Part 74

The period of the ascendancy of Pericles was the "golden age" of Athenian prosperity and power, both material and intellectual. The beginning of the end of it was reached a little before he died, when the long-threatened war between Athens and the Peloponnesian league, led by Sparta, broke out (B. C. 431). If Athens had then possessed the good will of the cities of her own league, and if her citizens had retained their old sobriety and intelligence, she might have triumphed in the war; for she was all powerful at sea and fortified almost invincibly against attacks by land. But the subject states, called allies, were hostile, for the most part, and helped the enemy by their revolts, while the death of Pericles (B. C. 429) let loose on the people a swarm of demagogues who flattered and deluded them, and baffled the wiser and more honest, whose counsels and leadership might have given her success.

The fatal folly of the long war was an expedition against the distant city of Syracuse (B. C. 415-413), into which the Athenians were enticed by the restless and unscrupulous ambition of Alcibiades. The entire force sent to Sicily perished there, and the strength and spirit of Athens were ruinously sapped by the fearful calamity. She maintained the war, however, until 404 B. C., when, having lost her fleet in the decisive battle of Ægospotami, and being helplessly blockaded by sea and land, the city was surrendered to the Spartan general Lysander. Her walls and fortifications were then destroyed and her democratic government was overthrown, giving place to an oligarchy known as the "thirty tyrants." The democracy soon suppressed the thirty tyrants and regained control, and Athens, in time, rose somewhat from her deep humiliation, but never again to much political power in Greece. In intellect and cultivation, the superiority of the Attic state was still maintained, and its greatest productions in philosophy and eloquence were yet to be given to the world.

Spartan and Theban Ascendancy.

After the fall of Athens, Sparta was dominant in the whole of Greece for thirty years and more, exercising her power more oppressively than Athens had done. Then Thebes, which had been treacherously seized and garrisoned by the Spartans, threw off their yoke (B. C. 379) and led a rising, under her great and high-souled citizen, Epaminondas, which resulted in bringing Thebes to the head of Greek affairs. But the Theban ascendancy was short-lived, and ended with the death of Epaminondas in 362 B. C.

Macedonian Supremacy.

Meantime, while the city-states of Hellas proper had been wounding and weakening one another by their jealousies and wars, the semi-Greek kingdom of Macedonia, to the north of them, in their own peninsula, had been acquiring their civilization and growing strong. And now there appeared upon its throne a very able king, Philip, who took advantage of their divisions, interfered in their affairs, and finally made a practical conquest of the whole peninsula, by his victory at the battle of Chæronea (B. C. 338). At Athens, the great orator Demosthenes had exerted himself for years to rouse resistance to Philip. If his eloquence failed then, it has served the world immortally since, by delighting and instructing mankind.

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King Philip was succeeded by his famous son, Alexander the Great, who led an army of Macedonians and Greeks into Asia (B. C. 334), overthrew the already crumbling Persian power, pursued his conquests through Afghanistan to India, and won a great empire which he did not live to rule. When he died (B. C. 323), his generals divided the empire among them and fought with one another for many years. But the general result was the spreading of the civilization and language of the Greeks, and the establishing of their intellectual influence, in Egypt, in Syria, in Asia Minor, and beyond.

In Greece itself, a state of disturbance and of political confusion and weakness prevailed for another century. There was promise of something better, in the formation, by several of the Peloponnesian states, of a confederacy called the Achaian League, which might possibly have federated and nationalized the whole of Hellas in the end; but the Romans, at this juncture, turned their conquering arms eastward, and in three successive wars, between 211 and 146 B. C., they extinguished the Macedonian kingdom, and annexed it, with the whole peninsula, to the dominions of their wonderful republic.

The Romans.

