ITALY 
 
 Before Roman Conquest 
 
 I Gauls 
 ED LatinsUmbriansSabines 
 Z3 Settled mainLyby Sabiney 
 
 Settled " "Samnites 
 Greek Colonies thus: 
 Tarentum
 
 Before the Social War 
 
 DID AgerRomanus (Roman Citizens) 
 Latin Colonies 
 Treaty StatesfCivtialesFoederatae)
 
 253S-2
 
 J) 
 
 C/D
 
 The Growth of 
 
 R O ME 
 
 BY 
 
 P. E. MATHESON 
 
 LONDON 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 1922
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THIS small volume does not pretend to be more, than an 
 attempt to suggest some of the chief characteristics that give 
 its significance to the story of ancient Rome. It is obvious that 
 in such a sketch much must be omitted and that it is impossible 
 to enter in detail into controversial questions. It is assumed 
 that the reader has already read or will read with it one of the 
 continuous histories which are accessible to English readers ; 
 Mommsen, Heitland, Myres, How and Leigh, and J. Wells for 
 the Republic, and Bury and Stuart Jones for the Empire. 
 
 It is a bold venture to try to bring within the compass of some 
 eighty pages the main features of Roman history. Such an 
 attempt involves vast omissions, and must at the best give 
 a very imperfect impression of what ancient Rome has 
 meant and still means in the history of the world ; but it may 
 perhaps serve to interest readers unfamiliar with the story and 
 stimulate them to further study. If so, its purpose will have 
 been achieved. 
 
 All that can be done within these narrow limits is to give 
 some slight sketch of the process by which Rome acquired the 
 mastery first over Italy and then over the Mediterranean; and 
 of the means by which the Romans gained and secured their 
 Empire ; to trace in some measure the secret of these successes, 
 and to indicate the causes which ultimately led to the dissolu- 
 tion of the great fabric of the Empire. 
 
 The first chapter deals with the early history of Rome down 
 to 266 B.C. : the second with the period of foreign conquest, 
 with its reaction on the politics and constitution of Rome : 
 the third with the decline of Senatorial government and with 
 the period of revolution, and the fourth with the foundation 
 and history of the Principate, from Augustus to Marcus 
 Aurelius. 
 
 Permission to reproduce the beautiful drawings by E. Lear, 
 Francis Towne, John Robert Cozens, and Guy Head, we owe 
 to the courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.
 
 The Growth of 
 
 ROME 
 
 Roman History down to 266 B.C. The Conquest 
 of Italy 
 
 ROME at the outset was one of many scores of Italian com- 
 munities scattered over Italy, each living its own isolated life. 
 It became in the end the centre of a world-wide government, 
 the symbol of peace and order for thousands of self-governing 
 cities dispersed over the world. The history of Rome, like the 
 story of every people, may be looked at from two points of 
 view. It may be viewed as an outward growth, an expansive 
 process measurable in time and space, or it may be viewed as 
 a spiritual development, the formation of a national character, 
 and its embodiment in literature, art, and institutions. It 
 may be summed up on the one hand as the building up through 
 a thousand years of a great material structure, of a complex 
 of states under one control and governed from one centre ; 
 on the other hand as the creation of an ideal of government, 
 of the gradual embodiment of principles of justice in the great 
 monuments of Roman law, the Digest and the Code, and in 
 the great literary achievements of the Latin world, finding 
 their culmination in the Aeneid of Virgil, whose spirit passed on 
 into Latin Christianity, to inspire Augustine's City of God and 
 Dante's vision of the Mediaeval Empire. We are accustomed 
 to look to Greece and the Greek people as the source of creative 
 ideas in art, science, and speculation, but we have always to 
 remember that it was through the Roman rule and through
 
 6 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 Roman institutions that the genius of Greece was enabled 
 ultimately to exert its influence over a wider field and to become 
 a formative element in the whole of western civilization. For 
 the world which Rome ruled when her power was once esta- 
 blished in the Mediterranean was a Graeco-Roman world. 
 The peace which the Principate of Augustus gave to the 
 distracted countries of Europe and the nearer East was a peace 
 which embraced peoples speaking many languages and dialects, 
 but among them Greek held a place by the side of Latin, and 
 both alike were the speech of all educated men. Therefore 
 we cannot think of Greek and Roman history apart, and we 
 shall see that, long before the Pax Augusti, the reaction of 
 Greece on Rome had begun to mould political movements 
 and to determine the direction of literary evolution. It is 
 significant that two of the books which have done most for 
 our familiar knowledge of the Roman world are written in 
 Greek Plutarch's Lives and the New Testament. But this does 
 not mean that Rome has not its distinctive character and 
 development. It is this development which I now propose to 
 try to trace. 
 
 Our knowledge of the earlier history of Rome is unfortunately 
 based on very inadequate evidence. It is not until the second 
 century B. c. that we have in Polybius, the Greek statesman 
 and exile, a historian writing on contemporary events : further 
 back we are dependent on secondhand historians, such as Livy, 
 and on what we can derive from such documents as the list 
 of consuls, the remains of the legal document known as the 
 XII Tables, and such inferences as may be drawn from the 
 evidence of language, from later institutions, civil and religious, 
 and from the discoveries of the archaeologist in Rome and 
 Italy. But the main outlines of the early history are fairly clear. 
 
 As a preliminary, one glance at the geography is necessary.
 
 The Conquest of Italy 
 
 Politically Italy was not a united whole until the close of the 
 Republic, but throughout the history which culminated in 
 that union, its geographical unity and its local diversities had 
 an important influence on the political development. Beneath 
 the great barrier of the Alps in the north is the rich plain of 
 Lombardy ; open to attack from east and west over the low 
 passes of the Maritime Alps on the west and of Istria on the 
 east. From this fertile alluvial plain the great chain of the 
 Apennines stretches along the full length of the peninsula. 
 Only in Etruria, Umbria, Latium, and Campania is there 
 any extensive plain country ; and in the extreme south- 
 west in Bruttium the peninsula ends in the wildest forest. 
 The enormous length of the peninsula, in Roman days as now, 
 made communications and a unified administration very 
 difficult. But Rome had from the outset the supreme advantage 
 of central position in the peninsula and a commanding site on 
 the Tiber. From this central position she could gradually 
 extend her power north and south, over the plains of Etruria 
 and Latium, and later to the wider plains beyond. Throughout 
 the story we have to remember the permanent geographical 
 conditions and also the variety of Italian life the contrast 
 of plain and mountain, which provide the winter and summer 
 pastures ; the contrast between town and country life, between 
 the austerer Sabine highlands and the rich plains of Lombardy 
 or Latium and Campania. The aspect of the land has been 
 altered since Roman times by the cutting down of forests and 
 the silting up of rivers the ancient crops of spelt have given 
 place first to wheat and later to olive and vine, and later again 
 to maize but hundreds of towns remain on the same sites as in 
 Roman days, and the Italian cattle to-day move to and fro 
 along the same immemorial green tracks from plain to mountain 
 and from mountain to plain.
 
 8 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 At the beginning of the historic period we have to imagine 
 the peninsula occupied by a large number of separate com- 
 munities, some with a civic, some with a tribal organization : 
 Greek cities in the extreme south ; a Celtic or, as the Romans 
 called them, a Gallic population in the north, pressing down 
 on the Etruscan peoples who had occupied a good part of 
 Lombardy and Venetia and who were still in undisputed 
 possession of Tuscany. There were also the Ligurian tribes 
 along the Western Riviera, and, occupying the central region, 
 were the two main branches of the distinctively Italian races, 
 the Latins and the Umbro-Sabellians ; the Latins with their 
 centre in the region south of the Tiber, the Umbro-Sabellians, 
 including in the north the Umbrians, and farther south the 
 Sabines, Samnites, and Lucanians, spreading down from the 
 Celtic country to the Greek region of the south and already 
 threatening the existence of the Greek cities. These Greek 
 cities, it must always be remembered, had maintained their own 
 distinctive Greek life in contact with the cities of Sicily and the 
 mainland of Greece, whose trade and civilization they shared. 
 
 The compact solidarity of the united Italy which ultimately 
 came into being under the governing guidance of Rome is 
 partly due to the fact that the Celts, the Greeks, and the Italian 
 peoples were not alien from one another in race, and that in 
 particular the Celts and the Italians were closely related, and 
 well fitted to complement each other's qualities and form by 
 fusion a strong and resourceful people. But the process was 
 a gradual one. The unity of Italy was only consummated at 
 the accession of Augustus, and when it became merged as time 
 went on in the great machine of the Empire, its national unity 
 was lost, not to appear again till the Risorgimento. 1 What 
 
 1 See Dr. J. W. Mackail,T? Italy of Virgil and the Italy of Dante, in Dante, 
 Essays in Commemoration, London University Press, 1921.
 
 The Conquest of Italy 
 
 we have to notice in this early period is that the alien 
 elements, Etruscan and Ligurian, were absorbed without 
 greatly affecting the Roman character, and the intercourse with 
 the cities of the so-called ' Great Greece ' of the south prepared 
 the way for the later stage in Roman history, when Rome 
 became the mistress of the Graeco-Roman world. But the 
 fusion of races was only a co-operating cause. The greatness of 
 Rome was based ultimately on the distinctive character of her 
 people, on qualities of manliness, discipline, and order, which 
 marked out the inhabitants of the city on the Tiber from her 
 Latin and Sabine kinsmen, as a conquering and governing race. 
 
 It was in the period with which we are now concerned that 
 these qualities were developed, by quiet growth and strenuous 
 conflict, in which the issue long seemed uncertain and only 
 a rare union of tenacity, compromise, and political genius finally 
 established Roman power. At the end of the period we find 
 Rome entering the circle of the great powers by her treaty 
 with Egypt in 273, which brought her into the main stream of 
 Mediterranean history. We have now to trace the process by 
 which this great position was achieved. 
 
 In the earliest period we have to think of the Roman State 
 as a small community established on the hills x above the 
 Tiber, with the Palatine as its centre : a community consisting, 
 according to the tradition, of a mingling of Latin and Sabine 
 elements. The people are mainly agricultural, but from very 
 early days they maintained maritime and commercial relations 
 with the outside world through the settlement of Ostia at the 
 river's mouth. The period before 266 B. c. falls into two 
 main divisions. The Roman Republic, like that of Athens, was 
 preceded by a period of monarchy which is said to have lasted 
 
 1 The annual festival of the Septimontium on December 1 1 marks the 
 significance of the hills in the early history.
 
 io Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 some two hundred and forty years, down to 509 B. c. In that 
 period, among the uncertain shadows of legendary history we can 
 already trace certain significant features. First there was the 
 expiring effort of the Etruscan power in Italy expressed in a period 
 of Etruscan rule or influence in Rome. That influence dis- 
 appeared and left no trace except in some of the religious 
 institutions of the city and in the world of art. Secondly, we 
 see the beginnings of a constitutional government in which an 
 assembly of the people already played an important part. 
 Thirdly, Rome had already begun to acquire a dominant 
 position in the League of the Latin Cities. And finally, the 
 firm foundations were already beginning to be laid of Roman 
 law and legal procedure. 
 
 Certain names were handed down from this period, which 
 were associated with the origin of the religious and civil 
 institutions of Rome, and in particular that of King Servius 
 Tullius, to whom are attributed two momentous changes : (i) the 
 new organization of the people for military purposes, the origin 
 of the great assembly of citizens, the Comitia Centuriata ; 
 (2) the alliance with the Latins, the outward symbol of which 
 was the temple of Diana on the Aventine. The walls, which 
 are attributed to him, are probably not earlier than the fourth 
 century "B. c. This great formative period, with no literature 
 and very uncertain records, was no doubt of immense 
 importance in giving shape to Roman character and direction 
 to Roman institutions, but it remains shadowy and obscure. 
 
 With the fall of the Monarchy in 509 and the foundation of 
 the Republic we pass into a clearer air, although for some 
 century and a half the records are still far from certain. The 
 two hundred and forty years from 509 to 266, saw the founda- 
 tions laid of the civil and military system of the Republic. 
 It saw also the expansion of Roman power over the central
 
 The Conquest of Italy n 
 
 regions of the Italian peninsula, until at the close Rome had 
 mastered her neighbours to north and south, and had created 
 the nucleus of a great Italian union of states, owning her 
 supremacy, and privileged to share, as time went on, her 
 expanding trade and her governing position. 
 
 Let us look first at the internal development. 
 
 The factors in the constitution which followed on the period 
 of the kings define themselves clearly from the first and deter- 
 mine the future of Rome. 1 
 
 The executive is in the hands of two annual magistrates, 
 possessing full power, imperium, both civil and military, each 
 magistrate having power to veto the other's acts. It is on this 
 executive power that ultimately the government of Italy and 
 the Empire depends. Whether they are called Praetors, as at 
 first, or Consuls, the name we are familiar with in history, this 
 pair of magistrates represents the characteristic executive of 
 Rome. It is only on special occasions, for military or formal 
 purposes, that recourse is had to the nomination of a Dictator 
 by one of the Consuls. The Dictator is an emergency officer 
 who acts for a limited time, and is never regarded as a normal 
 official of the State. It is in the two annual Consuls, command- 
 ing the armies and administering the affairs of the city, that the 
 effective force of the State resides. Their Imperium, or civil 
 and military command, is the organic cell, so to say, from which 
 all the governing greatness of Rome was evolved. The 
 Magistrates are the creation of the people, the Populus 
 Romanus, the whole assembled body of citizens. 
 
 In this Populus Romanus we find already distinctions which 
 are significant through history. 'We see, first, the distinction 
 
 1 For constitutional questions see A. J. Greenidge, Roman Public Life, 
 which embodies the substance of Mommsen's Staatsrecbt, independently 
 handled.
 
 12 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 of master and dependant, or patron and client ; and, secondly, 
 the distinction, vastly more important for political purposes, 
 of Patrician and Plebeian. The Patricians were the members 
 of the select families, who alone could be fathers of their 
 family in the full sense and alone could share in- the older 
 worships of the State. The Plebeians, or Plebs, were those 
 outside this inner circle, originally unprivileged and many of 
 them poor. These outsiders gradually, as time went on, 
 acquired a special assembly of their own and absolute social 
 and political equality with the Patricians, except that to the 
 end they were shut out from some of the sacred offices, in 
 particular that of Rex sacrorum, which belong to the original 
 inner families of the community. The Populus Romanus is 
 the ultimate sovereign, the ultimate source of power, for 
 legislation and for election of magistrates, and for the exercise 
 of the final deciding vote in criminal cases. Whether they 
 met by Curiae, or wards, as in the early days of the city or 
 by Centuries, the military ordering of the people which is 
 attributed to the legendary king Servius Tullius, but may 
 belong to a later date, or by Tribes, the district divisions 
 which in the later Republic are the important civic unit, they 
 vote always not as individuals but in groups, and their effective 
 voting power depends very much on the arrangement of the 
 groups. But besides Consuls and People there is that august 
 assembly, which becomes, as time goes on, the seat and centre 
 of Roman government, i.e. the Senate. Fundamental to the 
 Roman mind is the duty of the magistrate to take advice from 
 the wise. The Senate is the Council which it is the duty of 
 the Consuls to consult, and in proportion as the power of Rome 
 extends and the Citizen Assembly less and less corresponds to 
 the whole body of Roman citizens, the power of the Senate 
 grows, till it becomes the commanding factor in the constitution.
 
 The Conquest of Italy 13 
 
 Before this point was reached, new magistracies had grown 
 up around the original pair. There were the Censors (443), 
 periodical officers at five years' interval to take the census, 
 choose men into the Senate, and exercise a general supervision 
 over manners. More important because they were elected 
 yearly were the Praetors, 1 who administered justice. Through 
 them and through their edicts was built up the law of Rome, 
 and by an extension of their office the office of provincial 
 governor was developed. The Praetors, too, can also act as 
 heads of the Government if the Consuls are away. Various 
 minor magistrates too appear Quaestors, the officials for 
 finance, and Aediles, concerned with the internal economics 
 of Rome. Thus, by a process of division and differentiation, 
 the original executive of the single king is broken up into 
 groups of specialized officials ; the monarchy is put in com- 
 mission. 
 
 Outside these offices there was another group which must be 
 mentioned apart : the Plebeians by degrees had become an 
 organized power in the State, their officers, the Tribunes of the 
 Plebs, originally merely the officers of a corporation within the 
 State, became practically magistrates of Rome, but with 
 distinctive attributes which mark their position as different 
 from that of the Magistrates proper. Their powers are not 
 Command (Imperium) but Auxilium (Help) on the one hand, 
 and on the other, the negative power of intercession or veto, 
 which enabled them to block and so to control legislation. 
 In the first two centuries of the Republic these officers, 
 who are elected by the Plebeian Assembly (Concilium Plebis 
 
 1 The Praetors, like our English Judges, did not decide questions of fact. 
 They laid down the law and referred the question of fact to a iudcx or 
 indices. They did not even direct the jury, but by consulting wise men 
 of the law they brought theory to bear on practice.
 
 14 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 Tributum), have the power of summoning and presiding over 
 this Assembly, and acquire for it by degrees the full legislative 
 power. The Hortensian Law of 287 put them finally for law- 
 making purposes on the level of the Populus Romanus, while 
 a Licinian law of 367, eighty years earlier, had already secured 
 for the Plebs one place at least in the consulate each year. 
 The effect of this was momentous. 
 
 The Plebs, the Commons, thus enfranchized are not to be 
 regarded as merely a poor and dependent class : from almost 
 the earliest days they consisted of richer and poorer elements. 
 The process which culminated in the Licinian and the Hor- 
 tensian laws may be regarded from two points of view. On 
 the one hand it was a widening of the conception of citizenship. 
 The Citizen body now came to include all elements of the 
 people, voting in their Tribes in equality side by side. On 
 the other hand the process was an enlargement of the circle of 
 the nobility from whose ranks the magistrates were drawn, 
 and of the Senate into which they passed after holding office. 
 Thus the earlier nobility of birth passed in the fourth century 
 into a nobility of office, consisting of those families whose 
 ancestors had held the higher magistracies. 
 
 To a date early in the Republican period, 450 B. c., is referred 
 the institution of the Twelve Tables, which were looked back 
 to as the foundation of Roman Law. 1 Though the circum- 
 stances which surround them are mixed with legendary elements 
 there can be no doubt that the establishment of a written code 
 marks a definite stage in the development of Rome ; it is clear 
 from the evidence we have of them that they represent the 
 principles and practice of a primitive age. 
 
