No doubt Rome owed something, but not as much as her poets and orators pretended, to the cautious tactics of Quintus Fabius. At any rate, he gave her time to grow used to the presence of the invader and to recover from the shock of the three disasters with which the war opened. The Romans had never before been called upon to face a consummate strategist. Pyrrhus had been, within the limitations of Greek warfare, a clever tactician; he had even shown the originality to copy the Roman manipular system in his later battles. But Hannibal was more than a strategist; he was a psychologist who knew when the opposing general was rash and when he was wary, who had spies everywhere and could supplement their intelligence by disguising himself to do his own scouting. Scouting was an art that the Romans had yet to learn by bitter experience. At the Trasimene Lake[10] they blundered straight into the most obvious of natural death-traps. But the Romans were always good learners, and, as usually happens, the amateur patriot army steadily improved during the war while the hired professionals steadily deteriorated. The actual strategy by which Hannibal won most of his battles was simple enough. It was the policy of a long weak centre into which the Roman legions buried themselves deep while the two strong wings of the enemy closed round on their flanks and rear. In his Numidian horsemen Hannibal had the finest light cavalry yet known to European warfare.
For a time all went brilliantly for the invader. Italians, Greeks, and Gauls joined his victorious standard. Rome was on the brink of despair. The very gods began to tremble; their statues sweated blood, two-headed lambs were born with alarming frequency, and cows in Apulia uttered prophetic warnings with human voices; the most horrible of omens portended destruction. But the city and the senate never lost heart and gradually as the years passed by Hannibal began to see that his cause was lost. The Latin allies stood firm for Rome. The Romans were able to hold Sicily and even despatch a brilliant and lucky young general named Scipio to reconquer Spain. Thus the longed-for reinforcements were cut off. The stupid aristocracy of Carthage were jealous of their great soldier, and when at last a reinforcing Punic army from Spain managed to slip through into Italy, Nero caught it at the River Metaurus just before the junction was effected. The first news of that battle came to Hannibal when the Romans tossed over the rampart into his camp the bleeding head of the defeated general, his own brother Hasdrubal. Horace has sung of this tragic episode in his noblest manner:
This was in 207: in 206 Scipio won a decisive victory in Spain and in 205 made a counter-invasion upon the coast of Carthage. It was only “a forlorn hope of volunteers and disrated companies,” but it caused the recall of Hannibal and gained valuable African allies for Rome. The last scene of the duel was the victory of Zama in 202 in which Scipio won his title of Africanus and became the hero and saviour of Rome.[12] Carthage ceded Spain and the Spanish islands, lost her whole war-fleet, came under Roman suzerainty and agreed to pay an enormous indemnity. But her end was not yet. For another fifty years she was permitted to exist on sufferance in humiliation and agony.
Now, frightful as had been the losses of Rome in this seventeen-years’ conflict, and great as was her exhaustion, she proceeded in the very year following the peace with Carthage to enter upon a fresh series of campaigns. The Gauls of the north made a desperate revolt, sacked Piacenza and invested Cremona, but the Romans quickly brought them to reason. The Gauls could not, of course, receive any of the rights of citizenship as yet, but they received back their independence, and were left free of tribute to act as a bulwark against their northern cousins. There was incessant fighting in Spain also. In Sardinia there were perpetual slave-drives, until the market was glutted with slaves, and the phrase was begotten “as cheap as a Sardinian.” How could the senate at such a moment declare a fresh war with the greatest of European powers? Was it under pressure of that greedy commercial party at Rome of which we are beginning to hear so much? The suggestion is absurd. There were hard knocks and little money to be got from Macedon; and it is difficult to conceive how any powerful commercial interests could have arisen at Rome during the seventeen years of the Hannibalic War. If ever there was a nation whose early history declined the economic interpretation it was the Romans. Even when the Romans had conquered Macedon they shut down the famous gold mines because they did not know how to manage them! Nor, I think, was it any large-minded Welt-politik which led Rome into the Second Macedonian War. Doubtless Philip and the Greeks were dangerous and uncomfortable neighbours, and no doubt it was true that Philip of Macedon and Antiochus of Syria had formed a compact to divide up the realms of the boy-king of Egypt. But the war could probably have been postponed for years by negotiation. Philip did not want to fight Rome: he had not even ventured to intervene while she was almost prostrate before Hannibal. The fact is that the Romans were by habits and instinct a fighting people. From the earliest times they had inherited the custom of an annual summer campaign. Peace did not present itself to them, or most of their neighbours, as a desirable condition to be preserved as long as possible. They were soldiers and nought else, and what are soldiers for but for fighting? It is only blind optimism which can believe that nations are even now actuated habitually in their international relations by foresight and policy. “The plain truth is,” said William James, “that people want war. They want it anyhow; for itself, and apart from each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life’s fireworks.” That is certainly true of the Romans: the Roman state, as a whole, needed its customary annual campaign. It was the business of her statesmen and diplomats to choose the enemy and prepare a casus belli. To imagine the states of 200 B.C. as always calculating their actions solely on the basis of commercial interest must be unhistorical.
