It is surely unnecessary to emphasise the meaning of all this. An army was now a trained corps against which no levy of recruits could stand for an instant. Hitherto it had been the chief guarantee against usurpation by a general that new armies could be summoned from the soil at any time. Now there was a weapon in the hands of a successful general against which the feeble safeguards of the republican constitution were powerless. As with the first trained army in English history, the general of such a force became master of the destinies of the state so long as the allegiance of the soldiers was personal rather than patriotic. The Roman soldier’s allegiance had always been personal and now it became more so. Moreover the Roman constitution had never sought to distinguish military from civil power. Hence that day in 100 B.C., when the Appuleian code was carried under threat of the legions of Marius, was of evil omen for the constitution. Less than twenty years were to elapse before a Roman army entered Rome in triumph to support the political enactments of Sulla. It is in reality henceforward one long state of civil war, open or concealed, between rival generals, until at last a permanent military monarchy was established. It only required a bold free spirit like that of Julius Cæsar to discern the real facts of the case. Marius, as we have already seen, had not sufficient intellect to play a political part with success; Sulla attained what was really a monarchical position but retired when he had won it. Pompeius never had the courage to face the situation. Cæsar had, but he was sacrificed to the republican tradition. Finally the diplomatic Augustus realised the long inevitable fact.
Henceforth, then, it is merely a question of who shall be Emperor of Rome. The causes of the end of Rome’s incoherent constitutional system, called by us a Republic, are already clear. There are the constitutional causes—above all the inelasticity of the Roman system, which made legitimate reform impossible, provided no machinery to express the will of the people, and rendered it inevitable that rioting should accompany every change. It was a constitution essentially municipal and the tribunate was the centre of mischief. Then there are the economic causes, now working more banefully than ever, and causing the decay of the agricultural population, the rise of a dangerous uneducated city proletariat, and the corruption of the governing aristocracy. There was the political fact that the government of a vast ill-organised empire destroyed the Republican spirit and further increased corruption, while it denationalised the Roman temper. Lastly, there is the military cause, namely, the professionalisation of the army, putting excessive power into the hands of the general and replacing patriotism by esprit de corps.
It strikes the onlooker that no one of these evils, nor even the accumulation of them, need have been fatal to the republican system if there had been a genuine spirit of patriotic enthusiasm determined to overcome them. For instance, if the great men of Rome had been loyal and patriotic there is no reason why the excessive power of the generals should have led to high treason. And again, though the provincial system was misbegotten it might have been corrected and reformed. But it was the spirit that failed. Was not that just because Roman power had outstripped Roman civilisation? For the upper-class Roman, faith was dead or dying, and there were no high interests of the mind to replace it. Fighting was their sole inherited interest and their tastes were correspondingly brutal and bloody. The last agony of the Republic in the period we are now considering is painful enough, but the wise will surely regard it as the period in which a new and much more hopeful order of things was gradually evolved.
Sulla
On the extinction of Marius there arose Sulla. Sulla was the aristocrat of talent, almost of genius, who tried to save the state by reaction. He tried, vainly and foolishly enough, to bolster up the rickety structure of senatorial ascendancy, but had not the patience or the wisdom to attempt even that with any thoroughness. L. Cornelius Sulla was of the class of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belong, but an inferior specimen of the class. Though of noble birth he had risen from poverty and obscurity by his own talents. He was clever—and he did the most foolish acts in history. He was handsome—and his face in later life is described as “a mulberry speckled with meal.” He was brave and successful in war; half lion and half fox, they said, and the fox was the more dangerous of the two. He secured the affections of his soldiers by giving them free licence to plunder or to murder unpopular officers. He was a rake and a gambler, reckless of bloodshed as he was careless of praise or blame, and he had that fatal belief in a star which has led better men than him to follow will-o’-the-wisps. He might have stood where Cæsar stands. He would have made a very typical bad emperor, and whatever it was that made him decline to be one, it was not patriotism. He was as cultured as Nero, and showed it by sacking Athens, plundering Delphi, and looting a famous library. Like Nero, but unlike the majority of his fellow-countrymen, he had a sense of humour.