The Romans, as stated already, are believed to have been originally near kindred to the Greeks. The same movement, it is supposed, in the successive outswarmings of Aryan peoples, deposited in one peninsula the Italian tribes, and in the next peninsula, eastward, the tribes of the Hellenes. Among the Italian tribes were Latins, Umbrians, Sabines, Samnites, etc., occupying the middle and much of the southern parts of the peninsula, while a mysterious alien people, the Etruscans, whose origin is not known, possessed the country north of them between the Arno and the Tiber. In the extreme south were remnants of a primitive race, the Iapygian, and Greek colonies were scattered there around the coasts. From the Latins sprang the Romans, at the beginning of their separate existence; but there seems to have been a very early union of these Romans of the primitive tradition with a Sabine community, whereby was formed the Roman city-state of historical times. That union came about through the settlement of the two communities, Latin and Sabine, on two neighboring hills, near the mouth of the river Tiber, on its southern bank. In the view of some historians, it is the geographical position of those hills, hardly less than the masterful temper and capacity of the race seated on them, which determined the marvellous career of the city founded on that site. Says Professor Freeman: "The whole history of the world has been determined by the geological fact that at a point a little below the junction of the Tiber and the Anio the isolated hills stand nearer to one another than most of the other hills of Latium. On a site marked out above all other sites for dominion, the centre of Italy, the centre of Europe, as Europe then was, a site at the junction of three of the great nations of Italy, and which had the great river as its highway to lands beyond the bounds of Italy, stood two low hills, the hill which bore the name of Latin Saturn, and the hill at the meaning of whose name of Palatine scholars will perhaps guess for ever. These two hills, occupied by men of two of the nations of Italy, stood so near to one another that a strait choice indeed was laid on those who dwelled on them. They must either join together on terms closer than those which commonly united Italian leagues, or they must live a life of border warfare more ceaseless, more bitter, than the ordinary warfare of Italian enemies. Legend, with all likelihood, tells us that warfare was tried; history, with all certainty, tells us that the final choice was union. The two hills were fenced with a single wall; the men who dwelled on them changed from wholly separate communities into tribes of a single city."

The followers of Romulus occupied the Palatine Mount, and the Sabines were settled on the Quirinal. At subsequent times, the Cœlian, the Capitoline, the Aventine, the Esquiline and the Viminal hills were embraced in the circumvallation, and the city on the seven hills thus acquired that name.

If modern students and thinkers, throwing light on the puzzling legends and traditions of early Rome from many sources, in language and archæology, have construed their meaning lightly, then great importance attaches to those first unions or incorporations of distinct settlements in the forming of the original city-state. For it was the beginning of a process which went on until the whole of Latium, and then the whole of Italy, and, finally, the whole Mediterranean world, were joined to the seven hills of Rome. "The whole history of Rome is a history of incorporation"; and it is reasonable to believe that the primal spring of Roman greatness is found in that early adoption and persistent practice of the policy of political absorption, which gave conquest a character it had never borne before. At the same time, this view of the creation of the Roman state contributes to an understanding of its early constitutional history. It supposes that the union of the first three tribes which coalesced--those of the Palatine, the Quirinal and Capitoline (both occupied by the Sabines) and the Cœlian hills--ended the process of incorporation on equal terms. These formed the original Roman people--the "fathers," the "patres," whose descendants appear in later times as a distinct class or order, the "patricians"--holding and struggling to maintain exclusive political rights, and exclusive ownership of the public domain, the "ager publicus," which became a subject of bitter contention for four centuries. Around these heirs of the "fathers" of Rome arose another class of Romans, brought into the community by later incorporations, and not on equal terms. If the first class were "fathers," these were children, in a political sense, adopted into the Roman family, but without a voice in general affairs, or a share in the public lands, or eligibility to the higher offices of the state. These were the "plebeians" or "plebs" of Rome, whose long struggle with the patricians for political and agrarian rights is the more interesting side of Roman history throughout nearly the whole of the prosperous age of the republic.

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At Rome, as at Athens, there was a period of early kingship, the legends of which are as familiar to us all as the stories of the Bible, but the real facts of which are almost totally unknown. It is surmised that the later kings--the well known Tarquins of the classical tale--were Etruscan princes (it is certain that they were Etruscans), who had broken for a time the independence of the Romans and extended their sovereignty over them. It is suspected, too, that this period of Etruscan domination was one in which Roman civilization made a great advance, under the tuition of a more cultivated people. But if Rome in its infancy did know a time of subjugation, the endurance was not long. It ended, according to Roman chronology, in the 245th year of the city, or 509 B.C., by the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, the last of the kings.

The Roman Republic.

The Republic was then founded; but it was an aristocratic and not a democratic republic. The consuls, who replaced the kings, were required to be patricians, and they were chosen by the landholders of the state. The senate was patrician; all the important powers of government were in patrician hands, and the plebs suffered grievous oppression in consequence. They were not of a tamely submissive race. They demanded powers for their own protection, and by slow degrees they won them--strong as the patricians were in their wealth and their trained political skill.

Precisely as in Athens, the first great effort among the common people was to obtain relief from crushing burdens of debt, which had been laid upon them in precisely the same way--by loss of harvests while in military service, and by the hardness of the laws which creditors alone had framed. An army of plebs, just home from war, marched out of the city and refused to return until magistrates of their own choosing had been conceded to them. The patricians could not afford to lose the bone and sinew of their state, and they yielded the point in demand (B. C. 494). This first "secession of the plebs" brought about the first great democratic change in the Roman constitution, by calling into existence a powerful magistracy--the Tribunes of the Plebs--who henceforth stood between the consuls and the common people, for the protection of the latter.

