The Grandeur That Was Rome: a survey of Roman culture and civilisation

The fifth century seems to have been a period of decline for the Etruscan power. The Greek republics, with, as I hope we agreed, their northern stiffening, had advanced far beyond their Etruscan kinsmen in intelligence, and the tyrant Hiero of Syracuse defeated them in a great sea-fight in 474 B.C. It is agreeable to the historian to have a fact so certain and a date so well attested in all the wilderness of legend that surrounds the early history of Italy. Then the warlike hill tribes of the Southern Apennines began to press upon their southern colonies, and finally the Gauls from the north swept down upon Etruria at the beginning of the fourth century and broke up their declining empire for ever. It was probably during this period that the Romans expelled their Etruscan princes, and replaced royalty by a pair of equal colleagues sharing most of the royal power and regal emblems except crown and sceptre. So we get to the Rome of the earliest credible tradition—a Rome governed by two consuls and a senate of nobles. It is a city composed of farm-houses and in each house the head of the family rules in patriarchal majesty.

The Growing Republic

Thus it is necessary to throw overboard a great mass of edifying and famous history in the interest of youth. There were no contemporary records, the annals and fasti upon which Livy’s immediate predecessors relied in the first century B.C. are demonstrably of late concoction. Everywhere we can see the influence of Greek artists importing fragments of Greek history, rationalising names and customs, antedating and reduplicating later constitutional struggles, writing appropriate speeches for early parliamentarians who never existed, and generally demonstrating the power of Greek invention to flatter Roman credulity. The great families of 200 B.C. and onwards found themselves as rich and powerful as nabobs; they had great historic names, and when there was a funeral in the family they sent out a long procession of waxen images to represent the noble ancestors of the deceased. At such times there would be funeral orations recounting the deeds of those heroic ancestors. Every family had its traditions, as glorious and as authentic as those of the descendants of Brian Boru. When literature came into fashion and needy Greek scribes offered a plausible stilus to any rich patron, Roman history began to exist, sometimes bearing respectable Roman names but always written in Greek. It is thus that we get the series of heroic actions attributed to Fabii and Horatii and deeds of wicked pride ascribed to ancestral Claudii. Whatever it may cost us in pangs for the fate of pretty tales I fear we must not scruple to use the knife freely in this region of literary history. A glance at the following coincidences will help to allay our scruples: Tarquin the Roman tyrant was driven out in the same year as Hippias the Athenian tyrant (510 B.C.); the Twelve Tables at Rome were drawn up in the same year as the code of Protagoras at Thurii (451 B.C.); 300 Fabii died to a man in the battle of Cremera just about the same time as 300 Spartans died to a man with Leonidas at Thermopylæ in 480 B.C. To put it briefly: Nothing anterior to the Gallic invasion of 390 B.C. and very little for nearly another century can be accepted on literary evidence alone.

So far as we can read the stones, the earliest Rome consisted of a settlement on the Palatine Hill, with a citadel and a temple on the Capitol, and with a forum or market on the low ground between them. On the Esquiline Hill was a plebeian settlement. It was a pastoral and agricultural community, expressing wealth in terms of cattle, ploughing and reaping so much of the Campagna as their farmers could reach in a day or their armies protect. From the very earliest times the community consisted of a few great houses of patrician blood with numerous clients and slaves. In every house the father was king absolute, with power of life and death over his sons, daughters, and slaves. Daughters passed from the hand of the father to the hand of the husband, like any other property, by a form of sale. Out of remote antiquity comes a piece of genuine Latin:

—“If a boy beats his father and the father complains let the boy be devoted to the gods of parents,” i.e. slain as a sacrifice. It was a commonwealth of such parents—no republican lovers of liberty, be sure—whose chiefs met to discuss policy in the temple, as the Senate, and who themselves assembled in a body, fully armed, as the comitium, to vote upon the Senate’s decrees conveyed by the consuls.

Grim and despotic in peace these Roman aristocrats were fierce and tenacious in war. As soon as she was free, if not earlier, Rome appeared as a member of the Latin League which ruled over the Plain of Latium under the presidency of Alba Longa. This piece of tradition is attested by many survivals in ritual. Her earliest wars were against neighbours like Gabii, whose very name made the later Romans smile, so insignificant a village it was. It was in these little contests that the early Romans learnt their trade as warriors, and if any one seeks to know the causes of Rome’s victorious career the answer is, I suppose, that she fought very bravely and obeyed her generals better than her enemies obeyed theirs. Discipline was her secret, and discipline came, no doubt, from the strict patriarchal system in her homes, a system assuredly not of Mediterranean birth.

Whether the geese who cackled were authentic or merely ætiological fowls I know not, but it is certain that Rome did not suffer so severely from the Gallic invasion as did her neighbours across the Tiber. Probably it was only the last wave of a great invasion which reached as far as Rome, burnt the Palatine settlement and the humble wattled dwellings of the poor on the Esquiline, and failed to storm the Capitol. At any rate the Gallic invasion of 390 B.C. seems to have started the Romans on their career of conquest, mainly at the expense of the Etruscans. But there were incessant wars with all her neighbours; every summer the army marched out as a matter of course. If it was not a decaying Etruscan town to be taken by siege it was a Latin neighbour, or failing them a Volscian or Sabine community from the hills. Summer, while the corn could be left to do its own growing, was the time for battle. To have been at peace in summer would have been slackness, to wage war in winter a grave solecism. So in short space Rome became an important little town, head of the Latin League and probably the strongest unit in Central Italy. It appears that she began about now to emerge into international notice by the great powers, for we have a treaty of 348 B.C., which may probably be accepted as genuine though the actual date is not so certain, between Rome and Carthage, wherein the Romans, in consideration of promising not to trade in Carthaginian waters, are permitted to do business with the Carthaginian ports in Sicily and acknowledged as suzerains of the Latin League. Thus Rome has apparently by this time some overseas traffic.