After the shelving of Marius and the destruction of his democratic associates the governing clique pursued its old course of headlong folly. For one thing the aristocrats soon fell out with the capitalists, which is always an unwise thing for aristocrats to do. The equestrian jury-courts established by Gracchus acted with brutal simplicity on behalf of their tax-gathering and tax-farming brothers against whatever honest governors proceeded from the senate. Men were condemned for honest administration in those days. For another thing the bitter cry of the Italian “allies,” who bore all the hard knocks of the Roman service, and in return got nothing but servitude, was persistently and contemptuously ignored. In 95 a consular law flatly prohibited them from ever claiming the franchise. But presently there came forward a new reformer in M. Livius Drusus. This remarkable man might be described as a third Gracchus, only that he saw the futility of the so-called democracy of Rome, and adopted other means to attain his ends. On the one hand he was a champion of the senate against the knights, and on the other hand he was resolved to give the Italians their rights. He seems to have promoted a widespread secret organisation among the Italians. He then proposed four measures: the inevitable vote-catching corn law and agrarian law, the jury-courts to be restored to the senate, the senate for that purpose to be enlarged by the inclusion of three hundred knights, and, lastly, citizenship for the allies. The first three were carried, not without violence, but the fourth was his stumbling-block. The Italians were by now so clamorous that civil war was inevitable if it were refused, and no man denied the justice of their claim. But neither justice nor expediency had any power to move the dead weight of senatorial conservatism. Drusus was murdered and his laws repealed. That was the signal for the long and terrible Social War which completed the ruin of Italy and caused grave alarm for the very existence of Rome herself. In the course of this struggle and in fear for her existence Rome yielded in fact, if not openly, to the demand of the Italians. Some states received the franchise as a reward for fidelity and others as a bait for submission. By a law of 89 all Italians who applied to the prætor within sixty days received the citizenship, and this belated concession had its effect. The face of Italy had been covered with mourning to secure it. Even so the governing clique succeeded in nullifying the political value of the concession by confining the Italians along with the Roman freedmen to a few of the tribes so that their votes were almost useless.
The pressure of this war and of the great Mithradatic war which began simultaneously in Asia led to a serious economic crisis at Rome. Debt and usury were the symptoms, and when a prætor tried to meet it by reviving the old laws against usury he was murdered in his priestly robes at sacrifice. Now we begin to hear the ominous cry of “Novæ tabulæ”—the clean slate for debtors. A popular orator named Sulpicius Rufus, whose programme included the exclusion of all bankrupts from the senate, protected his valuable person with a bodyguard of 3000 hired roughs, and organised a mock senate of 300 high-spirited young bloods. Then, since Sulla with his army threatened opposition, he passed a decree giving the command of the great army destined to fight Mithradates to the old Marius. During the Social War both these generals had held command with some success, but on the whole the reputation of Marius had declined while that of Sulla had increased. Without hesitation Sulla now marched his army into Rome, and won a battle in the streets of the city. Sulpicius was of course executed, his head was nailed to the rostra, and Marius escaped under circumstances of romantic adventure. Sulla was thus in the year 88 completely master of Rome.
At this moment his real ambition was for more fighting. Mithradates, King of Pontus,[16] was then in full career of rebellion against the Roman dominion in Asia, where 80,000 Roman traders and money-lenders were murdered in a sudden mutiny. Sulla saw in Mithradates a worthy foeman, and much preferred glory on the fields of Asia to Roman politics; and besides, his army was clamouring for plunder. So he hastily flung out a series of constitutional reforms designed to restore the senate to more than its ancient predominance, and then set out for the East, heedless or ignorant of the fact that he had not really changed anything. On the contrary he had left at Rome in sole charge the new consul, Cinna, the worst and most dangerous of all the demagogues. Sulla—most innocent of reprobates—seems to have fancied that an oath to obey his constitution would restrain such a man at such a time.
Consequently as soon as his back was turned a fresh revolution broke out. Cinna also brought an army to Rome and invited Marius to return. Then the old general, furious with all his disappointments, began a fearful debauch of bloodshed. Every distinguished senator left in Rome, including statesmen like L. Cæsar, soldiers like Catulus, orators like Antonius and Crassus, were butchered by his slaves and their heads displayed in the forum. In 86 Marius gained the goal of his ambition, that seventh consulship which had been promised him long ago by a prophet. In the same year he died. Now for four years Cinna ruled as monarch at Rome. Year after year he assumed the consulship and nominated the other magistrates at his own choice without the formality of election. He repealed the laws of Sulla, equalised all the citizens in the tribes, and reduced all debts by 75 per cent. It is the last measure which is truly typical of Roman democracy. Meanwhile, of course, the reckoning was in preparation across the seas. Sulla was winning glorious victories in Greece and Asia, and at length in 84, drove Mithradates to surrender temporarily. Cinna, who does not seem to have understood that a Roman army belonged not to the republic but to its general, audaciously set out to supersede Sulla, and was murdered by the troops.