In their attack on Philip the Romans were allied with the most respectable elements in Levantine politics: Rhodes, the commercial republic; Pergamum, the kingdom of the cultivated Attalus; Athens, the ancient home of art and learning; Egypt, the centre of commerce and literature. Elsewhere[13] I have described how the simple Romans comported themselves in this land of higher civilisation. They trod almost reverently into the circle of Greek culture; they were flattered when the Athenians initiated them into the Eleusinian Mysteries, or when the Achæan League permitted them to take part in the Isthmian games. And when they had beaten Philip—not without difficulty, nor without indispensable aid from the Ætolian cavalry—at Cynocephalæ, they made no attempt at annexation. Leaving Philip crippled, they were content. Flamininus, their Philhellenic general, was proud to proclaim the liberty of Greece before he retired. He and many of his officers carried away with them an ineffaceable impression. They were returning to barbarism from a land rich in ancient temples of incredible splendour, crowded with works of art. They had seen the tragedies in the theatres, the runners in the games. They had heard the philosophers disputing in the colonnades, the orators haranguing in the market-place. A world glowing with life undreamt-of, where there were other things to live for than battle, had suddenly flashed upon their eyes.
The next great war was against Philip’s accomplice, Antiochus of Syria. This war was as inevitable as the last. Antiochus, puffed up with the pretensions of an Oriental King of Kings, was eager to match his strength against the parvenus Romans. Rome seemed, and perhaps was, reluctant to undertake the apparently enormous task at this moment, though Pergamum and Rhodes invoked her assistance. One strong cause for war was that Antiochus had given a home to Hannibal, Rome’s hunted but dreaded foe. If the Great King had but had the sense to give Hannibal power over his great host it might yet have gone hard with the Romans. As it was, the battle of Magnesia (190) was one of those tame victories in which Oriental hosts are butchered by superior Western weapons and methods of fighting. But even with the wealth of Syria spread out at her feet, Rome annexed nothing; not out of any spirit of self-denial, for she exacted an indemnity of almost four million sterling, but because she was not prepared to undertake the responsibility of governing regions so vast and so much more civilised than herself.
Actually, of course, the effect of these wars was to give Rome complete command of the Mediterranean coast-lands. Though she did not annex, she accepted suzerainty; that is, she controlled, or attempted to control, foreign policy. Rome is the patron; Macedonia, Syria, Egypt, Pergamum, Rhodes, Bithynia, Athens, the two leagues and all the ancient states of Greece are her clients. The position of policeman and nurse of the Ægean world had been thrust upon Rome because she was strong and just. Even that was a terrific and bewildering responsibility. Every day fresh embassies came to Rome to complain of neighbours and solicit assistance—clever Greeks who would talk your head off with sophistries, and rich Asiatics who would corrupt you with bribes and blandishments. There was no one within reach who would stand up and fight squarely. In the West there were Provinces, in the East allies; it was difficult to know which gave most trouble.
So we come to the next stage, when the Romans began to annex and subjugate. It was the only way. In Macedonia, after Philip had been conquered and pardoned, Perseus arose and rebelled. After Perseus had been crushed and his kingdom dismembered, a bastard pretender arose and headed a revolt, joined by the Greeks. Obviously there was nothing for it but to round off the business by sending a permanent army under a permanent general to Macedonia, and to call it his “province.” Not even yet did the Romans dream of making cities like Athens her subjects. These free cities, however, needed a sharp lesson; and Corinth, as an almost impregnable fortress which had been a centre of Achæan mischief, was selected for destruction and destroyed in 146 B.C.
