Part 329

And now, for the first time, Rome came into conflict with an Asiatic power. The throne of the Syrian monarchy, founded by one of the generals of Alexander the Great, was occupied by a king more ambitious than capable, who had acquired a large and loosely jointed dominion in the East, and who bore the sounding name of Antiochus the Great. This vainglorious King, having a huge army and many elephants at his disposal, was eager to try a passage at arms with the redoubtable men of Rome. He was encouraged in his desire by the Ætolians in Greece, who bore ill-will to Rome. Under this encouragement, and having Hannibal—then a fugitive at his court—to give him counsel, which he lacked intelligence to use, Antiochus crossed the Ægean and invaded Greece (B. C. 192). The Romans met him at the pass of Thermopylæ; drove him back to the shores from which he came; pursued him thither; crushed and humbled him on the field of Magnesia, and took the kingdoms and cities of Asia Minor under their protection, as the allies (soon to be subjects) of Rome.

Twenty years passed with little change in the outward situation of affairs among the Greeks. But discontent with the harshness and haughtiness of Roman "protection" changed from sullenness to heat, and Perseus, son of Philip of Macedonia, fanned it steadily, with the hope of bringing it to a flame. Rome watched him with keen vigilance, and before his plans were ripe her legions were upon him. He battled with them obstinately for three years (B. C. 171-168); but his fate was sealed at Pydna. He went as a prisoner to Rome; his kingdom was broken into four small republics; the Achæan League was stricken by the captivity of a thousand of its chief men; the whole of Greece was humbled to submissiveness, though not yet formally reduced to the state of a Roman province. That followed some years later, when risings in Macedonia and Achaia were punished by the extinction of the last semblance of political independence in both (B. C. 148-146).

The Zenith of the Republic.

Rome now gripped the Mediterranean (the ocean of the then civilized world) as with four fingers of a powerful hand: one laid on Italy and all its islands, one on Macedonia and Greece, one on Carthage, one on Spain, and the little finger of her "protection" reaching over to the Lesser Asia. Little more than half a century, since the day that Hannibal threatened her own city gates, had sufficed to win this vast dominion. But the losses of the Republic had been greater, after all, than the gains; for the best energies of its political constitution had been expended in the acquisition, and the nobler qualities in its character had been touched with the incurable taints of a licentious prosperity.

Beginning of Decline.

A century and a half had passed since the practical ending of the struggle of plebeians with patricians for political and agrarian rights. In theory and in form, the constitution remained as democratic as it was made by the Licinian Laws of 367 B. C., and by the finishing touch of the Hortensian Law of 287 B. C. But in practical working it had reverted to the aristocratic mode. A new aristocracy had risen out of the plebeian ranks to reinforce the old patrician order. It was composed of the families of men who had been raised to distinction and ennobled by the holding of eminent offices, and its spirit was no less jealous and exclusive than that of the older high caste.

The Senate and the Mob.

Thus strengthened, the aristocracy had recovered its ascendancy in Rome, and the Senate, which it controlled, had become the supreme power in government. The amazing success of the Republic during the last century just reviewed—its successes in war, in diplomacy, and in all the sagacious measures of policy by which its great dominion had been won—are reasonably ascribed to this fact. For the Senate had wielded the power of the state, in most emergencies, with passionless deliberation and with unity and fixity of aim.