Sulla, having offered terms which the government very foolishly declined, came home in 83 after five years’ absence bearing not peace but a sword. He had five veteran legions of his own, the exiled aristocrats joined him, and among them a young man called Pompeius with three more legions. The lead of the democratic party had now fallen into the hands of a young Marius, and he having no troops to oppose the returning veterans decided to join the Samnite rebels who remained unconquered from the Social War. Before leaving the city they ordered a final and still more bloody massacre of the surviving aristocrats; practically all the men of distinction left in the city suffered death. Sulla had to fight 40,000 Samnites at the Colline Gate of Rome, and after a desperate struggle was victorious. The young Marius committed suicide. Thus Sulla was once more master of Rome. His 8000 Samnite prisoners were slaughtered in the Circus. Of the Roman democrats, 80 senators, 3600 equites, and over 2000 private citizens were proscribed, and their heads nailed up in the forum. In Spain, Sertorius, an honest and valorous democrat, maintained a gallant struggle by the aid of a miraculous deer, and a native Spanish army trained on the Roman model, until at last he fell by treachery.
For two years Sulla was monarch at Rome. For the purpose he invented a sort of revival of the obsolete dictatorship, without limit of time and without a colleague. If we care for the term, Sulla was at that time as much “Emperor” as Augustus. He enacted a whole constitution of his own—which it is scarcely necessary to recount since scarcely anything of it survived—all destined to put the senate on its throne again, and then simply abdicated and retired into private life. I think he was bored with Rome and politics. It is generally admitted that he had a sense of humour. It was a very foolish thing to do. But Sulla’s star was with him and he died in his bed. His dying moments were comforted by the apparition of his deceased wife (he had had five) and son, who invited him to join them in the land of peace and bliss beyond the grave.
Sulla was hardly dead before another consul had marched against Rome with his army and suffered defeat in the city. But these were mere episodes. The streets of the sacred city were in a perpetual state of war: every serious politician had to organise his gang of roughs, and when the very senate-house was burnt down in one such encounter it only seemed an excessive display of political zeal. Of constitutional government there was little pretence. The seas were swarming with pirates, no longer isolated rovers who preyed upon commerce, but an organised pirate-state with head-quarters in Cilicia, and a great fleet consisting of all the broken men and desperate outlaws of the unhappy Mediterranean world. They sailed the high seas in fleets under admirals who voyaged in state like princes. For their homes they had impregnable citadels among the creeks of the Cilician and Dalmatian coasts where they stored their families and their plunder. They were not afraid to march inland to sack a city or loot a rich temple. Commerce at sea was ruined, even the food-supply of the capital was occasionally cut off. On land and even in Italy things were not much better. All through Republican history (but seldom afterwards) we hear of risings among the slaves of Italy. Now, under the plantation system, the inaccessible Apennine highlands were swarming with desperate runaways who constantly committed minor acts of brigandage. In 73 they found a leader in Spartacus, the gladiator who was said to be of royal descent in Thrace. Starting as a mere handful the band swelled in the course of a few months to 40,000. Roman armies one after another and ten in all marched against them in vain. Two consuls were defeated, many eagles were captured, Italy was at their mercy. Respectable towns like Thurii and Nola were seized, their prisoners were crucified like slaves or forced with grim irony to fight one another to the death like gladiators. Thus the most frightful form of civil war was devastating Italy. It was necessary to raise an army of eight legions to crush the slaves, and the command was entrusted to Marcus Crassus, who even then had to decimate a legion before he could get his cowardly troops to stand and fight. After several stubborn battles, and aided by the want of discipline which was even more conspicuous among the slaves than among the Romans, Crassus accomplished his task. Six thousand crucified slaves who lined the road from Capua to Rome testified to the restoration of order.
