With the death of Sulla ends what we may call the first act of the Roman Revolution. We are now in the middle of a revolution in more than one sense of that word. The constitution and the government of Rome are being slowly but surely changed, and at the same time the era of the free and independent city-state of the GrÆco-Roman world is being brought to an end. Both these changes, as we can see now, were inevitable; without them the civilised world could not have been defended against barbarian invasion, or Italy united into a contented whole possessed of Roman citizenship. In the first act, as I have called it, the immediate danger of invasion was checked, both in north and east, and Italy had become Roman, enjoying perfect equality with Rome under the great body of Roman law now being rapidly developed.

But, in truth, this inevitable work of change was not as yet half done. It was soon found that both in north and east some definite system of frontier must be fixed, or the Empire would be in continual peril from without. It was also found that Sulla’s constitution would not work, and that to defend the frontiers of civilisation effectively there must be a government of sterner force, whatever form that force might take. Thus in the second act of the Revolution we have two main points to attend to: first, the settlement of the frontiers against Oriental despots and wandering hordes of Germans: secondly, the acquisition of power by a great soldier-statesman, Julius CÆsar, and the abandonment, as a working power, of the ancient polity of Senate and people. And inasmuch as this period of revolution was also the age of the best and purest bloom of Latin literature, I must find space for a few words about Cicero, Lucretius, and Catullus.

I said in the last chapter that there was a very dangerous enemy threatening the eastern or Greek part of the Empire. This was Mithradates, king of Pontus, that part of Asia Minor which borders on the Euxine (Black Sea) eastwards: a man of genius and ambition, and by no means to be reckoned a barbarian. It is curious that he began his great career by protecting Greek cities against their enemies, and one is tempted to ask whether he might not have been at least as beneficent a champion and master for the Greek world as Rome herself. But we must look at things with Roman eyes if we are to understand the work of Rome in the world; we must think of Mithradates as the Romans then did, as the deadly enemy alike of Greek freedom and of Roman interests.

His armies had invaded Greece in 87 B.C. and had even occupied Athens, while the Greek cities of Asia Minor had willingly submitted to him: the whole Hellenic world was fast coming under his sway. Then Sulla had expelled his generals from Greece proper, and had forced him to accept such conditions of peace as kept him quiet for a few years. But when Sulla was dead he started on a fresh career of conquest, and once more the Roman protectorate of Greek civilisation was broken down. For a time it looked as if no power could restore it. The sea was swarming with pirates from Cilicia, who constantly harassed the Roman fleets, and ventured even as far as Italy, snapping up prisoners for sale as slaves in the great slave-market at Delos. And behind Mithradates and these pirates there was another power even more formidable. Tigranes, king of Armenia, had also been extending his dominions southward, and was even in possession of Syria and JudÆa at the time of which we are now speaking, 75 B.C. Should the two kings unite their forces and policy, it would be all but impossible for Rome to remain the mistress of the eastern Mediterranean and the Hellenic world. It was another example of Rome’s wonderful good fortune that this alliance was never solidly effected till too late.

The Senate, left by Sulla to govern the world, soon showed that it was incapable of grasping the necessity of vigorous action in the East. It was not till 74, four years after Sulla’s death, that they sent out a really capable general with an adequate force. Lucullus, whose name has become a by-word for wealth and luxury, was in his prime a soldier of great ability, and he soon broke the power of Mithradates, who immediately fled for refuge to Tigranes. This made it absolutely necessary to deal with that king also; and Lucullus invaded Armenia and captured the king’s new capital, Tigranocerta. Unluckily, he had not that supreme gift of a great commander which enables him, as it afterwards enabled CÆsar, to lead his men where and when he will; the army mutinied, refusing to go farther into the wild Armenian mountains, the most distant and formidable region a Roman army had as yet penetrated. Lucullus had to retreat.

