels was constructed and given to the State. And this
fleet ended the war. Every man in it was alive with enthusiasm, ready to
die for Rome. The Consul Lutatius Catulus, who was put in command of it,
utterly defeated the Carthaginian navy in a great battle off the
Aegatian Islands (241). In Sicily Hamilcar could do nothing; no supplies
could reach him. With bitterness in his heart he had to make a peace
which gave Sicily to Rome. The real heroes are the Roman people who,
whether in the armies or the navies or at home, never yielded or lost
courage in spite of defeat and disaster but held on to the end. They won
the victory. They defeated Hamilcar. In this, the first Punic War, the
Carthaginian Government was glad to make peace; Hamilcar was not. He was
determined that Carthage should defeat Rome yet: he made his young son
Hannibal swear never to be friends with Rome.
—OF A MIMIC NAVAL BATTLE
Hannibal
This son of Hamilcar was the most dangerous enemy the Romans ever had
to face. He was not only, like Pyrrhus, a brilliant soldier and
general: he was much more than this. He was a genius in all the arts of
war, and in the leadership of men; great as Napoleon and Julius Caesar
were great. He had the power to fill the hearts of his followers with a
devotion that asked no questions; they were ready to die for him, to
endure any and every hardship. No Roman general of the time was a match
for him: few in any time. Yet he was defeated. The reason was simple. He
was defeated not by this or that Roman general but by the Roman people.
His genius broke against their steady endurance, grim patience, and
devotion to Rome. Hannibal could and did win battles, but no victory
brought him nearer to his great object, that of dividing Italy and
breaking the dominance of Rome. Except for the southern tribes and Capua
the Italians stood solid; in Rome there was never any talk of giving in.
When Varro, after a rout, partly due to his own recklessness, which left
the road to Rome open to Hannibal, brought his remnant back to the city,
the senators came out to meet him, and instead of uttering reproaches or
lamentations, thanked him because he had not despaired of the Republic.
This spirit Hannibal could not break. Behind him there was nothing of
this kind. He had his genius and the soldiers he had made; but the
people of Carthage only gave him grudging support.
Hannibal’s invasion of Italy failed: but it is one of the most
wonderful stories in the whole history of war, and he is one of the
great men of history.
His father, Hamilcar Barca (‘Barca’ means ‘lightning’), was a
brilliant general; that the Carthaginians lost their first war with Rome
was their fault, not his. Of his three sons, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and
Mago, Hannibal the eldest was the dearest to him and most like himself
in strength of will, in the power to form a purpose and hold to it
unshaken by all that happened to him or that other people said. Soon
after the war with Rome was ended Hamilcar left Carthage, taking his
sons
with him. Before he left he made young Hannibal, then nine years old,
swear on the altars never to be friends with Rome. They sailed for
Spain. Spain, Hamilcar saw, could be worth more than Sicily, if the
people were trained as soldiers and taught the arts of agriculture and
mining. The country was rich in metals. His sons helped him, and he
meantime taught them not only everything connected with war and the
training and handling of men, but languages and all that was then known
of history and of art, so that although their boyhood was spent in camps
they were as well taught as the noblest Roman.
At the age of six-and-twenty Hannibal was chosen by the army to
command the Carthaginian forces in Spain. Although young in years
Hannibal’s purpose in life had long been clear to him: since his
father’s death he had lived and thought for nothing else. He had trained
the army in Spain for this purpose; his captains knew and shared it; and
they and the men were filled with a passionate love for and belief in
their young commander. Hannibal could make himself feared. The
discipline in his army was strict, though he never asked men to do or
suffer what he would not do or suffer himself. It was not through fear,
however, that he made men devoted to him. They followed him because they
believed in him, believed that he had a clear plan and the will to carry
it through, and because they loved him. He was the elder brother and
companion of his soldiers, and never forgot that they were men.
Three years after he had been made general in Spain Hannibal’s plans
were complete. Everything was ready. He knew what he was going to do.
Suddenly he laid siege to Saguntum (219), a town in Spain allied to
Rome, and took it. This was a declaration of war on Rome. A few
months later news came to Rome; news which at first could hardly be
believed. Hannibal had left New Carthage, his great base in Spain, with
a large army. He had defeated the northern Spaniards and was preparing
to cross the Alps and descend on Italy. The Roman army sent to stop him
on the Rhone arrived too late to do so. But to cross the Alps with
troops and baggage when the winter snows were beginning to fall upon the
mountain passes and the streams
were freezing into ice was believed to be impossible: no army had ever
done it. The paths were precipitous, at places there were no tracks at
all. Wild fighting tribes of Gauls held the passes. There was no food:
not even dry grass for the animals. Fierce storms of hail and snow swept
the mountain tops.
Nevertheless, before winter had fully set in Hannibal had brought his
army over. The losses of men and animals had been severe; but a thing
thought impossible had been done. The season was still early for
fighting: Hannibal could let his suffering troops rest in the fertile
North Italian plains. Livy describes the last stage of the journey:
Hannibal’s March: the Sight of the Promised Land
On the ninth day they reached the crest of the Alps, pushing on over
trackless steeps, and sometimes compelled to retrace their steps owing
to the treachery of the guides or, where they were not trusted, to the
random choice of some route through a valley. For two days they encamped
on the top, and the soldiers, exhausted by marching and fighting, were
allowed to rest. A number of baggage animals, too, that had slipped
on the rocks, reached the camp by following the tracks of the army.
Tired as the men were, and wearied by so many hardships, a further
dismay was caused by a fall of snow, which the setting of the Pleiades
brought with it. They started again at dawn, and the army was slowly
advancing through ways blocked with snow, listlessness and despair
visible on the faces of all, when Hannibal hurried in front of his men
and ordered them to stop on a ridge commanding a wide and distant view,
from which he pointed out Italy and the plains of the Po lying at the
foot of the Alps. ‘Here’, he exclaimed, ‘you are scaling the walls, not
merely of Italy, but of Rome; the rest of the way will be smooth and
sloping; one or at most two battles will make you masters of the
fortress and capital of Italy.’
Livy, xxi. 35. 4-9.
Just across the river Ticinus a Roman army came to meet him under
Cornelius Scipio (218). It was defeated; a month later the other
consul, Sempronius, was out-generalled and defeated on the river Trebia.
These two victories meant that Italy north of the Po was in Hannibal’s
hands. Moreover the
Gauls had risen and joined him. Hannibal at once set to work training
them, and filling the thinned ranks of his own army with fresh men. His
hope was that not only the Gauls—poor allies, for they could never
be trusted—but the Italians generally would rise and join him. He
counted on their being eager to shake off the yoke of Rome.
GREAT ST. BERNARD PASS
In Rome men were anxious and excited, but not dismayed. There were
two main parties among the people and among the soldiers, led by men of
very differing type. On one side stood those who believed that the way
to treat Hannibal was by a waiting game. If Rome stood fast they could
wear him out as they had worn Pyrrhus out. He was far away from his base
of supplies. His new troops could not be so good as his old. The
Italians would not rise to help him in any great numbers. The centre of
Italy was safe, anyhow. So long as he stayed in the north the south
would not rise; if he moved south the Gauls would soon tire of fighting.
The leader of this party was Quintus Fabius, a member of one of the
proudest Roman families, and a man of what was already beginning to be
called the old
school. That the common people might suffer if the war dragged out for
years did not disturb him much.
On the other side stood men like Caius Flaminius and Terentius Varro,
younger both in years and in mind, eager, impatient for action.
Caius Flaminius had opposed Fabius before. He had been elected a
tribune of the people—one of those magistrates appointed at the
time of Coriolanus to speak for them. He was a man of great ability and
warm enthusiasm, a man with more imagination than Fabius. He was as
truly devoted to his country, but to his mind the greatness of Rome
depended not only on conquest and fine laws and honesty and honour in
its leading citizens. These were all good things. But there was another
question to ask. Were the ordinary common people happy? Fifteen years
before Hannibal’s invasion, Flaminius had brought in a Bill intended to
help the poorer Romans by making land settlements for small cultivators
in the north. Fabius and most of the old patricians were hot against
this. Fabius said to give land to the poor people of Rome encouraged men
who could find work in the city but did not take the trouble. They would
not cultivate the land if they got it: they would sell it and come back
for more. Flaminius denied this. There were men in numbers, he said, men
who had served in the armies, who wanted to work but could not do it
because they could not get land. To put more men on the land would
enrich the whole country. His law was finally carried. Another work done
by Flaminius stands to this day as a memorial of him. It, too, shows the
imagination of the man. This is the Via Flaminia, a magnificent
road that ran right across the Apennine Mountains from sea to sea. It
took twenty years to build, but when built it stood for centuries,
useful in time of war, even more useful in time of peace.
Flaminius, already popular on account of these achievements, dreamed
of doing yet more striking things as a soldier. This was his danger. In
the year after the battle of the Trebia he was put in command of one of
the two new Roman armies. He was all for a bold policy and believed that
he could defeat
Hannibal and thus add military glory to himself. He did not know
Hannibal. Hannibal, however, had made it his business to know his
enemies; he did know what Flaminius was like and used that knowledge for
his undoing. Flaminius’s views and character are given by Livy.
Flaminius before Trasimene
Flaminius would not have refrained from action even if his enemy had
been inactive; but when the lands of the allies were harried almost
before his eyes, he thought it a personal disgrace that Hannibal should
range through the heart of Italy and advance unopposed to attack the
walls of Rome. In the council all the rest urged a safe rather than an
ambitious policy. ‘Wait for your colleague,’ they exclaimed, ‘and then,
joining the two armies, carry on the war with a common spirit and
purpose; meantime use the cavalry and light-armed infantry to check the
reckless plundering of the enemy.’ In a rage he flung himself out of the
council and, bidding the trumpet give at once the signal for march and
battle, he cried, ‘Rather let us sit still before the walls of Arretium,
for here is our country and our home. Hannibal is to slip away from our
hands and devastate Italy and, plundering and burning, to reach the
walls of Rome, while we are not to move a step till C. Flaminius is
summoned by the Fathers from Arretium, as Camillus of old was summoned
from Veii.’ Amid these angry words he ordered the standards to be pulled
up with all speed and leapt into the saddle, but the horse suddenly fell
and threw the consul over his head. While the bystanders were alarmed by
this gloomy omen for the beginning of a campaign, a further message
arrived that, in spite of all the standard-bearer’s exertions, the
standard could not be pulled up. Turning to the messenger, he said, ‘Do
you also bring a dispatch from the Senate forbidding me to fight? Go,
tell them to dig out the standard if their hands are so numbed with fear
that they cannot pull it up.’ Then the advance began; the chief
officers, apart from their previous disagreement, were further alarmed
by the double portent; the soldiers were delighted with their
high-spirited leader, as they thought more about his confidence than any
grounds on which it might rest.
Livy, xxii. 3. 7-14.
TRASIMENE
When Flaminius took the field he found that Hannibal, despite the
melting snow that flooded the fields and made them into marshes and the
rivers into torrents, had crossed the
Apennines. It had been a terrible crossing: men, horses, and animals
fell ill and died. Hannibal himself lost an eye. But he had crossed the
mountains and marched right past Flaminius, who was not strong enough to
attack him, on the road to Rome. This was done on purpose to lure
Flaminius on; for Hannibal knew that he longed to fight before the other
consul, Servilius, could join him with his army and share the glory.
Hannibal had learned a great deal about the country and he succeeded in
misleading Flaminius as to his movements, drawing him on into a deadly
trap. Along the high hills standing round the shores of Lake Trasimene
he posted his men one night on either side of the pass that closed the
entrance. In the morning the heavy mists concealed them absolutely.
Flaminius marched his army right in, unsuspecting. Hannibal’s soldiers
swept down the slopes and closed the Romans in on every side. They were
doomed. There was no escape: they were entrapped between the marshes and
the lake; only the vanguard cut their way through, and they were
surrounded later. Fifteen thousand men perished, among them Flaminius
himself, who died fighting. As many were taken prisoners. Hannibal’s
losses were far less. Livy comments:
After Trasimene
Such was the famous battle of Trasimene, one of the most memorable
disasters of the Roman people. Fifteen thousand men were slain on the
field; ten thousand, scattered in flight all over Etruria, made for Rome
by different ways. Two thousand five hundred of the enemy fell in the
battle; many afterwards died of wounds. Hannibal released without ransom
the prisoners who belonged to the Latin allies, and threw the Romans
into chains. He separated the bodies of his own men from the heaps of
the enemy’s dead and gave orders for their burial. A long search
was made for the body of Flaminius, which he wished to honour with a
funeral; but it could not be found.
Livy, xxii. 7. 1-5.
After this disaster old Fabius was called to the helm and he carried
out his own totally different policy; a policy of endless waiting.
During the whole of the rest of the year Hannibal could not force Fabius
to give battle. Hannibal moved gradually south, along the western coast.
But the Italians did not rise in any great numbers. Hannibal believed
that a crushing defeat of Rome would make them do so, and prepared to
that end. This is Livy’s account of Fabius’s plan of campaign, and of
some of the difficulties he met with in carrying it out: difficulties
not only from Hannibal but from his own captains. Thus Varro, his master
of the horse, was constantly stirring up discontent.
The Strategy of Fabius
The dictator took over the consul’s army from his deputy, Fulvius
Fleccus, and marching through the Sabine land came to Tibur on the day
which he had fixed for the gathering of the new recruits. From Tibur he
moved to Praeneste, and by cross roads to the Latin way. Thence, after
very careful scouting, he led his army against the enemy, determined not
to risk an engagement anywhere if he could avoid it. On the day that
Fabius first encamped within view of the enemy, not far from Arpi,
Hannibal at once formed his army into line and offered battle; but when
he saw no movement of troops and no stir in the camp, he retired
exclaiming that the ancestral spirit of the Romans was broken, that they
were finally conquered, and that they admitted their inferiority in
valour and renown. But an
unspoken anxiety invaded his mind that he would now have to deal with a
general very unlike Flaminius and Sempronius, and that the Romans,
taught by their disasters, had at last sought out a leader equal to
himself.
Thus Hannibal at once saw reason to fear the wariness of the new
dictator, but as he had not yet put his determination to the proof, he
began to worry and harass him by constantly moving his camp and
pillaging the lands of the allies actually before his eyes. Sometimes he
would hurriedly march out of sight, sometimes he would wait concealed
beyond a bend of the road, in the hope that he might catch him on the
level. Fabius, however, led his troops along the high ground, neither
losing touch with his enemy nor giving him battle. The soldiers were
kept in the camp unless some necessary service called them out. If
fodder and wood were wanted, they went in strong parties that did not
scatter. A force of cavalry and light-armed infantry, formed and
posted to meet sudden attacks, protected their own comrades and
threatened the scattered plunderers of the enemy. The safety of the army
was never staked on one pitched battle, while small successes in trivial
engagements, begun without risk and with a retreat at hand, taught the
soldiers, demoralized by previous disasters, to think better of their
own valour and the chances of victory. But he did not find Hannibal such
a formidable enemy of this sound strategy as the master of the horse,
who was only prevented by his subordinate position from ruining the
country, being headstrong and rash in action and unrestrained in speech.
First with a few listeners, afterwards openly among the soldiers, he
described the deliberation of his commander as indolence and his caution
as cowardice, attributing to him faults that were akin to his virtues,
and tried to exalt himself by depreciation of his superior,
a detestable practice that has become common because it has been
too successful.
Livy, xxii. 12.
In the following year, Varro, this same master of the horse, was made
consul, sharing the command with Aemilius Paulus. Aemilius was an
experienced soldier; but he was on the worst of terms with Varro, and
Fabius did not mend matters by warning him that Varro’s rashness was
likely to be more dangerous to Rome than Hannibal himself.
The Roman army was the largest yet put in the field and especially
strong in infantry. The Plain of Cannae, where Hannibal was encamped,
was not favourable for infantry,
Aemilius therefore wanted to put off battle. Varro was eager for it.
They could not agree. In the end they decided to take command
alternately. As soon as Varro’s day came the soldiers saw, to their
delight, the red flag of battle flying from the general’s tent.
HELMET found on the
field of CANNAE
The battle of Cannae (216) was Hannibal’s greatest victory and the
most terrible defeat for Rome in all its history. The Roman charge drove
right through the Carthaginian centre: too far, so that the
Carthaginians turned and attacked on all sides. The slaughter was
terrible. Of 76,000 Romans who fought in the battle the bodies of 70,000
lay upon the field, among them Aemilius himself and the flower of the
noblest families in Rome. It was said that a seventh of all the men of
military age in Italy perished. Of the higher officers Varro was the
only one who escaped; with him was a tiny handful of men, all that was
left of the mighty army.
The news of Cannae came to Rome and the city was plunged in mourning.
Yet despite the hideous losses and the extreme danger no one gave way to
weakness or despair. The strife of parties died down. Men and women
turned from weeping for their dead to working for their country. Rome
still stood and to every Roman the city’s life was more important than
his own. Not a reproach was uttered against Varro, even by those who
before had distrusted and blamed him. After the battle he had done well.
With great courage and energy he collected together and inspired with
new faith the scattered units that remained, and at their head he
marched back to Rome. The Senate and people went in procession to the
city gate to meet him and the scattered remnant of travel-worn,
bloodstained men who had escaped with him from Cannae. Before them all
Varro was thanked because he had not despaired of the Republic. Well
might Hannibal feel that even after Cannae Rome was not conquered. It
was not conquered because the spirit of its people was unbroken. Rome
stood firm. The rich came forward giving or lending all they had to the
State; men of all classes flocked to the new armies; heavy taxes were
put on and no one complained. If the ordinary man was ready to give his
life, the least the well-to-do could do was to give his money. The
people of Central Italy stood by Rome. In the south rich cities like
Capua opened their gates to Hannibal; some of the southern peoples
joined him. But there was no big general rising. Nor did the help
Hannibal needed come from home, Carthage, or from his other allies in
Sicily and Macedonia. The people of Carthage were not like those of
Rome. They were sluggish and a big party there was jealous of Hannibal
and would do nothing to support him.
Marcellus, the general who took the field after Cannae, was a fine
soldier who believed with Fabius that the way to defeat Hannibal was to
wear him down. In Marcellus Hannibal found an enemy he must respect.
When Marcellus was killed at last and brought into the Carthaginian camp
Hannibal stood for a long time silent, looking at his dead enemy’s face.
Then he ordered the body to be clothed in splendid funeral garments and
burned with all the honours of war. He had the ashes placed in a silver
urn and sent to Marcellus’s son. He had in the same way buried Aemilius
with all honourable ceremony.
Time was on the Roman side. Yet for eleven years Hannibal, with a
small army, kept the whole might of Rome at bay. He was driven further
south, that was all. His great hope was that though the Carthaginians
would not stir, his brothers Hasdrubal and Mago would send him help from
Spain. In Spain after his own departure the Romans had reconquered most
of the country, but four years after Cannae Publius Scipio (defeated on
the Ticinus) and his brother Cneus were both defeated and killed, and
during the next few years Hasdrubal won nearly the whole of Spain. In
208 he was able to move north. He crossed the Pyrenees; spent the winter
in Gaul; and in the
spring, as soon as the snows melted, crossed the Alps by an easier pass
than that taken by his great brother. Before any one expected him he was
in Italy. The danger, if he could join Hannibal, was extreme. So serious
was it indeed that Fabius, now a very old man, went to the two consuls,
Livius and Claudius Nero, and begged them to act together. They hated
one another. Fabius had learned how dangerous such quarrels might be to
the State, and what harm his own advice had done between Varro and
Aemilius Paulus; he now used all his great influence to get the consuls
to put an end to personal strife. They agreed and joined their armies.
Together they were much stronger than Hasdrubal. On the river Metaurus
he was defeated (207). There Hasdrubal himself, fighting like a lion,
was killed with ten thousand of his men.
Unhappily the victorious Nero showed in his treatment of his dead
enemy a spirit very different from that of Hannibal. He threw the bloody
head of Hasdrubal in front of Hannibal’s lines. It was the first news he
had of the fate of his brother. He had lost not only a man dearer to him
than any on earth but, with him, his last hope of success. He knew that
all was over; the fortune of Carthage was at an end. For a moment he hid
his face in his mantle. What deep bitterness and pain held his heart in
that moment none may guess.
Two later Roman writers, Livy and Horace, have described the battle
of the Metaurus, which was, indeed, the turning-point of the war: for
Hannibal a fatal turning.
Metaurus, and After
Hasdrubal had often shown himself a great leader, but never so great as
in this, his last battle. It was he who supported his men in the fight
by words of encouragement and by meeting danger at their side; it was he
who, with mingled entreaty and rebuke, fired the spirit of his troops,
weary and despairing of a hopeless struggle; it was he who called back
the fugitives and in many places restored the broken ranks. At last,
when fortune declared itself in favour of the enemy, he would not
survive the great host that had followed him, but spurred his horse into
the thickest of the Roman legionaries. There he fell fighting, as became
the son of Hamilcar and the brother of Hannibal.
The consul, C. Claudius, on his return to the camp ordered the head
of Hasdrubal, which he had carefully brought with him, to be thrown down
in front of the enemy’s sentries, and he exhibited African prisoners in
chains. Two of them he freed and sent to Hannibal to inform him of
everything that had happened. Hannibal, stricken with grief at such
public and personal loss, exclaimed, as we are told, ‘I recognize
the doom of Carthage.’ Then he withdrew to Bruttium in the southern
corner of Italy, with the intention of concentrating there all the
allies, whom he could not protect if they were scattered.
Livy, xxvii. 49, 51.
Despair
What thou owest, Rome, to the house of Nero, let the Metaurus be our
witness, and Hasdrubal’s overthrow, and that bright day that scattered
the gloom of Latium, the first to smile with cheering victory since the
dread African careered through the cities of Italy, like fire through a
pine forest or Eurus over Sicilian waves. After this the manhood of Rome
gained strength from continued and successful effort, and temples
desecrated by the unhallowed violence of the Carthaginian saw their gods
restored. And the treacherous Hannibal at length exclaimed ‘Like stags,
the prey of ravening wolves, we essay to pursue those whom it is a rare
triumph to elude and escape.... No more shall I send triumphant messages
to Carthage; fallen, yea fallen, is all the hope and greatness of our
name with the loss of Hasdrubal. Naught is there that the hands of the
Claudii will fail to perform, for Jupiter protects them with beneficent
power, and prudent forethought brings them safe through the perils of
war.’
Horace, Od. iv. 4. 36-76.
For four more years Hannibal stood at bay in South Italy. No Roman
general drove him out, no Roman army could defeat him or the soldiers
who stood by him with a matchless devotion only given to men who have,
as Hannibal had, what we call the divine spark burning within them. When
at last, after fourteen years in Italy, he sailed home, it was to try to
save Carthage, the city which had betrayed him, and now called him to
save them from the war the Romans had carried into their own country. He
knew that he could not do it. The Carthaginians had signed their own
doom when they failed to send him help. When they in their turn called
to Hannibal the
enemy was at their gates. In the great battle of Zama, outside Carthage,
Scipio defeated Hannibal. This defeat was the end of Carthage as a great
power. The Roman terms had to be accepted. The power and might of
Carthage was over. The city still stood: but its empire was gone. All
its overseas possessions were added to the Roman dominions.
A COIN OF VICTORY
Six years after Zama Hannibal was banished from Carthage at the
bidding of Rome, although Scipio protested in the Senate, declaring it
to be unworthy of Rome to fear one man in a ruined state. Hannibal took
refuge in the East. There, some years later, he and Scipio met. Of the
conversation between them many stories were told. Scipio asked Hannibal
whom he thought the greatest general in the world. Hannibal replied that
he put Alexander first, then Pyrrhus, then himself.
‘And where would you have placed yourself had I not defeated
you?’
‘Oh, Scipio, then I should have placed myself not third but
first.’
In saying this Hannibal put his thought in words that might give
pleasure to his listener but were not quite true. Scipio had defeated
him at Zama; but no one knew better than the victor that the real
triumph was not his. The forces that had defeated Hannibal were greater
than those in the hand of any one man.
Had Hannibal defeated the Romans, the whole course of the world’s
history might have been changed. Looking back now it seems impossible
that he could ever have thought he could do so. But part of the secret
of a truly great man is that he believes nothing to be impossible on
which he has set his will. The power to set the will firmly, clearly,
with knowledge, on some action to be done, of whatever kind it be; to
sacrifice, for that end, one’s own wishes; to crush down the desire
every
human being feels for rest, enjoyment, comfort at the moment, and go on
when the chance of success seems far away; this power is the instrument
by which extraordinary things are brought about. Because of this power
behind him Hannibal was a real danger to Rome, and Rome knew it. If he
could have made the people of Carthage feel as he did, he would have
conquered. But he could not. His will was set on defeating Rome: the
will of the Carthaginians was set, not on this, but on a life of ease
and comfort for themselves. And because the Carthaginians were built
thus, and not like Hannibal, and he could not, by his single force, make
them like himself, it would have been a disaster for the world if
Hannibal had won. The Romans defeated him because they, and not the
Carthaginians, had in them something of the force that moved Hannibal:
they, as Polybius said of them, ‘believed nothing impossible upon which
their minds were set’.