Abroad matters were little better. The war against Mithradates, which had provided so many Roman triumphs and had so often been proclaimed at an end, actually lasted for twenty-five years, and its duration was due rather to the ineptitude of the government than to the prowess of the unmilitary Asiatics. In Spain it took ten years to defeat Sertorius with his native troops, and even then the result was only accomplished by assassination. If a Hannibal had entered Italy in these latter days the state could not have survived. But there was only one military power of any consequence left in the world in those days, the Parthians. Here there were half-hellenised despots ruling over tribes of warriors only lately descended from the Caucasian and Armenian highlands, and still nursing a fierce mountain spirit though they occupied the rich plains of Mesopotamia. Crassus, the victor over the slaves, was sent to fight them with a great army, but the millionaire displayed wretched ignorance of strategy and especially of the perils of Eastern warfare. He blundered on into the wilderness and tried to meet the terrible horse-bowmen and mail-clad lancers of the East with his legions in a hollow square. The result was the great disaster of Carrhæ in 53, a defeat which amid all the shameful ignominies of this period rankled continually owing to the loss of the eagles and the tragic fate of the leader. Marcus Crassus himself was an almost wholly repulsive character, who had amassed a fortune, colossal even in those days of millionaires, by the most discreditable method. The foundations of his millions had been laid by speculating in the property of the victims of Sulla’s proscriptions. He had been a slave-trainer on a large scale and at one time he had organised a private fire-brigade which he used for acquiring house-property cheaply by blackmail. By lending money to the young spendthrifts of the aristocracy he obtained great influence at Rome, and indeed figures in the wretched politics of his day as a statesman on equality with really great men like Cæsar and Pompeius. But he had no policy and was only of importance through his wealth and influence.
Pompeius and Cæsar
So we come to the final phase of the Republic—the great struggle between the giants Cæsar and Pompeius, with figures like Cicero, Cato, and Clodius in the background. I do not propose to linger over this period, because on the one hand it is so thoroughly well known as the period of fullest evidence in all Roman history, and therefore would require a volume for adequate treatment, and on the other hand because it has been such a battle-ground for partisan historians of all times that it is difficult in such a summary as this to do justice without detailed argument.
Gneius Pompeius the Great[17] had first come into prominence as a supporter of Sulla. He was of high official family and was a born soldier. That is really the secret of his career. Like Marius he was a general and no statesman, but he was a very great general, and one of the few honest men, one might almost say one of the few gentlemen, of his period. The tragedy of his life was to be born in such a period. He had disdained the minor offices of state, and relying on his military renown but in defiance of the law, he stood for the consulship in 70 B.C. As the official aristocracy objected he went over to the democrats, and allied himself with Crassus. These two, elected under threat of Pompeius’s army, straightway repealed most of the Sullan constitution, and restored the balance of power to the knights and the assembly. At the end of the year Pompeius retired into private life. This was characteristic of him; he was capable of grandiose schemes but he lived in fear of public opinion, and he was really moved when orators spoke of illegality. Meanwhile there was a loud demand for some comprehensive scheme of attack upon the pirates. No ordinary
consular command would do. Even the Roman senate was by this time convinced that it was useless to send legions and cavalry against pirate ships. Accordingly a Gabinian Law of 67 gave to Pompeius a command of unprecedented magnitude. Millions of money were voted to him, he was to be supreme over all the seas and all the coasts for fifty miles inland for three years, with a staff of twenty-five legates, and all governors were to obey his orders. The price of corn fell at once: Pompeius discovered abundance of it in the granaries of the Sicilian corn trust. Then he began a systematic drive of the seas, and in about three months had cleared them. Thousands of pirates were caught and crucified. All this made Pompeius the most powerful and the most dangerous man in Rome.
Next the tribune Manilius, in whose favour that rising novus homo the friend of our youth, Marcus Tullius Cicero, pronounced an oration, gave to Pompeius another huge commission against Mithradates, the irrepressible rebel of Asia. Pompeius succeeded where all his predecessors, from Sulla to Lucullus, had failed, and the wicked old king was driven to suicide. Then Pompeius proceeded to organise the East like an Alexander, but always in perfect loyalty to Rome.
While Pompeius was absent the so-called democracy, which mostly consisted of hired ruffians in the pay of discontented nobles, ruled the streets of the city. Among the young nobles who took this side was one more dissolute and more foppish than the rest, a notorious adulterer and spendthrift, Gaius Julius Cæsar. Though of the highest birth—the goddess Venus by her marriage with the father of Æneas was among his ancestors—he was also by lineage associated with the democracy. His aunt was the wife of Marius, and his wife was a daughter of Cinna. He began his public career quaintly enough as pontifex maximus. When Julia the widow of Marius died, young Cæsar had the audacity to display images and utter an oration in praise of Marius. This, as was intended, set all the gossips talking, and his amazing extravagance kept him well in the public eye. On one occasion he exhibited three hundred gladiators in silver armour, although he was known to be penniless. Probably Crassus was his financier all along.