In the same year came the end of Carthage. During the last fifty years there had been incessant trouble there. Rome had left Carthage prostrate before her dangerous African enemies, and refused all her appeals to be allowed to defend herself. All the time Carthage was undoubtedly recovering financially from her defeat, in spite of her large annual tribute. This sight moved the fears and jealousy of the Romans. It was not sufficient to have ordered the expulsion of Hannibal. The Romans who had grown up under the shadow of the great Punic War had sucked in hate and fear of Carthage with their mother’s milk. Intelligent people like Scipio, who had seen Carthage in the dust, might mock at their fears. It was the Old Roman party, with their spokesman Cato and his stupid parrot-cry of delenda est Carthago, who constantly kept their nerves on edge, until at last in sheer panic they obeyed. The long feud between Carthage and the Berber chief Masinissa came to a head in 154. Masinissa appealed to Rome, and Rome ordered Carthage to dismiss her army and burn her fleet. Carthage, now desperate, refused, went to war with Masinissa, and was beaten. Then Rome declared war upon her—the Third Punic War. Two consuls landed with a large army and Carthage offered submission. The consuls demanded complete disarmament. Carthage submitted. Then the consuls demanded that the existing city should be destroyed and the inhabitants settled ten miles inland. That meant not only the destruction of their homes and hearths and temples, but the end of the commerce for which they lived. This preposterous demand shows that Cato’s policy had triumphed. Carthage could not submit to this, and there followed one of those frightful sieges in which the Semitic peoples show their amazing tenacity. Three years it lasted, by favour of the gross incompetence of the Roman generals; until at last a Scipio came to turn the tide once more. Carthage was destroyed utterly with fire and sword, her very site laid bare, and the soil sown with salt, in token that man should dwell there no more.
The destruction of these two cities, Corinth and Carthage, together with other facts such as the unreasonable irritation which Rome displayed against her Greek allies, Rhodes and Pergamum, have been taken by some modern historians to indicate, once more, a policy of commercial jealousy instigating the destruction of rival markets. In the one case, however, it has been proved that Corinth was no longer a great centre of Greek commerce when she was destroyed, and in the case of Carthage it was the party of Cato, who was much more of a farmer than a company-promoter, that urged destruction. A man of business might indeed be foolish enough to want to close the principal markets which bought and sold with him—there are such business men to-day—but he would scarcely be so mad as to have a fine commercial centre with its docks and quays utterly destroyed and cursed for ever. Similarly, when Macedon was conquered her rich gold mines were shut down by order of the senate. The truth is that Rome was tired and exhausted with her colossal wars, irritable and nervous beyond expression with the gigantic task of government which she had found thrust upon her. Surrounded with false friends and secret enemies, she was losing the noble sang froid she had displayed in times of real crisis. Corinth was destroyed as a warning to the Greeks, Carthage as an expiation for the lemures of the unburied Roman dead.
In considering the ancient, imperial, and provincial systems it is necessary for the modern to divest himself of all the geographical notions which spring from the study of maps. The ancients probably had only the most vague notions of territory. Natural frontiers such as mountains, rivers, and coasts were of course familiar to them, from the strategic point of view. Within those were cities great and small, which in the case of civilised people formed the units of life and government. In the case of barbarians there were tribes and nations, seldom sufficiently settled to produce any notion of geographical area. Thus when Rome conquered Sicily she was acquiring not so much one geographical unit, an island, as a collection of states of various types and constitutions. Similarly in the case of Spain; she said and thought that she acquired Spain, although the greater part of the Iberian peninsula remained unconquered for another century and a half. To remember the limitations of ancient geographical knowledge is essential to the understanding of the Roman provincial system. Provincia means in the first instance a sphere of official duty, a man’s provincia might be the feeding of the sacred geese or it might be the control of an army. It was not for a long time that the word came to connote a territorial area. When it did so, the day of the city-state was at an end.
The earliest Roman provinces were Sicily, acquired by conquest in the First Punic War, 241 B.C., then Corsica and Sardinia, annexed in the diplomatic intrigues which followed. Spain, or rather “the Spains.” Further and Hither, were the fruit of the Second Punic War (201). After the Third Punic War (146) the territory of Carthage became a province under the name of Africa. At the same time the Macedonian Wars gave Rome the province of Macedonia. To complete the list so far as the Roman Republic is concerned: Attalus III. bequeathed his kingdom to Rome in 133, and this became the province of Asia. In 121 the conquest of Southern Gaul gave Rome Gallia Narbonensis. In 103 the prevalence of piracy on the southern coasts of Asia Minor compelled the Romans to make Cilicia a province. In 81 a legislative act of Sulla brought the already conquered Cisalpine Gaul into the same category. The King of Bithynia imitated Attalus in bequeathing his kingdom to Rome. Cyrene also was bequeathed to Rome and united in one province with Crete in 63. In 64 Pompeius the Great deposed the King of Syria and annexed his kingdom. About the same time, on the death of Mithradates, Pontus was added to Bithynia as a united province. In 51 Julius Cæsar completed the conquest of Gaul and added it as Gallia Comata to the old province of Narbonensian Gaul. Finally in 31 Octavianus added Egypt to the list.