If no other art, diplomacy seems always to have been at home on Roman soil, and in all her works Rome shows a genius for statecraft. It must have been at some very early date that she discovered her great secret of divide et impera. She had already become so far the greatest power in the Latin League, that she had equal rights with all the others combined. The allies, it seems, claimed to supply the general of the allied army on alternate days and to have a half-share of the plunder. Against these very modest demands Rome was firm. She fought the League and beat it in 338; then she divided and ruled the cities. With each she made a separate treaty, granting to each two of the rights of citizenship—the right to trade and the right to marry with her citizens. But she allowed no such rights between the other members of the League, however close neighbours they might be. In this way Rome became the staple market of all Latium; all traffic passed through her hands and her wealth and population increased.

These city-states had no means of ruling otherwise than tyrannically. Their whole constitution forbade it. We have seen elsewhere[8] that citizenship in a city-state implied membership of a corporate body, a close partnership in a company of unlimited liability with very definite privileges and responsibilities. Full citizenship at Rome meant a vote in electing the city magistrates and a vote in the comitium, which decided matters like peace and war. It was obvious that you had to be very jealous about extending these rights to outsiders. But Rome went part of the way, granted parts of the citizen rights, and thereby showed finer imperial statecraft than any Greek state had yet discovered. Her first offshoot was Ostia, the town she planted at the mouth of her river only fifteen miles off, her first Colonia. The men of Ostia remained citizens of Rome, and might vote in the elections if they thought it worth while, but were exempt from the duty of serving in the army because their own town formed a standing garrison in the Roman service. Then when the Romans made conquests in Etruria or Campania or any region where the natives spoke a foreign language and therefore could not fight in the legions under Roman officers, they would receive the “citizenship without vote,” which enabled them simply to trade and marry like Romans. Thirdly, some of the Latin towns became merely municipia, that is, country towns enjoying full Roman citizenship if they came to the city, but at home a local constitution with considerable powers of self-government and a magistracy modelled on that of Rome, namely, senators and consuls under other names. All this granting of rights—without any tribute—was, according to the ways of ancient city-states, surprising generosity or the deepest statesmanship. Already Rome begins to show the genius of empire-building: she was relentless and unscrupulous in conquering, but generous and broad-minded in governing. Such was the wisdom of her council of despots—the Senate.

Nevertheless these “allies” were more sensible of the liberties they had lost than of the rights they had gained by coming under the expanding wing of Rome. The latter part of the fourth century shows the growing state embarked upon a terrific struggle which lasted on and off from summer to summer for nearly fifty years. Her principal foes were the warlike Samnites of the Southern Apennines, closely akin, it seems, to the dominant race at Rome. This tremendous conflict is clearly the turning-point of Roman history. At various stages nearly all the peoples of Italy rose and enrolled themselves among the enemy, the Latins, the Etruscans, the Umbrians, the Marsi, the Gauls (for they too were brought in again by the Etruscans in their last efforts for freedom) and the Samnites themselves, a race of born fighters under competent generals. Once, in 321 B.C., both consuls and the entire army of Rome were entrapped at the Caudine Pass, but Rome never thought of surrender. Doggedly her Senate refused to know when it was beaten and continued the struggle. Fortunately it was one purpose against many, and Rome beat her enemies in detail until she was able to emerge victorious.

The history of that great conflict has come down to us in an incomplete state full of fairy-tales and omissions, but it is clear that the Roman Senate showed extraordinary resolution and tenacity, as it did in the next century against foreign enemies. Beaten to its knees again and again it refused any terms of peace short of victory. That is a marvellous thing, if Rome was really one among many towns of Latium. It is to be noted that this was the war in which she learnt the new system of fighting whereby she was fated to conquer the world. Hitherto in ancient warfare a battle array had meant a solid line in which the men stood shoulder to shoulder in several ranks, pressing on with spear and shield against a similar line of the enemy. It was largely a question of weight in the impact. You tried to make your line deep enough to prevent yielding and long enough to envelop the enemy’s flank: once you could turn or break the enemy’s line victory was yours. But the Romans, either because they were often outnumbered on the field of battle, or, as some say, in fighting the Gallic warriors with their long swords, found it necessary to fight not shoulder to shoulder but in open order—not in a solid phalanx but in open companies or “maniples.” This had a far-reaching effect: it made every Roman soldier a self-reliant unit, who could fence skilfully with his favourite weapon, the sword, instead of merely pushing a long pike as his neighbours did. It is clear that only an army of natural soldiers could have adopted such an innovation successfully. Once established, it made the Roman soldier invincible. The maniple of 200 men was not only far more mobile than a solid phalanx, but it covered a length of ground equal to that of three times its own numbers. Formerly only the front rank—the principes—had required a full suit of armour and it was only the richest who could afford it. Now the whole army had to be properly equipped, and this reacted upon the social and political system of the city.