At this time there was another of the frequently recurring financial crises at Rome. Everybody was deeply in debt, and loud rose the cry for the clean slate, as part of the democratic programme—the only intelligible part. This was the cause of the famous conspiracy of Catiline, who, if Cicero may be trusted, proposed to seize and burn Rome by the aid of the discontented Sullan colonists in Etruria. Both Cæsar and Crassus are said to have favoured the plot, but it is exceedingly difficult to see what a large owner of Roman house property had to gain by it. Cicero was the consul for the year 63, and though it is the fashion just now to sneer at Cicero, he seems to have displayed courage and promptitude in dealing with the conspirators. Unfortunately his arrest and execution of Catiline was technically illegal. Cicero himself, as a parvenu, was naturally an aristocrat, and his policy, though futile, was intelligible. Briefly, it was to unite the senate with the capitalist class in what he called the “union of the orders” against the democratic elements of disorder. Pompeius came home from the East to find the conspiracy crushed. He and his legions were not wanted. With incredible folly and ingratitude the senate, led by Cicero, refused even to grant the lands he had promised to his veterans.
Cæsar had gone as prætor to Spain, and there began to win military renown—much to the surprise of his friends—and money. He wanted the consulship for the next year, and therefore required the support of Pompeius, who had now been driven away from the aristocratic party to which he belonged by sympathy. Crassus came in as Cæsar’s creditor and as the necessary millionaire. Thus was formed the Triumvirate of the year 60, and in 59 Cæsar became consul. By this time he had conceived high, possibly the highest, ambitions. Marius and Sulla, not to mention Alexander and Æneas, had always been much in his mind. For the present his object was to acquire a lasting office and secure the allegiance of a trained army. Cæsar’s colleague in the consulship was a certain Bibulus, who tried to stop the dangerous proceedings of the democrat by seeing omens in the heavens every day, but no one, least of all Cæsar, took any notice of him. The only serious opposition came from Cato the Younger, who represented the genuine and respectable aristocracy. This Cato was a queer anachronism at Rome, an honest man. He was also, if biography may be trusted, a bigot and a priggish eccentric. He was the sort of man to go about Africa without a hat, or to sit on the judicial bench without shoes, because such was the mos maiorum. He tried to revive the ways which had been styled old-fashioned in his grandfather. Nevertheless he was upright and brave, a good soldier, and a man with a clear though impossible policy. Once again it is the fault of rhetorical history that all the good men of Rome appear as prigs and eccentrics. This man most courageously opposed his veto to the proceedings of Cæsar, though he was hustled and beaten by the democratic hirelings, then organised under that most notorious scoundrel Clodius. But the result was that though Cæsar’s laws might pass, they could afterwards be declared illegal, and Cæsar would be liable to prosecution as soon as he became a private citizen. However, he had no immediate intention of becoming a private citizen. He secured the province of Gaul for five years with four legions.
Now Gaul was not reckoned an important province. It was only the peaceful plain of Upper Italy to which the senate had added Narbonensian Gaul, a southern strip of France, chiefly considered as a step on the road to Spain. Four legions was a small consular army for those days; no one supposed that he would have much fighting. But either Cæsar had received secret intelligence or else he had very good luck. At the outset he was called to deal with a great immigration of the barbarian Helvetii, who were migrating out of Switzerland into Gaul and threatening the province.
The conservatives at Rome maintained that Cæsar’s conquests in Gaul were the result of wanton aggression—cheap victories over inoffensive savages, wholly unjustifiable and unauthorised. At this point it is scarcely possible to avoid entering upon the much-debated question of Cæsar’s real character. For orthodox Romans Cæsar was the founder of the empire, a person not only of divine descent, but himself divine. All emperors took his name, until that surname of Cæsar, once a mere nickname, came, in half the languages of Europe, to be synonymous with “Emperor.” For the Middle Ages he stood with Constantine, who christianised the Empire, and Charlemagne, who revived it, as the founder of that divinely instituted polity which shared with the Church God’s viceregency on earth. In the eyes of Dante, Cæsar stood very near to Christ, for the poet peoples the frozen heart of his Inferno with three tormented figures who writhe in the very jaws of Cocytus. Along with Judas Iscariot are the two murderers of Julius Cæsar. Though the Renaissance stripped him of much of his legendary greatness, Cæsar remained for the men of Shakespeare’s day the embodiment of imperial pride. Shakespeare himself was too great an artist to make any of his characters more or less than human, but it is evidently Brutus who has the sympathies of the dramatist. In the French Revolution, again, Brutus and Cassius were heroes and glorious tyrannicides. The reaction against early nineteenth-century liberalism brought Cæsar once more into honour, and Mommsen, the prophet of Cæsarism, makes him the hero of his great history. To Mommsen Cæsar was almost divine, the clear-sighted and magnanimous “saviour” who alone saw the true path out of the disorders of his city. From this view again we are apparently now in reaction once more. To the latest critics the greatness of Cæsar and of Mommsen are alike abhorrent, and Signor Ferrero depicts his greatest fellow-countryman as an unscrupulous demagogue who blundered into renown through treachery and bloodshed.