It was not the Roman way to think a situation out with the logic and directness of a Greek or a Frenchman. More like the Englishman, he took things as they came and made the best of them with as little derangement as possible of his pre-existing system and preconceived ideas. The Roman Empire was not governed on a system as it was not acquired by a policy. When Sicily came into the Roman hands, it came piecemeal in the course of the war. Various cities accepted Roman “alliance” on various terms. Rome had never been able to grant full citizenship to Greek states, because their inhabitants, speaking a foreign language, could not give the equivalent in military service. If Sicily had been Italian it would no doubt have entered the Roman alliance as a collection of municipia; as it was, the sixty-five or so separate Sicilian states continued to enjoy for the most part their previous constitutions under various agreements with Rome. Some were “free,” some were “free and confederate”; similarly of kings who yielded to Rome, some were styled “allies,” some “allies and friends.” The cities would have their charters and the kings would have their personal treaties with Rome which lapsed with their death. But in a region conquered in war most of the tribes or states were simply “stipendiary,” that is, tribute-paying. The stipendium paid was originally, and in theory, an indemnity or a contribution for the maintenance of a military force by people who were unqualified to give personal service. It was generally settled by a commission of ten members of the senate, who went out to organise a newly acquired territory. Even these tributary states had their charters from Rome. The stipendium was by no means extortionate. In Macedonia, for example, the people only paid to Rome half as much as they had previously paid to their kings. In Sicily and Sardinia the tillers of the soil paid a tithe, generally in kind (that is, in corn), to the Roman treasury, and the town-dwellers probably paid a poll-tax. It was an error of the jurists, who confused this tithe with the tenth paid by occupants of Roman public land, which afterwards led to the dangerous legal theory that Rome had acquired the whole soil of the country conquered by her arms and leased it back for a consideration to the original proprietors. As a matter of fact, few of the provinces were remunerative to the Roman state. Spain, where warfare was incessant, was certainly a heavy loss. Macedonia was no source of profit. Sicily, largely owing to the Roman Peace, became the granary of the capital, but Asia alone was a source of great wealth to the treasury. There were, of course, harbour dues for the provinces as for Italy herself.
On the whole, it is fair to say that local autonomy was generally preserved. Either through policy or, more probably, because the Romans habitually took things as they found them, the previous laws and constitutions of conquered units, whether cities or tribes, remained in force. In Syracuse, for example, the law of King Hiero remained, and it was much better for the Sicilians to pay their taxes to Rome than to be subject to the personal extortions of a monster like Agathocles. In law-suits between citizens of one Sicilian state the trial was to be held in that state by a native judge and according to the native laws—possibly with a right of appeal to the Roman governor. In suits between Romans and Sicilians the judge was to be a native of the defendant’s state. So far the Roman sway is the mildest, the most benevolent system of government which has ever been imposed by an empire upon conquered subjects. Athens, it will be remembered, had grown rich and beautiful by misapplying the contributions of allies which she had converted into the tribute of subjects. Sparta had put garrisons into every conquered city. So had Carthage. No modern power allows as much local autonomy to conquered territories as Rome granted to hers.
But in every conquered territory it was necessary to have an armed force, large or small according to circumstances, and for the soldiers a general. As all the Roman magistrates were military in the first instance, but also judicial and executive—as, in fact, the nature of Roman ideas of imperium implied an unlimited competence in every department of rule, the provincial general was also, necessarily, a provincial judge and administrator free from all control during his year of office. No doubt the Romans, if they had possessed the wisdom and retrospective foresight so lavishly displayed by their modern critics, would, in sending officers to distant parts, have revised their notions of imperium and defined the spheres of duty which they entrusted to their generals. If they had studied political science they might have learnt that it is wise to separate the legal functions from the administrative, and both from the military. Or if they had made historical researches, they might have discovered that the Persian administrative system of three independent functionaries in each satrapy was the best that had yet been discovered. But they did none of these things: they simply blundered on in the old Roman way, more maiorum. They did not foresee the demoralising effect of absolute power in an alien and subject land. They did not foresee the necessity for central control in a Roman Colonial Office; there was not even any Latin equivalent for the Franco-Grecian term “bureaucracy.” Thus they were compelled to trust to the honour and sense of justice which was, when this colossal experiment began, still believed to exist in the heart of a Roman officer and gentleman, unaware that corruption was beginning even then to taint the whole body of their aristocracy.