Then, under pressure from the men of business who were losing money by the instability of Roman dominion in Asia, Senate and people agreed to supersede Lucullus by a younger man, reckoned the best soldier of the day, and a military pupil of Sulla. This was the famous GnÆus Pompeius, known to us familiarly as Pompey. In 67 he had been commissioned to clear the sea of pirates, and did it effectually. Now, with a combination of civil and military power such as no Roman had yet enjoyed, he took over Lucullus’s army, made short work of Mithradates, and utterly broke up the empire of Tigranes. He overran Syria, the region between the Mediterranean and the desert stretching to the Euphrates, penetrated to JudÆa and took Jerusalem. This famous event is the first in the long and sad story of the relations of Rome with JudÆa. At Jericho, before he reached the holy city, he received the dispatch which told him of the death of Mithradates, the removal from the scene of one who had been for thirty years Rome’s most dangerous enemy.

The result of the efforts of Lucullus and Pompey was the establishment of a frontier system in the East which may be said to have held good for the rest of Roman history. The principle of it is not easy to explain; but if the reader will take a map and trace the river Euphrates from its sources in western Armenia to the Arabian desert, and then make it clear to himself that all within that line was to be either Roman or under Roman suzerainty, he will be able to form some idea of its importance in history. There were to be three new Roman provinces: Pontus with Bithynia in the north of Asia Minor, Cilicia on its south-eastern coast, and Syria, the coast region from Cilicia southwards to the frontier of Egypt. But between these and the Euphrates there were two kingdoms, Cappadocia and Galatia, and other smaller ones, which formed a Roman sphere of influence where Rome herself could not as yet be constantly present. Imperfect as this system seems, it was quite strong enough to spread the prestige of the Roman Empire far and wide in the East, and the great king of Parthia, beyond the Euphrates, might well begin to be alarmed for his own safety.

Now in settling this frontier system Pompey had, of course, to attend to an infinite number of details, and to make decisions, convey privileges, negotiate treaties, and grant charters, in dealing with those cities new and old which formed a most important part of his plan of settlement and defence. All this had to be done on his own responsibility, but would need the sanction of the Senate to be recognised as legally valid. When he returned home in 62 B.C. he expected that the Senate would give this sanction, especially as he had just disbanded his army, with which he might, if he had chosen, have enforced his claims. But the Senatorial government was reduced to such a state of imbecility that the majority would have nothing to do with Pompey’s invaluable work: they were jealous, they were lazy, and, above all, they were ignorant. So he had to fall back after a year or two on the consul of 59, C. Julius CÆsar, who undertook to get the necessary sanction from the people if not from the Senate. In return Pompey was to help him to get a long command in Gaul, so that the work of frontier defence there begun by Marius might be resumed and completed. At this very moment a German people, the Suebi, whose name still survives in the modern Swabia, were threatening the rich plains of what is now eastern France: and then, just as a peace had been patched up with them, a Gallic tribe, the Helvetii, suddenly issuing from its home in (modern) Switzerland in search of new settlements, or pressed on by other tribes beyond it, was about to break into the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul. But CÆsar had now done his part by Pompey, though not, indeed, without straining the constitution; and moving with the wonderful swiftness that afterwards became characteristic of him as a general, he reached Geneva just in time to stop them, and soon afterwards beat them in a great battle and forced them back to their homes.

This was the beginning of a career of conquest which made the glorious country we know as France into the most valuable part of the Roman Empire, and later on into the most compact and gifted nationality in Europe. What motives inspired CÆsar in all he did during the nine years he spent there we need not ask, for we can only guess the answer; though he has left us his own story of his campaigns in simple straightforward Latin, he has not chosen to tell us what was all along at the back of his mind. Ambition, says the superficial historian; the desire to make himself in due time tyrant of Rome and the Empire. But we may take it as certain that CÆsar, a man whose health was never strong, would not have exposed himself to constant peril of his life for nine successive years had he really all the time been nursing a secret ambition which death or serious illness might at any time destroy. What he really seems to have loved, like C. Gracchus, was work—steady, hard work with no one to hinder him, and with a definite practical object before him. Doubtless further hopes or fears were in his mind, but this great practical genius, with an intellect characteristically Roman,[10] though more scientific in its tendency than that of any other Roman known to us, was always bent on the work immediately in front of him, and never rested till it was completed to his satisfaction.

