CHAPTER XI

The Commonwealth and Its Economy

External and Internal Bankruptcy of the Roman State

We have traversed a period of ninety years--forty years of profound peace, fifty of an almost constant revolution. It is the most inglorious epoch known in Roman history. It is true that the Alps were crossed both in an easterly and westerly direction,(1) and the Roman arms reached in the Spanish peninsula as far as the Atlantic Ocean(2) and in the Macedono-Grecian peninsula as far as the Danube;(3) but the laurels thus gained were as cheap as they were barren. The circle of the "extraneous peoples under the will, sway, dominion, or friendship of the Roman burgesses,"(4) was not materially extended; men were content to realize the gains of a better age and to bring the communities, annexed to Rome in laxer forms of dependence, more and more into full subjection. Behind the brilliant screen of provincial reunions was concealed a very sensible decline of Roman power. While the whole ancient civilization was daily more and more distinctly embraced in the Roman state, and embodied there in forms of more general validity, the nations excluded from it began simultaneously beyond the Alps and beyond the Euphrates to pass from defence to aggression. On the battle- fields of Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae, of Chaeronea and Orchomenus, were heard the first peals of that thunderstorm, which the Germanic tribes and the Asiatic hordes were destined to bring upon the Italo- Grecian world, and the last dull rolling of which has reached almost to our own times. But in internal development also this epoch bears the same character. The old organization collapses irretrievably. The Roman commonwealth was planned as an urban community, which through its free burgess-body gave to itself rulers and laws; which was governed by these well-advised rulers within these legal limits with kingly freedom; and around which the Italian confederacy, as an aggregate of free urban communities essentially homogeneous and cognate with the Roman, and the body of extra-Italian allies, as an aggregate of Greek free cities and barbaric peoples and principalities--both more superintended, than domineered over, by the community of Rome--formed a double circle. It was the final result of the revolution--and both parties, the nominally conservative as well as the democratic party, had co- operated towards it and concurred in it--that of this venerable structure, which at the beginning of the present epoch, though full of chinks and tottering, still stood erect, not one stone was at its close left upon another. The holder of sovereign power was now either a single man, or a close oligarchy--now of rank, now of riches. The burgesses had lost all legitimate share in the government. The magistrates were instruments without independence in the hands of the holder of power for the time being. The urban community of Rome had broken down by its unnatural enlargement. The Italian confederacy had been merged in the urban community. The body of extra-Italian allies was in full course of being converted into a body of subjects. The whole organic classification of the Roman commonwealth had gone to wreck, and nothing was left but a crude mass of more or less disparate elements.

The Prospect

The state of matters threatened to end in utter anarchy and in the inward and outward dissolution of the state. The political movement tended thoroughly towards the goal of despotism; the only point still in dispute was whether the close circle of the families of rank, or the senate of capitalists, or a monarch was to be the despot. The political movement followed thoroughly the paths that led to despotism; the fundamental principle of a free commonwealth-- that the contending powers should reciprocally confine themselves to indirect coercion--had become effete in the eyes of all parties alike, and on both sides the fight for power began to be carried on first by the bludgeon, and soon by the sword. The revolution, at an end in so far as the old constitution was recognized by both sides as finally set aside and the aim and method of the new political development were clearly settled, had yet up to this time discovered nothing but provisional solutions for this problem of the reorganization of the state; neither the Gracchan nor the Sullan constitution of the community bore the stamp of finality. But the bitterest feature of this bitter time was that even hope and effort failed the clear-seeing patriot. The sun of freedom with all its endless store of blessings was constantly drawing nearer to its setting, and the twilight was settling over the very world that was still so brilliant. It was no accidental catastrophe which patriotism and genius might have warded off; it was ancient social evils--at the bottom of all, the ruin of the middle class by the slave proletariate--that brought destruction on the Roman commonwealth. The most sagacious statesman was in the plight of the physician to whom it is equally painful to prolong or to abridge the agony of his patient. Beyond doubt it was the better for the interests of Rome, the more quickly and thoroughly a despot set aside all remnants of the ancient free constitution, and invented new forms and expressions for the moderate measure of human prosperity for which in absolutism there is room: the intrinsic advantage, which belonged to monarchy under the given circumstances as compared with any oligarchy, lay mainly in the very circumstance that such a despotism, energetic in pulling down and energetic in building up, could never be exercised by a collegiate board. But such calm considerations do not mould history; it is not reason it is passion alone, that builds for the future. The Romans had just to wait and to see how long their commonwealth would continue unable to live and unable to die, and whether it would ultimately find its master and, so far as might be possible, its regenerator, in a man of mighty gifts, or would collapse in misery and weakness.

Finances of the State

It remains that we should notice the economic and social relations of the period before us, so far as we have not already done so.

Italian Revenues

The finances of the state were from the commencement of this epoch substantially dependent on the revenues from the provinces. In Italy the land-tax, which had always occurred there merely as an extraordinary impost by the side of the ordinary domanial and other revenues, had not been levied since the battle of Pydna, so that absolute freedom from land-tax began to be regarded as a constitutional privilege of the Roman landowner. The royalties of the state, such as the salt monopoly(5) and the right of coinage, were not now at least, if ever at all, treated as sources of income. The new tax on inheritance(6) was allowed to fall into abeyance or was perhaps directly abolished. Accordingly the Roman exchequer drew from Italy including Cisalpine Gaul nothing but the produce of the domains, particularly of the Campanian territory and of the gold mines in the land of the Celts, and the revenue from manumissions and from goods imported by sea into the Roman civic territory not for the personal consumption of the importer. Both of these may be regarded essentially as taxes on luxury, and they certainly must have been considerably augmented by the extension of the field of Roman citizenship and at the same time of Roman customs-dues to all Italy, probably including Cisalpine Gaul.

Provincial Revenues

In the provinces the Roman state claimed directly as its private property, on the one hand, in the states annulled by martial law the whole domain, on the other hand in those states, where the Roman government came in room of the former rulers, the landed property possessed by the latter. By virtue of this right the territories of Leontini, Carthage, and Corinth, the domanial property of the kings of Macedonia, Pergamus, and Cyrene, the mines in Spain and Macedonia were regarded as Roman domains; and, in like manner with the territory of Capua, were leased by the Roman censors to private contractors in return for the delivery of a proportion of the produce or a fixed sum of money. We have already explained that Gaius Gracchus went still farther, claimed the whole land of the provinces as domain, and in the case of the province of Asia practically carried out this principle; inasmuch as he legally justified the -decumae-, -scriptura-, and -vectigalia- levied there on the ground of the Roman state's right of property in the land, pasture, and coasts of the province, whether these had previously belonged to the king or private persons.(7)

There do not appear to have been at this period any royalties from which the state derived profit, as respected the provinces; the prohibition of the culture of the vine and olive in Transalpine Gaul did not benefit the state-chest as such. On the other hand direct and indirect taxes were levied to a great extent. The client states recognized as fully sovereign--such as the kingdoms of Numidia and Cappadocia, the allied states (-civitates foederatae-) of Rhodes, Messana, Tauromenium, Massilia, Gades--were legally exempt from taxation, and merely bound by their treaties to support the Roman republic in times of war by regularly furnishing a fixed number of ships or men at their own expense, and, as a matter of course in case of need, by rendering extraordinary aid of any kind.

Taxes

The rest of the provincial territory on the other hand, even including the free cities, was throughout liable to taxation; the only exceptions were the cities invested with the Roman franchise, such as Narbo, and the communities on which immunity from taxation was specially conferred (-civitates immunes-), such as Centuripa in Sicily. The direct taxes consisted partly--as in Sicily and Sardinia--of a title to the tenth(8) of the sheaves and other field produce as of grapes and olives, or, if the land lay in pasture, to a corresponding -scriptura-; partly--as in Macedonia, Achaia, Cyrene, the greater part of Africa, the two Spains, and by Sulla's arrangements also in Asia--of a fixed sum of money to be paid annually by each community to Rome (-stipendium-, -tributum-). This amounted, e. g. for all Macedonia, to 600,000 -denarii- (24,000 pounds), for the small island of Gyaros near Andros to 150 -denarii- (6 pounds, 10 shillings), and was apparently on the whole low and less than the tax paid before the Roman rule. Those ground-tenths and pasture-moneys the state farmed out to private contractors on condition of their paying fixed quantities of grain or fixed sums of money; with respect to the latter money-payments the state drew upon the respective communities, and left it to these to assess the amount, according to the general principles laid down by the Roman government, on the persons liable, and to collect it from them.(9)

Customs

The indirect taxes consisted--apart from the subordinate moneys levied from roads, bridges, and canals--mainly of customs-duties. The customs-duties of antiquity were, if not exclusively, at any rate principally port-dues, less frequently frontier-dues, on imports and exports destined for sale, and were levied by each community in its ports and its territory at discretion. The Romans recognized this principle generally, in so far as their original customs-domain did not extend farther than the range of the Roman franchise and the limit of the customs was by no means coincident with the limits of the empire, so that a general imperial tariff was unknown: it was only by means of state-treaty that a total exemption from customs-dues in the client communities was secured for the Roman state, and in various cases at least favourable term for the Roman burgess. But in those districts, which had not been admitted to alliance with Rome but were in the condition of subjects proper and had not acquired immunity, the customs fell as a matter of course to the proper sovereign, that is, to the Roman community; and in consequence of this several larger regions within the empire were constituted as separate Roman customs-districts, in which the several communities allied or privileged with immunity were marked off as exempt from Roman customs. Thus Sicily even from the Carthaginian period formed a closed customs-district, on the frontier of which a tax of 5 per cent on the value was levied from all imports or exports; thus on the frontiers of Asia there was levied in consequence of the Sempronian law(10) a similar tax of 21 per cent; in like manner the province of Narbo, exclusively the domain of the Roman colony, was organized as a Roman customs- district This arrangement, besides its fiscal objects, may have been partly due to the commendable purpose of checking the confusion inevitably arising out of a variety of communal tolls by a uniform regulation of frontier-dues. The levying of the customs, like that of the tenths, was without exception leased to middlemen.

Costs of Collection

The ordinary burdens of Roman taxpayers were limited to these imposts; but we may not overlook the fact, that the expenses of collection were very considerable, and the contributors paid an amount disproportionately great as compared with what the Roman government received. For, while the system of collecting taxes by middlemen, and especially by general lessees, is in itself the most expensive of all, in Rome effective competition was rendered extremely difficult in consequence of the slight extent to which the lettings were subdivided and the immense association of capital.

Requisitions

To these ordinary burdens, however, fell to be added in the first place the requisitions which were made. The costs of military administration were in law defrayed by the Roman community. It provided the commandants of every province with the means of transport and all other requisites; it paid and provisioned the Roman soldiers in the province. The provincial communities had to furnish merely shelter, wood, hay, and similar articles free of cost to the magistrates and soldiers; in fact the free towns were even ordinarily exempted from the winter quartering of the troops-- permanent camps were not yet known. If the governor therefore needed grain, ships, slaves to man them, linen, leather, money, or aught else, he was no doubt absolutely at liberty in time of war--nor was it far otherwise in time of peace--to demand such supplies according to his discretion and exigencies from the subject- communities or the sovereign protected states; but these supplies were, like the Roman land-tax, treated legally as purchases or advances, and the value was immediately or afterwards made good by the Roman exchequer. Nevertheless these requisitions became, if not in the theory of state-law, at any rate practically, one of the most oppressive burdens of the provincials; and the more so, that the amount of compensation was ordinarily settled by the government or even by the governor after a one-sided fashion. We meet indeed with several legislative restrictions on this dangerous right of requisition of the Roman superior magistrates: for instance, the rule already mentioned, that in Spain there should not be taken from the country people by requisitions for grain more than the twentieth sheaf, and that the price even of this should be equitably ascertained;(11) the fixing of a maximum quantity of grain to be demanded by the governor for the wants of himself and his retinue; the previous adjustment of a definite and high rate of compensation for the grain which was frequently demanded, at least from Sicily, for the wants of the capital. But, while by fixing such rules the pressure of those requisitions on the economy of the communities and of individuals in the province was doubtless mitigated here and there, it was by no means removed. In extraordinary crises this pressure unavoidably increased and often went beyond all bounds, for then in fact the requisitions not unfrequently assumed the form of a punishment imposed or that of voluntary contributions enforced, and compensation was thus wholly withheld. Thus Sulla in 670-671 compelled the provincials of Asia Minor, who certainly had very gravely offended against Rome, to furnish to every common soldier quartered among them forty-fold pay (per day 16 -denarii- = 11 shillings), to every centurion seventy-five-fold pay, in addition to clothing and meals along with the right to invite guests at pleasure; thus the same Sulla soon afterwards imposed a general contribution on the client and subject communities,(12) in which case nothing, of course, was said of repayment.

Local Burdens

Further the local public burdens are not to be left out of view. They must have been, comparatively, very considerable;(13) for the costs of administration, the keeping of the public buildings in repair, and generally all civil expenses were borne by the local budget, and the Roman government simply undertook to defray the military expenses from their coffers. But even of this military budget considerable items were devolved on the communities--such as the expense of making and maintaining the non-Italian military roads, the costs of the fleets in the non-Italian seas, nay even in great part the outlays for the army, inasmuch as the forces of the client-states as well as those of the subjects were regularly liable to serve at the expense of their communities within their province, and began to be employed with increasing frequency even beyond it--Thracians in Africa, Africans in Italy, arid so on--at the discretion of the Romans.(14) If the provinces only and not Italy paid direct taxes to the government, this was equitable in a financial, if not in a political, aspect so long as Italy alone bore the burdens and expense of the military system; but from the time that this system was abandoned, the provincials were, in a financial point of view, decidedly overburdened.

Extortions

Lastly we must not forget the great chapter of injustice by which in manifold ways the Roman magistrates and farmers of the revenue augmented the burden of taxation on the provinces. Although every present which the governor took might be treated legally as an exaction, and even his right of purchase might be restricted by law, yet the exercise of his public functions offered to him, if he was disposed to do wrong, pretexts more than enough for doing so. The quartering of the troops; the free lodging of the magistrates and of the host of adjutants of senatorial or equestrian rank, of clerks, lictors, heralds, physicians, and priests; the right which the messengers of the state had to be forwarded free of cost; the approval of, and providing transport for, the contributions payable in kind; above all the forced sales and the requisitions--gave all magistrates opportunity to bring home princely fortunes from the provinces. And the plundering became daily more general, the more that the control of the government appeared to be worthless and that of the capitalist-courts to be in reality dangerous to the upright magistrate alone. The institution of a standing commission regarding the exactions of magistrates in the provinces, occasioned by the frequency of complaints as to such cases, in 605,(15) and the laws as to extortion following each other so rapidly and constantly augmenting its penalties, show the daily increasing height of the evil, as the Nilometer shows the rise of the flood.

Under all these circumstances even a taxation moderate in theory might become extremely oppressive in its actual operation; and that it was so is beyond doubt, although the financial oppression, which the Italian merchants and bankers exercised over the provinces, was probably felt as a far heavier burden than the taxation with all the abuses that attached to it.

Aggregate Financial Result

If we sum up, the income which Rome drew from the provinces was not properly a taxation of the subjects in the sense which we now attach to that expression, but rather in the main a revenue that may be compared with the Attic tributes, by means of which the leading state defrayed the expense of the military system which it maintained. This explains the surprisingly small amount of the gross as well as of the net proceeds. There exists a statement, according to which the income of Rome, exclusive, it may be presumed, of the Italian revenues and of the grain delivered in kind to Italy by the -decumani- up to 691 amounted to not more than 200 millions of sesterces (2,000,000 pounds); that is, but two-thirds of the sum which the king of Egypt drew from his country annually. The proportion can only seem strange at the first glance. The Ptolemies turned to account the valley of the Nile as great, plantation-owners, and drew immense sums from their monopoly of the commercial intercourse with the east; the Roman treasury was not much more than the joint military chest of the communities united under Rome's protection. The net produce was probably still less in proportion. The only provinces yielding a considerable surplus were perhaps Sicily, where the Carthaginian system of taxation prevailed, and more especially Asia from the time that Gaius Gracchus, in order to provide for his largesses of corn, had carried out the confiscation of the soil and a general domanial taxation there. According to manifold testimonies the finances of the Roman state were essentially dependent on the revenues of Asia. The assertion sounds quite credible that the other provinces on an average cost nearly as much as they brought in; in fact those which required a considerable garrison, such as the two Spains, Transalpine Gaul, and Macedonia, probably often cost more than they yielded. On the whole certainly the Roman treasury in ordinary times possessed a surplus, which enabled them amply to defray the expense of the buildings of the state and city, and to accumulate a reserve-fund; but even the figures appearing for these objects, when compared with the wide domain of the Roman rule, attest the small amount of the net proceeds of the Roman taxes. In a certain sense therefore the old principle equally honourable and judicious-- that the political hegemony should not be treated as a privilege yielding profit--still governed the financial administration of the provinces as it had governed that of Rome in Italy. What the Roman community levied from its transmarine subjects was, as a rule, re- expended for the military security of the transmarine possessions; and if these Roman imposts fell more heavily on those who paid them than the earlier taxation, in so far as they were in great part expended abroad, the substitution, on the other hand, of a single ruler and a centralized military administration for the many petty rulers and armies involved a very considerable financial saving. It is true, however, that this principle of a previous better age came from the very first to be infringed and mutilated by the numerous exceptions which were allowed to prevail. The ground- tenth levied by Hiero and Carthage in Sicily went far beyond the amount of an annual war-contributioa With justice moreover Scipio Aemilianus says in Cicero, that it was unbecoming for the Roman burgess-body to be at the same time the ruler and the tax-gatherer of the nations. The appropriation of the customs-dues was not compatible with the principle of disinterested hegemony, and the high rates of the customs as well as the vexatious mode of levying them were not fitted to allay the sense of the injustice thereby inflicted. Even as early probably as this period the name of publican became synonymous among the eastern peoples with that of rogue and robber: no burden contributed so much as this to make the Roman name offensive and odious especially in the east. But when Gaius Gracchus and those who called themselves the "popular party" in Rome came to the helm, political sovereignty was declared in plain terms to be a right which entitled every one who shared in it to a number of bushels of corn, the hegemony was converted into a direct ownership of the soil, and the most complete system of making the most of that ownership was not only introduced but with shameless candour legally justified and proclaimed. It was certainly not a mere accident, that the hardest lot in this respect fell precisely to the two least warlike provinces, Sicily and Asia.

The Finances and Public Buildings

An approximate measure of the condition of Roman finance at this period is furnished, in the absence of definite statements, first of all by the public buildings. In the first decades of this epoch these were prosecuted on the greatest scale, and the construction of roads in particular had at no time been so energetically pursued. In Italy the great southern highway of presumably earlier origin, which as a prolongation of the Appian road ran from Rome by way of Capua, Beneventum, and Venusia to the ports of Tarentum and Brundisium, had attached to it a branch-road from Capua to the Sicilian straits, a work of Publius Popillius, consul in 622. On the east coast, where hitherto only the section from Fanum to Ariminum had been constructed as part of the Flaminian highway (ii. 229), the coast road was prolonged southward as far as Brundisium, northward by way of Atria on the Po as far as Aquileia, and the portion at least from Ariminum to Atria was formed by the Popillius just mentioned in the same year. The two great Etruscan highways-- the coast or Aurelian road from Rome to Pisa and Luna, which was in course of formation in 631, and the Cassian road leading by way of Sutrium and Clusium to Arretium and Florentia, which seems not to have been constructed before 583--may as Roman public highways belong only to this age. About Rome itself new projects were not required; but the Mulvian bridge (Ponte Molle), by which the Flaminian road crossed the Tiber not far from Rome, was in 645 reconstructed of stone. Lastly in Northern Italy, which hitherto had possessed no other artificial road than the Flaminio-Aemilian terminating at Placentia, the great Postumian road was constructed in 606, which led from Genua by way of Dertona, where probably a colony was founded at the same time, and onward by way of Placentia, where it joined the Flaminio-Aemilian road, and of Cremona and Verona to Aquileia, and thus connected the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic seas; to which was added the communication established in 645 by Marcus Aemilius Scaurus between Luna and Genua, which connected the Postumian road directly with Rome. Gaius Gracchus exerted himself in another way for the improvement of the Italian roads. He secured the due repair of the great rural roads by assigning, on occasion of his distribution of lands, pieces of ground alongside of the roads, to which was attached the obligation of keeping them in repair as an heritable burden. To him, moreover, or at any rate to the allotment-commission, the custom of erecting milestones appears to be traceable, as well as that of marking the limits of fields by regular boundary-stones. Lastly he provided for good -viae vicinales-, with the view of thereby promoting agriculture. But of still greater moment was the construction of the imperial highways in the provinces, which beyond doubt began in this epoch. The Domitian highway after long preparations(16) furnished a secure land-route from Italy to Spain, and was closely connected with the founding of Aquae Sextiae and Narbo;(17) the Gabinian(18) and the Egnatian (19) led from the principal places on the east coast of the Adriatic sea--the former from Salona, the latter from Apollonia and Dyrrhachium--into the interior; the network of roads laid out by Manius Aquillius immediately after the erection of the Asiatic province in 625 led from the capital Ephesus in different directions towards the frontier. Of the origin of these works no mention is to be found in the fragmentary tradition of this epoch, but they were nevertheless undoubtedly connected with the consolidation of the Roman rule in Gaul, Dalmatia, Macedonia, and Asia Minor, and came to be of the greatest importance for the centralization of the state and the civilizing of the subjugated barbarian districts.

In Italy at least great works of drainage were prosecuted as well as the formation of roads. In 594 the drying of the Pomptine marshes--a vital matter for Central Italy--was set about with great energy and at least temporary success; in 645 the draining of the low-lying lands between Parma and Placentia was effected in connection with the construction of the north Italian highway. Moreover, the government did much for the Roman aqueducts, as indispensable for the health and comfort of the capital as they were costly. Not only were the two that had been in existence since the years 442 and 492--the Appian and the Anio aqueducts-- thoroughly repaired in 610, but two new ones were formed; the Marcian in 610, which remained afterwards unsurpassed for the excellence and abundance of the water, and the Tepula as it was called, nineteen years later. The power of the Roman exchequer to execute great operations by means of payments in pure cash without making use of the system of credit, is very clearly shown by the way in which the Marcian aqueduct was created: the sum required for it of 180,000,000 sesterces (in gold nearly 2,000,000 pounds) was raised and applied within three years. This leads us to infer a very considerable reserve in the treasury: in fact at the very beginning of this period it amounted to almost 860,000 pounds,(20) and was doubtless constantly on the increase.

All these facts taken together certainly lead to the inference that the position of the Roman finances at this epoch was on the whole favourable. Only we may not in a financial point of view overlook the fact that, while the government during the two earlier thirds of this period executed splendid and magnificent buildings, it neglected to make other outlays at least as necessary. We have already indicated how unsatisfactory were its military provisions; the frontier countries and even the valley of the Po(21) were pillaged by barbarians, and bands of robbers made havoc in the interior even of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Italy. The fleet even was totally neglected; there was hardly any longer a Roman vessel of war; and the war-vessels, which the subject cities were required to build and maintain, were not sufficient, so that Rome was not only absolutely unable to carry on a naval war, but was not even in a position to check the trade of piracy. In Rome itself a number of the most necessary improvements were left untouched, and the river- buildings in particular were singularly neglected. The capital still possessed no other bridge over the Tiber than the primitive wooden gangway, which led over the Tiber island to the Janiculum; the Tiber was still allowed to lay the streets every year under water, and to demolish houses and in fact not unfrequently whole districts, without anything being done to strengthen the banks; mighty as was the growth of transmarine commerce, the roadstead of Ostia--already by nature bad--was allowed to become more and more sanded up. A government, which under the most favourable circumstances and in an epoch of forty years of peace abroad and at home neglected such duties, might easily allow taxes to fall into abeyance and yet obtain an annual surplus of income over expenditure and a considerable reserve; but such a financial administration by no means deserves commendation for its mere semblance of brilliant results, but rather merits the same censure-- in respect of laxity, want of unity in management, mistaken flattery of the people--as falls to be brought in every other sphere of political life against the senatorial government of this epoch.

The Finances in the Revolution

The financial condition of Rome of course assumed a far worse aspect, when the storms of revolution set in. The new and, even in a mere financial point of view, extremely oppressive burden imposed upon the state by the obligation under which Gaius Gracchus placed it to furnish corn at nominal rates to the burgesses of the capital, was certainly counterbalanced at first by the newly-opened sources of income in the province of Asia. Nevertheless the public buildings seem from that time to have almost come to a standstill. While the public works which can be shown to have been constructed from the battle of Pydna down to the time of Gaius Gracchus were numerous, from the period after 632 there is scarcely mention of any other than the projects of bridges, roads, and drainage which Marcus Aemilius Scaurus organized as censor in 645. It must remain a moot point whether this was the effect of the largesses of grain or, as is perhaps more probable, the consequence of the system of increased savings, such as befitted a government which became daily more and more a rigid oligarchy, and such as is indicated by the statement that the Roman reserve reached its highest point in 663. The terrible storm of insurrection and revolution, in combination with the five years' deficit of the revenues of Asia Minor, was the first serious trial to which the Roman finances were subjected after the Hannibalic war: they failed to sustain it. Nothing perhaps so clearly marks the difference of the times as the circumstance that in the Hannibalic war it was not till the tenth year of the struggle, when the burgesses were almost sinking under taxation, that the reserve was touched;(22) whereas the Social war was from the first supported by the balance in hand, and when this was expended after two campaigns to the last penny, they preferred to sell by auction the public sites in the capital(23) and to seize the treasures of the temples(24) rather than levy a tax on the burgesses. The storm however, severe as it was, passed over; Sulla, at the expense doubtless of enormous economic sacrifices imposed on the subjects and Italian revolutionists in particular, restored order to the finances and, by abolishing the largesses of corn and retaining although in a reduced form the Asiatic revenues, secured for the commonwealth a satisfactory economic condition, at least in the sense of the ordinary expenditure remaining far below the ordinary income.

Private Economics Agriculture

In the private economics of this period hardly any new feature emerges; the advantages and disadvantages formerly set forth as incident to the social circumstances of Italy(25) were not altered, but merely farther and more distinctly developed. In agriculture we have already seen that the growing power of Roman capital was gradually absorbing the intermediate and small landed estates in Italy as well as in the provinces, as the sun sucks up the drops of rain. The government not only looked on without preventing, but even promoted this injurious division of the soil by particular measures, especially by prohibiting the production of wine and oil beyond the Alps with a view to favour the great Italian landlords and merchants.(26) It is true that both the opposition and the section of the conservatives that entered into ideas of reform worked energetically to counteract the evil; the two Gracchi, by carrying out the distribution of almost the whole domain land, gave to the state 80,000 new Italian farmers; Sulla, by settling 120,000 colonists in Italy, filled up at least in part the gaps which the revolution and he himself had made in the ranks of the Italian yeomen. But, when a vessel is emptying itself by constant efflux, the evil is to be remedied not by pouring in even considerable quantities, but only by the establishment of a constant influx-- a remedy which was on various occasions attempted, but not with success. In the provinces, not even the smallest effort was made to save the farmer class there from being bought out by the Roman speculators; the provincials, forsooth, were merely men, and not a party. The consequence was, that even the rents of the soil beyond Italy flowed more and more to Rome. Moreover the plantation- system, which about the middle of this epoch had already gained the ascendant even in particular districts of Italy, such as Etruria, had, through the co-operation of an energetic and methodical management and abundant pecuniary resources, attained to a state of high prosperity after its kind. The production of Italian wine in particular, which was artificially promoted partly by the opening of forced markets in a portion of the provinces, partly by the prohibition of foreign wines in Italy as expressed for instance in the sumptuary law of 593, attained very considerable results: the Aminean and Falernian wine began to be named by the side of the Thasian and Chian, and the "Opimian wine" of 633, the Roman vintage "Eleven," was long remembered after the last jar was exhausted.

Trades

Of trades and manufactur es there is nothing to be said, except that the Italian nation in this respect persevered in an inaction bordering on barbarism. They destroyed the Corinthian factories, the depositories of so many valuable industrial traditions--not however that they might establish similar factories for themselves, but that they might buy up at extravagant prices such Corinthian vases of earthenware or copper and similar "antique works" as were preserved in Greek houses. The trades that were still somewhat prosperous, such as those connected with building, were productive of hardly any benefit for the commonwealth, because here too the system of employing slaves in every more considerable undertaking intervened: in the construction of the Marcian aqueduct, for instance, the government concluded contracts for building and materials simultaneously with 3000 master-tradesmen, each of whom then performed the work contracted for with his band of slaves.

Money-Dealing and Commerce

The most brilliant, or rather the only brilliant, side of Roman private economics was money-dealing and commerce. First of all stood the leasing of the domains and of the taxes, through which a large, perhaps the larger, part of the income of the Roman state flowed into the pockets of the Roman capitalists. The money- dealings, moreover, throughout the range of the Roman state were monopolized by the Romans; every penny circulated in Gaul, it is said in a writing issued soon after the end of this period, passes through the books of the Roman merchants, and so it was doubtless everywhere. The co-operation of rude economic conditions and of the unscrupulous employment of Rome's political ascendency for the benefit of the private interests of every wealthy Roman rendered a usurious system of interest universal, as is shown for example by the treatment of the war-tax imposed by Sulla on the province of Asia in 670, which the Roman capitalists advanced; it swelled with paid and unpaid interest within fourteen years to sixfold its original amount. The communities had to sell their public buildings, their works of art and jewels, parents had to sell their grown-up children, in order to meet the claims of the Roman creditor: it was no rare occurrence for the debtor to be not merely subjected to moral torture, but directly placed upon the rack. To these sources of gain fell to be added the wholesale traffic. The exports and imports of Italy were very considerable. The former consisted chiefly of wine and oil, with which Italy and Greece almost exclusively--for the production of wine in the Massiliot and Turdetanian territories can at that time have been but small-- supplied the whole region of the Mediterranean; Italian wine was sent in considerable quantities to the Balearic islands and Celtiberia, to Africa, which was merely a corn and pasture country, to Narbo and into the interior of Gaul. Still more considerable was the import to Italy, where at that time all luxury was concentrated, and whither most articles of luxury for food, drink, or clothing, ornaments, books, household furniture, works of art were imported by sea. The traffic in slaves, above all, received through the ever-increasing demand of the Roman merchants an impetus to which no parallel had been known in the region of the Mediterranean, and which stood in the closest connection with the flourishing of piracy. All lands and all nations were laid under contribution for slaves, but the places where they were chiefly captured were Syria and the interior of Asia Minor.(27)

Ostia Puteoli

In Italy the transmarine imports were chiefly concentrated in the two great emporia on the Tyrrhene sea, Ostia and Puteoli. The grain destined for the capital was brought to Ostia, which was far from having a good roadstead, but, as being the nearest port to Rome, was the most appropriate mart for less valuable wares; whereas the traffic in luxuries with the east was directed mainly to Puteoli, which recommended itself by its good harbour for ships with valuable cargoes, and presented to merchants a market in its immediate neighbourhood little inferior to that of the capital-- the district of Baiae, which came to be more and more filled with villas. For a long time this latter traffic was conducted through Corinth and after its destruction through Delos, and in this sense accordingly Puteoli is called by Lucilius the Italian "Little Delos"; but after the catastrophe which befel Delos in the Mithradatic war,(28) and from which it never recovered, the Puteolans entered into direct commercial connections with Syria and Alexandria, and their city became more and more decidedly the first seat of transmarine commerce in Italy. But it was not merely the gain which was made by the Italian exports and imports, that fell mainly to the Italians; at Narbo they competed in the Celtic trade with the Massiliots, and in general it admits of no doubt that the Roman merchants to be met with everywhere, floating or settled, took to themselves the best share of all speculations.

Capitalist Oligarchy

Putting together these phenomena, we recognize as the most prominent feature in the private economy of this epoch the financial oligarchy of Roman capitalists standing alongside of, and on a par with, the political oligarchy. In their hands were united the rents of the soil of almost all Italy and of the best portions of the provincial territory, the proceeds at usury of the capital monopolized by them, the commercial gain from the whole empire, and lastly, a very considerable part of the Roman state-revenue in the form of profits accruing from the lease of that revenue. The daily-increasing accumulation of capital is evident in the rise of the average rate of wealth: 3,000,000 sesterces (30,000 pounds) was now a moderate senatorial, 2,000,000 (20,000 pounds) was a decent equestrian fortune; the property of the wealthiest man of the Gracchan age, Publius Crassus consul in 623 was estimated at 100,000,000 sesterces (1,000,000 pounds). It is no wonder, that this capitalist order exercised a preponderant influence on external policy; that it destroyed out of commercial rivalry Carthage and Corinth(29) as the Etruscans had formerly destroyed Alalia and the Syracusans Caere; that it in spite of the senate upheld the colony of Narbo.(30) It is likewise no wonder, that this capitalist oligarchy engaged in earnest and often victorious competition with the oligarchy of the nobles in internal politics. But it is also no wonder, that ruined men of wealth put themselves at the head of bands of revolted slaves,(31) and rudely reminded the public that the transition is easy from the haunts of fashionable debauchery to the robber's cave. It is no wonder, that that financial tower of Babel, with its foundation not purely economic but borrowed from the political ascendency of Rome, tottered at every serious political crisis nearly in the same way as our very similar fabric of a paper currency. The great financial crisis, which in consequence of the Italo-Asiatic commotions of 664 f. set in upon the Roman capitalist-class, the bankruptcy of the state and of private persons, the general depreciation of landed property and of partnership-shares, can no longer be traced out in detail; but their general nature and their importance are placed beyond doubt by their results--the murder of the praetor by a band of creditors,(32) the attempt to eject from the senate all the senators not free of debt,(33) the renewal of the maximum of interest by Sulla,(34) the cancelling of 75 per cent of all debts by the revolutionary party.(35) The consequence of this system was naturally general impoverishment and depopulation in the provinces, whereas the parasitic population of migratory or temporarily settled Italians was everywhere on the increase. In Asia Minor 80,000 men of Italian origin are said to have perished in one day.(36) How numerous they were in Delos, is evident from the tombstones still extant on the island and from the statement that 20,000 foreigners, mostly Italian merchants, were put to death there by command of Mithradates.(37) In Africa the Italians were so many, that even the Numidian town of Cirta could be defended mainly by them against Jugurtha.(38) Gaul too, it is said, was filled with Roman merchants; in the case of Spain alone--perhaps not accidentally--no statements of this sort are found. In Italy itself, on the other hand, the condition of the free population at this epoch had on the whole beyond doubt retrograded. To this result certainly the civil wars essentially contributed, which, according to statements of a general kind and but littletrustworthy, are alleged to have swept away from 100,000 to 150,000 of the Roman burgesses and 300,000 of the Italian population generally; but still worse was the effect of the economic ruin of the middle class, and of the boundless extent of the mercantile emigration which induced a great portion of the Italian youth to spend their most vigorous years abroad.

A compensation of very dubious value was afforded by the free parasitic Helleno-Oriental population, which sojourned in the capital as diplomatic agents for kings or communities, as physicians, schoolmasters, priests, servants, parasites, and in the myriad employments of sharpers and swindlers, or, as traders and mariners, frequented especially Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium. Still more hazardous was the disproportionate increase of the multitude of slaves in the peninsula. The Italian burgesses by the census of 684 numbered 910,000 men capable of bearing arms, to which number, in order to obtain the amount of the free population in the peninsula, those accidentally passed over in the census, the Latins in the district between the Alps and the Po, and the foreigners domiciled in Italy, have to be added, while the Roman burgesses domiciled abroad are to be deducted. It will therefore be scarcely possible to estimate the free population of the peninsula at more than from 6 to 7 millions. If its whole population at this time was equal to that of the present day, we should have to assume accordingly a mass of slaves amounting to 13 or 14 millions. It needs however no such fallacious calculations to render the dangerous tension of this state of things apparent; this is loudly enough attested by the partial servile insurrections, and by the appeal which from the beginning of the revolutions was at the close of every outbreak addressed to the slaves to take up arms against their masters and to fight out their liberty. If we conceive of England with its lords, its squires, and above all its City, but with its freeholders and lessees converted into proletarians, and its labourers and sailors converted into slaves, we shall gain an approximate image of the population of the Italian peninsula in those days.

The economic relations of this epoch are clearly mirrored to us even now in the Roman monetary system. Its treatment shows throughout the sagacious merchant. For long gold and silver stood side by side as general means of payment on such a footing that, while for the purpose of general cash-balances a fixed ratio of value was legally laid down between the two metals,(39) the giving one metal for the other was not, as a rule, optional, but payment was to be in gold or silver according to the tenor of the bond. In this way the great evils were avoided, that are otherwise inevitably associated with the setting up of two precious metals; the severe gold crises--as about 600, for instance, when in consequence of the discovery of the Tauriscan gold-seams(40) gold as compared with silver fell at once in Italy about 33 1/3 per cent--exercised at least no direct influence on the silver money and retail transactions. The nature of the case implied that, the more transmarine traffic extended, gold the more decidedly rose from the second place to the first; and that it did so, is confirmed by the statements as to the balances in the treasury and as to its transactions; but the government was not thereby induced to introduce gold into the coinage. The coining of gold attempted in the exigency of the Hannibalic war(41) had been long allowed to fall into abeyance; the few gold pieces which Sulla struck as regent were scarcely more than pieces coined for the occasion of his triumphal presents. Silver still as before circulated exclusively as actual money; gold, whether it, as was usual, circulated in bars or bore the stamp of a foreign or possibly even of an inland mint, was taken solely by weight. Nevertheless gold and silver were on a par as means of exchange, and the fraudulent alloying of gold was treated in law, like the issuing of spurious silver money, as a monetary offence. They thus obtained the immense advantage of precluding, in the case of the most important medium of payment, even the possibility of monetary fraud and monetary adulteration. Otherwise the coinage was as copious as it was of exemplary purity. After the silver piece had been reduced in the Hannibalic war from 1/72 (42) to 1/84 of a pound,(43) it retained for more than three centuries quite the same weight and the same quality; no alloying took place. The copper money became about the beginning of this period quite restricted to small change, and ceased to be employed as formerly in large transactions; for this reason the -as- was no longer coined after perhaps the beginning of the seventh century, and the copper coinage was confined to the smaller values of a -semis- (1/4 pence) and under, which could not well be represented in silver. The sorts of coins were arranged according to a simple principle, and in the then smallest coin of the ordinary issue--the -quadrans- (1/8 pence)--carried down to the limit of appreciable value. It was a monetary system, which, for the judicious principles on which it was based and for the iron rigour with which they were applied, stands alone in antiquity and has been but rarely paralleled even in modern times.

