Part 3

Such a city as Rome was not comparable to a modern city in many particulars; even after the definite establishment of the Empire when it had approached the modern conception, there were still survivals from a previous state of things. It would not, for instance, occur to a wealthy citizen of London to start from his residence in Park Lane with a pack of hounds, and all the other paraphernalia of a hunting expedition, in order to impress his fellow-citizens with a sense of his importance as a territorial magnate; such a thing was possible at Rome even in the reign of Domitian, or there would be no point in one of Martial’s epigrams. The heads of the great Roman families were not originally rich men who conducted their business in Rome, and possessed houses in the country to which they went to enjoy sport and the amenities of Nature; they were originally territorial magnates, whose importance was due to the fact that they were such; it was a later development which made them approach to the position of our great commercial princes in London. The ancient city community was not a thing enclosed within walls; it extended over a considerable area. The land outside the city walls might be held under some form of communal tenure and subdivided into small plots, but it might also be occupied by large holders in positions analogous to our conceptions of a tenant-in-chief, whose subtenants were free citizens with full civic rights in the eye of the law, but who were also in many respects vassals. Dionysius has a statement of the relations between patron and client which may be inaccurate in the letter, but which in its spirit at once suggests the feudal system. It is inevitable in certain stages of social development that the small man should associate himself in some way or other with the big man, in order to be able to render effective the rights which the law gives him. The Roman noble took charge of his client’s interests in the law courts, the client voted as his patron directed at the polling booths. The free and independent electors who swarmed in from the country to give their votes were pledged to support the candidates and measures recommended to them by their patrons; had they failed to do so, they would have been thought deficient in a Roman virtue.

There was a third relationship of patron and client which was fairly strictly defined by law; when a man emancipated a slave, the relations between them were changed from those of master and slave to those of patron and client. The slave did not always receive full citizenship on emancipation, but all through the various degrees by which he passed from the servile status to that of full citizen, he and his descendants continued in the position of client to the original manumittor and his descendants; the relationship was so close that the property of an intestate freedman went to his patron or his patron’s representatives. The legal statements on this subject are somewhat obscure, but enough remains to show that the connection was recognized by the law as a close one, and that there were rights on both sides; the relationship was not purely a matter of personal choice nor readily dissoluble.

All these three ways in which the relation of patron and client might be created tended even in the purest days of the Roman Republic to make an election a struggle between big families and groups of big families rather than a political struggle in which each elector formed an opinion upon a question of policy and gave his vote independently. The Senate, that is to say, the assembly of heads of houses, divided into parties or groups, and each head of a house could bring so many electors to vote at the polling booths with tolerable certainty. The ultimate political unit for practical purposes was not the individual but the group formed by a patron and his clients, who in their different degrees voted as the patron directed.

A free Government controlled by an electorate, in which each individual elector votes according to his own judgment, is a dream of political theorists. It may have existed for a short time in some of the small city states of antiquity, but in practice the individual elector is too lazy to exert his own judgment; he votes, if it is made worth his while to vote, either by the pressure of some extra constitutional association to which he belongs, or by direct bribery, or by the more insidious indirect bribery of party leaders who promise pecuniary or sentimental satisfaction.

In political life the letter of the statute book is always in process of modification by custom and convenience. No state which is expanding can hope to keep the letter of its constitution up to date; the changes are too rapid, too subtle. Constitution makers are thus commonly disappointed in the results of their labours, partly because they are not in possession of all the facts, and partly because the conditions have changed even in the time required to frame a constitution. At Rome the letter of the constitution was but slightly changed during the two centuries preceding the Empire; there were the same magistrates, the same Senate, the same electoral and legislative bodies, very nearly the same methods of voting, and the same qualifications of an elector, but the working of the constitution changed; the admission of large numbers of fresh citizens expanding the mass of voters beyond manageable numbers, the changed responsibilities of the magistrates, the widened career open to successful politicians rendered the old terminology almost meaningless in reference to the actual working of the constitution.

There was a time when the extra constitutional organization of the electors was entirely in the hands of the great families; this arrangement broke down gradually before the influx of new citizens; direct bribery took its place alongside of personal influence. Up to the year 180 B.C. Rome had pursued a policy in relation to her allies which, judged by the standards of antiquity, was liberal; she admitted her immediate neighbours to a modified form of citizenship, she gave the citizens of certain towns the right of voting in some of the Roman elections, and she even gave those citizens of these towns who had held the highest offices in their own towns, the right of standing for the magistracies at Rome; she pursued a policy of expansion; at that date her policy changed; she began to check the admission to citizenship, which was afterwards only wrung from her by war, till the city constitution was all but lost in the building of the Empire.