The historical principle by which this result is attained is rather typical of certain modern critical methods. Since the account of the Gallic Wars was written chiefly by Cæsar himself, and Cæsar is by hypothesis a scoundrel, the history of these wars must be found by reading between the lines of Cæsar’s account, putting the most unfavourable construction upon everything and preferring any evidence to his, even if it be that of two centuries later. If any gaps or inconsistencies are noticed they must be treated as concealing defeats or acts of treachery. Written in this spirit, the story of the Gallic Wars is a very black one for Cæsar and Rome. Yet unbiassed readers must generally admit that Cæsar was a very careful and on the whole an honest historian. The accusation that he was capable of relentless cruelty springs from his own admissions. It was in the Roman character to despise life, and when Cæsar thought that a rebellious tribe needed a lesson he did not hesitate to massacre defenceless women and children or to lay waste miles of territory with fire and sword. But, on the other hand, his preference was for clemency and justice.
Without making him a demigod, we ought to be able to see his greatness. As a young man his ardour of soul, working in a debased society without ideals, made him simply more extravagant and more foppish than the spendthrifts and rakes who surrounded him. Doubtless the scandalous Suetonius has embellished the story of his early follies. Many of his youthful escapades were, one suspects, carefully designed to bring him into notice. It is probable that from a very early age he was ambitious, and his family connections clearly marked out his career as a democrat. He had the failure of Sulla before his eyes. The greatness of his character lay chiefly in an instinctive hatred for muddle and pretence. He could not fail to see the hopeless confusion into which the Roman state had fallen. From the first, I think, he was aiming at power for himself in order to put things straight. Whether self or country came first in his calculations, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to decide; but the historian is not necessarily a cynic when he demands strong proof of altruism in the world of politics. To obtain power the democratic side was the only possible one, for the nobles stood for the predominance only of their class. Crassus was necessary to Cæsar as his banker and creditor until he had acquired a fortune for himself by conquest. Pompeius was the foremost soldier of the day, and it is probable that Cæsar deliberately sought to climb over the shoulders of Pompeius into monarchy. He saw—he could not help seeing, for it was written plainly in the history of the past century—that for power two things were necessary, the support of the mob in the forum and the backing of a veteran army. At the time when Cæsar got Gaul for his province there was a fresh movement towards imperial expansion. Foreign conquest afforded some relief for the chagrins of internal politics. By it Marius, Sulla, and Pompeius had become powerful. If Cæsar wanted to eclipse them all, he must present Rome with a new province, the most powerful of all bribes. It was in this spirit that he set out for Gaul. If his ulterior motive was selfish it is certain that he threw himself heart and soul, with all the burning energy of which his tireless spirit was capable, into the work of conquest and civilisation.
And what a work it was! Archæology is now beginning to prove to history that the so-called barbarians were by no means always savages. Even the “naked woad-stained” Britons had their arts and industries and political systems. The Gauls, when Cæsar attacked them, were well on the road to civilisation. Druidism was a declining force, town-life was beginning, and there was even a fairly artistic coinage. The Gallic pottery is by no means destitute of beauty. As soldiers the Gauls showed many of the qualities of their descendants, a devoted impetuosity in the charge, coupled with a lack of tenacity in resistance which always cost them dear. Much of Cæsar’s success was due to his skill in dividing them against themselves, but many of his difficulties arose from their fickle disposition. Mommsen, like a true Bismarckian German, has a striking comparison of the ancient Gallic Celt with the modern Irishman.
“On the eve,” he says, “of parting from this remarkable nation, we may be allowed to call attention to the fact that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire and the Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits which we are accustomed to recognise as marking the Irish. Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields; the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation ... the droll humour ... the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds of past ages, and the most decided talent for rhetoric and poetry; the curiosity—no trader was allowed to pass before he had told in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news—and the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts ... the childlike piety which sees in the priest a father and asks him for advice in all things” (this, by the way, was apparently a characteristic of the contemporary Germans also), “the unsurpassed fervour of national feeling, and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen cling together almost like one family in opposition to the stranger; the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance leader that presents himself, but at the same time the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage equally remote from presumption and pusillanimity, to perceive the right time for waiting and for striking, to obtain or even barely to tolerate any organisation, any sort of fixed military or political discipline. It is, and remains, at all times and places the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisitive, credulous, amiable, clever, but—from a political point of view—thoroughly useless nation; and therefore its fate has been always and everywhere the same.”