 This is the history of the State from within. Let us now 
 look without. These earlier centuries record a series of 
 ' Fons omnis publici privatique est iuris ', Liv. iii. 34.
 
 1 6 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 conflicts with the races of Italy in which Rome met, and after 
 repeated failures overcame, the armed forces of her neighbours, 
 Etiuscans and Gauls in the north, the mountain races in the 
 near east and south Sabines and Volscians and Hernicans 
 the Samnites and the Greek cities in the south. 
 
 These conflicts are recorded for us by late historians, in whose 
 pages wars and battles are often duplicated, but certain facts 
 emerge clearly from the legendary darkness. First is the fact 
 that Rome's central position was at the outset established by 
 her contiol and domination of the great League of the Latin 
 cities. The stages of her progress are marked by certain critical 
 moments. These were the destruction of Alba Longa in the 
 period of the monarchy, the closing of the League against new 
 members in 385, and the dissolution of the League in 338. Rome's 
 relations with these Latin communities left their mark far on into 
 the Empire. By the destruction of Alba Longa, the old capital 
 of the League of the Latin towns, Rome had become the 
 dominant power in it. Then by exercising her control over the 
 members of the League, Rome founded under its auspices 
 new centres of influence in the colonies of the League. It was 
 these early colonies which formed a model for the later ' Latin 
 colonies ' which, when Rome had become supreme, she herself 
 founded as garrisons to control the great roads that led north 
 and south and held the peninsula in their inevitable grip. 
 And later on when these colonies in Italy had become merged 
 in the Roman State, the Latin status, Latinitas or Latium, was 
 still bestowed on towns beyond the seas as a preliminary stage 
 towards the grant of full Roman citizenship. Such towns 
 formed centres of Roman influence in the provinces. 
 
 The League also left a striking religious survival in the 
 Roman State in the form of the great Latin Festival, which 
 was celebrated every year by the Consuls at the opening of
 
 2538^
 
 i8 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 their year of office in the temple of Juppiter Latiaris, Jove of 
 the Latins, on the top of the Alban Mount. 1 It is a thrilling 
 spot even now. Before Rome's control over the Latin towns 
 was established the city of Rome had to suffer the ignominy 
 of a Gallic raid, which gave the Celts of the north possession of 
 the city for a short time, and left to tradition the legend of 
 the geese of the Capitol. It is only after the recovery of the 
 city and the re-establishment of order that the records of 
 Roman history begin to be established on a solid basis. The 
 domination over Latium was only the beginning of Rome's 
 struggle for mastery. The records of the earlier years of the 
 Republic are full of repeated conflicts with the Etruscan cities 
 across the Tiber on the north, particularly the city of Veii. 
 This city, about twelve miles -north of Rome, threatened for 
 generations the very existence of the city on the Tiber, and 
 its conquest in 396 by the heroic M. Furius Camillus, the first 
 great name in the external history of Rome, marks a decisive 
 moment in Rome's advance. The sequel to his victory was 
 the foundation of two Latin colonies at Sutrium and Nepete, 
 the gates of Etruria, in 383. 
 
 The conflicts with the hill-tribes of the south and east, the 
 Aequians and the Volscians, were no less significant. These 
 tribes inhabited the hilly country east and south of that 
 group of volcanic hills, the Alban Mountains, with which 
 visitors to Rome are familiar as closing the southern view from 
 Rome. 
 
 The traveller who goes south-eastwards to Velletri (Velitrae), 
 twenty-five miles from Rome, and from there climbs Mount 
 Algidus, the southern outpost of the Alban hills, can see about 
 him the sites of the hill-towns of Tusculum to the north and 
 
 1 This historic temple on the top of Monte Cavo made way for a monastery 
 in the eighteenth century.
 
 The Conquest of Italy 19 
 
 Praeneste (now Palestrina) to the south-east, and below him 
 can mark the point where the Latin road runs through the 
 pass of the Alban hills into the heart of the Volscian country. 
 From this outpost it may be seen how the support of the 
 Latins and of the Hernicans enabled Rome to fight and subdue 
 the Volscians. We have a glimpse of the struggle in the legend 
 of Coriolanus, familiar to all from Shakespeare's play. The 
 victory was won partly by arms and partly by diplomacy. 
 
 It was only when this hill country had been conquered fhat 
 Rome was able to become independent of her allies. The 
 last Latin war ended, as we have seen, in the dissolution of the 
 Latin League in 338. This marks the final collapse of Latin 
 resistance. Rome to all intents and purposes had swallowed 
 up Latium. This closed the first great stage in the process by 
 which Rome became supreme head of an Italian Confederation, 
 which in the end was conterminous with the Italian peninsula. 
 It was only then, with Southern Etruria subdued beyond the 
 Tiber and Latium as a solid base to work from, that the 
 further advance southwards became possible. 
 
 Eighty years earlier, in 420, the Campanian Samnites, 
 Sabine tribes attracted by the wealth and civilization of the 
 Greek cities of the south, had pushed down the peninsula and 
 conquered Cumae the oldest Greek settlement in Italy. 
 The fall of Cumae struck a warning note for the other Greek 
 cities. More recently, in 341, Rome had made alliance with 
 the Samnites, but now that Rome had completed her mastery 
 over the Latin towns a conflict with Samnium was inevitable, 
 unless Rome was to accept the control of Magna Graecia by 
 the Sabellian races. The victory of the Samnites would have 
 meant a divided Italy, half Latin and half Oscan, unable to 
 hold its own against Carthage or other great powers. For 
 between fifty and sixty years (347-290) Rome was engaged, 
 
 B 2
 
 20 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 with intervals of peace, in a great struggle with this powerful 
 race. It was a war of the city of the plain matched against 
 the people of the mountains, with their own language and 
 civilization and their own ambitions. The first stage ended 
 with the foundation of the great fortress of Luceria (a Latin 
 colony of 2,500 colonists, founded in 314), followed by 
 similar fortresses in Apulia and Campania and the construc- 
 tion of the great south road, the Via Appia, in 312. In 
 the. next twenty years the Samnites found support at 
 different times in the Etruscans, the Hernicans, and other races 
 of central Italy, whose resistance made necessary the further 
 consolidation of Rome's position by roads and colonies. The 
 most critical moment was the great battle of Sentinum, 295, 
 in Umbria, on the borders of the Celtic country, east of the 
 Flaminian road. On that famous battle-field the Umbrians, 
 Etruscans, and Gauls of the north fought side by side with the 
 Samnites against Rome, and were defeated. This battle 
 decisively broke the alliance between Rome's northern and 
 southern enemies. The great roads and colonies established 
 a solid block of Romanized land between the Celtic and the 
 Samnite countries. Even after this great victory the position 
 of Rome was not yet completely secure. The Sabine country 
 indeed was absorbed into the Roman citizenship, but Etruscans 
 and Gauls took up war again and Rome had still to reckon 
 with the Greek cities of the south which she had for a time 
 defended against the attacks of the Lucanians, also a Samnite 
 people. The collision came in 282. Tarentum, that town whose 
 deep and spacious harbour is now familiar to our soldiers and 
 sailors as Taranto, had become the dominant State in the south, 
 and secured the help of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus beyond the 
 Adriatic, to defend her against attack. For a time it looked as 
 if this brilliant adventurer, by his victories in Italy and Sicily,
 
 The Conquest of Italy 21 
 
 might carve out a new Greek power in the south. But Pyrrhus 
 was too far from his base across the Adriatic ; his nearer allies, 
 too, the Greek cities of Sicily failed to support him, for united 
 action among Greek cities was always hard to secure. The war 
 ended in the submission of Tarentum on honourable terms 
 and the collapse of the Samnite resistance in the south. Twice 
 again Rome had to meet the resistance of the Samnites. They 
 gave support to Hannibal after his great victory at Cannae, 
 and in the civil wars of Marius and Sulla they again fought 
 against Rome, only to be butchered after the battle of the 
 Colline Gate. 
 
 Thus by a series of wars Rome had become head of a great 
 confederation of various but mainly kindred races, but it is in 
 the means by which her rule was established and confirmed 
 that her genius is best seen. 
 
 The first principle of Roman rule was : Divide et impera 
 divide to conquer. Rome tolerated no league or alliance 
 between tribes or cities. With each of her allies and subjects 
 she made a separate treaty : no city or tribe could have its 
 own foreign policy, none could combine with any other. 
 They were all separate units. They had different grades of 
 privilege and were kept apart by their difference. Rome 
 alone could make war or treaties, and although coins might 
 be struck at other mints besides that of Rome they bore 
 Roman emblems and were of Roman standard. 1 It is 
 significant that in 269 the silver denarius, of which we still 
 retain a record in the symbol d for our penny, was introduced 
 as the unit of Rome's imperial currency, to remain so for over 
 five hundred years. 2 If we look beyond Rome and those 
 towns of Latium which had the full franchise, we find a group 
 of towns which had Roman citizenship, but without the power 
 
 1 G. F. Hill, Historical Roman Coins, p. 77. a Ibid., p. 28.
 
 22 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 of voting in the Assembly (civitas sine suffragio). Their 
 citizens served in the legions and shared the burdens and 
 private rights of Roman citizenship. 1 Some of these towns 
 governed themselves, others had justice administered to them 
 by a prefect from Rome. This was a transitional type of citizen- 
 ship, which had disappeared in five or six generations, before 
 the final struggle for the franchise the Social War of 91-89. 
 Beyond these semi-privileged communities come the mass of the 
 Allied States (civitatesfoederatae], who governed themselves and 
 sent their own contingents in squadrons of horse and cohorts of 
 foot to fight side by side with the Roman legionaries. They paid 
 no money tribute to Rome. The cities with Latin rights, the 
 ' Latin name ' as they were called, were a special class of those 
 Allies, who shared in the private rights of citizens, and could 
 if they chanced to be in Rome when the Citizen Assemblies 
 met, give a vote in that Assembly. 2 They could also by 
 migrating to Rome or by serving a magistracy in their own 
 town acquire the full franchise of Rome. 
 
 The important thing to notice is that in her dealings with the 
 Italians Rome combined strong and effective control with the 
 lavish grant of valuable and varied privileges to her allies, and 
 thus made easy and natural the process of gradual incorporation 
 and fusion. It is this inclusive and far-seeing policy, at once 
 liberal and strong, which marks her political superiority to 
 Athens, where the confederacy of allies degenerated into an 
 Empire, and to Sparta, which always kept the Lacedaemonian 
 population in subjection. 3 
 
 1 The technical name for this status was municipium, see Greenidge, 
 Roman Public Life, p. 304. After the social war municipium is the general 
 term for a self-governing community possessing Roman or Latin rights. 
 
 2 Cf. Liv. xxv. 3. 
 
 3 Mr. Strachan Davidson used to quote Mr. W. L. Newman as saying 
 that ' Sparta never ennobled the Perioecic relation '.
 
 The Conquest of Italy 23 
 
 Throughout this period of conquest there was going on 
 a process of Romanization by means of colonies and roads of 
 which the chief were the great southern road (Via Appia] and 
 the great northern road (Via Flaminia}, secured by fortresses 
 which were Latin colonies possessing the rights already described. 
 The colonists sent there, varying in number from 2,000 to 
 20,000 (Venusia), consisted of conquered Italians or of Roman 
 settlers, who were ready to give up their full citizen rights and 
 accept the Latin status in return for allotments on the con- 
 quered land. 1 Even in this early period some colonies were 
 founded with full Roman citizenship, but it was only later in 
 the second century B.C., when the position of the Italians had 
 deteriorated, that the Latin colonies give way to the Roman. 2 
 This double process, extension of citizenship and extension of 
 Latin rights, is to be traced in the record of (i) new tribes, 
 until the final number of thirty-five was reached in the year 
 241 ; and (2) new Latin colonies, mainly on the great roads, 
 in Etruria and Umbria, the Volscian country, and the highlands 
 of the Marsians and the Aequians. 
 
 The foundation and background of Italian life was still 
 agricultural : farming was the main industry, both citizens and 
 non-citizens looked to this for their living. The organization 
 of the army as we trace it in the divisions of the Centuriate 
 Assembly shows that there is inequality of property at an early 
 date, and we have to imagine large estates, side by side with 
 small farms ; but it was not till the prolonged wars of foreign 
 conquest took the yeomen farmers away from their farms for 
 many months together that the evil of latifundia, that is, large 
 
 1 Travellers on the railway between Piacenza (Placentia) and Modena 
 (Mutina) may still trace the parallel lines of the allotments as laid out by 
 the Roman commissioners and surveyors. 
 
 2 Aquileia, 181 B.C., was the last Latin colony in Italy.
 
 24 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 estates run 'by slave labour, and crushing out the smaller 
 farmers, began to be a crying grievance. In this earlier period 
 the main life of the people is a country life. The commerce 
 of the seas had in the dawn of Roman history been still in the 
 hands of the Etruscans on the west and of the Greek cities 
 Corinth and Athens and Corcyra on the east ; but in the 
 western seas Carthage, which for generations had been exer- 
 cising pressure on the Greek cit'ies of Sicily and Southern Italy, 
 was now taking the place of the Etruscans. The Etruscan cities 
 had received a fatal blow from Syracuse in 474, and by the 
 middle of the fourth century (and possibly 150 years earlier) 
 Rome was making a treaty with Carthage (348). By that 
 treaty the Romans agreed to recognize the western sphere of 
 influence of Carthage in Spain and Africa in return for receiving 
 the privileges of free trade in Sicily and protection for the 
 Italian coast towns from Punic attack. The position of Italy 
 with its long sea-board on both sides, then, as to-day, made 
 her relations with countries possessing sea-power of vast 
 importance, and it was becoming clear that sooner or later 
 Rome would have to obtain the command of both the upper 
 and the lower waters the Adriatic and the Tuscan Sea. But 
 so far Rome was too much occupied in the absorption and 
 consolidation of her conquests in Central Italy to do more 
 than temporize with the maritime states of the day. Her 
 treaty with Carthage in 306, which limited Roman activity 
 in the southern seas, was dictated by the pressure of the Samnite 
 wars, and it was not till the conquest of Southern Italy was 
 complete that the Romans could enter on the conflict for sea 
 power with the great commercial city state of Africa. 
 
 If we look back on these early centuries and ask the secret 
 of Roman success we find it in a combination of causes the 
 central position of Rome, the fighting quality of her people
 
 The Conquest of Italy 25 
 
 which was able to maintain an efficient fighting force of two 
 to four legions, or more when occasion called, composed of 
 soldiers who were not mercenaries, like those of Carthage, nor 
 town riff-raff, like those raised in Rome at a later date. They 
 were strong men bred in the fields, who could ply the plough 
 as well as the sword, and who returned from their campaigns 
 to work on their ancient farms or on the new allotments 
 assigned them by the government commissioners on the public 
 land along the great high roads as a reward for service done. 
 But these causes alone would not have sufficed : it was the 
 political genius of Rome which made the Romans succeed in 
 Italy as neither Etruscans nor Celts nor Greeks had done before 
 them. If we look first to institutions we have to remember 
 that from the earliest days of the Republic there existed in 
 germ two institutions which were to determine the future of 
 Rome. 
 
 The first of them, the Imperium, the high command of 
 the consuls, was the germ out of which the elaborate system 
 of the Roman magistracy was developed. From this was 
 evolved, as time went on, the Praetorship with its system of 
 Roman law, the Provincial Governorship, with its combination 
 of civil and military command, and finally the Principate, in 
 which the high command in the end overshadows and controls 
 the advisory body which had in earlier days kept it in control. 
 
 Secondly, there was the Senate, the body which throughout 
 the Republic was the most permanent element in the State. 
 The Senate, while magistrates clash and pass away, remains to 
 supply the continuous vital tissue of government. On this, in 
 the last resort, and on the character, the moral of its members, 
 the existence of the Republic depends. Against the power 
 of the Senate the individual magistrate, be he Consul or Praetor 
 or Tribune, cannot in the_end prevail.
 
 26 Roman History down to 266 B.C. 
 
 These two factors, the power of the Magistrate, the per- 
 manence and vitality of the Senate, govern the whole history. 
 It is only in the age of revolution, when the adjustment be- 
 tween the two falls out of gear, when the commander has lost 
 the habit of obedience, and when the Senate has lost its power 
 of giving sound counsel, that the collapse of the Republic 
 begins. But in the earlier stages, while the growth of Rome was 
 still confined to Italy, these constitutional resources served her 
 in good stead. 
 
 Institutions, however, are not enough without a genius for 
 political life. Rome had a genius for politics, which showed 
 itself in this period of political expansion in three characteristic 
 ways. 
 
 (1) There was a sense of discipline and government, which 
 from early times developed a sound system of law and justice 
 and proved adaptable to the conditions of the expanding State. 
 With this went a high average capacity for command. The 
 wealthier families produced from year to year a succession of 
 magistrates who, without distinguished genius, maintained 
 a high level of public service and created from their stored 
 experience a senatorial order in which the merits of heredity 
 and of selection were remarkably combined. 
 
 (2) Secondly in this period of Rome's expansion we have to 
 notice the peculiar gift which the governing class of Rome 
 showed for handling political difficulties. From early days, as 
 we have seen, there were conflicts between the two orders, 
 Patrician and Plebeian, rivalries between the different Assem- 
 blies, competition for privilege and power. More than once 
 there were secessions of the Commons which seemed to threaten 
 the very existence of the State. But through all this period 
 of the struggle between the orders and this violent clash of 
 forces there prevailed a spirit of reasonable compromise which
 
 The Conquest of Italy 27 
 
 was the making of Rome's greatness. This perhaps more than 
 anything else is what distinguishes the political history of Rome 
 from that of the States of Greece and gives it the stability and 
 strength which were the foundation of its success. 
 
 (3) And thirdly the liberal policy of incorporation, the 
 generous bestowal of the franchise, and the influence of Roman 
 law and order, diffused by the action of the magistrates and of 
 those who represented Rome in her relations with the Allies, 
 were building up a moral and political fabric which was to hold 
 together the races and classes of the Italian peninsula in a way 
 that no power east or west of it had yet exercised in Europe. 
 
 The Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) and its 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 
 
 WE have seen that Rome by a combination of military vigour, 
 and political capacity had established her position in Italy, and 
 that no power in the peninsula was able to dispute her supre- 
 macy. That supremacy, we saw, was secured by the building 
 of great roads and the foundation of fortress colonies which 
 made a strong barrier between the enemies in the north and 
 those in the south. The secret of Rome's success so far lay 
 chiefly in the military efficiency of her soldiers and in the 
 concentrated and compact fabric of the Senatorial order. It 
 remained to be seen whether the same qualities would enable 
 the Romans to rise to the height of the new task which they 
 now began to take in hand. The problem which confronted 
 them was that which has so profoundly moved the Italians of 
 to-day the problem of supremacy in the waters of the penin- 
 sula. Etruscans. Greeks, Carthaginians had hitherto competed
 
 28 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 for commerce and control in these waters and in the outlying 
 islands of Sicily and Sardinia. The power of the Etruscans 
 had been declining ever since their defeat by Hiero of Syracuse 
 in 474, and long before their final submission to Rome in 280 
 they had been removed from the field of possible rivals. Of the 
 Greek powers in the west Tarentum had been defeated : 
 Syracuse, the leading state in Sicily, had from time to time put 
 up a strong defence against the Punic settlements in that 
 island, but never with a success complete enough either to 
 expel these persistent Semitic settlers and traders or to establish 
 a supremacy over South Italy. For the moment the Romans 
 had made an alliance with Carthage (278), but only under 
 stress of their war with Pyrrhus the king of Epirus. With the 
 defeat and retirement of Pyrrhus in 275 and the subjection 
 of the stubborn Samnites and Lucanians in the south, it became 
 clear that sooner or later Rome would have to match her 
 strength against that of Carthage, unless the Romans were to 
 be content with having an alien sea-power continually threaten- 
 ing their seaboard and their commerce. 
 
 The first collision arose out of an incident at the town of 
 Messana, on the straits that bear its name, near the famous rock 
 of Scylla and whirlpool Charybdis, which might almost be said 
 to typify the two influences which were struggling for supremacy 
 in the island. By which overmastering force were these old 
 Greek settlements to be swept away ? Were they to be swallowed 
 up by the rising power of Rome or to surrender their island 
 at last to the menacing advance of Punic enterprise and com- 
 merce ? Some Campanian soldiers of fortune, the Mamertines, 
 who had ventured to Sicily in the reign of Agathocles (that 
 gallant but cruel adventurer who made a near approach to 
 achieving the expulsion of the Carthaginians from Sicily) had 
 occupied Messana in order to form there an independent
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 29 
 
 State. They came into conflict in Messana with Hiero, king 
 of Syracuse, and when pressed by him they appealed for help 
 both to Rome and to Carthage. Both powers in turn intervened. 
 Carthage at first acted alone, and then supported Hiero against 
 the Mamertines. Rome, in spite of the help that Hiero had 
 recently given her in Magna Graecia (271), decided to support 
 the Mamertines and by so doing declared for the policy of 
 supremacy in Sicily. The conflict between Carthaginians and 
 Romans for the possession of Messana was the beginning of that 
 first war with Carthage which for over twenty years (264-241) 
 made large demands on the Roman resources and several times 
 threatened completely to overwhelm the Roman State. The 
 Romans secured the alliance of Syracuse in 263, and though some 
 other towns of the Sicilian coast had Punic sympathies and 
 though for some time a vigorous Punic aggressive was carried 
 on in the west of the island under Hamilcar Barca, nevertheless 
 the Roman forces in the end prevailed. But the cost was heavy. 
 The Romans did indeed win several victories at sea, at Mylae 
 in North Sicily (260), Ecnomus in South Sicily (256), and the 
 Hermaean Cape in Africa (255), but these were balanced by 
 great disasters from foul weather and unskilled command. 
 The only attempt made by Rome to carry the aggressive into 
 Africa ended in the defeat and capture of Regulus, the Roman 
 commander, whose voluntary return to Carthage as a prisoner 
 became a legend illustrating the heroic honour of a true Roman. 1 
 Without entering into the details of this war we may mention 
 two principal features which are characteristic and deserve 
 notice : first the dauntless tenacity of the Romans, who built 
 fleet after fleet to repair their losses ; and secondly the Roman 
 want of seamanship as compared with the Carthaginians. The 
 Romans had, indeed, the South Italians to draw on for their 
 1 Horace, Odes, iii. 5.
 
 30 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 oarsmen and sailors (and they were Greeks who had been mariners 
 for many generations), but the Roman naval commanders were the 
 ordinary consuls of the year. These were, of course^ noblemen 
 of average capacity and without technical skill upon the sea, 
 and their naval tactics were in general confined to the very 
 simple plan of converting a sea-fight into a land-fight by the help 
 of boarding-bridges and grappling-irons. Finally, the Romans 
 were greatly handicapped by the system of annual command, 
 which made a continuous strategy impossible, while the con- 
 stant shipbuilding was an immense drain on the resources of 
 the Roman State. Finance at Rome, it must be remembered, 
 was still elementary. The military system rested on personal 
 service by ordinary citizens, while the armies and fleets of 
 Carthage were purely professional. It is a striking evidence of 
 the rudimentary state of Roman finance that the fleet which 
 ended the war by the great victory at the Aegates Islands (241) 
 off the western coast of Sicily was a fleet of light ships raised by 
 voluntary contributions. 
 
 The peace forced upon Carthage by this defeat had momen- 
 tous consequences not only for Rome and Carthage but for 
 the whole Mediterranean world and for the history of Europe. 
 It finally expelled the Semitic power from Sicily and 
 prepared the way for the complete Romanization of the 
 western seas. It crippled the power of Carthage by the in- 
 demnity imposed upon her, and so led almost immediately 
 to a mutiny of the Punic mercenary troops which kept Carthage 
 occupied at home and enabled Rome within the next five years 
 to add Sardinia and Corsica to her domain. The western sea 
 thus became completely Roman. Most momentous of all, 
 it gave the Romans the final mastery over Sicily and was the 
 beginning of a new form of government which contained the 
 seeds of ruin for the Republic of Rome.
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 31 
 
 Sicily was the first Roman -province. What does this mean ? 
 Hitherto Roman conquest had been confined to the Italian 
 peninsula. Every conquest had been followed by a process of 
 incorporation into the Roman State system, by which the 
 conquered peoples acquired a share in the Roman confederacy 
 of Italian States, subject indeed to Rome, but nominally 
 independent and free and enjoying a certain measure of self- 
 government. Their status gave them a place by the side of the 
 Romans in battle and in commerce and opened up the possi- 
 bility of further promotion, which enabled them as time went 
 on to share completely or incompletely in the citizenship of 
 Rome. The Italian allies of Rome, as we have seen, paid no 
 tribute their contribution to the Roman Government was in 
 the form of personal service in the army or on shipboard. 
 
 Now mark the change which comes over the Roman State. 
 The cities of Sicily which were now made subject to Rome, 
 instead of being governed as part of the Italian Confederacy, 
 whose soldiers mustered in their squadrons and cohorts to 
 fight side by side with Roman citizens, were subject to Rome 
 in a new sense. A Roman officer, with civil and military powers, 
 took the place of the Carthaginian governor and later, when 
 Syracuse was annexed, the place of the Syracusan king (201). 
 From 227 onwards two Praetors were elected year by year at 
 Rome to go and govern Sicily and Sardinia (with Corsica), each 
 island being termed a province. That word is simply the name 
 for a department or sphere of command. The Praetor, who in 
 Rome and Italy was one among a group of colleagues who had 
 equal powers with him and might modify his action, was in this 
 more distant field much more like the monarch or absolute 
 governor whom he succeeded. Again the cities of Sicily contri- 
 buted money and corn to Rome instead of military service. 
 They paid a yearly tribute. This tributary relation was
 
 32 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 significant and momentous and that in two ways : in the 
 government of Syracuse which the Romans took over in 212, 
 and still more in the kingdom of Pergamum which was be- 
 queathed to Rome in 133 and which became the Roman 
 province of Asia, the Romans came into contact with an 
 organized bureaucratic system of Greek officials. This fact 
 tended to react in an unhealthy way on Republican institutions 
 at home. And the idea of a tributary State or complex of 
 States in which' there was little personal contact between 
 governor and governed easily led to a conception of the overseas 
 conquests of Rome as ' estates of the Roman people ' to be 
 exploited at all costs for the benefit of the governing race. The 
 combination of this conception with the Roman system of annual 
 appointment led to calamitous results. The transitory governor 
 and his finance officer, the Quaestor, were but birds of passage 
 and could have no real intimacy with their transitory subjects. 
 There was, indeed, some graduation of rights and privileges 
 among the inhabitants. The Sicilian province, like the later 
 provinces of Rome, was not a uniform dead-level surface. 
 Of the sixty-eight communities which Rome governed there 
 eight were treated either as allied or as free and untaxed. 
 Of the remainder some continued to pay the tithe of their 
 produce (wine, oil, and corn) which they had paid to their 
 previous ruler ; some were deprived of their land, which 
 became domain-land of the Roman people, ' ager publicus populi 
 Romani ', and cultivated it as tenants of Rome. These also 
 appear to have paid the rent of their arable land in the form 
 of tithe. The other taxes payable to Rome were a tax on 
 pasture (scriptura) and also harbour-dues (portorium). The 
 collection of these two taxes was leased by the Censors at Rome 
 to public contractors (publicani), whose companies found 
 a lucrative field in such undertakings. It was the privilege
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 33 
 
 of the tithe-paying subjects in Sicily that the tithes were 
 leased district by district in Sicily itself, and were thus managed 
 locally. In the province of Asia, annexed eighty years later, 
 the tithes were leased to contractois in Rome with disastrous 
 results. The contractors paid a lump sum for the tax and 
 then made what they could of it. In theory, it is true, the 
 subjects were protected by the charter of the province, the 
 lex provincial drawn up by Roman commissioners at the time 
 of annexation, but there was a wide door open to corruption, 
 if the governor was wanting in firmness and a sense of justice. 
 What the practical results of such a system were we see very 
 clearly from the speeches and letters of Cicero in the first 
 century B.C. His friendship with the capitalist contractors, 
 the Equites, did not blind him altogether to the abuses which 
 their uncontrolled power entailed, although it led him on 
 occasion to sacrifice justice to friendship. 
 
 On the other side of the account it must be remembered 
 that from the outset the conquerors provided for the admini- 
 stration of justice by the establishment of circuits of assize. 
 Roman justice, though it might sometimes fail or be perverted 
 by bribery, was, if honestly administered, a real boon to the 
 subject peoples. In many countries it was an advance on their 
 previous condition. 
 
 These arrangements for Sicily were not completed until 
 thirty years later, in the middle of the second war with Car- 
 thage ; but they were the direct result of the battle of the 
 Aegates Islands and mark in a sense l a critical change of spirit 
 in the Roman people. The Romans had entered the war 
 reluctantly. There are indications that now the people were 
 at first somewhat reluctant to make peace. Polybius tells us 2 
 that they rejected the terms made by Lutatius and sent 
 
 1 de Sanctis, Storia dei Romani. iii. 192. 2 Polyb. i. 63. 
 
 2538-2 C
 
 34 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 commissioners to examine the situation before they assented. 
 They had the self-consciousness of a power which had 'arrived', 
 and had tasted the sweets of foreign conquest. This had been 
 the first testing of the new union of Italy in the furnace of war, 
 and the Confederation had stood the test. 
 
 In the second war with Carthage, which began some twenty 
 years later, the Confederation had to bear a heavier strain. 
 Before this new struggle opened, the genius of Hamilcar had 
 laid the foundations of a new Punic power in Spain. He 
 belonged to a famous family, the house of Barca or Barak, 
 which played a great part in the imperial history of Carthage. 
 The conquered land after seven years under Hasdrubal was 
 handed ori to Hamilcar's more famous son Hannibal, the 
 greatest commander with whom the Romans ever had to 
 contend. 
 
 But before their long seventeen years' conflict with him 
 began they had to confirm their position in Italy. In the 
 first place they had to suppress several risings of the Celtic 
 population of the north and this led to the extension of Roman 
 power into the valley of the Po. Secondly, they had to deal 
 with the pirate power of Illyria on the Dalmatian coast and 
 assert their mastery over the Adriatic. This was immensely 
 significant, because it was the first decisive step in that eastern 
 advance of Rome which ended in her taking over the defence 
 of the Greek world and of Hellenism in general against the 
 forces of Northern Europe and of the Eastern peoples. The 
 supremacy over the Celtic peoples in Italy was not achieved 
 without great slaughter : 40,000 Gauls are said to have fallen 
 at the final engagement at Telamon in Etruria in 225. The 
 completion of the conquest was marked by the distribution of 
 land allotments (232) and by the building of the great north 
 road (220), the Via Flaminia alreadymentioned. About the same
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 35 
 
 time in 218 were founded the two Latin colonies of Placentia 
 and Cremona. These famous towns command the passage of 
 the Po, and the meeting-point of the great lines of com- 
 munication which connect Rome and Italy by land with the 
 rest of the world. For from this commanding centre in the 
 Po valley the roads go east, west, and north, to Gaul, and 
 Germany and the Balkan Peninsula. 1 Rome, then, was rapidly 
 becoming the centre of the Mediterranean world, but the 
 position was still precarious. Carthage still barred the way. 
 
 The invasion of Italy by Hannibal was one of the boldest 
 ventures in history, and it was placed for a great stake, the 
 command of the Mediterranean world. It was unexpected, 
 because the Romans never imagined that Hannibal would dare 
 to push on so far from his base at New Carthage in Spain and 
 would isolate himself in a foreign country, while the Roman 
 navy had complete command of the sea. The rapidity of 
 Hannibal's march and the miscalculation of the Romans gave 
 him a firm footing in Italy, which with amazing skill he managed 
 to retain for fourteen years. His successful skirmish on the 
 Ticinus and the battle on the Trebia followed by his great 
 victories first at the Trasimene Lake (217) in Etruria and then 
 at Cannae (216) near the Aufidus in Apulia, shook the Roman 
 supremacy in Italy to its foundations. Two things saved it : 
 the dogged patience and persistence of the Roman character, 
 and the loyalty of the Allies. 
 
 It was not for nothing that Rome had based her Italian 
 policy on generous principles. There were indeed some 
 backsliders among the Italians. After the great disaster at 
 Cannae in 216, Capua (the Campanian city on the Volturno, 
 which the traveller still passes through on the way to Naples) 
 
 1 For Roman roads see Prof. Stuart Jones, Companion to Roman History^ 
 pp. 40 ff . 
 
 C 2
 
 36 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 and the Samnites and Lucanians joined the invader, but even 
 in this searching time of trial most of the Greek towns of the 
 south remained faithful. In 209 twelve out of thirty Latin 
 colonies were obliged to refuse men and money from sheer 
 exhaustion, but the northern colonies stood firm, and in the 
 end the Italian Confederation completely justified itself. Never 
 did a policy of wise incorporation win a greater success. 
 
 The fighting was not in one country alone. Throughout the 
 war the Romans had fighting on hand in Spain as well as in 
 Italy. For this they had the great advantage over Carthage 
 that they could transport their troops by sea through their 
 supreme sea-power ; but the Carthaginian resistance was 
 serious, and Rome's powers were strained to the utmost by the 
 great defeat of 212 in Spain, in which two Roman commanders, 
 Publius and Cornelius Scipio, were killed and a great army 
 was destroyed. But the next year brought relief, for in Italy 
 the Roman spirits were raised by the reduction of the rebellious 
 city of Capua, while the younger P. Cornelius Scipio, a com- 
 mander-in-chief of only twenty-four years, began to retrieve 
 the Roman fortunes in Spain. But the Carthaginian resistance 
 was not exhausted. Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal was able 
 to make his way to Italy with an army to relieve his hard- 
 pressed brother, but his defeat at the Metaurus l in 207 marked 
 the last crisis in the war within the peninsula. The closing 
 scenes of the drama of war were enacted in Africa, where the 
 young Scipio dealt the final blow at Zama, 202, a battle which 
 ended the power of Carthage for ever. 
 
 The result of this, the second Punic war, was to convert 
 
 1 By a subtle stroke of flattery Horace uses this victory, in which 
 C. Claudius Nero bore a part, to glorify Augustus and his two stepsons, 
 Tiberius, afterwards emperor, and Nero Claudius Drusus, the conqueror of 
 Rhaetia and the Alps. Horace, Odes, iv. 4.
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 37 
 
 Carthage from a great Mediterranean State into a mere town, 
 to make Rome supreme in the Western Mediterranean lands, 
 and almost at once to add Spain to her subject territory. This 
 meant the formation of two new provinces, Nearer and Further 
 Spain, for Spain was too large for one governor. It also meant 
 what was more serious, the inauguration of practically per- 
 manent military service : for the new territory had to be 
 secured by a large garrison of Roman troops. From this time 
 forward Spain was not indeed conquered, but the foundations 
 were laid of a provincial life which became intensely Roman, 
 and supplied, in the end, men of letters, administrators, and 
 even emperors to Rome. 
 
 Another great change had been effected. Even in earlier 
 days, when military necessity arose, the Roman government had 
 extended the Imperium of its consuls ; but with the Younger 
 Scipio for the first time we find military command prolonged 
 over a period of years. It is significant that the admiring 
 Spaniards offered him the kingship of their country. 1 This was 
 an ominous sign that Roman imperial policy had brought with 
 it the menace of a military monarchy. 
 
 The Punic danger was gone. But across the Adriatic Rome had 
 to deal with Macedon and with the States of Greece. Through 
 all the vicissitudes of the war with Hannibal Rome had not 
 only to fight in Italy and Spain, but to play her part as a 
 European power coming for the first time in contact with the 
 Greek world of the East. Philip of Macedon's alliance with 
 Hannibal in 215 inevitably involved the Romans in the politics 
 of the Greek world. It was Rome's good fortune that at this 
 time her old alliance with Egypt could be renewed. That 
 alliance served as a counterpoise against Macedonian influence 
 in the Mediterranean. Rome's diplomacy was now directed 
 1 Polybius, x. 40.
 
 38 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 to securing a coalition of Pergamum and other Greek States 
 against Philip, which should prevent him from active inter- 
 vention on the side of Carthage. Throughout the period of 
 foreign conquest with which we are now concerned we can trace 
 the same policy : friendship and alliance with those leading 
 States of Greece which were still independent Pergamum, 
 Rhodes, the Aetolian League passing, as Rome's power 
 grew and one enemy after another was conquered, from 
 friendship into vassalage and from vassalage into absolute 
 conquest and absorption. The same policy was pursued in 
 Africa, where the Romans for two centuries maintained 
 relations with client princes in Numidia and Mauretania. 
 With the help of these princes they were enabled first to crush 
 Carthage and later to protect the borders of the Roman Empire 
 from the wild tribes of the desert. 
 
 The power of Macedon had effected nothing in the Punic 
 wars, but it was still a menace to Rome, for Philip had made 
 a compact with Antiochus, the Seleucid king of Syria, for the 
 partition of Egypt, and this meant nothing less than that Rome 
 would find the Eastern world closed to her commerce and her 
 influence unless Philip could be crushed. The second Punic 
 War was hardly over when Rome found a cause of quarrel with 
 Philip, and with the help of her Greek allies Rhodes and 
 Pergamum reduced him by the battle of Cynoscephalae in 
 198 to the position of a second-rate power. The conflict 
 proved conclusively that the Roman legion, developed from 
 its original solid mass-formation into the more elastic manipular 
 system, was more than a match for the armies of the Greek 
 East, with their inferior discipline and vigour. 
 
 This victory over Macedon left Rome the dominating power 
 in the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula. She now became 
 the acknowledged patron of the freedom of Hellas, which was
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 39 
 
 publicly proclaimed by Flamininusat the Isthmian Games of 194. 
 But that freedom was still threatened by Antiochus the 
 Seleucid, the king of Syria, one of the kingdoms carved out of 
 Alexandria's Empire. The position of Rome as the patron and 
 protector of the Greek States remained precarious until 
 Antiochus the Great was defeated by L. Scipio at Magnesia, 190. 
 This battle decided for the time the fate of the Hellenic East. 
 Syria ceased to be a formidable power and was kept to the 
 east of Mt. Taurus, and Rome acquired that decisive influence 
 over Asia Minor which, though threatened more than once by 
 Mithradates of Pontus and later by the Parthians, was never 
 completely lost until the Turks overwhelmed the last remnant 
 of Rome's empire in the East. But Rome's conquest of the 
 Balkan Peninsula was not complete until she had defeated 
 Philip's successor Perseus on the field of Pydna and broken up 
 the once proud monarchy of Macedon into four Republican 
 Leagues, 167. The final step was taken by the conversion of 
 Macedonia into a Province twenty years later, into which 
 Achaea, which comprised the ancient Greek States, was 
 absorbed. 
 
 The year 146 was a decisive year. The destruction in 
 that year not only of Corinth, the commercial capital of 
 Greece, but also of Carthage, Rome's other great trade 
 rival, marked the changed spirit of Rome. She had used 
 her victories to break her commercial rivals in the Mediter- 
 ranean. The further outcome of Rome's victory on the Greek 
 mainland was that the States of Pergamum and Rhodes, having 
 been used as allies and friends against Syria and Macedon, were 
 now shorn of all influence and reduced to complete dependence. 
 In the same year with the victory of Pydna, 168, Antiochus 
 Epiphanes, the Seleucid king who had grown up jn Rome, 1 was 
 1 Bevan, House of Seleucus, ii. 128.
 
 40 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 made to withdraw from Alexandria, and Egypt accepted once 
 for all the protectorate of Rome. Thus, with her great trade 
 rivals crushed and the richest country on the Mediterranean 
 seaboard reduced to vassalage, Rome was able henceforward to 
 extend her trade unhindered over the whole known world. 
 
 But these successive victories meant that the Romans had 
 undertaken new and heavy responsibilities. By the conquest 
 of Macedon they became the guardians of the Balkan Peninsula 
 against the moving peoples of Central Europe. From genera- 
 tion to generation they had to deal, in a succession of irregular 
 campaigns, with the wild tribes of the region of the Danube 
 until something like a scientific frontier was established by the 
 first Roman Emperor, Augustus. One of that Emperor's 
 greatest tasks was to knit up the defences of the north and to 
 construct the outline of a defensive frontier policy against 
 Germans, Sarmatians, and Dacians, which was consolidated in 
 the course of a century by his successors. This was a later 
 work ; but its ultimate achievement was a duty which now 
 fell upon Rome, if her position in the lands east of the Adriatic 
 was to be maintained. Not only so, but the warning given 
 to Antiochus Epiphanes, when Popilius in 168 drew a circle 
 round him and made him obey the Roman bidding 1 and retire 
 from Egypt, carried with it, for those who could look forward, 
 the fateful consequence that in Asia and Egypt, no less than 
 in Europe, the Romans would sooner or later become the 
 defenders of Hellenism against the Oriental world. For the 
 present they were content to exercise influence in the East by 
 diplomacy. They had still much to do in Italy itself before 
 they could undertake further responsibilities outside. 
 
 The Italian Allies, we have seen, had in the main been faithful 
 to Rome in the war with Hannibal : the colonies were staunch, 
 1 Polyb. xxix. 27.

 
 42 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 and the Umbrian and Sabellian races were becoming merged 
 in the Roman unity, but the Celtic tribes, which had supported 
 Hannibal, were still unsettled, and the war with Carthage was 
 hardly over when Rome had to deal with risings in the north, 
 of Boii, Insubres, and'Cenomani in the region of the Padus, 
 where it will be remembered Roman colonization had already 
 been active before Hannibal's invasion. This was the last expiring 
 effort of the Celtic tribes, and it ended, as it was bound to end, 
 in their subjection and in the rapid Romanization of their 
 country. The new roads, the Via Flaminia already mentioned 
 by anticipation and the Via Aemilia, which has given its name 
 to a province of Italy to-day, confirmed the Roman hold on 
 the country. From this time dates the final consolidation of 
 the Celtic region. It was secured by these roads and by the 
 colonies founded upon the Via Aemilia, together with those 
 like Placentia and Cremona on the Po, dating back to 218, and 
 Aquileia, 181, in the north-east, on the highway to the Balkan 
 region, the last Latin colony in Italy. This Celtic district was, 
 it would seem, for the time administered not by regular pro- 
 vincial governors, but as a part of Italy, under the consuls or 
 other Roman officers. It was only by Sulla that Gallia Cisalpina 
 was made a province, to remain so for forty years until Augustus 
 finally unified the Italian Peninsula, and divided it into eleven 
 districts (regiones], corresponding roughly to the earlier racial 
 divisions. 
 
 The same policy of consolidation by colonies was applied to 
 the centre and the south Etruria, Picenum (183), Campania, 
 Apulia, Lucania, and Bruttium. Here the normal development 
 by means of town foundations was followed : in the Celtic 
 country beyond the Po something of the canton system still 
 remained until the end of the Republic. The Celtic wars were 
 further complicated by the forty years of petty warfare with
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 43 
 
 their neighbours, the Ligurians of the Riviera, who were 
 persistent and troublesome fighters, and who were not finally 
 conquered till about 165. Their subdual made it possible to 
 develop the coast-road north-westward to Massilia, the Roman 
 ally in Southern Gaul who provided the half-way house for 
 Romans travelling to the Spanish provinces. The Aurelian 
 road to Lucca and the cross-road from Lucca to Arretium 
 probably belong to this period. They are all part of the great 
 work of Romanization in Italy. 
 
 If we look at the state of Italy thus united under Rome and 
 compare it with that of 120 years earlier, several features strike 
 us. First, the process of Romanization has made a steady 
 advance, although, even now, the unity of the peninsula was 
 not complete. Secondly, there is a hardening in the Romans' 
 attitude to their allies. The freedom of migration was being 
 curtailed. In 187 some 12,000 Latins were expelled from Rome, 
 and ten years later a Claudian law enacted a further ejection 
 of allies from the capital. At the same time the ranks of the 
 citizen body were more strictly closed, and access to the 
 citizenship became more difficult for Italian communities and 
 individuals. There is one fact of great significance which 
 illustrates the changed relations between Rome and her Allies. 
 Down to 181 B.C. when Aquileia, the last Latin colony, was 
 founded in Italy, Latin colonies in Italy were as frequent as 
 the colonies of Roman citizens. After that date only Roman 
 colonies, i.e. colonies with full citizenship, were founded in 
 Italy. The reason was that while in the earlier period Roman 
 citizens were content to waive their citizen rights in order to 
 receive an allotment in a Latin colony, the position of the 
 Latins now was thought inferior, and the colonists would not 
 consent to go as settlers unless they received the full Roman 
 rights. Livy, writing under Augustus, but doubtless basing
 
 44 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 his story on good authority, tells us that a consul of 173 B.C., 
 L. Postumius, who was journeying southwards on the public 
 service, took a new departure. He called on Praeneste, an 
 allied city on his road, to give him supplies for his journey. 
 ' Till that day ', says Livy, ' no Roman had ever been a burden 
 or expense to the allies in any matter.' 1 These words bear 
 a striking testimony to the virtues of the earlier Republic ; 
 but they are also a warning sign that the spirit of the governing 
 class of Rome was beginning to degenerate. The result was 
 that eighty years later they had to pay for their short-sighted 
 policy by a war which laid waste huge tracts of Italy and 
 greatly advanced the economic decline of the peninsula. 
 
 This crowded hundred years of Roman history is the great 
 century of the Roman Republic, in which step by step the 
 rule of the Romans was extended on all sides until they became 
 the supreme power in the Mediterranean. It is also the age 
 of Senatorial government at its best and strongest. Many 
 reasons combined to consolidate the power of the Senate. 
 
 (i) The Assemblies of citizens, the Comitia and the Concilium 
 Plebis, were bound to become weaker just in proportion as the 
 arms of Rome advanced. The Romans, like the Greeks, had no 
 idea of what we call ' representation '. Their Assemblies 
 consisted of all full citizens, not of certain citizens selected to 
 represent the rest. In early days when Rome meant only the 
 city and the surrounding district of Latium all citizens could 
 take a personal share in government. As soon as the bounds 
 of the franchise were enlarged, it became clear that the more 
 distant citizens could but rarely exercise their active rights : 
 they might come once a year to Rome for an election or a 
 festival, but only those who happened to reside in or near 
 
 ' Ante hunc consulem nemo unquam sociis in ulla re oneri aut sumptui 
 fuit.' Liv. xlii. i.
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 45 
 
 Rome could take part in the day-to-day or week-to-week duties 
 of normal government. Further, the very nature and con- 
 stitution of the Assemblies limited their powers. They could 
 simply say ' yes ' or ' no ' to the proposals laid before them. 
 They had no power to amend, and without such power no 
 assembly can be strong. The Senate, which drafted the bills 
 put before the people, was, on the other hand, a real delibera- 
 tive body, with free power to discuss and amend. Clearly 
 the control was bound to rest with the smaller body, the 
 Senate. 
 
 (2) The Magistrates of Rome were annual, and, further, each 
 magistrate was one of a group whose members were all of 
 equal power and could interfere with one another at every stage. 
 The result of this, the collegiate principle, was that no single 
 magistrate could stand alone, and that the power of the 
 executive depended entirely on the backing of the Senate, the 
 body from which the magistrates came and into which they 
 returned. 
 
 (3) The Magistrates of Rome, like those of Athens before 
 Pericles, were unpaid, and there was no permanent civil service 
 to carry on the daily routine of government. This being so, the 
 current duties of government naturally tended to fall more and 
 more on the Senate, which was composed of ex-magistrates of 
 tried experience. The Senators, being resident in Rome and 
 well-to-do, could give daily attention to current business and 
 deal with the multitude of questions to which the government 
 of Rome and Italy and the provinces gave rise, without reference 
 to the sovereign assembly of citizens. We have only to read 
 Livy's history to see how by a process as inevitable as it was 
 advantageous, the conduct of affairs passed completely into 
 the hands of the Senate. The affairs of Italy, e. g. the arrange- 
 ments for founding or replenishing or fortifying colonies, and
 
 46 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 for protecting or punishing Allies ; the ordering of conquered 
 territories abroad, the government of them when organized ; 
 the direction of the armies of the State ; the conduct of 
 diplomacy and the making of war and peace ; and finally the 
 control of finance all these varied powers and duties which 
 make up the sum of what we call government, were in their 
 hands. It was with good reason that in official documents the 
 Senate's name stands first S.P.Q.R., Senatus Populusque 
 Romanus the Senate and People of Rome. 
 
 And in these years the Senate fulfilled its duties well. The 
 original narrow circle of the Patriciate no longer controlled 
 affairs. The mixed nobility of officers, drawn from both 
 patrician and plebeian homes, and supplied not only from Rome 
 and Latium but from many Italian towns, had become con- 
 solidated into a compact society in which governing capacity 
 and a strong sense of service produced a high average level of 
 ability. From year to year Consuls and Praetors were found to 
 lead the armies of Rome and administer justice to citizens and 
 foreigners. This high average of capacity is not hard to account 
 for. The avenue to the Senate was the Magistracy ; but to 
 this few but the sons of Senators could hope to attain. The 
 principle of heredity the idea of son following father was 
 strong at Rome. But there was no rigid rule of succession, 
 and, far more important, there was no preference of the 
 eldest son. It was this basis of heredity tempered by selection 
 which gave to the Senate its immense capacity and power. In 
 one region in particular we must note its activity : in the 
 development of law. For it was in this period that Roman law 
 took a great step forward. In 243 the judicial duties of Rome 
 were for the first time divided between two officers a City 
 Praetor to give justice to citizens, and a Foreign Praetor to 
 give justice as between citizens and foreigners. From the
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 47 
 
 annual activities of these Praetors there was gradually developed 
 a system of law which came to be one of the chief glories of the 
 Roman State. From the judgements given in these courts there 
 grew up a body of case law, which, codified later by the lawyers 
 of the Empire, became the foundation of a large part of the 
 law of Europe. And as time went on, and the growth of Rome 
 was extended over peoples who had legal ideas and institutions 
 of their own the wider principles of the ius gentium, the law 
 common to nations, occupied an increasingly large place in 
 Roman legal practice, reacted on the whole legal system of 
 Rome and supplied equitable principles of expansion which 
 a purely traditional system would have lacked. How much 
 Roman law owed in its origin and development to Greece is 
 a question not here to be discussed, but throughout Roman 
 history the growth of law and its adaptation to an ever- widening 
 multitude of conditions is vastly important and is a side of the 
 history which we are apt to overlook. For some seven hundred 
 years much of the best intellect of Rome was directed to 
 building up the great structure which found its consummation 
 in the Codes of Theodosius and Justinian. Here we have only 
 to note the significance of Roman law and to remind ourselves 
 that it is the perpetual correlative of Roman conquest and 
 Roman rule, an abiding and developing element throughout 
 Rome's history. 
 
 Two more things must be mentioned : first, the development 
 of Roman literature; second, the spirit of the Roman army. 
 
 It was in the year after the first Punic War ended that the 
 first play of Livius Andronicus, a prisoner of war from Tarentum, 
 was produced on a Roman stage. He was soon followed by 
 Cn. Naevius, a Latin, born in Campania, who was the first 
 to lead the way in distinctively Roman drama and epic. 
 Plautus, the Umbrian (254-184), in the same age produced
 
 48 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 a quantity of Latin comedies translated from the Greek. 
 But the greatest name of the period is that of Q. Ennius, the 
 Calabrian, whose tragedies and whose epic of Roman history, 
 the Annales, were the first great Latin works of literature. It 
 was Ennius who in his epic substituted the hexameter for the 
 old native Saturnian metre, and paved the way for the great 
 achievements of Lucretius and Virgil. 
 
 Two general remarks may be made on this literary develop- 
 ment : 
 
 (1) It was founded on Greek models and largely dependent 
 on Greek literature for subject and material. 
 
 (2) From the first it was Italian rather than purely Roman. 
 In literature as in political and military strength the greatness 
 
 of Rome depended on her control and co-ordination of the 
 spiritual and material resources of the whole peninsula. 
 
 Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. 1 
 Such pains it cost to build the Roman State. 
 
 The Army. The great work accomplished by Rome in these 
 years could not have been achieved without her citizen army. 
 Without going into details, it may be worth while to notice 
 one or two points : 
 
 (1) The army was a citizen army ; all citizens of a certain 
 property were liable to service from seventeen to forty-six. 
 
 (2) Rome's wars with the Italian peoples had improved her 
 arms and had adapted the heavy phalanx system to a more 
 elastic formation. 
 
 (3) The troops were officered by the nobility of Rome the 
 Consuls and sometimes the Praetors of the year, and below 
 them the tribunes of the soldiers who were the legionary 
 officers. But the backbone of the army was supplied by the 
 Centurions, whose service was more continuous and who by 
 
 1 Virg. Aen. i. 33.
 
 Reaction on the Roman Constitution 49 
 
 their mastery of drill and discipline held the companies together 
 and provided the permanent tradition of the service. 
 
 (4) Side by side with the legions (as we have seen) served the 
 cohorts and squadrons of the Allies, in their own formations 
 but under Roman officers, prefects of the Allies (praejecti 
 sociorum). 
 
 What the spirit of the Centurion was may best be seen 
 from a speech given us by Livy in an account of a protest 
 made by some centurions in 171 at being posted to commands 
 lower than those that they had held before. 1 
 
 ' I Spurius Ligustinus of the Crustumine tribe was born in 
 the Sabine country. My father left me an acre of land and a little 
 cottage in which I was born and brought up and I live there 
 still. As soon as I was old enough my father gave me his niece 
 in marriage, who brought as her dowry her free birth, her good 
 name, and fruitfulness that would do honour to a richer home. 
 We have six sons and two daughters, both now married : four 
 sons are of age, two still boys. I entered the army in the consul- 
 ship of P. Sulpicius and C. Aurelius [200 B.C.]. I fought in 
 the ranks two years in the army that crossed to Macedonia to 
 fight against Philip : in the third year I was made centurion of 
 the loth maniple of the Hastati, 2 as the reward of merit. 
 Discharged after the conquest of Macedon I served as a 
 volunteer with M. Porcius Cato in Spain there could be no 
 severer critic of valour, as all would admit and he promoted 
 me to the 1st maniple. I served the third time as a volunteer 
 in the war against the Aetolians and Antiochus and was pro- 
 moted to the leading maniple of the Principes. Later I served 
 on two annual campaigns. Next I served in two campaigns in 
 
 1 Liv. xlii. 34, slightly abbreviated. 
 
 z Hastati, Principes, and Triarii were the three main divisions of the 
 Roman infantry, in ascending order of rank. The centurion of the first 
 maniple of the Triarii was called Primipihts. 
 2538-2 D
 
 50 Period of Foreign Conquest (266-146) 
 
 Spain and for four years was centurion of the first maniple of 
 the legion. I have been honoured 34 times by my officers and 
 had six civic crowns. 
 
 ' I have served 22 campaigns and am over 50. But in no 
 circumstances am I going to beg off service if I am thought 
 fit, and am prepared to accept any rank to which I am assigned 
 by the Tribunes. I shall always take pains to surpass all others 
 in valour, as my comrades will agree I have always done. And 
 I advise all you my comrades like me to put yourselves at the 
 disposal of the Senate and to consider any post as honourable, 
 where you can defend the Roman Commonwealth.' 
 
 It is not surprising that an army of tough material, so 
 officered, should have done what it did. 
 
 The Decline of Senatorial Government and the 
 Period of Revolution 
 
 WE have seen how a single city state of central Italy had 
 mastered the peninsula and now dictated policies to the Eastern 
 and the Western world. The next 160 years saw the exten- 
 sion of Roman conquest carried still further, and the penetration 
 of Italy by Roman ideas and government made more complete. 
 But the outward expansion of the Empire is in contrast with 
 the declining moral of the governing class. The best men of 
 that class made attempts to reform the body politic ; but their 
 order, the nobles as a body, were unsympathetic, and the 
 citizens at large showed no proper appreciation of the claims 
 of the Italians outside the franchise. The result was that the 
 conflict for the franchise ended in a devastating Italian war 
 which left a permanent mark on Italy. The attempts at reform 
 led to revolution and civil war. The struggle became one
 
 Decline of Senatorial Government 51 
 
 between rival military leaders. The victory of Julius Caesar led 
 to a short period of masterful rule and activity, in which the 
 main lines were traced of the monarchy to come. Caesar 
 worked with a bold hand which paid no regard to immemorial 
 convention or to the feelings of the Senatorial order, and his 
 murder not unnaturally followed. That is the tragedy which 
 Shakespeare has made familiar to us all. It was the irony of the 
 conflict that his death led not to a Republican restoration such 
 as Brutus dreamed of, but to a bloody and prolonged series of 
 civil wars which ended only with the battle of Actium, and 
 led to the establishment of the Principate, the government of 
 one man under Republican forms. 
 
 We have now to trace the main features of this stormy time. 
 We have to piece them together from fragmentary sources 
 until we come to the life-time of Cicero and Caesar, when we 
 are fortunate enough to have contemporary letters and speeches 
 and above all the commentaries of Caesar, his own story of the 
 conquest of Gaul and of the Civil War. With the death of 
 Cicero we are again reduced mainly to secondary sources for 
 the closing years of the Republic and the final conflicts between 
 the heirs of Caesar's power. 
 
 We have hitherto been mainly concerned with the outward 
 expansion of the Roman State. We cannot understand this 
 last stage in the history of the Republic without reviewing the 
 social and economic conditions in Italy. The basis of Roman 
 life had been the knd. It was on the peasant-farmers of the 
 expanding Roman State that Rome relied for her armies. 
 But this farming class had been affected in two ways by the 
 past two centuries of war. Service in the field had taken many 
 men away from their farms ; the actual loss of life had been 
 considerable ; and finally the transmarine wars had brought 
 large numbers of slaves into Italy, whose labour tended to 
 introduce a new phase of agriculture the system of working 
 
 D 2
 
 52 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 the land by gangs of slaves. With the extension of conquest 
 in Italy Rome had acquired large tracts of land for the State : 
 this had been disposed of partly in small lots, granted in full 
 ownership to citizens or allies ; partly in large tracts granted 
 in occupation, without ownership, for pasture (scripturarius ager) 
 or for agriculture to squatters (possessores) whose holdings, 
 though not freeholds, could be transferred like property. The 
 effect of the great wars had been to diminish the small holdings 
 and to encourage the encroachment of the large holders, while 
 the introduction of large-scale farming on the Carthaginian 
 model and the abundance of slaves, encouraged the growth 
 of' large estates (latifundia], worked by slave labour. 
 
 At the same time a new capitalist class had come into 
 existence, partly as a consequence of the fortunes made in war 
 contracts, partly from the extension of Roman trade beyond 
 the seas. This class found a sphere for its activities not only 
 in extended commerce but also as we saw in the financial 
 arrangements connected with the taxation of the provinces. 
 The financial system of the Roman Republic still remained 
 simple. The annual system of magistracy meant that the 
 Quaestors, who were the financial officers of the State, gained 
 no continuous experience, and in the absence of a permanent 
 civil service to conduct and control finance, a large part of the 
 revenues of Rome was handled by the companies of public 
 contractors who made their bargains with the State for fixed 
 periods and under the State acted as collectors of revenue. 
 This system relieved the Government of the necessity of having 
 a developed Treasury system, and was an almost necessary 
 result of the Senatorial ideal of government which was founded 
 on the unpaid services of an aristocracy. But the system had 
 the dangerous result that it produced a class of very rich men, 
 outside the ranks of the Senate, exercising immense indirect 
 influence, but, from their exclusion from the Senate, bearing
 
 and the Period of Revolution 53 
 
 no direct responsibility for public policy or for the conduct of 
 affairs. At the same time the richer Senatorial families, who 
 were excluded from commerce, were putting into the land 
 the capital which they had gained by foreign wars, with the 
 natural result that the tendency to crush out the small holders 
 was increased. The attraction of men from Italian towns to 
 the city of Rome had collected there a large population of 
 comparatively idle citizens, some of them engaged in the 
 service of the rich and in the exercise of crafts ; but the majority 
 of them becoming more and more mere spectators of the daily 
 life and amusements of the capital, ' the dregs of Romulus,' 1 
 as Cicero calls them. The households of Italy had in the past 
 been in the main self-supporting : they had manufactured 
 their own clothes and provided for their own necessities. 
 Life had been simple and the household self-sufficing. The 
 growth of wealth and luxury had created new needs, which 
 were supplied largely by importation from the highly organized 
 manufacturing centres of Asia and Egypt, which poured their 
 products into Italy through Puteoli and other ports, partly by 
 the labour of slaves and freedmen. In Rome and Italy as 
 elsewhere slave labour had made trade and craftsmanship come 
 to be regarded as sordid and illiberal. 
 
 The new world which thus confronts us had its nobler 
 aspects. The closer contact with Greece had brought new 
 interests and new motives into Roman life. Already, as we saw, 
 the Greek influences in the Italian peninsula itself had given 
 rise to the beginnings of comedy with Plautus and of epic with 
 Ennius, but with the conquest of Macedonia and Achaea the 
 full flood of Greek influence came to pervade the life of the 
 Senatorial nobles, in spite of the protest of certain old-fashioned 
 spirits which suspected the new learning. The later Greek 
 philosophic schools the Academy, the Stoics, the Epicureans 
 1 In Romulijaece, Cic. Epp. ad Ait., 2. 1.8.
 
 54 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 and the political principles of the Greek statesmen of the 
 Achaean League, the wealth of Greek literature as a whole, 
 from Homer to the schools of Alexandria all these came in to 
 exercise their potent forces. Higher education became Graeco- 
 Roman the outlook of the educated class was widened, and 
 the better men of Rome found in Greek ideals of literature and 
 political life a new stimulus and a new food for their spiritual life. 
 But it was part of the tragedy of Roman history that these new 
 influences came into Roman life at a time when the political 
 and social problems had become almost overwhelming, and 
 so the choice spirits, like the Gracchi, who had drunk of the 
 Greek springs of political wisdom, were foredoomed to failure 
 in their attempt to re-create or renew the Republic of Rome. 
 The enrichment of Roman life was to be seen in the next 
 hundred years of Roman literature, in Lucretius with his 
 austere and passionate union of science with imagination, in 
 Catullus with his lyric power and passion, in Horace with his 
 happy mingling of humanity and worldly wisdom. And 
 finally the great works of Virgil, his Aeneid and Georgics 
 written in 
 
 ' the stateliest measure 
 Ever moulded by the lips of man,' 
 
 were the product" of North Italian genius expressing the ideals 
 of Italian country life and Roman government in a form based 
 on a Greek model, but in its character individual, national, and 
 supreme in its appeal. But all these poets and the great names 
 in prose Cicero, Livy, Tacitus belong to the age when 
 government was passing or had passed already from the hands 
 of a free Republic to the control of a single ruler. 
 
 The success of Rome in the earlier age had rested on character : 
 on the family life and discipline, with its simplicity, severity, 
 and efficiency. The new influences had broken into this simple 
 life, and the new generation which was growing up in Rome was
 
 56 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 much more complex and had much harder problems to settle 
 than merely conquering mountain tribes or expelling a foreign 
 invader from Italy. 
 
 Two main problems confronted the new age : (i) the 
 government of Italy and its social regeneration ; (2) the 
 government of the transmarine possessions which now 
 extended eastward to the Taurus, and westward to Spain. 
 
 The political efforts and achievements of the brothers 
 Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, which open the political experi- 
 ments of the new age, give an indication of the needs of the time 
 and a forecast of the hopelessness of the problems to be solved. 
 They were partly social and economical, partly political. 
 The attempt of the two brothers to restore or to enlarge the 
 class of small farmers had some success, but could achieve 
 comparatively little in face of the fact that corn-growing, 
 though it might support the farmer and his household, was 
 not a paying industry on a large scale. The vine and the olive 
 were, indeed, becoming much more the staple product of the 
 country, 1 and were grown with profit ; but there were other 
 factors which prevented any substantial revival of farming at 
 this time : the continuance of foreign wars, the revolt of the 
 Allies, and the succession of civil wars which occupied a large 
 part of the last fifty years of the Republic. Later attempts 
 were made at land legislation by Sulla and Julius Caesar, but 
 they were legislating not so much for the landless farmer as 
 for the retired soldier, who, coming to the land without experi- 
 ence, was often an unsatisfactory landholder and had to give 
 up his new profession and fall back into the ranks of the idle 
 or disorderly class. 2 
 
 1 See Prof. Stuart Jones, op. cit., pp. 308 ff. Cf. Ferrero, Greatness and 
 Decline of Rome, i. p. 49. On the whole land question Mr. Heitland's Agricola 
 supplies abundant information. 
 
 2 Cf. Sallust, Cat., ch. 16, 28.
 
 and the Period of Revolution 57 
 
 If we try to Sum up the results of the agrarian legislation of 
 this period, we come to the conclusion that far more was done 
 by civil war to destroy agricultural prosperity than by any 
 political measures to restore it. It was not till the peace of 
 Augustus gave Italy tranquillity and a revival of rural and 
 municipal life that Italian agriculture achieved any real 
 improvement. The larfd was the foundation of the old Italian 
 life, and the problem of its distribution had exercised men's 
 minds for generations : the historians tell us that a Licinian 
 law as early as 367 B.C. had limited the size of single holdings 
 of the Public Land and that the law of Gracchus was only 
 a reinforcement of the old limit. However this may be, the 
 event proved that the magic of property was not strong enough 
 to fight against the attraction of Rome and the decline in the 
 free population. Nevertheless we must not suppose that small 
 farms wholly disappeared. Till the end of the first century A. D. 
 many holdings of moderate size survived, and the latifundia, 
 the wide estates worked by slaves, which the historians deplore, 
 were in this age at least only prevalent in certain regions in 
 parts of Etruria and Campania and other regions where the 
 conditions favoured pasturage or agriculture on a large scale. 1 
 
 At the best then the land-laws of the Gracchi were only 
 a qualified success. From the constitutional point of view their 
 legislation had fatal consequences. How was it that two of 
 the most generous and gifted statesmen of the governing 
 nobility failed and met their death in their attempts at reform ? 
 
 The Tribunate, which they made use of for their legislation, 
 had been in origin a popular office, but the extension of Roman 
 citizenship, as we have seen, had made the citizen assemblies 
 unreal, and thrown all the power of the constitution into the 
 hands of the Senate. The Tribunes, like the regular magis- 
 
 1 Mommsen, Die italische Bodentheilung und die Alimentartafeln 
 (Historiscbe Scbriften, ii, p. 123).
 
 58 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 trates, were drawn from the official nobility, and shared in 
 general the prejudices of their order. The consequence was 
 that the Tribunate had lost its democratic associations, and by 
 a perfectly natural development had become only a wheel in 
 the Senatorial machine, and the plebeian assembly over which 
 they presided, and which possessed legislative power since 287, 
 had come completely under Senatorial control. Thus, when 
 the Gracchi revived the old ideal of the Tribunate, as an 
 independent instrument of reform, they came into collision 
 with Senatorial usage, the strongest force at Rome, and when 
 Tiberius Gracchus went further and deposed his colleague, the 
 tribune Octavius, for vetoing his act, he struck a heavy blow at 
 constitutional government. Two things came out clearly from 
 the fate of the Gracchi : first, that it was futile to attempt to 
 rule through the popular assembly ; the Assembly could never 
 be made a useful instrument of government. Secondly, that 
 no reform could be effective which did not widen the composi- 
 tion and change the character of the Senate. 
 
 The younger brother Gaius Gracchus struck out in two new 
 directions, which were significant of the future. Instead of 
 widening the basis of the Senate and bringing into it new blood 
 from the Italian towns, as had happened in earlier days, he 
 constituted a new order in the State in the so-called Equites 
 or Knights, by giving to the rich capitalists a new prestige 
 and the privilege of serving on juries and collecting the taxes 
 of Asia. The result was on the whole calamitous. The new 
 order had vast influence, direct and indirect, but none of the 
 responsibilities of government, and as a class it developed no 
 public spirit. Its interest in making money out of the taxes 
 of Asia made it a mischievous element in politics, equally 
 dangerous whether it acted in league with corrupt governors, 
 or used its power to procure the recall or condemnation of just 
 ones. As a substantial moneyed class they gave a certain
 
 and the Period of Revolution 59 
 
 stability to any government they supported, but they brought 
 no new or quickening idea into Roman life or administration. 
 It was only when a century later Augustus remodelled the 
 Order and brought it under disciplined control that it became 
 a serviceable element in the State. In the meantime it had 
 done nothing for the cause of free government. 
 
 The Gracchi had legislated by direct appeal to the Assembly, 
 but though they certainly sympathized with the claims of the 
 Italians outside the citizen body they did not succeed in 
 achieving their inclusion, urgent as the claim was and vital 
 for the security of Italy. The Allies, though they had shed their 
 blood in the foreign wars out of proportion to their numbers 
 and in excess of their treaty obligations, were still refused 
 access to the full franchise. This exclusion was felt the more 
 because during the last hundred years Italy was becoming in 
 language, manners, and form of government more completely 
 Roman. The Roman type of government with its two chief 
 magistrates and its Senate was becoming widely spread, and 
 the Latin language and Roman law were being widely adopted. 
 The Italians were fighting Rome's battles and were travelling 
 far and wide under the Roman flag, to engage in business in 
 Asia and Africa, Gaul and Spain. There was no reason for 
 their exclusion from the citizen body but the selfishness of the 
 existing citizens. The wiser statesmen saw this and proposed 
 inclusion, and the rejection of this policy led to the devastating 
 Social war, which turned Italy upside down for two years. 
 The laws which followed the conclusion of the war converted 
 all Italy south of the Po into Roman territory, and gave Latin 
 rights to the country between the Po and the Alps rights 
 which were converted into full Roman citizenship by Julius 
 Caesar in 49 B. c. 
 
 The legislation of the Gracchi showed once for all that the 
 Comitia could not govern : legislation by the people meant
 
 60 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 legislation by the mob of Rome. Their reforming successor, 
 the great Livius Drusus, had in some ways a wider outlook : 
 his idea of a widened Senate was sound and constructive ; 
 but his plans were wrecked when he tried to satisfy Italians 
 as well as Roman citizens. He fell because he was a good 
 Italian as well as a good Roman. The revolt of the Allies which 
 followed, the Social or, as it is sometimes called, the Marsian 
 War, achieved his Italian aims. Italy became Roman up to the 
 Po, but it was an Italy impoverished by war. 
 
 The question of distribution of the new citizens after the 
 Social war for voting purposes gave some trouble, but was 
 finally settled in a generous sense. But before this unification 
 of Italy was completed, Rome had experienced the danger and 
 the responsibility of her position in Europe as the guardian of 
 Latin and Hellenic culture : the threatening of invasion from 
 the barbarians of the North, Celts and Teutons, was a renewal 
 of the Celtic peril of three centuries earlier. For. the moment 
 it was crushed by Marius, the people's general, but it was not 
 till Julius Caesar had conquered Gaul and Augustus had 
 created something like a scientific frontier on Rhine and Danube 
 that the danger was fully averted. Throughout this age the 
 Northern peril loomed large in the background of Roman 
 life. 
 
 But the crisis brought with it another danger, as ominous 
 to Roman liberty as the Northern peril was to the existence 
 of the Roman State. The renewed consulships of Marius, 
 re-elected consul again and again in order to meet dangerous 
 enemies of Rome in Africa and in the North, emphasized what 
 was becoming an immediate danger to the Republic the 
 danger of the omnipotence of a powerful military commander. 
 It was a grave defect of the Roman constitution that it did 
 not separate civil and military command, and that the armies 
 of the State were controlled by the consuls of the year, who were
 
 and the Period, of Revolution 61 
 
 also responsible for the conduct of civil affairs. True, the 
 prolongation of foreign wars had already been leading to an 
 adjustment by which the command (imperium) was prolonged 
 for military purposes beyond the consular year of office, and 
 thus military was getting to be separated from civil rule ; but 
 even so the high prestige of a proconsul or a propraetor at the 
 head of a victorious army was destined to become an imminent 
 danger when a generation of Senators grew up who had lost 
 the good tradition of discipline and civil obedience. Military 
 command thus became an object of competition among the 
 nobles, and the military leader became a determining force 
 in politics. This menace of domination by military leaders 
 haunts the whole of the last century of the Republic. And the 
 danger of military rule did not come merely from without. 
 It was becoming almost a necessity if laws were to be carried 
 in the now disordered state of the constitution. 
 
 The failure of the mob of Rome to protect the Gracchi was 
 a sign that no legislator in the future could appeal to the 
 Assembly with success unless he had an army which he could 
 call to his support. The armies of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and 
 Caesar in succession were the means by which the laws of this 
 period were carried. Each of these military leaders was brought 
 to the front by the opportunities or needs of foreign war. 
 Marius put an end to a lingering war in Africa, where Roman 
 merchants and colonists had suffered from the incompetence 
 of senatorial commanders, and he had checked the invaders 
 from the North : Sulla had fought and conquered Mithradates, 
 the last great enemy of Rome in Asia. Pompey and Caesar we 
 shall consider later. This dominance of the great generals was 
 largely due to the fact that the army from Marius's time became 
 practically professional open to all classes, and not as in earlier 
 days restricted to men who owned land and had a stake in the 
 country. It was natural that such an army should be ready to
 
 62 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 sacrifice loyalty towards the State to personal allegiance to 
 a general. It is one of the most striking ironies in Roman 
 history that Sulla, the one statesman who posed as the guardian 
 of Senatorial government and of the old order, was the first 
 to invade Rome with a Roman army (in 88). That act and the 
 organized butchery of his Proscriptions when he became 
 absolute ruler were fatal precedents which were only too 
 faithfully followed. 
 
 Italy had already suffered much since the Social War from 
 the conflicts between the armies of Marius and of Sulla, and the 
 massacres enacted by the Marian party ; and this final revenge 
 of Sulla on his enemies still further weakened the resources of 
 the State, not to speak of the terrible example which it left. 
 The bloodshed might have been a price worth paying had it 
 ended in a broad and stable government. As it was, it made 
 only a momentary pause. Sulla was a typical Senator and could 
 see no further than the rest of his order. His legislation, except 
 for his reorganization of the criminal law, which was a business- 
 like and efficient piece of work, was in the main reactionary and 
 worse than useless. 1 It was an attempt to establish the power 
 of the Senate on a statutory instead of a customary basis. To 
 do this he destroyed the power of the Tribunes by making the 
 Tribunate a bar to higher office and by requiring the sanction 
 of the Senate for all laws of the plebeian assembly. At the same 
 time by his revival of the laws regulating the tenure of magis- 
 tracies, and his reorganization of the relation of home and 
 foreign command, he tried to reinforce the two main principles 
 of Senatorial government : (i) the principle that no one but 
 Senators should rule ; (2) the principle that no Senator should 
 
 1 Sulla's replenishment of the ranks of the Senate may seem an exception. 
 But it is not clear that he brought it into any closer relation to Italian life 
 or introduced any valuable elements. See Greenidge and Clay, Sources for 
 .Roman History, p. 173.
 
 and the Period of Revolution 63 
 
 have more than his share of office, and that all military command 
 should be controlled by the Senate. Sulla's degradation of the 
 Equestrian order from the position given it by G. Gracchus was 
 part of the same policy of a supreme Senate. 
 
 The soldiers and the freedmen of Sulla held his constitution 
 together while he lived, but with his death war at home and 
 abroad brought a new military leader to the front. The 
 Sullan constitution fell because the Senatorial order were too 
 weak to defend it. The young Pompey who now leapt into 
 prominence %had been a protege of Sulla. Sent to Spain the 
 year after Sulla's death, entrusted with high command without 
 having held any previous office, he was destined, by force of 
 circumstances, to tear to pieces every principle that Sulla had 
 established. Elected direct by the people, as Marius had been, 
 but without holding any magistracy, he ended the war against 
 the remnant of the Marian party in Spain, and returned to 
 lead the popular party against the Senate. After a short 
 interval he received direct from the people extraordinary 
 commands in the East, against the Pirates and then against 
 Mithradates of Pontus. His whole career defied the Sullan 
 rules. But for a time it seemed as though through him the 
 discordant elements in Roman politics might be reconciled. 
 Brought up under the patronage of Sulla, he had wider interests 
 and ties than his master and the legislation which as consul with 
 Crassus he carried in 70 represented a compromise between the 
 old Senatorial traditions and the interests of the capitalists, 
 while it reinstated the prestige of the Tribunate as the organ 
 of popular government. This compromise ultimately failed, 
 from the inherent selfishness of the Senatorial and Equestrian 
 orders and from the inarticulate impotence of the People at 
 large. 
 
 The year 70 then must be noted as a critical year for it marks 
 the overthrow of the Sullan reaction, but it brought no new or
 
 64 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 constructive element to Roman politics, though it may be said 
 to embody the triumph of compromise. That spirit of com- 
 promise we find expressed in the speeches and letters of Marcus 
 Tullius Cicero, the great orator and man of letters, whose 
 speeches, letters, and essays provide our fullest evidence for this 
 age. A ' new man ',* from one of the country families which 
 had from time to time refreshed the Senate with new blood, 
 he expressed the ideas of an educated class which with a respect 
 for the best traditions of Senatorial government combined 
 sympathy for the Italian country towns and for the world-wide 
 interests of Roman finance and commerce. It was in their 
 interest and with their support that as consul in 63 he helped 
 to crush the revolutionary movement of Catiline, which aimed 
 at upsetting credit and society. The tragedy of Cicero's life 
 lay in the fact that Pompey and the Senate by their mutual 
 jealousies refused the combination which might have prolonged 
 Senatorial government and so threw Cicero into the position 
 of hopeless loyalty to a leader and a Senatorial order who had 
 thrown away their opportunity. In 70, the time we are now 
 considering, Cicero was in full accord with Pompey's policy 
 of reversing the reactionary policy of Sulla and supported it 
 with a whole heart. His ideal was a Republic governed by an 
 enlightened Senate, which should give free scope to the 
 Equestrian order. It was his fate that Pompey, whom he 
 respected and followed, neglected him, while Caesar, whom he 
 feared as an enemy of the Republic, treated him with kindness 
 and consideration. But after Caesar's death Caesar's heir, 
 Octavius, was not strong enough to save him from the hatred 
 of Antony, and Cicero fell a victim to his loyalty to the outworn 
 Republic. For Pompey the legislation of 70 was only an 
 incident between his success in Spain and his later triumphs in 
 the East. He had no taste for civil glory and no political gifts. 
 1 novus homo, i. e. a man whose ancestors had not held high office.
 
 and the Period of Revolution 65 
 
 What was the condition of Rome and the Empire when 
 Pompey returned from Asia nine years later, in 61 B.C. ? 
 
 Italy, as we have seen, had gone through the horrors of 
 prolonged civil war. A slave-rising, too (73-71), like earlier 
 risings in Sicily (135-132, and 103-99), na< ^ thrown a lurid light 
 on the social and economic dangers of slavery. In the East, 
 Pompey himself, following on the military successes of Lucullus, 
 a great man unjustly used, had incorporated new provinces in 
 the Empire Pontus and Syria besides re-organizing Bithynia. 
 But Rome's hold on Asia Minor had not been completed 
 without a great struggle. In Mithradates, King of Pontus, the 
 Romans found a formidable antagonist, who threatened to sweep 
 them from Western Asia. His massacre of 80,000 Romans 1 in 
 88 had been the beginning of a long and stubborn struggle 
 extending with intervals over twenty years (first war 88-84, 
 second 74-65), which finally settled the fate of Asia Minor. 
 Western and not Eastern ideas were henceforth to prevail in 
 Western Asia. The Parthian power, which during the Civil 
 wars threatened Roman government in Asia and later became 
 Rome's most formidable enemy, could not entirely destroy the 
 effect of the campaigns of Lucullus and Pompey. It was on 
 their foundation that Augustus when he came to power con- 
 structed an Eastern frontier, which, when consolidated by the 
 Flavian Emperors, secured the quiet development of the 
 Hellenic East for many centuries. Pompey, by the new 
 provinces he had added to the Empire, had indicated the main 
 lines of the future frontier system of the East. In the African 
 continent the territory of Carthage had become a province 
 and Numidia had been reduced to a client State. Spain, 
 which for 150 years had cost Rome heavy losses in men and 
 money, was finally reduced in the Numantine War (133) and 
 
 1 This probably includes many Italians who were not full Roman 
 citizens. 
 
 2538-2 E
 
 66 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 in the next century became the most intensely Roman of the 
 Roman provinces. In Gaul a province had been founded in 
 what we now call Provence in 121, to command the highway 
 to Spain, and there a new departure had been taken. The 
 colony of Narbo Martius, the modern Narbonne, founded in 
 1 1 8, was the first transmarine colony founded with full Roman 
 rights, the first of a series of colonies which in the next two 
 centuries were used to Romanize Southern Gaul and Spain and 
 the districts of the Rhine and Danube. But at present and 
 till the end of the Republic the northern frontier was undefined, 
 and Rome had all the anxieties that attend the existence of an 
 unguarded border. The Gallic peril was a commonplace in 
 conversation. Gaul within the Alps, the Cisalpine, was being 
 rapidly Romanized by the bestowal of Latin rights or citizen- 
 ship, but the districts of the Alps themselves were still half- 
 independent under their chieftains and the country behind 
 (now Switzerland and the Tyrol) was unconquered. The 
 Lombard plain was open to attack. East of the Adriatic the 
 Illyrian country, subject to Rome since the Macedonian con- 
 quest, was becoming the province of Illyricum, soon to be held 
 by Julius Caesar along with Gaul, the first of a series of Danubian 
 provinces. Thus the bounds of Empire were coming full circle, 
 but the ring of defence was loosely knit. It is a testimony to the 
 Roman constitution that, through years of civil war and revolu- 
 tion at home, the government of the Empire was going on and 
 provincial governors were succeeding one another, all the world 
 over. Beyond the provinces which were under the direct 
 government of Rome, the policy of a fringe of Client States 
 was still maintained, and as the princes died out, their kingdoms 
 came under the immediate government of Rome. Thus 
 Cyrene, bequeathed to Rome in 96, Bithynia, in 74, became 
 provinces in 74. 
 
 The return of Pompey from the East in 61 marks a crisis in
 
 and the Period of Revolution 67 
 
 the fortunes of Rome ; and we may survey from this point the 
 last act in the drama of the rise and fall of the Republic. 
 Lucan the poet, who died in a so-called Republican conspiracy 
 in the reign of Nero really a conspiracy to set up a good 
 emperor instead of a bad one took Pompey as the hero of his 
 Pharsalia, and as the embodiment of constitutional rule. 
 The contradiction of Pompey's position was that he posed as 
 the representative of constitutionalism while he claimed powers 
 and privileges which led straight to monarchy. His career was 
 a living contradiction. His coalition with Caesar and Crassus 
 in 60, the ' first Triumvirate ', involved an arbitrary partition 
 of the Empire between military commanders which was 
 incompatible with free government. To Caesar this was clear, 
 but Pompey never thought things out, and his equivocal 
 position was his ruin. Caesar used Pompey as a means to 
 acquire a great command for himself, the command of the 
 Gauls and Illyricum. The result was of vast moment in the 
 history of Rome and of Europe. In the strenuous years he spent 
 in the Gallic command Caesar not only achieved the conquest 
 of Gaul and saved Italy from the menace of the northern 
 barbarians, but also created an army, which enabled him to 
 defeat Pompey when the break inevitably came and which 
 formed the foundation of the permanent army of the Empire. 1 
 How great was the task achieved by Caesar in these years, 
 59-50, can only be realized by those who have studied the map 
 of France, and the distribution of the tribes which Caesar 
 found in possession. Courage and rapidity of action, organizing 
 capacity, firm control of capable and devoted lieutenants, 
 pitiless severity these were the qualities which commanded 
 success. There was a moment when the whole fabric of his 
 work threatened to collapse, in the great revolt of 52, the year 
 when at home Pompey began to turn against him, but by the 
 
 1 See Caesar's Conquest of Gaul by T. Rice Holmes. 
 E 2
 
 68 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 end of 50 when he crossed the Rubicon the work of conquest 
 was complete. Crassus, the third partner, played for himself 
 alone, and found a miserable end, when his severed head was 
 filled with Parthian gold after his defeat by the Parthians at 
 Carrhae. He does not count. 
 
 The civil war, which began with Caesar's crossing of the 
 Rubicon in January 49, was in one aspect a contest for supre- 
 macy between the rival leaders ; in another it was the conflict 
 between Senatorial government and the idea of monarchy 
 which Caesar embodied. The battle was fought between a man 
 who saw his way to consolidate the shaking fabric of the Empire 
 and direct it by wise laws and the government of a strong hand ; 
 and the man whose ambitions were beyond his powers, and 
 who was fighting for an outworn constitution, which his own 
 career had done much to undermine. The Senate could not 
 be saved, and the disorders of Pompey's court and camp were 
 a sure prophecy of the last scene on the sands of Egypt, where 
 Pompey found humble burial from a common soldier. 1 
 
 It is significant that the breach between Caesar and Pompey 
 began with a law of Pompey's, the lex Pompeia de iure magistra- 
 luum of 52, designed to rearrange the system of provincial 
 command, and that the actual outbreak in December 50 was 
 concerned with Caesar's military command in Gaul. Was 
 Caesar or was he not to resign his army and so lay himself open 
 to attack before the year 48, when he hoped, if all was well, 
 to be in a secure position as Consul ? Pompey in choosing war, 
 thought he had Italy and the eastern provinces and Client 
 States behind him. Caesar had the advantage of a few highly 
 trained and devoted legions : his rapidity and decision did 
 the rest. Spain and the Balkan peninsula before Pompey's 
 
 1 Pompey, though no statesman, was a great captain. What devotion he 
 could inspire may be seen in the concluding scene in Plutarch's life, which 
 should be read in North's translation.
 
 and the Period of Revolution 69 
 
 death Egypt, Africa, and Asia afterwards, fell into his hands. 
 The Pompeians failed to use their sea-power and none of their 
 leaders had Caesar's genius. In the intervals of these great 
 campaigns, not many months in all, Caesar passed a series of 
 laws which paved the way for ordered government. Besides 
 amnesty to his enemies, there was the settlement of Italy, 
 restoration of credit, reform of the Calendar, rigid repression 
 of revolutionary finance. But he did all this with an authority 
 that defied all rules : combining consulship and dictatorship, 
 appointing to provincial commands, disregarding all conven- 
 tions, and finally through his friends, asking for open monarchy. 
 His murder was the reply of the Senatorial order. The answer 
 was no answer, for the Republicans who murdered him could 
 not construct a new order nor control the warring passions of 
 Caesar's heirs. The three men who claimed to succeed him, 
 Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus, the Triumvirs of 43, crushed 
 the Republican opposition at Philippi and proceeded to divide 
 the Roman world between them. Lepidus, the third partner, 
 like Crassus in the earlier coalition was no match for the other 
 two and the war became in the end a duel between Antony and 
 Octavius. But before the final conflict, Sextus Pompeius, heir 
 of the great Pompey, had to be disposed of. A master on the 
 sea he was no match for the diplomacy of Antony and Octavius 
 and was finally beaten on his own element by Octavius's trusty 
 lieutenant Agrippa. Republican sea-power now, as in the 
 earlier conflict, failed against the persistency of a Caesar. The 
 treaty of Brundisium (40), which had been cemented by Antony's 
 marriage with Octavia, divided the Roman world between 
 Antony and Octavius, an anticipation of the later division 
 between the Eastern and Western Empires. Antony was the 
 greater soldier, but it became clear that in a struggle of policy 
 against passion, policy would win. Cleopatra captured Antony 
 as she had captured Julius Caesar, though less fatally, before
 
 70 Decline of Senatorial Government 
 
 liim, and the Roman world recognized in the final clash of arms 
 the conflict not between two Roman generals with equal claims 
 to empire, but a fateful encounter of the forces and ideals of 
 East and West. Virgil in picturing the scene of Actium in 
 Aeneid Fill is true to history in the contrast that he draws. 
 On the one side is Augustus (for the poet anticipates the title 
 by four years) leading into battle Italy with the Senate and 
 People of Rome, and their household gods on the other side 
 is Antony, the leader of a motley host marshalled in barbaric 
 splendour, with an Egyptian bride, and a monstrous train of 
 Oriental deities. The triumph of Augustus Virgil rightly 
 felt to be a triumph of law and disciplined life over the un- 
 bridled passions and the unholy worships of the Eastern world. 
 Actium reunited the Empire, which for nine years had been 
 parted between two masters. That momentous battle saved 
 the unity of Rome for five hundred years, and secured the 
 interval for the development of Roman law and government 
 under Augustus and his successors. Had Antony conquered, 
 the ideas and government of the Graeco-Roman world might 
 have been submerged in a flood of Orientalism before they had 
 sown their seed in the nations of modern Europe. 
 
 4 
 
 From the Accession of Augustus to the Death of 
 Marcus Aurelius 
 
 WE have seen how the decline of moral in the Senate, and its 
 incapacity to deal efficiently with urgent problems at home and 
 abroad, led to a century of civil strife, in which the whole 
 fabric of the constitution was for a time broken down. The 
 brief monarchy of Caesar had shown what might be done by 
 a single ruler with clear ideas and a strong will. It had also
 
 and the Period of Revolution 71 
 
 shown that Roman opinion would not tolerate an open 
 monarchy ; that the name ' king ' was impossible, and that 
 constitutional decencies must be observed. The Principate of 
 Augustus, in which the ruler of the Empire professed to be only 
 the leading citizen in a free state, was an attempt to meet these 
 conditions by a compromise. In the first instance at least it 
 was temporary. The position of ' Princeps ' or ' first man in 
 the State ' was not a definite office and was not hereditary. Its 
 vagueness was its merit. The various powers on which it 
 rested had precedents in the Republic, but the union of them 
 in one hand was unique and unprecedented. It has been 
 described as a Dyarchy, in the sense of a rule divided between 
 Prince and Senate. In regard to the government of the pro- 
 vinces, the administration of justice, the coinage, Prince and 
 Senate had parallel duties or powers ; but the supreme military 
 command, which was superior to the command held by the 
 generals of armies or by provincial governors, combined as it 
 was with the Tribunician power which gave security of person 
 and control of legislation, made the position of Augustus in 
 fact unique and unassailable. Before we attempt to show how 
 these powers developed and what organs the Principate evolved 
 to fulfil its functions, it is necessary to look for a moment at the 
 world which the Princeps was called upon to rule. 
 
 Italy had suffered from the campaign between Caesar and 
 Pompey, and still more from the conflicts that followed Caesar's 
 death. Something had been done by the Triumvirs to re- 
 colonize the peninsula, but a large measure of reconstruction 
 remained for Augustus to carry out. In that work he re-founded 
 many old towns of Italy and settled many colonies of citizens 
 abroad. Julius Caesar in his short reign is generally believed 
 to have laid down a type of charter for municipal towns, 1 and 
 
 1 See E. G. Hardy on ' Lex Tulia Municipalis ' in Journal oj Roman 
 Studies, vol. iv, and in Journal of Philology, xxxv.
 
 72 From the Accession of Augustus 
 
 his heir did all he could to promote their active life. He 
 improved communications by restoring roads and bridges, he 
 divided the peninsula into 1 districts (Regiones) and by every 
 means encouraged a return to the soil, while the coasts were 
 for the first time efficiently protected from piracy by permanent 
 fleets on the two seas. The removal of the legions to distant 
 frontiers banished the menace of war for a war-weary genera- 
 tion : the institution of the Praetorian guards and the City 
 Cohorts and the Vigiles (a kind of city police and firemen) gave 
 a security to the capital which was in contrast with the dis- 
 creditable riots and disorders of Rome in the late Republic. 
 The effect of these measures, and in particular the blessed 
 influence of his greatest gift, the gift of peace, was to give 
 Italy something like a century of prosperous life. Senatorial 
 nobles now took to high farming, and real advance was made in 
 agriculture. Capital was invested also in the manufacture of 
 pottery and other wares for export, and for a time the face of 
 Italy was changed. But this air of prosperity was partly 
 fictitious, for now, as in the Republic, much of the apparent 
 wealth of the country consisted of the spoils of the exhausted 
 world, drained of its treasures by one military leader after 
 another. It was unproductive wealth. The free population 
 of Italy was declining, but down to Vespasian there was a 
 partial but genuine revival. This finds its reflexion in the 
 elder Pliny's account of Italian farming and in the statistics of 
 recruiting for the legions, which till Vespasian's time drew 
 men for the Western armies from Italy and particularly from 
 the regions re-colonized by Augustus. But signs of decline 
 began to appear at the end of the first century A.D. in the loans 
 which it is found necessary to make to the farmers and in the 
 charities instituted for the maintenance of the children of 
 needy citizens. 1 Large tracts of country fell out of cultivation 
 1 See Mommsen on the Alimenta in Bd. II of Historische Scbriften.
 
 to the Death of Marcus Aurelius 73 
 
 and this led to the spread of malaria, which clung to them till 
 quite recent years : provinces like Gaul competed with Italian 
 manufactures and Italy became more dependent than ever on 
 the subject peoples. Ever since the wars with Macedon, the 
 Italians had enjoyed freedom from direct taxation and this 
 they retained down to Diocletian (284-305), when Italy 
 became one among many provinces. That was the end of free 
 Italy. Even a century earlier the establishment of a Roman 
 legion at Alba, the old capital of the Latins, by Septimius 
 Severus (193-211), was a sign that Italy, like the rest of the 
 Empire, was under direct military rule. 
 
 If we look further afield, in the provinces, as in Italy itself, 
 a great constructive work had to be accomplished : in the 
 East the provinces, drained of their treasures by successive 
 armies, had to be nursed into economic stability ; in the West 
 and North the newly conquered countries had to be settled ; 
 and in both the older and the newer provinces frontiers and 
 a military system had to be organized. 
 
 It was part of the great work of Augustus to construct out 
 of the vast armies left in being after Actium a permanent force 
 to defend the frontiers. The old tradition of the Roman army 
 had been to have Romans and their Allies fighting side by side. 
 In the Legions and the auxiliary troops (Auxilia) of the Empire 
 this principle was retained. The backbone of both armies 
 was, as it had always been, the centurions, the company 
 officers, drawn from the best Italian material. Among the 
 higher officers the legionary commanders (Legionum legati), a 
 creation of Caesar, remained as before, Senatorial : it was a sign 
 that the military monarchy had come into being when the 
 Senate ceased, in Gallienus's reign (259-68), to hold the highest 
 commands. The lower commands, of Tribune and Prefect, 
 were held alike by Equestrian officers qualifying for civil posts 
 and by Senators at the opening of their career. The Legions
 
 Augushts to Marcus Aurelius 
 
 were recruited partly from Italy (down to Vespasian) but 
 largely and increasingly from the Provinces, and from the 
 Provinces came also the Auxilia, at first under the command 
 of their national officers, but, when experience proved this to 
 be dangerous, under Romans or Italians. 
 
 These armies were disposed on the frontiers of the Empire. 
 We must see what these frontiers were, and this means that we 
 have to look beyond Augustus and see how later Emperors 
 completed his work. Let us begin with Asia. To the old 
 provinces in the East, as organized by Pompey, Augustus had 
 added Galatia, and to this were added by Tiberius and organized 
 by the Flavians, Cappadocia and Commagene. This, as will 
 be seen by a glance at the map, brought the frontier up to the 
 Euphrates and prepared the way for a reconstruction of the 
 Eastern defence. From Vespasian onwards the Eastern 
 frontier rested on a double base-^-Galatia with Cappadocia in 
 the north and the old province of Syria in the south. In the 
 African continent Egypt, which had for fifty years before Actium 
 been a Client-state, became the Emperor's private property, 
 which for safety's sake was kept under the Emperor's personal 
 control. The Emperor named his Viceroy, an Equestrian 
 Prefect, and for administrative purposes retained under him the 
 machinery of the old rule of the Ptolemies. The old division, 
 the Nome, under a Strategus was the unit of administration, 
 and the land tax on the old lines the main source of revenue. 
 The garrison of Egypt was anomalous one or two legions 
 under an Equestrian instead of a Senatorial commander, so 
 afraid were the Emperors, after Antony's great adventure, of 
 the possible rivalry of a Senatorial ruler. Farther west was 
 Cyrene, next to it the old province of Africa, and two minor 
 provinces of Mauretania organized by Claudius and governed 
 by Procurators : across the strait were the three provinces of 
 Spain, becoming yearly more Roman, and to the north of Spain
 
 Pompeii Strada dell' Abbondanza. 
 
 Pompeii Strada di Mercuric.
 
 76 From the Accession of Augustus 
 
 the great new province of the three Northern Gauls, with 
 their capital at Lugdunum (Lyon), while the old province 
 Narbonensis remained under the Senate. Beyond this 
 again were two strips of conquered territory on the Rhine, 
 mere spheres of occupation Upper and Lower Germany. 
 Eastward of them lay the minor provinces of Rhaetia and 
 Noricum, the hinterland of the Alps, and along the Danube 
 the three provinces of Dalmatia, Pannonia, and Moesia. This 
 region was still further consolidated in Claudius's reign by the 
 annexation of Thrace, which made the whole region south erf 
 the Danube a solid block of Roman rule. In the region between 
 the Rhine and Danube, where the great bend northwards of the 
 Rhine makes a re-entrant angle, the territory was occupied 
 by Roman settlers in the first century of the Empire, and the 
 beginnings were made of a Limes imperil, a frontier-line 
 connecting the two rivers Rhine and Danube, the eastern 
 part of which survives as the 'Devil's Wall' (Teufelsmauer). 
 Begun by the Flavians it was completed by Hadrian. Only 
 one other extension need be mentioned one which con- 
 cerns ourselves : Julius Caesar had made a reconnaissance 
 in Britain and established relations with Client-princes there. 
 Claudius invaded and annexed the island, which remained a 
 part of the Empire for four hundred years. Though the 
 institutions and even the common features of civilized life were 
 swept away by the flood of invading Germans in the fifth 
 century, Professor Haverfield has shown how thoroughly 
 Britain was for the time Romanized. 1 Our Roman roads and 
 the remains of villas, pottery, arms, and utensils, such as may 
 be seen in London at the British Museum or at the Guild Hall, 
 or at Reading, York, or Colchester Museum still more 
 the Roman Wall in Northumberland, tell their own tale. The 
 
 1 F. J. Haverfield, The Romanization of Roman Britain, Clarendon 
 Press.
 
 to the Death of Marcus Aurelius 77 
 
 farthest advance north was made by Agricola in 85, 1 and for 
 some time his advanced position in Scotland was maintained 
 by fortified camps, but later the Roman line of defence was 
 withdrawn first to the line of Forth and Clyde (the wall of 
 Antoninus) and then to the line of Tyne and Solway in its final 
 form (perhaps the work of Severus). 
 
 Two advances were made beyond these limits in the period 
 which comes within our view, both in the reign of Trajan 
 the annexation of Dacia north of the Eastern Danube, and 
 that of Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Arabia to the east of the 
 Euphrates. These eastern conquests were given up by Hadrian 
 as unprofitable, but Dacia was retained for a hundred and 
 fifty years, only to be given up by Aurelian (270-5). The 
 frontier then in this period was a shifting line, and the legions 
 had to be moved from time to time, to suit the new conditions. 
 But, with the exception of the withdrawal from Trajan's 
 advance in the East, the history is in general one of gradual 
 consolidation. The idea once entertained under Augustus of 
 a conquest of Germany was never seriously resumed after the 
 great Pannonian war and the defeat of Varus in A.D. 9, and the 
 main lines laid down by Augustus were adhered to. It was 
 based on the policy of Julius Caesar, who had the genius to 
 conceive a unified control, but had not had time to carry it into 
 effect. A frontier system became possible only with the 
 standing army which Augustus created. 
 
 The Rhine and Danube for many years claimed the largest 
 armies, some twelve to sixteen legions : the East was defended 
 by the four legions of Syria, to which were added in Flavian 
 times legions in Judaea and in the united provinces of Galatia 
 and Cappadocia. By that time the garrison of Spain, a highly 
 Romanized province, was reduced to one legion, Africa and 
 
 1 See G. Macdonald in Journal of Roman Studies, vol. ix, ' The Agricolan 
 Occupation of North Britain."
 
 78 From the Accession of Augustus 
 
 Egypt claimed two or three, and Britain three. These were 
 the forces, varying in different provinces from time to time, 
 that, with about an equal number of Auxiliary troops, defended 
 with the help of rivers, ocean, and desert the extended empire 
 of Rome. There was no field army, and when a fighting force 
 was needed for an emergency, one province had to borrow 
 from another. 
 
 Such was the world from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, 
 and from the Rhine to the Sahara, which Rome had now to 
 ?overn. 
 
 Q 
 
 The fall of the Republic, as we have seen, was due to a com- 
 bination of causes, partly mechanical or structural and partly 
 moral. The machinery of Senatorial government was too 
 rudimentary, the system of government by annual magistracy 
 was unequal to its task : the moral of the Senatorial order had 
 decayed : the new class of capitalists was influential but 
 corrupt and was subject to no control. Finally, the degradation 
 of free labour in Italy and the attractive glamour of the capital 
 had produced a dangerous class in Rome, which through the 
 weakness of Roman criminal law might at any moment make 
 government impossible. The problem of the Principate was 
 to restore and enforce order, to give free play to the new forces 
 and to the best elements in enfranchised Italy and in those 
 provinces which could readily be Romanized, and to create 
 a new machinery of government. But this must be done 
 without shocking Roman sentiment, and in a way which 
 should secure a sense of continuity with the past. 
 
 The form which Augustus gave to the Principate did secure 
 this end. The Emperor was the Princeps, the leading man in 
 the State, but the Senate still dealt with a great deal of current 
 business, and no Emperor was fully accepted until chosen by 
 the Senate. The people, it is true, disappear into the back- 
 ground, but we must remember that the Comitia, the Assem-
 
 to the Death of Marcus Aurelius 79 
 
 blies, which now ceased to meet, had for many years only met 
 to be mischievous if they blocked, and superfluous if they 
 supported, the legislation of the master of the armies. By 
 nomination and commendation the Princeps now controlled 
 the personnel of the Senate, and his choice governed their 
 social existence. Caesar had enlarged the Senate to one 
 thousand : it was now reduced to its old size. Its members 
 had to reside in Rome, and could only go abroad with leave. 
 The magistracies were reorganized and the Senatorial career was 
 defined. There was no lack of public duties. 1 Minor magis- 
 tracies and a period of qualifying military service as Tribune of 
 a Legion were followed by the serious duties of Praetor and 
 Consul, with the command of a legion or of a Province as the 
 crown of a career. Now as before, the Senator was deemed 
 capable alike of military and civil duty, and passed from one to 
 the other. 
 
 Did these officials, it may be asked, belong to the Senatorial 
 nobility of the Republic ? Many of the old families had died 
 out, others were too poor to serve ; but new families were 
 coming forward from the classes below, and as time went on 
 the Romanized provinces, especially Spain and Gaul, supplied 
 their quota to the new nobility. But the vast business of an 
 Empire could not be dealt with by this class alone. There 
 were two ways in which an advance was made and the personnel 
 of government enlarged. First, the growing needs of the 
 capital and of Italy made it necessary to create new offices 
 of high dignity to control the city of Rome, to take charge of 
 the great lines of communication in Italy, and to look after 
 the water-supply of the capital. These were great Senatorial 
 offices, one of which, the Prefecture of the City, came, in time, 
 to have high judicial duties. 
 
 Secondly, the Equestrian Order, the social class below the 
 1 For Senatorial careers see Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae, vol. i, cap. 4.
 
 8o From the Accession of Augustus 
 
 Senatorial, was by degrees converted into a civil service. By 
 a stroke of genius Augustus turned this moneyed class, which 
 had been irresponsible and selfish, to useful and efficient work, 
 by using them, under his personal control, as his agents or 
 proctors Procuratores and Praefecti for the conduct of that 
 class of affairs in Rome and the provinces which required some 
 permanence and business capacity and for which the high rank 
 of Senator was either not requisite or not desirable. Thus 
 a very valuable human asset of the Roman world, the trained 
 business class, was saved for the Empire ; and a wasting sore 
 of the late Republic was removed. We have only to look at the 
 inscriptions recording the career of some of these great Eques- 
 trian officials l to see what important offices they filled and with 
 what a wide range of influence. Foremost among these offices 
 was the command of the Guards in Rome. The Prefect of 
 the Praetorians (Praefectus Praetorii), the Emperor's Guards, 
 held office alone or with a colleague. This officer naturally 
 exercised a great power in Rome, particularly when the 
 camp of the Guards was established close to the city walls. 
 As the Guards were the only military force near the capital 2 
 they frequently determined the succession to the throne. 
 But apart from this their central position gave the Prefects 
 of the Guard great power and prestige, and in later days 
 they became judges of appeal for all cases beyond a circle 
 of a hundred miles from Rome. For the narrower sphere 
 of one hundred miles the Senatorial Prefects of the City 
 were responsible. Side by side with the Praetorian Prefects 
 was the Prefect of the corn-supply, the high official whom 
 Augustus had found it necessary to appoint to provide for the 
 feeding of the capital, a vital necessity if the city and the central 
 
 1 See Dessau, op. cit., vol. i, cap. 5. 
 
 2 Except the City Cohorts (Urbanae Cobortes), who were under the Prefect 
 of the City, a high Senatorial officer.
 
 to the Death of Marcus Aurelius 81 
 
 government were not to fall a prey to the attack of a hungry 
 rabble in Rome. Abroad the Procurators dealt with the whole 
 range of financial duties except so far as Quaestors survived 
 in the provinces immediately under the Senate. Procurators 
 also held the minor offices subordinate to the high Senatorial 
 commissionerships and curatorships ; and finally Procurators 
 (e. g. Felix and Festus) conducted the government of those 
 minor provinces, which the Emperor desired to keep under his 
 immediate control but without entrusting them to Senatorial 
 governors : such as Judaea, Mauretania, Rhaetia, and, most 
 important of all, Egypt. 
 
 There were two considerations that made the services of 
 this equestrian class especially valuable. One was that as the 
 Emperor's immediate agents they were completely under his 
 control and were not subject to the rule of annual succession. 
 And secondly, as non-Senators they were excluded from any 
 possible rivalry for the throne. 
 
 Just as the Senators had to qualify for civil service by serving 
 first as subordinate officers with the Legions so the Knights had 
 to serve as Tribunes in a Legion or as Prefects in the Auxilia, 
 but they could not rise higher in the army (save in Egypt alone) 
 without passing into the class of Senators. 
 
 Beneath these two governing classes of Senators and Knights 
 were the rank and file of the citizens, among whom some of the 
 most capable were the Greek freedmen, whom we meet as 
 conspicuous figures in the early Empire. These were mainly 
 Greeks who had made themselves useful to their masters from 
 their business capacity and cleverness in finance. Already 
 under the Republic, as we see from Cicero's letters, such men 
 had played an active part as private secretaries and confidential 
 agents of provincial governors and high senatorial nobles. 
 Augustus and Tiberius in the main relied on the services of 
 
 2538-2 F
 
 82 Augustus to Marcus Aurelius 
 
 men of Senatorial and Equestrian rank. Maecenas, a knight, 
 had played a great part in the rise of Augustus to power. 
 Seianus, a knight who was Prefect of the Guard, had a disastrous 
 influence over Tiberius. After Tiberius's long absence from 
 Rome, and the short disordered reign of Gaius (Caligula), the 
 cautious Claudius found that the whole fabric of the Empire 
 was in danger of dissolution, for want of firm centralized con- 
 trol, and it was to create this that he gave to the confidential 
 freedmen who governed his household a new position. 1 Men 
 like Pallas and Narcissus held posts which, though unofficial, 
 were highly influential, and they were rewarded by the bestowal 
 of senatorial decorations, though not of senatorial status. At 
 this period these household posts and many of the procurator- 
 ships in the Empire were held by freedmen, but this system of 
 freedmen officials proved unsatisfactory, and by the time of 
 Hadrian all such offices were reserved for men of the Equestrian 
 order, whose dignity and status corresponded to their actual 
 services. 
 
 While thus provision was made for the personnel of official 
 life, and while central control removed many of the abuses 
 and revived in great measure the efficiency of government, it 
 could not wholly restore the earlier vitality and freedom of 
 the governing class. Two things imposed serious shackles on 
 public life. There was a sense of discomfort in working with 
 a prince whose word, though he professed to be only -the first 
 citizen, was felt to be final ; whose power unquestioned. This 
 feeling prevented free speech in the Senate and produced an 
 atmosphere of unreality and hypocrisy in which it was difficult 
 to breathe. The machine could only be kept going by occasional 
 suppression of those who still ventured to utter Republican 
 
 1 See Hirschfeld, Die kaiserlichen Verwaltungsbeamten (and ed. 1905), 
 pp. 471 ff.
 
 F 2
 
 84 From the Accession of Augustus 
 
 sentiments or to air their Stoic principles. The astute Augustus 
 had possessed the tact to play his part in the tragi-comedy of 
 the Royal Republic, but the part was a hard part to play and 
 few Emperors played it well. ' The one fear of the Senate ', 
 says Tacitus of Tiberius's reign, was ' that they might appear to 
 understand ' : 1 they did not dare to avow the subjection that 
 they really felt, nor could they be frankly Republican. More 
 serious, perhaps, was the fact that as there was no recognized 
 succession, for outwardly at least there was no definite monarchy, 
 the death of the prince meant certainly danger and possibly 
 revolution. The year of the four Emperors, 69, is the glaring 
 example of the dangers of unavowed monarchy. The Princi- 
 pate did indeed escape some of the evils of a purely hereditary 
 system. It. enjoyed from time to time, thanks to adoption, 
 a period of wise and settled government like that of the 
 Antonines. But it was at a heavy cost of uncertainty, and of 
 all the horrors of battle, murder, and sudden death, which 
 uncertainty entailed. 
 
 Apart from this inherent weakness there was much that 
 promised well. Law and justice first. The strength of the 
 Roman State, as we saw, rested largely on its law and its judicial 
 system. But ' laws are silent in the clash of arms ' 2 and there 
 was much need for reconstruction. We cannot go into detail. 
 It is enough to say that the old standing courts of criminal law, 
 as organized by Sulla, survived, but under a supervision which 
 prevented abuse. By their side were instituted two new high 
 criminal courts the Senate sitting as a court and the 
 Princeps who sat and decided cases with the help of his Council, 
 selected from the two higher orders. These two courts dealt 
 with all criminal cases which concerned persons of importance, 
 
 1 Tac. Ann. i. n. 
 
 2 ' Silent enim leges inter arma ', Cic. pro Milone, iv. 10.
 
 to the Death of Marcus Aurelius 85 
 
 and among others all which concerned the doings of provincial 
 governors. Governors still committed crimes, but if they did, 
 they were brought to book. At the same time the civil law, 
 with the widely extended Empire and the increasing business 
 which administration and commerce brought to Rome, 
 continued its development through the Praetorian Edict and 
 the Responsa Prudentium the authorized opinions given by 
 the great lawyers and so prepared the way for the great 
 imperial codes of the later Empire. This is a silent growth, 
 which historians too often forget, and it is one of the great 
 works and perhaps the greatest glory of the Empire. 
 
 The Empire with its various opportunities of service did 
 call out men's powers. The historians indeed are apt to give 
 us only the morbid side of imperial life the discontents and 
 discomforts, the vices and the vanities of the capital, the 
 pettiness and the luxury and the oppressive sense of impotence 
 among the governing class. But even through the historians' 
 pages come glimpses of a nobler quality. If the air of Rome 
 was stifling and exhausted, there were great and exhilarating 
 tasks in the defence of frontiers, in the reorganization or 
 Romanization of new provinces, in the just and wise administra- 
 tion of distant and difficult populations. What such a life 
 might mean and how it might appeal not only to men of old 
 senatorial nobility, but to men of newer family who were 
 constantly coming in to reinforce the decaying stocks, may be 
 seen from the lives of men like Corbulo and Virginius Rufus, 
 Agricola and Vespasian. But Corbulo's death showed that to 
 live as a great Senator meant always to live dangerously, and 
 Tacitus's words on the death of Poppaeus Sabinus in 35, 
 a trusted governor of three provinces, are a melancholy re- 
 minder that absolute monarchy tends to promote mediocrity : 
 ' for twenty-four years he had been -retained in command of
 
 86 Augustus to Marcus Aurelius 
 
 important provinces : not for any conspicuous ability that he 
 possessed, but because he was competent and not more than 
 competent.' x But competence and justice were not virtues to 
 despise, and for two centuries they did wonders for the Empire. 
 What they did is written in the records of inscriptions in many 
 provinces and of thousands of potsherds and papyri from Egypt. 
 These records recall us to what we have left out of sight for 
 a moment the local units of government, the town and village 
 life of the Empire. Each province, we must remember, was 
 like Italy, not a uniform surface, but a complex of cities, 
 villages, or tribal units with a variety of rights and privileges. 
 All were subject to tribute unless specially exempted, but while 
 some had Latin or Roman rights with municipal constitutions of 
 the Italian pattern, others were developed on their own peculiar 
 lines : thus Cappadocia and Egypt retained their old divisions 
 into generalships or nomes : Asia and the Greek East in general 
 consisted mainly of cities of the Hellenic pattern with Greek 
 magistrates and council not unlike the Latin magistrates 
 (II viri) and Senate (Decurions) but not leading on, like the 
 Latin type, to Roman citizenship and high imperial service. 
 In Gaul, the old province (Gallia Narbonensis) was intensely 
 permeated by Roman institutions : the North shared Roman 
 culture, but its organization was based on the old canton 
 system, with central towns which grew into important cities 
 but, with rare exceptions, without full Roman or Latin rights : 
 Spain, in every one of its three provinces was steadily and con- 
 sistently becoming permeated with the Roman type of city 
 life : Africa had important Roman colonies and it also in- 
 cluded great imperial estates (saltus], and a wide fringe of open 
 country in which hundreds of native tribes had to receive 
 justice and order from the subordinate officials of the Govern- 
 1 ' Par negotiis neque supra erat ', Tac. Ann. vi. 39.
 
 The Palatine from the Colosseum, Rome, by Francis Towne.
 
 88 From the Accession of Augustus 
 
 ment : the Danubian provinces developed new Roman 
 centres round the great camps and highways. And throughout 
 this vast and varied extent of Empire the Graeco-Roman 
 culture followed the flag. Juvenal's words : 
 
 Gallia causidicos docuit facunda Britannos, 
 Glib Gaul has taught the Britains how to plead, 
 
 show us how culture passed from Italy to Gaul and thence to 
 Britain. Athens in the east and Massilia (Marseilles) in the 
 west became universities for young nobles from different parts 
 of the Empire. 
 
 How the Mediterranean world became unified by Roman 
 government and improved communications is shown by the 
 story of Epictetus and his works. Epictetus, slave and Stoic, 
 came to Rome and taught there. Exiled under Domitian, he 
 lectured at Nicopolis. That we possess his discourses, the 
 lectures that he gave at Nicopolis, is due to the accident that 
 Arrian of Nicomedia in Bithynia, who later rose to high imperial 
 office as governor of Bithynia, attended Epictetus's lectures 
 and published them from his notes. The works of Martial and 
 Seneca bear witness to the culture of Spain. Roman Africa, 
 which French savants have done so much to make known to us, 
 produced the romantic Latin prose of Apuleius, and later on 
 the eloquent utterances of Tertullian and Augustine. But 
 Augustine's ' City of God ' carries us beyond the limits we 
 have set for ourselves, into the region of the Christian Empire. 
 In the first two centuries of the Empire we have only to notice 
 that among the influences, philosophic and religious, which 
 were penetrating the Roman world were many faiths which 
 offered new consolation and new hope to a world which had 
 outgrown the early Italian worships and craved for a religion 
 more comprehensive and more cosmopolitan. 1 The Stoic and 
 1 Cf . T. R. Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Empire.
 
 to the Death of Marcus Aurelius 89 
 
 Epicurean philosophies, the religions of Isis and Mithras and 
 Christ were permeating the society of Rome and the Empire, 
 where Judaism had long before penetrated. The fact of 
 Rome's Empire over the Graeco-Roman world and the com- 
 munications between Asia and Europe established by the 
 Empire made possible the spread of the Christian faith to 
 Macedonia, Greece, and Italy, and eventually over the whole of 
 Europe. Without that link between East and West afforded 
 by the unity of Roman government, Christianity might have 
 remained a purely Oriental religion. Paul of Tarsus was a Jew, 
 but he was also a Roman citizen, with the rights of a Roman 
 throughout the Empire ; but his city was not Roman, but 
 Greek. He is typical of the new relations between Greek 
 culture as modified by Eastern ideas, and the institutions and 
 government of Rome. We cannot trace here the relations 
 between this new religion and the Roman government. They 
 are familiar to all in the narrative of the Acts and in the Apoca- 
 lypse, and we have glimpses of them in the Roman writers. 1 
 Acceptable as Christianity was to many men and women in the 
 Empire, especially among the poorer classes, by the appeal it 
 made to wider human sympathies, the dignity it gave to suffer- 
 ing, and among the educated, by its protest against materialism 
 and the worship of power, it was bound to collide sooner or 
 later with Government authority. The Empire allowed a wide 
 latitude in conduct, but was jealous of a society which had no 
 obvious object such as burial or trade-protection ; its wide 
 humanity, in which was no respect of persons, and no worship of 
 nationality, made it suspect. The simple test of loyalty to Rome, 
 the outward worship of Rome and the Emperor, was one the 
 Christian could not pass. That is why we find persecution of 
 
 1 Cf. E. G. Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government (in Studies in 
 Roman History, 1906).
 
 go Augustus to Marcus Aurelius 
 
 Christians even under the best Emperors, such as Trajan and 
 Marcus Aurelius, and it did not cease until the gradual per- 
 meation of the Empire by the Christian faith made the State 
 recognition of it by Constantine a matter of policy. How these 
 conflicting influences of religion and philosophy were working 
 like a leaven in the Roman world may be seen in Sir Samuel 
 Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius or in 
 Mr., Glover's book on the conflict of religions, or in a more 
 personal form in Dr. Edwin Abbott's Silanus the Christian and 
 Pater's Marius the Epicurean. 
 
 Throughout the first two centuries of the Empire many 
 regions of Europe enjoyed peaceful growth and development 
 under the Roman rule. The frontiers were consolidated, life 
 flourished in many hundreds of communities of Latin or 
 Hellenic type : 1 trade and culture were spread as wide as the 
 Roman world. But even in this period signs of decline began 
 to appear. Italy fell away in population and productiveness. 
 Large tracts of the land in Italy and the provinces became 
 absorbed in enormous estates (saltus) which gradually fell under 
 imperial control, and became the home of a new type of 
 tenant, the coloni, fixed to the soil and performing stated duties 
 to the lord, an anticipation of the villeinage of the Middle Ages. 
 Centralized administration became more rigid, local life 
 languished and had to be inspected and reformed and bolstered 
 up by imperial commissioners and public subsidies. The local 
 senates all over the Empire became responsible for the collection 
 of taxes. Municipal service thus became a pure burden, and 
 local production broke down under imperial charges. The 
 blighting influence of a bureaucracy which became more 
 
 1 For Municipal Life, see Dessau, op. cit., vol. ii, i, cap. xiv ; E. G. Hardy, 
 Roman Laws and Charters ; J. S. Reid, Municipalities of the Roman Empire ; 
 T. W.. Arnold, Roman Provincial Administration.
 
 The Segovia Aqueduct.
 
 92 From the Accession of Augustus 
 
 exacting as agriculture and commerce became less productive, 
 gradually dried up the springs of life. Meantime the enemies 
 without, Germans and Sarmatians in the north, Parthians in 
 the east, in spite of the repeated effort spent on the organization 
 of frontiers, exercised a continual pressure, which meant 
 continuous expenditure on war and on defensive lines. 
 
 The reign of Marcus Aurelius, a philosophic lover of peace, 
 was largely taken up with a more or less continuous conflict 
 with the tribes of the North Quadi, Marcomanni, and the 
 rest. His Meditations were written in the exile of border 
 campaigns. In A.D. 166, some three hundred and fifty years 
 after its foundation as a Latin colony to guard the eastern gate 
 of Italy, Aquileia was besieged by invading Germans. Though 
 the Emperor's coins bore the title a few years later of ' Germany 
 subdued ', the Emperor's scheme for new provinces beyond 
 the northern frontier had to be abandoned and, instead, a large 
 body of German settlers were planted within the Empire. 
 This was no new thing, but it marked a stage in the process by 
 which the population of the northern provinces was gradually 
 modified by peaceful penetration, until the Empire became 
 the easy prey of the invading barbarians. 1 
 
 We saw that with the destruction of Corinth and Carthage 
 in 146 B.C. the era of Revolution began and with it the presage 
 of the monarchy. There is a memorable symmetry in the fact 
 that A.D. 146, nearly three hundred years later, was the year 
 of the birth of L. Septimius Severus, 2 with whose reign the 
 military monarchy definitely began. After the reign of Marcus 
 Aurelius's worthless son Commodus, and the brief power of 
 
 1 See Letters of Sidonius Apollinaris (A.D. 431-89), translated by 
 O. M. Dalton, Clarendon Press. 
 
 2 See The Life and Reign of Septimius Severus by M. Platnauer, Clarendon 
 Press.
 
 to the Death of Marcus Aurelius 93 
 
 Pertinax, it was the task of Septimius Severus to reorganize the 
 military forces of the Empire. The reconstruction he accom- 
 plished cost a heavy price. From now onwards Italy lost the 
 free and commanding position she had held in the Empire ; 
 the Senate became a mere appendage and echo of the Emperor, 
 whose guards no longer represented the flower of Italian 
 manhood, but were drawn from victorious legions of the 
 Danube. The military autocracy was marked by the legion 
 stationed at Albano, the old centre of the Latin League. The 
 wheel had come full circle. Rome had first climbed to power 
 in Latium as the successor of Alba Longa. Since the dissolution 
 of the Latin League in 338 B.C. she had gradually -acquired 
 control first over Italy and then over all the Mediterranean 
 lands. For five hundred years Rome had spread her civil 
 government wherever her arms had conquered, and when the 
 Republic was succeeded by the monarchy, one of the signs of 
 the Augustan Peace and of the return of civil rule was the 
 removal of the army to the frontiers. The legion planted on 
 the Alban hills was a sinister sign that Rome had come under 
 military rule and that Italy henceforward was to be little more 
 than one among many provinces. For five hundred years 
 Rome had propagated the principle of self-governing communi- 
 ties within an expanding territory, ruled by Roman magistrates 
 and Roman law, and defended by Roman armies. This vital 
 principle had achieved great results : it had created a united 
 empire in which, amid many diversities of structure Graeco- 
 Roman culture was made widely accessible and Roman law was 
 administered to all. But from the moment when Rome began 
 to hold territories beyond the sea, the taint of selfish exploitation 
 entered the fabric of the State. The rule of the early Principate, 
 as we have seen, redressed many of the grievances of the subject 
 provinces, but even so their tributary position imposed on
 
 94 From the Accession of Augustus 
 
 them a heavy burden. Though the wide extension of Roman 
 and Latin rights opened an avenue to the service of the Empire 
 for provincials from many lands, the provinces as political 
 units had no share in imperial government. The Provincial 
 Councils 1 were little more than religious assemblies : they 
 might represent their grievances to Rome, but they had no 
 effective power. The position of Rome and Italy, dependent 
 on a toiling world beyond the seas, was unnatural and unhealthy, 
 and its economic and moral decline was reflected in the gradual 
 growth of an over-staffed bureaucracy, the substitution of 
 fussiness for vitality, and the final domination by the army over 
 a senatorial order which had lost its governing manhood and 
 was rapidly becoming a mere court nobility. The monarchy 
 of Diocletian with its elaborate hierarchy of officials, its sub- 
 divided provinces and economic regulations, was only the 
 logical fulfilment of a process which was squeezing the life 
 out of the Empire. New life could only come from the more 
 vigorous races of the barbarian world outside. This is not the 
 place to trace the fall of the Empire. With all its defects it had 
 saved Graeco-Roman civilization for some centuries. The new 
 nations which ultimately broke in ' upon its life inherited in 
 Roman law and institutions influences which have profoundly 
 moulded the fabric and the life of modern Europe. 
 
 Looking back we have to ask what are the features of Roman 
 history which dwell in our minds and what constitutes Rome's 
 claim to greatness ? 
 
 We must put first the vigour and vitality of the race, 
 
 which was the primary foundation of its emergence from the 
 
 other peoples of Italy. Next, its genius for command. The 
 
 command, imperium, of the Roman magistrate, was strong and 
 
 1 E. G. Hardy, Studies in Roman History (first series).
 
 to the. Death of Marcus Aurelius 95 
 
 rooted in a deep sense of order and discipline. Moreover, it 
 showed itself capable of adaptation and adjustment to many 
 services home and foreign, civil and military, judicial and 
 administrative. It was the directing and controlling force in 
 the State. But the magistrate's power was nothing if not 
 backed up by the counsel and support of its advisers. It was 
 the fundamental principle of Rome that the magistrate must 
 take advice. Out of this advice, consilium, and the picked 
 assembly of advisers, was evolved the might and majesty of the 
 ' Assembly of kings ' as an enemy called it, the Roman Senate. 
 Further, by its skilful adaptation of the City-state to the 
 conditions of a sovereign people, governing first Italy and then 
 an extended empire, Rome invented municipal life the 
 reconciliation of local and imperial government. It is true that 
 the reconciliation to our minds was incomplete. Rome never 
 invented a representative system. The towns of the Empire 
 remained without a voice (except through individual members 
 not selected by them) in the conduct of imperial affairs. 
 But even as it was the Roman municipal system was a great 
 creation. 
 
 Finally, through its judges and lawyers, working from 
 generation to generation to adapt legal ideas to a perpetually 
 expanding polity, a noble system of law was built up for the 
 use of the world. 
 
 And if we turn to the spiritual side of life, and ask what Rome 
 contributed, what are we to say ? The creative ideas in science 
 and art, it must be admitted, belong to Greece, though we are 
 beginning to realize that Greece, too, owed something to those 
 who went before. The early Roman religion, like the worship 
 of ancestors in China, added a dignity and sanctity to family 
 life, but the religion and philosophy of the later Republic and 
 Empire was drawn from Greece and the East. Rome's literature,
 
 g6 Augustus to Marcus Aurelius 
 
 too, looked eastward, but no one can say that Lucretius and 
 Virgil, Catullus and Horace and Juvenal, Tacitus and Seneca, 
 have not distinctive qualities which mark a masterly and 
 independent race. On architecture and engineering the 
 Romans left a lasting impress, and in historic sculpture, 1 in 
 noble portraiture and the rendering of great moments of 
 history in bronze and stone, still more in the inscriptions which 
 record men's lives they were masters of the grand style. 
 
 They showed at times the hardness and unscrupulousness 
 which few expanding nations have entirely escaped ; but that 
 must not blind us to their great virtues. To sum up their 
 greatness in a word is not easy, but it is perhaps enough to 
 point to three single works that illustrate their power the 
 Aeneid of Virgil, the marble sculptures of the Ara Pads that 
 record the Peace of Augustus, and their noblest...wonurnent 
 of all the Roman Law* jfut beyond -and a boVe particular 
 monuments is the tradition of a manly tfaticmal character, 
 nurtured to noble issues by the discipline and pieties of a whole- 
 some family life : strong in natural affections and in a high 
 sense of public service : a national character which found 
 expression in the lives of thousands of dutiful citizens (whose 
 portraits in the museums of Italy appeal to us with so close 
 a kinship), and in institutions which, at their best, brought 
 order, security, and justice to the nations of the earth., 
 
 1 See Mrs. Arthur Strong, : Roman Sctilptjtre, pp.. 4pJ oil.' 
 
 Printed in England at the Oxford University Press.
 
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