When CÆsar hurried up to check the Helvetii in 58 B.C. there was but one Roman province in Gaul, the south-eastern part of modern France (which still teems with Roman remains and inscriptions), together with a considerable district to the west of it at the foot of the Pyrenees. When he finally left Gaul at the end of 50, the whole of modern France and Belgium had been added to the Empire, though not as yet organised into provinces. He did not take long to reach our Channel and to subdue the tribes on the coast; he began the written history of our island by invading it twice, and recording such information as he could gain about its geography and inhabitants. He crossed the Rhine into Germany by a bridge constructed for him by his engineers: and the method of building this bridge survives in his book to puzzle the ingenuity of scholars as well as school-boys. The Gauls were doubtless amazed at these performances, as he meant them to be; and, after one heroic effort to save themselves from becoming an appendage of a Mediterranean empire, they had to submit. While we can feel with these noble efforts for freedom, or blame CÆsar for what sometimes seems unnecessary cruelty, we must remember that from this time forward the country from the Rhine to the ocean becomes a great factor in European civilisation.

There was still, indeed, a gap in the line of frontier; how was the eastern end of the Alps to be protected from invasion? There, as we saw, the great rampart was lowest, and beyond it the barbarians were an unknown quantity. Here the river Danube eventually became the frontier, and was carefully connected with that of the Rhine; but this completion of the great work had to wait for half-a-century, and in the meantime luckily no inroad was made or threatened. It was Tiberius, afterwards emperor, another great soldier, with an army almost as devoted to its general as that of CÆsar who after long steady effort planted the Roman power firmly in this region. From a military point of view the Roman Empire, and therefore Western civilisation as a whole, owed its very existence for centuries to Pompey, CÆsar and Tiberius, with their splendidly trained armies and their skilful engineers.

All this work of conquest and settlement was not the work of the State, or due to the old civic sense of duty and discipline; it was the work of the armies, due to their good discipline, and to their loyalty to their leaders. This being so, it was of course only natural that the armies and their leaders should claim to control the action and policy of an enfeebled State, as Sulla had already claimed it. This is really, put in a very few words, the secret of the Roman imperial system that was to come; so, too, in England, in Cromwell’s time, the State passed into the hands of the army, because that army (though in our case but for a short time) represented the best instincts and purposes of the nation. But the question of the moment was whether the commander of one of these Roman armies could so identify himself and his soldiers with the State and its true interests, as to become the means of establishing a sound and efficient government for the Mediterranean world. Sulla had failed so to identify himself: he had neither knowledge enough nor sympathy enough. The chance had been open to Pompey when he returned from the East in 62, but he had disbanded his army and declined it; he was in many ways a valuable man, but he was not the stuff that real statesmen are made of. After the long war in Gaul the chance was open to CÆsar, and he accepted it without hesitation.

He accepted it, but in truth he had to fight for it. For years his operations in Gaul had been looked on at Rome with suspicion, especially by a clique of personal enemies led by the famous Cato, a descendant of the old Cato whom we met in the previous century. These men looked on CÆsar as dangerous to the State—and dangerous indeed he was, to that old form of State which neither they nor he could make vigorous and efficient. They clung to the worn-out machinery of the constitution, to the checks, the vetoes, the short tenure of office, to the exclusive right of the Senate to deal with the ever-increasing administrative business of the Empire. Knowing, or guessing, that CÆsar, like Gaius Gracchus, would force his personal will on the State if he judged it necessary, they were determined to prevent his becoming a political power, and they brought Pompey to the same view, and armed him with military force to be used against CÆsar—against the man, that is, who had spent the best years of his life in indefatigable work for the Empire and civilisation. The result was civil war once more; civil war that might unquestionably have been averted by a wider outlook, a more generous feeling, a spirit of compromise, on the part of the high aristocrats who, like Cato, believed themselves to be struggling for liberty. The liberty they were struggling for was in reality the liberty to misgovern the Empire, and to talk without acting efficiently.