The Scipios
Scipio, to whom after his defeat of
Hannibal the name of Africanus was given by his countrymen, was a Roman
of a new type. For him the interest and business of the world were not
bounded by war. He read much and travelled widely in the course of his
life and thought deeply on many things that had hardly begun to trouble
the ordinary Roman of his time, though they were to trouble deeply the
Romans who came after him. He loved Rome: but his love was not the
simple unquestioning devotion of the old Romans, for whom it was enough
that the city was there, and that their religion as well as their
patriotism was bound up with it. He loved Rome because he believed it
stood for something fine.
Of Scipio’s domestic life we do not know much: but he was a man of
many warm and devoted friendships and certainly showed deep attachment
to his father, to his brother, and to Scipio Aemilianus, his grandson by
adoption. When young he
was distinguished by his slim height and extreme fairness of complexion;
a skin that flushed easily and showed the feelings he afterwards
learned to conceal.
Something of his character may be seen in his bust, which shows,
above the firm mouth and powerful chin of the man of action and resolute
will, the questioning eyes and fine brow of the thinker. It is a stern,
but not altogether a cold face; above all it is the face of a man to
whom nothing was indifferent. Like most portraits of great men, it
represents its subject well on in middle life, when the enthusiasms of
youth have cooled and settled, but it is the face of a man capable of
enthusiasm, if an enthusiasm controlled by judgement.
SCIPIO AFRICANUS
Scipio was capable of enthusiasm: but not of a kind that carried him
away or made him do reckless things. The Romans of his time believed
that he had been born under a lucky star, was in some sense a special
favourite of the gods. Certainly the chances that destroy or make men
seemed throughout his life always to turn out for good. He made
mistakes, and they proved more successful than the wisest judgements
could have been. But the real secret of his success was not luck but his
sureness of himself. He never lost his head. He believed he could do
anything he put his hand to. This belief not only inspired others with
confidence; it carried him through the stages of difficulty and apparent
failure in which all but the strongest are apt to give up an enterprise
for lost. More than that, thanks to his belief in himself, Scipio was
never disturbed by jealousy or by envy of other men’s success. Men’s
praise did not excite him; his own opinion was what mattered and he knew
what it was. At the same time Scipio had in his nature
no tinge of what the Greeks called the ‘daemon’ in man and we the divine
spark. The impossible did not beckon to him. His imagination and his
desires moved among the things that could be done. He was incapable of a
passion like Hannibal’s. He could never have set out to conquer the
world, and held on year after year, beaten but not defeated, knowing
that he could not win but refusing to give up. He was the natural leader
of a successful people. Always he had Rome behind him. Hannibal had
nothing behind him, in that sense. He had to create his instruments by
the sheer force of his own fiery energy. Scipio could never have done
this. It would have seemed to him foolish to try.
Although Scipio cared for many things outside the business of war, it
was as a soldier that he was admired and honoured by most of his
countrymen. War was the only road to high place and distinction
recognized in Rome. Scipio, like other young men of his class—he
belonged to a very ancient and honourable family, that of the
Cornelii—was trained as a soldier from his boyhood.
At the battle of the Ticinus the life of the consul Publius Cornelius
Scipio was saved by the gallantry of a lad of eighteen, serving his
first campaign. This lad was his son, named like himself Publius
Cornelius Scipio. He fought again at Cannae, and was, with the son of
old Fabius Cunctator, among the very few young officers who escaped
alive. As he made his way from the stricken field he came upon a group
of men, one or two being officers, who in despair after the frightful
day felt that Rome was lost. All that was left for them was to cross the
seas and try, in a new country, to carve a career for themselves. Scipio
and young Fabius, their swords drawn, compelled them to give up this
idea and swear that they would not desert their country. These young men
did yeoman service in helping Varro to collect the remnants of his
scattered army; and Scipio was clearly marked out for high command in
years to come.
That it would come as soon as it actually did no one, however, could
have foreseen. After the battles of Ticinus and Trebia, Scipio’s father
and his uncle were sent to Spain to reconquer
the lost provinces there and prevent any help coming to Hannibal. They
also stirred up trouble in Africa. But their success was brief. When
Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal returned to Spain the Spaniards who had
enlisted in the Roman armies deserted. Finally, four years after Cannae,
Publius Scipio was defeated and killed and Cnaeus, shut in by three
armies, suffered the same fate. To allow the Carthaginians to hold Spain
was a serious danger; to defeat them a big task. Long did the Roman
Senate deliberate over who was to be sent. There did not seem to be any
one capable who could be spared. Fabius was very old; Aemilius dead;
Marcellus needed against Hannibal. The younger generals thought the
Spanish command carried more risk than glory.
At last Scipio came forward and offered himself. A vivid account of
the impression he made on the men of his day is given by Livy.
Africanus, the Young Proconsul
At Rome, after the recovery of Capua, the Senate and people were as
anxious about the situation in Spain as in Italy, and it was determined
to strengthen the army there and to send a new commander. There was,
however, no agreement about the best man for the post, though all felt
that, as two great generals had fallen in the course of thirty days,
their successor ought to be chosen with unusual care. After various
names had been proposed, it was finally arranged that the people should
elect a proconsul for the Spanish command, and the consuls gave notice
of the day of election. It had been assumed that any who thought
themselves equal to the responsibility would come forward as candidates,
and when this expectation was disappointed, there was renewed mourning
for the recent disasters and regret for the lost generals. Thus it
happened that on the day of the election the citizens went down to the
Plain despondent and without definite purpose. Turning to the assembled
magistrates, they scanned the features of the leaders, who were looking
helplessly from one to another, and murmured that the blow had been so
great and that the position was now so hopeless that no one dared to
accept the Spanish command. All at once P. Scipio, the son of
Publius who had fallen in Spain, proposed himself as a candidate, though
he was only twenty-four years of age, and took his stand in a
conspicuous place. Every eye
was fixed on him, and the shouts of applause that at once burst forth
predicted good luck and success to his mission. Then the election
proceeded, and P. Scipio received the votes, not only of every
century, but of every individual. However, when the business was
finished and impetuosity and enthusiasm had cooled, men began to ask
themselves amid the general silence what they had really done, and
whether favour had not carried the day against judgement. There was a
strong feeling that the proconsul was too young, and some even found a
bad omen in the misfortunes of his family and in the very name of
Scipio, as he was leaving two households in mourning to go to provinces
where he would have to fight over the tombs of his father and of his
uncle.
When Scipio saw the trouble and anxiety caused by this hasty action, he
invited the people to meet him, and spoke with such pride and confidence
of his youth and the duty entrusted to him and the war which he was to
conduct that he awakened and renewed all the former enthusiasm, and
filled his hearers with a more sanguine hope than is usually suggested
by trust in promises or by inference from established facts. Scipio,
indeed, did not merely deserve admiration for his genuine qualities, but
from his youth upwards he had been endowed with a peculiar faculty for
making the most of them. When he gave counsel to the people, he founded
it on a vision of the night or an inspiration seemingly divine, either
because he was in some sort influenced by superstition, or because he
expected that his wishes and commands would be carried out readily if
they came with a kind of oracular sanction. In very early life he began
to create this impression, and as soon as he was of age, he would do no
business, public or private, till he had gone to the Capitol and entered
the temple, generally sitting there for a time alone and apart. By this
habit, which he maintained all through his life, he gave support, either
of set purpose or by accident, to a belief held by some that he was of
divine parentage, and he thus revived a similar and equally baseless
story, once current about Alexander the Great, that he was the son of a
huge serpent, which had often been seen in the house before his birth,
but glided away at the approach of any one and disappeared from sight.
Scipio did nothing to discredit these wonders; in fact, he indirectly
confirmed them, for, if he asserted nothing, he did not deny
anything.
Livy, xxvi. 18-19.
He was still very young, nevertheless he had already made people feel
confidence in him. In Spain, although he began with
a bad failure since he allowed Hasdrubal to cross the Pyrenees with his
army and march to Italy to assist Hannibal, his Spanish campaign was
ably carried out and his capture of New Carthage was a bold and
brilliant exploit. When the time came to choose a general, after the
Metaurus, to attack Hannibal at home, every one in Rome felt that Scipio
was the man. He would finish the war. There was, indeed, no serious
rival; the long struggle had worn the older generals out. Some of the
old-fashioned senators distrusted Scipio. He was too cultivated; too
much interested in Greek literature and too young. But he was the idol
of the people, who adore success, and was nominated by acclamation.
Soon the Carthaginians were so hard pressed that they sent frantic
messages to Hannibal to come to their aid. They knew that the death
struggle was upon them. Hannibal came. Even his genius could not, at
this stage, change the fortunes of war. He had no time to train the raw
Carthaginian levies. His veterans were invincible, but they were vastly
outnumbered when on the plains of Zama, five days’ march from Carthage,
he met Scipio in the final battle (202). It was a victory for Rome.
Hannibal, who always saw things as they were, knew that the long
struggle was over. Carthage must make what terms it could. These terms
were severe. The city lost all its foreign possessions, had to pay a big
indemnity, and hand over all but twenty men-of-war and all elephants; no
military operations even within Africa could be undertaken save by
permission of Rome. The city, however, was left free. Scipio set his
face firmly against those who clamoured for the utter destruction of
Carthage. In the same way he protested against the demand made six years
later for the banishment of Hannibal.
Scipio returned to Rome amid scenes of extraordinary enthusiasm and
rejoicing. All the way from Rhegium, where he landed, to Rome itself the
people came out and lined the roads, hailing him as the man who had
saved his country. He entered the city in triumph, marching to the
Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill to lay before the altar his
wreaths of olive and laurel. Magnificent games were held, lasting for
several
days, in honour of his victory, and he himself was given the name
Africanus.
For the next few years Africanus lived in Rome the life of a private
citizen, concerned with politics, giving his spare time to the study of
Greek literature, to which he was devoted. This study he shared with
many friends, among them Laelius, who had been his devoted lieutenant in
the Spanish and African wars, Tiberius Gracchus the Elder, the husband
of Scipio’s daughter Cornelia, herself a woman of high character and
educated ability; and Aemilius Paulus, whose sister he married and whose
nephew was afterwards adopted into the family of the Scipios by the son
of Africanus and known as Scipio Aemilianus. As they read the plays,
poetry, and philosophy of the Greeks, educated Romans learned that they
were not alone in the world. Before them had lived a people who were
skilled in all the arts of life at a time when they themselves were rude
barbarians, like the Gauls whom they despised.
The Greece of their day, however, was no longer the Greece of the
glorious past. Alexander’s great empire, which had extended over half
Asia, had fallen to pieces. In Greece itself the different peoples were
quarrelling among themselves. Even after the Roman armies had freed the
Greeks from Philip of Macedonia, Antiochus of Asia threatened them; at
the Court of Antiochus was Hannibal. It was as an envoy from Rome to his
Court that Scipio met and talked with Hannibal. Later he went out as
assistant to his brother Lucius, when the latter was made commander in
the war against Antiochus, and finally defeated him at the battle of
Magnesia in Asia Minor.
By no means all educated Romans shared Scipio’s feelings about
Greece. On the contrary there were many who thought that the simplicity
of the grand old Roman character was being destroyed, while the young
men were falling into luxurious and effeminate ways. Marcus Porcius
Cato, for example, a man of the utmost uprightness and courage,
took this view. He was a hard man himself, and he wanted others to be
hard. He could see no difference between a love of beauty and luxury. He
saw nothing that was bad in the old order, nothing that was good in the
new.
The Scipios, Africanus and his brother, who now bore the name of
Asiaticus, were Cato’s particular enemies. He had struggled in the
Senate with Africanus over Carthage, for the old man wanted to see the
city of Hannibal razed to the ground. He hated Scipio’s Greek ideas. He
thought him too proud and self-willed to be a good servant of the State.
After the Greek campaign Cato called upon Asiaticus to give an account
of the money spent in the wars against Antiochus, suggesting that he had
been extravagant. That such a charge should be brought against his
brother roused Scipio Africanus to passionate anger. He refused to
defend him; the character of a Scipio was its own defence. In the
presence of the Senate he tore up the account books which Cato had
called for. When Lucius was, nevertheless, condemned Scipio rescued him
by force. Thereupon he himself was charged with treason by two tribunes.
Even then his haughty spirit did not bend. Instead of pleading his cause
he reminded the people that it was the anniversary of the day on which
he had defeated Hannibal at Zama. Let them follow him to the Temple of
Jupiter and pray for more citizens like himself. The crowd obeyed. No
more was heard of the trial.
Scipio’s pride, however, was deeply injured. He had been the idol of
Rome in his youth. That he and his brother should be accused before the
Roman people was to him an unbearable sign of ingratitude and baseness
of mind. He left Rome, shaking its dust from his feet, and retired to
the country. There a few years later he died at the age of fifty-three.
In his will he ordered that his ashes should not be taken to Rome.
In the same year (183) Hannibal also died. To the last the Romans
feared him; Hannibal took poison when he heard that Nicomedes of
Bithynia, at whose Court he was, had been ordered to hand him over to
Rome.
Scipio Aemilianus
The young man left to carry on the great name of Scipio was the son
of Aemilius Paulus and nephew by marriage of Africanus, whose son
adopted him into the Cornelian family.
Scipio Aemilianus, to give him the name by which he was
always known after this adoption, saw, even more clearly than Africanus
had done, both that Rome was changing and what was good and what was bad
in the change. He shared in both good and bad. No one saw more clearly
than he the baseness of the destruction of Carthage and the cruelty of
the sack of Numantia; yet it was he who, as general, had to carry them
out. He saw the dangers of the growing contrast between the increasing
wealth of the few rich, as treasures poured from all parts of the world
into their coffers, and the wretchedness of the poor in Rome; he saw the
cruelty, indifference to human life, and love of pleasure that filled
men’s minds after a series of successful wars; he saw the old simplicity
of life and high devotion to country disappearing and a new selfishness
and personal ambition growing up.
Scipio was a man of action; an excellent soldier and general. Even
old Cato, who hated the Scipios, had to admire Aemilianus. Speaking of
him he quoted a famous line of Homer: ‘He is a real man: the rest are
shadows.’ In a very profound sense this was true. The mind of Scipio
Aemilianus saw below the surface of things to the reality. He could act,
but like all really first-rate men of action—Napoleon, Hannibal,
Caesar—he was a thinker. Round his table there gathered the most
interesting men in Rome. They talked of all the questions that have
puzzled and perplexed men’s minds since men began to think at all.
Closest of his friends was Polybius, the great Greek historian who wrote
the history of the wars with Carthage. He lived in his house and
accompanied him in his wars in Spain and Africa. Polybius stood by
Scipio’s side as he watched Carthage burning to the ground (146). Orders
had come from Rome that the city was to be utterly destroyed;
a ploughshare was to be drawn across the site and a solemn curse
laid on any one who should ever rebuild there. ‘It is a wonderful
sight,’ said Aemilianus as they watched walls toppling and buildings
collapsing in the flames which rose up, a huge cloud of ruddy smoke
darkening and thickening the noonday sky of Africa, ‘but I shudder to
think that some one may some day give the same order—for
Rome.’
The following sketch of his character by Polybius shows some of his
distinguishing traits:
Scipio Aemilianus as a Sportsman
After the war was decided, Paulus, in the belief that hunting was the
best training and recreation that a young man could have, put the king’s
huntsmen at the orders of Scipio, and gave him full authority over
everything connected with the chase. Scipio readily accepted the charge
and, regarding it almost as a royal office, continued to occupy himself
with it as long as the army remained in Macedonia after the battle. His
youth and natural disposition qualified him for this pursuit, like a
high-bred hound, and his devotion to hunting became permanent, being
continued when he came to Rome and found Polybius as enthusiastic as
himself. Consequently, all the time that other young men spent in the
law-courts and with morning calls, waiting about in the Forum and trying
thus to make a favourable impression on the people, was passed by Scipio
in hunting; and as he was constantly performing brilliant and notable
exploits, he distinguished himself more than all the rest. For they
could not win credit except by injuring others; such are the conditions
of legal action; but Scipio, without doing any harm to any one, gained a
popular reputation for courage, matching words with deeds. Therefore he
soon excelled his contemporaries more than any Roman of whom we have
record, though he followed a path to fame which, in view of Roman
character and prejudice, was the very opposite of that chosen by his
rivals.
Polybius, xxxvi. 15. 5-12.
From Carthage came another friend of Scipio’s—the poet Terence.
Born in that city about the time of Hannibal’s death, the lad had come
to Rome as a slave. His rare parts attracted the notice of his owner,
who finally set him free. Terence was introduced to Scipio by another
friend of his. This was Caecilius, the playwriter. His plays are
unfortunately all lost, so that we have no means of judging what they
were like. One day when Caecilius was at supper he was told that the
managers of the games had sent a young man to read him a play which he
had submitted to them, and of which they thought well. Caecilius called
him in and bade him sit down on a stool on the other side of the table
from that at which he and his friends were reclining
on sofas, and begin to read to him. The young man had only read a few
lines when the elder poet stopped him. The work was so good, he said,
that he ought to sit at the author’s feet, not he at his; he called
Terence up to the table. Afterwards Caecilius took the young man to see
Scipio Aemilianus; and he soon became one of the intimate circle which
Scipio had gathered round him. Scipio and Caecilius helped him with
advice, and they all worked together at Scipio’s favourite task of
improving and purifying the Latin language. A line in one of
Terence’s plays expresses the point of view which Scipio Aemilianus and
his friends tried to take. ‘I am human: nothing human is alien to
me.’ These plays are among the earliest works of pure literature in
Latin, and they show in every line the influence of Greece. The Greek
spirit was one of questioning; and its influence on Roman thought was
profound.
TRAGIC AND COMIC MASKS
Scipio Aemilianus questioned but looked on. He saw much in the
present state of Rome to disturb and displease him; he dreaded what
might come in the future, as the few grew richer and the many poorer;
but he did not take any action. His was the mind of the philosopher;
like his friends Polybius and
Terence he wanted to understand. He did not believe that things could be
changed. What was to happen would happen; to perturb and perplex oneself
was useless and might be dangerous. The people who got excited and
believed that great improvements could be brought about easily seemed to
him stupid and dangerous. It was easy to breed disorder; to spoil the
things that had made Rome great; very hard to make alterations. The men
who really served the Republic were not the politicians clamouring in
the market-place, orating in the Assembly, or the idle dirty mobs who
listened to them and were ready to shout for this to-day and the other
thing to-morrow. Them Scipio scorned. The real workers and builders he
thought were the silent soldiers fighting and working in all the
dreariness and discomfort of camps in foreign countries. In Scipio there
was a good deal of the temper of that Lucius Junius Brutus who in the
earliest days of the Republic had condemned his own sons to death for
treason to the State. He judged his own friends and relations more, not
less, severely than other people. Thus when Tiberius Gracchus, the
kinsman and brother-in-law of Scipio (his own wife was Sempronia, the
sister of Gracchus) brought in his Land Bill and came, over it, into
conflict with the Senate, Scipio was against him. When disorders and
rioting in the streets of Rome grew out of the struggle over the Land
Bill and Tiberius was murdered, Scipio made a speech in the Senate in
which he said that Tiberius had deserved his death. He quoted a line of
Homer: ‘So perish all who do the like again.’ When the people shouted
him down in their anger he turned on them with cold contempt—fear
of any kind was not in Scipio—and said, ‘Be silent, ye to whom
Italy is only a step-mother.’ Speeches like that did not make him
popular. Scipio was so much respected that men always listened when he
spoke. There was something lofty and splendid about him and no soldier
of his day could compare with him. But he stood aloof. Outside his own
circle of close friends he was little known and less understood.
His death was sudden and mysterious. One day after speaking in the
Senate he returned home apparently well and in his
ordinary calm frame of mind. Nothing had occurred to disturb him. He did
not seem to be disturbed about anything. Next morning he was found dead
in his bed. What had happened was never known. It was whispered about
that he had been murdered.
The Gracchi
No account of the heroes of Roman
History would be complete or truthful which left out the women. Although
the Roman woman was not supposed to take any share in public affairs,
although she was, until she married, subject to the authority of her
father, and afterwards to that of her husband, there are innumerable
stories which show how great was the real part played by women in Roman
life, even in quite early times. They were often as well educated as the
men, sometimes better.
This was clearly the case with Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio
Africanus, and wife of Tiberius Gracchus the elder. Left a widow when
the eldest of her three children, named Tiberius after his father, was
but a lad, she conducted their training herself. From her her sons and daughter
learned to be simple and hardy in their habits, truthful and upright in
their minds, and to care for things of the spirit rather than of the
body, as she did herself. When her friends boasted to her of the rich
furnishing of their houses, of their robes of silk, their ornaments and
jewels, Cornelia would turn to her children and say, ‘These are my
treasures.’ She taught Tiberius and Caius and their sister that what
mattered was not what a man had but what he was. They were rich. They
bore an honoured name. But these things would not give honour unless
they had the soul of honour in themselves. They must strive not for
their own pleasure or comfort or even for their own personal glory, but
to live a life of true service to their fellow citizens. And that meant
that they must see things as they were, and not be contented with the
names people gave them. They wanted to see Rome great and to help it to
grow greater. She taught them that a city, like a man, was great
only when it strove for right and justice. Mere wealth and power did not
make it so.
These thoughts sank into the minds of the young Gracchi. As they grew
up they cared for Greek learning, art, and literature, poetry, and all
the things that make life beautiful, as Scipio Aemilianus and Laelius
did; but it troubled them, as it had not troubled Scipio, that these
good things reached only the few, while the great body of the people had
no share in them at all. To them, as once to Caius Flaminius, it seemed
wrong as well as dangerous that Rome should be made up, as they saw that
it was, of two sorts of people, ever more and more separated from each
other; the few who had everything and the many who had nothing. They
could not feel, as Coriolanus had done, as Fabius had done, as Cato did,
and as Scipio Aemilianus, it seemed to them, was doing more and more,
that all good was to be found among the well-to-do and cultured few, and
that what happened to the many did not matter. It seemed to them that it
did matter if the many were poor, ignorant, stupid. It was not necessary
that they should be so. They were ignorant and stupid because they were
poor. If their lot were less hard they might be clever and good, or at
any rate better than at present.
So it seemed to Tiberius Gracchus and later to his younger brother
Caius, as they looked at what they saw in the light of what Cornelia had
taught them. They could not find life beautiful while so many people
were wretched, or feel that Rome was the city of their dreams, however
rich and powerful it might be, however many lands across the seas owned
its sway, so long as the ordinary men who served as soldiers in Rome’s
armies, the ordinary women who kept their homes and brought up their
children, were miserable.
The great wars which brought glory to generals and wealth and pride
to Rome actually made the poor more miserable, for many reasons, and for
two in particular. One was the growing number of slaves in the city.
After every campaign thousands of prisoners were taken and these
prisoners were not given back at the end of the war; they became the
slaves of the conqueror.
There were so many slaves in Rome after the wars with Sicily, Carthage,
Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, that it was by no means easy for the ordinary
Roman to get work. The other reason was the difficulty of getting land.
Once, before the long wars, Italy had been a country of small farmers
and peasants who lived on a little piece of land, sometimes rented and
sometimes their own, and cultivated it. There were very few of these
happy farmers now. The men had been called away to the wars; many never
came back. What happened was this. While the man was away at the wars,
his wife, with children to look after, and less strong than he, could
seldom cultivate the land fully. Even if she managed to keep the
children fed, she had no money or produce over with which to pay the
rent. Then the landlord would turn her out and take the plot and add it
to his own estate. This was happening all over Italy. If the owner were
not turned out, the land went to rack and ruin from neglect. Thus many a
soldier, when he did come back, found his home gone. Others, weary,
worn, and perhaps disabled after long years of the hardships of war, had
neither the strength nor energy to set to the heavy work of digging and
preparing land that had been neglected for years. At the same time the
common lands, which were supposed to belong to the whole people, who
might graze their cattle or cut wood on them, were taken in bit by bit
by the big landlords in the war years. Thus men who wanted land could
not get it. Big estates grew bigger, and they were run largely by
slave-labour. The independent husbandman, who had been the backbone of
the Roman army, was vanishing. A few people began, in Scipio’s day,
to be worried about this question of the land, because they saw that if
the peasants and farmers disappeared, the best soldiers would disappear
also.
All this was well known; it had been going on for long. People
talked, but nothing was done. Sometimes, however, there comes a man who
has the power to see and be moved to action by a thing which most
people, out of habit or laziness, take as a matter of course. Tiberius
Gracchus was such a man. In his young manhood he was quiet, rather shy,
and very silent;
he thought a great deal and said little about it. Some people regarded
him as slow. His was the slowness of a mind that takes a long time to be
sure of a thing but, once sure, never lets go. When he did speak, men
observed that his remarks were just and well considered and went to the
heart of the matter. His devotion to duty was obvious; as a soldier he
won the respect and love of his men by his unvarying fairness of temper
and the fact that he never asked them to take a risk or bear a hardship
that he did not share himself. And he acquired, too, a reputation
for integrity which was, as Plutarch tells us, of infinite value.
