see captionMITHRIDATESfrom a coinFor Mithridates was an exceedingly able prince. His strength did not lie in the huge hordes of soldiers he had behind him. Eastern soldiers were a poor match for Roman legionaries, even when they far outnumbered them. Nor did it lie in the vast wealth of the kingdoms over which he ruled: though in both men and resources he outclassed the small army Rome could send against him. His real strength was first his own ability, second, the general and widespread revolt against Rome. The Roman State, as he knew, was torn with revolution at home. There was a general sense of panic and uncertainty. The Government had neither men, money, nor supplies for the war against Mithridates.Now, instead of closing ranks, as after Cannae, rich Romans fled, some even joining Mithridates. Marius and his party saw in the dangers Sulla went out to face nothing but their chance to come back to power in Rome. Marius himself was old now and had taken to drink. Almost as soon as Sulla sailed revolution broke out again in Rome. The streets ran with blood; the town was heaped with the bodies of the slain. Cinna, one of the consuls, proposed to recall Marius (who had fled to the ruins of Carthage) and brought up first slaves and then armed Italians against the Senate. He was defeated and declared a public enemy. With Sertorius, a most able officer but a personal enemy of Sulla, Cinna then organized the Samnites. Marius returned from Africa, and he, Cinna, Sertorius, and Carbomarched on Rome (87). When they at last entered the city at the head of their troops a terrible massacre took place. Marius, who was almost mad with fury, struck down any one who had ever thwarted or criticized him, among them some of the noblest men in Rome. Antonius, first of living orators, Publius Crassus, a fine soldier, Catulus who had shared with Marius the toils and honours of the wars against Teutones and Cimbri, Merula the consul, shared the fate of hundreds of less note. No one was safe. Marius walked about like a raging lion, thirsting for blood. The heads of the dead stood in rows round the Forum and above Marius’s own house. For five days the massacre went on until at last Sertorius, who had looked on with horror, stopped it by cutting Marius’s bodyguard of murderers to pieces. The old man was elected consul for the seventh time (86): a few days later he died. Sulla meantime was declared a public enemy, banished, and removed from his command. His house was demolished, all his goods were sold, his wife and family were driven into exile.Such was the news that came to Sulla as he was besieging Athens and in the greatest danger. The city appeared impregnable. His small army was reduced by wounds, disease, and the shortage of supplies: the danger that Mithridates would land and cut them off was immediate. They would then be between the devil and the deep sea. But Sulla’s iron will did not quail. The man whom Rome regarded as a creature of pleasure shared every hardship of the soldiers and encouraged them day and night by his personal courage and calm. He showed marvellous ingenuity and resource in collecting supplies and a complete disregard of everything but the purpose in hand. He was a Greek scholar with a real admiration of Greek literature and art: yet he ransacked the temples and melted down the ornaments and treasures of centuries to make money; cut down the trees of the Sacred Grove of the Academy where Plato had walked with Socrates to make trench props. His ablest officer, Lucius Lucullus, was sent off to collect a fleet, somehow or other.All through the winter and the whole of the next year Athens held out. The next winter came before Mithridates’ fleet sailed: it could do nothing till the spring. But with this news came thatof a new danger. The Roman Government of Cinna was sending out an army against Sulla. He was between two fires. But his nerve did not fail. Athens fell to a supreme assault on the 1st March (86) before the new Roman army left Italy. Moving south Sulla then met Mithridates’ army on the Boeotian plain and at Chaeronea gained a victory that rang through the world. The spell of Mithridates’ name was broken: Rome was still invincible. The revolted cities of the East began to come back. In the same year Sulla gained another great victory. At first the Roman line broke, panic-struck. Sulla, leaping from his horse, snatched a standard and rushing into the hottest of the fight shouted to his men, ‘Soldiers! If you are asked where you abandoned your general, say it was at Orchomenus.’ Stung by this reproach and the supreme courage of their general, the men recovered. The day was won. Flaccus, the Roman general, made an agreement with Sulla: to him, whatever the orders of the Home Government, it seemed impossible that Roman armies should fight against one another when there was a common enemy to face. But a captain in the ranks, Fimbria by name, stirred up a mutiny, Flaccus was murdered, and Fimbria prepared to march on Sulla.Sulla was now in a dilemma. His life was in danger unless he made peace with Mithridates. To do so was not magnificent: it was not even highly honourable. But Sulla was not a man to be stayed by such ideas. His own life was at the moment more important than anything else. If he were killed there would not be much left of the honour of Rome. He therefore made a treaty with Mithridates. He made the treaty on his own terms, however. Earlier, at a time when he was in extreme danger, Mithridates had offered him an alliance. This he had utterly rejected. Now he insisted that Mithridates should altogether abandon his plans and claims against Rome. By the treaty of Dardanus (84) the king had to give up all his conquests in Greece and Asia and hand over ships of war and a great sum of money to Sulla. In return the man who had arranged the cold-blooded murder of 80,000 Italians was made ‘friend and ally’ of Rome. Sulla knew that Mithridates would sooner or later give trouble again: but for the time being the danger was over. Rome’s power andname in the East had been saved, at a price. The treaty could not stand, but for the moment it was necessary. Sulla could turn to saving Rome at home. Fimbria’s army began to desert to him. Fimbria in despair killed himself. Sulla spent the next year in preparations for his own return in Rome. Carbo, who had succeeded Cinna, was as bitter against him as Cinna had been.After a year in Asia collecting the taxes, not paid for the last four years, Sulla landed at Brundisium (83) with a well-filled treasury and a devoted army. On every soldier he imposed an oath: they were to treat the Italians as friends and fellow citizens, not as enemies. But to the Marian party in Rome he determined to show no mercy. The State must be cleared of these people: there must be no more riot and revolution. As Sulla marched north he defeated the forces sent against him: many of the soldiers deserted to him: many cities opened their gates. The Government of Marius, Cinna, and Carbo was thoroughly unpopular: and Sulla kept his word, doing no harm to the country through which he passed. Only the Samnites resisted strongly: them Sulla, who had been joined by young Crassus and by Cnaeus Pompeius, defeated in a great battle lasting from noon to the following mid-day outside the Colline Gate (82).Rome and all Italy were now in Sulla’s power. He entered the city and assembled the Senate in the Temple of Bellona. As he explained his plans for restoring order—he was to have the powers of a dictator till that was done—a frightful sound was heard. Sulla gave his grim smile. ‘Some criminals being punished’, he said. Six thousand Samnite prisoners were being cut to pieces. In this spirit he proceeded to stamp out what had been the party of Marius. Marius had been mad with rage: Sulla was quite calm, but not a whit more merciful. The tomb of Marius was broken open, his ashes scattered in the road. Samnium, which had resisted the conqueror, was laid desert. The land was broken into allotments for Sulla’s soldiers.The proscriptions followed. Lists of public enemies were posted and a reward paid to any one who killed the men whose names appeared. Their property was confiscated. Men put the names of private enemies on the list before or sometimes after they had killed them. Catiline, for instance, did this tohis own brother. Sulla did not care. The State must be cleared of dangerous men and it must get revenues from somewhere. On the 1st June 81 the lists were closed: the executions and confiscations ended. Nearly five thousand persons had perished. Their property and that of those who had fled or been banished fell to the State, which got four million pounds in this way.By murder and robbery the State treasury was filled. Sulla’s hard mind did not shrink from these ugly words. He did the things and made no pretences. In the same way he never pretended to believe in the rights of the people. He despised them, thought them stupid, ignorant, and lazy. What they needed was police. The Government he built up was of this kind. He made the Senate much larger and stronger, for men of birth and wealth, though no better than the others, could at least, he thought, be trusted to keep things orderly and as they were. No one was to be consul till he had passed through the lower offices, and then consul only once. As consul he was to stay in Italy without an army; at the end of his year he might be sent abroad, with an army, as a pro-consul. In Italy there were to be no troops: no soldiers were to cross the Rubicon. The law courts were reformed, the juries again drawn from the Senate.see captionA BOAR HUNTfrom a sculpture in the Capitoline MuseumWhen he had finished his work of reorganization and built up the power of the Senate—i.e. of the older men of birth and property—as strongly as he could, Sulla laid down all his extraordinary powers and retired to private life. He had built himselfa lovely villa, full of the art treasures he had brought from Greece and from the East, in the midst of exquisite gardens. There he lived, writing his memoirs, and enjoying the pleasures of hunting and fishing, banqueting and revelling, surrounded by the most amusing people he could find. Many of these were writers, artists, and actors. Actors were looked down upon in Rome, but Roscius the tragedian was a great friend of Sulla’s, for he scorned all such notions as unreal. Always Sulla had provoked the Romans by his power of casting off serious cares when he sat down at table and by what they thought his ill-timed jests. They did not understand his view of life. To him it was all a play, not a very good play: out of which, if one were lucky, one might get some entertainment. He had been lucky: chance was his goddess and he believed in nothing higher. Before he died, at the age of sixty, he wrote his own epitaph, which was inscribed on the great monument set up to him in the Campus Martius: ‘No friend ever did me so much good or enemy so much harm but I repaid him with interest.’see captionSCENE FROM A TRAGEDYTerra-cotta reliefVIIIThe New RomeWiththe death of Sulla a new period of Roman history begins, a brief and in many ways brilliant half-century, about which we know far more than we do of any earlier time, since we possess the works, in writing, architecture, sculpture, of the men, or of some of them, who helped to make it. Roman life in these fifty years is, in many respects, startlingly like that of our own day. True, the great discoveries of science had not beenachieved; there were no motors, telephones or lifts, no railways, no electric light or power, no illustrated papers—indeed the first