Part 5

How it was that Rome and Europe lived through such a trial, what were the special causes which gave Rome strength to bear up through the most fearful of dangers, it is for special historians of Rome to tell. For us it is enough that Rome came forth out of the struggle mistress of the West, with Carthage spared to live on for rather more than fifty years as a Roman dependency. She was then to perish; her land was to become a Roman province; she was herself, after a hundred years of desolation, to rise again as a Roman city, the head of one of the greatest of Roman lands, the seat of a special and abiding form of Roman life, a life of more than seven hundred years, till the power of Rome in Africa gave way to Semitic invaders more terrible than the old Phœnician. The fight of Zama put an end to the long and wonderful episode of Phœnician power in the Western seas; it left Rome leisure to go on with her work, as conqueror and teacher in Western Europe, as conqueror and disciple beyond Hadria. Whether if Philip had put forth the full power of his kingdom and its allies, he and Hannibal together could have overthrown Rome, it is a waste of time to guess. It is enough for us to know and to rejoice that so it was not; Philip failed to act with Hannibal, and Rome could overthrow Hannibal and Philip, each in his turn. The first Macedonian war brought Rome into the thick of Greek affairs. The Greek states learned all of a sudden what Rome could be either as a friend or as an enemy. But they were slow to learn how truly the relation of either friend or enemy of Rome was only a step to the relation, first of Roman dependent, and then of Roman subject. They were not likely to learn the lesson; neither princes nor commonwealths are ever quick in learning such lessons. The Greeks of that day no more dreamed what Roman interference meant than the Greeks of a hundred and fifty years before had dreamed what Macedonian interference meant. No prince or people ever does in such cases fully understand what is coming. But, seeing Rome had been on the whole the immediate loser in the first Macedonian war, the Greeks of that day were still less likely to see how vastly Rome was a gainer by engaging in any Macedonian war at all. Men who had grown up as leaders in the several Greek states, who were used to look on Greece and the neighbouring powers as forming a world of their own, a world in which Roman interference was as little looked for as interference from another planet, were not likely to foresee the days that were to come before their own lives were ended. Philopoimên dreamed not yet of days when no Greek statesman dared to strike a blow or speak a word without the good will of the barbarian commonwealth which had become practically the mistress of them all. That they did not foresee those days was no special short-sightedness of Greeks or of commonwealths; it was the common short-sightedness of merely human statesmen, who had not, like their critics, the means of profitting by the experience of ages which were still unborn.

At the beginning of the second century B.C. the actual possessions of Rome were small indeed compared with what they were at its ending. When the century opened, Rome was the undoubted head of the West; it was by no means clear that she was ever to become head of the East as well. To rule that so she was to be was the work of that all-important and neglected age. At its beginning, Rome was head of Italy; she was winning back the dominion in Cisalpine Gaul which the Hannibalian war had cost her; but she had no provinces of her own separate winning; she had only the lands in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain which she had taken over from Carthage, lands which in Spain at least needed frequent hard fighting to enlarge or even to keep. In Transalpine Gaul she had as yet no possessions; Massalia was still an independent and specially cherished ally. In Africa Carthage was an unwilling dependency; Massinissa of Numidia was a faithful and zealous vassal king, to be favoured and strengthened as long as Carthage was allowed to live. In Eastern Europe Rome had indeed begun her dominion beyond Hadria, a dominion as yet over allies and not over acknowledged subjects. But it was a dominion which did not stretch beyond certain points of coast immediately opposite to the Italian peninsula. Rome had appeared as a destroyer in more than one island and city in the heart of Greece; but she had done her work of havoc in fellowship with Greek allies, and, if she had shown herself at all in Greek warfare, it was only because Philip had chosen to be the ally of Hannibal, but not to be his ally in such a sort as to strike at Rome on her own ground. In the further East Pergamon was already the ally of Rome; Attalos and Eumenês were to be as Massinissa so long as either Macedonia or the Seleukid power needed watching on behalf of Rome. The Seleukid power was as yet neither friend nor enemy; Egypt was bound to Rome by a friendship of some standing, but friendship had not as yet brought dependence with it.

Let us look only twenty years later. Rome has not increased her immediate territory on the eastern mainland by a single district or city. But Kephallênia and Zakynthos have joined the company of Korkyra and Epidamnos; Aitôlia has entered the formal relation of Roman dependence; Macedonia has sunk to it as the penalty of warfare with Rome; she has risen again to at least formal independence as the reward of good service to the ruling commonwealth. Beyond her small possessions in Western Greece, Rome has in the Eastern world no dominion but that of influence; but through that dominion she is supreme. The vast dominion of Antiochos, the Great King, successor alike of Cyrus and of Alexander, has been cut short; driven back beyond Tauros, he has almost withdrawn from the Hellenic world; the lord of Asia, seeking for a moment to be lord of Europe, has sunk to be lord only of Syria and of such lands east of Syria as he can keep back from the grasp of the encroaching Parthian. In his stead, royal Pergamon, democratic Rhodes, a crowd of smaller powers, ready to receive the bounty of Rome, have parted out the solid peninsula of Asia among them. The Roman Senate, which so lately sat to devise means by which Rome might be saved from the grasp of Hannibal, now sits as a Court of International Justice for the whole civilized world, ready to hear the causes of every king or commonwealth that has any plaint against any other king or commonwealth, ready even to bend its ear to the voice of every party, of every man, that has any plaint against any other party or any other man within the smallest commonwealth. The Roman Fathers judge the causes of powers which are in theory the equal allies of Rome; they judge by virtue of no law, of no treaty; they judge because the common instinct of mankind sees the one universal judge in the one power which has strength to enforce its judgements. When Rome speaks, all obey; kings fall down at the threshold of the Senate-house, as entering an assembly of gods; they keep themselves humbly within the line that the Roman rod traces round them, even on soil that they have made their own. Rome in truth rules from the Hadriatic to the Euphrates no less than from the Ocean to the Hadriatic; but save in the old Roman land which is her own, save in the few provinces which she has taken over as part of the spoil of Carthage, her power is still everywhere a power of influence and nowhere of direct dominion.

The work of the hundred and fifty years which were to pass before Rome came to obey the rule of a single man was largely to change this power of influence into a power of direct dominion, in a word to change allied and dependent states into subject provinces. Let us look again in the later years of that same second century. Italy has extended herself, if not in formal language, if not in legal right, yet in the common speech of men, over all the lands within the Alps. Gaul is now the land beyond the Alps where Rome, now protector of Massalia, has won a mighty province, a province binding together Italy and Spain, and keeping her old ally as it were in ward. Spain has largely become a Roman land; it has altogether become a Roman possession, save only those mountain districts which so many conquerors, each in turn, have found it so hard to conquer. Africa is a province; Carthage is a wilderness; Numidia and Mauretania are helpless dependencies. East of the Hadriatic, not a few lands and cities, Athens, Sparta, Rhodes, Byzantium, the wise confederates of Lykia, still keep their formal independence. But direct dominion has widely advanced; if not as yet actually the rule, yet it is the fate which has overwhelmed the greatest powers; the kingdom of Macedonia is now the province of Macedonia; the kingdom of Pergamon, so lately enlarged out of Seleukid spoils, is now the province of Asia; Achaia, with Corinth lying waste, is, whether formally a province or not, at least so utterly dependent as to make the question as to its political state a question merely formal. Syria, Egypt, all the kingdoms of Asia, must count as vassals of Rome. If absolute freedom lives on anywhere in the Mediterranean world, it is where freedom is the shame of Rome rather than her glory; the independence which Rhodes and Athens keep but in name is kept in all its fulness by the pirates of Crete and the pirates of Kilikia.

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So the headship of Rome was won over Italy and the Mediterranean world. A dominion had grown up of which mankind had never seen the like. No king of kings had ever come so near to universal rule as this city of cities. And now, in the last years of the second century and the early years of the first, came the question whether Rome could keep what she had won, the question, we might almost say, whether Rome could keep her own independent being. New powers arose to dispute her claim to be head of the West, to be head of the East, to be head of her own Italy. Gaius Marius came down from his car of triumph over Jugurtha, to march, in a new consulship, in new consulships crowded one upon another, to save Gaul, to save Italy, to save Rome herself, from the attacks of Teutonic invaders who had come before their time. Small are the remains that Aquæ Sextiæ can show to remind us of that great deliverance; yet we look up to the Mount of Victory, and feel that it was in the fates that the bones of our kinsfolk should fence in Massaliot vineyards; the day was not yet come for Gothia and Romania to be freely yoked together in the happy bride-ale of Narbonne. The day of Aquæ Sextiæ, the day of the Raudian fields, confirmed Roman headship in the West for five hundred years. It needed a longer struggle with Eastern powers strengthened by the arts of Greece--when Greece and Asia, allies and subjects, were goaded to revolt by the misdeeds of the ruling city--to secure Roman headship in the East, not for five hundred years only, but for thrice that time. And nearer still, on her own soil, at her own gates, within her own future walls, Rome had again to fight for life and death against Italian enemies. Another Pontius had come from the Samnite hills to root up the wood that sheltered the wolves of Italy. It needed the happy star of Lucius Sulla, it needed the last eager prayer of the Felix, the Epaphroditos, to the angered gods of Greece, to keep in being, not merely the lordship over Gaul and Asia, but the very life of Rome as one Italian city on her own hills.