Tiberius Gracchus. The Value of a Reputation for Integrity
After the Libyan expedition Gracchus was elected quaestor, and it was
his lot to serve against the Numantines under the Consul Gaius Mancinus,
who had some good qualities, but was the most unfortunate of Roman
generals. Thus unexpected situations and reverses in the field brought
more clearly into light, not only the ability and courage of Tiberius,
but—what was more remarkable—his respect and regard for his
superior, who was so crushed by disaster that he hardly knew whether he
was in command or not. After some decisive defeats Mancinus left his
camp and attempted to retire by night, but the Numantines, being aware
of his movements, at once occupied the camp, fell upon his troops as
they fled, made havoc of the rear, and drove the whole army on to
difficult ground, from which it was impossible to escape. Whereupon, in
despair of forcing a way into safety, he sent envoys with proposals for
a truce and conditions of peace. The enemy replied that they trusted no
one except Tiberius and insisted that he should be sent to them. This
attitude was partly due to their high opinion of Tiberius, whose
reputation was familiar to all, partly to the memory of his father, who
after fighting against the Spanish tribes and subduing many of them
settled terms of peace with the Numantines and persuaded the Roman
people strictly to confirm and keep them. Thus it came about that
Tiberius was sent; and after some give and take in negotiations he made
a treaty, and beyond question saved twenty thousand Roman citizens,
besides attendants and camp followers.
Plutarch, liii. 5.
As Tiberius travelled through Italy on his way to the wars in Spain
he looked at the condition of the people of his own country,
thought of the fortunes of his own soldiers, and was moved to
indignation and distress by what he saw. On the banners carried into
battle, above the public buildings, at the head of the laws and decrees
issued by the Government, there stood the letters ‘S.P.Q.R.’—the
Senate and People of Rome. The senators, he knew, were rich and growing
richer. The name of Rome was carried far and wide. But what of the
people? As Tiberius himself said, ‘The wild beasts of Italy have their
lairs and hiding places, but those who fight and die for Italy wander
homeless with their wives and children and have nothing that they can
call their own except the air and sunlight.’
Tiberius saw and felt. But seeing and feeling were not enough. He
determined to act. The land question, the homelessness and poverty of
the people, and the army question were, as he saw it, really part of the
same. He resolved to deal with them together.
When he came back from his second term of service in Spain (134) he
got himself elected as one of the tribunes of the people. Almost at once
he introduced his Land Bill. The idea of this Bill was simple. All over
Italy the State of Rome owned great estates. But for years back the
estates had either been let to or occupied by the big landowners or
wealthy men of Rome. They were in possession. But the lands did not
belong to them. There was no reason in law or justice why the Republic
should not take back and use what was its own. These lands, cut up into
small holdings, would provide a means of livelihood to hundreds of
thousands of peasant proprietors. The miserable poverty of Rome could be
swept away. A new race would grow up.
COSTUME. THE ROMAN TOGA,
from a terra-cotta in the British Museum
The Bill was a reasonable one. It was received with enthusiasm by the
poorer classes. Moderate men saw that it was a sincere effort to tackle
a state of things they knew and deplored. It was necessary to do
something for the poor, they knew; they were glad of any plan which
promised to reduce the luxury and display of the rich. But the big
landowners, whose estates were going to be divided, who were being
called upon to give back what, after all, had never been their own, were
furious.
They were ready to go to any lengths to defeat the Bill. To them
Tiberius was a dangerous man, a traitor to his own class. Since
they were in a minority they knew that if the matter came to a vote they
would be defeated. Feeling grew more excited as the voting day drew
near. Tiberius had become the darling of the people; but he had to go
about armed for fear of an attack from the landlords’ party. At last the
latter hit on an ingenious device. The tribunes, the magistrates who
represented the poor classes, or plebeians as they were called, were ten
in number, one to represent each of the original ten tribes. If one of
them chose he could stop anything the others wanted to do by saying
‘Veto’—I forbid. This power was intended to be used sparingly and
only in times of grave danger. Originally, indeed, the tribune could
only say Veto on religious grounds; because having inspected the omens
he saw something which showed that the gods were unfavourable. The
landlords,
however, now persuaded Octavius, one of the colleagues of Tiberius, to
say Veto to his Land Bill. Tiberius understood what had happened. He
tried to persuade Octavius to give way. In vain. Then, as happens with
men who appear very quiet and hard to move, his anger, which had been
slowly mounting, burst out. He went down to the assembly of the people
and made a powerful attack upon Octavius. How could a man be said to
represent the people, he asked, to be a tribune of the people, who was
doing his best to prevent a measure which the people desired and which
was altogether for their good? There was a scene of great excitement.
Tiberius called upon Octavius to resign. Octavius refused. Then Tiberius
called for the election of another tribune in Octavius’s place. This was
against all rule and order. Nevertheless it was done. Octavius was
removed. A new tribune was elected in his stead. Amid great
rejoicing the Land Bill was passed.
The landlords were full of a deep bitterness against Tiberius and
accused him of all kinds of things. They said that he wanted to upset
the State and tear up the laws because he had passed a Bill taking from
them a portion of their lands which had never really belonged to them.
He, however, went quietly on with his work. A committee was set up,
on which were both Tiberius and his brilliant young brother Caius, to
divide the common land and give it out in lots to the citizens who
needed and could work it. This was a long task. At the end of the year
Gracchus ceased to be tribune. His work was not finished. The Senate had
refused to give the Land Commission any money for their expenses and was
putting every kind of difficulty in the way of their getting on with
their task. Moreover, in view of the hatred of the landlords Gracchus
himself, as a private person, was hardly safe. Therefore, when the
election time came he asked to be chosen as tribune again.
A great many of the citizens who had come in from the country
districts to vote for the Land Bill had gone back again; others had left
Rome to prepare for or take up the new allotments. The charges made
against Gracchus made timid people afraid; they were worried when it was
said that a man could not legally
be elected tribune for two years running. They were still further
alarmed by Gracchus’s own speeches. Feeling ran very high on both sides,
and it was plain that the election day would not go off without some
disturbance.
Rioting, indeed, broke out in the Capitol almost before the sun rose
and fighting with sticks and stones between those who wanted Tiberius
elected and those who did not. As always happens, many joined in who
neither knew nor cared what the trouble was all about. When Tiberius
himself appeared he raised his hand to summon his friends to gather
round him. This was reported to the Senate by a man who cried, ‘Tiberius
Gracchus has raised his hand to his head: he is asking the citizens to
crown him.’ On this Nasica, a senator who hated Gracchus, demanded
that he should be put to death as a traitor. When the consul refused
Nasica rushed out with a body of senators and, charging the people who
stood round Tiberius, broke through and killed him almost at once (133).
In the panic many others were slain and trampled underfoot. The body of
Gracchus was cast into the Tiber. Many of his supporters were
imprisoned. Others had all their property taken away.
The senators doubtless hoped that, Tiberius dead, his work would soon
be forgotten. But the evils he had tried to remedy remained. And abroad
serving in the army was his brother Caius, who did not forget. ‘Whither
can I go?’ said Caius. ‘What place is there for me in Rome? The Capitol
reeks with my brother’s blood. In my home my mother sits weeping and
lamenting for her murdered son.’ His was a nature very different from
his brother’s. Tiberius was quiet, gentle, kindly, naturally rather
dreamy; a man who in happier times would have been content with the
uneventful life of a gentleman. Caius was fiery and passionate, filled
with an energy that must have found some outlet for itself in whatever
circumstances he had lived. He loved his brother and his death filled
his heart with glowing anger and a fixed determination that his work and
life should not be wasted. He would carry out Tiberius’s ideals; and
carry them farther than Tiberius had ever dreamed.
Caius Gracchus was nine years younger than Tiberius and
a man of more remarkable character and more brilliant gifts than his
brother. The sense of a great wrong made Tiberius burn with indignation,
and in his indignation he took to politics; Caius had a natural genius
for politics. His mind ranged forward into the future; whereas Tiberius
worked blindly, in the dark, Caius knew where he wanted to go. And he
understood men as his brother had never done. Without any of the shy
aloofness that at times gave Tiberius the appearance of more strength
than he really possessed, Caius made people like him without moving away
by so much as an inch from the purpose he had in mind. That purpose was
a change far more revolutionary than Tiberius had dreamed of.
Only twenty years of age at the time of his brother’s ***, Caius
spent the next ten years in public service. Like Aemilianus he held it
every man’s duty to work for the Republic. But while Aemilianus thought
that for such work obedience, faithfulness, courage, temperance were all
that were required of a man, Caius, who had these virtues in a high
degree, had also an active questioning mind. It did not seem to him that
the men who ruled the State were wise or just or generous enough to lay
down, once for all, the lines on which it was to move for ever. The
citizen had a duty to the Republic beyond that of loyal and obedient
devotion. He must use not only his arm in its service but his mind also.
He must help it to grow; make Rome worthy of the greatness about which
people talked so lightly and easily. The greatness had been won at a
fearful price. Hundreds of thousands of Roman soldiers had laid down
their lives to make it; hundreds of thousands more had given their best
years to its service, asking no reward but that the Republic should
stand safe. It could, Caius thought, only be safe, only be great in so
far as it became more and more the city of free men in fact as well as
name.
With such thoughts as these moving in his mind he turned in loathing
from the life of the young Roman noble of his own age and class. He had
no use for personal luxury; wine and fine clothes and a gorgeous house
in which to live a life of ease and idleness—these things were
nothing to him. While serving
abroad in Spain, Sardinia, and elsewhere, he shared the hardships of his
soldiers, and spent his own money in the effort to make their hard lot
less severe. Such leisure as he had was occupied in reading. In this way
he disciplined and fortified his mind. Moreover, Caius had before him a
fixed purpose, a clearly determined work in life. For that he was
preparing. One of his weapons was to be the art of speech. He studied,
therefore, particularly the works of the great Greek orators. He wanted
to learn, and he did learn, how to use words to persuade men and impel
them to action. He made himself one of the greatest orators Rome knew.
His speeches are lost, but accounts of them remain, and they tell how
Caius could set his hearers on fire, stir them to tears or anger.
ELABORATE LAMP
to show the luxury
of later times
When, nine years after Tiberius’s death, Caius Gracchus came back to
Rome (124), he found that men were waiting eagerly for him. Tiberius had
not been forgotten. The poor hoped, the rich feared that Caius had come
as his avenger. When he stood for the tribuneship the party in the
Senate that had thwarted and finally murdered Tiberius strained every
nerve to prevent Caius’s election. They did not wait to hear what his
plans were. They knew that he belonged to the men of the new generation
who wanted far-reaching changes, and they believed that any change must
be at their expense. They at once began attacking Caius. They accused
him of coming home before his time of service abroad was up. They even
declared that he, the most scrupulously honest and disinterested of men,
had made more
money than he ought to have done from the various posts he had held.
Caius turned on them. He had already served twelve years in the army. As
for making money: ‘I am the only man who went out with a full purse
and returned with an empty one. Others took out casks of wine for
themselves, and when they had emptied them brought the casks back filled
with gold and silver.’ He lived not in the rich quarter of Rome among
the high-born and wealthy, but among the poor near the Forum. He was
elected tribune by an overwhelming majority and at once set to work.
His main idea was a really great and original one; nothing less than
the extension of Roman citizenship, in so far as voting rights went, to
the people of Italy. The Italians were called to serve in Rome’s armies.
The best soldiers, indeed, had always come from outside the capital. The
Italians paid heavier taxes; they ought to share in the benefits of Rome
and have a voice in its government. Caius Gracchus indeed dreamed of
making the Government of Rome a real democracy. It was a magnificent
dream; but the people were not ready for it. In fact it was only after a
bitter war that the Italians won from the Romans the right to vote.
Gracchus knew that his plan could not be carried through at once; but he
had worked out a series of Bills which would, he believed, pave the way
for it. Until they were through he said nothing of his great scheme.
Caius Gracchus. The varied Activities of a popular Leader
When the people had not only passed this law, but actually commissioned
Gracchus to appoint the judges from the Order of the Knights, he became
invested with a kind of royal authority, and even the senators were
ready to listen to his counsel. When he gave it, he always proposed
something to their credit, as, for example, a most just and
honourable decree about the corn which the proconsul Fabius had sent
from Spain. He persuaded the Senate to sell the corn and return the
money to the cities from which it came, and furthermore to censure
Fabius for making his rule burdensome and unendurable to the
inhabitants; and this brought him great reputation and popularity in the
provinces. He proposed, too, to send out colonies and to make roads and
to build granaries, personally managing and controlling
all these undertakings, never failing in attention to a mass of details,
but with extraordinary quickness and application working out each task
as if it alone engaged his efforts, with the result that even those who
hated and feared him were astounded at his universal thoroughness and
efficiency. Most people on meeting him were surprised to see him
surrounded by contractors, craftsmen, ambassadors, commanders, soldiers,
and scholars. Treating them all with an easy good nature, being at once
kind and dignified, and suiting himself to the character of the
individual, he proved that it was gross slander to call him dictatorial,
or presumptuous, or violent. Thus his gift for popular leadership was
shown rather in personal association and conduct than in public
speeches.
Plutarch, liv. 6.
He was a tremendous worker and all his plans were thought out to the
smallest detail. They were not vague ideas on paper. He began on his
land policy. If it were to have any chance of being carried he must, he
saw, break the solid majority of the landowning classes and their
friends. The most important of these friends were the class known as the
Knights, or Equestrian Order. The Senate was composed of men selected
from among those who had held one of the high offices of State. Senators
might not take part in business, but they alone served as jurors to try
the cases which concerned people who carried it on, and particularly
those who carried on one important kind of business, that of
tax-collecting in the provinces. This was largely in the hands of the
knights. Their name went back to the days of the old constitution when
men of a certain wealth served in the cavalry, and were given votes as
so serving. The so-called Equestrian Order had greatly grown in number.
They were the money-makers, financiers, capitalists of Rome. As against
changes in the land system they might stand with the Senate, but when
Caius Gracchus proposed that the juries which tried people for political
offences should be drawn not from the Senate, but from the knights, he
won their support against it. He then turned to win that of the people
by a new Corn Law which arranged that the Government should buy corn
wholesale and supply it to the Roman people at a fixed low price. From
this he turned to other constructive measures. He revived his
brother’s Land Laws; started a great road-building scheme; and worked
out a plan for the reorganization of the army. Over the detailed working
out of all these big plans he watched himself with the eye of a
practical man whom nothing escaped. For Caius, though his ideas were
large and far-reaching, and his mind grasped problems that the ordinary
Roman politician did not begin to see, was no dreamer. He was an
organizer of consummate ability and possessed a remarkable
knowledge of facts and of men. His house became a sort of great
Government office, buzzing with hard work from morning until night.
In the following year he was re-elected and at once moved on to the
next stage in his policy, a big scheme of land settlement and
colonization, very much on the lines now worked by Canada and our other
Colonies who assist intending settlers by giving them cheap passages out
and plots of land in new territories. This done, he launched his plan of
granting Roman citizenship to the Italians.
Here, however, he came into collision with rich and poor at once. The
ordinary Roman citizen was jealous of his rights and did not want to
share them. Caius’s popularity began to fall off at once. The idea of
Italy a nation was one for which the Romans were not ready. They had
been angry when Tiberius wanted to give farms to the Italians; Caius’s
plan of giving them votes and thereby a share in the games, cheap corn,
and other joys of Roman life, made them far more angry. They despised
the Italians and cared nothing for their grievances. Caius could not
stir them to any sympathy.
The leaders of the Senatorial party realized at once what had
happened, and determined to strike. An outbreak of disorder at a meeting
at which Caius was speaking gave them their chance. The consul declared
that the State was in danger and proclaimed a state of siege in the
city. Then he went out with armed bands and in the streets Caius himself
and a number of his supporters were cut down and slain (121).
Thus both Caius and Tiberius Gracchus perished. Cornelia their mother
left Rome and went to live at Misenum. Of her sons she spoke as of two
heroes who had given their lives for their
country. Her pride in them remained untarnished, for they had died true
to the things in which they believed. Indeed, many years had not passed
before statues to the brothers were set up in the public places in Rome
and offerings brought there by the people who realized, too late, how
greatly both Tiberius and Caius had served them. Had their work been
carried through, Rome might have been spared the terrible disasters that
came upon the city in the next half-century. As it was, the senators
breathed with relief that Caius had followed his brother to a bloody
grave; they did not see that those who opposed reform were preparing the
way for revolution and civil war.
Cato the Censor
At any time there are always some
people who look back and say, ‘Ah, things are not what they were. There
are no such men nowadays as there used to be. The good old days are
over. When I was young....’ and so on. Such men see in change nothing
but evil. There is, to some minds, a danger in every change: but
there may be greater danger in standing still.
The evils that men like the Gracchi saw in their own time made them
desire to see the life of Rome move forward to other and better ways.
A new world had opened round them: new ideas, new forces were
making themselves felt. Rome was no longer a small city, whose existence
was closed in by its own walls; it was the centre of a great dominion,
and touched the life of other peoples and nations at innumerable points.
The ways of the old could not be those of the new Rome. They saw the
difficulties and risks, but they saw too the promise of better things to
be won.
THE TOMB OF A ROMAN FAMILY: to show simplicity of dress
Very different was the outlook of a man like Marcus Porcius Cato. To
him the ancient ways alone seemed right. He modelled his own life and
actions so far as he could upon the heroes of the past, especially on
those like Cincinnatus, who were noted for their simplicity and
frugality. Cincinnatus, though he had held the highest offices in Rome,
was found driving his own plough by those who came from Rome in an hour
of peril to ask him to
take over the highest power in the State. So Cato kept his dress, the
furnishings of his house and table, and everything about him as plain as
those he might have had in the days when every one was poor. In his own
record of his life he reports that he never wore a garment that cost him
more than a hundred drachmae; that even when praetor or consul he drank
the same wine as his slaves; that a dinner never cost him from the
market above thirty pence; and that he was thus frugal for the sake of
his country, that he might be able to endure the harder service in war.
He adds that having got, among some goods he was heir to, a piece
of Babylonian tapestry, he sold it immediately; that the walls of his
country houses were neither plastered nor white-washed; that he never
gave more for a slave than fifteen hundred drachmae, as not requiring in
his servants delicate shapes and fine faces but strength and ability to
labour, that they might be fit to be employed in his stables, about his
cattle or on such-like
business; and that he thought proper to sell them again when they grew
old, that he might have no useless persons to maintain. In a word he
thought nothing cheap that was superfluous, that what a man has no need
of is dear even at a penny; and that it is much better to have fields
where the plough goes and cattle feed, than gardens and walks that
require much watering and sweeping. This stern simplicity he carried
throughout his life and in words of eloquence (he was one of the
most powerful speakers in Rome) he tried to get others to imitate
him.
PLOUGHING: a terra-cotta group
Cato’s own character was of remarkable firmness. He did not ask other
people to do what he would not do himself. He served in war again and
again, and distinguished himself as a soldier, though his harshness made
him detested by the peoples he conquered, for instance in Spain. But he
wanted every one to think and live in his way, and judged with cruel
severity those who thought or acted otherwise. The key to his character,
both its strength and its weakness, is given by Plutarch when he remarks
that ‘Goodness moves in a larger sphere than justice.’ Cato was just:
but his justice was often harsh, cruel, and ungenerous. Thus he left his
war-horse behind him when he left Spain, to save the public purse the
charge of his freight, just as he sold his slaves when they became too
old to work. In this we see carefulness and indifference to comfort and
luxury turning to parsimony and meanness. As Cato grew older he became
more and more fond of having money though not of
spending it. He himself had prospered in life and, as he grew older,
became extremely rich both from his farms and from lending money, at
high interest, to shipping and other companies. For those who did not
succeed he had a very severe judgement and small pity, as for those who
gave way to any of the faults from which he was free. He judged instead
of understanding them. His judgement was just but not sympathetic. His
own account of the duties of a bailiff and his wife gives an excellent
idea of the man.
The Duties of a Bailiff and his Wife
These will be your duties as bailiff. Maintain strict discipline;
observe rest-days; do not lay hands on the property of another, but keep
a careful watch over your own. It is your business to settle disputes in
the household and to punish offences without excessive severity. The
household ought to be well cared for, never suffering from cold or
hunger, and should be sufficiently employed; in which case it will be
easier to stop unruliness and dishonesty. If your conduct is good, your
example will be followed; if you are wronged, your master will inflict
the punishment. Reward merit, and thus encourage others to exert
themselves. Do not waste time in taking walks; always be sober, and
never go out to dinner. See that your master’s orders are carried out,
and do not suppose that you are wiser than he is. His friends should be
your friends, and you should obey those whom you are bidden to obey. Do
not sacrifice at the cross-ways and on the hearth of the homestead
except at the great festival of the Lares. Do not make an advance
without your master’s knowledge, but exact all that is due to him. Never
lend seed-corn, provisions, meal, grain, wine, or oil to any one. There
should be two or three households to which you apply in times of need,
and which you similarly help; but no more. Be punctual in settling
accounts with your master. Special labour on the land, paid by the day,
should not be employed beyond the term agreed. Buy nothing without your
master’s knowledge, nor, indeed, keep any transaction from him. Let no
one sponge upon you; consult no soothsayer, augur, prophet, or
Chaldaean. Do not stint the sowing; for the result will be a poor crop.
Acquaint yourself thoroughly with all the work on the farm, and often do
some yourself, as long as it does not overtire you. Thus you will
understand the feelings of the workers and they, knowing this, will be
more contented, while you will enjoy better health, have
less taste for idle walks, and be more ready for sleep. Be first to get
up in the morning, and last to go to bed at night, taking care that the
house is locked up, that everyone is at rest in his proper place, and
that the animals have got their fodder.
You should take care, too, that your wife does not neglect her duties.
Make her fear you. Do not let her indulge in luxury. She should see as
little as possible of her neighbours and other female friends; she
should not entertain at home or go out to dinner, or waste time in
walks. Do not let her sacrifice, or depute any one else to sacrifice,
without the orders of her master or mistress; for it must be understood
that the master sacrifices for all the household. She should be neat,
and keep the house neat and swept, and every day, before she goes to
bed, she should see that the hearth is clean and the ashes gathered on
to the embers. On days of festival, Kalends, Nones, or Ides, she should
lay a garland on the hearth and during the same days offer up prayer to
the Lar of the house for plenty. It is her business to see that food is
cooked for you and everybody else, and to keep a good supply of poultry
and eggs.
Cato, De Re Rustica, v. 1-5; cxliii. 1-2.
THE SHRINE OF THE LAR
from a house in Pompeii
This same just but hard and ungenerous spirit is seen in Cato’s
public life. As Censor he had the right to strike off the roll of
senators men who were in any respect unworthy. In doing this Cato was
fearless. He attacked the most popular men in Rome and did not yield an
inch when there was a howl against him. Public money was to him as
sacred as private, and ought, he held,
to be husbanded in the same careful way. Thus he attacked the brother of
Scipio Africanus, because, as he said, he had spent more than he ought
on his campaigns. He admired Scipio greatly. Cato was far too
intelligent not to appreciate his high qualities of mind and character:
but he thought him a new and therefore dangerous kind of man.
Fifty years after the battle of Zama the Carthaginians, who were not
allowed by the treaty to make war without the permission of Rome, sent
an appeal for protection against Masannasa, the King of Numidia, who had
gradually been encroaching on their territory. A Commission was
sent out from Rome to inquire, with Cato at its head. Cato came back
possessed by one idea, which never afterwards left him. ‘Carthage must
be destroyed. Rome would not be safe until it was blotted out.’ When it
was pointed out to him that the city was in no sense dangerous to Rome,
that it had practically no arms, absolutely no fleet, and had shown in
fifty years no sort of desire to attack Rome, was indeed too weak even
to defend itself against attack, Cato paid no heed. It did not stir him
when Scipio urged that to attack a defeated and helpless city was mean
and unworthy of Rome, that its greatness would not be increased by
destroying a beaten foe. Cato paid no heed. Carthage was rich and
flourishing: it might one day be a danger again. It was taking trade
that Rome might get, it possessed riches Rome might have. He was a
powerful and effective speaker and his name stood high in Rome. What he
said had a great influence because his character was deeply respected.
Though old, his red hair quite white, he had lost none of his vigour.
His dry humour could still make the Senate laugh, and his passionate
earnestness rouse them to anger. His grey eyes sparkled, his long white
teeth flashed when, day in, day out, whatever the main subject of his
speech, the inflexible old man always ended with the words, ‘Carthage
must be destroyed’.
Cato had his way in the end. The Romans carried out the destruction
of Carthage (146). It was a mean and disgraceful act. The Carthaginians
had already submitted, without terms, to the mercy of the Roman people.
When the consuls arrived
they first demanded that all arms should be collected and given up: then
that all the inhabitants should depart and the city itself be removed.
This was too much. The desperate people resolved to resist, and resist
they did with terrible and extraordinary heroism.
Cato himself did not live through the siege: but he died knowing that
his fierce will had its way. Carthage was to be destroyed. As a city it
was to exist no longer.
Caius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla
To understand the strange and in
many ways sinister characters of Caius Marius and of Lucius Cornelius
Sulla, we must have in our minds a picture of the dark times in which
they lived. At a crisis in the life of the State Sulla showed courage,
decision and will, and a stern devotion to his country which enabled
him, in his own way, to save it. In these things he showed that he was a
Roman of the old breed. Until this crisis came Sulla appeared no better
than the other aristocrats of his time: like them he was careless of
everything save his own selfish pleasure; always he remained hard,
cruel, indifferent to the lives, feelings, and happiness of others.
Whereas both Tiberius and Caius Gracchus lived and died for an idea
greater than themselves, Sulla’s was a mind incapable of idealism. He
and Caius Marius, his great rival, are alike in nothing except the harsh
cruelty that belongs to times of revolutionary upheaval. In all other
respects they are as unlike as any two men that ever lived. Marius was a
son of the soil, a soldier with a soldier’s merits—courage,
rude good humour, careless generosity—and his
faults—cruelty, coarseness, indifference to everything but the
rudest of pleasures. His one big work was the reconstruction of the
army. Sulla was an aristocrat to the finger-tips: proud, cold-blooded,
indifferent, highly educated, with a deep disbelief in everything and
everybody. He had a remarkable intellect, and a physical beauty which
attracted women without number. But it is doubtful whether
he ever cared for a human creature. His extraordinary courage and his
equally extraordinary indifference rested on a chilling belief in Fate.
He was lucky: he called himself Sulla Felix; but nothing in the end was
going to make any difference.
THE ARISTOCRAT
distributing largesse
To see Marius and Sulla against the background of their time the
events must be traced that followed on the death of Caius Gracchus.
Tiberius Gracchus, and far more clearly his brother Caius, had seen
the growing dangers that threatened Rome, if no wise steps were taken in
time to meet them. Both brothers gave their lives in the effort to save
their country. Their sacrifice was vain. The men who had power in their
hands were blind to the great change that was taking place. They tried
to compel the stream to go on flowing in its old channels, although the
weight of waters had grown too great for them to carry. The result was
that suddenly the waters broke loose and flooded everything. Rome, all
Italy, was torn by a bloody and terrible civil war.
At the time many people put these things down to the Gracchi. They
had stirred up the lower orders and the Italians to discontent and
bitterness. They had set strife between classes in Rome: roused the
middle class against the senators and the
mob against both. This was not a just statement. Caius Gracchus had
thought out a great plan of reform that, if carried through, might have
saved Rome and Italy from revolution and civil war. He had to win people
to his side. In order to do so he passed measures that were not good in
themselves but only as means to his great end. Thus he made the knights,
the new class of wealthy men, judges instead of the senators; and gave
doles of bread to the Roman populace in the hope that he would then be
able to persuade them to give votes to the Italians and so make Italy
really one.
The evil that men do lives after them:
The good is oft interréd with their bones.
It was so with Caius Gracchus.
THE FISHERMAN
But the real cause of the civil war lay much deeper than the work of
any single man or group of men. It was, in the main, the fact that while
Rome had grown, and grown into a new world, the old system of government
remained, and did not fit this new world. Rome was beginning to be a
great trading empire. Yet wealth and power was jealously held by a small
class in Rome in their own hands. The men of this class grew rich. They
went out to the provinces, to Sicily, Greece, and Spain, as governors
and made great fortunes. They came home with their riches and bought up
the land that had once belonged to peasants and
farmers, and worked this land with slaves. The condition of these slaves
in the country was miserable, especially that of those who lived herded
in camps. The greed of the agents of the tax-collecting companies made
the Roman name hated in the provinces. In Italy, too, there was deep
discontent. To keep the Roman poor quiet the ruling classes gave them
games and bread-doles; they altered the laws so that no Roman citizen
could be condemned to death for any offence. This kept the Romans quiet,
but it made the Italians, who had no share in it, increasingly
restive.
THE RICH MATRON
It had been clear to the far-seeing mind of Caius Gracchus that
unless Rome could draw fresh blood and life and energy from Italy it
must perish. The material wealth that was pouring into the city from all
parts of the world, from Carthage and Corinth and the conquered kingdoms
of the East, was doing more harm than good. Too many men, rich as well
as poor, were beginning to care only for pleasure and for money as a
means to pleasure. The luxury and extravagance of the rich made the
poverty of the poor bitter, and these poor, uneducated, idle, accustomed
to be kept in a good temper by splendid shows and presents of corn and
wine, were ready at any moment to rise in disorder and destroy those who
tried to help them. Most of them were not liable to military
service—that was still confined to the old classes of men who held
land; but they had votes, while the Italians had none. The town mob was
swollen by freedmen—slaves who had saved enough money to buy
themselves off—they too had votes.
The Roman voters cared nothing for the wrongs of the Italians, or of
the people of the provinces. Like the rich, who lived on the revenues of
the tax-collecting companies, they thought the rest of the world was
there merely to supply them with comfort and luxuries. But while in Rome
itself people were more and more sharply divided between the ‘have nots’
and the ‘haves’, all round them there was a growing dissatisfaction and
discontent. The strife at home meant that enterprises abroad were badly
managed. Many army commanders and provincial governors were incompetent
and corrupt. There was no longer the old high Roman sense of duty and
honesty. In its stead were pride, greed, and cruelty. The spirit that
had shown itself in the savage destruction of Carthage and Corinth was
shown again in the treatment of Jugurtha.
THE SHEPHERDESS
Jugurtha, the King of Numidia, threw off the Roman yoke and defied
every Roman general sent against him until Caius Marius was sent out
(107). Marius, the son of humble parents, had been marked by Scipio
Aemilianus, under whom he served in Africa, as a coming man: but though
he had already shown great gifts as a leader the Senate did not want to
give him the command against Jugurtha because of his low birth, rude
manners, and the love in which he was held by the Roman mob. He was at
last elected by a huge majority, and, thanks in part to the brilliant
exploits of a cavalry officer, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, ended the
campaign in triumph. Jugurtha was captured, marched
in chains through the Roman streets and cast naked into an ice-cold
dungeon to die of hunger and exposure.
In Marius’s triumph there was a drop of bitterness. His glory was
shared with Sulla. For it was Sulla who had actually captured Jugurtha.
With a small body of men he had daringly entered the camp of Bocchus,
King of Mauretania, with whom Jugurtha had taken refuge, and persuaded
Bocchus to make friends with Rome by giving him up. He had a ring made
with a picture of the scene, which annoyed Marius every time he
saw it.
But no one at the moment thought that Sulla could be a real rival to
Marius. There was no question of naming any one else as general when the
strife of parties in Rome was suddenly interrupted by terrible
news—the Northern barbarians were on the march. This danger, from
the Cimbri and the Teutones, had actually been threatening for a long
time. In 113 a consular army had been routed by the Cimbri. For the next
eight years, joined by other tribes, they remained on the North Italian
frontier, a perpetual menace, defeating, one after another, the
armies sent against them. In 105, when Marius was still in Africa, two
Roman armies were annihilated at Arausio on the Rhone (105). More than
80,000 men perished in a single battle. Only a handful escaped to bring
the terrible news home. Such a disaster had not happened since Cannae.
The way to Rome stood open: there was no army to stop the victors had
they marched on to Italy. They did not. They turned to Spain. Marius,
who was called home, given chief command, and made consul in three
successive years, had time to create a new army.
TROPHY OF VICTORY
Capitoline Museum
In doing this he tackled one of the most pressing problems
of the time. Gracchus had seen how great a danger the falling-off of the
supply of men from the land might be: but no one had really grasped and
dealt with the question from the army point of view until Marius took it
in hand. This was indeed his greatest and most lasting work. First he
changed the whole basis of service. Every one was liable to be called
on, not only the shrinking class of holders of land. He took soldiers
from the towns as well as from the country, from among freedmen and
paupers as well as from among citizens. Second, he paid to every soldier
a small daily wage. This was an immense change. It at once created a new
class: the professional soldier. Formerly men had done their time in the
army and then returned to ordinary civil life. Now the soldier was a
soldier for life. Next Marius reorganized the army from within, sweeping
away the differences between the Roman legions and those made up of
Italians and allies. He improved the equipment of all ranks. This done
he set himself to training his new men, encamped in Transalpine Gaul, in
readiness to meet the foe.
A soothsayer, in whose prophecy he placed great faith, had told
Marius he should be consul seven times. As consul for the fourth time he
finally attacked the Teutones with his new armies. At Aquae Sextiae
(to the north of Marseilles) 100,000 barbarians were slain (102).
It was a terrible slaughter. For centuries after the fields were covered
with blackening bones, and the people of Massilia used them to make
fences for their vineyards. Next year Marius, consul for the fifth time,
met the Cimbri, who had crossed the Alps and descended into the plains
of Lombardy, at Vercellae (101). Before the battle messengers came from
the Cimbri, demanding land for themselves and the Teutones. They had not
heard of the rout of Aquae Sextiae. Marius smiled grimly. ‘Do not
trouble yourselves about your brothers,’ he replied. ‘They have land
enough which we have given them to keep for ever.’ When battle was
joined next day it was the height of summer; the blazing heat exhausted
the Northerners. Boiorix, the Cimbrian king, the tallest and strongest
man in the army, perished; round him there lay, at the day’s end,
100,000 of his countrymen.
Marius returned home to be hailed as the saviour of his country, the
peer of Camillus and Fabius. He was made consul for the sixth time.
Marius had won great victories; but the rejoicings in Rome over the
terrible dangers that had been averted by his generalship were brief.
Men’s minds were profoundly disturbed: many felt dimly that great and
terrible events were coming without seeing what they were or how to deal
with or prevent them. Marius certainly was not the man who had either
the insight or the power to do this; he was a man of camps with no
knowledge or understanding of politics. His victories and the great
shows that followed them made him the idol of the mob: but the idol of
the mob was the last man to deal wisely with the difficulties of Rome.
The men of wealth and birth detested him as a dangerous, rude,
unlettered boor, who knew nothing of government or public business.
Marius could not even keep order. There were constant riots. People were
set upon and murdered in the open streets. Alarming reports came from
the provinces, especially from the East. But any one who had the courage
to demand justice for the provincials was certain to be detested in
Rome. Thus the honest Rutilius Rufus, who tried to defend the people of
Asia against the greed of the Roman tax-collectors, was driven into
exile. Nor did the Roman mob care a fig for the grievances of the
Italians—or the senators either.
Drusus
There were, however, men in Rome who felt that dishonour was coming
upon the Republic from these things as well as danger. These
men—aristocrats of the old stamp—were, however, mostly
rather inclined to turn aside from politics, which filled them with
disgust. Their feelings were not keen enough to make them take action.
But they saw that things were going from bad to worse; and when at last
one of their order came forward who cared enough to take risks, they
rallied round him. This was M. Livius Drusus, a young man of
lofty family, who thought the men of his own order were partly to blame
for what was happening. They
held aloof and let vulgar and ignorant men like Marius and his
associates, Glaucia and Saturninus (men of very low character who led
the crowd by promises and bribes), drag the good name of Rome down. Two
things stirred Drusus to action: one the shocking unfairness of the law
courts, the other the fact that the people of Italy were shut out of all
share in their own government. Everything was settled in Rome: the
Italians had no voice. The consuls and other magistrates who made and
administered the laws were chosen by Roman votes only. Yet the Italians
had to send men to the army and pay taxes.
Drusus got his Bill for the reform of the law courts through (91) in
spite of the moneyed men, since he proposed that the judges should be
partly chosen from the Senate, and a strong body of senators backed this
up. But when his Bill giving votes to the Italians came up things were
different. There he could count on very little support. It did not help
him in Rome that, when he fell ill, prayers for his recovery were put up
in every town in Italy. This was indeed used against him by his enemies
in Rome, who said there was a conspiracy going on. The rich Italians,
too, made common cause with the rich men in Rome. Some of the
aristocrats stood by Drusus, but the majority in Rome was against
him.
Throughout Italy the struggle round his Bill raised an intense and
deep excitement. Then one night Drusus was murdered in the street as he
was going home. The murderer vanished. No inquiry was made. Drusus’s
Bill was dropped; his party was crushed. His enemies at once rushed
through a measure setting up a court before which every one suspected of
sympathizing with votes for Italians was to be charged.
But the hopes of the Italians could not be crushed thus. The news of
Drusus’s *** ran like an earthquake shock through Italy. Feeling was
at fever pitch. Rome refused to recognize Italian rights: the Italians
would compel it to do so by the sword. All over the peninsula feverish
preparations went on. A few months after Drusus’s death fighting
broke out at Asculum in the south and spread like lightning all over the
north and centre.
This Social War, as it was called, was waged with dreadful bitterness
on both sides, and the misery and ruin it brought on the country was
terrible. In the first year (90) things went against Rome, though all
their best generals, including Marius and his hated rival Sulla, took
the field. In the second year (89) Marius did little or nothing, but in
the south Sulla carried everything before him. But while the Romans were
winning they were also beginning to see that the war need never have
taken place: it was time to let the Italians take their share and make
them Romans. A Bill giving them voting rights was drafted and
passed into law. This did more than anything in the actual campaign to
bring the fighting to an end.
The war was still raging when news came that the East was ablaze.
Mithridates, King of Pontus, the richest king in Asia Minor, and far the
ablest, had taken the field and was preparing to overrun the Roman
provinces. *** the heels of this came worse. Mithridates had
defeated a Roman general, destroyed his army, captured his fleet and was
invading Asia. He came, he said, to free the people from the Roman
tax-collectors who sucked their blood away. Slaves and prisoners were
set free, those who killed Italians pardoned. On a certain day of the
year 88 there was a massacre of no less than 80,000 Italians in Asia.
The rebellion against Rome, thus begun, spread to Greece. Athens threw
off the Roman yoke; Mithridates, who dreamed of ruling over the whole
East, sent his general to help overthrow the Roman garrisons in
Greece.
SULLA
from a coin
Thus while Romans were fighting one another the lands beyond the seas
of which they were so proud, and which were the source of most of their
wealth, were in rebellion. Men of their own race had been massacred by
Asiatics. Each day the news grew worse. In Rome there were riots in the
streets. Sulla had been named commander against Mithridates. Marius
could not bear this. He got his friends to bring in a Bill transferring
the command to him. It was carried, but amid such disorder that senators
and consuls fled from the city. Sulla had left the riots and disorders
of Rome to go to his army at Nola. There he received the order to hand
over the command to Marius. If Marius
expected him to obey he had misread the character of the man he hated.
Sulla’s answer was to march upon Rome at the head of his legions. There
he was welcomed by the remnant of the Senate as the restorer of law and
order. Marius fled.
Of the sudden rise of Sulla, Plutarch gives the following
account:
Sulla Felix
In the long Social War, with all its vicissitudes and disasters, and
dangers that threatened the safety of Rome, Marius could achieve nothing
great, and merely proved that military excellence demands physical
strength and vigour, while Sulla by many notable victories gained the
reputation of a great general with the people, of the greatest of
generals with his friends, and of the most fortunate with his enemies.
Yet he was not sensitive about this last judgement as Timotheus the son
of Conon was; for when his enemies attributed all his successes to
fortune, and painted pictures in which he was represented asleep with
Fortune casting a net over the cities, Timotheus was rude to them and
angry, feeling that they deprived him of the credit due to his deeds.
Sulla, on the other hand, not only accepted without annoyance the
‘felicity’ thus assigned to him, but even magnifying it and recognizing
it as divine, he made fortune responsible for his exploits, either in a
spirit of ostentation or from a genuine belief in providential guidance.
For example, he has written in his memoirs that of all his decisions
which were justified by results the happiest were not reached by
deliberation, but adopted in the hurry of the moment. Moreover, when he
says that he was born for fortune rather than for war, he seems to have
more respect for fortune than for merit and to accept the control of an
unseen power; insomuch that he makes a divine good luck the cause of his
harmony with Metellus, his kinsman and colleague in the consulship; for
he expected to have much trouble with him, but found him a most
agreeable partner in office. Again, in the memoirs, which he has
dedicated to Lucullus, he bids him place most reliance on any warning
given him by a vision in the night. He tells us, too, that when he was
leaving the city with an army to fight in the Social War, the earth
opened near Laverna and a great fire gushed out, shooting up a bright
flame to the sky. The prophets interpreted this to mean that a man of
genius, who was of unusual and remarkable appearance, would take the
command and free the country from its present disorders. Sulla declares
that he was the man; for his golden hair was the peculiarity in his
appearance, and he felt no diffidence in ascribing genius to himself
after his great achievements.
Plutarch, xxxiii. 6. 2-7.
In many respects Lucius Cornelius Sulla is the most extraordinary
figure in Roman history. Belonging to a very old family, the same as
that of the Scipios, he grew up in genteel poverty, living in one of the
large blocks of flats that had been built near the centre of the town.
He was extremely handsome, with every grace of form and feature, tall,
well built, with a face of classic outline, marred in later life by a
hot and somewhat mottled complexion, but distinguished by eyes of a
brilliant blue: eyes that could upon occasion flash fire. They did not
often do so, for Sulla was a person of ice-cold reserve, seldom carried
away by his feelings. Highly educated and gifted with unusual powers of
mind, he looked out upon the world and despised most people in it. His
was a mind incapable of feeling any sort of religious appeal. Most of
the things people strove after seemed to him stupid, because there was
no pleasure in them. He was what is called a cynic.
Until he was nearly fifty Sulla took no important part in public
affairs. He served with great distinction in Africa. His unshakable
courage and complete self-control, combined as they were with rare
powers of making men do what he wanted and an absolute belief in
himself, made him a successful commander. But for military glory in
itself he did not care, or for any other kind of glory. To him these
things were illusions. Nor was he stirred by patriotism in the ordinary
sense. He saw the Rome of his time very much as it was and did not
consider it worth the sacrifice of a pleasure. The aristocrats seemed to
him selfish and stupid: the popular party vulgar and stupid. He saw what
was going to happen but had none of the belief that inspires idealists
that he could change the course of events. ‘Things are what they are;
the consequences will be what they will be. Why
then should we seek to be deceived?’ This, said two thousand years
later, was a true description of Sulla’s point of view. He looked on,
coldly scornful; and amused himself, like other well-to-do men of his
class, with the arts in their lower as well as their higher forms. But,
when occasion called, he could act. When the Social War broke out, and
all hands in Rome were, as it were, called to the pumps, Sulla was
ready. He proved more successful, if also more ruthless, than any other
commander in the field; he understood, better than any one else, the
supreme danger in which Rome stood. It was this, and not personal
ambition in the ordinary sense, that made him take the command against
Mithridates, and march on Rome when the Marius faction showed that they
were incapable of keeping order there.
Sulla could spend no time in Rome. The danger in the East was too
pressing. He sailed for Greece. Marius might return: if he did Sulla
knew that his own life might be in danger, but he could not trouble
about that. Roman rule in the East was threatened: it was his business
to save it. He saw, as Marius did not or could not see, that at this
terrible moment the fate of Rome trembled in the balance. Italy lay torn
and exhausted by civil war. Agriculture had been ruined, thousands
slain, and business of all kinds was at a standstill. The war in the
East shook the very life of the Republic to its foundations. Rome lived,
as London lives, on trade and supplies from overseas. They were stopped.
There was a money panic. The danger was the greater that the revolt
against Rome, both in Italy and in Asia, Greece, and elsewhere, had
right on its side. The Roman Government, in the years that had passed
since the defeat of Hannibal, had been bad: cruel, extortionate, and
unjust. In Rome itself there was bitter disunion.
When Sulla set sail he knew all this, knew how tremendous a task was
before him, and, believing as he did in his star, knew that he would
accomplish it. But only he of Romans then living could have done it.
Marius, hot-headed always and now old and weakened in will and mind by
drink, could not have succeeded. It needed all Sulla’s extraordinary
coolness, all his iron will.
Though he saw that trouble would break out again in Rome as soon as
his back was turned, he also saw that the danger from the revolt of
Greece and from Mithridates was even more immediate and pressing. The
whole basis on which the Roman world rested would drop from under it if
Mithridates succeeded. The danger was, in its way, as great as that
which had threatened Rome when Hannibal crossed the Alps.
MITHRIDATES
from a coin
For Mithridates was an exceedingly able prince. His strength did not
lie in the huge hordes of soldiers he had behind him. Eastern soldiers
were a poor match for Roman legionaries, even when they far outnumbered
them. Nor did it lie in the vast wealth of the kingdoms over which he
ruled: though in both men and resources he outclassed the small army
Rome could send against him. His real strength was first his own
ability, second, the general and widespread revolt against Rome. The
Roman State, as he knew, was torn with revolution at home. There was a
general sense of panic and uncertainty. The Government had neither men,
money, nor supplies for the war against Mithridates.
Now, instead of closing ranks, as after Cannae, rich Romans fled,
some even joining Mithridates. Marius and his party saw in the dangers
Sulla went out to face nothing but their chance to come back to power in
Rome. Marius himself was old now and had taken to drink. Almost as soon
as Sulla sailed revolution broke out again in Rome. The streets ran with
blood; the town was heaped with the bodies of the slain. Cinna, one of
the consuls, proposed to recall Marius (who had fled to the ruins of
Carthage) and brought up first slaves and then armed Italians against
the Senate. He was defeated and declared a public enemy. With Sertorius,
a most able officer but a personal enemy of Sulla, Cinna then
organized the Samnites. Marius returned from Africa, and he, Cinna,
Sertorius, and Carbo
marched on Rome (87). When they at last entered the city at the head of
their troops a terrible massacre took place. Marius, who was almost mad
with fury, struck down any one who had ever thwarted or criticized him,
among them some of the noblest men in Rome. Antonius, first of living
orators, Publius Crassus, a fine soldier, Catulus who had shared
with Marius the toils and honours of the wars against Teutones and
Cimbri, Merula the consul, shared the fate of hundreds of less note. No
one was safe. Marius walked about like a raging lion, thirsting for
blood. The heads of the dead stood in rows round the Forum and above
Marius’s own house. For five days the massacre went on until at last
Sertorius, who had looked on with horror, stopped it by cutting Marius’s
bodyguard of murderers to pieces. The old man was elected consul for the
seventh time (86): a few days later he died. Sulla meantime was
declared a public enemy, banished, and removed from his command. His
house was demolished, all his goods were sold, his wife and family were
driven into exile.
Such was the news that came to Sulla as he was besieging Athens and
in the greatest danger. The city appeared impregnable. His small army
was reduced by wounds, disease, and the shortage of supplies: the danger
that Mithridates would land and cut them off was immediate. They would
then be between the devil and the deep sea. But Sulla’s iron will did
not quail. The man whom Rome regarded as a creature of pleasure shared
every hardship of the soldiers and encouraged them day and night by his
personal courage and calm. He showed marvellous ingenuity and resource
in collecting supplies and a complete disregard of everything but the
purpose in hand. He was a Greek scholar with a real admiration of Greek
literature and art: yet he ransacked the temples and melted down the
ornaments and treasures of centuries to make money; cut down the trees
of the Sacred Grove of the Academy where Plato had walked with Socrates
to make trench props. His ablest officer, Lucius Lucullus, was sent off
to collect a fleet, somehow or other.
All through the winter and the whole of the next year Athens held
out. The next winter came before Mithridates’ fleet sailed: it could do
nothing till the spring. But with this news came that
of a new danger. The Roman Government of Cinna was sending out an army
against Sulla. He was between two fires. But his nerve did not fail.
Athens fell to a supreme assault on the 1st March (86) before the new
Roman army left Italy. Moving south Sulla then met Mithridates’ army on
the Boeotian plain and at Chaeronea gained a victory that rang through
the world. The spell of Mithridates’ name was broken: Rome was still
invincible. The revolted cities of the East began to come back. In the
same year Sulla gained another great victory. At first the Roman line
broke, panic-struck. Sulla, leaping from his horse, snatched a standard
and rushing into the hottest of the fight shouted to his men, ‘Soldiers!
If you are asked where you abandoned your general, say it was at
Orchomenus.’ Stung by this reproach and the supreme courage of their
general, the men recovered. The day was won. Flaccus, the Roman general,
made an agreement with Sulla: to him, whatever the orders of the Home
Government, it seemed impossible that Roman armies should fight against
one another when there was a common enemy to face. But a captain in the
ranks, Fimbria by name, stirred up a mutiny, Flaccus was murdered, and
Fimbria prepared to march on Sulla.
Sulla was now in a dilemma. His life was in danger unless he made
peace with Mithridates. To do so was not magnificent: it was not even
highly honourable. But Sulla was not a man to be stayed by such ideas.
His own life was at the moment more important than anything else. If he
were killed there would not be much left of the honour of Rome. He
therefore made a treaty with Mithridates. He made the treaty on his own
terms, however. Earlier, at a time when he was in extreme danger,
Mithridates had offered him an alliance. This he had utterly rejected.
Now he insisted that Mithridates should altogether abandon his plans and
claims against Rome. By the treaty of Dardanus (84) the king had to give
up all his conquests in Greece and Asia and hand over ships of war and a
great sum of money to Sulla. In return the man who had arranged the
cold-blooded *** of 80,000 Italians was made ‘friend and ally’ of
Rome. Sulla knew that Mithridates would sooner or later give trouble
again: but for the time being the danger was over. Rome’s power and
name in the East had been saved, at a price. The treaty could not stand,
but for the moment it was necessary. Sulla could turn to saving Rome at
home. Fimbria’s army began to desert to him. Fimbria in despair killed
himself. Sulla spent the next year in preparations for his own return in
Rome. Carbo, who had succeeded Cinna, was as bitter against him as Cinna
had been.
After a year in Asia collecting the taxes, not paid for the last four
years, Sulla landed at Brundisium (83) with a well-filled treasury and a
devoted army. On every soldier he imposed an oath: they were to treat
the Italians as friends and fellow citizens, not as enemies. But to the
Marian party in Rome he determined to show no mercy. The State must be
cleared of these people: there must be no more riot and revolution. As
Sulla marched north he defeated the forces sent against him: many of the
soldiers deserted to him: many cities opened their gates. The Government
of Marius, Cinna, and Carbo was thoroughly unpopular: and Sulla kept his
word, doing no harm to the country through which he passed. Only the
Samnites resisted strongly: them Sulla, who had been joined by young
Crassus and by Cnaeus Pompeius, defeated in a great battle lasting from
noon to the following mid-day outside the Colline Gate (82).
Rome and all Italy were now in Sulla’s power. He entered the city and
assembled the Senate in the Temple of Bellona. As he explained his plans
for restoring order—he was to have the powers of a dictator till
that was done—a frightful sound was heard. Sulla gave his grim
smile. ‘Some criminals being punished’, he said. Six thousand Samnite
prisoners were being cut to pieces. In this spirit he proceeded to stamp
out what had been the party of Marius. Marius had been mad with rage:
Sulla was quite calm, but not a whit more merciful. The tomb of Marius
was broken open, his ashes scattered in the road. Samnium, which had
resisted the conqueror, was laid desert. The land was broken into
allotments for Sulla’s soldiers.
The proscriptions followed. Lists of public enemies were posted and a
reward paid to any one who killed the men whose names appeared. Their
property was confiscated. Men put the names of private enemies on the
list before or sometimes after they had killed them. Catiline, for
instance, did this to
his own brother. Sulla did not care. The State must be cleared of
dangerous men and it must get revenues from somewhere. On the 1st June
81 the lists were closed: the executions and confiscations ended. Nearly
five thousand persons had perished. Their property and that of those who
had fled or been banished fell to the State, which got four million
pounds in this way.
By *** and robbery the State treasury was filled. Sulla’s hard
mind did not shrink from these ugly words. He did the things and made no
pretences. In the same way he never pretended to believe in the rights
of the people. He despised them, thought them stupid, ignorant, and
lazy. What they needed was police. The Government he built up was of
this kind. He made the Senate much larger and stronger, for men of birth
and wealth, though no better than the others, could at least, he
thought, be trusted to keep things orderly and as they were. No one was
to be consul till he had passed through the lower offices, and then
consul only once. As consul he was to stay in Italy without an army; at
the end of his year he might be sent abroad, with an army, as a
pro-consul. In Italy there were to be no troops: no soldiers were to
cross the Rubicon. The law courts were reformed, the juries again drawn
from the Senate.
A BOAR HUNT
from a sculpture in the Capitoline Museum
When he had finished his work of reorganization and built up the
power of the Senate—i.e. of the older men of birth and
property—as strongly as he could, Sulla laid down all his
extraordinary powers and retired to private life. He had built himself
a lovely villa, full of the art treasures he had brought from Greece and
from the East, in the midst of exquisite gardens. There he lived,
writing his memoirs, and enjoying the pleasures of hunting and fishing,
banqueting and revelling, surrounded by the most amusing people he could
find. Many of these were writers, artists, and actors. Actors were
looked down upon in Rome, but Roscius the tragedian was a great friend
of Sulla’s, for he scorned all such notions as unreal. Always Sulla had
provoked the Romans by his power of casting off serious cares when he
sat down at table and by what they thought his ill-timed jests. They did
not understand his view of life. To him it was all a play, not a very
good play: out of which, if one were lucky, one might get some
entertainment. He had been lucky: chance was his goddess and he believed
in nothing higher. Before he died, at the age of sixty, he wrote his own
epitaph, which was inscribed on the great monument set up to him in the
Campus Martius: ‘No friend ever did me so much good or enemy so much
harm but I repaid him with interest.’
SCENE FROM A TRAGEDY
Terra-cotta relief
The New Rome
With the death of Sulla a new period
of Roman history begins, a brief and in many ways brilliant
half-century, about which we know far more than we do of any earlier
time, since we possess the works, in writing, architecture, sculpture,
of the men, or of some of them, who helped to make it. Roman life in
these fifty years is, in many respects, startlingly like that of our own
day. True, the great discoveries of science had not been
achieved; there were no motors, telephones or lifts, no railways, no
electric light or power, no illustrated papers—indeed the first
newspaper of any kind was a small sheet issued by Caesar. But in the
things they did and said and thought about, and in the way they acted
and spoke and thought about them, the Romans who lived in the sixty odd
years before the birth of Christ were very much like the Englishmen of
our own day. The comfort of the lives of the well-to-do, with their
elegant town houses and charming country villas, furnished with
beautiful things brought from all parts of the world, depended on the
labour of innumerable slaves. In many ways, however, these
slaves were not worse off than the poor factory workers of our great
towns; in some they were more fortunate. The lot of those who were being
trained to fight in the games was certainly dreadful; but those owned by
private persons were for the most part kindly treated and could and
often did buy their freedom. The class of freedmen was a large and
growing one in Rome.
CUTLER’S FORGE
The revolutionary wars had brought ruin to many. Large tracts of
Italy had been laid waste. But though the wounds that had been dealt at
the life of the country bled for long, prosperity returned surprisingly
quickly. If some families had lost everything, others had profited by
their losses. And from abroad wealth poured into Italy in
ever-increasing streams. A new class of rich men grew up, whose
wealth came from business of all sorts—tax-farming in the
provinces, house building, ship construction, agriculture on a large
scale. Side by side with them were the lawyers, an increasingly
important body. As to-day, a great many young men, when they had
completed their education by spending some time abroad, in Greece by
preference, became barristers. Success in the courts, the power of
public speaking, opened the way to success in politics, though it was
long before any one could go far along that road who had not won
distinction as a soldier.
CUTLER’S SHOP
Very slowly and gradually, the sharp line between the new men and the
old patrician families began to soften. There were few so proud that
they would not go and eat a sumptuous dinner at the house of a man
because his parent had not worn the purple stripe on his toga that
marked the senator. Education spread. Sulla brought back with him from
Greece innumerable treasures, among them the works of Aristotle, which
became the educated young Roman’s bible.
All over Italy wealth spread, as the fields blossomed with vine and
olive. Great roads made travel easier and swifter; aqueducts brought
water where it was needed; the marshes were drained; everywhere lovely
villas were built, their exquisite gardens adorned with beautiful
statues. Thither the tired Roman went for a few days’ refreshment,
accompanied by his friends and escorted by trains of slaves. Slaves
wrote his letters
for him, and carried them swiftly to his friends in other parts of Italy
or across the seas. They copied the verses and prose sketches which the
young Roman of fashion liked to have written, so that the vellum roll
circulated almost as quickly and freely, among the well-to-do, as does
the volume to-day. Life became more elegant and refined. Music, dancing,
games of all sorts provided distraction; gambling became a passion with
many; eating and drinking were as luxurious as now. When we think of the
Romans of the period after the civil wars we must think of men
intelligent, cultivated, educated, polished by contact with a wide and
various world of affairs, their minds opened by foreign travel and the
study of Greek language and literature.
WRITING MATERIALS
Pens, Ink, Tablet, and Potsherd
Brit. Mus.
War, however, remained the high road to popularity and fame. Since
all the provinces were held by military governors (pro-consuls or
quaestors) any one who aspired to high place in the State must have gone
through some sort of military training. The successful general was still
the favourite candidate. But military prowess alone was no longer
enough. The day was gone by when a boor like Marius could ride
rough-shod over the Republic. The hero of the new Rome was to be
something more than a soldier, though he must be a soldier too.
Within Italy the struggle between Romans and Italians was over. Italy
was one, as it had never been before. Having acquired the vote, though
not on terms of full equality with the Roman citizen, the Italian middle
class settled down to money-making and did not, as a rule, trouble much
about the stormy course of politics in the capital. More and more, it
was
from Italy that the army came; the Roman populace liked the shows given
at the close of campaigns, but did not care much for the dangers and
hardship of service.
But although this struggle was over, another remained, sharper and
more bitter than before. The return of Sulla had meant the triumph of
the Senatorial Party, of the Conservatives, the men of old family and
fixed ideas. Sulla’s proscriptions, the *** and banishment of
innumerable families and the seizure of their goods and estates, to be
divided among their enemies, left behind them a deep hatred between
those who had triumphed and those who had been defeated. After Sulla’s
death the sons and grandsons of the proscribed began to come back, and
what had once been the Popular Party, led by Marius and Cinna, built
itself up again. At first it had no leaders. The men who were to be its
leaders were still too young. Gradually, however, in spite of the
unpopularity that had become attached to its very name, it gathered
strength. The new rich and the struggling lawyers joined its ranks,
since there was more chance there than in those of the Conservatives for
fresh talent and new ideas. A new kind of political organization
was built up through the clubs and workmen’s associations.
The main source of the growing strength of this new Popular Party was
the weakness and inefficiency of the Government. Sulla had erected a
remarkable machine, intended to prevent all change and keep the power of
the State in the hands of a small ruling class, the patricians. But the
machine would not work when his strong directing hand was removed. It
was too stiff and rigid to cope with the growing tasks of administering
the great empire over which Rome had to rule. Bit by bit Sulla’s system
broke down; his rules were swept aside. In the years between his death
and that of Caesar the rule of Rome extended enormously; each extension
made the need of a strong and efficient Government more pressing. The
actual government of Rome through the Senate was neither strong nor
efficient. Nothing was well managed. This growing mismanagement
compelled men of active minds to look around and ask themselves what was
wrong. They found different answers. But the need of change was
clear.
Lucius Licinius Lucullus
If great men are those whose action
brings about great changes, Lucius Licinius Lucullus was one of the
greatest men of his time. His campaign in Asia Minor started an
altogether new policy. Hitherto Rome had acquired provinces in an
accidental way; there had been no purpose of conquest. In Spain and
Africa the influence of Carthage had to be wiped out; in Greece Rome was
nominally a protector only, called in to help against outside dangers.
In Asia Minor it was more or less the same. As regards Asia Minor no one
in Rome was satisfied with the treaty Sulla had made with Mithridates.
It was felt to be a disgrace to Rome that the man who had caused the
*** of hundreds of thousands of Italians in cold blood was recognized
as the ‘friend and ally’ of Rome and left in undisturbed possession.
Mithridates had got to be punished. When Lucullus went to the East it
was for this purpose. But he did far more. He discovered that these
great Asiatic monarchies, with their myriad armies, looked strong but
were really weak; they could not maintain themselves, if attacked. He
did not merely make Rome safe against their attack; he marched through
kingdom after kingdom, conquering and subduing them to Rome. Thus, in
fact, if not yet in name, he made Rome an empire.
The work he thus began Lucullus did not complete. The idea was his;
it was his hard fighting, the courage with which he overrode
instructions and disregarded the Senate’s order to return, which paved
the way for conquest. Pompeius, whose slow mind and cautious temper
could never have started such a policy, saw from Rome what Lucullus’s
fighting was leading up to. He saw the golden prize at the end of his
efforts and determined to *** it from him. In this he succeeded. But
the credit or blame of making Rome an imperial power, a power that
rules by force over alien races, belongs not to him but to
Lucullus. This was not understood at the time. Lucullus, disappointed
and embittered, came back to Rome and was known to his contemporaries
not as the man who laid the foundations of the empire, but as the giver
of the most luxurious and extraordinary banquets ever eaten. The proverb
associated with his name—‘Dining with Lucullus’—shows this.
His feasts were famous; the rarest foods from every part of the known
world were on his table. His gardens too were wonderful, and his house
glowed with all the treasures of the distant East. Among the treasures
he brought back was one little noticed in his day—the cherry-tree.
This soon grew all over Italy, but that Lucullus had brought it was
forgotten. Like everything else that he did, it failed to bring him
fame.
The family of L. Licinius Lucullus was one of the oldest in Rome and
one of those not too numerous ones which maintained not only the pride
of ancient race but the idea that good birth carried duties with it. He
was poor but excessively proud, and belonged to that small Conservative
group from which Rutilius Rufus and Livius Drusus came. His mind was
clear and highly educated, cultivated in the full sense. As a soldier he
was extremely able. The way in which the ordinary politician made money
and bought votes disgusted him. In the main he stood sternly aloof from
the scramble for office and wealth.
After Sulla’s death—he had been one of Sulla’s most capable
officers—he retired to private life and watched with cold scorn
the way in which the affairs of the State were mismanaged both at home
and abroad; the long struggle with Sertorius, the rise of Pompeius, by
good luck rather than, he thought, by merit. He had strong feelings and
a good deal of the ambition that moves in almost every mind that is
aware of its own powers, but he detested intrigue and had no aptitude
for it. He was unpopular, because of his habit of saying what he
thought, both in public and in private, about the corrupt politicians
and vulgar scrambling money-makers whom other politicians abused in
private but dared not offend in public. He had no party. Until he was
fifty he had held no command or office of the first rank.
But when the question of the campaign against Mithridates
came up Lucullus felt that he had a claim to it and was prepared,
despite his ordinary aloofness, to push that claim through. Nicomedes,
the old King of Bithynia, had just died (74) and left his rich
territory—a buffer state between the Roman provinces in Asia Minor
and Mithridates’ kingdom of Pontus—to the Roman people. This the
able and wily King of Pontus was not going to allow. He declared war,
made an alliance with Sertorius, and marched into Bithynia. This was a
serious menace. When Mithridates invaded Cilicia (73) people remembered
the massacre of fifteen years ago and trembled. Pompeius wanted the
command, but he was still busy in Spain; in the end Lucullus was
appointed.
The difficulties of the campaign were at first overwhelming. Lucullus
was not in sole control and his colleagues were refractory. But the
defeat of Cotta, the other consul, at last left him a free hand. Many of
his captains were dismayed by the reduction of the Roman army. Lucullus
remained calm. Mithridates had attacked the port of Cyzicus, far from
his own base, with an army so large that to provision it was extremely
difficult. Lucullus took up a position from which he could cut off his
supplies and so close him in a trap between the town and his own army.
With his smaller army Lucullus refused battle, and when Mithridates
endeavoured to make his way out by dividing his forces Lucullus attacked
the two parts in turn, though it was the dead of winter, and defeated
them disastrously. A vast army perished in the snow. Lucullus was
able to overrun Bithynia and force Mithridates to retreat into
Pontus.
It was now that Lucullus took the step which makes his career
profoundly important in the history of Rome. Instead of waiting for
instructions from the Home Government—instructions which he knew
would probably have ordered his recall and certainly a halt in his
operations—he resolved to act boldly on a plan of his own. That
plan was no less than the invasion of Mithridates’ kingdom. Nearly all
his generals opposed him, but Lucullus’s mind was clear. He burned to
wipe out the treaty of Dardanus and had come to the conclusion that
Eastern monarchies were not so strong as they looked: that their loose
organization could not stand against the disciplined force of Rome.
Mithridates himself had something of genius; but Mithridates was
old.
The progress of the campaign showed that Lucullus was right. Entering
Pontus in the late autumn, he overran the rich country without meeting
with any serious opposition; Mithridates’ armies had been scattered at
Cyzicus; he had not yet collected fresh ones. Immense
plunder—slaves and cattle, gold and silver, ivory and precious
stones, rare stuffs and wondrous embroideries—were sent home to
Rome. In the following spring when Mithridates did advance with his new
army Lucullus defeated it decisively. Cabira was taken and Lucullus
spent the winter with the royal palace as his head-quarters, training
his army for the work before it. Here the defects of his character came
into play. Proud and passionate, Lucullus had an inordinate sense of his
own dignity and of the greatness of his own purpose; he forgot that the
greatest general is only the leader of other men, on whom his triumphs
depend. To Lucullus his soldiers were mere instruments, not human
beings; the army a machine. Great generals like Hannibal, Caesar,
Napoleon, Alexander and, in his degree, Sertorius, owe their lasting
success to the power they have to make each man in the army feel that he
is a man, whose devotion matters, on whom in the last resort everything
depends. When soldiers feel this, when they feel that they and their
general are part of one living thing, they can perform miracles.
Lucullus had no such power. He was harsh, tyrannical, and inhuman in his
attitude and, overwhelmed by a mass of work, never found time to relax.
The sternness of discipline never unbent. He seemed to grudge the
soldiers any share in the vast *** sent to Rome. He had no kindly word
or look for individuals. It was this growing feeling of bitterness that
the discontented officers in his army, and especially his brother-in-law
Clodius, who was secretly working for Pompeius against him, used to sow
the seeds of mutiny.
Lucullus, absorbed in the mighty design he had conceived, did not
realize what was happening, even when after the capture of Amisus his
men paid no heed to his orders that the city
should be spared, but sacked and looted it. By the autumn all Pontus was
in Roman hands. Lucullus, again refusing to await orders from Rome,
pushed on into Armenia and attacked Tigranes, with whom Mithridates had
taken refuge. This campaign was brilliantly carried out. With his small
army, hardly 20,000 in all, Lucullus inflicted a series of crushing
defeats on the Armenian forces. Armenia was under his feet. He had shown
all the qualities of a great commander: clearness and steadiness of
purpose, complete confidence, the boldness and unresting energy of
genius. As he rested in winter quarters in South Armenia planning the
conquest of Persia and Parthia, he might well compare himself with
Alexander.
Next year Tigranes had gathered a fresh army and Lucullus determined
to smash him by taking Artaxata, the capital of Armenia. But here he
failed. The campaign was dreadful: the ground was covered with snow; the
rivers icy. At last mutiny broke out, his men refused to go on. News
came from Rome that Lucullus had been superseded. The plotters at Rome
had got their way.
The fruits of victory had been snatched from Lucullus and left for
Pompeius to garner. His soul might well be filled with bitterness as he
came back to Rome. No one there realized what he had done; he had no
party. The political struggle disgusted him more than ever. His
solitariness had been increased by years of absolute power in the East.
He withdrew into silent isolation, and the banquets which were the talk
of Rome. Men gaped, but did not understand either the man or his
work.
After Strenuous Years
In the life of Lucullus, as in Old Comedy, we find at the beginning the
acts of a soldier and a statesman, but towards the end eating and
drinking, and little else but revels and illuminations, and mere
frivolity. For I count as frivolous his costly houses, with their
porticoes and baths, and still more the pictures and statues and his
pains in collecting such works of art at great expense, lavishing the
magnificent fortune amassed during his campaigns on the site where even
now, though luxury has increased so much, the gardens of Lucullus are
counted among
the noblest belonging to the Emperor. At Naples, too, and on the
neighbouring coast he pierced hills with great tunnels, surrounded his
house with ponds and channels of salt water for breeding fish, and even
built out into the sea, so that Tubero, the Stoic philosopher, at the
sight of this magnificence called him ‘Xerxes in a toga’. Besides all
this, he had country seats near Tusculum, with gazebos and rooms and
porticoes open to the air, where Pompeius came on a visit, and blamed
him for lodging himself excellently in summer, but making a house that
was uninhabitable in winter. Lucullus merely smiled and said, ‘Do you
think that I have less sense than the cranes and storks, and do not
change my home according to the season?’ At another time, when a Praetor
was anxious to make his spectacle magnificent, and begged for a loan of
some purple cloaks to dress the performers, Lucullus replied that he
would give him some if he found that he had any. Next day he asked how
many were wanted, and hearing that a hundred would be enough, he offered
two hundred. Horace is thinking of this when he remarks that he
considers a house poor when the valuables hidden and overlooked are not
more than those known to the master.
Plutarch, xxxvi. 39.
Cnaeus Pompeius
At the time of Sulla’s death the
unanimous opinion of Rome would have fixed upon Cnaeus Pompeius as the
one young man then alive who was likely to follow in his footsteps and
rule the Roman world by his own will. And if there had been in
Pompeius’s character the qualities which his rapid success seemed to
promise, they would have been right. But the life of Pompeius shows how
much circumstances—chance, opportunity, the good opinion of
others, birth and wealth—can do for a man; and what they cannot
do, unless he has within himself the qualities of mind and will which
mark off the first-rate from the best second-rate. Greatness was, as it
were, thrust upon him; but since he was not great in himself he could
not achieve it. It is this that makes him so interesting a failure. His
failure was due to the fact that at a supreme crisis he was called upon
to do just the things
he could not do. It was no accident that enabled Julius Caesar to
succeed where he failed. For Caesar possessed in supreme degree the
power to act with decision, which, when combined with clear judgement,
makes the great man of action. At the crucial moment the judgement of
Pompeius wavered: his will was uncertain. In ordinary peaceful times his
weaknesses might never have been seen; but his life fell within an era
of storm and stress when the stuff of which men are made is tested and
shown.
Tall, strongly built, with curly hair and large eyes that though
prominently set and wide open had a rather sleepy expression, Pompeius
when young was often likened to Alexander the Great. He had his regular
features and brilliant colouring, but in his eyes there was none of the
fire or mystery that made Alexander seem to his contemporaries as
beautiful as a god. His manners were grave and dignified. He gave all
who saw him an impression of his importance. Pompeius had a very strong
sense of his own importance. The thing he was most afraid of was of
being laughed at. When he suspected that any one was doing this, he lost
his temper.
POMPEIUS
Pompeius belonged to a family old and honourable enough, though
plebeian, to make the senators at last accept him as one of themselves,
the more readily that he had acquired immense wealth in the
proscriptions. At the time of the civil war he was on the side of
Marius, and closely associated with him, while Marius and Cinna were in
power in Rome. His first wife Antistia was the daughter of a friend of
Cinna’s. When Sulla landed, however, Pompeius soon saw which way things
were going. He collected an army and marched to join Sulla. Although he
was only twenty-three at the time, Sulla hailed him
as one of the most important of his supporters. He suggested to him that
he should put away his young wife Antistia and marry his own
daughter-in-law. To this Pompeius agreed, although Antistia loved him
and was in the deepest distress, since her father had been killed in the
proscriptions; moreover, her mother, when she heard how Pompeius
intended to treat her daughter, laid violent hands upon herself. In the
proscriptions Pompeius acquired so much wealth that within a few years
he was one of the richest men in Rome. His popularity was great and he
could afford to keep it up by giving splendid shows and presents to the
people.
His wealth, his quick success, his great popularity filled the
senators with awe. They had a constant fear that he was to be the next
Sulla. They listened with respect to all that Pompeius said, though he
was a dull speaker; and regarded him as the first general of the day,
though he had really done nothing to deserve that title. But he was
always lucky in his campaigns, and again and again had the good fortune
to be made commander just at the stage when the fruits of a long
struggle, carried on by others, were ready to be gathered. In the means
by which he achieved success Pompeius was not over scrupulous. His want
of feeling in the matter of Antistia was only one sign of this. The same
kind of callousness was shown in the way he secured the final defeat of
Sertorius, not by action in the field but by a plot. After three years
of unsuccessful fighting Sertorius, much the ablest of Marius’s
followers, who had raised the standard of revolt in Spain, was still as
far from being conquered as ever. Pompeius was tired of the war; so were
his troops. At last by the treachery of Perpenna and some other Romans
in his army, on whose minds secret emissaries from Rome had worked,
Sertorius was murdered. Pompeius then suppressed the revolt in Spain
with horrible cruelty and returned to Rome crowned with success.
He was made consul (70) although he had never held any of the junior
offices of State; but his consulship was marked by nothing more
important than his constant disagreements with his colleague Crassus,
who, though of patrician birth, inclined to the so-called Popular,
anti-Senatorial party. For the next two
years he was little to the fore until called upon, as the first general
of the day, to deal with a difficulty which represented a most serious
danger to Rome. Rome depended to a large extent on foreign corn. Yet
this overseas corn supply was almost suspended by the pirates of the
Mediterranean. Commander after commander failed to suppress them. Food
prices in Rome rose to famine heights. At last the tribune Gabinius
proposed that a special commander should be appointed, with unexampled
power, both as regards men and money; and that Pompeius should be the
man. Caesar and Cicero supported the plan. It was hotly opposed by those
who thought such powers dangerous; but in the end Pompeius was
appointed. He showed conspicuous energy and within forty days the seas
were cleared.
A VASE in the shape of a galley
A vivid account of Pompeius’s operations against the pirates was
given by Cicero in the great speech he made in support of the proposal
of Manilius to give him the command in the East, in the place of
Lucullus.
Pompeius in his Prime
You know well enough how quickly these operations against the Pirates
were conducted, but I must not on that account omit all mention of them.
What man ever existed that, either
in the course of business or in the pursuit of gain, was able to visit
so many places and to travel such long distances in so short a time as
this great blast of war, directed by Cn. Pompeius, swept over the seas?
Even when it was yet too early for a distant voyage, he visited Sicily,
explored the coast of Africa, thence crossed to Sardinia, and protected
these three great granaries of the Republic with strong garrisons and
fleets. Next, after returning to Italy, he provided in the same way for
the safety of the two Spains and Transalpine Gaul, and sending ships to
the Illyrian coast, to Achaia, and all Greece besides, he established
large forces, military and naval, in the two seas of Italy. On the
forty-ninth day after he left Brundisium he brought the whole of Cilicia
under the dominion of the Roman people, and all the Pirates, wherever
they might be, either were captured and put to death, or surrendered to
his sole authority and command. Finally, when the Cretans had followed
him even into Pamphylia with envoys begging for clemency, he did not
disdain their offer of submission and was content to demand hostages.
The result was that this great war, that lasted so long and reached so
far, a war that harassed every country and every people, was taken
in hand by Pompeius at the end of the winter, was begun in the early
days of the spring, and was finished by the middle of the summer.
Cicero, De Lege Manilia, §§ 34-5.
Pompeius used the renown won by this success to secure for himself
the fruits of the Asiatic victories won by Lucullus. On the one hand, he
worked in Rome against Lucullus so that he got the command transferred
to himself; on the other, by bribery and the arts of Clodius, Lucullus’s
brother-in-law and aide-de-camp, he worked up a mutiny among his troops.
Then he went out to Asia and in a series of spectacular campaigns laid
the East at his feet. His progress through Asia was a parade; it was no
wonder that the Romans were dazzled by the news of the way in which he
overran kingdoms and conquered vast territories of enormous wealth.
Pompeius seemed to them a general of the rank of Hannibal or
Alexander.
The Senate grew alarmed. They had not forgotten how Sulla had
returned from the East in 83 and set himself up as Dictator, master of
Rome. If Pompeius in 62 wanted to do the same there was nothing to
prevent him. He had a great army, devoted
to him and ready to follow him in any adventure. He was extremely
popular with the people of Rome. He had never shown any particular
respect for the laws and customs of the State when he wanted anything
for himself. He had broken the rules Sulla had laid down, by which no
one could hold high command until he had passed through all the lower
offices. Now, while still in Asia, he demanded to be allowed to stand as
consul, in his absence, although he had never been tribune or praetor.
The Senate put difficulties in his way. Indeed they did everything they
could to irritate Pompeius and give him the excuse for taking the strong
line they dreaded. Only Julius Caesar, the young and rapidly rising
leader of the Popular party, backed him. The Senate refused to allow
Pompeius to stand for the consulship. Nepos, his emissary, would
actually have been killed in the streets if Caesar had not saved him.
Caesar pleased him by proposing that he should finish rebuilding the
Capitol.
The Senate’s fears were groundless, as Caesar knew. Pompeius was not
like Sulla. Sulla always knew what he wanted. Pompeius had no clear aim.
Opportunities lay open before him which he did not desire or know how to
use. He wanted to be important, a big man of whom people spoke
well, to whom they looked up; but his timid mind shrank from
responsibility. He had never been fired by any great idea; he had no
purpose that he wanted to impress upon the world. He had not even got
that harsh and cold contempt for the mass of mankind that caused Sulla
to feel a sort of bitter pleasure in imposing his will upon them. Of
Caesar’s fire he had nothing. Politically he had never taken a firm
line. If no one in Rome quite knew where he stood, Pompeius was in the
same doubt himself. His was a respectable nature with a natural
inclination towards safety. But in the Rome of his day things were in a
state of uneasy movement; there was no safety or quiet for any one who
wanted at the same time to be a big figure. Pompeius was later forced to
take action. This action was weak and irresolute because his mind had
never been clear. Most people are like Pompeius: they do not know what
they want; or they want something
vague, like happiness or the good opinion of others; or they want a
number of things which cannot be had together. The mark of those men who
stand out in history is that they conceived clearly something they
wanted to have or do; and by force of will drove through to it. Even
when they failed, as Hannibal, for instance, failed, their failure has
in it something more magnificent than ordinary success. But this power
to will implies a readiness to make sacrifices. If you want one thing
you must be prepared to do without others. If you want to please
yourself you must be ready to displease other people. You cannot have
your own way and at the same time have the good opinion of everybody.
This Pompeius never saw.
A TRIUMPH
from a relief of the Empire
When he returned from his great campaigns in the East in the year 62
Pompeius landed at Brundisium and dismissed his soldiers to their homes.
The senators heaved a vast sigh of relief. He was not going to be
dangerous. When Pompeius arrived in Rome without his army he found that
nobody much wanted him. People were more interested in the struggles
that had been going on at home—Catiline’s conspiracy, Cicero’s
strong line in putting the conspirators to death, the question whether
Caesar had been implicated, the friendship between Caesar and
Crassus—than in what Pompeius had been doing in the East. Without
his army nobody was afraid of Pompeius. He found Lucullus, in the Senate
and political circles generally,
doing everything he could to thwart him, supported by Cato the Younger,
who thought that imperialism, Eastern conquests, and new wealth were bad
things, likely to ruin Rome. Pompeius celebrated a stupendous triumph
which made him the idol of the mob; but the Senate would not hear of his
being made consul or make grants of lands to his soldiers. The
Conservative party had thwarted Pompeius at every turn; he was deeply
hurt, and in his most sensitive part, his vanity. This hurt finally
drove him into an alliance with Caesar and Crassus, the leaders of the
Popular party, and his own most dangerous rivals. He disliked Crassus
and feared Caesar. At the moment his support was invaluable to the
Popular party; therefore Caesar set himself to overcome Pompeius’s
distrust of himself and Crassus’s deep detestation of Pompeius. He had
good arguments for each of them; and behind them a charm of manner that
few people could resist.
Three years after Pompeius returned from the East the three strongest
men in Rome were bound together. This first Triumvirate (60), as it was
afterwards called, was a private arrangement. People only learned of its
existence when they saw it at work. Pompeius married Caesar’s daughter,
Julia, who, so long as she lived, kept him friendly with her father.
Caesar was made consul and at once confirmed all that Pompeius had done
in the East and made grants of lands to his soldiers. A big
programme of land reform was passed through. The corn distribution was
reorganized. People who criticized the Triumvirate too openly, like
Cato, were banished. Cicero also was exiled, since Clodius had sworn
vengeance on him. Caesar would have saved him by taking him with him to
Gaul, as well as his brother Quintus, who was one of his adjutants; but
Cicero refused. Caesar went off to Gaul the year after his consulship
(58); Pompeius and Crassus were left masters in Rome.
There were at the time incessant disorders in the city. The strife of
parties waxed bitter and furious. Fights between different political
clubs were of nightly occurrence. The ingenious Clodius had reorganized
the old associations of the workers into guilds of a more or less
political kind, and thus built up a
machinery in every quarter of the city which he handled with great
adroitness at election times. Moreover, he organized something like a
voters’ army of slaves and freedmen, which turned out on his
instructions, and lived on the free corn given out by the State.
Pompeius did nothing to cope with this state of things. He fell, in
fact, into a strange condition of indolence, and took hardly any part in
public affairs. The news of Caesar’s victories in Gaul did not rouse
him, though Caesar’s popularity increased daily and his own
declined.
Pompeius’s sloth at this period is sometimes put down to his extreme
domestic happiness. Julia, his new wife, was but half his age, three and
twenty. She possessed a full measure of the irresistible charm of her
father; so long as she lived the bond between the Triumvirs was
unshakeable. But her husband’s apparent indifference to public affairs
was due, in the main, to another reason; the one which explains so much
in Pompeius’s action and inaction both at this time and later. He stood
aloof because he did not know what to do. The political tangle had
become a knot that must be cut. Pompeius was not the man to cut knots.
He let things slide.
A ROMAN VILLA ON THE COAST
Notice the roof garden
Disorder grew and nothing was done to stop it. The Senate, alarmed by
Caesar’s growing popularity—a fifteen days’ festival was held in
honour of his victories in Gaul—began to attack his new land and
other laws. Pompeius did not trouble to defend them. Cicero had come
back from banishment and made alarmist speeches declaring that Caesar
was aiming at bringing the Republic to an end. Pompeius and Crassus
quarrelled again. Yet when Caesar called his friends to meet him at
Lucca, where he had gone into winter quarters (56), hardly any one in
Rome refused to go. Pompeius, despite his growing
jealousy and uneasiness, was reconciled to Crassus and the Triumvirate
renewed. But as soon as he got back to Rome again, away from Caesar’s
charm, he fell back into his old moody indolence. In the course of the
next few years he became openly hostile to Caesar. Little heed was paid
in Rome to what he was doing in Gaul. The death and defeat of Crassus at
Carrhae (53), produced no deep stir. The disturbances in the city, which
had been occasional, grew constant. More interest was felt by the
ordinary citizen and even the ordinary senator in the brawls between
Clodius and Milo than in anything happening outside Rome.
The Government was quite helpless. Things were plainly going from bad
to worse. There was one strong man in the Roman world who might save the
State; but the price of his doing it was one that made the Conservatives
determined to have civil war rather. The clearer Caesar’s outstanding
position became the more resentful were Pompeius’s feelings against him.
Since his early youth he had been regarded by other people, and had come
to regard himself, as the great man. Now, however, when there was a real
opportunity for showing greatness he did not know how to do it; and saw,
too, another likely to carry off the prize.
Julia’s death, two years after the meeting at Lucca, removed the one
human being who might have prevented an open breach between Pompeius and
Caesar, and left Pompeius’s jealousy to rule unchecked in his mind.
Caesar, far from Rome, saw with clear eyes the meaning of what was
happening there; Pompeius, though on the spot, did not or would not
understand. He would never take action. For this very reason the
senators looked upon him as a safe man and gave him powers far greater
than any Caesar had or had ever asked for. He was made sole consul (52)
and head of a special court which was to try all cases of disorder.
Disorder had indeed been getting more and more serious; Clodius and Milo
were rival candidates for the consulship. There were open fights, day
and night, between their followers. At last Clodius was actually
murdered by Milo’s ruffians on the Appian Way.
Pompeius did nothing, though in Rome he was all-powerful. Crassus was
dead; Caesar far away in Gaul and hard pressed there. When Pompeius fell
ill about this time prayers for his recovery were put up all over Italy;
and when the news came that he was better great public services of
thanksgiving took place. But as Plutarch says, this demonstration proved
to be one of the causes of the civil war which followed. ‘For the joy
Pompeius conceived on this occasion, added to the high opinion he had of
his achievements, intoxicated him so far that, bidding adieu to the
caution and prudence which had put his good fortune and the glory of his
actions upon a sure footing, he gave in to the most extravagant
presumption and even contempt of Caesar; insomuch that he declared, “He
had not need of arms nor any extraordinary preparations against him,
since he could pull him down with much more ease than he had set him
up”.’ When people like Cicero expressed their fear that Caesar might
march upon Rome with his army he said, ‘In Italy, if I do but stamp upon
the ground an army will appear.’ Filled with such notions, he proceeded
recklessly to drive Caesar to desperation. He refused to disband his own
troops (two legions which he had lent to Caesar, and Caesar, on his
demand, had returned to him loaded with presents); instead of backing
Caesar’s candidature for the consulship for the year in which he was due
to return from Gaul he opposed him in every way. Finally, he made it
quite clear that if Caesar came to Rome without his army he would be in
serious danger; and at the same time insisted that he should
do so.
What this must lead to was plain enough to people in Rome. When they
heard that Caesar had crossed the Rubicon (49) at the head of his troops
(regardless of Sulla’s law) they fell into a panic. The Senate was
terrified of Caesar and not much less afraid of Pompeius. But disunited
as the Conservatives were among themselves, he was the only man who
could hold them together at all, and their only general. If Pompeius had
acted firmly at the crisis, whether with Caesar or against him, he might
have prevented the civil war. But at a time when every day was vital he
did nothing at all for several days,
remained in his own house without giving any lead or staying in any way
the gathering tumult and excitement. Refugees began to pour into Rome.
For some reason or other every one took it for granted that Caesar was
going to march on the city, though as a matter of fact he had made no
move. At last Pompeius declared that the country was in danger and that
every one should leave Rome. He himself left the city to muster the
great bodies of soldiers in Italy into an army. Very soon afterwards the
consuls fled, in such a hurry that they left the State treasures behind
them, and with most of the senators joined Pompeius at Brundisium,
whence they intended to sail for Greece.
Perhaps only a poet could interpret what was happening, in this time,
in the mind of Pompeius. Lucan thus describes it:
The Last Phase: the ‘Shadow of a Mighty Name’
You fear, Magnus, lest new exploits throw past triumphs into the shade,
and victory over the Pirates be eclipsed by the conquest of Gaul; your
rival is spurred on by the habit of continuous enterprise and a success
too proud to take the second place; for Caesar will no longer endure a
greater nor Pompeius an equal. Which of them appealed more righteously
to civil war, we are not permitted to know. Each has the support of a
mighty judge; the gods approved the cause of the conqueror, Cato of the
conquered. They were not, indeed, equally matched. Pompeius was of an
age already failing in decay, and during the long repose of peace and
civil life had forgotten the practice of command; eager to be on the
lips of all, lavish in his gifts to the mob, swayed by the breath of the
people’s will, and flattered by applause in the theatre that he built.
Careless, too, of gaining fresh stores of strength, and relying over
much on earlier success, he stands the shadow of a mighty name; like an
oak that, towering in some fertile field, bears spoils offered by the
people of old and votive gifts of their leaders; no longer cleaving to
the earth by stout roots, it is kept upright by its own mere weight, and
thrusting leafless branches through the air, gives no shade save from
the naked trunk. Yet, though it rocks and soon will fall before the
first blast from the east, though around it so many forest trees raise
their stems unshaken, it is worshipped alone.
Lucan, Pharsalia, i. 121-43.
First in leaving Rome and then in leaving Italy Pompeius made fatal
mistakes. Caesar was soon master of Italy, almost without bloodshed.
Within the year he had reduced Spain and Sicily, the Roman granaries,
after severe fighting; built a fleet and sailed for Greece. There he
tried to induce Pompeius to meet him and so come to a settlement.
Pompeius refused.
He believed that his army was stronger than Caesar’s. He and all his
friends were full of bitterness, and quite sure of victory. They had,
indeed, every advantage on their side, in numbers and supplies, and
could afford to wear Caesar down by a waiting policy. This was
Pompeius’s own plan, and it was sound. But he allowed himself to be
overruled largely because of the gibes of his followers. He moved from
Dyrrachium, where he had held a very strong position, to the plains of
the Enipeus river. At Pharsalia a great battle took place (48). Pompeius
was defeated. His defeat was largely his own fault. He had 43,000 men to
Caesar’s 21,000 and was especially strong in cavalry. By a skilful
stratagem Caesar defeated the cavalry; when Pompeius saw this he
believed the day was lost; left the field and hid himself in despair in
his tent. Deserted by their general his lines broke; the defeat became a
rout. His army was wiped out. Pompeius himself fled to Egypt with a
handful of attendants. There he was murdered by the Egyptians, under the
eyes of his wife and son.
Caesar, it is said, wept when Pompeius’s seal-ring was handed to him,
and he knew that his great rival had perished. He set the statue of
Pompeius up again in Rome; and might, thereby, have seemed to rebuke,
almost in the words Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Marullus, the
fickle people of Rome who so soon forgot him who was once their
idol.
A Broken Idol
Marullus. Wherefore rejoice? What conquest
brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome
To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb’d up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome:
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made a universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks,
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way,
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?
Be gone!
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, I. i.
Marcus Licinius Crassus
Of all the wealthy men in Rome,
whether like Lucullus or Sulla they had brought their riches back from
foreign conquests, or extracted it from the people of the overseas
provinces as governors, or made it in business, the wealthiest was
Marcus Licinius Crassus. His riches became a standard by which other
men’s were measured. Crassus belonged to an old but comparatively poor
family which suffered much in the wars of Marius and Sulla. He himself
as a very young man was, like Pompeius, one of Sulla’s lieutenants. Like
Pompeius again he had founded his fortune at the time of Sulla’s
proscriptions. But the extraordinary and constant increase in his wealth
was due to his own unresting energy and extreme ingenuity, helped by the
fact that he was not in the least scrupulous.
The houses in which the ordinary Roman lived were chiefly built of
wood: only very rich men had stone or marble houses at this time. The
streets were extremely narrow, and many of
them very steep and crooked, and the dwellings, whether single houses or
great tenements, were crowded closely together. As the buildings grew
old they were apt to fall down, especially the high flats, which became
top-heavy. Serious fires were also very common. Crassus observed this.
He therefore collected a great body of slaves, skilled as carpenters and
masons. He also equipped others as a fire brigade. When a fire broke out
anywhere he would make an offer to the owner to buy the house very
cheaply. Were his offer accepted he would put out the conflagration and
rebuild. Were it refused he would let it burn. At the same time he
bought up at cheap rates houses in bad repair and likely to collapse,
which he therefore got at low prices. In this way he became owner of a
great part of Rome, and, as more and more people were constantly
crowding into the city to live, and the supply of houses was less than
the demand for them, he could and did charge high rents. People who
refused to live in his houses could find nowhere else to go.
This was one of the means by which Crassus acquired his riches. But
he was incessantly alert and active to spy out opportunities in this
direction or in that for making money. His energy never relaxed: he was
always busy. He never fell into idle ways or the kind of stupid
amusement in which so many Romans, young and old, frittered away most of
their time. At a time when he owned half the houses in Rome, and so many
members of the Senate were in debt to him that they dared not vote
against his wishes, he built for himself only one house, and that of
moderate size. He enjoyed money-making as men enjoy any pursuit of which
they are master. After a time, however, he grew so rich that a new
ambition seized him. He began to thirst after direct political
power—not merely the indirect power which his money gave him.
Crassus was no fool. In financial affairs of all kinds he had courage,
resource, ingenuity, determination, and persistence, with that touch of
imagination which belongs to any kind of genius. It was not only by
accident that everything he touched turned to gold. But his imagination
was of a narrowly limited kind. He understood all the lower motives that
move men but none of the higher ones, for he understood
only what he found within himself, and within himself there was no room
for the power of any kind of idea.
With most Romans of his time religion had become a dead thing. They
kept the sacred images in their houses and performed all the official
and recognized ceremonies. But this was matter of custom and manners,
like the rules of dress. There was no reality or feeling in it. The
reality of Roman religion had been men’s devotion to their country and
the belief in the city as a great thing whose life went on after their
own ended. In its service they had been prepared to spend themselves,
for it to die. This kind of devotion had been profoundly shaken. The
average Roman of Crassus’s time believed in nothing but his own
pleasure, and in power and glory for himself.
In this Crassus was exactly like them. He was the richest man in
Rome, but riches after a time ceased to satisfy him. They did not give
him popularity. This it is true was partly his own fault, for Crassus,
like many very wealthy men, combined reckless occasional expenditure
with steady meanness. He gave the most gorgeous shows; but he hardly
ever let off a debtor. His hardness in collecting small sums was a
byword. He would spend thousands one day and haggle about a shilling the
next. Of course it was this careful looking after the pence that had
made and kept Crassus so rich; but it did not make him beloved. Nor,
though he was a very capable soldier, could he compete in this respect
with Pompeius, who always seemed to manage to get the showy things to do
while other people only got the hard work. When Crassus boasted of his
exploits in the campaign against Spartacus, people shrugged their
shoulders. Yet the Slave War had been a most serious danger, the more so
that it broke out at a moment when difficulties were dark on every
side.
More than once in the last few years Rome had suffered severely from
a shortage in the supply of wheat that meant actual famine for the
poorer people. In Italy the fields which used to grow corn had been
increasingly planted with vine and olive—more profitable crops.
The corn grown in the countryside was not much more than sufficient for
the needs of the people living there. Rome depended in the main on
supplies from across the seas.
Although the Sicilian towns were legally bound to send a certain
proportion of their crop to Rome they did not always do so, and the
Government was extremely slack in keeping them up to the mark.
A serious famine occurred in the year of Mithridates’ invasion of
Bithynia, which looked dangerous enough. At the same time came the news
that the commander who had been sent out against the pirates who were
devastating the Cilician coast had been seriously defeated by them and,
worst of all, that a great rising of the slaves had broken out
throughout Italy (73).
This Slave War proved more serious even than at first appeared. The
slaves had not merely risen in great bodies: they had found a leader who
proved a real military genius in Spartacus. Spartacus was a Thracian,
and like most of his fellow slaves had been a prisoner of war.
These slaves were not the ordinary household slaves, many of whom
were treated kindly enough, or those employed in crafts and industries.
They were for the most part men kept in compounds under training for the
games. All over Italy there were training schools, belonging to rich
men, where picked slaves, chosen among prisoners of war because they
were tall, strong, and handsome, were kept and taught to fight as
gladiators. The conditions of these schools were very bad and the
unfortunate men in them had nothing better before them than the chance
of death in the arena. The taste of the Roman people was growing brutal;
the part of the shows given them by successful generals or politicians
who wanted popularity that they liked the best were the gladiatorial
fights: fights between men armed in different ways that went on till one
or other of the combatants was killed. A favourite combat was that
between a man armed with a trident and another provided with a net.
Sometimes these fights took place between bodies of men. Like the
Spanish bull fights, these shows excited the people of Rome beyond
anything. Good swordsmen fetched high prices and won fame for their
owners.
These unhappy men were for the most part prisoners of war; many of
them had been chiefs and leaders in their own country,
and were men not only of strength and courage but of intelligence. In
the big training school at Capua there was such a man among the slaves:
Spartacus, a Thracian chief. His mind rebelled against the
hopelessness of his lot and he stirred up his fellows. Eighty of them
broke out from captivity and made their escape to the slopes of
Vesuvius. There they built a strong camp, and, as the news spread of
what they had done, slaves from all over Italy joined them: some
breaking out of the schools and prisons as they had done, others running
away from their masters and places of employment. A small force was
sent against them. They drove it back in disorder and captured its
weapons. This success encouraged further risings. Spartacus was soon at
the head of a considerable force. In the next year (72) he defeated a
consular army. His own numbers rose to over 40,000. The war was fought
with horrible cruelty and bitterness on both sides. Neither gave nor
expected any mercy. All captured slaves were put to death. Spartacus
compelled three hundred Roman prisoners to fight as gladiators at the
funeral games held for a fallen slave captain. Farms and country houses
were plundered and burned.
A THRACIAN GLADIATOR
The growing success of the slaves filled people with terror: they
dreaded a general massacre of the rich. Yet it seemed impossible to
crush them. Spartacus showed rare qualities as a general and organizer;
and after he had defeated both consuls, in the following year, and began
to move northwards, there was
something like a panic in Rome. No one was willing to undertake command
against him. At last Crassus came forward. Here, he thought, was his
chance to win glory equal to that which Pompeius was gaining in Spain.
His quick eye saw that the Roman armies were falling to pieces through
bad discipline: his first task was to restore the strictness of military
law.
In the beginning Spartacus seemed too strong and skilful for him, but
Crassus knew that in the end jealousies were sure to break out in his
ranks, since the slaves were men of different nationalities, only held
together by the will and skill of their commander. At last, after long
months in which success seemed hopeless, so hopeless that the Senate
recalled Pompeius from Spain to Crassus’s infinite rage, he compelled
Spartacus to fight a battle. He was killed and with him 12,000 of his
followers. They fought heroically, their wounds were all in front.
Pompeius as he crossed the Alps met only the bands of desperate
fugitives fleeing from the conqueror. He put them to the sword and
afterwards, to the disgust of Crassus, claimed a share in the victory.
‘Though Crassus’s men defeated the gladiators in battle, I plucked
the war up by the roots’, he told the Senate.
Next year (70) Crassus and Pompeius were elected consuls together.
This did not make them friends. Crassus disliked Pompeius and was
exceedingly jealous of his great position and influence. He did not see
why he should not be recognized as as big a man as Pompeius. Pompeius was cold, lazy,
self-satisfied; good fortune rained its golden shower upon him and he
stood and gathered it up in his hands. Crassus, tingling with energy,
alert in every nerve, was exasperated when he thought of Pompeius.
But he was intelligent enough soon to realize that he would not rise
to the position and power in the State he wanted by his own unaided
efforts. Nor had he to look far to find the person who could give him
what he had not himself got. Pompeius’s success filled him with anger
and bitter envy because he disliked Pompeius. His self-satisfied and
slow temper annoyed him. For the powers of Julius Caesar, on the other
hand, Crassus felt nothing but lively admiration, wonder, and even
devotion. He realized
his extraordinary qualities at a time when Caesar was unpopular and
unsuccessful. Moreover, he was conquered immediately by Caesar’s
personal charm, and never ceased to feel it. Caesar was loaded with
debt: his want of money was his main personal difficulty. His main
political difficulty was the fact that the Democratic or Popular party
had become stamped, at the time of Marius and Cinna, as the party of
revolution and disorder. To Caesar, therefore, Crassus was invaluable:
a firm bond was sealed between them.
Some years later Caesar actually succeeded in reconciling Crassus to
Pompeius by persuading them that as long as they levelled their
artillery against one another they raised people like Cicero and Cato
the Younger to importance. These men would be nothing and could do
nothing if Crassus, Pompeius, and himself were friends and acted
together. He soon proved to be right. The Triumvirate were irresistible.
First Caesar was consul (59): then, four years later (55), Crassus and
Pompeius.
Crassus’s thirst for glory made him eager to have, in the year after
his consulship, a great and important provincial command. To his
delight, while Pompeius took Spain and Caesar remained in Gaul, he was
given Syria. Although he was by now sixty the most fantastic visions of
triumph and conquest immediately floated before his eyes: he saw himself
performing feats in the East which should altogether outshine those of
Lucullus and Pompeius. There was no war going on in that part of the
world, but Crassus at once made up his mind that there should be war
since it was the straight path to honour and renown. He would attack
Parthia and conquer a new and rich country for Rome. This he planned
regardless of the fact that the Parthians were actually allies of Rome.
The ideas sown by Lucullus were bearing fruit.
Crassus was elderly. It was long since he had directed a campaign,
and campaigning in the East was new to him. Neither he nor his son
Publius, who after serving with Caesar in Gaul came with him as his
aide-de-camp, or any other member of his staff, knew anything of the
geography of Parthia. After gaining quick successes in Mesopotamia he
returned to Syria for the
winter instead of going forward and making, as he could have done,
allies in the cities of Babylon and Seleucia, cities always at enmity
with the Parthians. As it was, while he was busy inquiring into the
revenues of the cities of Syria and weighing the treasures in the
temples, the Parthians, warned of his intentions, were making
preparations against him. Accounts of the scale of these preparations
were brought in which alarmed the Roman soldiers. They had imagined that
the Parthians, a most warlike people, were tame folk such as
Lucullus had found the Armenians and Cappadocians. A series of
terrific thunderstorms seemed to them to herald disaster.