But it maintained its ascendancy by an increasing employment of means which debased and corrupted all orders alike. The people held powers which might paralyze the Senate at any moment, if they chose to exercise them, through their assemblies and their tribunes. They had seldom brought those powers into play thus far, to interfere with the senatorial government of the Republic, simply because they had been bribed to abstain. The art of the politician in Rome, as distinguished from the statesman, had already become demagoguery. This could not well have been otherwise under the peculiar constitution of the Roman citizenship. Of the thirty-five tribes who made up the Roman people, legally qualified to vote, only four were within the city. The remaining thirty-one were "plebs urbana." There was no delegated representation of this country populace—citizens beyond the walls. To exercise their right of suffrage they must be personally present at the meetings of the "comitia tributa"—the tribal assemblies; and those of any tribe who chanced to be in attendance at such a meeting might give a vote which carried with it the weight of their whole tribe. For questions were decided by the majority of tribal, not individual, votes; and a very few members of a tribe might act for and be the tribe, for all purposes of voting, on occasions of the greatest possible importance. It is quite evident that a democratic system of this nature gave wide opportunity for corrupt "politics." There must have been, always, an attraction for the baser sort among the rural plebs, drawing them into the city, to enjoy the excitement of political contests, and to partake of the flatteries and largesses which began early to go with these. And circumstances had tended strongly to increase this sinister sifting into Rome of the most vagrant and least responsible of her citizens, to make them practically the deputies and representatives of that mighty sovereign which had risen in the world—the "Populus Romanus." For there was no longer either thrift or dignity possible in the pursuits of husbandry. The long Hannibalic War had ruined the farming class in Italy by its ravages; but the extensive conquests that followed it had been still more ruinous to that class by several effects combined. Corn supplies from the conquered provinces were poured into Rome at cheapened prices; enormous fortunes, gathered in the same provinces by officials, by farmers of taxes, by money-lenders, and by traders, were largely invested in great estates, absorbing the small farms of olden time; and, finally, free-labor in agriculture was supplanted, more and more, by the labor of slaves, which war and increasing wealth combined to multiply in numbers. Thus the "plebs urbana" of Rome were a depressed and, therefore, a degenerating class, and the same circumstances that made them so impelled them towards the city, to swell the mob which held its mighty sovereignty in their hands.

{1000}

So far, a lavish amusement of this mob with free games, and liberal bribes, had kept it generally submissive to the senatorial government. But the more it was debased by such methods, and its vagrancy encouraged, the more extravagant gratuities of like kind it claimed. Hence a time could never be far away when the aristocracy and the senate would lose their control of the popular vote on which they had built their governing power.

Agrarian Agitations.

But they invited the quicker coming of that time by their own greediness in the employment of their power for selfish and dishonest ends. They had practically recovered their monopoly of the use of the public lands. The Licinian law, which forbade any one person to occupy more than five hundred jugera (about three hundred acres) of the public lands, had been made a dead letter. The great tracts acquired in the Samnite wars, and since, had remained undistributed, while the use and profit of them were enjoyed, under one form of authority or another, by rich capitalists and powerful nobles.

This evil, among many that waxed greater each year, caused the deepest discontent, and provoked movements of reform which soon passed by rapid stages into a revolution, and ended in the fall of the Republic. The leader of the movement at its beginning was Tiberius Gracchus, grandson of Scipio Africanus on the side of his mother, Cornelia. Elected tribune in 133 B. C., he set himself to the dangerous task of rousing the people against senatorial usurpations, especially in the matter of the public domain. He only drew upon himself the hatred of the senate and its selfish supporters; he failed to rally a popular party that was strong enough for his protection, and his enemies slew him in the very midst of a meeting of the tribes. His brother Caius took up the perilous cause and won the office of tribune (B. C. 123) in avowed hostility to the senatorial government. He was driven to bid high for popular help, even when the measures which he strove to carry were most plainly for the welfare of the common people, and he may seem to modern eyes to have played the demagogue with some extravagance. But statesmanship and patriotism without demagoguery for their instrument or their weapon were hardly practicable, perhaps, in the Rome of those days, and it is not easy to find them clean-handed in any political leader of the last century of the Republic. The fall of Caius Gracchus was hastened by his attempt to extend the Roman franchise beyond the "populus Romanus," to all the freemen of Italy. The mob in Rome was not pleased with such political generosity, and cooled in its admiration for the large-minded tribune. He lost his office and the personal protection it threw over him, and then he, like his brother, was slain (B. C. 121) in a melee.

Jugurthine War.

For ten years the senate, the nobility, and the capitalists (now beginning to take the name of the equestrian order), had mostly their own way again, and effaced the work of the Gracchi as completely as they could. Then came disgraceful troubles in Numidia which enraged the people and moved them to a new assertion of themselves. The Numidian king who helped Scipio to pull Carthage down had been a ward of Rome since that time. When he died, he left his kingdom to be governed jointly by two young sons and an older nephew. The latter, Jugurtha, put his cousins out of the way, took the kingdom to himself, and baffled attempts at Rome to call him to account, by heavy bribes. The corruption in the case became so flagrant that even the corrupted Roman populace revolted against it, and took the Numidian business into its own hands. War was declared against Jugurtha by popular vote, and, despite opposing action in the Senate, one Marius, an experienced soldier of humble birth, was elected consul and sent out to take command. Marius distinguished himself in the war much less than did one of his officers, Cornelius Sulla; but he bore the lion's share of glory when Jugurtha was taken captive and conveyed to Rome (B. C. 104). Marius was now the great hero of the hour, and events were preparing to lift him to the giddiest heights of popularity.