The internal politics of Gaul seem to have been marked by a division between two parties, one the conservative party of the aristocratic knights, the other a nationalist and popular faction. Cæsar used these divisions for the furtherance of his scheme of conquest. He was not only a consummate general with an instinct for strategic points and huge combinations, but he was also a superb regimental officer in the making of soldiers. By the end of his ten years he had forged a small but invincible army devoted to his interests and entirely confident in his leadership. Personally, moreover, the Roman debauchee was the best soldier in the army. Physically he was a stranger to weariness or fatigue. He could travel immense distances with incredible rapidity, alone on horseback, or with a handful of followers. He seemed ubiquitous. In the battle, when his men wavered, he would leap down into the ranks, sword in hand, or snatch the standard from the hand of a centurion and fight among the foremost. No detail of fortification or commissariat escaped him, and he, more than any one else, showed the power of engineering in warfare. In the supreme battle against Pompeius he even carried his devotion to the spade beyond reasonable limits when he tried to circumvallate the much larger camp of his enemies. One of his most surprising exploits was when half Gaul, supposed to be pacified, rose in sudden revolt under Vercingetorix. With a much smaller army he chased the rebels into the fortress of Alesia, neglecting for the time all communication with his base, and fully aware that a still larger army would soon advance to the relief of the besieged. He therefore entrenched himself outside the gates of the city and kept off the relieving force with one hand while he continued the siege with the other. But while he was capable of brilliant strokes of audacity like this, he was also a cold and cautious organiser of victory, ready to meet his enemies on their own ground and with their own weapons.
In this great war, which ended in the conquest of Gaul, Cæsar’s expeditions to Britain were mere episodes which have been greatly exaggerated in the traditional histories of our schools. They were summer raids, like his dash across the Rhine, intended for a warning to the barbarians of the hinterland; for it seems that communication to and fro across the channel was continuous. It is probable enough that the persuasions of the Roman traders who swarmed after the eagles across Gaul had their influence also. Undoubtedly the Romans of this generation were keenly alive to commercial openings, and always on the search for mines, real or imaginary. Further, we cannot deny that Cæsar in all his undertakings had one eye upon his political position in Rome itself, and the “conquest of Britain,” that almost legendary corner of the earth, concealed in boreal mists and embosomed in the ever-flowing Ocean river, would be a sensational achievement calculated to outshine the Oriental triumphs of Pompeius. One cannot but place among the extravagances of hero-worship Mommsen’s belief that Cæsar had a prophetic insight into the true nature of the “German Peril” for Rome. When Cæsar took over the Gallic province there was no tremendous German menace. There had always been occasional irruptions of the barbarians from across the Rhine, and a steady German penetration of the Netherlands. Cæsar did not lay down any intelligible frontier policy: that was one of the achievements of Augustus. Both in Gaul and Britain it was simply a forward movement by a general of bold and untiring resolution, backed by an invincible army. The two trips to Britain, like those across the Rhine, were reconnaissances only, and the conquest of the island was one of the legacies which Cæsar intended to reserve for the future. His successor very wisely declined it. There was little immediate profit there, and the Gallic conquests had glutted the Roman market with slaves.
Gaul had submitted easily to a force of less than forty thousand Romans; then it had revolted unsuccessfully. In the end the whole country acknowledged defeat and rapidly began to assimilate Latin civilisation. Meanwhile in the imperial city the Republic was slowly expiring by a natural death. Every winter Cæsar returned to the Cisalpine part of his province to receive intelligence from Rome and secure his position there. Clodius, the most evil of mob-leaders, was his agent with the democracy. Clodius had managed to hound the respectable Cicero into exile for his share in suppressing Catiline, and when Cicero, who was really popular at Rome, had at length persuaded Pompeius to allow his return, the great orator remained thenceforward a timid and reluctant servant of the triumvirate, defending their friends or prosecuting their enemies, with inward reluctance, no doubt, but with unimpaired eloquence. With his astonishing victories in Gaul the star of Julius was rising in the political heavens. The commons of Rome were not only dazzled by his successes, but captivated by his largesses. Meanwhile Pompeius was living on his military reputation, and slowly squandering it by his political incapacity. He continued to hold various high offices unknown to the constitution; he became sole consul, a thing abhorrent to the Roman system; he held the province of Spain and governed it from Italy through his legates, and at the same time continued to exercise a general oversight over the corn-supply of Rome. In fact there was scarcely anything in the future position of a Roman emperor which had not its precedent in the career of Pompeius. Had he wished it, or, more probably, had he known how to obtain it, he and not Augustus might easily have been the first Roman emperor. By taste and natural sympathies he was an aristocrat, but the force of circumstances had driven him into an uncomfortable position of alliance with Cæsar the democrat and Crassus the plutocrat. This was in a large measure the secret of his political helplessness. He, the conqueror of the East, often found himself openly flouted, nay, actually hustled and threatened in the streets, by the organised roughs. Meanwhile there was a small but tenacious opposition party of aristocrats, who had no discipline and therefore no leaders, but among whom Cato and Marcellus were the most conspicuous. They had not the strength to offer any consistent resistance to Cæsar’s progress, which they watched with growing jealousy and alarm. They had not the sense to rally the respectable elements in the state to their side. Both Cicero and Pompeius would readily have joined them if they had made it possible. Instead of that, they were content to carp at Cæsar’s achievements and threaten him with a prosecution as soon as he should return to private life. That was the stupidest mistake, for it made Cæsar resolve at all costs to retain his command, and eventually precipitated the civil war.