The Constitution

In ancient times a man’s rights as citizen depended entirely upon his duties as a soldier. The comitium was the army, and the preponderance of voting power went to the rich who could afford a panoply. Now the soldiers were equalised and therefore the citizens claimed equality. We cannot put much faith in Livy’s story of the struggle between the two orders for political equality; the details, which include elaborate reports of the speeches delivered, are clearly free compositions based upon much later controversies between the republicans and democrats of Livy’s own earlier days. There is a great deal of confusion and contradiction in the accounts of the various legislative measures by which the plebeians were gradually admitted to equality with the patricians. But the story of the Secession of the Plebs—there are two such stories, but probably that is the result of duplication—is so distinctive and peculiarly Roman that it scarcely seems like an invention. To put it shortly, the plebeians won their rights by means of that very modern weapon—a strike. Being refused the rights for which they were agitating, they refused to join the citizen levy, but marched out under arms to the neighbouring Sacred Mount, and threatened to set up a new Rome of their own there. The political instinct was healthy and strong among them: the plebeians formed themselves into a second corporation organised like the patricians. Where the patricians had their two consuls with two prætors under them, the plebeians had their two tribunes and two ædiles. Where the patrician army had its comitium meeting in groups called “curies,” the plebeians had their assembly meeting in tribes. So the new magistracies and the new meetings became part and parcel of the Roman republic. The tribunes were protected not so much by laws as by an oath: their persons were declared sacred, and they had the right to thrust their sacred persons between the plebeian offender and the consul’s lictor who came to arrest him, thus expressing the ultimate sovereignty of the army of Roman citizens. That is, in broad outline, how the story of political equality at Rome has come down to us. But it must not be supposed that even now the Roman republic was in anything but externals like the Greek democracy. The Roman comitia never debated like the Athenian ecclesia. They assembled to listen to such speeches as the magistrates or their invited friends might choose to make upon topics which had previously been selected, discussed and decreed by the senate; they were there to ratify the senate’s decisions with “Yes” or “No.” Even then they did not vote as individuals; each “century,” each “cury,” or each “tribe,” according to the form of meeting summoned, was a single voting unit. Everything in the system tended to put real power into the hands of the executive. When you get the executive able to control policy you get efficiency, but if you want liberty you must adopt other means. The senate at Rome gradually came to consist entirely of retired magistrates, and so to exhibit all the knowledge, competence, experience, and bigoted self-confidence which we expect from retired functionaries.

The republican constitution had invented two devices to save itself from tyranny, and, according to tradition, had invented them at the very beginning of republicanism. One was the collegial system by which every magistracy was held in commission by two or more colleagues. There were two consuls from the first, sharing between them most of the royal prerogatives, heads of the executive in peace and supreme generals in war, with power of life and death, or full imperium, at any rate on the field of battle. There was at first only one prætor, for he was then merely the consuls’ lieutenant in time of war; but when, as soon happened, the prætor became a judge in time of peace, that office, too, was given to a pair of colleagues. There were, it is said, at first two tribunes of the plebs, principally charged with the protection and leadership of their own order; but as the city grew their numbers were increased to ten. So there were two ædiles, who principally looked after affairs of police in the city. There were two censors, ranking highest of all in the hierarchy of office because their sphere was so largely connected with religion. Their duty was to number the people and to expiate that insult to heaven with a solemn rite of purification. In numbering they also had to assess every man’s property for the purpose of fixing his rank in the army and in the state. All these magistrates had powers of jurisdiction in various spheres. All the priests and prophets, too, of whom there were many varieties, were formed into colleges. Only the pontifex maximus stood alone without a colleague—and he had an official wife. We are too familiar with the working of “boards” and “commissions” to misunderstand the purpose of this system. Theory required unanimity in each board, each member of it had power to stop action by the others, one powerful weapon to that end being the religious system whereby nothing could be attempted without favourable omens. You had only to announce unpropitious auspices to stop any action whatever.

The other great check against official tyranny was the system of annual tenure. All magistrates, except the censors, who had a lengthy task before them and therefore held office for five years, were annual. While this was some safeguard for liberty, it told heavily against efficiency, especially in the case of military leadership by the consuls. It also meant the gradual creation of a great number of office-holders, past and present. It was not quite so effective as the corresponding Athenian system of balloting for office in checking personal eminence, but it certainly succeeded in putting a great number of nonentities and failures into high office—even the supreme command of the legions.

The Early Roman

It is only very dimly that we can trace the outlines of public history as Rome grew to be a power in Italy. We can scarcely hope to trace the lineaments of the individual Roman even in outline. It is sometimes said that even if the earliest history of the city is admitted to be apocryphal, we can draw valuable deductions as to the Roman character from the sort of actions which were regarded as praiseworthy in the earliest times. There is some truth in that view, though it might be objected that most of these stories took literary shape only in the second and first centuries B.C. It might be added that men often admire qualities just because they feel that they themselves cannot claim them. But, on the whole, I think we can get from this period of legendary history some insight into Roman character. There is a remarkable difference between the Roman hero and the Greek. Greek mythology busies itself very largely with stories of cleverness—how Heracles outwitted his foes, smart équivoques by the oracles, ingenious devices of Themistocles, wise sayings of Thales and Solon. It is mainly the intellectual virtues that Greek history of the borderland admires. But the Roman of the same historical area is not clever. Most of the old Roman stories are in praise of courage—for example, the contempt of pain shown by Scævola, who held his right hand in the flames to demonstrate Roman fortitude; the courage of the maiden Clœlia, who swam the river, or of Horatius, who held the bridge against an army; the devotion to his country of Quintus Curtius, who leapt in full armour into the chasm which had opened in the Forum. Many of them celebrate the true Roman virtue of sternness and austere devotion to law, as when the Roman fathers condemned their sons to death for breaking the law under most excusable circumstances. The love of liberty is extolled in Brutus, the love of equality in Valerius and Cincinnatus, called from the plough-tail to supreme command. Austere chastity in females and the strict demand for it in their proprietors is praised in the stories of Lucretia and Virginia. All these we may well set down as the virtues admired and, we hope, practised in early Rome; they form a consistent and quite distinctive picture.