They might, one would think, have realised the super-human temptations in the path of a Roman governor. He went out, with a company of his own friends, chiefly ambitious young men, for a staff, with a senatorial legate chosen by himself, and a juvenile quæstor as his subordinate to keep accounts, if he could: for there was no competitive examination in book-keeping. The governor went for a year only among a people whose traditions, laws, and even language, were probably quite unknown to him. He left an austere and barbarous republic to act as monarch among flattering Greeks or cringing Asiatics. No power on earth could even criticise him while he held the imperium: afterwards he might be impeached, it is true, but before a court of his own friends. He had just completed a civic magistracy, and these were won and held by means of lavish bribes and public entertainments. Opportunities to recoup himself were irresistible.
True to the mos maiorum, the Romans invented no new magistracy for the provinces. Already as early as the Samnite Wars they had found it necessary sometimes to break down the annual system by proroguing a magistrate’s term of office in order that he might finish a campaign. If he were prætor or consul, he continued for another year as proprætor or proconsul. When Sicily was conquered the Romans added another prætor to the two functionaries already existing, another for Sardinia, and two more for Spain; but after that the new provinces were entrusted to proprætors and proconsuls, or, in case of a war, to the consuls themselves during the latter part of their year of office. The senate decided what the magisterial provinces should be, which of them should be consular, and then generally the qualified officers balloted for them.
The same want of elasticity in the Roman system spoilt their good intentions in the matter of finance. As we have seen, the State imposed no crushing burdens upon its vassals. Had the stipendium been honestly collected by official emissaries under proper control, the provincials would have had little cause of complaint. But the Romans here again provided no new functionaries for the new duty. In some cases they allowed the subject communities to collect their own taxes and forward the required aggregate to Rome, and in such cases there was a great deal of peculation on the way. But where this was impossible the senate farmed out the collection of taxes under contract to certain individuals who bought them at auction. The publicani quickly grew into a regular institution, grouping themselves into capitalist syndicates which combined tax-farming with money-lending. Banks were established in every provincial centre. This capitalist class soon established itself as a political body at Rome, where it exerted a powerful and sinister influence over public policy. Just below the senatorial order were the equites. Of old they had been real cavalry, for it was only the rich who could afford to maintain a horse and the necessary equipment; now it was mainly a titular distinction, implying a certain income. It was here that the bankers of Rome and the financial interests were grouped in a single powerful class. For a time these “horsemen” actually secured control of the jury courts which tried charges of extortion. Then the lot of the provincials was wretched indeed: to pay their greedy and extortionate tax-gatherers they had often to borrow from the same individuals in their capacity of usurers, and then, if they ventured to journey to Rome with a complaint, they would meet the same evil class in the very judges who heard their complaints. This was how “publican and sinner” came to be an appropriate conjunction.
The corruption, as we shall see later, began to be serious with the acquisition of Asia. At first the incompetence due to the inexperience of the governors and their staffs was the chief failing of the system. But when Asia with its stored-up capital, its possibilities of exploitation, and its extreme helplessness, fell to Rome, traders and money-lenders swarmed down upon it, so that there were 80,000 Italians there when Mithradates ordered his famous massacre. Thus money poured into the capital, and there was an unseemly scramble for wealth. But for the present we are only concerned with the system of provincial government as it was in the beginning. I think we may conclude that it started with the best intentions, but with two inherent defects, both due to the conservatism of the Roman character. Their constitution was municipal and their outlook parochial. Their empire-building was precisely of the narrow-minded, well-intentioned character that one would expect if the Marleybone Borough Council suddenly found itself presented with Ireland, France, and half Spain, and asked to govern them.
A poor man cannot become a millionaire without at least altering his way of living, and a little backward provincial town cannot find itself the mistress of a great empire without undergoing very profound modifications. In 208 B.C. Rome was struggling for her life with a foreign enemy raging at her gates. Fifty years later she was mistress in the Mediterranean, and owner of more land than she could conceive.
One of the effects of the change was a prodigious influx of wealth into the city. In war indemnities alone six or seven millions sterling must have flowed into the coffers of a state which had till recently conducted its business with lumps of copper. In loot Rome was said to have gained above two millions in the Syrian War, and about the same in the Third Macedonian. Vast tracts of public land were gained, and there was a steady influx of tributary corn and money: public mines, such as those in Spain, must be added. There never had been regular direct taxation in the city: a Roman paid his dues in the form of personal service, and a tributum was the mark of defeat. But now all taxation ceased at Rome except an indirect tariff on salt and the customs at the ports. Henceforth Rome was living on her empire and growing fat upon it. It is true that expenditure was also increasing. In the earliest days there had been no public finance. A war was conducted by a citizen army, who marched out for a few days’ campaigning in the neighbourhood, wearing their own armour and carrying a commissariat provided by their wives. The only public expense was the religious duty of providing beasts for sacrifice, and even that was largely defrayed by fines paid to the treasury. But now expeditions cost money, armies soldiering for months in distant lands had to be fed and maintained, ships had to be built, equipment and machines provided. Nevertheless, with wise financial administration the treasury ought to have had a decent surplus. But wisdom in finance was lacking: although we are assured that book-keeping was one of the points in which the old Roman paterfamilias especially took pride, yet the public treasury of Rome, which had the temple of Saturn for its bank, was managed by the quæstors, the lowest grade of Roman official life, consisting of young men just beginning a public career. That fact alone will show how far more important the Romans regarded warfare than finance, and how far wrong are those historians who make Roman greatness dependent upon economic advantages. The maladministration of finance was not due to dishonesty at first: Polybius, the Greek historian, who was brought up in the heart of Greek politics under Aratus, the cunning chief of the Achæan League, and came to Rome in the second century as a hostage, was genuinely astonished at Roman honesty. Their financial errors were due to sheer inexperience in the handling of large sums of money.