Teutones and Cimbri.

Hitherto, the barbarians of wild Europe whom the Romans had met were either the Aryan Celts, or the non-Aryan tribes found in northern Italy, Spain and Gaul. Now, for the first time, the armies of Rome were challenged by tribes of another grand division of the Aryan stock, coming out of the farther North. These were the Cimbri and the Teutones, wandering hordes of the great Teutonic or Germanic race which has occupied Western Europe north of the Rhine since the beginning of historic time. So far as we can know, these two were the first of the Germanic nations to migrate to the South. They came into collision with Rome in 113 B. C., when they were in Noricum, threatening the frontiers of her Italian dominion. Four years later they were in southern Gaul, where the Romans were now settling colonies and subduing the native Celts. Twice they had beaten the armies opposed to them; two years later they added a third to their victories; and in 105 B. C. they threw Rome into consternation by destroying two great armies on the Rhone. Italy seemed helpless against the invasion for which these terrible barbarians were now preparing, when Marius went against them. In the summer of 102 B. C. he annihilated the Teutones, near Aquæ Sextiæ (modern Aix), and in the following year he destroyed the invading Cimbri, on a bloody field in northern Italy, near modern Vercellæ.

Marius.

From these great victories, Marius went back to Rome, doubly and terribly clothed with power, by the devotion of a reckless army and the hero-worship of an unthinking mob. The state was at his mercy. A strong man in his place might have crushed the class-factions and accomplished the settlement which Cæsar made after half a century more of turbulence and shame. But Marius was ignorant, he was weak, and he became a mere blood-stained figure in the ruinous anarchy of his time.

{1001}

Optimates and Populares.

The social and political state of the capital had grown rapidly worse. A middle-class in Roman society had practically disappeared. The two contending parties or factions, which had taken new names—"optimates" and "populares"—were now divided almost solely by the line which separates rich from poor. "If we said that 'optimates' signified the men who bribed and abused office under the banner of the Senate and its connections, and that 'populares' meant men who bribed and abused office with the interests of the people outside the Senatorial pale upon their lips, we might do injustice to many good men on both sides, but should hardly be slandering the parties" (Beesly). There was a desperate conflict between the two in the year 100, B. C. and the Senate once more recovered its power for a brief term of years.

The Social War.

The enfranchisement of the so-called "allies"—the Latin and other subjects of Rome who were not citizens—was the burning question of the time. The attempt of Caius Gracchus to extend rights of citizenship to them had been renewed again and again, without success, and each failure had increased the bitter discontent of the Italian people. In 90 B. C. they drew together in a formidable confederation and rose in revolt. In the face of this great danger Rome sobered herself to action with old time wisdom and vigor. She yielded her full citizenship to all Italian freemen who had not taken arms, and then offered it to those who would lay their arms down. At the same time, she fought the insurrection with every army she could put into the field, and in two years it was at an end. Marius and his old lieutenant, Sulla, had been the principal commanders in this "Social War," as it was named, and Sulla had distinguished himself most. The latter had now an army at his back and was a power in the state, and between the two military champions there arose a rivalry which produced the first of the Roman Civil Wars.

Marius and Sulla.

A troublesome war in the East had been forced upon the Romans by aggressions of Mithridates, King of Pontus. Both Marius and Sulla aspired to the command. Sulla obtained election to the consulship in 88 B. C. and was named for the coveted place. But Marius succeeded in getting the appointment annulled by a popular assembly and himself chosen instead for the Eastern command. Sulla, personally imperilled by popular tumults, fled to his legions, put himself at their head, and marched back to Rome—the first among her generals to turn her arms against herself. There was no effective resistance; Marius fled; both Senate and people were submissive to the dictates of the consul who had become master of the city. He "made the tribes decree their own political extinction, resuscitating the comitia centuriata; he reorganized the Senate by adding three hundred to its members and vindicating the right to sanction legislation; conducted the consular elections, exacting from L. Cornelius Cinna, the newly elected consul, a solemn oath that he would observe the new regulations, and securing the election of Cn. Octavius in his own interest, and then, like 'a countryman who had just shaken the lice off his coat,' to use his own figure, he turned to do his great work in the East."