But the early Roman had few accomplishments to embellish his virtues. Art and civilisation either did not exist or have perished without leaving any traces. It is likely enough that all the city’s energies were occupied with the one business of fighting. Some hints of civilising reform hang about the name of Appius Claudius, who was censor about 318-312 B.C. In his time we date some of the military changes mentioned above, and they seem to have accompanied economic changes which point to growing wealth at Rome. Copper gave place to silver as the standard of exchange, and therewith the copper as depreciated in value, so that the Roman unit of historical times, the sestertius of 2½ as value, was a coin worth about 2d. Land was no longer the sole basis of property; it became possible for a man to become rich by trade, and accordingly landless citizens were now drafted into the ancient tribes for the first time. To this great censor also belongs the first of the famous Roman military roads, the Appian Way, which led southwards to the Greek cities of Campania. Even to-day the Via Appia, flanked with its ruined tombs—for the Romans often buried their dead along the highways—running like a dart across the barren Campagna, is one of the most striking spectacles which modern Rome has to offer.[9]

Of anything which can be dignified with the name of literature we have scarcely a relic. What there is seems ludicrously rustic and uncouth. Consider, for an example, the ancient hymn of the Salii, the jumping priests of Mars. There were twelve of them, all men of patrician family; they dressed in embroidered tunics, with the striped toga, a breastplate of bronze, a conical cap with a spike; they carried each a sacred shield, and as they made their annual processions through the city at the beginning of each campaigning year, they leaped into the air and thumped their shields with sticks; trumpeters preceded them, and they sang this ghostly chant:

which is probably to be translated:

Early Religion

In our quest for the essential Roman we shall find nothing more illuminating than religion. With some people culture takes the place of religion, but it is far commoner to find religion taking the place of culture: it did so with the Hebrews, and it does so to a great extent among the English. The Romans were never a really religious people. Probably they lacked the imagination to be really devout. They had scarcely any native mythology. But they were ritualists and formalists to the heart’s core. If those Salii had jumped only four times at the word “Triumpe,” the whole value of the rite would have been lost: if no worse thing befell them they would have had to begin again from the beginning. Thus religion, always conservative, and generally the richest hunting-ground for the antiquarian in search of prehistoric history, is almost our only source of information as to the mind of the early Roman. Of course, Roman religion is so deeply overlaid with Greek mythology that it takes some digging to discover the real gods of old Rome. But that is being done by the patience and insight of such scholars as Mr. Warde Fowler and Dr. J. G. Frazer, so that we now have a good deal of information about the original Roman religion.

Mr. Warde Fowler makes two important conclusions about the early Romans from his study of the twofold character of Mars, who, in spite of the later primacy of Jupiter, is undoubtedly the true Roman male god: “(1) that their life and habits of thought were those of an agricultural race, and (2) that they continually increased their cultivable land by taking forcible possession in war of that of their neighbours.” This was the Roman method of making agriculture pay. The spring of the year and the month which still bears the name of Mars was not only the season of returning life to nature, but it was also the time when the god and his worshippers buckled on their armour to seek fresh ploughlands, just as did the primitive Germans. It was Europe’s first method of extensive farming, and the habit clung to the Romans long after they had ceased to be farmers. In the spring it was time to look about you and consider where and with whom you should begin to fight this year.

Some of these old Roman festivals are worth a brief description, for they and they alone are the authentic history of the early Romans. For example, on the Ides of March the lower classes streamed out to the Campus Martius on the banks of the river and spent the day in rustic jollity with wine and song in honour of Anna Perenna—the recurring year. On another day there was a ceremony like that of the Hebrew scapegoat. Two dates in the calendar are marked for the king to dissolve the comitia. The assembly had to be summoned by the blast of special trumpets of peculiar un-Italian shape (some say Etruscan), and the trumpets had to be purified by a special service on the previous day. Although the Romans abolished their political kingship, religion required the retention of the title for numerous ceremonial purposes. Then there were the Parilia in honour of the old shepherd god Pales, when sheepfolds were garlanded with green, the sheep were purified at the dawn, and rustic sacrifices were paid to avert the wrath of the deity in case you had unwittingly disturbed one of the mysterious powers who dwell in the country—the nymphs and fauns of pool and spring and tree. There was a prayer to this effect of which Ovid has given us the substance, and “this prayer,” adds Mr. Warde Fowler, “must be said four times over, the shepherd looking to the east, and wetting his hands with the morning dew. The position, the holy water, and the prayer in its substance, though now addressed to the Virgin, have all descended to the Catholic shepherds of the Campagna.” There were other primitive agricultural deities, such as Robigus (the red rust on the corn), on whose festival you sacrificed red puppies; Terminus (the boundary god), to whom you slaughtered a sucking-pig on the boundary stone; or Ops Consiva, the deity who protected your buried store of corn. Such names and their attributes indicate a certain poverty of religious imagination. There were more abstract, or, rather, less tangible powers, such as Lares, the spirits of the dead ancestors who figured as guardian angels of the home; the Penates, the spirits who watched over the store-cupboard; the Genius, a man’s luck; the Manes, the kindly dead; or the Lemures, dangerous ghosts of the unburied. The house, like the fields, was full of unseen presences to be appeased with appropriate ritual, which had to be most punctiliously performed. Every year at the Lemuria the master of the house would rise at midnight and, with clean hands and bare feet, walk through the house, making a special sign with his fingers and thumbs to keep off the ghosts. He fills his mouth with black beans and spits them out as he goes, carefully keeping his eyes averted, and saying, “With these I redeem me and mine.” Nine times he speaks these words without looking round, and the ghosts come behind him unseen to gather up the beans. Then the father washes himself again, and clashes the pots together to frighten the spirits away. When he has repeated the words “Depart, ye kindly spirits of our ancestors” nine times, he looks round at last and the ceremony is complete.

The history of Rome, as Mr. Warde Fowler discerns it in religion, begins with an extremely simple rustic worship of natural forms, meteoric stones, sacred trees and animals such as the Mother Wolf or Mars’ woodpeckers; to this stage belong many of the curious spells and charms against ghosts. This sort of worship is not distinctively Roman, but common to the greater part of Central Europe. From these savage local cults we pass to the more centralised worship which belongs to the household, and that household an agricultural one. The father is the priest, and his principal deity is Janus, the god of the doorway; his sons are the subordinate flamines; and his daughters have special charge of Vesta, who presides over the family hearth-fire. Their agricultural activities are reflected in the more orderly rural ceremonies in honour of Saturn, Ops, and Vesta. Thirdly, we have a series of cults which indicate the beginnings of a community with the king for chief priest, supported by State Vestals and flamines. The Latin Festival marks the participation of Rome in the Latin League, whose presiding deity was Jupiter. In these three stages it is mainly an affair of formless powers or “numina,” deities very scantily realised, with little or no personality, scarcely to be termed anthropomorphic at all. Instead of temples there was nothing but altars, chapels, groves.

If we view these changes in the light of ethnology we shall probably agree that the first of them is the common ground of prehistoric Mediterranean worship. It is what we find in Crete at the earliest period. But we have come to regard the strict monogamous patriarchal family as especially the contribution of the north to the civilisation of Europe. Unfortunately those deities who are most certainly plebeian, such as Ceres, Flora, and Diana, do not seem to belong to the earlier strata of religion.

However that may be, it seems that we can trace in the next succeeding stage a period of public worship connected with clearly anthropomorphic deities who have temples, priests, and probably images of their own. Towards the end of the monarchic period we find those distinctly Etruscan characteristics of which I have already spoken. Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva are an Etruscan trinity. Now begins the pre-eminence of greater gods more or less personified and closely resembling those of the Greeks—such as Mercury, Ceres, and Diana. It is now that the important priestly colleges, pontifices, and augurs are founded, largely replacing, as being more important politically, the old agricultural brotherhood of the Fratres Arvales and the martial fraternity of the Salii.

Thus in religion as in art the Romans were prepared by their Etruscan connections for their subsequent capture by Greek civilisation. It was inevitable that a Greek should recognise Diana as Artemis, Minerva as Pallas, Mercury as Hermes, and Juno as Hera. It was equally inevitable that the Romans should be willing to clothe these bare and chilly abstractions with the charming fabric of Greek mythology. That process, and the simultaneous reception at Rome of Oriental cults, form still later stages in the progress of that strange medley which passed in the Rome of literature for religion.

There is little to elevate or inspire in Roman religion. The only virtue belonging to it was reverence and the strict sense of duty which a Roman called pietas, explaining it as “justice towards the gods.” “Religion” meant “binding obligation” to the Romans; its source was fear of the unseen, its issue was mainly punctilious formalism. No doubt the gods would punish disrespect to a parent or rebellion against the state, no doubt a fugitive or a slave had altars and sanctuaries where he might claim mercy; but there is little more than that to connect virtue with religion at Rome. On the other hand, we are not to suppose that when the lascivious rites of Isis and Ashtaroth or the Paphian Venus came to Rome in later days they came to corrupt a race of pious puritans. True Roman deities like Flora, Fortuna Virilis, and Anna Perenna had a native bestiality of their own. The simple rustic is seldom a natural puritan, and we must beware of idealising our Early Roman as a Scottish Covenanter. There was savage cruelty in many of the early rites, such as the Ver Sacrum when all the offspring of men and cattle within a specified period was devoted to the gods, or the Fordicidia when unborn calves were burnt. Human sacrifice looms large in the early religion, and it was probably only a later refinement which limited it to criminals or volunteers.

Mommsen has drawn our attention to the business-like relation between worshipper and god, for that is also typical of the old Roman character. “The gods,” he says, “confronted man just as a creditor confronted a debtor.... Man even dealt in speculation with his god: a vow was in reality as in name a formal contract between the god and the man by which the latter promised to the former for a certain service to be rendered a certain equivalent return.” Nay, he might venture to defraud his god. “They presented to the lord of the sky heads of onions or poppies, that he might launch his lightnings at these rather than at the heads of men. In payment of the offering annually demanded by father Tiber, thirty puppets plaited of rushes were annually thrown into the stream.” It may be true, as Mr. Warde Fowler argues, that the bargain sometimes took the form of a lively sense of favours to come, but a votum was essentially a business transaction.

