J. M. Robertson

ROMAN POLITICAL EVOLUTION

§ 1

A survey of the ancient history best known to us may help to make clearer the fatality of strife and the impossibility of solving it save by transcending the physical plane. The habit of summing up all Roman history as so many planned actions of "the Romans," or of "Rome," is in singular contrast with the imbroglio of the records. In the social stage discovered to us by the analysis of the oldest known institutions, "early" Rome is already an artificial political organism, far removed from the simple life of tribal barbarism.[12] There are three tribes; the very name of tribe, it may be, comes from the number three[13] in the flection tribus; and the subdivisions are fixed by the numbers three and ten.[14] Behind the artificial "tribe" is a past in which, it may be, a group of villages forms the pagus or settlement.[15]

Already privilege and caste are fully established, even between classes of freemen; and only by inference can we reach the probable first bases of civic union among the ruling caste. They were clearly a caste of conquerors. Their curiÆ, apparently the oldest form of group after the family or the clan,[16] are artificially arranged, numbering thirty, each curia containing nominally a hundred gentes, each gens nominally ten families.

Eduard Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 511) decides for the view of L. Lange, that the historic appellation of Roman citizens, Quirites, derives from curia. The ancients had several theories as to the name. One (Festus) was that the Sabine goddess Curis gave her name to the Sabine town Cures (cp. AthenÊ, Athenai), whence, according to the legend, had come a band under Titus Tatius, who conquered the Capitoline and Quirinal hills, and had for tribe-god Quirinus. Cp. Ihne, Early Rome, p. 82. Mommsen (Eng. tr. 1862, i, 57, 78, notes) has secured currency for the other tradition, argued for by F.W. Newman (Regal Rome, 1852, pp. 55-56), that the root is the Sabine word curis, quiris, a spear. For this somewhat unplausible theory there is support in the fact that in the cognate Gaelic coir, pronounced quÎr, means a spear, and that there is derived thence curiadh, a warrior. Mommsen is followed by Merivale, General History of Rome, 5th ed. p. 13; and Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 33. Pott and Becker, who derived Quirites from curia, explain the latter word as co-viria, the band of warriors. And as the view that "AthenÊ" comes from "Athenai," not vice versÂ, has the stronger claims to acceptance, the more acceptable presumption is that "Curis" and Quirinus evolved from the curia. If Quirites meant spearmen, how could CÆsar be understood to cow mutineers by simply addressing them as Quirites [= citizens]? The curia theory is supported by the facts that "the Roman constitutional tradition ... makes the division into curies alone originate with the origin of the city"; that it "appears as an essential part of the Latin municipal system;" and that of all the old divisions it seems to be the only one that "really fulfilled important functions in the primitive constitutional organisation" (Mommsen, B. i, ch. v, pp. 73-75).

These curiÆ may be conceived as derived from inner tribal or clan groups formed in the conquering stage, since they are ostensibly united by their collective or curial sacra, the rites for which the grouped gentes—who each have their private sacra—assemble in a special place, under a special priest. They still retain the usage of a common banquet,[17] the earliest form of collective religion known to us.[18] Apart from the members of the curiÆ are the conquered plebs,[19] "the many" not enslaved, but payers of tribute; without share in the curiÆ or vote in the comitia, or assembly, and without part in the curial or other sacra.

On this head there has been some gratuitous confusion. Schwegler (i, 621 sq.) gives convincing reasons for the view that in early times the plebs were not members of the curiÆ. Cp. Ihne, as cited, pp. 110, 127; and Fustel de Coulanges, p. 278 sq. Meyer (ii, 513, 521) asserts, on the contrary, without any specification of periods, that the curiÆ included plebeians as well as patricians. The contradiction seems to arise out of inattention to chronology, or a misreading of Mommsen. That historian rightly sets forth in his history (B. ii, ch. i; Eng. trans. ed. 1862, i, 264-65) that the plebs were not admitted into the comitia curiata before the "Servian" period; adding that these bodies were "at the same time" almost totally deprived of their prerogatives. In his RÖmisches Forschungen, 1864, i, 144 sq., he shows that they were admitted in the "historic period"—when the comitia in question had ceased to have any legal power, and when, as he elsewhere states, the admission "practically gave little more than the capacity for adrogation" (RÖmisches Staatsrecht, Bd. iii, Abth. i, p. 93). Here again he states that "to equal rights in the curies, especially to the right of vote in the comitia, the plebeians attained only in the later times" (Id. p. 72). Yet Professor Pelham, in asserting (p. 21; cp. p. 46) that "the primitive Roman people of the thirty curiÆ included all the freemen of the community, simple as well as gentle," gives the note: "The view here taken on the vexed question of the purely patrician character of the curiÆ is that of Mommsen (RÖm. Forschungen, vol. i)."

When this error is corrected, the question ceases to be vexed. Schwegler has disposed of the blunder of Dionysius, who ascribes to the plebeians a share in the curiÆ from the beginning; and it is not disputed that they were allowed to enter when the comitia curiata had been practically superseded by the comitia centuriata. It is to be noted that the denial of the inclusion of the plebeians in the original curiÆ does not apply to the clientes, whose status, though non-patrician, had been different from that of the true plebs. M. Delaunay, who argues that the plebeians were all along admitted to the curiÆ, adds the qualification: "Doubtless not the entire mass of the plebeians, but only those who were ... attached to the gentes" (Robiou et Delaunay, Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1884, i, 21). But who were these gentilitia if not the clientes? (cp. loc. cit. p. 26).

The populus at this stage, then, is not "the people" in the modern sense; it is the aggregate of the privileged curiÆ, and does not include the plebs,[20] which at this stage is not even part of the army. But a separate quasi-plebeian class, the clientes of the patricians, are in a state of special dependence upon the latter, and in a subordinate fashion share their privileges.

The clientes have very much the air of being primarily the servile or inferior part of the early clan or gens, as distinct from its "gentlemen." Cp. Burton, Hist. of Scotland, viii, 524-25, as to the lower and the higher (duniewassal) orders in the Scottish Highland clans. "In the old life of the pagus and the gens the weaker sought the protection of the stronger by a willing vassalage" (Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 6). The clientes are the nominal as distinct from the real "family" of the chief or patronus. M. Delaunay (Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, as cited, i, 27) thinks with Mommsen (so also Dupond, pp. 20-21) that they were mainly freedmen, but gives no evidence. As to the meaning and etymology of the word (clientes from cluere or cliere, "to listen" or "obey"), cp. Newman, Regal Rome, p. 49; Ortolan, p. 29; Mommsen, RÖmisches Staatsrecht, III, i, 1887, p. 63. The theory that the plebeians were all clientes (Ortolan, pp. 25, 27) seems untenable, though Mommsen (Staatsrecht, III, i, 63) pronounces that "all non-patricians were clients"; and Meyer (ii, 521) appears to acquiesce. Only in theory can the mass of the plebs have been clients at any time. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 277-78. The clientes, it seems clear, were as such admitted to the comitia, whereas the plebs were not. See the citations of Fustel de Coulanges from Livy, ii, 56-64; also iii, 14 (Dupond, p. 22, doubts the fact). On any view, the clientela rapidly dwindled, passing into the plebs (cp. Dupond, p. 23; Livy, vi, 18). As to its early status see Fustel de Coulanges, p. 273 sq. Ortolan, after representing all plebeians as clients, speaks (p. 31) of plebeians belonging to no gens (so Aulus Gellius, x, 20).

Wealth is not yet a matter of land-owning—the main element of property is cattle;[21] and the bulk of the land is ager occupatorius, a great "common" on which all men's cattle feed. The voteless free plebeian has simply his home and homestead, "toft and croft," the latter being two yokes (= five roods) of land, on which he raises the grain and olives and vegetables that feed his household.[22] This goes to his heir. Here arises another problem. E.W. Robertson (as last cited) decides that the "two yokes" can have been only "the homestead, and could not have included the farm or property attached to it." The heredium, he holds, following Pliny (Hist. Nat., xix, 19), and citing Livy (vi, 36), was only in the hortus, the house and garden, "and not in the arable or pasture land." But surely the arable was on a different footing from the pasture land (ager compascus). Corn was not grown in common, unless it were by the gentes (Mommsen, vol. i, pp. 38, 72, 193). The solution seems to be that given by Greenidge, that as "the heredium consisted only of two jugera (Festus, p. 53), an amount obviously insufficient for the maintenance of a family," "there must have been ager privatus as well, owned by some larger unit, and this unit would naturally have been the gens" (Roman Public Life, p. 15).

Among general historians of Rome Mommsen seems to be the first to note this circumstance, and he gives neither details nor evidence. Schwegler, discussing (i, 619) the theory of Puchta that there was no private property in Rome before the "arrival" of the plebs, admits that among the ancient Germans the land was yearly apportioned among the groups as such, but finds that "Roman tradition tells of nothing of the kind." (So Greenidge, p. 15.) In any case, Mommsen, while insisting that "the fields (sic) of the gentes (Geschlechts-Genossen) in the earliest period lay together" (Staatsrecht, III, i, 24; cp. p. 94), admits that such gentile ownership had at an early stage disappeared (frÜh verschwundenen). There was then no communal tillage in the historic period. Cincinnatus, in the legend, returns to the plough on his own croft. Further, the early complaints cited by Livy as to the "two yokes" being "hardly enough to raise a roof on or to make a grave in" were addressed by the tribunes on behalf of plebeians to patricians who each had above five hundred yokes. The non-client plebeians then had no share in the land of the gentes or clans, being themselves in large part dispossessed by conquest.

Meyer (ii, 519) pronounces that the plot of two yokes was, "of course, no farm, but a kitchen-garden," adding: "It is also the personal land of the small farmers and day-labourers who look after the lands of the large landholders, not the original private holding in contrast to the mark belonging in common to the gens (Geschlecht) or commune (Gauverband)." But on the previous page Meyer says that "the land was settled not by the gentes, but communally (genossenschaftlich) by unions of equal freemen." If these, then, were the curiÆ (the Mark, says Meyer in this connection, did not belong to the gentes), they did not include the plebs; and we come back to the datum that the free plebeian had no means of support save his five roods and what beasts he had on the public pasture. The pasture-land, again, is surmised by Mommsen (ch. xiii, p. 201) to have been small in area relatively to the arable-land communally owned and cultivated by the gentes or clans—a proposition irreconcilable with the evidence as to the quantity of cattle. As to the two yokes of land, Schwegler decides (i, 618) that it was "nowise inadequate" as arable-land, in view of the extraordinary fruitfulness of Italy, and, further, of the circumstance that "the free burghers had also the use of the common land" (for pasture). We are to remember that Italian land could yield two crops in a year. (Niebuhr, Lebensnachrichten, ii, 245, cited by Schwegler.)

On the general problem as to why or how the land once communally tilled ceased to be so, we have still no better light than the old generalisation of Hobbes in reply to his own question: "Upon what impulsives, when all was equally every man's in common, men did rather think it fitting that every man should have his inclosure?" "I found," he puts it, "that from a community of goods there must needs arise contention whose enjoyment should be greatest, and from that contention all kind of calamities must unavoidably ensue." [Epistle Dedicatory to Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Civil Society (translation of De Cive), 1651. Cp. Goldwin Smith, The United States, 1893, p. 23.]

The patrician, of course, had a larger homestead, at least "four yokes" in the earlier stages; later seven; later still twenty-five.[23] But the patricians were "a class of occupying landholders rather than proprietary landowners."[24] The "public land" was literally so, save in so far as the patricians would have the ampler (and often untaxed or low-rented) use of it for their much larger herds;[25] or, it may be, for cultivation by their clients or slaves. Heredia, however, were saleable, and herein lay one usual path to the dispossession and enslavement of freemen; while at all stages there went on that pressure of population on means of subsistence which underlies all economic history.

Thus far, however, mere conquest has done less to impoverish and enslave the mass than the economic process is to do later. The conquerors, probably highland herdsmen to begin with, take estates for themselves, but leave the mass of the conquered in possession or use of land for which they pay tribute, and upon which they can independently live.[26] And thus far they live mainly as small pastoral farmers.[27]

Trade and artisanship were for long but slightly developed, and were mainly in the hands of slaves, dependent "clients," or foreigners; and artisans and aliens were not admitted into the legions.[28] The ruling caste occupied, potentially[29] if not constantly, the city proper, the two or three fortified hills[30] on which at this stage it stands. They were certainly not the founders. The Palatine and the Quirinal hills had been occupied by Latins and Sabines respectively long before the time traditionally assigned to the "founding" of Rome; and there were communities there before them. Modern excavators trace many successive strata of civilisation before that which we call the Roman; and the probability is that the Romans of history, like the kindred Sabines, conquered a previous city "aristocracy" of kindred race, whose place and possessions they took. The previous inhabitants had presumably grown weak for self-defence by reason of some such disintegrating economic evolution as was soon to affect the conquerors themselves. Such a disintegration may well have taken place in the case of Alba Longa, of which the prior supremacy seems entirely credible.[31] But before Alba Longa there had been a civilisation[32] on the Roman hills which perhaps outwent in economic evolution anything attained in the Roman period until the last century of the Republic.

§ 2

There had in fact been a "decline and fall of Rome" before the Rome we know began to be. Relatively to their predecessors, the early Romans were even as the northerners who in a later age were to capture historic Rome—vigorous barbarians beginning a new era on a footing of fraternity in conquest; and the condition of their early success as State-builders seems to have been precisely the joining of several tribe-groups in a real federation,[33] securing local peace as between the hill-holders. It has been said that Rome grew up without any known aid from men of political genius such as Solon.[34] But men of genius have counted for something in all stages of upward human evolution. The guiders of early Rome are lost in a cloud of myth and fable; but some man or men of civic faculty there must have been to shape tendency, though doubtless a main factor in the early union was the simple collocation of the hills first fortified. Granting that Servius Tullius is a mythical king, the elaborate constitution assigned to him stood for some planning by able men, and has several main points in common with that given to Athens by Solon.

Whatever were the part played by individual leaders, Roman or Etruscan, there clearly came into play in early Rome as in Athens the important factor of mixture of stocks. Romans and Sabines united to begin with; and the conquered plebs, destined later to enter the constitution and share in all the civic offices, represented some such source of recuperation to the Roman aristocracy as did the Saxons to that of England after the Norman Conquest. If we add the probable factor of an Etruscan element, Rome is to be conceived as standing for a ruling class of more various faculty than was to be found in any of the rival communities singly. The progressive absorption of the most enterprising of the plebeians was again, probably, an exception to the rule of Italic life as to that of other races, so that in following the class struggles of Rome we are to note not so much the violence of the process as the fact that, so far as it went, it was relatively fortunate. And its success, again, is conceivably due to the fact, among others, that from an early period the region of the seven defensible hills was a refuge or centre for men breaking away from the other Italian communities, where conservatism held firm.

Behind the legend of the flocking of all manner of "broken men" to the standard of Romulus lies the probability that the ancient "asylum" behind the Capitol brought a variety of types to the place; and as in Athens so in Rome, such variety of stock might well raise the level of faculty. But it was a faculty for aggression. Given the initial federation of Romans and Sabines, the one general force of comity or cohesion, apart from the more public cults, is the bond of mere collective antagonism to other communities. The total polity is one of war; and never in the history of civilisation has that ground of comity long averted the economic process by which social inequality deepens and widens. It is thus entirely credible that, through this economic process, which we shall trace later, the early Roman polity came to a pass at which its conquest by Etruscan "kings" was welcomed by the plebs, sinking into poverty or held in outlawry under primitive "capitalistic" exploitation. There is no clear historic record of the process; but all the better evidence goes to prove its occurrence.[35]

The most plausible theory of the constitution ascribed to Servius Tullius is that it was imposed by Etruscan conquerors. The earlier Romans had been quasi-sacerdotally ruled by priest-kings of the primitive type, "kings of the sacrifice," whose religious powers were balanced by the secular interest of the patrician heads of families—themselves priests of their family cults. The "Servian" constitution put down the rex sacrificulus, divided the city into four tribes, and its territory into twenty-six districts, each under a headman or headmen. The city at the same time was in part new walled, and the seven hills united; while the mass of the free population were divided into five classes according to their property, and enrolled for military purposes in 193 "centuries." In the first and richest class were forty centuries of men above forty-six for the defence of the city, and forty of younger men for service in the field; while the second, third, and fourth classes were divided into twenty centuries each, and the fifth class into thirty. The poorest of all were grouped in a separate century, the "Proletarians," or "breeders," without military duties; and the trumpeters, armourers, and carpenters in four more. New assemblies, the comitia centuriata, were formed, in which all members of the centuries shared, the old comitia curiata being thus virtually superseded. The military organisation was made the basis of a fiscal one, in which the classes were taxed on the capital value of their property. As freedom from direct taxation was the mark of the ancient "free" communities in general, the whole arrangement seems to be one that only a conqueror could have imposed; and the tradition ran that Servius was regarded as the friend of the poor, who made his birthday an annual festival.

But plebeian distress was probably not the sole, perhaps not the primary, factor in the convulsion. All along, the process of inequality had gone on among plebeians and patricians alike, some of the former rising to wealth and some of the latter sinking to relative poverty. Thus arises in effect the struggle of a "middle class" to share the political and social privileges of the "upper"; and there is reason to think that the Etruscan conquest was furthered by rich plebeians as against the patricians. The new constitution was what the Greeks called a "timocracy," or "rule of property"; and though in respect of the comitia centuriata plebeians were admitted to the franchise, it was under such provisions as to voting that the richer classes easily held the balance of power.[36] At the same time the patricians retained the religious power of the old kings, as custodians of the ritual mysteries—a great source of dominion. Thus the crisis was only temporarily relieved, and the struggle was renewed again and again, both under and after the kings. We can broadly divine that the anti-patrician rule of the king, who would rely on the plebs, unified against him the patricians or "free" citizens, who sought to keep down the masses; while, on the other hand, the increasing outlaw plebs was unified by its sheer need.[37]

As to the rule of the kings, whether native or Etruscan, no exact knowledge is now possible. We can but trace some of their functions in certain constitutional forms. Thus the Senate, or Council of the Elders, appears to have been the council of the king, selected by him, but capable of nominating his successor.[38] Whatever were its original function, it became in time the supreme power in the State, growing alike in numbers and in power, overruling or eclipsing the comitia curiata, comitia centuriata, and other bodies in which the general mass, first of patrician citizens and later of enfranchised plebeians, were enrolled.[39] But it is not through the complicated archÆology of the Roman constitution, latterly compiled with such an infinity of scholarly labour, that the nature of Roman evolution is really to be known. The technique of the system resulted from an endless process of compromise among social forces; and it is in the actual clash and play of those forces, as revealed in the simple records, that the human significance of it all is to be felt. In this way we substitute for a vague and false conception of unitary growth one of perpetual strife of classes, interests, and individualities.

In the doubtful transition period, as the tradition goes, it is in the time of discontented plebeian subjection, after the expulsion of the king (510 B.C.), that the Etruscan enemy captures the city (497); and the surmise that the battle of Lake Regillus was not really a Roman victory[40] is partly strengthened by the fact that soon after it there occur the division into twenty-five tribes, the tumults of the nexi, and the successful Secession of the Plebs, ending in their incorporation, with two tribunes to represent their interests (494). There is a clear presumption that only from a weakened patriciate, forced to seek union, could the plebs have won their tribunate and enfranchisement. On the other hand, it is after victories over the Volscians that the consul Spurius Cassius, who had proposed to divide among landless men the land conquered from the Hernicans, is said to have been executed (485) by the triumphant aristocracy; and it is in another period of security, when the Veientines and Sabines are depressed (473), that the tribune Cneius Genucius is murdered for having ventured to bring a consular to trial. Always we are in presence of a brutal caste, in the main utterly selfish, some of whose members are at all times as prone to the use of the dagger as an Italian camorra of our own day. Yet it is by the forcing of concessions on this caste that the Roman polity is kept vigorous and adaptable in comparison with those of the surrounding States which Rome subordinated or overran.

While Rome thrives, a new project for popular law reform is defeated (462); and it is after Cincinnatus, according to the legend, barely saves the State (458) that the tribunes are raised from five to ten, and the land is divided among the poor (456); though at the same time decemvirs are appointed and the conservative Twelve (at first Ten) Tables are drawn up (451-450). Thus partially strengthened, the plebs are able soon to force the abdication of the decemvirate (449) by the old menace of their withdrawal; and for a time the commonalty sufficiently holds its own, getting (445) the right of marriage with patricians, and (444) the institution of military tribunes with consular power;[41] though fresh distribution of land is prevented, and the patricians learn to divide the tribunes against each other. Thus class dissension goes on till the Gauls capture the city (390), multitudes of the Romans flying to Veii. Then it is that the plebeian party, after the Gauls have gone, are willing to transfer the seat of government to Veii; and the threat would doubtless win them some concessions in the rebuilding of Rome. But population always blindly increases; and the cancer of poverty spreads, despite the chronic planting of colonies in subject territory. Manlius is executed for trying to relieve debtors; but some land is reluctantly distributed. New wars create new popular distress, and new colonies fail to relieve it. At length the Licinian laws, relieving debtors and limiting estates, are proposed (376), and after nine years of agitation are passed at the crisis (367) at which the Gauls (who themselves had in the meantime undergone dissensions) again attack Rome; while the powers of the consuls (limited in 443 by the appointment of two Censors) are now further limited by the creation of a PrÆtor (patrician) and of Curule Ædiles, alternately taken from the two strata.

This makes a temporary palliation, and in time the now privileged plebeians[42] lean to the patrician side and status; while fresh wars with Hernicans, Gauls, Etruscans, and Samnites check class strife, and the patricians recover preponderance, passing a law (358) to check "new men." This is immediately followed by counter measures, limiting interest to ten per cent. and putting a five per cent. tax on manumissions; but the eternal distress of debtors is renewed, and a vain attempt is made to meet it (352) by State loans, and again by reducing interest to five per cent. (347). Increase of plebeian poverty again causes reactions, and after a mutiny futile laws are passed prohibiting interest altogether (342); the dictator Publilius carries popular political laws (339) checking the power of the Senate, and debtors are once more protected (326). After many wars, checking all domestic progress, popular distress causes a last Secession of the Plebs (287) and new political concessions to them; but still wars multiply, till all Italy is Romanised (266). The now mixed warlike aristocracy of birth, wealth, and office monopolises power in the Senate; and the residual plebs gradually ceases to be a distinct moral force, its last great struggle being made under the Gracchi, to whom it gives no valid support.

If we consider this evolution purely as a play of domestic political forces, we recognise it from first to last as a simple conflict of class needs and interests, partially modified at times by movements of true public spirit on the part of such men as the patricians who supported the Licinian laws, and such men as the Gracchi. The State-organism is the result of the struggles and pressures of its elements. What happened in the chronic readjustments was never a democratisation of the State, but at most an institutional protection of the poorer plebeians, and an admission of the richer to something like equal status with the optimates. Never was the "people" really united by any common home interest beyond the need of extorting some privileges. Only to that extent were the richer plebeians at one with the poorer; and there can be little doubt that as soon as the former secured the privileges they craved they tended to abuse them as the patricians had done. There was no personnel adequate to the effective working of the Licinian laws in face of a perpetual process of conquest which infallibly evoked always the instinct of acquisition, and never the science which might have controlled it. The early division of the State-territory into twenty-five tribes (495), of whom twenty-one were rural, determined the limitation of the political problem to the simple sharing of land; and every effort of public-spirited men to arrest the aggregation of lands in the hands of a few meant a convulsive explosion of resistance by the wealthy.

From the Polonian prattle of Cicero to his son we can gather how all schemes of reconstruction were viewed by the ruling class, whether in retrospect or prospect. The slaying of Tiberius Gracchus by Scipio Nasica is a standing theme of praise;[43] the lesson of the course of things social towards a steep sunderance of "haves" and "have-nots" is angrily evaded. Cicero knew as well as any the need for social reconstruction in Rome;[44] and he repeatedly records the sagacity of Lucius Marcus Philippus, who had been tribune and consul in Cicero's boyhood. As consul, Philippus had resisted the attempts of M. Livius Drusus to reform the Senate and provide for the poorer citizens and the Italians; but inasmuch as he had during his tribuneship avowed the fact that there were not left two thousand men in the State who owned property, Cicero denounces the avowal as pernicious.[45] The ideal aristocratic course was to resist all political change and slay those who attempted it—Drusus as the Gracchi before him. It was as a consummation of that policy that there exploded the so-called Marsian or Social War, in which Rome and the Italian States around her grappled and tore for years together like their ancestors of the tribal period; whereafter Marians and Sullans in turn rent Rome, till Sulla's iron dictatorship, restoring class supremacy, marked the beginning of the end of self-governing institutions, and prepared for the day of autocracy, which was not to come without another agony of long-protracted civil war. It is the supreme proof of the deadliness of the path of conquest that for most Romans the end of Roman "freedom" was a relief.

§ 3

The effect of continuous foreign war in frustrating democracy is here plain. On the one hand, the peasant-farmers are reduced to debt and slavery by their inability to farm their lands in war-time, while the patrician's lands are worked by his slaves. On the other hand, their distress is met by a share in the lands conquered; and after the soldiers are allowed pay (406 B.C.) they are more and more ready to join in conquest. Not only is popular discontent put off by the prospect of foreign plunder, but the perpetual state of aggressive war, while tending first to pauperise most of the small cultivators who make the army, breeds a new public spirit on a low plane, a sinister fraternity of conquest. Ethics must needs worsen throughout the State when the primitive instinct of strife developed into a policy of plunder; and worsened ethics means a positive weakening of a society's total strength. There is no lesson that men are slower to learn—and this naturally, because they see the success of unjust conquest—yet there is no truth easier to prove from history. Early Rome was strong as against strong enemies, because not only were its people hardily bred, but the majority were on the whole satisfied that they had just laws: the reciprocal sense of recognised rights sustained public spirit at the possible maximum. But the rights are thoroughly selfish at best; and it is the diversion of their selfishness to the task of continuous conquest that "saves" the community from early dissolution, preserving it for the life of dominion, which in turn destroys the old forces of cohesion, and leaves a community fit only for subjection to a military autocracy. The society of mutual selfish rights has a measure of cohesion of its own, up to the point of conflict between the "haves" and the "have-nots." An outwardly similar cohesion can, indeed, be sustained for a time by mere concurrence in piracy; but it lies in the very nature of society that union so engineered, cohesion so secured, is fleeting. Men whose main discipline is the practice of tyranny over aliens become simply incapable of strict reciprocity towards kin, and there must ensue either internecine strife or the degradation of the weaker elements, or a sequence of these results.

This is what happened in Rome. One of the first political signs of the contagion of the life of rapine in the later Republic is the growth of public bribery as a means to further wealth. Administrative posts being the chief of these means, candidates for them set about buying votes in the modern manner.[46] As early as 432 B.C. the law against canvassing by candidates[47] (lex de ambitu) suggests the recognition of electoral corruption; and later there followed a whole series of futile vetoes—futile because the social conditions grew always morally worse. The lex Æmilia BÆbia (182 B.C.) forbade all money gifts by candidates; and twenty-three years later another law decreed that offenders should be exiled. This also failing, there followed the leges tabellariÆ, establishing the ballot (139-137). Still the disease persisted, because there was no stop now possible to the career of conquest, which had undermined the very instincts whereon law depends; and on the treacherous struggle for place and pelf by way of bribery there supervened the direct grapple over the ill-gotten gains. The Roman ruling class had evolved into a horde of filibustering fortune-hunters, as did the Greeks under and after Alexander; and the political sequels of despotism and civil war were substantially the same.

The process was gradual, and the phenomena are at times apt to delude us. When a political machinery was set up that conduced to systematic and extending warfare in which the commonwealth was often at stake, the community had a new albeit fatal bond of cohesion, and the destructive or repulsive energies for generations found a wide field outside of the State. It is when the aristocratic Republic, succeeding finally in the long struggle with Carthage for the wealth of Sicily and Spain and the control of the Mediterranean, has further overrun Greece and pretty well exhausted the immediate fields of conquest, that the forces of repulsion again begin to work destructively within the body politic itself, and men and classes become the fools of their animosities. The wars of faction, the popular propaganda of the Gracchi, the murderous strifes of Marius and Sulla, the rivalries of Pompey and Crassus, Conservatives and Democrats, CÆsar and Pompey, the pandemonium on CÆsar's death, all in turn represent the renewed operation within the State of the crude energies of cohesion and strife which had been so long employed in foreign war. And the strife is progressively worse, because the materials are more complex and more corrupt. The aristocracy are more arrogant and hardened, the free farmer class has in large part disappeared, and the populace are more debauched.[48]

The perpetual wars had multiplied slaves; and the slaves added a new and desperate element to the social problem. It was the proof of the fatal lack in Rome of vital ethical feeling—or, let us say, of social science—that this deadly iniquity was never effectually recoiled from, or even impugned as it had been, before Aristotle, among the more highly evolved of the Greeks.[49] As wealth and luxury, pride and power accumulated, the usage of slave labour spread ever further and ate ever deeper into the population, brutalising alike the enslaved and the free.

But the fatality of war was as irresistible as the fatality of plebeian degradation; and the collapse of the slave war in Sicily (132), and the political movement of the Gracchi, alongside of the new warlike triumphs in Spain and Southern Gaul (121—the first great successes since the fall of Carthage), illustrate the general principle that a ruling class or house may always reckon on checking domestic criticism and popular self-assertion by turning the animal energies of the people to animal strife with another nation, in which case union correlates with strife. Wars imply comradeship and the putting aside of domestic strife for the time being; and a war with Illyria was made the pretext for suspending the operation of the new land law passed by the elder Gracchus when the younger later sought to carry it out. The triumphs of Marius, again, over Jugurtha and the Cimbri availed nothing to unify the parties in the State, or to secure his own. In democratising the army by drawing on a demoralised demos, he did but make it a more facile tool for the general, a thing more detached from the body politic.[50] The tendency of all classes in Rome to unite against the claims of the outside Italians was from the first a stumbling-block to the democrats within Rome; and the final identification of the popular interest, in the period of Marius and Sulla, with an anti-Roman policy among the Marians, gave to Sulla, strong in the prestige of recent conquest, the position of advantage, apart from his own strength. Further, as Montesquieu very justly notes, civil wars turn an entire nation into soldiers, and give it a formidable advantage over its enemies when it regains unity.[51] But this again is only for a time; there is no enduring society where there is no general sense of reciprocal justice among free men; and systematic militarism and plunder are the negation of moral reciprocity.

One partial exception, it is true, must be made. In the early days of the Republic the poor soldier stood to lose his farm by his patriotism. Soon the fighters had to be paid; and from the day of Marius onwards Roman commanders perforce provided for their veterans—so often their accomplices in the violation of their country's laws and liberties. The provision was made on the one hand by donations from the loot, on the other by grants of land taken from others, it might be in Italy itself. Sulla so rewarded his sworders; the triumvirs took the land of eighteen Italian towns to divide among their legionaries.[52] To the end the emperors had constantly to provide for their time-expired men by confiscations. Thus did empire pay for its instrument.

§ 4

The animal energies themselves, in time, are affected by domestic conditions; and when CÆsar comes on the scene Rome is visibly far on the way to a state of things such as had long before appeared in older civilisations[53]—a state of things commonly but rather loosely called degenerate, in which the animal energies are grown less robust, and the life therefore in some respects more civilised. Such a course had been run in Italy long before the rise of Rome, notably in Etruria, where, after a conquest of aborigines by a small body of invaders,[54] who were in touch with early Greek culture, the civilisation remains at that archaic stage while Greek civilisation continues to progress.[55] There, with a small aristocracy lording it over a people of serfs,[56] progress of all kinds was arrested, and even the religion of the conquerors assimilated to that of the aborigines.[57] In the Rome of CÆsar we see, after much fluctuation, with a more complex and less enfeebled structure of population, the beginnings of the same fixation of classes; while, at the same time, there has been such psychological variation as can begin to give new and ostensibly higher channels to the immanent forces of union and strife. This is the social condition that, given the required military evolution, above all lends itself to imperialism or absolute monarchy; which system in turn best maintains itself by a policy of conquest, so employing the animal energies and keeping up the cohesive force of militarist pride throughout all classes. Even now, of course, in a semi-enslaved populace, as in a slave population pure and simple,[58] there were possibilities of insurrection; and it was at length empirically politic for the emperors to give the populace its daily bread and its daily games, as well as to keep it charmed with the spectacle of conquest. The expedient of doles of food did not at once condemn itself by dangerously multiplying mouths, because, although it was only in the upper classes that men commonly refused to marry and have legitimate children, population was now restrained by the preventive checks of vice, city life, and wholesale abortion,[59] which are so much more effective—alike against child and mother[60]—than the random resort to infanticide, though that too had greatly increased.[61]

On the other hand, as the field of practicable conquest again approaches exhaustion and no sufficiently strong rival arises to conquer the conquerors, nothing can hinder that people of all classes, having no ideals tending to social and intellectual advance, and no sufficient channel for the instinct of union in the politics of the autocracy, shall find some channels of a new kind.[62] These are opened in due course, and take the shape especially of religious combinations or churches. Such modes had appeared even in the earlier stages of civic disintegration, when the semi-private or sectarian cults had begun to compete successfully with the public or civic. They did so by appealing more freshly and directly to the growths of emotional feeling (the outcome in part of physiological modification)[63] which no longer found outlet in primary forms, such as warfare and primitive revelry. After having themselves consented in times of panic to the introduction of several cults in the name of the public interest, the ruling classes, instinctively conservative by the law of their existence, take fright at the startling popularity of the unofficial Bacchic mysteries, and decide to stamp out the movement.[64] But the attempt is futile, the causal conditions remaining; and soon Judaism, Osirianism, Mithraism, the worships of Attis, Adonis, Bacchus, Isis, Serapis, all more or less bound up with divination and sorcery, make way in the disintegrating body politic.[65] The wheel of social evolution had, so to speak, "gone full circle" since the first Roman curia, the basis of the State, subsisted as groups with their special sacra, finding in these their reason for cohering. Decadent Rome, all other principles of subordinate cohesion having been worked out, resolves itself once more into groups similarly motived. But the principle is newly conditioned, and the sacra now begin the struggle for existence among themselves. The rise of Christianity is simply the success of a system which, on a good economic foundation, copied from that of the Jewish synagogues, assimilates the main attractions of similar worships, while availing itself of exoteric and democratic as well as esoteric methods. It thus necessarily gains ground among the multitude, rich as well as poor;[66] and its ultimate acceptance by the autocrat was due to the very exclusiveness which at first made it intolerable. Once diffused widely enough to set up the largest religious organisation in the Empire, it became the best possible instrument of centralisation and control, and as such it was accepted and employed.[67]

And now again we see how inevitably the force of attraction correlates with the force of repulsion. The new channels of the spirit of union, being dug not by reason but by ignorance, become new channels for the reverse flow of the spirit of strife; and as sectarian zeal spreads, in the absence of openings, good or bad, for public spirit, there arise new forms of domestic hate and struggle. Crude religious fervours, excluding, or arising in lack of, the play of the saner and higher forms of thought and feeling, beget crude antipathies;[68] and Christianity leads back to bloody strifes and seditions such as had not been seen since the fall of the Republic. There is not intellectuality enough to raise men above this new superinduced barbarism of ignorant instinct; half of the old Christendom, disintegrated like the old politics, is overrun by a more robust barbarism that adopts a simpler creed; and the new barbaric Christendom exhibits in its turn all the modes of operation of the biological forces that had been seen in the old.