As it can easily be seen, the coalition between Cæsar and Pompeius was not a natural one: psychologically they had nothing in common, and their interests soon began to diverge. Pompeius could hardly fail to perceive that Cæsar was climbing by his help and at his expense. The old general saw the memory of his great deeds eclipsed by the new one, and there was no lack of mischief-makers to widen the breach. The alliance had been cemented in a striking fashion at a conference at Lucca in 56 B.C. when the conservatives were threatening to annul Cæsar’s acts in Gaul. Cæsar had replied by inviting Pompeius to meet him in his southern province; he also invited those senators who were his friends to appear at the same time. Two hundred senators had answered the invitation, and for the time being the opposition died away into grumbling.
But now the breach was growing open to all men’s eyes. Cæsar’s charming daughter, Julia, who had been married to Pompeius as a pledge of union, and had done much to hold the two chiefs together, died at an early age in the year 54. In the next year Crassus, the mediating third party of the “triumvirate,” met his fate at Carrhæ. In the next there were more than ordinary disorders over the elections, culminating in a fierce battle in the forum between the rival gangs of Clodius for the triumvirate and Milo for the senate. The senate-house was burnt and Clodius slain. Pompeius then became sole consul, and proceeded, under threat of his army, to introduce a series of laws almost openly aimed at Cæsar. By the Pompeian law of magistrates Cæsar would be compelled to appear in Rome as a private citizen for some months in the year 49, at the mercy of his enemies, while Pompeius himself, by having his titular command in Spain prolonged, would still be master of an army. These laws were passed at the crisis of Cæsar’s fate in Gaul, when the whole nation had risen in arms against him. But Cæsar emerged victorious, and was now, in the year 50, free to consider his position in regard to Pompeius and the senate. Cæsar himself maintains that he was reluctant to resort to violence, and I think we may believe him. Though nine legions were still under his command, he could hardly venture to denude the newly conquered province of its garrisons, while Pompeius was master of an equal number of legions, including the veteran Spanish troops, and could levy any number of recruits or reservists in Italy. Cæsar could not have faced the prospect of a civil war with any confidence as to the result, even if he had been the sort of man to provoke it without scruple. There is a further proof: as late as 50 B.C. he resigned two legions to Pompeius, which would have been madness if he had then intended to wade through bloodshed to a throne. In all the abortive negotiations which preceded the outbreak of the great civil war, Cæsar was prepared to resign everything except the one condition upon which his very life depended, namely, that he should not have to return to Rome as a defenceless private citizen. The civil war was due to the mad folly of the conservatives led by Marcellus, who had convinced themselves that Cæsar meant to sack Rome with his Gallic cavalry and to reign as tyrant over its ashes. In the end they succeeded in communicating their panic to Pompeius.
Conciliatory to the last, Cæsar was driven to show that he was in earnest. Bidden to dismiss his army, and declared a public enemy, in January 49 B.C. he took the decisive step of crossing the little river Rubicon which marked the frontier of Italy. Even then it was only a demonstration of force. Only 1500 men followed Cæsar to Rimini and Arezzo, and he still offered peace on the most moderate terms. But the panic-stricken and conscience-stricken senators, still believing in the imminent sack of Rome, decided to leave their wives and children there while they saved their precious necks, in headlong flight to Capua, and then to Brindisi, and then to Greece. The great Pompeius showed equal panic. Apparently demoralised by Cæsar’s swift and decisive movements, he decided to give up Italy without a struggle and retire to the East, where all his triumphs had been won. From there he would fight for the lordship of the world.