The deity was very dimly visualised: the cult was everything, the god nothing. The true Latin god does not marry or beget children—did not, at least, till the Greek theologians came over and married them all suitably and provided them with families. Before history began the Romans had forgotten the little they had ever known about their most ancient deities. The rite, perhaps the altar, was preserved, but no one remembered the object of it. This is a typical Roman prayer as we have it in old Cato: “This is the proper Roman way to cut down a grove. Sacrifice with a pig for a peace-offering. This is the verbal formula:

Whether thou art a god or a goddess to whom that grove is sacred, may it be justice in thine eyes to sacrifice a pig for a peace-offering in order that the sanctity may be restrained. For this cause, whether I perform the sacrifice or any one else at my orders, may it be rightly done. For that cause in sacrificing this pig for a peace-offering I pray thee honest prayers that thou mayest be kind and propitious to me and my house and my slaves and my children. For these causes be thou blessed with the sacrifice of this pig for a peace-offering.” To misplace a word in this formula would have been fatal. The vagueness of the address is typical: the wood is sacred, no doubt, to some invisible numen; the woodman must guard himself against addressing the wrong power. Much of the Roman worship is thus offered “to the Unknown God.”

Law

It was this quality of precision and formalism which made Rome the lawgiver of Europe. In the battle between law and sentiment the Roman sword has been thrown with decisive effect into the scale of law. All Roman law was originally a series of formulæ, and like all ancient law a part of religion. First the king and then the priests were the only people who knew these formulæ. Thus the king was the sole judge both in private and public right; he might summon a council of advisers or he might delegate his powers to an inferior officer, such as the prætor or the prefect of the city, or the trackers of murder. Both these rights, that of choosing a consilium and of delegating authority, with, however, a right of appeal from the lower to the higher functionary, remained inherent in the Roman magistracy. In all cases, private or public, the king or the magistrate who replaced him had to pronounce the jus first: that is, to state the proper formula for the case in question; then he would send the case for trial of fact, or judicium, before judge or jury. The formula would run “if it appears that A. B. has been guilty of—— condemn him to ——; if not, acquit him.” Jus, human right, was inseparably connected with fas, divine right: no layman could properly interpret either. For a long time it was necessary for one of the priests to be present in court to see that the proper formularies of action were observed with strict verbal accuracy. This was, of course, an enormously powerful weapon in the hands of the patricians.

Then in the course of the struggle between the orders came the usual demand for written laws. The famous story of the Decemviri and their commission to Athens in 451 B.C. is unfortunately very dubious history. It is full of romantic elements, it is part of that systematic depreciation of the Claudii in Roman history which Mommsen has traced to its probable source, it has elements which look as if they were borrowed from the story of the thirty tyrants at Athens, and there is no confirmation from the Athenian side. Professor Pais believes that the fifth century is much too early for such a code. There are, it is true, in the fragments of the Twelve Tables which have come down to us, some enactments closely resembling those of the Greek codes—regulations, for example, limiting the expense of funerals—but we find such laws in other codes than that of Solon. One would like to have fuller details about that later Appius Claudius, the famous censor of 312 B.C. It is said that he desired to reduce the now complicated bulk of legal formulæ to writing simply for the benefit of the priests, but that a low-born scribe, one Flavius, whom he employed for the purpose as his clerk, fraudulently revealed these judicial secrets to the public. The whole tendency of the Claudian falsifications is to make out that the Claudii were tyrannical and anti-democratic. It certainly looks as if the dishonesty of the freedman had been put into the story for the purpose of robbing the famous censor of his credit for helping the people to a knowledge of law.

The whole fabric of Roman law was supposed to rest upon the foundation of the Twelve Tables. Only fragments of them have come down to us. They are undoubtedly very ancient and primitive, more so, it would seem, than the Athenian law of 451 B.C. Fines are to be paid in metal by weight. A creditor has the right to carve up the body of his debtor. Plebeian may not intermarry with patrician. But they also carried something of a charter of liberties for the citizens in that capital punishment could not be inflicted without right of appeal to the assembly, and no law could be proposed against an individual. The language of this famous code is of a rugged simplicity and directness that is truly Roman. On the whole Roman law is merciful, considering its strict character: though much of Roman pleading, as we have it in the mouth of Cicero, is full of appeals to sentiment, Roman law itself allows no appeal to anything so vague as abstract justice. The written letter stands, and there can be no pleading without a legal formula.

The character of the ancient Roman is best described by his favourite virtue of gravitas. In that word is implied serious purpose, dignified reserve, fidelity to one’s promise, and a sense of duty. Levity is its opposite, and among the things repugnant to true Roman gravity were art, music, and literature. It is on the battlefield, in the senate-house, and the law-courts that the old Roman is most truly at home.

II

CONQUEST

HE great Samnite wars, which had lasted on and off from 343 to 290 B.C., had been the school of Roman valour. In her citizen legions Rome had evolved a fighting machine unequalled, probably, until the Musketeers of Louis XIV. and Marlborough. Also she was learning politics and the art of government. She was now mistress over the greater part of Italy; all, in fact, except the Gallic plain in the north and the Greek cities of the south. The Pyrrhic war which followed after a short breathing-space forms the transition between domestic expansion and foreign conquest. Our business here is not with wars and battles for their own sake, but it will be important to observe in what manner Rome was launched on her career of empire-making. Seeley has shown how the British Empire grew up in a haphazard manner, without any wise policy to direct its growth, with continual neglect of opportunities, and often in contemptuous ignorance of the work that private citizens were undertaking for its honour and advancement. We shall see that it was very much the same with the Roman Empire. One responsibility leads to another, one conquest leads to many entanglements: if the coast is to be held the hinterland must be conquered. Thus power follows capacity, and the doctrine which seems so unjust, “To him that hath shall be given, from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have,” is fulfilled in all the dealings between Providence and imperial peoples. By coming into contact with the Greeks of the south Rome was brought definitely to deal with a superior but declining civilisation. The career of Agathocles, the brigand tyrant of Sicily, had lately shown how easy a thing it was to make empires among the opulent and luxurious cities of the Calabrian and Bruttian shores.