From this first success the plebeian order went forward, step by step, to the attainment of equal political rights in the commonwealth, and equal participation in the lands which Roman conquest was continually adding to the public domain. In 450 B. C., after ten years of struggle, they secured the appointment of a commission which framed the famous Twelve Tables of the Law, and so established a written and certain code. Five years later, the caste exclusiveness of the patricians was broken down by a law which permitted marriages between the orders. In 367 B. C. the patrician monopoly of the consular office was extinguished, by the notable Licinian Laws, which also limited the extent of land that any citizen might occupy, and forbade the exclusive employment of slave labor on any estate. One by one, after that, other magistracies were opened to the plebs; and in 287 B. C. by the Lex Hortensia, the plebeian concilium, or assembly, was made independent of the senate and its acts declared to be valid and binding. The democratic commonwealth was now completely formed.

Roman Conquest of Italy.

While these changes in the constitution of their Republic were in progress, the Romans had been making great advances toward supremacy in the peninsula. First they had been in league with their Latin neighbors, for war with the Æquians, the Volscians, and the Etruscans. The Volscian war extended over forty years, and ended about 450 B. C. in the practical disappearance of the Volscians from history. Of war with the Æquians, nothing is heard after 458 B. C., when, as the tale is told, Cincinnatus left his plow to lead the Romans against them. The war with the Etruscans of the near city of Veii had been more stubborn. Suspended by a truce between 474 and 438 B. C., it was then renewed, and ended in 396 B. C., when the Etruscan city was taken and destroyed. At the same time the power of the Etruscans was being shattered at sea by the Greeks of Tarentum and Syracuse, while at home they were attacked from the north by the barbarous Gauls or Celts.

These last named people, having crossed the Alps from Gaul and Switzerland and occupied northern Italy, were now pressing upon the more civilized nations to the south of the Po. The Etruscans were first to suffer, and their despair became so great that they appealed to Rome for help. The Romans gave little aid to them in their extremity; but enough to provoke the wrath of Brennus, the savage leader of the Gauls. He quitted Etruria and marched to Rome, defeating an army which opposed him on the Allia, pillaging and burning the city (B. C. 390) and slaying the senators, who had refused to take refuge, with other inhabitants, in the capitol. The defenders of the capitol held it for seven months; Rome was rebuilt, when the Gauls withdrew, and soon took up her war again with the Etruscan cities. By the middle of the same century she was mistress of southern Etruria, though her territories had been ravaged twice again by renewed incursions of the Gauls. In a few years more, when her allies of Latium complained of their meager share of the fruits of these common wars, and demanded Roman citizenship and equal rights, she fought them fiercely and humbled them to submissiveness (B. C. 339-338), reducing their cities to the status of provincial towns.

And now, having awed or subdued her rivals, her friends, and her enemies, near at hand, the young Republic swung into the career of rapid conquest which subdued to her will, within three-fourths of a century, the whole of Italy below the mouth of the Arno.

In 343 B. C. the Roman arms had been turned against the Samnites at the south, and they had been driven from the Campania. In 327 B. C. the same dangerous rivals were again assailed, with less impunity. At the Caudine Forks, in 321 B. C., the Samnites inflicted both disaster and shame upon their indomitable foes; but the end of the war (B. C. 304) found Rome advanced and Samnium fallen back. A third contest ended the question of supremacy; but the Samnites (B. C. 290) submitted to become allies and not subjects of the Roman state.

In this last struggle the Samnites had summoned Gauls and Etruscans to join them against the common enemy, and Rome had overcome their united forces in a great fight at Sentinum. This was in 295 B. C. Ten years later she annihilated the Senonian Gauls, annexed their territory and planted a colony at Sena on the coast. In two years more she had paralyzed the Boian Gauls by a terrible chastisement, and had nothing more to fear from the northward side of her realm. Then she turned back to finish her work in the south.

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War with Pyrrhus.