On the one hand, the great families discovered that they had entered upon the possession of a magnificent property, which they were not disposed to share with an indefinite number of partners; on the other hand, they felt that owing to the influx of numbers they had lost their grip of the electorate, for the men who came to vote from outlying towns were often sheep without a shepherd. It proved, however, impossible to keep the electorate restricted. Rome herself could not supply the armies necessary to carry on the career of conquest upon which she had embarked; she was forced to depend upon allies to supply the men whom she organized, and she was forced in various ways to pay the price. One form of payment was the citizenship, which enabled the Samnite or other Italian soldier to come to Rome for the elections, and extort extra payment for his military services; whether he was feasted, or amused, or actually paid for his vote, he shared with his Roman fellow-soldier in the spoil of the provinces which he had helped to conquer. Every fresh concession of citizenship rendered the electorate more unwieldy, till the Roman people of whose favours Cicero so often boasts had become little better than a mob.

While the Roman Electorate was thus outgrowing all possible organization, and the constitution of a city state was breaking down in every direction under the weight of burdens which it was not constructed to carry, the minds of liberal statesmen at Rome were unhappily occupied largely with city constitutions. The enlightened circle of the Roman nobility, which was represented by such men as Scipio Æmilianus, studied the Greek political writers rather than the events which were going on around them, and were tempted to see in the creation of a really democratic constitution the remedy for the disorders which were only too obvious. They were liberal in one sense, but it was in terms of the city state, which no longer existed.

We have had an analogous process in our own history. The expansion of England for a long time escaped the notice of men, who, frightened by the French Revolution, were concerned in demonstrating the incomparable merit of representative government, and of establishing the fact that the English constitution had always contained in it the democratic principle. One of these men rewrote for us the history of Greece in terms of the praise of democracy; another proclaimed the merits of liberty and representative government; a whole school of historians is interested in showing the popular share in such events as the extortion of Magna Charta from an unwilling King, and in the constitution of the Parliament summoned in the King’s name by Simon de Montfort; as the result of the labours of these and other men our attention was drawn for many years exclusively to problems of domestic government; the far greater problem, the relations of England to her colonies and dependencies, and the necessary modifications in her internal constitution, escaped notice.

At Rome the first important act of the new Liberal school was the attempted agrarian legislation of Tiberius Gracchus; Rome was to deal with her conquered territory in the terms of a city state; conquered land was public land; in such states it had always belonged to the whole people, and had been shared between them; Rome had neglected this salutary arrangement; her public land had passed into the possession of the wealthy few; it must be resumed, and redivided. The proposal was about as practical as an attempt to restore all the common lands to the English peasantry would be at present; it failed; the originator was assassinated.

Ten years later his brother proposed further liberal schemes; he was less of a dreamer; he looked forward rather than back; he saw that Rome must provide for her time-expired soldiers, and must give non-Roman Italians who had fought under her standards a larger share in her conquests; but he was before his time, and was in his turn assassinated; a similar fate befell a leader from the ranks of the Conservative nobility, a Livius Drusus, who a few years later advanced the same political programme. The expansion of Rome to include Italy had thus become part of the policy of a definite party at Rome; but this party was not always a popular party, for the men who idled about the streets of Rome, living on the profits of citizenship, were no more disposed than the great families to add to the number of the partners.

During the second century before the Christian era, the forms of popular government were maintained at Rome ready to become more than forms when an organization was also ready to use them. The most important effect of the political work of the Gracchi was to breathe fresh life into the popular assembly; but this was no sooner done than the constitution proved to be unworkable; then followed a period of anarchy in Rome itself, which lasted for seventy years; during this period one party, the party of Greater Rome, steadily grew, and eventually left the constitution so modified that the local politics of the capital no longer had a predominant weight in the Empire. The first great step towards this end was made in the period during which C. Marius had an overpowering influence in Roman politics. Marius is represented to us by the historians from an unfriendly point of view; it is not easy to get at the real man through the mass of legend which obscures his real story. We see him a capable general who reorganized the Roman Army; we also see him incapable as a politician; he figures as the rough brutal demagogue whose violence stands in unpleasing contrast to the suave manners of Sulla; but whatever he may have been personally he represented definite political tendencies. The Marian party survived Marius, and found its most distinguished representative in the great Cæsar, who was a nephew of Marius.