One summer’s day in 282 B.C. the people of Tarentum were seated in their open-air theatre, watching the performance of a tragedy. They looked out above the stage over the blue waters of the Gulf of Calabria, and there they saw a small detachment of the Roman fleet sailing into their harbour. The ships were on a voyage entirely peaceful, but there was an old treaty forbidding the Romans to pass the Lacinian Promontory, and these barbarians had lately been interfering in the affairs of their Greek neighbours, always in favour of oligarchy against democracy. The mob was seized with a sudden access of fury; they rushed down to the harbour, butchered or enslaved the sailors, and put the admiral to death. The Roman Senate met this atrocious insult with calm, even with generosity. But the Tarentine mob would have no peace. Looking abroad for a champion they invited the Prince of Epirus to their aid. Pyrrhus was a young man of charm, ability, and ambition almost equal to that of Alexander the Great, whose career he longed to emulate in the West. He was called the first general of his day, and he brought with him 20,000 infantrymen of the phalanx, 2000 archers, 500 slingers, and 3000 cavalry. Moreover he had twenty Indian war elephants. The boastful Greeks had offered to provide 350,000 infantry, but when it came to the point they would do nothing but hire a few mercenaries. However, Pyrrhus was victorious in the first battle near Heraclea. The victory was won, it is said, by the final charge of the elephants. The simple Romans had never seen an elephant before; they called them “snake-hands” and “Lucanian cows,” and their horses were even more alarmed than they. But the next time the Romans had to meet elephants they provided themselves first with wonderful machines, in which chariots were mysteriously blended with chafing-dishes, and then when these failed, with fiery darts, which converted this heavy cavalry into engines of destruction for their owners. That is rather typical of the simple Roman and his way of encountering monsters.

After the victory of Heraclea, Pyrrhus sent to Rome with overtures of peace a smooth-tongued courtier named Cineas, who was much impressed with the incorruptibility of the political chiefs and their wives. It was he who described the Senate as a “council of kings,” so grave and majestic was their bearing and discourse. Nevertheless the Roman Senate would have made terms if it had not been for the great Censor Appius Claudius, now blind and infirm, who laid down for the first time the celebrated doctrine that Rome never listened to terms while there were foreign troops on Italian soil. Therefore, although the Romans had lost 15,000 men, fresh conscripts eagerly enrolled themselves to make a new army.

Meanwhile Pyrrhus, after another incomplete “Pyrrhic” victory, was proceeding unchecked over the island of Sicily. There he drove the Carthaginians from point to point until they concentrated in their great stronghold of Lilybæum in the west. But all the time his position was desperate. The coalition on which he depended was composed of faithless and useless allies. While his stiff Epirot phalanx was depleted at every victory, fresh levies of Roman citizens seemed to spring from the soil to replace the losses of every defeat. So at length it came to the battle of the Arusine Plain, near Beneventum, in which the Romans were completely victorious. Thus Pyrrhus leaves to history the reputation not of a conqueror but of an adventurer. The Romans had thus faced and overthrown the Greek phalanx at its best, and were now masters of Italy from Genoa to Reggio, with Sicily obviously inviting their next advance. That Rome was now formally accepted among the great powers of the Mediterranean world is shown by an embassy offering alliance with Ptolemy of Egypt.

She had a breathing-space of eleven years before the first of her two great conflicts with the Carthaginians. Carthage, a colony of the Phœnicians of Tyre, had grown rich and prosperous on the fertile soil of the modern Tunis. She was an aristocracy wholly devoted to trade, and living uncomfortably amid a surrounding population of dangerous native subjects. War was not her main business, but when she sought fresh markets she was apt to fight with horrible ferocity, sacrificing her prisoners in hundreds to hideous gods when she was victorious, and impaling her generals when she was not. As a military power she varied greatly: the comparatively puny Greek states of Sicily had been maintaining a fairly equal struggle against her for centuries. But she used the British system of sepoy troops, and thus everything depended on the general. Had it not been for the inexperience of the Romans at sea and the extraordinary genius of Hannibal, Carthage would never have come as near victory as she did. We have no history of the struggle from the Punic side, and Carthage herself must remain somewhat of a mystery even when illuminated by the brilliant imagination of the author of Salammbô.