It is plain, as we may learn from the abundant correspondence of the time,[11] that they did not know the man they had to deal with. CÆsar took them completely by surprise; in a few weeks he had cleared Pompey and Senate and their army out of Italy, had provided for the government, and gone off to Spain to secure the West by turning the Pompeian armies out of that peninsula also. After a brilliant campaign of six weeks, admirably described by himself in his work on the Civil War, he forced those armies to surrender and then let them go, as he had done just before in Italy. His clemency took the world by surprise as much as his generalship.

But the worst was not over for him. Pompey was gathering all the resources of the East against him, and concentrating them in Epirus with a view to the re-conquest of Italy. Again CÆsar’s rapidity saved him; he was just in time to strike the first blow by crossing the sea from Brindisi—a rash expedient—and hampering Pompey before his concentration was effected. Here, however, in his eagerness to bring the campaign to an issue, he made a serious blunder, and had to pay for it by defeat and a retreat to the corn-growing plain of Thessaly. Pompey unwisely followed him, instead of invading Italy; and here, in August 48, was utterly beaten at the battle of Pharsalia. The worn-out old soldier fled to Egypt, where he was treacherously murdered by one of the king’s generals. He was an estimable man with many excellent qualities, and in a more tranquil age might have well become what Cicero wished to make him, the presiding genius of the Roman State.

CÆsar had yet much war before him—war in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Africa and in Spain, against the supporters of the old rÉgime, for nothing he could do in the way of conciliation would persuade them to forgive him the crime of seeking to identify himself with the State. In doing so they deprived him of the time which he might have spent to far better purpose at Rome on the work of efficient government. As it was, he had been able to spend but a few months in all at home, when on March 15, 44 B.C., he was murdered at a meeting of the Senate, at the feet of Pompey’s statue, by a small group of assassins, some of whom were intimate friends of his own. They thought he was on the point of assuming a visible despotism, and they had some justification for the suspicion, though it was probably a delusion. To kill a tyrant, they thought, was to do a noble work in true old Roman fashion. So did the murderers of the Gracchi.

From what little we know about such work of reform as CÆsar had time for, we may take it as certain that these deluded assassins made a sad blunder. CÆsar’s legislative work was fragmentary, but every item of it shows intelligence and political insight. He did not attempt to turn out a new constitution in black and white; he did the work of government mainly himself for the time being, and we do not know how he meant to provide for it after his death. In the most important matter of all, the adjustment of the Empire to the home government, and especially the subordination of the provincial governors to a central authority, he forestalled the imperial system of the future: he made himself the central authority, to whom the governors were to be responsible. The other most important question of government, that of the power and composition of the Senate, he answered by raising the number of Senators to 900, as Gaius Gracchus had wished to do, and thus destroying the power of the old narrow oligarchical cliques. But perhaps his practical wisdom is best seen in his economic legislation for Rome and Italy. He was the first statesman to try and check the over-abundance of slave-labour; the first, too, to lay the foundation of a reasonable bankruptcy law. He regulated the corn-supply in the city, and brought down the number of recipients of corn-doles to less than one-half of what it had lately been. Again, he laid down general rules for the qualification of candidates for municipal office in Italy, and arranged for the taking of a census in all the cities every five years, the records of which were to be deposited at Rome. It would seem as if he meant to work out the enfranchisement of Italy to its natural conclusion: for he not only completed it by extending it to the Alps, which had never yet been done, but went beyond the bounds of Italy, offering the citizenship freely both to Gauls and Sicilians.