newspaper of any kind was a small sheet issued by Caesar. But in the things they did and said and thought about, and in the way they acted and spoke and thought about them, the Romans who lived in the sixty odd years before the birth of Christ were very much like the Englishmen of our own day. The comfort of the lives of the well-to-do, with their elegant town houses and charming country villas, furnished with beautiful things brought from all parts of the world, depended on the labour of innumerable slaves. In many ways, however, theseslaves were not worse off than the poor factory workers of our great towns; in some they were more fortunate. The lot of those who were being trained to fight in the games was certainly dreadful; but those owned by private persons were for the most part kindly treated and could and often did buy their freedom. The class of freedmen was a large and growing one in Rome.see captionCUTLER’S FORGEThe revolutionary wars had brought ruin to many. Large tracts of Italy had been laid waste. But though the wounds that had been dealt at the life of the country bled for long, prosperity returned surprisingly quickly. If some families had lost everything, others had profited by their losses. And from abroad wealth poured into Italy in ever-increasing streams. A new class of rich men grew up, whose wealth came from business of all sorts—tax-farming in the provinces, house building, ship construction, agriculture on a large scale. Side by side with them were the lawyers, an increasingly important body. As to-day, a great many young men, when they had completed their education by spending some time abroad, in Greece by preference, became barristers. Success in the courts, the power of public speaking, opened the way to success in politics, though it was long before any one could go far along that road who had not won distinction as a soldier.see captionCUTLER’S SHOPVery slowly and gradually, the sharp line between the new men and the old patrician families began to soften. There were few so proud that they would not go and eat a sumptuous dinner at the house of a man because his parent had not worn the purple stripe on his toga that marked the senator. Education spread. Sulla brought back with him from Greece innumerable treasures, among them the works of Aristotle, which became the educated young Roman’s bible.All over Italy wealth spread, as the fields blossomed with vine and olive. Great roads made travel easier and swifter; aqueducts brought water where it was needed; the marshes were drained; everywhere lovely villas were built, their exquisite gardens adorned with beautiful statues. Thither the tired Roman went for a few days’ refreshment, accompanied by his friends and escorted by trains of slaves. Slaves wrote his lettersfor him, and carried them swiftly to his friends in other parts of Italy or across the seas. They copied the verses and prose sketches which the young Roman of fashion liked to have written, so that the vellum roll circulated almost as quickly and freely, among the well-to-do, as does the volume to-day. Life became more elegant and refined. Music, dancing, games of all sorts provided distraction; gambling became a passion with many; eating and drinking were as luxurious as now. When we think of the Romans of the period after the civil wars we must think of men intelligent, cultivated, educated, polished by contact with a wide and various world of affairs, their minds opened by foreign travel and the study of Greek language and literature.see captionWRITING MATERIALSPens, Ink, Tablet, and PotsherdBrit. Mus.War, however, remained the high road to popularity and fame. Since all the provinces were held by military governors (pro-consuls or quaestors) any one who aspired to high place in the State must have gone through some sort of military training. The successful general was still the favourite candidate. But military prowess alone was no longer enough. The day was gone by when a boor like Marius could ride rough-shod over the Republic. The hero of the new Rome was to be something more than a soldier, though he must be a soldier too.Within Italy the struggle between Romans and Italians was over. Italy was one, as it had never been before. Having acquired the vote, though not on terms of full equality with the Roman citizen, the Italian middle class settled down to money-making and did not, as a rule, trouble much about the stormy course of politics in the capital. More and more, it wasfrom Italy that the army came; the Roman populace liked the shows given at the close of campaigns, but did not care much for the dangers and hardship of service.But although this struggle was over, another remained, sharper and more bitter than before. The return of Sulla had meant the triumph of the Senatorial Party, of the Conservatives, the men of old family and fixed ideas. Sulla’s proscriptions, the murder and banishment of innumerable families and the seizure of their goods and estates, to be divided among their enemies, left behind them a deep hatred between those who had triumphed and those who had been defeated. After Sulla’s death the sons and grandsons of the proscribed began to come back, and what had once been the Popular Party, led by Marius and Cinna, built itself up again. At first it had no leaders. The men who were to be its leaders were still too young. Gradually, however, in spite of the unpopularity that had become attached to its very name, it gathered strength. The new rich and the struggling lawyers joined its ranks, since there was more chance there than in those of the Conservatives for fresh talent and new ideas. A new kind of political organization was built up through the clubs and workmen’s associations.The main source of the growing strength of this new Popular Party was the weakness and inefficiency of the Government. Sulla had erected a remarkable machine, intended to prevent all change and keep the power of the State in the hands of a small ruling class, the patricians. But the machine would not work when his strong directing hand was removed. It was too stiff and rigid to cope with the growing tasks of administering the great empire over which Rome had to rule. Bit by bit Sulla’s system broke down; his rules were swept aside. In the years between his death and that of Caesar the rule of Rome extended enormously; each extension made the need of a strong and efficient Government more pressing. The actual government of Rome through the Senate was neither strong nor efficient. Nothing was well managed. This growing mismanagement compelled men of active minds to look around and ask themselves what was wrong. They found different answers. But the need of change was clear.IXLucius Licinius LucullusIfgreat men are those whose action brings about great changes, Lucius Licinius Lucullus was one of the greatest men of his time. His campaign in Asia Minor started an altogether new policy. Hitherto Rome had acquired provinces in an accidental way; there had been no purpose of conquest. In Spain and Africa the influence of Carthage had to be wiped out; in Greece Rome was nominally a protector only, called in to help against outside dangers. In Asia Minor it was more or less the same. As regards Asia Minor no one in Rome was satisfied with the treaty Sulla had made with Mithridates. It was felt to be a disgrace to Rome that the man who had caused the murder of hundreds of thousands of Italians in cold blood was recognized as the ‘friend and ally’ of Rome and left in undisturbed possession. Mithridates had got to be punished. When Lucullus went to the East it was for this purpose. But he did far more. He discovered that these great Asiatic monarchies, with their myriad armies, looked strong but were really weak; they could not maintain themselves, if attacked. He did not merely make Rome safe against their attack; he marched through kingdom after kingdom, conquering and subduing them to Rome. Thus, in fact, if not yet in name, he made Rome an empire.The work he thus began Lucullus did not complete. The idea was his; it was his hard fighting, the courage with which he overrode instructions and disregarded the Senate’s order to return, which paved the way for conquest. Pompeius, whose slow mind and cautious temper could never have started such a policy, saw from Rome what Lucullus’s fighting was leading up to. He saw the golden prize at the end of his efforts and determined to snatch it from him. In this he succeeded. But the credit or blame of making Rome an imperial power, a power that rules by force over alien races, belongs not to him but toLucullus. This was not understood at the time. Lucullus, disappointed and embittered, came back to Rome and was known to his contemporaries not as the man who laid the foundations of the empire, but as the giver of the most luxurious and extraordinary banquets ever eaten. The proverb associated with his name—‘Dining with Lucullus’—shows this. His feasts were famous; the rarest foods from every part of the known world were on his table. His gardens too were wonderful, and his house glowed with all the treasures of the distant East. Among the treasures he brought back was one little noticed in his day—the cherry-tree. This soon grew all over Italy, but that Lucullus had brought it was forgotten. Like everything else that he did, it failed to bring him fame.The family of L. Licinius Lucullus was one of the oldest in Rome and one of those not too numerous ones which maintained not only the pride of ancient race but the idea that good birth carried duties with it. He was poor but excessively proud, and belonged to that small Conservative group from which Rutilius Rufus and Livius Drusus came. His mind was clear and highly educated, cultivated in the full sense. As a soldier he was extremely able. The way in which the ordinary politician made money and bought votes disgusted him. In the main he stood sternly aloof from the scramble for office and wealth.After Sulla’s death—he had been one of Sulla’s most capable officers—he retired to private life and watched with cold scorn the way in which the affairs of the State were mismanaged both at home and abroad; the long struggle with Sertorius, the rise of Pompeius, by good luck rather than, he thought, by merit. He had strong feelings and a good deal of the ambition that moves in almost every mind that is aware of its own powers, but he detested intrigue and had no aptitude for it. He was unpopular, because of his habit of saying what he thought, both in public and in private, about the corrupt politicians and vulgar scrambling money-makers whom other politicians abused in private but dared not offend in public. He had no party. Until he was fifty he had held no command or office of the first rank.But when the question of the campaign against Mithridatescame up Lucullus felt that he had a claim to it and was prepared, despite his ordinary aloofness, to push that claim through. Nicomedes, the old King of Bithynia, had just died (74) and left his rich territory—a buffer state between the Roman provinces in Asia Minor and Mithridates’ kingdom of Pontus—to the Roman people. This the able and wily King of Pontus was not going to allow. He declared war, made an alliance with Sertorius, and marched into Bithynia. This was a serious menace. When Mithridates invaded Cilicia (73) people remembered the massacre of fifteen years ago and trembled. Pompeius wanted the command, but he was still busy in Spain; in the end Lucullus was appointed.The difficulties of the campaign were at first overwhelming. Lucullus was not in sole control and his colleagues were refractory. But