Little of this vast influx of money was spent upon public works. To begin with, there was not the taste for fine architecture at Rome, nor indeed for art of any sort. The private houses were still mainly built of unbaked bricks or tiles, often with thatched or shingled roofs: the interiors of the bare simplicity of a country farm-house. And then Roman religion, which, as we have seen, was always somewhat cold towards the high Olympian gods, offering its real devotion to obscurer rustic powers, made little claim for temples and stately shrines. Temples had been built under the Etruscan domination in the fifth century B.C. But thereafter for a period of four centuries there is an almost complete blank in the annals of Roman archæology. If anything was built between Tarquin and Sulla it was generally of wood and brick or rubble with no architectural pretensions. Augustus swept it all away with contempt. Of course it was the fashion for Cato and the old Roman party to say they preferred good old Roman temples with the painted terra-cotta ornaments to all the new-fashioned fripperies of Greece; but that is only the spleen of the outraged Philistine. These centuries of growth are empty of art.
What the nouveaux riches of the second century B.C. found to spend their money on it is hard to say. In 218 B.C. the people passed a resolution as the Lex Claudia forbidding senators to engage in foreign commerce. It is very unlikely that the senate would have allowed that if they had already been deeply involved in business. But this enactment checked the only fruitful use of wealth: it turned, and was possibly intended to turn, the money of the great houses into land speculation. This was followed by disastrous results. The Punic Wars had thrown millions of acres out of cultivation. That land which had belonged to rebels passed to the Roman state as public land and the scramble for it was the cause of momentous political conflicts in the succeeding generation. But rich senators acquired enormous estates without any deep interest in their economic productiveness. Like the old English squire the old Roman senator was not a professional nor even a very serious landowner, and moreover he was an absentee. Thus large tracts of Central Italy became the estates of rich men who added park to park and villa to villa rather as a hobby than for any good reason. The common notion of Italy before the Punic Wars as a vast smiling cornfield, dotted with little farm-houses and country cottages full of stalwart husbandmen, is both unhistorical and ungeographical. The Italian farmer lived—like the mediæval European farmer—mostly in townships which he called “cities,” and it was only the plain-land in the vicinity of a town which was regularly ploughed and sown. A glance at the map will show how little of Central Italy is suited for cereal cultivation. But, if the records are true, 400 Italian townships had been destroyed in the great wars and that meant, perhaps, 400,000 acres out of cultivation. And what had become of their inhabitants? Thousands, of course, had left their bones on Roman battlefields, but thousands more, when their term of service was done, went to swell the proletariat of Rome. There they herded in ill-built, ill-drained quarters on the low ground of the city. Physically and morally they declined. What is perhaps worse, they could not perpetuate their breed under the new conditions. It takes generations for the human animal to adapt itself to new conditions. Modern Europe has seen the enormous influx into towns accompanied by a decline in the birth-rates, and the swollen town-populations are only maintained by constant influx from the country. It has truly been said that the future rests with the race which can most readily adapt itself to such new conditions. But the Romans never could. The humbler quarters of the city, though they grew more and more populous, grew, it seems, by immigration and not by natural increase. Thus the populace of Rome became more and more cosmopolitan, less and less Roman. These generalisations are apparently well founded, but it must not be forgotten that we know scarcely anything of the free poor at Rome. A nation of orators generally forgets to speak of the butcher, the baker, and his colleagues. It is as impossible to believe that all trade and industry at Rome was carried on by slaves as that the poor of a city can live by bread alone. “Bread and the circus” is a respectable phrase, as true as epigrams ever are, but it cannot be the whole truth.
