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 need aqueducts 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, their summum 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 grouping of 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 the Æneid of 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 they were 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 is vir 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; industria and diligentia, 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 industrial or 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 suffered defeat; 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 his Origins 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).
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 true that 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 will probably 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 as important 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 Greek settlements. 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 are wanting, and such as there are were occupied about the eighth century B.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 soon gathers 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 as Samnites 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 was all 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 extinct volcano 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 called Roma; 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 against her 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 in A.D. 455. On the whole, we may say that no other city in Italy had the same chance, as regards position, of dominating the 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.