the defeat of Cotta, the other consul, at last left him a free hand. Many of his captains were dismayed by the reduction of the Roman army. Lucullus remained calm. Mithridates had attacked the port of Cyzicus, far from his own base, with an army so large that to provision it was extremely difficult. Lucullus took up a position from which he could cut off his supplies and so close him in a trap between the town and his own army. With his smaller army Lucullus refused battle, and when Mithridates endeavoured to make his way out by dividing his forces Lucullus attacked the two parts in turn, though it was the dead of winter, and defeated them disastrously. A vast army perished in the snow. Lucullus was able to overrun Bithynia and force Mithridates to retreat into Pontus.It was now that Lucullus took the step which makes his career profoundly important in the history of Rome. Instead of waiting for instructions from the Home Government—instructions which he knew would probably have ordered his recall and certainly a halt in his operations—he resolved to act boldly on a plan of his own. That plan was no less than the invasion of Mithridates’ kingdom. Nearly all his generals opposed him, but Lucullus’s mind was clear. He burned to wipe out the treaty of Dardanus and had come to the conclusion that Eastern monarchies were not so strong as they looked: that their looseorganization could not stand against the disciplined force of Rome. Mithridates himself had something of genius; but Mithridates was old.The progress of the campaign showed that Lucullus was right. Entering Pontus in the late autumn, he overran the rich country without meeting with any serious opposition; Mithridates’ armies had been scattered at Cyzicus; he had not yet collected fresh ones. Immense plunder—slaves and cattle, gold and silver, ivory and precious stones, rare stuffs and wondrous embroideries—were sent home to Rome. In the following spring when Mithridates did advance with his new army Lucullus defeated it decisively. Cabira was taken and Lucullus spent the winter with the royal palace as his head-quarters, training his army for the work before it. Here the defects of his character came into play. Proud and passionate, Lucullus had an inordinate sense of his own dignity and of the greatness of his own purpose; he forgot that the greatest general is only the leader of other men, on whom his triumphs depend. To Lucullus his soldiers were mere instruments, not human beings; the army a machine. Great generals like Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander and, in his degree, Sertorius, owe their lasting success to the power they have to make each man in the army feel that he is a man, whose devotion matters, on whom in the last resort everything depends. When soldiers feel this, when they feel that they and their general are part of one living thing, they can perform miracles. Lucullus had no such power. He was harsh, tyrannical, and inhuman in his attitude and, overwhelmed by a mass of work, never found time to relax. The sternness of discipline never unbent. He seemed to grudge the soldiers any share in the vast booty sent to Rome. He had no kindly word or look for individuals. It was this growing feeling of bitterness that the discontented officers in his army, and especially his brother-in-law Clodius, who was secretly working for Pompeius against him, used to sow the seeds of mutiny.Lucullus, absorbed in the mighty design he had conceived, did not realize what was happening, even when after the capture of Amisus his men paid no heed to his orders that the cityshould be spared, but sacked and looted it. By the autumn all Pontus was in Roman hands. Lucullus, again refusing to await orders from Rome, pushed on into Armenia and attacked Tigranes, with whom Mithridates had taken refuge. This campaign was brilliantly carried out. With his small army, hardly 20,000 in all, Lucullus inflicted a series of crushing defeats on the Armenian forces. Armenia was under his feet. He had shown all the qualities of a great commander: clearness and steadiness of purpose, complete confidence, the boldness and unresting energy of genius. As he rested in winter quarters in South Armenia planning the conquest of Persia and Parthia, he might well compare himself with Alexander.Next year Tigranes had gathered a fresh army and Lucullus determined to smash him by taking Artaxata, the capital of Armenia. But here he failed. The campaign was dreadful: the ground was covered with snow; the rivers icy. At last mutiny broke out, his men refused to go on. News came from Rome that Lucullus had been superseded. The plotters at Rome had got their way.The fruits of victory had been snatched from Lucullus and left for Pompeius to garner. His soul might well be filled with bitterness as he came back to Rome. No one there realized what he had done; he had no party. The political struggle disgusted him more than ever. His solitariness had been increased by years of absolute power in the East. He withdrew into silent isolation, and the banquets which were the talk of Rome. Men gaped, but did not understand either the man or his work.After Strenuous YearsIn the life of Lucullus, as in Old Comedy, we find at the beginning the acts of a soldier and a statesman, but towards the end eating and drinking, and little else but revels and illuminations, and mere frivolity. For I count as frivolous his costly houses, with their porticoes and baths, and still more the pictures and statues and his pains in collecting such works of art at great expense, lavishing the magnificent fortune amassed during his campaigns on the site where even now, though luxury has increased so much, the gardens of Lucullus are counted amongthe noblest belonging to the Emperor. At Naples, too, and on the neighbouring coast he pierced hills with great tunnels, surrounded his house with ponds and channels of salt water for breeding fish, and even built out into the sea, so that Tubero, the Stoic philosopher, at the sight of this magnificence called him ‘Xerxes in a toga’. Besides all this, he had country seats near Tusculum, with gazebos and rooms and porticoes open to the air, where Pompeius came on a visit, and blamed him for lodging himself excellently in summer, but making a house that was uninhabitable in winter. Lucullus merely smiled and said, ‘Do you think that I have less sense than the cranes and storks, and do not change my home according to the season?’ At another time, when a Praetor was anxious to make his spectacle magnificent, and begged for a loan of some purple cloaks to dress the performers, Lucullus replied that he would give him some if he found that he had any. Next day he asked how many were wanted, and hearing that a hundred would be enough, he offered two hundred. Horace is thinking of this when he remarks that he considers a house poor when the valuables hidden and overlooked are not more than those known to the master.Plutarch, xxxvi. 39.XCnaeus PompeiusAtthe time of Sulla’s death the unanimous opinion of Rome would have fixed upon Cnaeus Pompeius as the one young man then alive who was likely to follow in his footsteps and rule the Roman world by his own will. And if there had been in Pompeius’s character the qualities which his rapid success seemed to promise, they would have been right. But the life of Pompeius shows how much circumstances—chance, opportunity, the good opinion of others, birth and wealth—can do for a man; and what they cannot do, unless he has within himself the qualities of mind and will which mark off the first-rate from the best second-rate. Greatness was, as it were, thrust upon him; but since he was not great in himself he could not achieve it. It is this that makes him so interesting a failure. His failure was due to the fact that at a supreme crisis he was called upon to do just the thingshe could not do. It was no accident that enabled Julius Caesar to succeed where he failed. For Caesar possessed in supreme degree the power to act with decision, which, when combined with clear judgement, makes the great man of action. At the crucial moment the judgement of Pompeius wavered: his will was uncertain. In ordinary peaceful times his weaknesses might never have been seen; but his life fell within an era of storm and stress when the stuff of which men are made is tested and shown.Tall, strongly built, with curly hair and large eyes that though prominently set and wide open had a rather sleepy expression, Pompeius when young was often likened to Alexander the Great. He had his regular features and brilliant colouring, but in his eyes there was none of the fire or mystery that made Alexander seem to his contemporaries as beautiful as a god. His manners were grave and dignified. He gave all who saw him an impression of his importance. Pompeius had a very strong sense of his own importance. The thing he was most afraid of was of being laughed at. When he suspected that any one was doing this, he lost his temper.see captionPOMPEIUSPompeius belonged to a family old and honourable enough, though plebeian, to make the senators at last accept him as one of themselves, the more readily that he had acquired immense wealth in the proscriptions. At the time of the civil war he was on the side of Marius, and closely associated with him, while Marius and Cinna were in power in Rome. His first wife Antistia was the daughter of a friend of Cinna’s. When Sulla landed, however, Pompeius soon saw which way things were going. He collected an army and marched to join Sulla. Although he was only twenty-three at the time, Sulla hailed himas one of the most important of his supporters. He suggested to him that he should put away his young wife Antistia and marry his own daughter-in-law. To this Pompeius agreed, although Antistia loved him and was in the deepest distress, since her father had been killed in the proscriptions; moreover, her mother, when she heard how Pompeius intended to treat her daughter, laid violent hands upon herself. In the proscriptions Pompeius acquired so much wealth that within a few years he was one of the richest men in Rome. His popularity was great and he could afford to keep it up by giving splendid shows and presents to the people.His wealth, his quick success, his great popularity filled the senators with awe. They had a constant fear that he was to be the next Sulla. They listened with respect to all that Pompeius said, though he was a dull speaker; and regarded him as the first general of the day, though he had really done nothing to deserve that title. But he was always lucky in his campaigns, and again and again had the good fortune to be made commander just at the stage when the fruits of a long struggle, carried on by others, were ready to be gathered. In the means by which he achieved success Pompeius was not over scrupulous. His want of feeling in the matter of Antistia was only one sign of this. The same kind of callousness was shown in the way he secured the final defeat of Sertorius, not by action in the field but by a plot. After three years of unsuccessful fighting Sertorius, much the ablest of Marius’s followers, who had raised the standard of revolt in Spain, was still as far from being conquered as ever. Pompeius was tired of the war; so were his troops. At last by the treachery of Perpenna and some other Romans in his army, on whose minds secret emissaries from Rome had worked, Sertorius was murdered. Pompeius then suppressed the revolt in Spain with horrible cruelty and returned to Rome crowned with success.He was made consul (70) although he had never held any of the junior offices of State; but his consulship was marked by nothing more important than his constant disagreements with his colleague Crassus, who, though of patrician birth, inclined to the so-called Popular, anti-Senatorial party. For the next twoyears he was little to the fore until called upon, as the first general of the day, to deal with a difficulty which represented a most serious danger to Rome. Rome depended to a large extent on foreign corn. Yet this overseas corn supply was almost suspended by the pirates of the Mediterranean. Commander after commander failed to suppress them. Food prices in Rome rose to famine heights. At last the tribune Gabinius proposed that a special commander should be appointed, with unexampled power, both as regards men and money; and that Pompeius should be the man. Caesar and Cicero supported the plan. It was hotly opposed by those who thought such powers dangerous; but in the end Pompeius was appointed. He showed conspicuous energy and within forty days the seas were cleared.see captionA VASE in the shape of a galleyA vivid account of Pompeius’s operations against the pirates was given by Cicero in the great speech he made in support of the proposal of Manilius to give him the command in the East, in the place of Lucullus.Pompeius in his PrimeYou know well enough how quickly these operations against the Pirates were conducted, but I must not on that account omit all mention of them. What man ever existed that, eitherin the course of business or in the pursuit of gain, was able to visit so many places and to travel such long distances in so short a time as this great blast of war, directed by Cn. Pompeius, swept over the seas? Even when it was yet too early for a distant voyage, he visited Sicily, explored the coast of Africa, thence crossed to Sardinia, and protected these three great granaries of the Republic with strong garrisons and fleets. Next, after returning to Italy, he provided in the same way for the safety of the two Spains and Transalpine Gaul, and sending ships to the Illyrian coast, to Achaia, and all Greece besides, he established large forces, military and naval, in the two seas of Italy. On the forty-ninth day after he left Brundisium he brought the whole of Cilicia under the dominion of the Roman people, and all the Pirates, wherever they might be, either were captured and put to death, or surrendered to his sole authority and command. Finally, when the Cretans had followed him even into Pamphylia with envoys begging for clemency, he did not disdain their offer of submission and was content to demand hostages. The result was that this great war, that lasted so long and reached so far, a war that harassed every country and every people, was taken in hand by Pompeius at the end of the winter, was begun in the early days of the spring, and was finished by the middle of the summer.Cicero,De Lege Manilia, §§ 34-5.Pompeius used the renown won by this success to secure for himself the fruits of the Asiatic victories won by Lucullus. On the one hand, he worked in Rome against Lucullus so that he got the command transferred to himself; on the other, by bribery and the arts of Clodius, Lucullus’s brother-in-law and aide-de-camp, he worked up a mutiny among his troops. Then he went out to Asia and in a series of spectacular campaigns laid the East at his feet. His progress through Asia was a parade; it was no wonder that the Romans were dazzled by the news of the way in which he overran kingdoms and conquered vast territories of enormous wealth. Pompeius seemed to them a general of the rank of Hannibal or Alexander.The Senate grew alarmed. They had not forgotten how Sulla had returned from the East in 83 and set himself up as Dictator, master of Rome. If Pompeius in 62 wanted to do the same there was nothing to prevent him. He had a great army, devotedto him and ready to follow him in any adventure. He was extremely popular with the people of Rome. He had never shown any particular respect for the laws and customs of the State when he wanted anything for himself. He had broken the rules Sulla had laid down, by which no one could hold high command until he had passed through all the lower offices. Now, while still in Asia, he demanded to be allowed to stand as consul, in his absence, although he had never been tribune or praetor. The Senate put difficulties in his way. Indeed they did everything they could to irritate Pompeius and give him the excuse for taking the strong line they dreaded. Only Julius Caesar, the young and rapidly rising leader of the Popular party, backed him. The Senate refused to allow Pompeius to stand for the consulship. Nepos, his emissary, would actually have been killed in the streets if Caesar had not saved him. Caesar pleased him by proposing that he should finish rebuilding the Capitol.The Senate’s fears were groundless, as Caesar knew. Pompeius was not like Sulla. Sulla always knew what he wanted. Pompeius had no clear aim. Opportunities lay open before him which he did not desire or know how to use. He wanted to be important, a big man of whom people spoke well, to whom they looked up; but his timid mind shrank from responsibility. He had never been fired by any great idea; he had no purpose that he wanted to impress upon the world. He had not even got that harsh and cold contempt for the mass of mankind that caused Sulla to feel a sort of bitter pleasure in imposing his will upon them. Of Caesar’s fire he had nothing. Politically he had never taken a firm line. If no one in Rome quite knew where he stood, Pompeius was in the same doubt himself. His was a respectable nature with a natural inclination towards safety. But in the Rome of his day things were in a state of uneasy movement; there was no safety or quiet for any one who wanted at the same time to be a big figure. Pompeius was later forced to take action. This action was weak and irresolute because his mind had never been clear. Most people are like Pompeius: they do not know what they want; or they want somethingvague, like happiness or the good opinion of others; or they want a number of things which cannot be had together. The mark of those men who stand out in history is that they conceived clearly something they wanted to have or do; and by force of will drove through to it. Even when they failed, as Hannibal, for instance, failed, their failure has in it something more magnificent than ordinary success. But this power to will implies a readiness to make sacrifices. If you want one thing you must be prepared to do without others. If you want to please yourself you must be ready to displease other people. You cannot have your own way and at the same time have the good opinion of everybody. This Pompeius never saw.see captionA TRIUMPHfrom a relief of the EmpireWhen he returned from his great campaigns in the East in the year 62 Pompeius landed at Brundisium and dismissed his soldiers to their homes. The senators heaved a vast sigh of relief. He was not going to be dangerous. When Pompeius arrived in Rome without his army he found that nobody much wanted him. People were more interested in the struggles that had been going on at home—Catiline’s conspiracy, Cicero’s strong line in putting the conspirators to death, the question whether Caesar had been implicated, the friendship between Caesar and Crassus—than in what Pompeius had been doing in the East. Without his army nobody was afraid of Pompeius. He found Lucullus, in the Senate and political circles generally,doing everything he could to thwart him, supported by Cato the Younger, who thought that imperialism, Eastern conquests, and new wealth were bad things, likely to ruin Rome. Pompeius celebrated a stupendous triumph which made him the idol of the mob; but the Senate would not hear of his being made consul or make grants of lands to his soldiers. The Conservative party had thwarted Pompeius at every turn; he was deeply hurt, and in his most sensitive part, his vanity. This hurt finally drove him into an alliance with Caesar and Crassus, the leaders of the Popular party, and his own most dangerous rivals. He disliked Crassus and feared Caesar. At the moment his support was invaluable to the Popular party; therefore Caesar set himself to overcome Pompeius’s distrust of himself and Crassus’s deep detestation of Pompeius. He had good arguments for each of them; and behind them a charm of manner that few people could resist.Three years after Pompeius returned from the East the three strongest men in Rome were bound together. This first Triumvirate (60), as it was afterwards called, was a private arrangement. People only learned of its existence when they saw it at work. Pompeius married Caesar’s daughter, Julia, who, so long as she lived, kept him friendly with her father. Caesar was made consul and at once confirmed all that Pompeius had done in the East and made grants of lands to his soldiers. A big programme of land reform was passed through. The corn distribution was reorganized. People who criticized the Triumvirate too openly, like Cato, were banished. Cicero also was exiled, since Clodius had sworn vengeance on him. Caesar would have saved him by taking him with him to Gaul, as well as his brother Quintus, who was one of his adjutants; but Cicero refused. Caesar went off to Gaul the year after his consulship (58); Pompeius and Crassus were left masters in Rome.There were at the time incessant disorders in the city. The strife of parties waxed bitter and furious. Fights between different political clubs were of nightly occurrence. The ingenious Clodius had reorganized the old associations of the workers into guilds of a more or less political kind, and thus built up amachinery in every quarter of the city which he handled with great adroitness at election times. Moreover, he organized something like a voters’ army of slaves and freedmen, which turned out on his instructions, and lived on the free corn given out by the State. Pompeius did nothing to cope with this state of things. He fell, in fact, into a strange condition of indolence, and took hardly any part in public affairs. The news of Caesar’s victories in Gaul did not rouse him, though Caesar’s popularity increased daily and his own declined.Pompeius’s sloth at this period is sometimes put down to his extreme domestic happiness. Julia, his new wife, was but half his age, three and twenty. She possessed a full measure of the irresistible charm of her father; so long as she lived the bond between the Triumvirs was unshakeable. But her husband’s apparent indifference to public affairs was due, in the main, to another reason; the one which explains so much in Pompeius’s action and inaction both at this time and later. He stood aloof because he did not know what to do. The political tangle had become a knot that must be cut. Pompeius was not the man to cut knots. He let things slide.
see captionMITHRIDATESfrom a coin
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MITHRIDATESfrom a coin
For Mithridates was an exceedingly able prince. His strength did not lie in the huge hordes of soldiers he had behind him. Eastern soldiers were a poor match for Roman legionaries, even when they far outnumbered them. Nor did it lie in the vast wealth of the kingdoms over which he ruled: though in both men and resources he outclassed the small army Rome could send against him. His real strength was first his own ability, second, the general and widespread revolt against Rome. The Roman State, as he knew, was torn with revolution at home. There was a general sense of panic and uncertainty. The Government had neither men, money, nor supplies for the war against Mithridates.
Now, instead of closing ranks, as after Cannae, rich Romans fled, some even joining Mithridates. Marius and his party saw in the dangers Sulla went out to face nothing but their chance to come back to power in Rome. Marius himself was old now and had taken to drink. Almost as soon as Sulla sailed revolution broke out again in Rome. The streets ran with blood; the town was heaped with the bodies of the slain. Cinna, one of the consuls, proposed to recall Marius (who had fled to the ruins of Carthage) and brought up first slaves and then armed Italians against the Senate. He was defeated and declared a public enemy. With Sertorius, a most able officer but a personal enemy of Sulla, Cinna then organized the Samnites. Marius returned from Africa, and he, Cinna, Sertorius, and Carbomarched on Rome (87). When they at last entered the city at the head of their troops a terrible massacre took place. Marius, who was almost mad with fury, struck down any one who had ever thwarted or criticized him, among them some of the noblest men in Rome. Antonius, first of living orators, Publius Crassus, a fine soldier, Catulus who had shared with Marius the toils and honours of the wars against Teutones and Cimbri, Merula the consul, shared the fate of hundreds of less note. No one was safe. Marius walked about like a raging lion, thirsting for blood. The heads of the dead stood in rows round the Forum and above Marius’s own house. For five days the massacre went on until at last Sertorius, who had looked on with horror, stopped it by cutting Marius’s bodyguard of murderers to pieces. The old man was elected consul for the seventh time (86): a few days later he died. Sulla meantime was declared a public enemy, banished, and removed from his command. His house was demolished, all his goods were sold, his wife and family were driven into exile.
Such was the news that came to Sulla as he was besieging Athens and in the greatest danger. The city appeared impregnable. His small army was reduced by wounds, disease, and the shortage of supplies: the danger that Mithridates would land and cut them off was immediate. They would then be between the devil and the deep sea. But Sulla’s iron will did not quail. The man whom Rome regarded as a creature of pleasure shared every hardship of the soldiers and encouraged them day and night by his personal courage and calm. He showed marvellous ingenuity and resource in collecting supplies and a complete disregard of everything but the purpose in hand. He was a Greek scholar with a real admiration of Greek literature and art: yet he ransacked the temples and melted down the ornaments and treasures of centuries to make money; cut down the trees of the Sacred Grove of the Academy where Plato had walked with Socrates to make trench props. His ablest officer, Lucius Lucullus, was sent off to collect a fleet, somehow or other.
All through the winter and the whole of the next year Athens held out. The next winter came before Mithridates’ fleet sailed: it could do nothing till the spring. But with this news came thatof a new danger. The Roman Government of Cinna was sending out an army against Sulla. He was between two fires. But his nerve did not fail. Athens fell to a supreme assault on the 1st March (86) before the new Roman army left Italy. Moving south Sulla then met Mithridates’ army on the Boeotian plain and at Chaeronea gained a victory that rang through the world. The spell of Mithridates’ name was broken: Rome was still invincible. The revolted cities of the East began to come back. In the same year Sulla gained another great victory. At first the Roman line broke, panic-struck. Sulla, leaping from his horse, snatched a standard and rushing into the hottest of the fight shouted to his men, ‘Soldiers! If you are asked where you abandoned your general, say it was at Orchomenus.’ Stung by this reproach and the supreme courage of their general, the men recovered. The day was won. Flaccus, the Roman general, made an agreement with Sulla: to him, whatever the orders of the Home Government, it seemed impossible that Roman armies should fight against one another when there was a common enemy to face. But a captain in the ranks, Fimbria by name, stirred up a mutiny, Flaccus was murdered, and Fimbria prepared to march on Sulla.
Sulla was now in a dilemma. His life was in danger unless he made peace with Mithridates. To do so was not magnificent: it was not even highly honourable. But Sulla was not a man to be stayed by such ideas. His own life was at the moment more important than anything else. If he were killed there would not be much left of the honour of Rome. He therefore made a treaty with Mithridates. He made the treaty on his own terms, however. Earlier, at a time when he was in extreme danger, Mithridates had offered him an alliance. This he had utterly rejected. Now he insisted that Mithridates should altogether abandon his plans and claims against Rome. By the treaty of Dardanus (84) the king had to give up all his conquests in Greece and Asia and hand over ships of war and a great sum of money to Sulla. In return the man who had arranged the cold-blooded murder of 80,000 Italians was made ‘friend and ally’ of Rome. Sulla knew that Mithridates would sooner or later give trouble again: but for the time being the danger was over. Rome’s power andname in the East had been saved, at a price. The treaty could not stand, but for the moment it was necessary. Sulla could turn to saving Rome at home. Fimbria’s army began to desert to him. Fimbria in despair killed himself. Sulla spent the next year in preparations for his own return in Rome. Carbo, who had succeeded Cinna, was as bitter against him as Cinna had been.
After a year in Asia collecting the taxes, not paid for the last four years, Sulla landed at Brundisium (83) with a well-filled treasury and a devoted army. On every soldier he imposed an oath: they were to treat the Italians as friends and fellow citizens, not as enemies. But to the Marian party in Rome he determined to show no mercy. The State must be cleared of these people: there must be no more riot and revolution. As Sulla marched north he defeated the forces sent against him: many of the soldiers deserted to him: many cities opened their gates. The Government of Marius, Cinna, and Carbo was thoroughly unpopular: and Sulla kept his word, doing no harm to the country through which he passed. Only the Samnites resisted strongly: them Sulla, who had been joined by young Crassus and by Cnaeus Pompeius, defeated in a great battle lasting from noon to the following mid-day outside the Colline Gate (82).
Rome and all Italy were now in Sulla’s power. He entered the city and assembled the Senate in the Temple of Bellona. As he explained his plans for restoring order—he was to have the powers of a dictator till that was done—a frightful sound was heard. Sulla gave his grim smile. ‘Some criminals being punished’, he said. Six thousand Samnite prisoners were being cut to pieces. In this spirit he proceeded to stamp out what had been the party of Marius. Marius had been mad with rage: Sulla was quite calm, but not a whit more merciful. The tomb of Marius was broken open, his ashes scattered in the road. Samnium, which had resisted the conqueror, was laid desert. The land was broken into allotments for Sulla’s soldiers.
The proscriptions followed. Lists of public enemies were posted and a reward paid to any one who killed the men whose names appeared. Their property was confiscated. Men put the names of private enemies on the list before or sometimes after they had killed them. Catiline, for instance, did this tohis own brother. Sulla did not care. The State must be cleared of dangerous men and it must get revenues from somewhere. On the 1st June 81 the lists were closed: the executions and confiscations ended. Nearly five thousand persons had perished. Their property and that of those who had fled or been banished fell to the State, which got four million pounds in this way.
By murder and robbery the State treasury was filled. Sulla’s hard mind did not shrink from these ugly words. He did the things and made no pretences. In the same way he never pretended to believe in the rights of the people. He despised them, thought them stupid, ignorant, and lazy. What they needed was police. The Government he built up was of this kind. He made the Senate much larger and stronger, for men of birth and wealth, though no better than the others, could at least, he thought, be trusted to keep things orderly and as they were. No one was to be consul till he had passed through the lower offices, and then consul only once. As consul he was to stay in Italy without an army; at the end of his year he might be sent abroad, with an army, as a pro-consul. In Italy there were to be no troops: no soldiers were to cross the Rubicon. The law courts were reformed, the juries again drawn from the Senate.
see caption
A BOAR HUNTfrom a sculpture in the Capitoline Museum
When he had finished his work of reorganization and built up the power of the Senate—i.e. of the older men of birth and property—as strongly as he could, Sulla laid down all his extraordinary powers and retired to private life. He had built himselfa lovely villa, full of the art treasures he had brought from Greece and from the East, in the midst of exquisite gardens. There he lived, writing his memoirs, and enjoying the pleasures of hunting and fishing, banqueting and revelling, surrounded by the most amusing people he could find. Many of these were writers, artists, and actors. Actors were looked down upon in Rome, but Roscius the tragedian was a great friend of Sulla’s, for he scorned all such notions as unreal. Always Sulla had provoked the Romans by his power of casting off serious cares when he sat down at table and by what they thought his ill-timed jests. They did not understand his view of life. To him it was all a play, not a very good play: out of which, if one were lucky, one might get some entertainment. He had been lucky: chance was his goddess and he believed in nothing higher. Before he died, at the age of sixty, he wrote his own epitaph, which was inscribed on the great monument set up to him in the Campus Martius: ‘No friend ever did me so much good or enemy so much harm but I repaid him with interest.’
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SCENE FROM A TRAGEDYTerra-cotta relief
Withthe death of Sulla a new period of Roman history begins, a brief and in many ways brilliant half-century, about which we know far more than we do of any earlier time, since we possess the works, in writing, architecture, sculpture, of the men, or of some of them, who helped to make it. Roman life in these fifty years is, in many respects, startlingly like that of our own day. True, the great discoveries of science had not beenachieved; there were no motors, telephones or lifts, no railways, no electric light or power, no illustrated papers—indeed the first newspaper of any kind was a small sheet issued by Caesar. But in the things they did and said and thought about, and in the way they acted and spoke and thought about them, the Romans who lived in the sixty odd years before the birth of Christ were very much like the Englishmen of our own day. The comfort of the lives of the well-to-do, with their elegant town houses and charming country villas, furnished with beautiful things brought from all parts of the world, depended on the labour of innumerable slaves. In many ways, however, theseslaves were not worse off than the poor factory workers of our great towns; in some they were more fortunate. The lot of those who were being trained to fight in the games was certainly dreadful; but those owned by private persons were for the most part kindly treated and could and often did buy their freedom. The class of freedmen was a large and growing one in Rome.
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CUTLER’S FORGE
The revolutionary wars had brought ruin to many. Large tracts of Italy had been laid waste. But though the wounds that had been dealt at the life of the country bled for long, prosperity returned surprisingly quickly. If some families had lost everything, others had profited by their losses. And from abroad wealth poured into Italy in ever-increasing streams. A new class of rich men grew up, whose wealth came from business of all sorts—tax-farming in the provinces, house building, ship construction, agriculture on a large scale. Side by side with them were the lawyers, an increasingly important body. As to-day, a great many young men, when they had completed their education by spending some time abroad, in Greece by preference, became barristers. Success in the courts, the power of public speaking, opened the way to success in politics, though it was long before any one could go far along that road who had not won distinction as a soldier.
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CUTLER’S SHOP
Very slowly and gradually, the sharp line between the new men and the old patrician families began to soften. There were few so proud that they would not go and eat a sumptuous dinner at the house of a man because his parent had not worn the purple stripe on his toga that marked the senator. Education spread. Sulla brought back with him from Greece innumerable treasures, among them the works of Aristotle, which became the educated young Roman’s bible.
All over Italy wealth spread, as the fields blossomed with vine and olive. Great roads made travel easier and swifter; aqueducts brought water where it was needed; the marshes were drained; everywhere lovely villas were built, their exquisite gardens adorned with beautiful statues. Thither the tired Roman went for a few days’ refreshment, accompanied by his friends and escorted by trains of slaves. Slaves wrote his lettersfor him, and carried them swiftly to his friends in other parts of Italy or across the seas. They copied the verses and prose sketches which the young Roman of fashion liked to have written, so that the vellum roll circulated almost as quickly and freely, among the well-to-do, as does the volume to-day. Life became more elegant and refined. Music, dancing, games of all sorts provided distraction; gambling became a passion with many; eating and drinking were as luxurious as now. When we think of the Romans of the period after the civil wars we must think of men intelligent, cultivated, educated, polished by contact with a wide and various world of affairs, their minds opened by foreign travel and the study of Greek language and literature.
see captionWRITING MATERIALSPens, Ink, Tablet, and PotsherdBrit. Mus.
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WRITING MATERIALSPens, Ink, Tablet, and PotsherdBrit. Mus.
War, however, remained the high road to popularity and fame. Since all the provinces were held by military governors (pro-consuls or quaestors) any one who aspired to high place in the State must have gone through some sort of military training. The successful general was still the favourite candidate. But military prowess alone was no longer enough. The day was gone by when a boor like Marius could ride rough-shod over the Republic. The hero of the new Rome was to be something more than a soldier, though he must be a soldier too.
Within Italy the struggle between Romans and Italians was over. Italy was one, as it had never been before. Having acquired the vote, though not on terms of full equality with the Roman citizen, the Italian middle class settled down to money-making and did not, as a rule, trouble much about the stormy course of politics in the capital. More and more, it wasfrom Italy that the army came; the Roman populace liked the shows given at the close of campaigns, but did not care much for the dangers and hardship of service.
But although this struggle was over, another remained, sharper and more bitter than before. The return of Sulla had meant the triumph of the Senatorial Party, of the Conservatives, the men of old family and fixed ideas. Sulla’s proscriptions, the murder and banishment of innumerable families and the seizure of their goods and estates, to be divided among their enemies, left behind them a deep hatred between those who had triumphed and those who had been defeated. After Sulla’s death the sons and grandsons of the proscribed began to come back, and what had once been the Popular Party, led by Marius and Cinna, built itself up again. At first it had no leaders. The men who were to be its leaders were still too young. Gradually, however, in spite of the unpopularity that had become attached to its very name, it gathered strength. The new rich and the struggling lawyers joined its ranks, since there was more chance there than in those of the Conservatives for fresh talent and new ideas. A new kind of political organization was built up through the clubs and workmen’s associations.
The main source of the growing strength of this new Popular Party was the weakness and inefficiency of the Government. Sulla had erected a remarkable machine, intended to prevent all change and keep the power of the State in the hands of a small ruling class, the patricians. But the machine would not work when his strong directing hand was removed. It was too stiff and rigid to cope with the growing tasks of administering the great empire over which Rome had to rule. Bit by bit Sulla’s system broke down; his rules were swept aside. In the years between his death and that of Caesar the rule of Rome extended enormously; each extension made the need of a strong and efficient Government more pressing. The actual government of Rome through the Senate was neither strong nor efficient. Nothing was well managed. This growing mismanagement compelled men of active minds to look around and ask themselves what was wrong. They found different answers. But the need of change was clear.
Ifgreat men are those whose action brings about great changes, Lucius Licinius Lucullus was one of the greatest men of his time. His campaign in Asia Minor started an altogether new policy. Hitherto Rome had acquired provinces in an accidental way; there had been no purpose of conquest. In Spain and Africa the influence of Carthage had to be wiped out; in Greece Rome was nominally a protector only, called in to help against outside dangers. In Asia Minor it was more or less the same. As regards Asia Minor no one in Rome was satisfied with the treaty Sulla had made with Mithridates. It was felt to be a disgrace to Rome that the man who had caused the murder of hundreds of thousands of Italians in cold blood was recognized as the ‘friend and ally’ of Rome and left in undisturbed possession. Mithridates had got to be punished. When Lucullus went to the East it was for this purpose. But he did far more. He discovered that these great Asiatic monarchies, with their myriad armies, looked strong but were really weak; they could not maintain themselves, if attacked. He did not merely make Rome safe against their attack; he marched through kingdom after kingdom, conquering and subduing them to Rome. Thus, in fact, if not yet in name, he made Rome an empire.
The work he thus began Lucullus did not complete. The idea was his; it was his hard fighting, the courage with which he overrode instructions and disregarded the Senate’s order to return, which paved the way for conquest. Pompeius, whose slow mind and cautious temper could never have started such a policy, saw from Rome what Lucullus’s fighting was leading up to. He saw the golden prize at the end of his efforts and determined to snatch it from him. In this he succeeded. But the credit or blame of making Rome an imperial power, a power that rules by force over alien races, belongs not to him but toLucullus. This was not understood at the time. Lucullus, disappointed and embittered, came back to Rome and was known to his contemporaries not as the man who laid the foundations of the empire, but as the giver of the most luxurious and extraordinary banquets ever eaten. The proverb associated with his name—‘Dining with Lucullus’—shows this. His feasts were famous; the rarest foods from every part of the known world were on his table. His gardens too were wonderful, and his house glowed with all the treasures of the distant East. Among the treasures he brought back was one little noticed in his day—the cherry-tree. This soon grew all over Italy, but that Lucullus had brought it was forgotten. Like everything else that he did, it failed to bring him fame.
The family of L. Licinius Lucullus was one of the oldest in Rome and one of those not too numerous ones which maintained not only the pride of ancient race but the idea that good birth carried duties with it. He was poor but excessively proud, and belonged to that small Conservative group from which Rutilius Rufus and Livius Drusus came. His mind was clear and highly educated, cultivated in the full sense. As a soldier he was extremely able. The way in which the ordinary politician made money and bought votes disgusted him. In the main he stood sternly aloof from the scramble for office and wealth.
After Sulla’s death—he had been one of Sulla’s most capable officers—he retired to private life and watched with cold scorn the way in which the affairs of the State were mismanaged both at home and abroad; the long struggle with Sertorius, the rise of Pompeius, by good luck rather than, he thought, by merit. He had strong feelings and a good deal of the ambition that moves in almost every mind that is aware of its own powers, but he detested intrigue and had no aptitude for it. He was unpopular, because of his habit of saying what he thought, both in public and in private, about the corrupt politicians and vulgar scrambling money-makers whom other politicians abused in private but dared not offend in public. He had no party. Until he was fifty he had held no command or office of the first rank.
But when the question of the campaign against Mithridatescame up Lucullus felt that he had a claim to it and was prepared, despite his ordinary aloofness, to push that claim through. Nicomedes, the old King of Bithynia, had just died (74) and left his rich territory—a buffer state between the Roman provinces in Asia Minor and Mithridates’ kingdom of Pontus—to the Roman people. This the able and wily King of Pontus was not going to allow. He declared war, made an alliance with Sertorius, and marched into Bithynia. This was a serious menace. When Mithridates invaded Cilicia (73) people remembered the massacre of fifteen years ago and trembled. Pompeius wanted the command, but he was still busy in Spain; in the end Lucullus was appointed.
The difficulties of the campaign were at first overwhelming. Lucullus was not in sole control and his colleagues were refractory. But the defeat of Cotta, the other consul, at last left him a free hand. Many of his captains were dismayed by the reduction of the Roman army. Lucullus remained calm. Mithridates had attacked the port of Cyzicus, far from his own base, with an army so large that to provision it was extremely difficult. Lucullus took up a position from which he could cut off his supplies and so close him in a trap between the town and his own army. With his smaller army Lucullus refused battle, and when Mithridates endeavoured to make his way out by dividing his forces Lucullus attacked the two parts in turn, though it was the dead of winter, and defeated them disastrously. A vast army perished in the snow. Lucullus was able to overrun Bithynia and force Mithridates to retreat into Pontus.
It was now that Lucullus took the step which makes his career profoundly important in the history of Rome. Instead of waiting for instructions from the Home Government—instructions which he knew would probably have ordered his recall and certainly a halt in his operations—he resolved to act boldly on a plan of his own. That plan was no less than the invasion of Mithridates’ kingdom. Nearly all his generals opposed him, but Lucullus’s mind was clear. He burned to wipe out the treaty of Dardanus and had come to the conclusion that Eastern monarchies were not so strong as they looked: that their looseorganization could not stand against the disciplined force of Rome. Mithridates himself had something of genius; but Mithridates was old.
The progress of the campaign showed that Lucullus was right. Entering Pontus in the late autumn, he overran the rich country without meeting with any serious opposition; Mithridates’ armies had been scattered at Cyzicus; he had not yet collected fresh ones. Immense plunder—slaves and cattle, gold and silver, ivory and precious stones, rare stuffs and wondrous embroideries—were sent home to Rome. In the following spring when Mithridates did advance with his new army Lucullus defeated it decisively. Cabira was taken and Lucullus spent the winter with the royal palace as his head-quarters, training his army for the work before it. Here the defects of his character came into play. Proud and passionate, Lucullus had an inordinate sense of his own dignity and of the greatness of his own purpose; he forgot that the greatest general is only the leader of other men, on whom his triumphs depend. To Lucullus his soldiers were mere instruments, not human beings; the army a machine. Great generals like Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander and, in his degree, Sertorius, owe their lasting success to the power they have to make each man in the army feel that he is a man, whose devotion matters, on whom in the last resort everything depends. When soldiers feel this, when they feel that they and their general are part of one living thing, they can perform miracles. Lucullus had no such power. He was harsh, tyrannical, and inhuman in his attitude and, overwhelmed by a mass of work, never found time to relax. The sternness of discipline never unbent. He seemed to grudge the soldiers any share in the vast booty sent to Rome. He had no kindly word or look for individuals. It was this growing feeling of bitterness that the discontented officers in his army, and especially his brother-in-law Clodius, who was secretly working for Pompeius against him, used to sow the seeds of mutiny.
Lucullus, absorbed in the mighty design he had conceived, did not realize what was happening, even when after the capture of Amisus his men paid no heed to his orders that the cityshould be spared, but sacked and looted it. By the autumn all Pontus was in Roman hands. Lucullus, again refusing to await orders from Rome, pushed on into Armenia and attacked Tigranes, with whom Mithridates had taken refuge. This campaign was brilliantly carried out. With his small army, hardly 20,000 in all, Lucullus inflicted a series of crushing defeats on the Armenian forces. Armenia was under his feet. He had shown all the qualities of a great commander: clearness and steadiness of purpose, complete confidence, the boldness and unresting energy of genius. As he rested in winter quarters in South Armenia planning the conquest of Persia and Parthia, he might well compare himself with Alexander.
Next year Tigranes had gathered a fresh army and Lucullus determined to smash him by taking Artaxata, the capital of Armenia. But here he failed. The campaign was dreadful: the ground was covered with snow; the rivers icy. At last mutiny broke out, his men refused to go on. News came from Rome that Lucullus had been superseded. The plotters at Rome had got their way.
The fruits of victory had been snatched from Lucullus and left for Pompeius to garner. His soul might well be filled with bitterness as he came back to Rome. No one there realized what he had done; he had no party. The political struggle disgusted him more than ever. His solitariness had been increased by years of absolute power in the East. He withdrew into silent isolation, and the banquets which were the talk of Rome. Men gaped, but did not understand either the man or his work.
In the life of Lucullus, as in Old Comedy, we find at the beginning the acts of a soldier and a statesman, but towards the end eating and drinking, and little else but revels and illuminations, and mere frivolity. For I count as frivolous his costly houses, with their porticoes and baths, and still more the pictures and statues and his pains in collecting such works of art at great expense, lavishing the magnificent fortune amassed during his campaigns on the site where even now, though luxury has increased so much, the gardens of Lucullus are counted amongthe noblest belonging to the Emperor. At Naples, too, and on the neighbouring coast he pierced hills with great tunnels, surrounded his house with ponds and channels of salt water for breeding fish, and even built out into the sea, so that Tubero, the Stoic philosopher, at the sight of this magnificence called him ‘Xerxes in a toga’. Besides all this, he had country seats near Tusculum, with gazebos and rooms and porticoes open to the air, where Pompeius came on a visit, and blamed him for lodging himself excellently in summer, but making a house that was uninhabitable in winter. Lucullus merely smiled and said, ‘Do you think that I have less sense than the cranes and storks, and do not change my home according to the season?’ At another time, when a Praetor was anxious to make his spectacle magnificent, and begged for a loan of some purple cloaks to dress the performers, Lucullus replied that he would give him some if he found that he had any. Next day he asked how many were wanted, and hearing that a hundred would be enough, he offered two hundred. Horace is thinking of this when he remarks that he considers a house poor when the valuables hidden and overlooked are not more than those known to the master.
Plutarch, xxxvi. 39.
Atthe time of Sulla’s death the unanimous opinion of Rome would have fixed upon Cnaeus Pompeius as the one young man then alive who was likely to follow in his footsteps and rule the Roman world by his own will. And if there had been in Pompeius’s character the qualities which his rapid success seemed to promise, they would have been right. But the life of Pompeius shows how much circumstances—chance, opportunity, the good opinion of others, birth and wealth—can do for a man; and what they cannot do, unless he has within himself the qualities of mind and will which mark off the first-rate from the best second-rate. Greatness was, as it were, thrust upon him; but since he was not great in himself he could not achieve it. It is this that makes him so interesting a failure. His failure was due to the fact that at a supreme crisis he was called upon to do just the thingshe could not do. It was no accident that enabled Julius Caesar to succeed where he failed. For Caesar possessed in supreme degree the power to act with decision, which, when combined with clear judgement, makes the great man of action. At the crucial moment the judgement of Pompeius wavered: his will was uncertain. In ordinary peaceful times his weaknesses might never have been seen; but his life fell within an era of storm and stress when the stuff of which men are made is tested and shown.
Tall, strongly built, with curly hair and large eyes that though prominently set and wide open had a rather sleepy expression, Pompeius when young was often likened to Alexander the Great. He had his regular features and brilliant colouring, but in his eyes there was none of the fire or mystery that made Alexander seem to his contemporaries as beautiful as a god. His manners were grave and dignified. He gave all who saw him an impression of his importance. Pompeius had a very strong sense of his own importance. The thing he was most afraid of was of being laughed at. When he suspected that any one was doing this, he lost his temper.
see captionPOMPEIUS
see caption
POMPEIUS
Pompeius belonged to a family old and honourable enough, though plebeian, to make the senators at last accept him as one of themselves, the more readily that he had acquired immense wealth in the proscriptions. At the time of the civil war he was on the side of Marius, and closely associated with him, while Marius and Cinna were in power in Rome. His first wife Antistia was the daughter of a friend of Cinna’s. When Sulla landed, however, Pompeius soon saw which way things were going. He collected an army and marched to join Sulla. Although he was only twenty-three at the time, Sulla hailed himas one of the most important of his supporters. He suggested to him that he should put away his young wife Antistia and marry his own daughter-in-law. To this Pompeius agreed, although Antistia loved him and was in the deepest distress, since her father had been killed in the proscriptions; moreover, her mother, when she heard how Pompeius intended to treat her daughter, laid violent hands upon herself. In the proscriptions Pompeius acquired so much wealth that within a few years he was one of the richest men in Rome. His popularity was great and he could afford to keep it up by giving splendid shows and presents to the people.
His wealth, his quick success, his great popularity filled the senators with awe. They had a constant fear that he was to be the next Sulla. They listened with respect to all that Pompeius said, though he was a dull speaker; and regarded him as the first general of the day, though he had really done nothing to deserve that title. But he was always lucky in his campaigns, and again and again had the good fortune to be made commander just at the stage when the fruits of a long struggle, carried on by others, were ready to be gathered. In the means by which he achieved success Pompeius was not over scrupulous. His want of feeling in the matter of Antistia was only one sign of this. The same kind of callousness was shown in the way he secured the final defeat of Sertorius, not by action in the field but by a plot. After three years of unsuccessful fighting Sertorius, much the ablest of Marius’s followers, who had raised the standard of revolt in Spain, was still as far from being conquered as ever. Pompeius was tired of the war; so were his troops. At last by the treachery of Perpenna and some other Romans in his army, on whose minds secret emissaries from Rome had worked, Sertorius was murdered. Pompeius then suppressed the revolt in Spain with horrible cruelty and returned to Rome crowned with success.