As we have seen in the case of Greece, all ancient city-states undertook duties which the modern individualistic community regards, up to the present at least, as private and not public. The city-state regarded it as part of its business to see that its shareholders did not starve, therefore the supply of corn and the price of it was always a matter of state supervision. From the earliest days of Roman history there had been officers charged with the duty of securing the city’s corn-supply at reasonable charges. Now the corn was beginning to arrive in the form of tribute from Sicily and Africa. Soon we shall have the agrarian laws and all the disorder that resulted from them. But it is important to observe that the depopulation of the Italian countryside resulted from war and politics as well as from economic causes. Of course economic causes kept it depopulated. Nature never intended Central Italy for a wheat-growing land; the vine, the olive, and the fig are its best products. Now that the seas were open for free imports it no longer paid to plough and sow the stony upland farms.
So the land passed out of cultivation. As in England, grazing was found to be cheaper, easier, and more profitable than agriculture. Oxen were used for ploughing or reserved for sacrifice. The Italians, like the Greeks, seldom ate meat and then little but smoked bacon, but as all Romans wore the woollen toga sheep-farming was profitable. In summer the sheep grazed on the Sabine hills, in winter on the Latin plain among the stubble of the cornfields or beneath the olive-trees. Wild slave-shepherds tended them.
Slavery was the canker at the root of ancient civilisation. It assumed more awful proportions at Rome than in Greece owing to the hard materialism of the Roman character. Of course it had existed from the earliest times as the common lot of the prisoner of war. The sturdy Roman farmer, so dear to Roman rhetoric, was after all little more than a sturdy slave-driver. The actual field labour had always been in the hands of slaves. As early as 367 B.C., if we may believe the records of that age, legislation had attempted to fix a certain proportion of free labour on country estates. From the first, too, the slave had been the merest chattel, a colleague of the dog, a little lower even than the wife or daughter of the Roman house-father. It was cheaper to buy slaves than to let them breed, cheaper to sell them for what they would fetch when they grew old than to keep them. You could dodge the gods, who enjoined holidays even for slaves, by giving your slaves work indoors on feast-days—such are some of the maxims of the venerable Cato, who is the type of the old Roman squire, and who personally attended to the scourging of his slaves after dinner. Now slaves were becoming more numerous and cheaper than ever—you might have to pay as much as £1000 for a pretty boy or girl—but a wild Sardinian or Gaul or Spaniard cost very little. Hence began the really pernicious system of specialised slavery. A wealthy Roman moved neither hand nor foot for himself. To have only ten slaves was contemptible poverty. Each slave was trained simply for one special task—cook, barber, footman, bearer, lacquey, or schoolmaster. The shepherds and gladiators might retain their manhood, as indeed they did, and showed it in frightful revolts during this and the succeeding generation. But the domestic slaves of the capital had no hope but to cringe and wheedle their way into favour by flattering and corrupting their masters. One alleviation of the slave’s lot there was: it was easier for a slave to earn his freedom at Rome than in Greece. But this type of person when liberated, and his children after him, made the worst type of citizen, and tended still further to corrupt the tone of the proletariat. Worse than domestic slavery was the plantation system, which during all this period was growing in the country. At its worst it meant huge slave barracks, in which the slaves lived in dungeons underground and worked by day in gangs, chained night and day. It was a profitable system of agriculture and it rapidly ousted free labour. In the city too, in the merchant ships and the mines, a cruel and vicious system of servitude was destroying free industry. Truly the hollowest of historic frauds was the eighteenth-century view of an idealised Roman republic of citizens, free, equal, and fraternal. It inspired the Convention and coloured the periods of Mirabeau, but so far as the records prove, the virtuous and liberal old Roman never existed.
Equality beyond the name was certainly unknown at Rome. All government was in the hands of a close circle of aristocrats whose stronghold was in the senate. By virtue of the client system the great houses of the Claudii, the Cornelii, the Fabii, the Livii, the Flaminii, the Julii, and a dozen others kept the high offices of state exclusively in their hands. By this time the censors drew up the senate-lists chiefly from the ranks of ex-magistrates, and the magistracies became a graduated course. It required extraordinary pushfulness or wealth or patronage for a new man to insinuate himself into the charmed circle. The old patriciate had gone, politically at least, and only survived for religious purposes, but Rome still remained a thrall to aristocracy of a far more dangerous type, an aristocracy of office. One of the troubles of Rome lay in the fact that this aristocracy was daily becoming less warlike and less competent.