A significant fact about Marius is that he was not a Roman; he came from the small town of Arpinum. Technically he was a Roman citizen, for Arpinum was a community which had enjoyed for nearly a century the privileges of Roman citizenship; but his connexion with Rome was not the connexion of a Cornelius or an Æmilius. He was one of the many men from Italian towns who used their Roman citizenship to push a career at Rome; Cicero, also from Arpinum, and Pompeius from Picenum are well-known examples of the same class of men.

Each of these three men failed as a politician at Rome, and in much the same way each of them transferred to the wide arena of Roman politics the limitations imposed by the traditions of a small city state. Marius could not manage the Electorate nor the Senate; Pompeius could not manage the Senate; Cicero saw in Rome a magnified Arpinum. Of the three, Marius, in spite of the clumsiness which defeated his own purposes, had grasped the one political idea which was to conquer all others in the end; he saw that the men who fought in the armies of the Empire must have a share in the government of the Empire; he contributed to this end, perhaps unconsciously, by his reorganization of the Army. The reforms of Marius in military organization were in the first place technical, and unfortunately we cannot assign the several details to their responsible authors. We do not know exactly what was done by Marius himself, what by his successors; but we do know that his administration marks the period at which the Roman Army took the form of a professional standing army as distinct from a militia. The change had been long in progress, military necessities had imposed it; occasional service had been practically replaced by continuous service. Marius substituted in fact, if not in every form, a military organization in the army for a civil organization; the change was forced upon the Roman by the dangerous invasions from the north which had found the Government unprepared. Marius dispersed the invaders; he stood forth as the saviour not only of Rome, but of Italy, and he was able to reorganize the army in terms not of the Roman constitution but of military necessities. The Roman Armies at this date were not recruited exclusively or even in the greater proportion from Rome herself; not only was each legion supported by auxiliaries, such as cavalry and light armed skirmishers, drawn from non-Italian territories, but the legion itself was recruited from the allies in Italy as well as from Rome, and the balance of military strength was against the capital.

The State at once found itself confronted with a difficult problem: what was to be done with the professional soldiers when their time of service had expired? Men who had served for a term of years found their previous employments closed to them. Alongside with the expansion of the Empire went the depression of Italian agriculture; the food supplies of the capital were increasingly drawn from Sicily, Africa and Sardinia; soldiers who had been free agricultural labourers found their places taken by the captives whom they had themselves reduced to slavery. The remedy that suggested itself was to assign lands to the soldiers; they could either be sent to form military colonies in conquered territory, or be provided with land in Italy confiscated on various pretexts, or simply taken without further excuse. This remedy was not in all respects successful. Men who had become used to the excitements of war and the pleasures of looting, did not settle down readily to the drudgery of farming; some parted with their farms, others in cases where the farm had been one appropriated by the State, allowed the proprietor who had been defrauded to retain possession on condition of paying a rent; some of these men re-enlisted, others went to swell the mob of the capital and enjoy its amusements. The Roman people of Cicero’s days largely consisted of men drawn from many parts of Italy, who had been, or still were, soldiers, and who had no objection to being bribed to give their votes; if they had any political convictions they were Italian rather than Roman; if they resisted any further extension of the privileges of citizenship it was from interested motives, and not because they loved the Conservative party in the Senate. As Rome was the only place in which votes could be given, the tendency was for all Italians possessing the status of Roman citizens to drift into Rome, if they had no occupations to detain them elsewhere. Men who aspired to be political leaders had to win the favour of this increasing multitude.

The Roman people so constituted had no particular affection for Rome, and none for the Senate of Rome as a body; its affections were centred on those who could promote its own interests, on those who were lavish in providing it with amusements and distributing doles, on generals who promised large rewards to their soldiers, on orators who flattered the vanity of the mob; if it had any genuine political sympathies they were with the Army, and with Italy rather than with the hierarchy at Rome. The greatness of the Roman statesmen lies in this, that though nominally the magistrates were elected and laws passed by this rabble, and the whole administration lay at its mercy, outside Italy the Roman Government steadily grew in strength; the love of order and faith in law were so deeply implanted in the Roman character that the administration was not shattered by years of apparent anarchy, in which the constitution seemed to have fallen into abeyance, and the fate of the civilized world to depend upon the caprices of a mob or the loyalty of soldiers to their leaders. The Roman resembled the Englishman in being able to make the best of a bad government or no government; disorder called his reserve of moral strength into action; the executive was always superior to the constitution; however unruly the city, the Roman citizen in the provinces preserved the qualities which had made Rome the ruling power in the Mediterranean.