Yet it had also its weak point. According to a custom, common in all antiquity, but which reached its highest development at Carthage,(44) the Roman government issued along with the good silver -denarii- also -denarii- of copper plated with silver, which had to be accepted like the former and were just a token-money analogous to our paper currency, with compulsory circulation and recourse on the public chest, inasmuch as it also was not entitled to reject the plated pieces. This was no more an official adulteration of the coinage than our manufacture of paper-money, for they practised the thing quite openly; Marcus Drusus proposed in 663, with the view of gaining the means for his largesses of grain, the sending forth of one plated -denarius- for every seven silver ones issuing fresh from the mint; nevertheless this measure not only offered a dangerous handle to private forgery, but designedly left the public uncertain whether it was receiving silver or token money, and to what total amount the latter was in circulation. In the embarrassed period of the civil war and of the great financial crisis they seem to have so unduly availed themselves of plating, that a monetary crisis accompanied the financial one, and the quantity of spurious and really worthless pieces rendered dealings extremely insecure. Accordingly during the Cinnan government an enactment was passed by the praetors and tribunes, primarily by Marcus Marius Gratidianus,(45) for redeeming all the token-money by silver, and for that purpose an assay-office was established. How far the calling-in was accomplished, tradition has not told us; the coining of token-money itself continued to subsist.

As to the provinces, in accordance with the setting aside of gold money on principle, the coining of gold was nowhere permitted, not even in the client-states; so that a gold coinage at this period occurs only where Rome had nothing at all to say, especially among the Celts to the north of the Cevennes and among the states in revolt against Rome; the Italians, for instance, as well as Mithradates Eupator struck gold coins. The government seems to have made efforts to bring the coinage of silver also more and more into its hands, particularly in the west. In Africa and Sardinia the Carthaginian gold and silver money may have remained in circulation even after the fall of the Carthaginian state; but no coinage of precious metals took place there after either the Carthaginian or the Roman standard, and certainly very soon after the Romans took possession, the -denarius- introduced from Italy acquired the predominance in the transactions of the two countries. In Spain and Sicily, which came earlier to the Romans and experienced altogether a milder treatment, silver was no doubt coined under the Roman rule, and indeed in the former country the silver coinage was first called into existence by the Romans and based on the Roman standard;(46) but there exist good grounds for the supposition, that even in these two countries, at least from the beginning of the seventh century, the provincial and urban mints were obliged to restrict their issues to copper small money. Only in Narbonese Gaul the right of coining silver could not be withdrawn from the old-allied and considerable free city of Massilia; and the same was presumably true of the Greek cities in Illyria, Apollonia and Dyrrhachium. But the privilege of these communities to coin money was restricted indirectly by the fact, that the three-quarter -denarius-, which by ordinance of the Roman government was coined both at Massilia and in Illyria, and which had been under the name of -victoriatus- received into the Roman monetary system,(47) was about the middle of the seventh century set aside in the latter; the effect of which necessarily was, that the Massiliot and Illyrian currency was driven out of Upper Italy and only remained in circulation, over and above its native field, perhaps in the regions of the Alps and the Danube. Such progress had thus been made already in this epoch, that the standard of the -denarius- exclusively prevailed in the whole western division of the Roman state; for Italy, Sicily--of which it is as respects the beginning of the next period expressly attested, that no other silver money circulated there but the -denarius---Sardinia, Africa, used exclusively Roman silver money, and the provincial silver still current in Spain as well as the silver money of the Massiliots and Illyrians were at least struck after the standard of the -denarius-.

It was otherwise in the east. Here, where the number of the states coining money from olden times and the quantity of native coin in circulation were very considerable, the -denarius- did not make its way into wider acceptance, although it was perhaps declared a legal tender. On the contrary either the previous monetary standard continued in use, as in Macedonia for instance, which still as a province--although partially adding the names of the Roman magistrates to that of the country--struck its Attic -tetradrachmae- and certainly employed in substance no other money; or a peculiar money-standard corresponding to the circumstances was introduced under Roman authority, as on the institution of the province of Asia, when a new -stater-, the -cistophorus- as it was called, was prescribed by the Roman government and was thenceforth struck by the district- capitals there under Roman superintendence. This essential diversity between the Occidental and Oriental systems of currency came to be of the greatest historical importance: the Romanizing of the subject lands found one of its mightiest levers in the adoption of Roman money, and it was not through mere accident that what we have designated at this epoch as the field of the -denarius- became afterwards the Latin, while the field of the -drachma- became afterwards the Greek, half of the empire. Still at the present day the former field substantially represents the sum of Romanic culture, whereas the latter has severed itself from European civilization.

It is easy to form a general conception of the aspect which under such economic conditions the social relations must have assumed; but to follow out in detail the increase of luxury, of prices, of fastidiousness and frivolity is neither pleasant nor instructive. Extravagance and sensuous enjoyment formed the main object with all, among the parvenus as well as among the Licinii and Metelli; not the polished luxury which is the acme of civilization, but that sort of luxury which had developed itself amidst the decaying Hellenic civilization of Asia Minor and Alexandria, which degraded everything beautiful and significant to the purpose of decoration and studied enjoyment with a laborious pedantry, a precise punctiliousness, rendering it equally nauseous to the man of fresh feeling as to the man of fresh intellect. As to the popular festivals, the importation of transmarine wild beasts prohibited in the time of Cato(48) was, apparently about the middle of this century, formally permitted anew by a decree of the burgesses proposed by Gnaeus Aufidius; the effect of which was, that animal- hunts came into enthusiastic favour and formed a chief feature of the burgess-festivals. Several lions first appeared in the Roman arena about 651, the first elephants about 655; Sulla when praetor exhibited a hundred lions in 661. The same holds true of gladiatorial games. If the forefathers had publicly exhibited representations of great battles, their grandchildren began to do the same with their gladiatorial games, and by means of such leading or state performances of the age to make themselves a laughing-stock to their descendants. What sums were spent on these and on funeral solemnities generally, may be inferred from the testament of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (consul in 567, 579; 602); he gave orders to his children, forasmuch as the true last honours consisted not in empty pomp but in the remembrance of personal and ancestral services, to expend on his funeral not more than 1,000,000 -asses- (4000 pounds). Luxury was on the increase also as respected buildings and gardens; the splendid town house of the orator Crassus (663), famous especially for the old trees of its garden, was valued with the trees at 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), without them at the half; while the value of an ordinary dwelling-house in Rome may be estimated perhaps at 60,000 sesterces (600 pounds).(49) How quickly the prices of ornamental estates increased, is shown by the instance of the Misenian villa, for which Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, paid 75,000 sesterces (750 pounds), and Lucius Lucullus, consul in 680, thirty-three times that price. The villas and the luxurious rural and sea- bathing life rendered Baiae and generally the district around the Bay of Naples the El Dorado of noble idleness. Games of hazard, in which the stake was no longer as in the Italian dice-playing a trifle, became common, and as early as 639 a censorial edict was issued against them. Gauze fabrics, which displayed rather than concealed the figure, and silken clothing began to displace the old woollen dresses among women and even among men. Against the insane extravagance in the employment of foreign perfumery the sumptuary laws interfered in vain.

But the real focus in which the brilliance of this genteel life was concentrated was the table. Extravagant prices--as much as 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds)--were paid for an exquisite cook. Houses were constructed with special reference to this object, and the villas in particular along the coast were provided with salt-water tanks of their own, in order that they might furnish marine fishes and oysters at any time fresh to the table. A dinner was already described as poor, at which the fowls were served up to the guests entire and not merely the choice portions, and at which the guests were expected to eat of the several dishes and not simply to taste them. They procured at a great expense foreign delicacies and Greek wine, which had to be sent round at least once at every respectable repast. At banquets above all the Romans displayed their hosts of slaves ministering to luxury, their bands of musicians, their dancing-girls, their elegant furniture, their carpets glittering with gold or pictorially embroidered, their purple hangings, their antique bronzes, their rich silver plate. Against such displays the sumptuary laws were primarily directed, which were issued more frequently (593, 639, 665, 673) and in greater detail than ever; a number of delicacies and wines were therein totally prohibited, for others a maximum in weight and price was fixed; the quantity of silver plate was likewise restricted by law, and lastly general maximum rates were prescribed for the expenses of ordinary and festal meals; these, for example, were fixed in 593 at 10 and 100 sesterces (2 shillings and 1 pound) in 673 at 30 and 300 sesterces (6 shillings and 3 pounds) respectively. Unfortunately truth requires us to add that, of all the Romans of rank, not more than three--and these not including the legislators themselves--are said to have complied with these imposing laws; and in the case of these three it was the law of the Stoa, and not that of the state, that curtailed the bill of fare.

It is worth while to dwell for a moment on the luxury that went on increasing in defiance of these laws, as respects silver plate. In the sixth century silver plate for the table was, with the exception of the traditionary silver salt-dish, a rarity; the Carthaginian ambassadors jested over the circumstance, that at every house to which they were invited they had encountered the same silver plate.(50) Scipio Aemilianus possessed not more than 32 pounds (120 pounds) in wrought silver; his nephew Quintus Fabius (consul in 633) first brought his plate up to 1000 pounds (4000 pounds), Marcus Drusus (tribune of the people in 663) reached 10,000 pounds (40,000 pounds); in Sulla's time there were already counted in the capital about 150 silver state-dishes weighing 100 pounds each, several of which brought their possessors into the lists of proscription. To judge of the sums expended on these, we must recollect that the workmanship also was paid for at enormous rates; for instance Gaius Gracchus paid for choice articles of silver fifteen times, and Lucius Crassus, consul in 659, eighteen times the value of the metal, and the latter gave for a pair of cups by a noted silversmith 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds). So it was in proportion everywhere.

How it fared with marriage and the rearing of children, is shown by the Gracchan agrarian laws, which first placed a premium on these.(51) Divorce, formerly in Rome almost unheard of, was now an everyday occurrence; while in the oldest Roman marriage the husband had purchased his wife, it might have been proposed to the Romans of quality in the present times that, with the view of bringing the name into accordance with the reality, they should introduce marriage for hire. Even a man like Metellus Macedonicus, who for his honourable domestic life and his numerous host of children was the admiration of his contemporaries, when censor in 623 enforced the obligation of the burgesses to live in a state of matrimony by describing it as an oppressive public burden, which patriots ought nevertheless to undertake from a sense of duty.(52)

There were, certainly, exceptions. The circles of the rural towns, and particularly those of the larger landholders, had preserved more faithfully the old honourable habits of the Latin nation. In the capital, however, the Catonian opposition had become a mere form of words; the modern tendency bore sovereign sway, and though individuals of firm and refined organization, such as Scipio Aemilianus, knew the art of combining Roman manners with Attic culture, Hellenism was among the great multitude synonymous with intellectual and moral corruption. We must never lose sight of the reaction exercised by these social evils on political life, if we would understand the Roman revolution. It was no matter of indifference, that of the two men of rank, who in 662 acted as supreme masters of morals to the community, the one publicly reproached the other with having shed tears over the death of a -muraena- the pride of his fishpond, and the latter retaliated on the former that he had buried three wives and had shed tears over none of them. It was no matter of indifference, that in 593 an orator could make sport in the open Forum with the following description of a senatorial civil juryman, whom the time fixed for the cause finds amidst the circle of his boon-companions. "They play at hazard, delicately perfumed, surrounded by their mistresses. As the afternoon advances, they summon the servant and bid him make enquiries on the Comitium, as to what has occurred in the Forum, who has spoken in favour of or against the new project of law, what tribes have voted for and what against it. At length they go themselves to the judgment-seat, just early enough not to bring the process down on their own neck. On the way there is no opportunity in any retired alley which they do not avail themselves of, for they have gorged themselves with wine. Reluctantly they come to the tribunal and give audience to the parties. Those who are concerned bring forward their cause. The juryman orders the witnesses to come forward; he himself steps aside. When he returns, he declares that he has heard everything, and asks for the documents. He looks into the writings; he can hardly keep his eyes open for wine. When he thereupon withdraws to consider his sentence, he says to his boon-companions, 'What concern have I with these tiresome people? why should we not rather go to drink a cup of mulse mixed with Greek wine, and accompany it with a fat fieldfare and a good fish, a veritable pike from the Tiber island?' Those who heard the orator laughed; but was it not a very serious matter, that such things were subjects for laughter?"

CHAPTER XII

Nationality, Religion, and Education

Paramount Ascendency of Latinism and Hellenism

In the great struggle of the nationalities within the wide circuit of the Roman empire, the secondary nations seem at this period on the wane or disappearing. The most important of them all, the Phoenician, received through the destruction of Carthage a mortal wound from which it slowly bled to death. The districts of Italy which had hitherto preserved their old language and manners, Etruria and Samnium, were not only visited by the heaviest blows of the Sullan reaction, but were compelled also by the political levelling of Italy to adopt the Latin language and customs in public intercourse, so that the old native languages were reduced to popular dialects rapidly decaying. There no longer appears throughout the bounds of the Roman state any nationality entitled even to compete with the Roman and the Greek.

Latinism

On the other hand the Latin nationality was, as respected both the extent of its diffusion and the depth of its hold, in the most decided ascendant. As after the Social war any portion of Italian soil might belong to any Italian in full Roman ownership, and any god of an Italian temple might receive Roman gifts; as in all Italy, with the exception of the region beyond the Po, the Roman law thenceforth had exclusive authority, superseding all other civic and local laws; so the Roman language at that time became the universal language of business, and soon likewise the universal language of cultivated intercourse, in the whole peninsula from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. But it no longer restricted itself to these natural limits. The mass of capital accumulating in Italy, the riches of its products, the intelligence of its agriculturists, the versatility of its merchants, found no adequate scope in the peninsula; these circumstances and the public service carried the Italians in great numbers to the provinces.(1) Their privileged position there rendered the Roman language and the Roman law privileged also, even where Romans were not merely transacting business with each other.(2) Everywhere the Italians kept together as compact and organized masses, the soldiers in their legions, the merchants of every larger town as special corporations, the Roman burgesses domiciled or sojourning in the particular provincial court-district as "circuits" (-conventus civium Romanorum-) with their own list of jurymen and in some measure with a communal constitution; and, though these provincial Romans ordinarily returned sooner or later to Italy, they nevertheless gradually laid the foundations of a fixed population in the provinces, partly Roman, partly mixed, attaching itself to the Roman settlers. We have already mentioned that it was in Spain, where the Roman army first became a standing one, that distinct provincial towns with Italian constitution were first organized--Carteia in 583,(3) Valentia in 616,(4) and at a later date Palma and Pollentia.(5) Although the interior was still far from civilized,--the territory of the Vaccaeans, for instance, being still mentioned long after this time as one of the rudest and most repulsive places of abode for the cultivated Italian--authors and inscriptions attest that as early as the middle of the seventh century the Latin language was in common use around New Carthage and elsewhere along the coast. Gracchus first distinctly developed the idea of colonizing, or in other words of Romanizing, the provinces of the Roman state by Italian emigration, and endeavoured to carry it out; and, although the conservative opposition resisted the bold project, destroyed for the most part its attempted beginnings, and prevented its continuation, yet the colony of Narbo was preserved, important even of itself as extending the domain of the Latin tongue, and far more important still as the landmark of a great idea, the foundation- stone of a mighty structure to come. The ancient Gallic, and in fact the modern French, type of character, sprang out of that settlement, and are in their ultimate origin creations of Gaius Gracchus. But the Latin nationality not only filled the bounds of Italy and began to pass beyond them; it came also to acquire intrinsically a deeper intellectual basis. We find it in the course of creating a classical literature, and a higher instruction of its own; and, though in comparison with the Hellenic classics and Hellenic culture we may feel ourselves tempted to attach little value to the feeble hothouse products of Italy, yet, so far as its historical development was primarily concerned, the quality of the Latin classical literature and the Latin culture was of far less moment than the fact that they subsisted side by side with the Greek; and, sunken as were the contemporary Hellenes in a literary point of view, one might well apply in this case also the saying of the poet, that the living day-labourer is better than the dead Achilles.