ORODES THE PARTHIAN
Crassus, however, paid no heed to the murmurs of his officers and
men. He had no lack of courage or energy, and did not at all realize his
danger. Moreover, he was deceived by spies into a false security. Thus
he marched too far into a country about which he knew nothing. Suddenly
his scouts brought in news that a great army was advancing. Very soon
the Romans were upon this army. They found that its advance guard was
composed of a kind of warrior never met by the Romans—bowmen on
horseback, and bowmen of most deadly skill, whose arrows could pierce a
steel cuirass, whose aim was sure and whose rapid movements made it
almost impossible to stay them. Indeed, within a very short space of
time the Roman army was hemmed in and surrounded. Crassus showed great
intrepidity, but his men could not withstand the superior numbers and
dreadful skill of the Parthians. With great difficulty he succeeded in
extricating
a portion of his men; but the day closed in defeat and the survivors
were in the darkest spirits.
Next morning the enemy advanced again with loud shouts and songs of
victory and a fearsome noise of drums. And in the front of their line
was a man carrying on a high spear the head of young Publius Crassus,
the son of the Roman commander. This sight sent a thrill of horror
through the army. Crassus alone showed greatness of mind. Plutarch gives
the following account of his behaviour:
Carrhae
Crassus was in this condition. He had ordered his son to charge the
Parthians, and as a messenger had come with the news that there was a
great rout, and that the enemy were being hotly pursued, and as, besides
this, he saw that the force opposed to him was not pressing so hard (for
in truth the larger part had moved off to meet Publius), he regained
courage somewhat, and, concentrating his force, posted it in a strong
position on some slopes, in the expectation that his son would soon come
back from the pursuit. It proved, however, that the first messengers
sent to him by Publius when he realized his danger had been intercepted
by the barbarians and slain, while others, getting through with
difficulty, reported that Publius was lost if he was not supported
strongly and at once. Then Crassus became the prey of contrary impulses
and no longer able to take a reasoned view of anything, being distracted
between the desire to help his son and the fear of risking the safety of
his force as a whole. At length he determined to advance.
Meantime the enemy were hurrying to the attack, more terrible than ever,
with yells and shouts of triumph, and the kettledrums thundered again
round the Roman ranks, as they stood expecting another battle to begin.
Some of the Parthians, who were carrying the head of Publius stuck on
the end of a spear, rode close up and displayed it, insolently asking
about his parents and family, for it was monstrous, they said, that a
noble youth of such brilliant courage should be the son of a coward like
Crassus. This sight, more than all else, crushed and broke the spirit of
the Romans, for they were not strengthened, as they should have been, by
a resolution to defend themselves, but were seized, one and all, with
fright and panic.
Yet it is said that Crassus never showed himself so great as in this
disaster. Passing along the ranks, he shouted, ‘This grief
touches me, and none besides, but by your success alone can the honour
and glory of Rome be preserved inviolate and unconquered. If you pity me
for the loss of a gallant son, prove it by your fury against the enemy.
Take from them their triumph, punish their ferocity, do not be cast down
by our loss. Great aims are never realized without some suffering.
Lucullus did not overthrow Tigranes without bloodshed, nor Scipio
Antiochus; our ancestors lost a thousand ships off the coast of Sicily,
and in Italy many dictators and generals; but never did these defeats
prevent them from crushing the conquerors. It is not by good luck, but
by endurance and courage in the face of peril, that Rome has risen to
its height of power.’
Plutarch, xxxix. 26.
Faulty generalship had brought the Roman army into a position whence
no courage could save it. In the second day’s battle a terrible defeat
was sustained: no less than thirty thousand Romans perished in the
disaster of Carrhae (53). Crassus himself was killed in a parley
afterwards.
It is said that a few days after the battle, before the news of it
had reached him, the Parthian king was witnessing a performance of the
Bacchae of Euripides in which there is a scene where one of the dancers
comes in bearing a bleeding head. The actor who took this part carried
the head of Crassus, which he cast, amid shouts of joy, at the king’s
feet.
Such was the tragic end of the millionaire Crassus. The news of his
death and defeat came to Rome but caused no excitement there. The city
was more interested in the street brawls of Clodius and Milo. The
politicians were watching the growing conflict between Caesar and
Pompeius. Crassus had dropped out of the Triumvirate. The stage was
cleared for the great duel.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Of none of the men of his own time
do we know so much as of Marcus Tullius Cicero. His contemporaries we
know from the accounts given and judgements passed by others: Cicero we
know from his own. He was the first speaker of his age, and
his speeches deal largely with the politics and people of his time, as
he defended or attacked the men and their acts. Cicero was anything but
impartial; yet it is from what he says that much of our picture of
Caesar and Crassus, Pompeius, Antonius, Catiline, Clodius, Cato, Brutus
and a host of others are drawn. In all the long gallery of portraits he
has painted none is so sharp and vivid as his own. It comes to us not
only through his speeches but through all his writings—and he
wrote admirably on many philosophical and semi-philosophical
subjects—and above all through his letters. These letters are
addressed for the most part to his intimate friend the banker Pomponius
Atticus, but also to others including most of the prominent men of his
time, and to his daughter Tullia, to whom he was devotedly attached.
They give a day-to-day picture of the life of Rome and also of the man
who wrote them. Cicero was immersed, like most men of his time, in
politics. He rose, to his own ineffable delight (a delight which he
expresses again and again with childlike complacency), to be consul. But
the explanation of a character that at times amused and at times
exasperated his contemporaries, and has caused the same mixture of
feelings to much later admirers, is that he was, in his essence, an
artist. He wanted, as do many artists, to be and do other things. He was
more vain of his dubious success in politics than of the splendour of
his oratory or the beauty of his writing. In action he was timid,
uncertain, and quite unable to cope with the great currents of his time,
snobbish and constantly mistaken in his judgements of people, and
alternately elated and despairing in his view of public events. When he
takes up his pen he is a master.
CICERO
Cicero was in some ways typical of the new men in Rome.
He was born at Arpinum, where his family belonged to the Italian middle
class. His parents were sufficiently well-to-do for the young man to
receive an excellent education, completed, like that of other well-bred
young men of the time, by attending lectures in Athens on literature and
philosophy. His father’s death brought him a fortune that though not
large was sufficient, together with a small estate at Arpinum and a
house in Rome.
But Cicero had no mind for a life of fashionable idleness. For a
middle-class provincial there was little chance in politics, so long as
Sulla’s laws stood. He therefore turned to the law courts. There he soon
made himself a great name, the more distinguished since he kept up the
old custom of refusing fees. A wealthy marriage increased his
consequence. His honesty and ability made him respected by all sorts of
people. Cicero used his gifts in the most honourable way by defending
the people of the provinces, who before his time had hardly ever got a
hearing, against the rapacity of some of the Roman tax collectors.
A case which made his name known throughout the Roman world was the
prosecution of Caius Verres which he undertook on behalf of the people
of Sicily. Verres, once an
officer in Marius’s army, was a man of notoriously bad character. Like
other praetors he looked on his governorship simply as an opportunity to
make money for himself and his friends; it was freely said, even in
Rome, that his misrule was ruining Sicily. And Sicily was one of the
chief granaries of Rome. The greatest excitement was aroused over the
case because the Democratic party took it up as a means of discrediting
the Government; and at the same time brought in a Bill for the reform of
the law courts by making the jurors not senators only, but, as before
Sulla’s time, men belonging to the Equestrian Order. This frightened the
Conservatives: they saw that much hung on the case of Verres. Quintus
Hortensius, the most famous advocate of his time, agreed to defend
him.
ARPINUM. Cicero’s birthplace
Cicero went to Sicily to collect evidence. He was quick to feel, in
all his sensitive nerves, the tense atmosphere of excitement gathering
round the case. It was to make or mar him. His genius rose delighted to
the great occasion. He understood, as the Conservatives did not, the
feelings that were dumbly stirring the mind of the ordinary decent
Roman, and could give them voice. As the evidence he had collected was
unrolled the story of the greed of Verres and the suffering of the
people of Sicily was laid bare step by step. Excitement and anger
against the class in power who did and defended such things grew and
grew. Each day an enormous crowd thronged the Forum and at times its
feelings made it positively dangerous. One witness told how a Roman
citizen had been crucified: his appeal, ‘Civis Romanus sum—I am a
Roman citizen’, had fallen on deaf ears. At this the hearers were
stirred to such rage that Verres was only saved from being torn to
pieces by the adjournment of the hearing. After fourteen days the
defendants realized that their case was lost; no judge dared acquit
Verres. He fled the city and was never heard of again. Cicero was the
hero of the hour.
The man who appears and feels himself a hero when addressing a great
crowd, who can work their feelings and his own into tempestuous
enthusiasm, is often a weak reed, swayed by every impulse and incapable
of the long slow effort required to carry
a purpose into action. This was the case with Cicero. When speaking he
was carried away by his own passion. Then he appeared to know exactly
what he thought. Alone, however, he was moody, a prey to fearful
doubt and depression, one day full of enthusiasm, the next despairing.
He was at once vain and timid; uncertain of himself and turned this way
and that by the praise or blame of others. His great desire was to be
admired by every one. His comparatively humble origin made him feel any
attention from the nobles far more flattering than it was.
In a good sense as well as in a bad he was a Conservative. His study
of history made him feel full of respect for any institution that had
lasted a long time, and for men belonging to ancient families. He felt
this even at a time when his writings and speeches were making him known
throughout Italy and admired by men whose praise was worth having. The
rich men and many of the aristocrats were far inferior to Cicero in
brains and character; yet he longed and strove to get into ‘society’.
Society at the time was extravagant, frivolous, vicious, and
hard-hearted. Cicero was modest and frugal in his personal habits,
serious in the bent of his mind, a man of high moral principle and
tender domestic affections. Yet nothing pleased him more than an
invitation to one of the houses of the smart set; nothing vexed him more
than to be thought old-fashioned or middle-class in his ideas.
All these feelings made him regard his own election to the
consulship, and the support he received as candidate from the noble
Conservatives, as the most wonderful affair. Yet the real reason why the
Conservatives supported him was not that they loved Cicero but that they
loathed Catiline, the third strong candidate, and were prepared to go to
great lengths to keep him out. Antonius, who was elected as Cicero’s
colleague, though a friend of Crassus, was considered to be
harmless.
This consulship was the turning point in Cicero’s life. He had always
wanted to stand well with all parties. Now he was compelled to take his
place definitely on the Conservative side. More than that, it finally
caused him to lose his sense of balance
altogether and to think of himself as a statesman: a part for which
he was ill fitted. He was so much impressed with his own importance that
he bought a vast house on the Palatine. To do so he had to borrow money
and thus got into debt. Before he had been free, after his consulship he
became entangled and embarrassed.
This was the case with many of the leading politicians and men of all
parties, and hampered their actions in countless ways. In order to win
popular favour they spent huge sums on shows and gave feasts and
presents to the populace. They lived altogether in a way expensive and
showy beyond their means. To do this they had to borrow money at
exorbitant terms, and were thus helplessly in the power of the rich men
who lent to them. Caesar at this time was fearfully in debt and
constantly in difficulties on this account. So were innumerable
fashionable young aristocrats. The Roman laws of debt were still
extremely harsh and all acted against the unfortunate debtor. Prices
were steadily rising: the vast wealth of the few made the lot of the
many increasingly hard. While Lucullus was in the East there had been a
serious financial crisis in Rome, and the effects of this lasted for a
long time.
As a consequence of this state of things a vast number of people of
all classes were stirred to wild excitement and enthusiasm when
Catiline, who was determined to be consul and by no means inclined to
sit down under one rebuff, set out a programme of which the chief item
was a wiping off of a large part of all outstanding debts. The poorer
people were on his side in this almost to a man. So were a great many
needy aristocrats, especially among the younger men. The rich, on the
other hand, especially the class of Knights, to which most of the big
financiers and trading houses belonged, were furious. They were ready to
throw all their influence and the great power of the purse on to the
side of the Conservatives, who cried that Catiline’s programme meant
revolution. On both sides the wildest excitement and the most extreme
bitterness of feeling was stirred up.
Catiline was a man of low character, and of very bad record,
quite reckless. But he was by no means without ability. There was
something to be said for his programme if nothing for the man who
proposed it. Certainly the law of debt needed to be reformed. The rich
did not argue against it: they fell into a panic. They saw that popular
feeling and popular votes would be on Catiline’s side. But they had
money and could bribe. They did bribe so effectively that when it came
to the election he was beaten again.
The alarm of the propertied classes did not, however, die down, or
the excitement of the disappointed. People had talked of revolution and
civil war so loud and long during the elections that they began to
believe in it. Cicero had been going about for days with a cuirass under
his toga. He really believed that grave plots were on foot. He spent his
time listening to spies and informers. One day he came down to the
Senate with a very long face declaring that he ‘knew all’. He produced
no proofs, but most people were too much excited to ask for proofs. The
word plot was enough. A state of siege was proclaimed in the
city.
Soon afterwards news came that a follower of Catiline had actually
got some soldiers together in Etruria. Catiline, however, was still in
Rome. He attended a meeting of the Senate. On his bench he sat alone,
shunned by all the other senators, who applauded loudly while Cicero
thundered against him. At last Catiline, unable to bear it any longer,
got up, marched out of the Senate House, and left Rome. Cicero did not
dare to have him arrested. There were as yet no solid proofs against
him. A few days later proofs came. Catiline’s supporters in Rome
lost their heads without him. They were foolish enough to ask some
ambassadors of the Allobroges—a tribe of Gauls, then in the city
with a petition to the Senate—whether their people would send
soldiers to assist a rising.
Cicero now seemed to have the Catilinarians in his hand. They were
ready, some of them, to bring the Gauls into Italy! That was enough.
There was a wild outburst of feeling. All sorts of prominent people,
including Caesar, were said to be implicated. Catiline had escaped, but
all his close associates
were arrested and brought up for trial by the Senate. Cicero hurried on
the proceedings. He was terrified by the wild passion that swept all
classes, the senators no less than the howling mobs outside. After two
days’ debate the question of what should be done to the conspirators was
put to the vote. The first senator voted for death. All the others who
followed voted for death until it came to Caesar. Caesar knew of the
rumours going about and the risk of his own position as leader of the
party to which Catiline had belonged. Nevertheless with great courage he
voted against the death penalty. Every Roman citizen, he urged, had the
right to appeal to his fellows. To put men to death without trial was
illegal. Cato, however, made a powerful plea on the other side. Death
was decreed. As Caesar left the Senate House a group of knights
threatened him with swords.
Next day Cicero, accompanied by a solemn procession of senators, saw
the executions carried out. Caesar was not in the procession.
A huge crowd escorted Cicero back to his home. They declared, and
he proudly believed, that he had saved the country. Plutarch thus
describes
Cicero’s Day of Triumph
Cicero passed through the Forum and, reaching the prison, handed over
Lentulus to the officer with orders to put him to death; then he brought
down Cethegus and the rest separately for execution. And when he saw
many of the conspirators still standing together in the Forum, ignorant
of what had happened and waiting for darkness in the belief that the men
were alive and could be rescued, he cried to them with a loud voice,
‘They lived,’ Thus Romans signify death if they wish to avoid words of
ill omen.
Evening had already come when he returned through the Forum to his house
on the Palatine, no longer attended by the citizens with silence or even
with restraint, but received everywhere with shouts and clapping of
hands, and saluted as saviour and founder of his country. The streets
were bright with the gleam of all the torches and links that were placed
at the doors, and the women displayed lights from the roofs that they
might see the hero and do him honour, as he made his stately progress
escorted by the noblest in Rome; most of whom had conducted great wars
and entered the city in triumphal processions and added whole tracts of
sea and land to the empire, and who now agreed as they marched along
that the Roman people was indebted to many leaders and generals of
their day for wealth and spoil and power, but to Cicero alone for safety
and life, because he had freed it from so vast and terrible a danger.
For it was not thought so wonderful that he had crushed the conspiracy
and punished the conspirators, but that he had quenched the most serious
insurrection ever known with very little suffering, and without domestic
strife and disturbance.
Plutarch, lvii. 22. §§ 2-5.
The circumstances of Cicero’s exile and return are described by
Plutarch in passages that give a lively picture of the life of the
time:
Cicero, convinced that he must go into exile or leave the question to be
decided by armed conflict with Clodius, determined to ask Pompeius for
help; but he had purposely gone away and was now staying at his villa in
the Alban hills. Accordingly, Cicero first sent Piso, his son-in-law, to
make an appeal, and afterwards went himself. When Pompeius knew that he
had come, he did not wait to see him (for he was terribly ashamed to
face the man who had engaged in hard struggles on his behalf and often
shaped his policy to please him), but at the request of Caesar, whose
daughter he had married, he was false to those obsolete services, and,
slipping out by a back door, managed to evade the interview.
Thus betrayed by Pompeius and left without support, Cicero put himself
in the hands of the consuls. Gabinius was harsh and unrelenting, but
Piso spoke more gently to him, bidding him withdraw and let Clodius have
his day, endure the changed times, and become once more the saviour of
his country, which his enemy had filled with strife and suffering. After
this answer Cicero consulted his friends, and Lucullus urged him to
remain in the assurance that he would prevail, but others advised him to
go into exile; for the people would feel his loss when it had enough of
the mad recklessness of Clodius. He accepted this council, and taking to
the Capitol the image of Minerva, a prized possession which had
long stood in his house, he dedicated it with the inscription, ‘To
Minerva, guardian of Rome,’ Then, having got an escort from his friends,
he left the city secretly at
night, and journeyed by land through Lucania, wishing to reach
Sicily.
31. §§ 2-5.
As a matter of fact the immediate danger from Catiline had been
exaggerated. People came to see this in a very few months. Catiline
raised a few hundred men and was killed fighting. The real danger lay
not in him but in the economic and political condition of Rome and
Italy. Its causes were the mismanagement, corruption, and feebleness of
the Government; the flaunting vulgarity and profiteering of the rich;
the misery of the poor. Cicero had done nothing to meet these evils: he
had no plan for doing so; he hardly realized that they were there. Men
had called him ‘Father of his country’. That great day was ever in his
mind. As he thought of it his vanity swelled and swelled until the year
of his consulship seemed to him the greatest in the annals of Rome. He
bored every one by talking incessantly of it on all occasions. He
dreamed of this and saw nothing of the dark tides rising round. He
watched helplessly the growing power of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar,
and did not understand what Rome was coming to. Caesar was always
friendly and gracious to him, for he had a mind which could appreciate
Cicero’s genius as a writer: but Cicero distrusted Caesar.
He had meantime made a deadly enemy of Clodius who, by playing on
disorder, was making himself more and more dangerous in Rome. Clodius
was charged with sacrilege. He defended himself by saying that on the
day on which he was said to have been present, in female clothes, at the
Women’s Festival being celebrated in the house of Caesar’s wife, he was
in fact not in the city. Cicero swore that he had seen him. Thanks to
bribery Clodius was acquitted. He never forgave Cicero. Soon after this,
in the first year of the Triumvirate (59), he secured his banishment
from the city for a year.
Cicero, after a visit to Greece, retired to his villa at Tusculum. He
would have been wiser had he settled down there and devoted himself to
the writing of which he was a consummate master. But after sixteen
months in the country he returned to Rome.
The Return
It is said that the people never passed a measure with such unanimity,
and the Senate rivalled it by proposing a vote of thanks to those cities
that had given help to Cicero in exile, and by restoring at the public
expense his house, with the villa and buildings, which Clodius had
destroyed. Thus Cicero returned in the sixteenth month after his
banishment, and so great was the rejoicing in cities and the general
enthusiasm in greeting him that he fell short of the truth when he
declared afterwards that he was brought to Rome on the shoulders of
Italy. Crassus, too, who had been his enemy before his exile, was glad
to meet him and make proposals for reconciliation, saying that he did it
to please his son Publius, who was an admirer of Cicero.
33. §§ 4-5.
When Clodius was murdered in the streets by Milo, Cicero undertook
the latter’s defence in a very famous speech, which we still possess.
Milo, however, was condemned. In the province of Cilicia to which he was
soon afterwards appointed governor, Cicero showed himself an honest and
upright administrator. When he returned to Rome, however, his conduct
showed a helpless weakness. Between Pompeius and Caesar he for long did
not know how to choose. Both seemed to him in a measure wrong. In his
own letters he said to one of his friends at this time, ‘Whither shall I
turn? Pompeius has the more honourable cause, but Caesar manages his
affairs with the greatest address and is most able to save himself and
his friends. In short, I know whom to avoid but not whom to seek.’
In the end, since he thought that Caesar failed, when he entered Rome,
to treat him with proper distinction and courtesy, he joined Pompeius at
Dyrrachium.
There, however, he made himself very unpopular by criticism of
everything done or left undone. He took no part in the battle of
Pharsalia, being in poor health: after it, instead of joining Cato, who
was carrying on the war in Africa, he sailed to Brundisium. When Caesar
returned from Egypt he set out to join him. Caesar hailed him with the
greatest kindness and respect. Cicero, however, soon withdrew to
Tusculum, where he busied himself with writing. His private affairs
vexed him, however.
He divorced his wife Terentia and married a rich young woman whose
fortune paid off some of his debts. But his days were clouded by a heavy
grief: his beloved daughter Tullia died.
After Caesar’s *** Octavius treated him graciously. Marcus
Antonius, however, who divided the power of the State with Octavius, was
detested by Cicero, who did all in his power to increase the growing
dissensions between the two. Against Antonius he wrote a series of most
envenomed speeches which he called Philippics in imitation of those of
Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon. In this, however, he paved the
way to his own doom. Antonius and Octavius patched up their quarrels,
formed the Second Triumvirate with Lepidus, and carried through a
terrible proscription. Cicero’s was one of the names on Antonius’s list,
placed there mainly by the wish of his wife Fulvia, who hated the man
who had spoken evil of her husband. Cicero was killed in his own villa
at the age of sixty-four, and his head set up in Rome above the rostrum
from which he had so often delivered passionate speeches.
Caius Julius Caesar
So long as the world lasts men will
discuss, without settling, the question, What constitutes greatness?
Some people will give one answer, some another. There are those who hold
that no man ought properly to be called great who is not also good. Thus
a French historian said that Napoleon was as great as a man could be
without virtue. Even here, however, there is room for difference and
discussion. What is meant by virtue? Is the good man he who does good,
who makes people better and happier, or the man who is good in himself,
who tries always to put the welfare of others before his own, whether he
succeeds or not? If the first be true, poets, painters, and sculptors
must rank highest in the order of goodness as of greatness. If the
second, most of the really good are forgotten, since they tried and
failed. Is success the test? It is the only test that history accepts.
The men who appear to us as great in the story of the
past are those who made some mark, whether for good or evil, on their
time. The others are forgotten. What we know of most of the men, great
or small, of the past, is not what they were, but what they did. We know
what they did. We can only guess why they did it. Often, too, it happens
that good men—men kindly, affectionate, and unselfish—do
harm to others without knowing it: bad men do good.
JULIUS CAESAR
The Brit. Mus.
gem
All these puzzling questions, and many more, are set to us by the
character of Caius Julius Caesar. He puzzled the men who lived in his
own time, and has gone on puzzling historians ever since. Brutus, who
loved him, finally killed him because he thought he was doing more harm
than good. Marcus Antonius, who also loved him, thought him, to the end,
the noblest man that ever lived. One great historian regards him as one
of the few really wise and far-seeing statesmen in the world’s story;
a man who with extraordinary genius saw what the world needed and
with extraordinary will carried it out. Another sees him as no more than
a clever, selfish, and ambitious time-server: a man without fixed
ideas or principles, whose sole object was power. Both admit his genius:
but where one sees it directed steadily to great ends, the other sees
nothing fixed in his character but the determination to succeed.
Caesar’s speeches (and he was a great speaker) are lost. We have two
volumes of his writings: his account of the conquest and settlement of
Gaul, and his account of the Civil War. These two volumes of
Commentaries are so admirably written, in so pure and firm and
lucid a style, with such mastery of narrative and of order, that their
author would stand high among Roman writers
had he been distinguished in no other way. Only a remarkable man could
have written an account of his own doings in just this style. For there
is no word of comment: the whole thing is, as Caesar himself says, bare,
simple, and plain, with every kind of ornament cast aside. The language
is simple, exact, concise. Every word tells. There is never a word too
much. The dryness with which amazing feats of generalship, of endurance,
of courage, are set down only makes them, in the end, more impressive.
No mere talker, no one shifted this way and that by chance and by the
opinion of others, could have written these books. They are the record
of one who could both see and act.
In so far as we can judge a man from his face, the busts tell the
same story. They show us Caesar in middle age, when firmly set to
serious purposes, the idle impulses of youth left behind. The power to
think, the power to act—these are the characteristics of the
familiar bust. Yet Caesar, if we can believe the stories of him,
retained to beyond middle life a rare personal charm, and always had
much of the quick, passionate responsiveness of the artist. There was
room in his mind for all sorts of things beside the business of making
men do what he wanted. Whether the almost tragic nobility of the
sculptured face, which is in this respect like that of Napoleon, means
that Caesar was led on by something higher than personal ambition, the
desire to engrave his own will upon the stuff of life, it is impossible
to say. He made history; he was, in that sense, a man of destiny,
but did he know what he was doing? did he care for a good beyond his
own?
JULIUS CAESAR
The Brit. Mus. bust
The first incident we know of Caesar is highly characteristic.