Yet vain indeed was the struggle of Cimbri and Teutones, of Marsian and Samnite, of the Pontic king and his allies in Asia and in Europe. Rome came forth from her threefold trial the undoubted mistress of all. On no corner of Mediterranean soil was there any power left that could really dispute her will. The first century before and after our æra sufficed to gather in the spoil. Enemies and allies, independent and dependent, were to be changed into subjects; kingdoms were to sink to provinces; and, if some cities once more than sceptred still kept the forms of freedom, yet chains did in truth clank over them when the Senate and People of an independent commonwealth dared only to pass such decrees as might suit the pleasure of the nearest proconsul. Of Rome’s two great rival leaders, one was to spread her dominion to the Euphrates, the other to the Channel and the Northern Sea. The Syria of Gnæus Pompeius became Rome’s richest province; but the land of old Damascus and younger Antioch could never become a Roman land. The Gaul of Gaius Cæsar became a Roman land indeed, the abiding home of Roman life and Roman culture, the land that had the praises of its cities sung by Ausonius of Bordeaux and its whole life painted for us in full by the pencil of Sidonius of Auvergne. And above all things the possession of Syria and Gaul gave Rome a new position and laid on her new duties. One aspect of the second century before our æra is that the barbarian powers of the East are again threatening. The work of Alexander and Seleukos seems half undone. Rome had weakened the arms of their successors without taking their calling on her own shoulders. As it was with the pirates, so it was with the Parthians; so it was even with the barbarians to the north of Macedonia. During the time when the Greek commonwealths and kingdoms had ceased to be really independent, but when they had not yet formally sunk to the state of Roman provinces, neither of these frontiers of the civilized world was effectually guarded. The second century before Christ was therefore a great age of barbarian advance. Again, as Mommsen puts it, the world had two lords. A power grew up on the eastern border, before which the Macedonian kings of Syria gave way, and against which Rome herself could do little more than hold her own. That Sulla was the first Roman who had direct dealings with the Parthians marks the course of things. Parthia was waxing mighty while Rome was weakening the kingdoms which might have checked the growth of Parthia. The new barbarian power lived for three hundred years after Sulla’s day to be the equal rival of Rome, in whose strife with Rome both sides could boast of victories and momentary conquests, while neither could boast of any lasting weakening of its rival. And a day came when the Parthians, who had come within the range of Greek influences, whose kings boasted themselves as φιλέλληνες, had to give way to more vigorous champions of the Asiatic side in the Eternal Question. In a long rivalry of four hundred years, the regenerate Persian, strong in his national life and national religion, remained Rome’s truest and worthiest rival. Again each power felt the might of the other on its borders; what Galerius won Jovian had to give back. At last, when the great blow was coming on both alike, each sent forth as it were its own Hannibal to strike at the vitals of the enemy. Chosroes encamped within sight of Constantinople; Heraclius gave law to the Persian in the heart of his own realm. One might be curious to know how this great side of the world’s history looks in the eyes of those who draw the mystic line at the patriciate of Odowakar. Julian to be sure comes before the line; but the writings which record the deeds of Julian are a sealed book--unclassical, I believe, not of the golden or even of the silver age. As for Belisarius and Heraclius, they doubtless pass, either in East or West, for Greeks of the Lower Empire, as cowardly and effete as all their fellows.

But the growth of the Parthian power, continued, as far as universal history is concerned, in the power of the regenerate Persian, is after all only one aspect of a chain of events which was then already ancient and which still abides. It did but put the Eternal Question under new conditions and give either side new and stronger champions. Meanwhile in vast regions of the West, in one memorable corner of the East, conditions arose which were absolutely new. Pompeius, conqueror of Syria, caused the lands of Rome to march upon the Parthian; Cæsar, conqueror of Gaul, caused the lands of Rome to march upon the German. One gave her a neighbour who could be only an abiding rival; the other gave her a neighbour who would not be a subject, but who was, in the fulness of his time, to enter on his twofold calling as conqueror and disciple. And now our own history begins, the history of the Teutonic race in its three great homes, in the European mainland, in the great island of the Ocean, in the vaster mainland beyond the Ocean. I need tell no one here that in Cæsar’s day, in days ages after Cæsar, the history of ourselves, as distinguished from the history of our future home, is to be sought for, not by the Thames and the Severn, but by the Rhine and the Weser. We have not very long to wait before one line of Tacitus will reveal the existence of the Angle, before one line of Ptolemy will reveal the existence of the Saxon. But as yet we stand undistinguished among the mass of our brethren. Whatever is theirs is ours also. We have our part in the great deliverance by the wood of Teutoburg; Arminius, “liberator Germaniæ,” is but the first of a roll which goes on to Hampden and to Washington. By Rhine and Danube Rome at last found her Terminus; to extend it to Elbe or Eider was not for Drusus or Germanicus, but for the first Teuton who wore her crown.