A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the luxury of the Romans as one of the causes of their decline. Even Mommsen relates with shocked emotion that they imported anchovies from the Black Sea and wine from Greece. Two hot meals a day they had and “frivolous articles” including bronze-mounted couches. There were professional cooks, and actually bakers’ shops began to appear about 171 B.C. It is true that all this luxury would pale into insignificance before the modern artisan’s breakfast-table with bread from Russia, bacon from America, tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, sugar from Jamaica, and eggs from Denmark. Cato would have swooned at the sight of our picture-frames coated with real gold, for he publicly stigmatised a senator who had £30 worth of silver plate. The truth is that Rome having grown rich was just beginning to grow civilised. It is the everlasting misfortune of Rome that events occurred in that order.
In conquering Macedon Rome had become acquainted with civilisation. At that date civilisation meant Hellenism slightly tinctured with Orientalism, a culture which, though still alive and still original and creative, was certainly past its prime. The Hellenistic period of Greek art has been unjustly depreciated in comparison with the more youthful and virile age of Pericles. But it could still boast of great scholars, scientists, and philosophers, both at Alexandria and Athens. Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus form a group of original poets who are really great, and an art that could produce the lovely Aphrodite of Melos cannot with justice be termed decadent. Politically, morally, and physically Greece was no doubt long past the vigour of her youth, but intellectually she was still well qualified to play the part of schoolmistress to the lusty young barbarian of the West. We have seen that in very remote times Rome had come under Etruscan influences which were closely akin to Greek. There had been some interchange, if tradition may be trusted, of Greek and Etruscan art and artists. Greek painters had worked in Rome at a very early date. Then came perhaps two centuries of relapse in the cultural sense while Rome was busy with warfare and conquest. In 300 B.C. she was almost entirely destitute of accomplishments, and even, if we may except law, politics, and military skill, of civilisation. The war with Pyrrhus, the conquest of Tarentum and then of Sicily brought in Greek slaves, and semi-Greek South-Italian citizens who were bound to have some influence. Then came direct dealings with Greece in the three Macedonian wars, and every Roman who had fought with Flamininus or Paulus returned to Rome if not an apostle of culture at any rate a man who had seen civilisation with his own eyes and could no longer regard old Roman ways as sufficient for man’s happiness. How could eyes that had seen the Zeus of Pheidias at Olympia glowing with ivory and gold be content with the old vermilion Jove of his native temple?
Nevertheless it was very slowly that culture filtered in. All through the third century and for the first half of the second Rome was still incessantly occupied with war. Her tastes were brutalised and demoralised by it. When drama painfully began, the dramatists sadly lamented that their audiences would desert the theatre for the sight of a rope-dancer or a beast-baiting or, better still, a pair of gladiators. From the first it was vain to attempt the creation of a national drama for a people whose craving was for the sight of blood. Gladiatoral combats are said to have been of Etruscan origin. They first appeared at Rome in the early part of the third century in connection with funeral displays. From every African expedition wild beasts were brought home to be slaughtered in the Roman amphitheatres. These bloody shows indicate the real tastes of the Romans from the earliest times. They are no spurious growth of the so-called “degenerate Empire.” On one occasion, when the music of some Greek flute-players failed to please a Roman audience, the presiding magistrate ordered the unlucky artists to fight one another, and the hoots of the crowd were instantly transformed to rapturous applause.
All the arts were held in contempt, all were entrusted to slaves or the poorest kind of citizens. Thus Hellenic civilisation was transported to Rome under a double disadvantage. Not only was Greek civilisation itself already past its prime, but it was interpreted largely by slaves. Every Roman of position had Greeks among his retinue—not, of course, the citizens of famous cities like Athens or Alexandria, which were still free, but low-caste, half-barbarian wretches from the great market at Delos or from the southern towns of Italy—for clerks, accountants, scribes, jesters, procurers, physicians, pedagogues, flute-players, philosophers, cooks, concubines, and schoolmasters. We may be sure that it was not the most favourable type of Hellenism that would creep into Rome by such channels as these. But it was precisely in this manner that Roman literature began. The noble general M. Livius Salinator brought from Tarentum in about 275 B.C. a Greek slave named Andronikos, as a tutor for his sons. This man received his liberty, and as Livius Andronicus set up a school. For his school he required books, and as there was no other text-book in Latin but the XII Tables, he undertook the translation of Homer’s Odyssey into the native Italian measure of Saturnian verse. His work was, of course, very indifferently performed, but it remained a primer of education down to the schooldays of Horace. Emboldened by this success he proceeded to supply the Roman stage with translations of Greek tragedies.
Such was the beginning; the sequel was not much more promising. Nævius was a Campanian who translated Greek comedies and tragedies. In the former he attempted the old Greek custom of political allusions, but speedily found that there was no such liberty of speech in Rome as had prevailed in the palmy days of Athenian comedy. An allusion to the Metellus family brought the famous and thoroughly old Roman poetical retort: