The Project Gutenberg eBook ofRome

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofRomeThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: RomeAuthor: W. Warde FowlerRelease date: February 23, 2018 [eBook #56630]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive/American Libraries.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROME ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: RomeAuthor: W. Warde FowlerRelease date: February 23, 2018 [eBook #56630]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive/American Libraries.)

Title: Rome

Author: W. Warde Fowler

Release date: February 23, 2018 [eBook #56630]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROME ***

HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARYOF MODERN KNOWLEDGENo. 30

Editors:HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., LL.D., F.B.A.Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.

16mo cloth, 50 centsnet, by mail 56 cents

ROMEBYW. WARDE FOWLER, M.A.AUTHOR OF “LIFE OF JULIUS CÆSAR,” “THE CITY-STATE OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS,” “SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME IN THE AGE OF CICERO,” ETC.Οὐ πολλὰ ἀλλὰ πολύNEW YORKHENRY HOLT AND COMPANYLONDONWILLIAMS AND NORGATE

BYW. WARDE FOWLER, M.A.AUTHOR OF “LIFE OF JULIUS CÆSAR,” “THE CITY-STATE OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS,” “SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME IN THE AGE OF CICERO,” ETC.

Οὐ πολλὰ ἀλλὰ πολύ

NEW YORKHENRY HOLT AND COMPANYLONDONWILLIAMS AND NORGATE

Let us suppose an ordinary Englishman, with no special knowledge of classical history, to be looking at a collection of Roman antiquities in the cases of a museum. He will probably not linger long over these cases, but will pass on to something more likely to attract his interest. The objects he is looking at are, for the most part, neither striking nor beautiful, and the same are presented for his inspection over and over again as collections from various Roman sites. They are chiefly useful things, implements and utensils of all kinds, and fragments of military weapons and armour. In the coins he can take no delight, because, apart from the fact that, uninterpreted, they have no tale to tell him, they do not excite his admiration by beauty of design and workmanship. If, indeed,he were visiting a museum at Rome, he would find plenty of beautiful things in it; but these are works of Greek artists, imported by wealthy or tasteful Romans in the later ages of Rome’s history. A typical collection of genuine Roman antiquities would probably have the effect I describe. Utility, not beauty, would seem to have been the motive of the people who left these things behind them.

The same motive will also be suggested to us if we visit any of the larger Roman works either in this country or on the Continent. Most of us know the look of a Roman road running straight over hill and valley, and meant mainly for military purposes, to enable troops to move rapidly and to survey the country as they marched. In the towns which have been excavated, we usually find that the most spacious and striking buildings must have been the meeting-halls (basilicæ), in which business of all kinds was transacted, and especially business connected with law and government. Very often, though not in the comparatively poor province of Britain, this characteristic of utility is combined with another—solidity and imposing size. In this well-watered island the Romans did not needaqueducts to bring a constant supply of water to their towns, but in Italy and the south of France these great works are sometimes unnecessarily huge and imposing. Even when they left the path of strict utility, as in their triumphal arches and gateways, for which we must go to Trier in Germany, or to Orange in the south of France, or to Italy itself, they held strongly to the principles of solidity and imposing size. A writer who knew their art well has said that their notion of the highest of all things, theirsummum bonum, was not the beautiful, but the powerful, and that they thought they had as a people received this notion from heaven.

It would, indeed, be wrong to say that there is no beauty in Roman art; but it is quite in accordance with what has just been said, that even in the best of it there is a strong tendency to realism, to matter of fact. In their sculpture they were especially strong in portraiture, and in depicting scenes of human life they never or rarely idealise. A battle scene, or a picture on stone of life in a city, is crowded with figures, just because it really was so, and the work is without that restfulness for the eye which the perfect groupingof a Greek artist so often supplies. So, too, in literature; all their greatest poetry has a strictly practical object, and bears directly on human life. The great philosophical poem of Lucretius was meant to rescue the Romans from religious superstition; the object of theÆneidof Virgil, of which I shall have more to say in another chapter, was to recall the degenerate Roman of that day to the sense of duty in the home and in the State. Their one original invention in literary form was satire, by which they meant comment, friendly or hostile, on the human life around them. Their myths and legends, of which there was no such abundant crop as in Greece, dealt chiefly with the founding of cities, or with the heroic deeds of human beings.[1]On the whole they excelled most in oratory and history; and their prose came to perfection earlier than their poetry.

One other feature of their character shall be mentioned here, which is entirely in keeping with the rest, and often escapes notice. If in the works of their hands and their brains theywere not an imaginative people, we can well understand that they had not this gift in practical life. Imagination in action takes the form of adventurousness, as we may see in our own history; the literary imaginativeness of Elizabethan England has its counterpart in the adventurous voyages of Elizabethan seamen. The Romans were not an adventurous people; they were not imaginative enough to be so. They penetrated, indeed, into unknown countries; Cæsar reached Britain and bridged the Rhine, but that great man, a true Roman born, had a temperament rather scientific than romantic. He did as almost all conquering Romans had done before him, and were to do after him—he advanced solidly, making his way safe behind him and feeling carefully in front of him. His book about his wars in Gaul was written without a touch of imagination, and for strictly practical purposes. There is, indeed, in the generation before Cæsar, an exception so striking that it may be said to prove the rule; he who reads Plutarch’s charming life of Sertorius, an Italian from the mountains of central Italy, will find both romance and adventure in his story.

It is plain, then, that we have to do in this volume with a people not of imagination, but of action: a people intensely alive to the necessities and difficulties of human life. The Romans were, in fact, the most practical people in history; and this enabled them to supply what was wanting to the civilisation of the Mediterranean basin in the work of the Greeks. They themselves were well aware of this quality, and proud of it. We find it expressed by the elder Cato quite at the beginning of the best age of Roman literature; his ideal Roman isvir fortis et strenuus—a man of strong courage and active energy. Tacitus, in the later days of that literature, says that all designs and deeds should be directed to the practical ends of life (ad utilitatem vitæ). Midway between these two, we have the great Latin poets constantly singing of the hardihood and the practical virtues which had made Rome great, and Italy great under Rome’s leadership. “A race of hardy breed, we carry our children to the streams and harden them in the bitter, icy water; as boys they spend wakeful nights over the chase, and tire out the whirlwind, but in manhood, unwearied by toil and trained to poverty,they subdue the soil with their mattocks, or shake towns in war” (Virg.,Æn.ix. 607 foll.). These lines, though applied to an Italian stock, were meant to remind the Roman of a life that had once been his. The words in which the Romans delighted as expressing their national characteristics, all tell the same tale:gravitas, the seriousness of demeanour which is the outward token of a steadfast purpose;continentia, self-restraint;industriaanddiligentia, words which we have inherited from them, needing no explanation;constantia, perseverance in conduct; and last, not least,virtus, manliness, which originally meant activity and courage, and with ripening civilisation took on a broader and more ethical meaning. Quotations might be multiplied a thousandfold to prove the honest admiration of this people for their own nobler qualities. As exemplified in an individual, Plutarch’s life of the elder Cato, which can be read as well in English as in the original Greek, will give a good idea of these.

But it is essential to note that this hard and practical turn of the Roman mind was in some ways curiously limited. It cannot be said that they excelled either in industrialor commercial pursuits. Agriculture was their original occupation, and trade-gilds existed at Rome very early in her history; but the story of their agriculture is rather a sad one, and Rome has never become a great industrial city. Their first book about husbandry was translated from the Carthaginian, and their methods of commerce they learnt chiefly from the Greeks. It was in another direction that their genius for practical work drew them: to the arts and methods of discipline, law, government.

We can see this peculiar gift showing itself at all stages of their development: in the agricultural family which was the germ of all their later growth, in the city-state which grew from that germ, and in the Empire, founded by the leaders of the city-state, and organised by Augustus and his successors. It is seen, too, in their military system, which won them their empire; they did not fight merely for spoil or glory, but for clearly realised practical purposes. As Tacitus says of a single German tribe which possessed something of this gift, the Romans did not so much go out to battle as to war. True, they constantly made blunders and suffereddefeat; they often “muddled through” difficulties as we do ourselves; but they refused to recognise defeat, and profited by adverse fortune. Listen once more to a few words of old Cato; in hisOrigins of Rome, written for his son, he wrote: “Adversity tames us, and teaches us our true line of conduct, while good fortune is apt to warp us from the way of prudence.” Thus they went on from defeat to victory, conquest, and government. It is worth while not only to lay to heart, but to learn by heart, the famous lines in which Virgil sums up the Roman’s conception of his own work in the world—

“Others will mould their bronzes to breathe with a tenderer grace,Draw, I doubt not, from marble a vivid life to the face,Plead at the bar more deftly, with sapient wands of the wise,Trace heaven’s courses and changes, predict us stars to arise.Thine, O Roman, remember, to reign over every race!These be thine arts, thy glories, the ways of peace to proclaim,Mercy to show to the fallen, the proud with battle to tame!”Æneid, vi. 847-853(Bowen’s translation).

“Others will mould their bronzes to breathe with a tenderer grace,

Draw, I doubt not, from marble a vivid life to the face,

Plead at the bar more deftly, with sapient wands of the wise,

Trace heaven’s courses and changes, predict us stars to arise.

Thine, O Roman, remember, to reign over every race!

These be thine arts, thy glories, the ways of peace to proclaim,

Mercy to show to the fallen, the proud with battle to tame!”

Æneid, vi. 847-853

(Bowen’s translation).

It was this power of ruling, which itself implies a habit of discipline, that marked out Rome as the natural successor of Greece in European civilisation; and it grew naturally out of the purely practical bent of the early Romans, who were unhampered in their constant activity by fancy, reflection, or culture. Without it, we may doubt if the work of the Greeks would have been saved for us when the storms from the north, invasions of barbarian peoples, fell at last upon the sunny lands filled with the spirit of Greek thought and the divine works of Greek artists. To Roman discipline, law, and government, we owe not only much that even now is every day of practical benefit to us, but the preservation of what we still possess of the treasures of Hellenic genius.

For this reason I assume that this book will be taken up by most readers after they have made some acquaintance with the history and thought of the Greeks. It is truethat the history of the two peoples is best looked at as one great whole; there is a general likeness in their institutions; the form of the State, and the ideas of government, with which each grew to maturity, were in the main the same. But Roman mental development was much slower than Greek; and Greece was already beginning to lose her vitality when Rome was still illiterate and unable to record her own history adequately. Thus Greek influence was the first to tell upon the world; the basin of the Mediterranean was already permeated by the Greek spirit when Roman influence began to work upon it; and there can be no doubt that he who begins with Roman history and then goes on to Greek is reversing the natural order of things.

I will also assume that those who have begun to read this book are provided with some knowledge of that Mediterranean basin which is the scene of Græco-Roman history; such as can be gained by frequent contemplation of a good map. They will be familiar with Sicily and south Italy, which were teeming with Greek settlements when Roman history really begins. They willprobably have realised how short a step it is from Italy to Africa, whether or no Sicily be taken as a stepping-stone; Cato could show fresh figs in the Roman senate which had been grown in Carthaginian territory. They will have realised that you can pass from the “heel” of Italy to the Hellenic peninsula in a single night, as Cæsar did when he embarked his army at Brindisi to attack his rival; such geographical facts are of immense importance in explaining not only the foreign policy of Rome, but also the development of her culture. And thus furnished, they will begin to be curious about the destiny of the Italian peninsula, of which Greek history has had little to tell them. Leaving that question for the present, they will wish to know why the Greeks did not colonise the centre and north of Italy as they did the south and south-west, but left room enough for a new type of civilisation to grow up there. And above all, they will wish to know how and why a single city on the western coast should have succeeded in building up a great power in Italy quite independent of Greece, and destined eventually to supersede her, which may be reckoned as a factor almost asimportant in the making of our modern civilisation as Hellas herself.

This last question is the one which I must try to answer in the earlier part of this book; in the later chapters I shall have to deal with another one—how this single city-state contrived to weld together the whole Mediterranean civilisation, strongly enough to give it several centuries of security against uncivilised enemies in the north, and half-civilised enemies in the east. But for the moment let us see why the Greeks did not permeate Italy with their own civilisation as they did Sicily: how it was that they left room for a new power, capable eventually of shielding them and their work from destruction. To answer this question we must consider the nature of the Italian peninsula, and the character of the races then living in it.

The simple fact is, that though the shrewd commercial Greek had seized on all the best harbours in the long, narrow peninsula, these harbours were all in the south coast, about the “heel” of Italy, or in the south-west coast, in the volcanic region of the modern Naples, which was itself one of these Greeksettlements. The east coast north of the “heel” is almost harbourless, as will be realised by any one who takes the route by rail to Brindisi on his way to Egypt or India.Italy is a mountainous country—a fact never to be forgotten in Roman history—and its mountains, the long chain of the Apennines, have their spinal ridge much nearer the east than the west coast, and descend upon the sea so sharply on that side that for long distances road or railway only just finds a passage. All along this east coast there was nothing to tempt Greeks to settle, and as they rarely or never penetrated far inland from their settlements, their influence never spread into this mountainous region from the many seacoast towns of Magna Græcia, as their part of Italy was called. On the Bay of Naples they had, indeed, a better chance; here there was a rich fertile plain stretching away to the hills, which on this side come down less steeply than on the eastern; this we shall hear of again as the Plain of Campania, in which Greek influence was very strong and active, capable of penetrating beyond its limits northward. But north of this again they left no permanent settlements; good harbours arewanting, and such as there are were occupied about the eighth centuryB.C.by a people at that time as enterprising as themselves, the Etruscans. These, too, had been recent immigrants into the peninsula from the east, and together with the Greeks they formed the only obstacles to the growth of a native Italian power—a power, that is, belonging to the older races that had long been settled there. The Greeks were not likely to interfere with such a growth, as we have seen; whether the Etruscans were to do so we have yet to see.

It was, in fact, this Etruscan people who first gave an Italian stock the chance of rising into a great Mediterranean power; and in order to understand how this was, we must look at a good map of central Italy, which gives a fair idea of the elevations in this part of the peninsula. Looking at such a map, it is easy to see that the long, narrow leg of Italy is cloven in twain about the middle by a river, the Tiber, the only river of considerable size and real historical importance, south of the Po. It is formed of several streams which descend from the central mass of the Apennines, now called the Abruzzi, but soongathers into a swift though not a wide river, and emerges from that mountainous district some five-and-twenty miles from the sea, into what we now call the Roman Campagna, the Latium of ancient times; skirting the northern edge of this comparatively level district it falls into the sea, without forming a natural harbour, about half-way up the western coast of the peninsula. To the north of it and of the plain were settled a number of cities, more or less independent of each other, forming the Etruscan people, whose origin we do not yet know for certain, and whose language has never been deciphered from the inscriptions they have left behind them; a mysterious race, active in war and commerce, who had subdued but not exterminated the native population around them. To the east and south of the Tiber, stretching far along the mountainous region and its western outskirts, was a race of hardy mountaineers, broken up, as hill peoples usually are, into a number of communities without any principle of cohesion except that of the various tribes to which they belonged. The northern part of this sturdy hill-folk was known as Umbrians and Sabines; the southern part asSamnites or Oscans. They all spoke dialects of the same tongue, a tongue akin to those which most European peoples still speak. Lastly, immediately to the south of the Tiber in the last part of its course, occupying the plain which stretches here between the mountains, the river, and the sea, there was settled another branch of this same stock, speaking another dialect destined to be known for ever as Latin. These three sub-races of a great stock—Umbrians, Samnites, and Latins—are meant when we speak of a native Italian population as opposed to Greek or Etruscan immigrants. Doubtless they were not the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, but of older stocks history knows nothing that concerns us in this book. These are the peoples who were destined to be supreme in the Mediterranean basin, and eventually to govern the whole civilised world.

It is as well to be quite clear at once that the acquisition of this supremacy was not the work of one only of these peoples, the Latins, or of one city only of the Latins,i.e.Rome. It was the work of all these stocks which I have called native Italian. Roman is a convenient word, and Rome wasall along the leader in action and the organising power; but the material, and in a great part as time went on the brain-power also, was contributed by all these peoples taken together. They had first to submit to the great leader and organiser, Rome, a fate against which, as we shall see, they struggled long; but no sooner had they submitted than they were added to the account of Italian development, and with few exceptions played their new part with a good courage.

So much, then, for the Italian peoples who were to supersede the Greeks in the world’s history. But let us now return for a moment to the Tiber, and fix our eyes on the last five-and-twenty miles of its course, where it separates the plain of Latium from the Etruscan people to the north. The Latin-speaking stock were far more in danger from these Etruscans than the Umbrian and Samnite mountaineers; nothing but the river was between them and their enemies, for enemies they undoubtedly were, bent on pushing farther south, like the Danes in England in the ninth century of our era. The Latins had, indeed, a magnificent natural fortress in the middle of their plain, in the extinctvolcano of the Alban mountain, some 3000 feet above sea-level; and here, according to a sure tradition, was their original chief city, Alba Longa. But this was of no avail against an invader from the north; it was the river that was the vital concern of Latium when once the Etruscans had become established to the north of it. Now at one point, some twenty miles by water from the river’s mouth, was a group of small hills, rising to a height of about 160 feet, three of them almost isolated and abutting on the stream, and the others in reality a part of the plain to the south, with their northern sides falling somewhat steeply towards the Tiber. Here, too, was an island in the river, which might give an enemy an easy chance of crossing. On this position there arose at some uncertain date, but beyond doubt as a fortress against the Etruscan power, a city calledRoma; and there a city has been ever since, known by the same name. It is likely enough that it was an outpost founded by the city of Alba Longa, which eventually itself vanished out of history; and this was the tradition of later days. If we can accept the motive of the foundation—the defence of Latium againsther foe, we need not trouble about the many legends of it.

Rome started on her wonderful career as a military outpost of a people akin to her, and face to face with an enemy with whom she had no sort of relationship. If she could but hold her position there was obviously a great future for her. The position on the Tiber was, in fact, strategically the best in Italy. It is, as a great Roman historian said, just in the centre of the peninsula. There was easy access to the sea both by land and water, and a way open into central Italy up the Tiber valley—the one great natural entrance from the sea. She was far enough from the sea to be safe from raiders, yet near enough to be in communication with other peoples by means of shipping. If enemies attacked her from different directions inland, she could move against them on what in military language we may call “inner lines”—she could strike simultaneously from a common base. From the sea no power dared attack her, until in her degenerate days Genseric landed at Ostia inA.D.455. On the whole, we may say that no other city in Italy had the same chance, as regards position, of dominatingthe whole of Italy, and that in those early days of her history the Etruscans unwittingly taught her how to use this great advantage. Just as the kingdom of the West Saxons, and their supremacy in England, was built up by the stern necessity of having to resist the Danes, so the Romans became a leading people in Italy by virtue of having to withstand the Etruscans.

In my next chapter I propose to tell the story in outline (and in detail it cannot be told for want of knowledge) of the advance of the Roman power to the leadership of Italy. Then I will try and explain the qualities and the organisation which enabled her to turn her chances to account.

I said in the last chapter that if Rome could only hold the line of the lower Tiber against the Etruscans, great possibilities of advance were open to her. How long she held it we do not know; but there is hardly a doubt that in course of time—some time probably in the sixth centuryB.C.—she lost it, and even herself fell into the hands of the enemy. The tale is not told in her legendary annals; but we have other convincing evidence. The last three kings of Rome seem to have been Etruscans. The great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill, which was founded at this time, was in the Etruscan style, and built on foundations of Etruscan masonry, some of which can still be seen in the garden of the German embassy in modern Rome. Below this temple, as you go to the river, was a street called the street of the Etruscans, andthere are other signs of the conquest which need not be given here. On the whole we may believe that this persistent enemy crossed the Tiber higher up, where she already had a footing, and so took the city in flank and rear.

Fortunately, the Etruscans were not in the habit of destroying the cities they took: they occupied and made use of them. They seem to have used Rome to spread their influence over Latium: they built a temple of Jupiter on the Alban hill, the old centre of a Latin league: and there is strong evidence that they made Rome the head of another and later league, with a religious centre in a temple of Diana, who was not originally a Roman deity, on the Aventine hill overlooking the Tiber. All events in this Etruscan period are very dim and doubtful, but it looks as if the very loss of the line of defence had only given the conquered city a new lease of life, with a widened outlook and fresh opportunities. But was she to continue as an Etruscan city? The question reminds us of a crisis in our own history: was England to become a Norman-French country after the Conquest?

At this time it seems that the Etruscans were being harassed from the north by Gallic tribes, who had already spread over northwest Europe, and were conquering the valley of the Po and pressing farther south. This may account for the undoubted fact that about the end of the sixth centuryB.C.Rome did succeed in throwing off the Etruscan yoke: that the old Roman families united to expel their foreign king, and to establish an aristocratic republic. Henceforward the very name of king (rex) was held in abhorrence by the Romans, and the government passed into the hands of two yearly elected magistrates, with absolute power as leaders in war, and a limited power within the city. In the next chapter I will explain this new form of government more fully: here it will be enough to say that they were called consuls, and that they had an advising body (as the kings probably had before them) of the heads of noble families, calledsenatus, or a body of elderly men. At present let us go on with the story of Rome’s advance in Italy.

According to the legend, the Etruscans made a vigorous attempt to recover Rome.This is a picturesque story, and is admirably told in one of Macaulay’s famousLays of Ancient Rome. But we must pass it over here, for we have no means of testing the truth of it. Soon afterwards we come upon what seems to be a real historical fact, a treaty between Rome and the other Latin cities, the text of which was preserved for many centuries. This treaty shows plainly that henceforward we have to reckon Rome and Latium as one power in Italy; and this is the first real forward step in the advance of Rome. It guaranteed in the first place mutual support in war; Rome needed support against the Etruscans, and the Latin cities at the southern end of the plain were liable to be attacked by hill tribes from the east and south. Still more important as showing the advance of civilisation was the sanction of a common system of private law. Any citizen of a Latin city (including, of course, Rome ) was to be able to buy and sell, to hold and inherit property, in any other city, in full confidence that he would be protected by the law of that city in so doing; and if he married a woman of another city his marriage was legitimate and his children could inherit his propertyaccording to law.[2]This was going a long way towards making a single state of the whole of Latium. All the communities were on equal terms, and all had certain legal relations with each other; and these are two of the chief features of a true federation. Now all federations were an improvement on the isolation of the single city-state, which was helpless in those days of turbulence and invasion. This one looks like the work of a statesman; and if that statesman was a Roman, Spurius Cassius, as tradition asserted, then Rome had achieved her first victory in the arts of statesmanship and diplomacy with which she was destined to rule the world.

Before we go on with our story let us notice how well Latium was geographically fitted to develop a federation, as compared with the more mountainous districts of Italy. Latium was a plain, as its name seems to imply; and like Bœotia in Greece it was naturally suited for federative union, while tribes living in the highlands always found it difficult to unite. Again, the Latins were jammed into acomparatively small space between the hills and the sea, and their strength was concentrated by their position: while the Etruscans, and the various Italian stocks, were continually moving onward to look for better quarters, and losing their strength and their cohesion in doing so.

In these early federations of cities there was always a tendency for one particular city to slip into the position of leader, just as in modern federations, that of Switzerland for example, there is a continual tendency for the central authority to extend its influence. In Latium there can be no doubt that Rome very soon began to assume some kind of headship. Her position on the Tiber, and the constant strain that she had to undergo in resisting the Etruscans, gave her an advantage over the other Latin cities, who had to resist less constant annoyance from less highly civilised enemies. I mean that the Roman people had both nerve and brain so continually exercised that they developed not only brute courage, but endurance, diplomatic skill and forethought. For a whole century after they expelled their Etruscan kings they had to keep up a continual struggle with thegreat Etruscan city of Veii, which was only a few miles to the north of the river, on very high ground, and with the smaller town of Fidenæ on the Tiber above Rome, which the Veians could make use of to attack them from that side. No wonder that when at last they succeeded in taking Veii they burnt it to the ground. It is said that they thought of migrating to that lofty site themselves, and abandoning the position on the Tiber; but they wisely gave up the idea, and Veii was sacked and her goddess Juno brought to Rome. The site is a deserted spot at the present day.

It was this prolonged struggle, in which the Latins were of course called upon to help, that placed Rome in the position of leader of the league, and from the moment it was over we find her attitude towards the Latins a changed one. It is likely enough that she had long been growing overbearing and unpopular with the other cities, but of this, if it was so, we have no certain details. What we do know is that at the beginning of the fourth centuryB.C., when a terrible disaster overtook Rome, the Latins failed to serve her.

This disaster was the capture and sack of Rome by a wandering tribe of Gauls from the north, who descended the valley of the Tiber, took the Romans by surprise, and utterly routed them at the little river Allia, twelve miles from the city. These Gauls were formidable in battle and fairly frightened the Romans; but, like other Celtic peoples, they were incapable of settling down into a solid State, or of making good use of their victories. They vanished as quickly as they had come, and left nothing behind them but an indelible memory of the terror they had inspired, and many stories of the agony of that catastrophe. The most characteristic of these shows the veneration of the Romans for what was perhaps their greatest political institution, the Senate. The citizens had fled to the Capitol, where they contrived to hold out till relief came; but meanwhile the older Senators, men who were past the age of fighting, determined to meet their death, and devoted themselves, according to an old religious practice resorted to in extreme peril, to the infernal deities. Each then took his seat in state robes at the door of his house. There the Gauls found them and marvelled, takingthem for more than human. At last a Gaul ventured to stroke the beard of one of them named Papirius, who immediately struck him with his ivory wand: he was instantly slain, and of the rest not one survived. We need not ask whether this story is true or not, for it is impossible to test it: but it is truly Roman in feeling, and from a religious point of view it falls in line with others that were told of the sacrifice of the individual for the State.

This experience was a terrible discipline for the Romans, but no sooner had the Gauls departed than they began to turn it to practical account. They saw that they must secure the country to the north of them more effectually, and they did so by making large portions of it Roman territory, and by establishing two colonies there,i.e.garrisoned fortresses on military roads. Then they turned to deal with their own confederates, who perhaps had felt a secret satisfaction in the humiliation of a leader of whom they were jealous, and were now, especially the two great neighbouring cities of Tibur and Præneste (Tivoli and Palestrina), beginning to rise in open revolt. Knowing what happenedafterwards, we can say that these Latin cities were standing in the way of Italian progress: but to the ancient city-state independence was the very salt of life.

All public records and materials for history, except those engraved on stone, were destroyed in the capture and burning of Rome by the Gauls, so that up to this time Roman “history” is not really worthy of the name. But from this time onward certain official records were preserved, and we gradually pass into an age which may truly be called historical. In detail it will still be questionable, chiefly owing to the tendency of Roman leading families to glorify the deeds of their own ancestors at the expense of truth, and so to hand on false accounts to the age when history first came to be written down. But in the fourth and third centuriesB.C.it becomes fairly clear in outline. I said in the last chapter that the Romans were curiously destitute of the imaginative faculty. But no people is entirely without imagination, and it is most interesting to find the Romans using their moderate allowance in inventing the details of noble deeds and honourable services to the State. Provoking as it is to us, andprovoking even to the Roman historian Livy himself, who was well aware of it, this habit has its own value as a feature of old Roman life and character.

But I must return to the story of the advance of Rome in Italy. It seems clear that after the Gallic invasion the Latins became more and more discontented with Roman policy, which probably aimed at utilising all the resources of the league and at the same time getting complete control of its relations to other powers. We have the text in Greek, preserved by the historian Polybius, of a treaty with Carthage, then the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean, which well illustrates this: the date is 348B.C.Rome acts for Latium in negotiating this treaty; and Carthage undertook not to molest the Latin cities,provided that they remained faithful to Rome; nay, even to restore to the power of the leading city any revolting Latin community that might fall into their hands. This plainly shows that revolt was expected, and a few years later it became general. But in spite of the support of the Campanians in the rich volcanic plain farther south, and indeed of danger so great that it gave rise toanother story of the “devotio” of a Roman consul to the infernal deities on behalf of the State, the Latins were completely beaten at the battle of Mount Vesuvius, and the Romans were able so to alter the league as to deprive it of all real claim to be called a federation.

We saw that any citizen of a Latin city could buy and hold property, marry and have legitimate children, in any other Latin city, knowing that he was protected by the law in the enjoyment of these rights. But after the rebellion this was all changed. A citizen could enjoy these rights in his own city, or at Rome, but nowhere else, while a Roman could enjoy them everywhere. A citizen of Præneste, for example, could enjoy them at Præneste or Rome, but not in the neighbouring cities of Tibur or Tusculum: while a Roman could do business in all these cities, and be supported in all his dealings by the Roman law, which now began gradually to permeate the whole of Latium. Rome thus had a monopoly of business with the other cities, which were effectually isolated from each other. To us this seems a cruel and selfish policy, and so in itself it was. But wemust remember that Rome had been all but destroyed off the face of the earth, and that the Latins had done nothing, so far as we know, to help her. To resist another such attack as that of the Gauls, it was absolutely necessary for Rome to control the whole military resources of Latium, and this she could not do in a loose and equal federation. She was liable not only to assaults from the Gauls, but from Etruscans, and, as we shall see directly, from Samnites, and, if we find that in the struggle for existence she was at times unjust, we may remember that there has hardly been a successful nation of which the same might not be said. She saw that Latium must become Roman if either Rome or the Latins were to survive, and she devised the principle of isolation with this object.

From this time all Latins served in Roman armies nominally as allies, but in reality as subjects; and all Latins who became Roman citizens served in the Roman legions. When a military colony was founded, it might be either Roman or Latin; but a Latin colony meant not necessarily a collection of Latins; it might admit any one—Roman, Latin orother, who threw in his lot with the new city and accepted the two rights of trade and marriage described above. Thus the term Latin came to mean not so much a man of a certain stock as a man with a certain legal position, and so it continued for many centuries, while the new power rising to prominence in the world came to be known not as Latin, but as Roman.

The last and decisive battle with the Latins took its name, as we saw, from Mount Vesuvius, and the reader who knows the map of Italy will ask how it came to be fought so far south of Latium, in the large and fertile plain of Campania, near the modern city of Naples. The answer is that a powerful State, such as Rome was now becoming, is liable to be appealed to by weaker communities when in trouble; and the Campanians, attacked by the hill-men from the central mountainous region of the Samnites, had appealed for help to Rome. This was given, but the Romans found it necessary to make peace with these Samnites, and left the Campanians in the lurch, and then the latter threw in their lot with the Latins, and the Latin war drifted south to Campania. At the end of that warthey were treated in much the same way as the Latins; and thus Rome now found herself presiding with irresistible force over a territory that included both the plains of western Italy and all its most valuable land, and over a confederacy in which all the advantages were on her side, and all the resources of the members under her control.

But to be mistress of these two plains was not as yet to be mistress of Italy. Those plains, and especially the southern and more valuable one, had to be defended from the mountaineers of the central highlands of the peninsula: a region which the reader should at this point of our story study carefully in his map. Towards the end of the Latin war these highlanders, Samnites, as the Romans called them, had ceased raiding the Campanian plain, for they in their turn had to defend southern Italy against an unexpected enemy. The strong and wealthy Greek merchant-city of Tarentum, just inside the “heel” of Italy, destined to play an important part in Italian history for the next century, had lately had its lands raided by the Samnites and their kin the Lucanians to the south of them, andhad called in Greeks from oversea to help them. Here we come into touch with Greek history, just at the time when Alexander the Great was the leading figure in the Greek world. A Spartan king came over to aid Tarentum, and lost his life in so doing; then Alexander of Epirus was induced to come, an uncle of the great conqueror: and after a period of success against the Samnites, he was assassinated. It is said that Rome came to an understanding with him, and it is likely enough; there must have been men in the great Council at Rome who were already accustomed to look far ahead, and keep themselves informed of what was going on far away in Italy and even beyond the Italian seas. Her long struggle for existence had taught her venerable statesmen the arts of diplomacy, and we are not surprised to learn that after the death of Alexander she began to form alliances in that far country between the Samnites and Tarentum, much of which was rich and fertile, in order that when the inevitable struggle with the hill-men should come, she might have them enclosed between two foes—herself and Latium on the north and west, and the Apulians and Greeks inthe south and east. It seemed as if her power and prestige must continually go forward, or collapse altogether; the same alternative that faced the English in India in the eighteenth century and later. In neither case did the advancing power fully realise what the future was to be.

The inevitable struggle with the Samnites came, and lasted many years. We need not pursue it in detail, and indeed the details are quite untrustworthy as they have come down to us; but one episode in it is told so explicitly and has become so famous, that it deserves a place in our sketch as showing that hard feeling of national self-interest, without a touch of chivalry, that is gradually emerging as the guide of Roman action in her progress towards universal dominion.

A strong Roman army, under the command of both consuls, was pushing to the south through the mountains, and fell into a trap in a defile called the Caudine Forks,[3]a name never forgotten by the Romans. All attemptsto escape were vain, and they were forced to capitulate. The terms dictated by Pontius the Samnite general were these: the consuls were to bind themselves on behalf of the Senate to agree to evacuate Samnium and Campania and the fortresses (coloniæ) which had been planted there, and to make peace with the Samnites as with an equal power. The consuls bound themselves by a solemn rite, and the army was allowed to go home, after being sent under the yoke,i.e.under a kind of archway consisting of one spear resting on two upright ones: this was an old Italian custom of dealing with a conquered army, which may have originally had a religious signification. When the disgraced legions reached Rome, and the consuls summoned the Senate to ratify their bond with Pontius, the Fathers, as they were called, positively refused to do so. The consuls and all who had made themselves responsible for the terms were sent back to Pontius as his prisoners,but not the army. His indignation was great, for he knew that Samnium had lost her chance, and would never have it again. The consuls, of course, had no power to bind the Senate, and the Samnite terms were suchas the Senate could not accept as the result of a single disaster caused by a general’s blunder: that was not the way in which the Romans carried on war. But the disgraced army should have been sent back too, and the Senate and people knew it. The speech which the later Roman historian puts into the mouth of Pontius to express his indignation, shows that some feeling of shame at this dishonourable action had come down in the minds of many generations.

The last effort of this long struggle against Rome was a desperate attempt to combine the forces of Samnites, Etruscans and Gauls: the idea was to separate her armies and thus crush her in detail. Even this was a failure, and without going into the doubtful stories of the fighting, we may ask why it was so. Beyond all doubt the Roman power was for a time in very great peril; but in the end it prevailed, and this is a good moment for pausing to think about the advantages that Rome’s genius for organisation had secured for herself; advantages which no other Italian stock seemed able to acquire.

First, she had learnt how to use with profither geographical position; to north, south and east she could send armies to strike in different directions at the same time; and she must have devised some means (though we do not know the method) of keeping up communication between these armies. The stories seem to suggest that the commanders of this period belonged to a very few noble families whose members had spent their whole lives in fighting—not indeed merely in fighting battles, but in carrying on war: the Fabii and Papirii are particularly prominent. These veterans must have come to know the art of war thoroughly, as it could then be applied in Italy, and also the details of the country in which they had to fight.

Secondly, the efforts of these tough old heroes were admirably seconded by the home government,i.e.the Senate, because this assembly consisted of men of the like military experience, and the leaders among them were themselves generals, men who had been consuls and had led armies. Though at this very time, as we shall see, there was a strong tendency towards popular government, yet in the direction of war we find no sign thatthe monopoly of the old families was questioned; and as their interests and their experience were all of the same type, they could act together with a unanimity which was probably unknown to their enemies. The fact that Rome always at this time, and indeed at all times, negotiated and kept in touch with thearistocraciesin the Italian cities, shows how completely the noble families had gained control over the management of diplomacy as well as war.

Thirdly, Rome was now beginning to learn the art of securing the conquered country by means of military roads and fortresses (coloniæ): an art to which she held firmly throughout her history, and to which the geography even of Roman Britain bears ample testimony. My readers will do well to fix their attention for a moment on three of these colonies which were founded during this long war; they are by no means the only ones, but they serve well to show the extent of the Roman power in Italy at this time, as well as the means taken to secure it. The first is Narnia, far up the Tiber valley (founded 299B.C.) on a military road afterwards known as the Flaminian Way: thiswas an outpost, with quick communication with Rome, against both Etruscans and Gauls. The second, Fregellæ, a city with a sad future, was some seventy miles to the south-east of Rome, on a road called the Latin Way, but beyond the limits of Latium proper, commanding, in fact, the passes between Latium and Campania; it was in a beautiful situation near the junction of two rivers, and became in time a most prosperous city. For the third colony we must look much further south on the map, at the south-eastern end of the mass of the Samnite highlands: this was Venusia, with 20,000 colonists, destined to separate the Samnites from the Greeks and other inhabitants of the heel and toe of Italy. It stood on the most famous of all the great roads, the Via Appia, which after leaving Rome ran nearer the coast than the Latin Way, but joined it in Campania, and then ran across the hilly country to Venusia, and eventually to Brundisium (Brindisi), which also became a colony fifty years later.

These three advantages, duly considered, will help the reader to understand to some extent how the prize of Italian presidency fell to Rome and not to another city: andthey will also explain why Rome emerged safe and stronger than ever from another peril that was now to threaten her existence.

The great colony of Venusia, as we saw, was meant to separate the Greeks of southern Italy from the highlanders of Samnium. Of the Greek cities by far the most powerful was Tarentum, then ruled by a selfish and ill-conditioned democracy, apt to be continually worrying its neighbours. That Rome should sooner or later come into collision with Tarentum was inevitable; but the Senate tried to avoid this, knowing that the Tarentines would appeal to some Greek power beyond sea to help them. Now just across the Adriatic, in Epirus, there was a king of Greek descent who was looking out for a chance of glory by imitating Alexander the Great; for Alexander’s marvellous career had stirred up a restless spirit of adventure in the free-lances of the generation that succeeded him. Pyrrhus seems to have fancied that he could act the part of a knight-errant in freeing the Greeks of the west from the barbarians—from the Romans that is, and the Carthaginians, who were at the moment in alliance. When the inevitable quarrel with Romecame, and Tarentum invited him, he crossed the sea with a small but capable force, determined to put an end to this new power that was threatening to swallow up the Greek cities. But he had to learn, and through him the Greek world had to learn as a whole, that the new power was made of sterner stuff than any that had yet arisen in the Mediterranean basin.

Pyrrhus began with a victory, not far from Tarentum; it was won chiefly by some elephants which he had brought with him to frighten the Roman cavalry. This shook the loyalty of many Italian communities, but the Senate was unmoved. The ablest diplomatist in Pyrrhus’s service made no impression on that body of resolute men, trained by long experience to look on a single defeat as only a “regrettable incident” in a long war. “Rome never negotiates while foreign troops are on Italian soil;” so, according to the story, the aged Appius Claudius told the Greek envoy in the Senate-house. Then Pyrrhus tried a march on Rome; but he had to learn, like another invader after him, that the nearer he drew to the city the more difficult his task became. A second victory was far lessdecisive and almost fruitless, and Pyrrhus most unwisely evacuated Italy. Tarentum had turned against him, unwilling to submit to his discipline, and now that wayward city fell a victim to the Roman power. The king crossed to Sicily to deliver the Sicilian Greeks from Carthage, and this he did brilliantly, but there, too, the fickle Greeks grew tired of him. Returning to Italy, he fought one more battle with the Romans, at Beneventum in Samnium, and lost it. Foiled everywhere, he left Italy, with Rome more firmly established than ever in the supremacy of the whole peninsula: for Tarentum, with its fine harbour, its almost impregnable citadel, and its fleet, fell soon afterwards into the hands of the Romans.

Almost the whole Italian peninsula was now Roman; or perhaps it is truer to say that Rome had become an Italian state. It was a wonderful work: perhaps the most wonderful that Rome ever achieved. The military part of it was the result mainly ofconstantia, steady perseverance and refusal to accept defeat; the political organisation was the result of good sense and good temper combined with an inflexible will, and a shrewdperception of the real and permanent interests of Rome. In the third centuryB.C., at which we have now arrived, Italy may be described as a kind of federation, in which each city has its own alliance with the leading one, and no alliance with any other. Each has its own government and administers its own law, but places all its military resources at the disposal of the Roman government. The fighting power of the future was to be Italy under Roman leadership, and all questions of foreign policy were decided by Rome alone. There was no general council of the whole confederacy. The Roman Senate controlled an ever-increasing mass of detailed and varied business, having to deal with Latins, Italians of the old stocks, Etruscans, Greeks and Gauls. How the business was done we cannot tell: not a single contemporary record of it is left. One glimpse of that wonderful Senate at work would be worth all descriptions of the battles of that century.

Before the close of the third centuryB.C.that Senate, instead of directing a further steady advance, had been forced to defend the State against an invader, in the most terrible life and death struggle ever experiencedby any people. But in the next chapter I must pause to try and explain wherein consisted the nerve-power, the mental and material fibre, of the people destined to rule the world.

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