He was made consul (70) although he had never held any of the junior offices of State; but his consulship was marked by nothing more important than his constant disagreements with his colleague Crassus, who, though of patrician birth, inclined to the so-called Popular, anti-Senatorial party. For the next twoyears he was little to the fore until called upon, as the first general of the day, to deal with a difficulty which represented a most serious danger to Rome. Rome depended to a large extent on foreign corn. Yet this overseas corn supply was almost suspended by the pirates of the Mediterranean. Commander after commander failed to suppress them. Food prices in Rome rose to famine heights. At last the tribune Gabinius proposed that a special commander should be appointed, with unexampled power, both as regards men and money; and that Pompeius should be the man. Caesar and Cicero supported the plan. It was hotly opposed by those who thought such powers dangerous; but in the end Pompeius was appointed. He showed conspicuous energy and within forty days the seas were cleared.
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A VASE in the shape of a galley
A vivid account of Pompeius’s operations against the pirates was given by Cicero in the great speech he made in support of the proposal of Manilius to give him the command in the East, in the place of Lucullus.
You know well enough how quickly these operations against the Pirates were conducted, but I must not on that account omit all mention of them. What man ever existed that, eitherin the course of business or in the pursuit of gain, was able to visit so many places and to travel such long distances in so short a time as this great blast of war, directed by Cn. Pompeius, swept over the seas? Even when it was yet too early for a distant voyage, he visited Sicily, explored the coast of Africa, thence crossed to Sardinia, and protected these three great granaries of the Republic with strong garrisons and fleets. Next, after returning to Italy, he provided in the same way for the safety of the two Spains and Transalpine Gaul, and sending ships to the Illyrian coast, to Achaia, and all Greece besides, he established large forces, military and naval, in the two seas of Italy. On the forty-ninth day after he left Brundisium he brought the whole of Cilicia under the dominion of the Roman people, and all the Pirates, wherever they might be, either were captured and put to death, or surrendered to his sole authority and command. Finally, when the Cretans had followed him even into Pamphylia with envoys begging for clemency, he did not disdain their offer of submission and was content to demand hostages. The result was that this great war, that lasted so long and reached so far, a war that harassed every country and every people, was taken in hand by Pompeius at the end of the winter, was begun in the early days of the spring, and was finished by the middle of the summer.
Cicero,De Lege Manilia, §§ 34-5.
Pompeius used the renown won by this success to secure for himself the fruits of the Asiatic victories won by Lucullus. On the one hand, he worked in Rome against Lucullus so that he got the command transferred to himself; on the other, by bribery and the arts of Clodius, Lucullus’s brother-in-law and aide-de-camp, he worked up a mutiny among his troops. Then he went out to Asia and in a series of spectacular campaigns laid the East at his feet. His progress through Asia was a parade; it was no wonder that the Romans were dazzled by the news of the way in which he overran kingdoms and conquered vast territories of enormous wealth. Pompeius seemed to them a general of the rank of Hannibal or Alexander.
The Senate grew alarmed. They had not forgotten how Sulla had returned from the East in 83 and set himself up as Dictator, master of Rome. If Pompeius in 62 wanted to do the same there was nothing to prevent him. He had a great army, devotedto him and ready to follow him in any adventure. He was extremely popular with the people of Rome. He had never shown any particular respect for the laws and customs of the State when he wanted anything for himself. He had broken the rules Sulla had laid down, by which no one could hold high command until he had passed through all the lower offices. Now, while still in Asia, he demanded to be allowed to stand as consul, in his absence, although he had never been tribune or praetor. The Senate put difficulties in his way. Indeed they did everything they could to irritate Pompeius and give him the excuse for taking the strong line they dreaded. Only Julius Caesar, the young and rapidly rising leader of the Popular party, backed him. The Senate refused to allow Pompeius to stand for the consulship. Nepos, his emissary, would actually have been killed in the streets if Caesar had not saved him. Caesar pleased him by proposing that he should finish rebuilding the Capitol.
The Senate’s fears were groundless, as Caesar knew. Pompeius was not like Sulla. Sulla always knew what he wanted. Pompeius had no clear aim. Opportunities lay open before him which he did not desire or know how to use. He wanted to be important, a big man of whom people spoke well, to whom they looked up; but his timid mind shrank from responsibility. He had never been fired by any great idea; he had no purpose that he wanted to impress upon the world. He had not even got that harsh and cold contempt for the mass of mankind that caused Sulla to feel a sort of bitter pleasure in imposing his will upon them. Of Caesar’s fire he had nothing. Politically he had never taken a firm line. If no one in Rome quite knew where he stood, Pompeius was in the same doubt himself. His was a respectable nature with a natural inclination towards safety. But in the Rome of his day things were in a state of uneasy movement; there was no safety or quiet for any one who wanted at the same time to be a big figure. Pompeius was later forced to take action. This action was weak and irresolute because his mind had never been clear. Most people are like Pompeius: they do not know what they want; or they want somethingvague, like happiness or the good opinion of others; or they want a number of things which cannot be had together. The mark of those men who stand out in history is that they conceived clearly something they wanted to have or do; and by force of will drove through to it. Even when they failed, as Hannibal, for instance, failed, their failure has in it something more magnificent than ordinary success. But this power to will implies a readiness to make sacrifices. If you want one thing you must be prepared to do without others. If you want to please yourself you must be ready to displease other people. You cannot have your own way and at the same time have the good opinion of everybody. This Pompeius never saw.
see captionA TRIUMPHfrom a relief of the Empire
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A TRIUMPHfrom a relief of the Empire
When he returned from his great campaigns in the East in the year 62 Pompeius landed at Brundisium and dismissed his soldiers to their homes. The senators heaved a vast sigh of relief. He was not going to be dangerous. When Pompeius arrived in Rome without his army he found that nobody much wanted him. People were more interested in the struggles that had been going on at home—Catiline’s conspiracy, Cicero’s strong line in putting the conspirators to death, the question whether Caesar had been implicated, the friendship between Caesar and Crassus—than in what Pompeius had been doing in the East. Without his army nobody was afraid of Pompeius. He found Lucullus, in the Senate and political circles generally,doing everything he could to thwart him, supported by Cato the Younger, who thought that imperialism, Eastern conquests, and new wealth were bad things, likely to ruin Rome. Pompeius celebrated a stupendous triumph which made him the idol of the mob; but the Senate would not hear of his being made consul or make grants of lands to his soldiers. The Conservative party had thwarted Pompeius at every turn; he was deeply hurt, and in his most sensitive part, his vanity. This hurt finally drove him into an alliance with Caesar and Crassus, the leaders of the Popular party, and his own most dangerous rivals. He disliked Crassus and feared Caesar. At the moment his support was invaluable to the Popular party; therefore Caesar set himself to overcome Pompeius’s distrust of himself and Crassus’s deep detestation of Pompeius. He had good arguments for each of them; and behind them a charm of manner that few people could resist.
Three years after Pompeius returned from the East the three strongest men in Rome were bound together. This first Triumvirate (60), as it was afterwards called, was a private arrangement. People only learned of its existence when they saw it at work. Pompeius married Caesar’s daughter, Julia, who, so long as she lived, kept him friendly with her father. Caesar was made consul and at once confirmed all that Pompeius had done in the East and made grants of lands to his soldiers. A big programme of land reform was passed through. The corn distribution was reorganized. People who criticized the Triumvirate too openly, like Cato, were banished. Cicero also was exiled, since Clodius had sworn vengeance on him. Caesar would have saved him by taking him with him to Gaul, as well as his brother Quintus, who was one of his adjutants; but Cicero refused. Caesar went off to Gaul the year after his consulship (58); Pompeius and Crassus were left masters in Rome.
There were at the time incessant disorders in the city. The strife of parties waxed bitter and furious. Fights between different political clubs were of nightly occurrence. The ingenious Clodius had reorganized the old associations of the workers into guilds of a more or less political kind, and thus built up amachinery in every quarter of the city which he handled with great adroitness at election times. Moreover, he organized something like a voters’ army of slaves and freedmen, which turned out on his instructions, and lived on the free corn given out by the State. Pompeius did nothing to cope with this state of things. He fell, in fact, into a strange condition of indolence, and took hardly any part in public affairs. The news of Caesar’s victories in Gaul did not rouse him, though Caesar’s popularity increased daily and his own declined.
Pompeius’s sloth at this period is sometimes put down to his extreme domestic happiness. Julia, his new wife, was but half his age, three and twenty. She possessed a full measure of the irresistible charm of her father; so long as she lived the bond between the Triumvirs was unshakeable. But her husband’s apparent indifference to public affairs was due, in the main, to another reason; the one which explains so much in Pompeius’s action and inaction both at this time and later. He stood aloof because he did not know what to do. The political tangle had become a knot that must be cut. Pompeius was not the man to cut knots. He let things slide.