Pompeius at the time of the proscriptions had put away his wife at
Sulla’s behest. Caesar, a little younger, like him a rising young
soldier, was descended from one of the most illustrious of patrician
families. But his uncle had married Marius’s sister. Not only was he the
nephew of Marius; he was allied to the beaten party in the Revolution by
his marriage to Cornelia the daughter of Cinna. Sulla commanded him to
divorce her. Caesar refused. He loved his wife dearly. Neither then
(he was hardly out of his teens) nor at any other time was he ready
to take orders from other men. Therefore his property and the dowry of
his young wife were confiscated. His own life was in danger and he had
to leave Rome. But his will did not bend. Sulla realized something of
the stuff of which, youthful and unknown as he was, Caesar was made. ‘In
that young man’, he said, ‘there are many Mariuses.’
At the time, and for long after, however, no sign of this was
perceived by most people. At an age when Pompeius, the darling of
fortune, had celebrated a triumph and was, despite his youth,
a leading man in Rome, looked up to by every one, rather feared by
the Senate, wealthy, prosperous, and important, Caesar was poor and
quite unknown, attached by his relationship to Marius and Cinna to a
defeated faction and a broken and discredited party. Yet Sulla was
right. Caesar had a genius, a patience, and a power of will such as
Marius never possessed. Of his military talents no one, not even Caesar
himself, had any suspicion till long after. His rise was slow and
difficult. Until his alliance with Crassus he was perpetually hampered
by poverty and debts, both in fact and in the opinion of Rome.
When he escaped from Rome (81) Caesar went abroad first to the Greek
islands, where he served his first campaign, and afterward to Bithynia;
he also raised an expeditionary force against the Rhodian pirates. After
Sulla’s death he returned to Rome. His eloquence soon won him a position
in the Popular party. No one, however, regarded him as a serious rival
to Pompeius, who was at this time regarded as inclining more or less to
the Popular side. The enormous debts which were to be such a burden to
Caesar were mainly contracted while Pompeius was
in the East. He carried through magnificent building schemes, and gave
superb games to the people—such being the road to popularity.
Wider plans were forming in his mind, however: plans on the lines of
Gracchus.
The great difficulty in Caesar’s way, over and above his own debts,
was the character of the Popular party. It stood, to the majority of
Conservatives and men of wealth and standing, for nothing but disorder
and insecurity, with revolution in the background. These Conservatives
did not see that they were helping to bring about all the things they
dreaded by their opposition to change and their effort to keep all power
in the hands of their own order, and their fear, distrust, and jealousy
of any man of real ability. They drove young able men into the Popular
party; and the Popular party to them was always the party of Marius and
Cinna. There were in fact too many men in it of low character and
reckless ways of life; men like Catiline and his friend Cethegus, like
Clodius and Milo. The more clearly Caesar was marked out as the leader
of this party the more did the Conservatives dread and hate him. Not
without reason did he often think his very life was in danger. It was
always possible that riots might break out. If they did the Popular
party would be held responsible, and he would suffer for them all. His
debts increased this danger. They made him at once reckless and
powerless.
Yet Caesar’s popularity in Rome was real. At the time when his
difficulties were thickest upon him he stood for election, against some
of the most honoured and important senators, as Pontifex Maximus, the
chief of the State religion. He was under forty; it was a post generally
held by an old man; his religious views were known to be extremely
‘advanced’. Moreover, many people whispered that he had been privy to
Catiline’s conspiracy, since Catiline was a member of his party. One of
the other candidates offered to pay his debts if he would retire. To
retire was not Caesar’s way; he regarded the proposal as an insult. As
he left home on the day of election he told his mother, to whom he was
devoted, that he would return Pontifex or an exile. He was elected.
The same immovable courage was shown by Caesar at the time of the
Catilinarian conspiracy. The whole machinery of the trial of the
conspirators was contrary to the law; the Senate was not a proper Court
which could condemn men to death. Caesar knew that he was suspected by
many of being involved in the conspiracy and that many would be only too
delighted if they could see him in the dock for any reason. Yet he was
the one man who dared to point out the illegality and injustice of what
was being done and to vote against the death sentence. Caesar’s life was
threatened at the time; but afterwards when the excitement died down and
people could consider the affair more calmly they saw that he had been
right; that he had kept his sense of justice when panic had made the
other senators lose theirs altogether.
Caesar was soon after this made governor of Spain (61-60). But his
creditors were so pressing that he would have actually been unable to
start had he not come to an understanding with Crassus. Crassus settled
the most urgent of his debts and he set out. Two stories are told of him
at this time which show a good deal of his mind. In crossing the Alps he
came upon a town so small that one of his friends remarked to him that
in a place so tiny there could be none of the struggle for place and
power such as there were in Rome, nothing worth having or being. Caesar,
however, said, ‘I assure you I had rather be the first man here
than the second man in Rome.’ When in Spain he spent his leisure in
reading. Among other books he studied the Life of Alexander the Great.
The followers of Pompeius who had just come back from the East were
freely comparing him to Alexander. Caesar was so much moved by what he
read that he sat thoughtful for a long time and at last, to the surprise
of his companions, burst into tears. They could not understand the
reason till he said, ‘Do you not think I have sufficient cause for
concern, when Alexander at my age ruled over so many conquered countries
and I have not one glorious achievement to boast?’
In his government of Spain Caesar showed firmness, energy, and
wisdom. He carried out successful expeditions to distant
parts of the peninsula and brought the whole country into such good
order that he enriched it as well as the Roman State, himself, and his
own soldiers. And all the time that he was in Spain his mind was at
work. From a distance he saw the meaning of events in Rome with
clearness and formed his own plans.
As soon as he returned he set to work to bring about that
understanding between himself, Crassus, and Pompeius that was known
afterwards (at the time it was a private bond) as the First
Triumvirate (60). To bring this about was by no means easy. Pompeius was
jealous and apt to ride the high horse. Crassus, though attached to
Caesar, hated Pompeius. But Caesar persuaded them both. The world might
see how things stood when he walked between them to the place of
election for the consulship.
During his consulship (59) Caesar, despite the feeble opposition of
his colleague, carried through a big programme of reforms. In addition
he got a decree passed making him governor and military commander of
Gaul for five years. In Transalpine Gaul very dangerous movements were
said to be going on among the tribes. The Senate was not sorry to think
of getting Caesar out of the way and into a dangerous place: he himself
desired to win a glory equal to that of Pompeius and the command of an
army devoted to himself. In Gaul he meant to find both. And he did.
Plutarch, who wrote the lives of many distinguished Romans, was no
lover of Caesar. Pompeius is his hero. Yet Plutarch says that Caesar’s
campaigns in Gaul (58-51) show him ‘not in the least inferior to the
greatest and most admired commanders the world ever produced’. ‘In
Gaul’, he says, ‘we begin a new life, as it were, and have to follow him
in quite another track.’ In the nine years he spent there Caesar showed
astonishing genius as a soldier and won the utter devotion of his men.
But what he did in the field is surpassed by the statesmanship shown in
his settlement of the country and plan for its government.
In Gaul Caesar’s great ideas found scope; but they were not born in
Gaul. If Caesar at work in Gaul appears to be a different man from
Caesar playing at politics in Rome, the reason is not
that he suddenly changed but that the picture of him in Rome is based on
the accounts given by his enemies, by men who feared and disliked
without understanding him. They have drawn a picture of a wild,
extravagant, and dissipated young man. Caesar was that, but behind it
there was a mind more powerful, a personality more strong, than in
any of his contemporaries: that mind and personality which old Sulla had
perceived. When in Rome Caesar worked incessantly even while he
pretended to idle. He was one of the busiest men in the city, though
some of his busy-ness was of a foolish kind. In Gaul his immense
energies were turned to constructive work. His health, which had been
fragile—he suffered from epilepsy or what was called ‘the falling
sickness’ and from violent headaches—and never became
extraordinarily robust, was strengthened by the hardships of a military
life, by long marches, exposure, and spartan food. And his energy,
always extraordinary, seemed to grow by what it fed on. He never rested.
When on horseback on the march he kept secretaries by him to write, at
his dictation, letters, orders, memoranda, draft laws, and his own
history. He reduced his hours of sleep to the fewest and at all times
shared, like Hannibal, every hardship of his men. They adored him, not
only because of this and because he never forgot that they were men like
himself, but because of something magnetic in his personality, that
charm which is the hardest thing in the world to describe or define.
Caesar made his men believe in him: trust him when he asked them to do
things that appeared impossible: face the most terrific odds and the
severest trials in perfect belief in him. They believed, as he did, in
his star. But their devotion was not only due to his genius. It was
given to him, as a man, because of his charm.
For nine years Caesar was in Gaul. For nine years Rome saw nothing of
him, though he spent winters at Ravenna and Lucca, and all the time
never lost touch with what was going on in the capital, or hold over men
there. He had left one or two faithful friends, among them Marcus
Antonius and Curio, to look after his interests. But his whole mind and
energy were devoted to his work in Gaul. It was a great work. Caesar not
only fought
battles and conquered territories, as Pompeius and Lucullus had done in
the East. He did what they had never even tried to do: he romanized the
country. Understanding, with rare quickness and sympathy, the nature of
the people with whom he had to deal, he did not try to alter their
deep-rooted habits. But he started the work, completed under the Empire,
of spreading Roman law and order, coins and ways of trading, in a word
Roman civilization, over Central Europe. Caesar’s mark remained upon it
all. There were disturbances in various parts of the country after he
left it. What the Romans called Gaul was a vast region inhabited by
numerous tribes who hated and warred against one another, and had not
learnt how to live in peace side by side. When Caesar took up his
command, the wild hordes of the north were ready to swoop down upon Rome
as they had done in the time of Brennus and again later when Marius
defeated them at Vercellae and the Raudine Fields. As the result of
Caesar’s work they were held back for more than four hundred years. And
since Caesar was a statesman as well as a soldier his work was never
wholly undone: the stamp of his genius and of Rome was set once and for
all on North-western Europe.
As a soldier Caesar ranks among the greatest in the world. When he
first went to Gaul his army was small—but four legions in all. The
rest of his army he created, enlisting and training it on the spot. With
his small forces he had to meet not Orientals, driven into battle by
fear, but sturdy and fiercely warlike men with whom fighting was a
natural passion. Among the Gaulish chieftains too there were leaders of
great military gifts—Ariovistus, the chief of the Teutons, and
Vercingetorix of the Arverni.
Some idea of the means by which Caesar stirred and inspired his men,
and checked the danger of insubordination in his own ranks, which rose
at times
when they were called upon to fight forces far greater in numbers, is
given by a passage in his own story. It begins with a speech he made to
his men.
How Caesar dealt with threats of insubordination provoked by fear of
meeting the Germans
SUBMISSION OF TRIBES
from a relief of the Empire
‘If any of you are alarmed by the defeat and flight of the Gauls, you
will find on inquiry that they were tired out by the length of the war,
and that Ariovistus, who for many months had been encamped behind the
shelter of the swamps and made it impossible to engage him, suddenly
fell on them when they were scattered without any thought of fighting,
and conquered them rather by stratagem than by valour. Such a policy
might well succeed against untrained barbarians, but even Ariovistus
does not expect that Roman armies can be ensnared by it. Again, if any
disguise their fears by a pretended anxiety about supplies or by
imaginary difficulties in the route, they are acting presumptuously;
for, as it seems, either they are hopeless about the commander’s
performance of his duty or they are dictating to him what that duty is.
These matters are for my decision; corn is being supplied by the
Sequani, Leuci and Lingones, and the crops are already ripe. As for the
difficulties of the route, you will soon have an opportunity of judging
them. When I am told that the soldiers will disobey me and refuse to
march, I am not at all troubled, for I know that, if an army has
been disobedient, either its commander has been defeated through
incompetence or some overt act has convicted him of extortion; but the
whole course of my life bears witness to my integrity, and my success is
proved by my campaign against the Helvetii. Accordingly I shall do at
once what I had intended to do later and shall march to-night at the
fourth watch, so that I may know without
delay whether your fears are stronger than the claims of honour and
duty. If no one else follows me, I shall start with the tenth
legion, whose devotion is beyond question, and I intend to make it my
bodyguard.’ Caesar had shown special favour to this legion and had an
absolute trust in its valour.
This speech made an extraordinary impression upon all and inspired very
great enthusiasm and eagerness to advance. The tenth legion set the
example, thanking Caesar through its tribunes for his generous
confidence, and declaring that it was ready in every way to fight. Then
the rest of the legions commissioned their tribunes and chief centurions
to apologize to Caesar; they had never hesitated or feared, and had
never thought that they should meddle with their commander in the
control of operations. Caesar accepted their apology and started at the
fourth watch, as he had warned them.
Caesar, De Bello Gallico, i. 40. 8-41. 4.
A ROMAN LEGIONARY HELMET
found in Britain
There was a moment when it looked as though all Caesar’s work was to
be swept away. He spent part of the year 54 in Britain. While he was
away plans for a great rising were conceived. Soon after he returned all
Gaul rose in a blaze. The first rising was put down. In 52 another and
more serious movement took place with Vercingetorix at its head. The
danger was greater than ever. It was the more serious that Caesar knew
that in Rome his enemies were working against him. So great was
it indeed that Caesar’s officers were in despair and begged him to
retreat to some safe spot until reinforcements could be sent. But to
wait for reinforcements would make things worse instead of better. The
rebellion would gather force. It was by no means certain that Pompeius,
now hand in glove with the Conservatives, would send him more troops.
Pompeius would be glad to see his rival fail. Caesar was not going to
give him that pleasure. And retreat in face of danger was never Caesar’s
way. Always he went to meet it. So now. He delivered a blow at the very
heart of the enemy’s position. Caesar’s capture of Alesia, the
stronghold of Vercingetorix, and his defeat of the second great Gallic
army that closed him in while he was blockading the town are among the
great feats in the history of war. The odds were heavy against him. His
army was in a position from which no luck, only the most brilliant
generalship, could save it. Caesar not only saved it: he absolutely
crushed the foe. Vercingetorix surrendered. The rebellion collapsed. By
the end of the next year Gaul was under Caesar’s feet again. It was
possible for him to turn his eyes and mind to Rome (50).
THE HEIGHTS OF ALESIA
The stronghold of Vercingetorix
He did not want to quarrel with Pompeius. He had indeed from the
first done everything in his power to prevent such a
quarrel. But he saw that the old order of things in Rome was crumbling
into ruin. If Pompeius and he could not rule together, one of them must
rule alone. In the years of his absence Pompeius had moved more and more
to the Conservative point of view. His jealousy of Caesar had grown. The
long struggle came to a head when Caesar’s time in Gaul drew to an
end.
MARCUS ANTONIUS
from a coin
Caesar from his winter quarters at Ravenna declared that he was ready
to disband his army and return to Rome as a private citizen as soon as
Pompeius demobilized his troops. Pompeius actually had a larger force of
men under arms than Caesar, including two legions which Caesar had
borrowed and sent back to him. In the Senate Curio proposed that both
generals should lay down their commands. This was agreed to. Pompeius
refused. A few months later the question came up again. Curio, who
had been to Ravenna, where Caesar was, read a letter from him. In this
he said he would disarm, if Pompeius did the same. The Senate declared
the letter was dangerous, and the man who wrote it dangerous.
A friend of Pompeius then proposed that by a certain day Caesar, if
not disarmed, should be regarded as a traitor. When Marcus Antonius and
Cassius, another tribune, vetoed this, they were expelled from the
Senate and threatened with swords by Pompeius’s adherents. Caesar could
no longer have any doubt as to what awaited him in Rome. He explained
how things stood to his soldiers: they cried to him to march
on (49).
By Sulla’s law the Rubicon was the military boundary of Italy. No one
might cross it under arms. Caesar paused for a moment on the bank; then
suddenly crying, ‘The die is cast’, he crossed the river at the head of
his men and marching with great speed entered Ariminum.
The poet Lucan, writing long afterwards, tried to penetrate the
secrets of his mind, and guess what passed in it at this moment.
The Approach to the Rubicon: a Poet’s Phantasy
Caesar had already hurried across the frozen Alps, pondering in his
heart vast schemes of war to come; but when he reached the narrow waters
of the Rubicon, the vision of his distracted country rose awful to his
gaze, with saddened features clear seen through the gloom and white
locks flowing from beneath her crown of towers. All dishevelled and
bare-armed she stood before him, uttering words broken by sighs:
‘Whither do ye press on? Whither do ye bear these my standards? If ye
come as loyal citizens, thus far and no further.’ Then Caesar shuddered
in every limb, his hair stiffened, and faintness of heart, checking his
steps, stayed him at the very brink. Soon he cried: ‘Oh Lord of thunder,
that from the Tarpeian rock dost survey all our city, and gods that
followed the race of Iulus from Troy, and mysteries of Quirinus lost to
our sight, and Jupiter enthroned over Latium on Alba’s mount, and hearth
of Vesta’s fire, and thou, Rome, worshipped as divine, be gracious to my
cause. I bear against thee no frenzied arms. Lo! here am I, Caesar,
conqueror by sea and land, still everywhere thy soldier if none forbid.
On him, on him shall rest the guilt who makes me thy enemy!’ Then
without delay be gave the signal for advance and quickly led his men
through the swollen stream.
Lucan, Pharsalia, i. 183-203.
There was no resistance. It was not Caesar’s intention to use any
violence. In Rome, however, when the news came that he was moving south,
people fell into a panic. Pompeius lost his head. Although the forces at
his command were greater than Caesar’s, he left the city, leaving
everything, including the State Treasury, behind him. Most of the
senators and people of consequence did the same.
Within sixty days from his crossing the Rubicon Caesar entered Rome
and made himself master of it and of all Northern Italy without
bloodshed. People who had trembled and believed that a reign of terror
and proscriptions of the kind carried out by Marius and Sulla would
follow, breathed again. Caesar showed no bitterness. There were no
executions. The property of those who had fled with Pompeius was
untouched. Even to Labienus, the one officer of his own who deserted him
and joined the other side, Caesar was generous. He sent his goods after
him.
Caesar summoned those members of the Senate who had remained in Rome
and addressed them in a mild and gracious speech. He had no desire for
war: he urged them to send deputies to Pompeius. But no one would do
this. Pompeius meantime was embarking for Greece. Caesar did not follow
him. He was master in Rome: but Rome was utterly dependent for all its
supplies, the means by which it lived, on the world outside. Of that
world Pompeius seemed master. Caesar’s first task was, therefore, not to
defeat Pompeius but to secure the food supply of the capital. For this
purpose he himself set out for Spain, where there was a strong Pompeian
army, leaving Marcus Antonius in charge in Italy and sending Curio to
Sicily. The Spanish campaign was severe, but after the Battle of Ilerda
the Pompeian armies were shattered. A considerable force
surrendered. Caesar pardoned the men and many of them joined his
legions. When he returned home, capturing Massilia on the way, he heard
that Curio had done excellently in Sicily: Cato had been defeated and
fled to Pompeius.
The West was safe. From Spain, Sicily, and Sardinia corn flowed into
Rome. Caesar could sail for Dyrrachium to meet Pompeius. Pompeius
rejected all his proposals for peace. He was in a strong position: his
army far outnumbered Caesar’s, and his companions were blindly certain
of victory. They indeed spent their time quarrelling among themselves as
to who should hold the great offices in Rome when they got back there:
who should be Pontifex Maximus for instance, when Caesar had been
killed. They were so sure of victory that when Caesar was compelled to
shift his camp, since his men were dying of starvation, they insisted on
following him and giving battle, though Pompeius saw that this was
playing Caesar’s game: whereas to delay would have worn him down. At the
battle of Pharsalia (48) Caesar’s much smaller army won a complete
victory, thanks to his superior generalship. The princes of the East
sent in their submission to the conqueror. The senators and men of rank
who survived Pharsalia hastened to make their peace with Caesar, all
except Cato, who had not shaved or cut his hair since Caesar crossed the
Rubicon, and now sailed to Africa to resist to the last.
Pompeius fled to Egypt. Thither Caesar followed him only to learn the
news of his death. When the bloody head of his chief enemy and sometime
friend was handed to him Caesar turned away, tears in his eyes.
Years before Caesar had planned to bring Egypt under the Roman rule:
but this plan had been defeated. Now he found everything in confusion
there. The old king, dying two years earlier, had left his kingdom to
his children, Cleopatra, then sixteen, and a baby boy. By Cleopatra, who
even as a young girl had those extraordinary powers of mind and charm
that have made her famous through the ages, Caesar was fascinated. Her
wit and gaiety, her beauty and changefulness, held him entranced: and
week after week he stayed on in Alexandria, while a dangerous
insurrection was being planned by the ex-vizier of the old king.
Suddenly it broke out. Caesar had but a handful of troops: to save his
fleet from being used against him he had to set fire to it with his own
hands. From the dock the flames spread to the palace and destroyed the
great Alexandrine library, the most wonderful in the world. Caesar
himself only just escaped: he had to swim across the harbour, holding
his papers in one hand.
CLEOPATRA
from a coin
The danger was serious but brief. Reinforcements arrived from
Cilicia: the Egyptian rebels were defeated: the ex-vizier put to death:
Cleopatra and her brother made rulers over Egypt under the protection of
Rome. Caesar in the spring crossed to Asia Minor, where he came, saw,
and conquered, as he himself said. In September he was in Athens: in
October in Rome: in December in Africa. There, at the battle of Thapsus,
he crushed out the last spark of opposition. Cato, who had fled to
Utica, killed himself, much to Caesar’s distress. He admired the sturdy
independence of the old man and would have spared him. His daughter
Portia was married to Marcus Junius Brutus, a Pompeian whom Caesar
had pardoned and loved as a son.
The secret of Caesar’s clemency, which astonished his contemporaries,
lay partly in his own nature, partly in his clear purpose to
re-establish life in Rome on a firm and lasting foundation. His mind had
no bitterness. Bitterness arises out of some inner uncertainty; Caesar
had a rare certainty as to what he wanted to do and as to his being able
to do it. He was not afraid of other people or of their judgements. He
had no need to compare himself uneasily with them. He could stand on
what he did, irrespective of what they thought about it. He had come to
build, not to destroy. He had seen the failure of Marius and of Sulla.
Sulla had tried to restart Rome on a false basis—the rule of one
party in the State, standing on the bleeding bodies and broken fortunes
of the other. He had failed. His system had crumbled, and in its ruin it
had brought the whole State to the ground. Moreover, Sulla’s system had
left no room for growth. Rome’s task in the world had grown enormously
and the old machine was quite incapable of fulfilling it. Caesar wanted
to create a new machine that could govern not a city but a world.
A ROMAN COIN
celebrating the *** of Caesar
Caesar worked with the energy and power of a giant at his colossal
task. Every part of the State was in disorder—the army, the navy,
the treasury, the laws, trade, the whole business of government. He had
to reconstruct the whole, and in the space of little more than a year he
did much towards this. And besides these great tasks there were lesser
ones—the reform of the calendar, of the system of weights and
measures, of the language. Reforms are never popular. The change from
bad to good is slow and gradual. Caesar’s followers were not made as
rich as they had hoped. His measures were directed to filling, not
private pockets, but the coffers of the State.
The people loved him. Their lot was vastly improved. But a growing
body began to say that he was behaving as a tyrant and that things were
no better than they had been under the old government. Some of these
people were sincere republicans
who were afraid that Caesar was trying to make himself king. Among them
was Marcus Junius Brutus.
Brutus had married Cato’s daughter and shared many of Cato’s ideas.
Round him there gathered a knot of men, among whom the ablest was Caius
Cassius, who determined to free the city of the tyrant. To the minds of
Brutus and Cassius it seemed that Caesar was destroying the seeds of
greatness in all other men, to make himself supreme. Shakespeare makes
Cassius argue thus:
The Penalty of Greatness
Cassius. Why, man, he doth bestride the
narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that ‘Caesar’?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with ’em,
‘Brutus’ will start a spirit as soon as ‘Caesar’.
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art sham’d!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was fam’d with more than with one man?
When could they say, till now, that talk’d of Rome,
That her wide walls encompassed but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
O! you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, I. ii.
Caesar was warned of the conspiracy but took little heed. He had
always taken his life in his hand. He knew that he walked in constant
danger. When a soothsayer warned him to beware the Ides of March he only
laughed; and when the Ides (March 15) came and his wife implored
him to stay indoors, he
paid no attention but set out for a meeting of the Senate as usual to
transact his daily business, hearing petitions and so on.
It was the day chosen by the conspirators. One of them detained
Marcus Antonius, who generally watched over his chief’s safety: the
others gathered round Caesar. At a sudden signal, they fell upon him
with their daggers. Caesar was unarmed. At the foot of the statue of
Pompeius, which he had himself caused to be set up in a place of honour,
he fell. Pierced by six and thirty wounds he died. Marcus Brutus raised
his dagger, dyed with Caesar’s blood, and holding it aloft declared that
he had freed Rome from a tyrant.
A CINERARY URN
So Caesar fell (44). Years of bitter civil war followed. Then at last
Caesar’s nephew and adopted son, Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, did
that which Brutus had slain Caesar to prevent—changed the Roman
Republic into the Roman Empire. All the Emperors bore the name of
Caesar. Throughout the vast world over which the Roman eagles flew,
Julius Caesar was worshipped almost as a god.
A ROMAN WATER-CARRIER
with his water-skin on his back
Printed in England at the Oxford University Press