Attempts have been made to depict CÆsar as almost more than human; and of late again there has been a reaction against him of no less absurdity, holding him up to contempt as a weak but lucky opportunist. As we have his own military writings, a life by Plutarch, a few letters written by or addressed to him, and innumerable allusions to him in contemporary literature, we ought to be able to form some just idea of him. As one who has been familiar with all these materials, and many others of less value, during the greater part of a lifetime, I say without hesitation that CÆsar was the one man of his time really gifted with scientific intelligence—with the power of seeing the facts before him and adjusting his action to them. This intelligence, combined with great strength of will, made him master of the Roman Empire; and though his character was by no means perfect, he seems to have used his mastership, not like a capricious Oriental despot, but with a real sense of responsibility. A man who combines the qualities of an intelligent statesman in bad times with a generous temper, good taste and good scholarship, surely deserves to be thought of as one altogether out of the common. In Shakespeare’s picture of him, derived from Plutarch’s biography, and representing only the last two days of his life, he seems weak in body and overweening in spirit, and is probably meant to seem so by the dramatist for his own purposes. But no sooner have the murderers done with him than the true greatness of the man begins to make itself felt, and is impressed on us in page after page to the end of the play, of which the action may be said to be pivoted on the idea of the horror and the uselessness of their deed.

So far in this chapter and the last I have been treating of this age as one of action. It is indeed filled full of human activity, in spite of the laziness of the governing class as a whole. But this activity was shown not only in war and politics; this is also an age of great poets and real men of letters. I must say a word about the two greatest poets, Lucretius and Catullus; but among the men of letters there stands out one far above the rest whose life and genius it would take a long chapter to explain. Cicero’s pre-eminence is not easy to understand even after long study of his voluminous works: yet I must try to make it clear that he was, in fact, one of the greatest of all Romans.

Of Lucretius it is our fate to know nothing except his poem in six books on “The Nature of Things.” But his name is Roman, and the poem has the true Roman characteristic of being essentially practical in its object. That object will seem a singular one to those who are unacquainted with the Greek and Roman culture of this age. What roused a poet’s passion in this man’s mind was simply the desire to free others, as he had freed himself, from the fetters of superstition, or, as he calls it, religion; to make them abandon the delusive dream of a life after death, to repudiate the old stories of torment in Hades, and all foolish legends of the gods, who in his view took no interest whatever in human life. All this was, of course, derived from Greek philosophy, the doctrine of the Epicurean school, but no Greek had ever put such passion into a creed as Lucretius. His poetry at times almost reminds us of the grandeur and authority of the Hebrew prophets, so ardently did he believe in his own creed, and in his mission to enforce it on others. Uncouth and dry as much of it is—for he has to explain that Epicurean theory of the universe known still to science as the atomic theory—he breaks out now and again into strains of magnificent verse which reveal a mind all burning within. Here is a specimen: it must be in prose, for no verse translation seems adequate—

“What hast thou, O mortal, so much at heart, that thou goest such lengths in sickly sorrows? Why bemoan and bewail death? for say that thy life past and gone has been welcome to thee, and that thy blessings have not all, as if they were poured into a sieve, run through and been lost without avail: why not then take thy departure like a guest filled with life, and with resignation, thou fool, enter upon untroubled rest? But if all that thou hast enjoyed has been squandered and lost, and if life is a grievance, why seek to make any addition, ... why not rather make an end of life and travail? for there is nothing which I can contrive or discover for thee to give pleasure: all things are ever the same” (iii. 933 foll.).

The other poet, Catullus, was not of Roman birth, but, like so many literary men of this and the following age, an Italian from the basin of the Po. He had no practical aim in writing poetry: he simply wrote because he could not help it, about himself and his friends and his loves. It was his own self that inspired him chiefly, and it is still himself that interests us. According to his own mood, now fresh with the happiness of an artist, now darkened by anger or self-indulgence, his poems are exquisite or repulsive; but they are always true and honest lyrics, and interesting because they are so full of life and passion. Catullus is one of the world’s best lyric poets. Here is one of his gems—

“Is aught of pleasure, aught of solace sweet

Permitted, Calvus, to the silent grave,

What time the tale of sorrow we repeat,

Yearning o’er memories we fain would save?