The Greek cities of the southern coast were harassed by various marauding neighbors, and most of them solicited the protection of Rome, which involved, of course, some surrender of their independence. But one great city, Tarentum, the most powerful of their number, refused these terms, and hazarded a war with the terrible republic, expecting support from the ambitious Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, on the Greek coast opposite their own. Pyrrhus came readily at their call, with dreams of an Italian kingdom more agreeable than his own. Assisted in the undertaking by his royal kinsmen of Macedonia and Syria, he brought an army of 25,000 men, with 20 elephants--which Roman eyes had never seen before. In two bloody fights (B. C. 280-279), Pyrrhus was victorious; but the cost of victory was so great that he dared not follow it up. He went over to Sicily, instead, and waged war for three years (B. C. 278-276) with the Carthaginians, who had subjugated most of the island. The Epirot king brought timely aid to the Sicilian Greeks, and drove their Punic enemies into the western border of the island; but he claimed sovereignty over all that his arms delivered, and was not successful in enforcing the claim. He returned to Italy and found the Romans better prepared than before to face his phalanx and his elephants. They routed him at Beneventum, in the spring of 275 B. C. and he went back to Epirus, with his dreams dispelled. Tarentum fell, and Southern Italy was added to the dominion of Rome.

Punic Wars.

During her war with Pyrrhus, the Republic had formed an alliance with Carthage, the powerful maritime Phœnician city on the African coast. But friendship between these two cities was impossible. The ambition of both was too boundless and too fierce. They were necessarily competitors for supremacy in the Mediterranean world, from the moment that a narrow strait between Italy and Sicily was all that held them apart. Rome challenged her rival to the duel in 264 B. C., when she sent help to the Mamertines, a band of brigands who had seized the Sicilian city of Messina, and who were being attacked by both Carthaginians and Syracusan Greeks. The "First Punic War," then begun, lasted twenty-four years, and resulted in the withdrawal of the Carthaginians from Sicily, and in their payment of an enormous war indemnity to Rome. The latter assumed a protectorate over the island, and the kingdom of Hiero of Syracuse preserved its nominal independence for the time; but Sicily, as a matter of fact, might already be looked upon as the first of those provinces, beyond Italy, which Rome bound to herself, one by one, until she had compassed the Mediterranean with her dominion and gathered to it all the islands of that sea.

The "Second Punic war," called sometimes the "Hannibalic war," was fought with a great Carthaginian, rather than with Carthage herself. Hamilcar Barca had been the last and ablest of the Punic generals in the contest for Sicily. Afterwards he undertook the conquest of Spain, where his arms had such success that he established a very considerable power, more than half independent of the parent state. He nursed an unquenchable hatred of Rome, and transmitted it to his son Hannibal, who solemnly dedicated his life to warfare with the Latin city. Hamilcar died, and in due time Hannibal found himself prepared to make good his oath. He provoked a declaration of war (B. C. 218) by attacking Saguntum, on the eastern Spanish coast--a town which the Romans "protected." The latter expected to encounter him in Spain; but before the fleet bearing their legions to that country had reached Massilia, he had already passed the Pyrenees and the Rhone, with nearly 100,000 men, and was crossing the Alps, to assail his astounded foes on their own soil. The terrific barrier was surmounted with such suffering and loss that only 20,000 foot and 6,000 horse, of the great army which left Spain, could be mustered for the clearing of the last Alpine pass. With this small following, by sheer energy, rapidity and precision of movement--by force, in other words, of a military genius never surpassed in the world--he defeated the armies of Rome again and again, and so crushingly in the awful battle of Cannæ (B. C. 216) that the proud republic was staggered, but never despaired. For fifteen years the great Carthaginian held his ground in southern Italy; but his expectation of being joined by discontented subjects of Rome in the peninsula was very slightly realized, and his own country gave him little encouragement or help. His brother Hasdrubal, marching to his relief in 207 B. C., was defeated on the river Metaurus and slain. The arms of Rome had prospered meantime in Sicily and in Spain, even while beaten at home, and her Punic rival had been driven from both. In 204 B. C. the final field of battle was shifted to Carthaginian territory by Scipio, of famous memory, thereafter styled Africanus, because he "carried the war into Africa." Hannibal abandoned Italy to confront him, and at Zama, in the autumn of 202 B. C., the long contention ended, and the career of Carthage as a Power in the ancient world was forever closed. Existing by Roman sufferance for another half century, she then gave her implacable conquerors another pretext for war, and they ruthlessly destroyed her (B.C. 146).

Roman Conquest of Greece.

In that same year of the destruction of Carthage, the conquest of Greece was finished. The first war of the Romans on that side of the Adriatic had taken place during the Second Punic war, and had been caused by an alliance formed between Hannibal and King Philip of Macedonia (B. C. 214). They pursued it then no further than to frustrate Philip's designs against themselves; but they formed alliances with the Greek states oppressed or menaced by the Macedonian, and these drew them into a second war, just as the century closed. On Cynoscephalæ, Philip was overthrown (B. C. 197), his kingdom reduced to vassalage, and the freedom of all Greece was solemnly proclaimed by the Roman Consul Flaminius.

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