The character of the Roman people having changed, the mass of citizens being no longer Romans and nothing else, the ruling classes at Rome did their best to organize the numbers who filled the streets. All the methods by which elections may be controlled were resorted to: political clubs were formed, the great families looked up their clients, some of them provided themselves with armed bands of retainers, bribery was systematic and constant; but all efforts to introduce order into the unwieldy body of the Roman people alike failed. It is possible that if the popular assembly had had no further voice in public affairs than to elect magistrates, a way might have been found out of the difficulty; but the mob was not only the electorate, it was also the legislative body, or rather a legislative body. It could not only pass laws, but it could prevent through its representatives, the tribunes, any laws being passed, or any business being conducted. The rule of the Roman people under these conditions was simply authorized anarchy, and the deeply lamented fall of the Republic with which school histories are apt to close, was the restoration of order. In fact just at the time when the history of Rome became the history of the civilized world, there was no longer any political meaning in the term “the Roman People”; it was a survival from previous conditions. The attempt to call to life the forms of popular government resulted, as it was bound to result, not in government, but in anarchy.

III

The Senate

If the Roman people acquired a political significance in the later days of the Republic only to show that it was an unmanageable part of the constitution, the Roman Senate had always been an organized power. Had it pursued the comparatively liberal policy which prevailed in its councils immediately after the second Punic War, the Empire would probably have come, but it might have come without the intervening period of revolution; this, however, was not to be; the temptations of wealth and power were too strong. While, however, we are at liberty to condemn the Senate as it is revealed to us by the transactions with Jugurtha and other scandalous incidents, we must not forget that the same body which failed so deplorably at one period of its career produced the men by whom the Empire was made. It was the embodiment of all that was politically good in the Roman character, as well as of much that was evil; its faults were the faults inherent to a close corporation of nobles enjoying vast responsibilities which it did not altogether comprehend; its virtues have impressed themselves upon subsequent history.

A peculiarity of the Roman constitution in the later centuries of the Republic is that it was practically unworkable even as a city government, unless everybody was agreed to exercise forbearance, and not to push constitutional powers to their legitimate extremes. Two chief magistrates were elected every year, each of whom could neutralize the work of the other; all public business could be stopped at a moment’s notice on religious grounds; the magistrates elected by the popular assembly could impose their veto upon the action of all other magistrates. As long as the Senatorial families worked together, and abandoned their mutual differences in the presence of external pressure, the popular element in the constitution could be disregarded; but when the Senate became divided against itself, or when individual Senators chose to ignore the traditional checks by which the whole body was enabled to work in the interests of the order rather than of the individuals composing the order, it was possible to paralyze the Government without departing from the strict letter of the constitution.

The Senate was a strictly aristocratical body, practically a co-optative body, for every five years the Censor, himself a Senator, revised the list of the Senate. It was in his power to remove members, who had in various ways disgraced themselves, or who had fallen below the property qualification demanded of a Senator; he could summon new members, and though, after Sulla had passed a decree to that effect, he was bound to summon all men who had held the elective office of Quæstor, so long as the Senate was united, it could control the elections, and take care that no undesirable politician should in this way effect his admission to the order. This quality of an Aristocratical Order still hung about the Senate in the early days of the Empire; it was felt even then to be a public misfortune that a Senatorial family should be unequal to maintaining its position, and such families were occasionally subsidised by the Emperors.

The Senate was chiefly composed of men who belonged to an aristocracy by birth, and it admitted new men very unwillingly; a Marius with the power of the Army behind him could force his way into the Senate; a useful advocate like Cicero, or general like Pompeius, could be summoned to its ranks, but such men were unwelcome; they were accepted as a disagreeable necessity; all three learned at different times by bitter experience, that they were, at the best, tolerated.

An indication of the aristocratic nature of the Senate is afforded by the fact that Senators were forbidden to engage in trade, a prohibition which however they contrived to evade.