§ 5

Thus far we have considered Roman evolution in terms of a moral estimate of the reactions of classes. But lest we lose sight of the principle of total causation, it is fitting to restate the process in terms of that conception, thus explaining it non-morally. We may view Rome, to begin with, as a case of the unique aggrandisement of a State in virtue of fit conditions and institutions. Thus (1) the comparatively uncommercial situation of the early Latins, leaving them, beyond cattle-breeding and agriculture, no occupation save war for surplus energy, and no readier way of acquiring wealth;[69] (2) the physical collocation of a group of seven defensive hills, so close that they must be held by a federated group;[70] (3) the ethnic collocation of a set of tribe groups of nearly equal vigour and ardour, strengthening each other's sinews by constant struggling; (4) the creation (not prescient, but purely as a provision against kingship) of the peculiar institution of the annual consulate,[71] securing a perpetuity of motive to conquest and a continuous flow of administrative energy;[72] (5) the peculiar need, imposed by this very habit of all-round warfare, for accommodation between the ruling and ruled classes, and for the safeguarding of the interests of the latter by laws and franchises; (6) the central position of Rome in Italy, enabling her to subdue it piecemeal; and finally (7) the development by all these means of a specialist aristocracy, habitually trained to administration[73]—all these genetic conditions combined to build up the most remarkable military empire the world has ever seen. They obtrude, it is clear, half of the explanation of the fact that the Romans rose to empire where the much more early civilised Greek cities of Italy did not.

Of the latter fact we still receive the old explanation that it came of "the habit, which had ever been the curse of Hellenism, of jealous separation and frequent war between town and town, as well as internal feuds in the several cities themselves."[74] But this is clearly no vera causa, as these symptoms are duplicated in the history of Rome itself. The determining forces must, then, be looked for in the special conditions. The Greeks, indeed, brought with them the tradition of the separate City-State; but just as the cities remained independent in Greece by reason of natural conditions,[75] so the Greek cities of Italy remained isolated and stationary at a certain strength, because their basis and way of life were commercial, so that while they restricted each other's growth or dominance they were in times of peace mutually nutritive. They wanted customers, not plunder. For the Romans plunder was the first social need after agriculture, and as they began they continued. When Jugurtha learned that anything could be had of the Romans for gold, he had but read an open secret.

Of course, the functions that were originally determined by external conditions came in time to be initial causes—the teeth and claws, so to speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic. The upper-class Romans became, as it were, the experts, the specialists of war and empire and administration. Until they became wholly demoralised by habitual plunder, they showed, despite their intense primeval superstition of citizenship,[76] a degree of sagacity in the conciliation of their defeated rivals which was a main cause of their being able to hold out against Hannibal, and which contrasts markedly with the oppressive and self-defeating policy of imperial Carthage, Athens, and Sparta. Their tradition in part was still that of conquering herdsmen, not wholly turned into mere exploiters of humanity. Pitted against any monarch, they were finally invincible, because a still-growing class supplied their administrators, as the swarming provinces supplied their soldiers, and because for all alike war meant plunder and new lands, as well as glory. Pitted against a republic like Carthage, even when its armies were led by a man of genius, they were still insuppressible, inasmuch as Carthage was a community of traders employing mercenaries, where Rome was a community in arms, producing generals as Carthage produced merchants. Mithridates failed in turn, as Hannibal failed. The genius of one commander, exploiting passive material, could not avail against the accumulated faculty for organisation in the still self-renewing Roman patriciate.[77]

Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of class egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social problem in the older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off domestic strife by colonies, by empire, and by doles,[78] and was already near the economic stage reached only centuries later by the Roman Empire. Save for Rome, her polity might have endured on the imperialist basis for centuries; but, as it was, it was socially exhausted relatively to the task and the danger, depending as it did on hired foreign troops and coerced allies. It is idle to speak, as men still do, of Hannibal's stay in Capua as a fatal mistake.[79] Had Hannibal taken Rome, the ultimate triumph of the Romans would have been just as certain. Their State was bound to outlast the other, so long as it maintained to any extent its old basis of a fecund rural population of free cultivators, supplying a zealous soldiery, headed by a specialised class equally dependent on conquest for all advancement. For the trading Carthaginians, war was, beyond a certain point, a mere act of self-defence; they could not have held and administered Italy had they taken it. The supreme general could last only one lifetime; the nation of warriors still yielded a succession of captains, always learning something more of war, and raising the standard of capacity as the progress of machinery widens the scope of all engineers.

The author of a recent and meritorious History of Rome, Mr. Shuckburgh, is satisfied to quote (p. 231) from Polybius, as explaining the fall of Carthage, the generalisation that "Italians as a nation are by nature superior to Phoenicians and Libyans, both in strength of body and courage of soul"; and to add: "That is the root of the matter, from which all else is a natural growth." This only leaves us asking: "What was the natural root of the alleged physiological superiority?" There must have been reasons. If they were "racial" or climatic, whence the later implied degeneration of the Romans in body or soul, or both? We are driven to the explanation lying in polity and institutions, which it should have been Mr. Shuckburgh's special aim to give, undertaking as he does to deal with "the state of the countries conquered by the Romans." And such explanations are actually offered by Polybius (vi, 53).