(Horton).

Sulla went to Greece, which was in revolt and in alliance with Mithridates, and conducted there a brilliant, ruthless campaign for three years (B. C. 87-84), until he had restored Roman authority in the peninsula, and forced the King of Pontus to surrender all his conquests in Asia Minor. Until this task was finished, he gave no heed to what his enemies did at Rome; though the struggle there between "Sullans" and "Marians" had gone fiercely and bloodily on, and his own partisans had been beaten in the fight. The consul Octavius, who was in Bulla's interest, had first driven the consul Cinna out of the city, after slaying 10,000 of his faction. Cinna's cause was taken up by the new Italian citizens; he was joined by the exiled Marius, and these two returned together, with an army which the Senate and the party of Sulla were unable to resist. Marius came back with a burning heart and with savage intentions of revenge. A horrible massacre of his opponents ensued, which went on unchecked for five days, and was continued more deliberately for several months, until Marius died, at the beginning of the year 86 B. C. Then Cinna ruled absolutely at Rome for three years, supported in the main by the newly-made citizens; while the provinces generally remained under the control of the party of the optimates. In 83 B. C. Sulla, having finished with carefulness his work in the East, came back into Italy, with 40,000 veterans to attend his steps. He had been outlawed and deprived of his command, by the faction governing at the capital; but its decrees had no effect and troubled him little. Cinna had been killed by his own troops, even before Bulla's landing at Brundisium. Several important leaders and soldiers on the Marian side, such as Pompeius, then a young general, and Crassus, the millionaire, went over to Sulla's camp. One of the consuls of the year saw his troops follow their example, in a body; the other consul was beaten and driven into Capua. Sulla wintered in Campania, and the next spring he pressed forward to Rome, fighting a decisive battle with Marius the younger on the way, and took possession of the city; but not in time to prevent a massacre of senators by the resentful mob.

Sulla's Dictatorship.

Before that year closed, the whole of Italy had been subdued, the final battle being fought with the Marians and Italians at the Colline Gate, and Sulla again possessed power supreme. He placed it beyond dispute by a deliberate extermination of his opponents, more merciless than the Marian massacre had been. They were proscribed by name, in placarded lists, and rewards paid to those who killed them; while their property was confiscated, and became the source of vast fortunes to Sulla's supporters, and of lands for distribution to his veterans.

When this terror had paralyzed all resistance to his rule, the Dictator (for he had taken that title) undertook a complete reconstruction of the constitution, aiming at a permanent restoration of senatorial ascendancy and a curbing of the powers which the people, in their assemblies, and the magistrates who especially represented them, had gained during the preceding century. He remodelled, moreover, the judicial system, and some of his reforms were undoubtedly good, though they did not prove enduring. When he had fashioned the state to his liking, this extraordinary usurper quietly abdicated his dictatorial office (B. C. 80) and retired to private life, undisturbed until his death (B. C. 78).

{1002}

After Sulla.

The system he had established did not save Rome from renewed distractions and disorder after Sulla died. There was no longer a practical question between Senate and people—between the few and the many in government. The question now, since the legionaries held their swords prepared to be flung into the scale, was what one should again gather the powers of government into his hands, as Sulla had done.

The Great Game and the Players.

The history of the next thirty years—the last generation of republican Rome—is a sad and sinister but thrilling chronicle of the strifes and intrigues, the machinations and corruptions, of a stupendous and wicked game in politics that was played, against one another and against the Republic, by a few daring, unscrupulous players, with the empire of the civilized world for the stake between them. There were more than a few who aspired; there were only three players who entered really as principals into the game. These were Pompeius, called "the Great," since he extinguished the Marian faction in Sicily and in Spain; Crassus, whose wealth gave him power, and who acquired some military pretensions besides, by taking the field against a formidable insurrection of slaves (B. C. 73-71); and Julius Cæsar, a young patrician, but nephew of Marius by marriage, who assiduously strengthened that connection with the party of the people, and who began, very soon after Sulla's death, to draw attention to himself as a rising power in the politics of the day. There were two other men, Cicero and the younger Cato, who bore a nobler and greater because less selfish part in the contest of that fateful time. Both were blind to the impossibility of restoring the old order of things, with a dominant Senate, a free but well guided populace, and a simply ordered social state; but their blindness was heroic and high-souled.

Pompeius in the East.