In entering upon this war, which Rome did ostensibly in response to an appeal from a parcel of ruffianly outlaws for whom she had no sympathy whatever, we can for once discover no motive but desire of conquest. Messina, the home of the said ruffians, was for her merely the tête du pont which led from Bruttium into Sicily. The conquest of that rich Greek island was plainly the objective, but she plunged into war without foreseeing the immensity of her undertaking. The chief interest of the First Punic War, which lasted from 264 to 241, lies in the creation of a Roman navy which occurred in the course of it. Although we may agree with Mommsen that “it is only a childish view to believe that the Romans then for the first time dipped their oars in water,” yet tradition says that the Romans constructed a fleet in a great hurry, taking for model a stranded Carthaginian galley. It was at any rate her first war-fleet worth mentioning. The tradition is proved by the lack of seamanship displayed by the Romans, for every storm cost her enormous losses by shipwreck. The device by which she overcame the Punic ships—a sort of grappling gangway on pulleys affixed to her masts, so that her soldiers could fight the enemy as if on shore—was a successful but essentially a landlubberly invention, and no doubt accounts for many of her losses by shipwreck. Her annual consuls, transformed for the occasion into annual admirals, had not even as much opportunity as Colonel Blake to learn their trade. And, though Rome launched fleet after fleet until at length she became mistress of the seas, she never treated her navy with respect. The ships were rowed by slaves and manned chiefly by subject allies, but the real business of fighting was done by the 120 legionaries on each vessel, who came into action when the enemy was grappled and the gangway fast in her deck. So the war dragged on for nearly a generation until at length the Carthaginians made peace, and Rome gained the coveted island. Britain is not the only empire in history which wins victories by “muddling through.”

The peace was clearly nothing more than a respite: the command of the Western Mediterranean was not yet settled. Rome spent the interval in making fresh conquests. First she seized the opportunity, while Carthage was involved with her native rebels, to annex the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, alleging with more ingenuity than geographical exactitude that these were some of the islands between Sicily and Africa which Carthage had agreed to surrender. Here we behold the simple Roman as a diplomat. Then she was compelled to intervene in Illyria in order to clear the Adriatic of piracy, and so acquired territory across the water. Soon afterwards the Gauls of the northern plain began under pressure from their kinsmen across the Alps to threaten invasion; and Rome, after failing to gain the favour of heaven by the pious expedient of burying a male and female Gaul alive in her Forum, marched out to meet them, slaughtered them in thousands, and thus rounded off her control over the peninsula. Much of this looks like conscious empire-building.

In the Second Punic War, which lasted from 218 to the end of the century, Rome was not the aggressor. At Carthage by this time the native rebellion had been put down with a heavy hand. It seems that Carthage had its party system, the democracy, as usual in ancient cities, being for war, and the aristocracy of rich merchants for peace. The democracy was led by the celebrated Barca family, who had long supplied the state with famous generals and now occupied a position of unrivalled eminence. Constitutionally a Carthaginian could rise no further than to be one of the two shophets who corresponded to the Roman consuls, but actually the Barcas were more like a family of dictators. From the first Hamilcar Barca foresaw that Rome was still the enemy, and he is said to have made his little son Hannibal swear an oath at the altar that he would prosecute that enmity to the death. But first it was necessary to acquire resources and an army for the purpose. This he resolved to do, as Julius Cæsar did after him, by foreign conquest. Without orders from home he led his army into Spain, and there began to build up a province and a native army under his absolute control. Though Cadiz was already a Carthaginian market and there was already a Greek colony at Saguntum, and the ships of Tarshish were known even to King Solomon, this is the first real appearance of Spain in history. There was metal to be had from the mines, gold, copper, and silver, and there were hardy warriors in the hills who only needed training to become excellent soldiers. So Carthage began to acquire a western substitute for her lost province of Sicily. Hamilcar died; his son-in-law, Hasdrubal, was assassinated; and then the army chose for its leader Hamilcar’s son Hannibal, then a young man of twenty-nine.

This man, though his history was written exclusively by his enemies, stands out as one of the greatest leaders in history. In strategy he was supreme; in statesmanship he had the gift which Marlborough shared of being able by his personal influence to hold unwilling allies together even in adverse circumstances. He was a cultivated man who spoke and wrote Greek and Latin. He is charged by the jealousy of the Romans with cruelty and perfidy, but in fact history has nothing to substantiate these charges: on the contrary his actions are often magnanimous and honourable. His brilliance as a general largely sprang from his power of entering into the mind of his enemy. This was the man who inherited his father’s deep-laid plans of vengeance, and set out, his heart burning with hatred of Rome, to fulfil them.

We cannot dwell upon his wonderful march over the Alps and his brilliant series of victories on the soil of Italy. Hannibal’s whole plan of campaign was, briefly, to invade Italy by land with a compact striking force and raise the unwilling subjects of Rome against her, while the main force of Carthage attacked Sicily and Italy by sea. But it contained three serious miscalculations which brought it eventually to ruin. First, the southern Gauls on whom Hannibal relied for his communications and his base proved fickle and untrustworthy allies; secondly, he found that Rome’s mild imperial system had not produced unwilling subjects such as Carthage possessed in Africa; and thirdly, he hoped for support from Philip of Macedon, but here he was foiled by Roman diplomacy. Moreover, while the Romans showed a tenacity and power of recuperation unexampled in history, Carthage herself, now in the hands of the commercial oligarchs, gave him grudging and uncertain support. The firmness and courage of the Roman senate and people were amazing. Beaten again and again in the field at the Ticino, the Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannæ, Rome never lost her pride. She refused offers of help from King Hiero of Syracuse, she could find time to order the Illyrian chiefs to pay their tribute, she actually summoned Philip of Macedon to surrender her fugitive rebel Demetrius. She kept an army in Spain; a fleet still cruised in Greek waters; she had an army in Sicily, while four legions besieged Capua; she had troops in Sardinia, three legions in North Italy, two legions as a garrison in the capital—no fewer than 200,000 citizens under arms. When the foolish demagogue Varro returned in defeat and disgrace from the awful disaster at Cannæ, the senate thanked him for not having committed suicide—“for not having despaired of the salvation of his country.”