Hellenism

But, however rapidly and vigorously the Latin language and nationality gain ground, they at the same time recognize the Hellenic nationality as having an entirely equal, indeed an earlier and better title, and enter everywhere into the closest alliance with it or become intermingled with it in a joint development. The Italian revolution, which otherwise levelled all the non-Latin nationalities in the peninsula, did not disturb the Greek cities of Tarentum, Rhegium, Neapolis, Locri.(6) In like manner Massilia, although now enclosed by Roman territory, remained continuously a Greek city and, just as such, firmly connected with Rome. With the complete Latinizing of Italy the growth of Hellenizing went hand in hand. In the higher circles of Italian society Greek training became an integral element of their native culture. The consul of 623, the -pontifex maximus- Publius Crassus, excited the astonishment even of the native Greeks, when as governor of Asia he delivered his judicial decisions, as the case required, sometimes in ordinary Greek, sometimes in one of the four dialects which had become written languages. And if the Italian literature and art for long looked steadily towards the east, Hellenic literature and art now began to look towards the west. Not only did the Greek cities in Italy continue to maintain an active intellectual intercourse with Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and confer on the Greek poets and actors who had acquired celebrity there the like recognition and the like honours among themselves; in Rome also, after the example set by the destroyer of Corinth at his triumph in 608, the gymnastic and aesthetic recreations of the Greeks-- competitions in wrestling as well as in music, acting, reciting, and declaiming--came into vogue.(7) Greek men of letters even thus early struck root in the noble society of Rome, especially in the Scipionic circle, the most prominent Greek members of which--the historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius--belong rather to the history of Roman than of Greek development. But even in other less illustrious circles similar relations occur; we may mention another contemporary of Scipio, the philosopher Clitomachus, because his life at the same time presents a vivid view of the great intermingling of nations at this epoch. A native of Carthage, then a disciple of Carneades at Athens, and afterwards his successor in his professorship, Clitomachus held intercourse from Athens with the most cultivated men of Italy, the historian Aulus Albinus and the poet Lucilius, and dedicated on the one hand a scientific work to Lucius Censorinus the Roman consul who opened the siege of Carthage, and on the other hand a philosophic consolatory treatise to his fellow-citizens who were conveyed to Italy as slaves. While Greek literary men of note had hitherto taken up their abode temporarily in Rome as ambassadors, exiles, or otherwise, they now began to settle there; for instance, the already-mentioned Panaetius lived in the house of Scipio, and the hexameter-maker Archias of Antioch settled at Rome in 652 and supported himself respectably by the art of improvising and by epic poems on Roman consulars. Even Gaius Marius, who hardly understood a line of his -carmen- and was altogether as ill adapted as possible for a Maecenas, could not avoid patronizing the artist in verse. While intellectual and literary life thus brought the more genteel, if not the purer, elements of the two nations into connection with each other, on the other hand the arrival of troops of slaves from Asia Minor and Syria and the mercantile immigration from the Greek and half-Greek east brought the coarsest strata of Hellenism--largely alloyed with Oriental and generally barbaric ingredients--into contact with the Italian proletariate, and gave to that also a Hellenic colouring. The remark of Cicero, that new phrases and new fashions first make their appearance in maritime towns, probably had a primary reference to the semi-Hellenic character of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium, where with foreign wares foreign manners also first found admission and became thence more widely diffused.

Mixture of Peoples

The immediate result of this complete revolution in the relations of nationality was certainly far from pleasing. Italy swarmed with Greeks, Syrians, Phoenicians, Jews, Egyptians, while the provinces swarmed with Romans; sharply defined national peculiarities everywhere came into mutual contact, and were visibly worn off; it seemed as if nothing was to be left behind but the general impress of utilitarianism. What the Latin character gained in diffusion it lost in freshness; especially in Rome itself, where the middle class disappeared the soonest and most entirely, and nothing was left but the grandees and the beggars, both in like measure cosmopolitan. Cicero assures us that about 660 the general culture in the Latin towns stood higher than in Rome; and this is confirmed by the literature of this period, whose most pleasing, healthiest, and most characteristic products, such as the national comedy and the Lucilian satire, are with greater justice described as Latin, than as Roman. That the Italian Hellenism of the lower orders was in reality nothing but a repulsive cosmopolitanism tainted at once with all the extravagances of culture and with a superficially whitewashed barbarism, is self-evident; but even in the case of the better society the fine taste of the Scipionic circle did not remain the permanent standard. The more the mass of society began to take interest in Greek life, the more decidedly it resorted not to the classical literature, but to the most modern and frivolous productions of the Greek mind; instead of moulding the Roman character in the Hellenic spirit, they contented themselves with borrowing that sort of pastime which set their own intellect to work as little as possible. In this sense the Arpinate landlord Marcus Cicero, the father of the orator, said that among the Romans, just as among Syrian slaves, each was the less worth, the more he understood Greek.

National Decomposition

This national decomposition is, like the whole age, far from pleasing, but also like that age significant and momentous. The circle of peoples, which we are accustomed to call the ancient world, advances from an outward union under the authority of Rome to an inward union under the sway of the modern culture resting essentially on Hellenic elements. Over the ruins of peoples of the second rank the great historical compromise between the two ruling nations is silently completed; the Greek and Latin nationalities conclude mutual peace. The Greeks renounce exclusive claims for their language in the field of culture, as do the Romans for theirs in the field of politics; in instruction Latin is allowed to stand on a footing of equality--restricted, it is true, and imperfect-- with Greek; on the other hand Sulla first allows foreign ambassadors to speak Greek before the Roman senate without an interpreter. The time heralds its approach, when the Roman commonwealth will pass into a bilingual state and the true heir of the throne and the ideas of Alexander the Great will arise in the west, at once a Roman and a Greek.

The suppression of the secondary, and the mutual interpenetration of the two primary nationalities, which are thus apparent on a general survey of national relations, now fall to be more precisely exhibited in detail in the several fields of religion, national education, literature, and art.

Religion

The Roman religion was so intimately interwoven with the Roman commonwealth and the Roman household--so thoroughly in fact the pious reflection of the Roman burgess-world--that the political and social revolution necessarily overturned also the fabric of religion. The ancient Italian popular faith fell to the ground; over its ruins rose--like the oligarchy and the -tyrannis- rising over the ruins of the political commonwealth--on the one side unbelief, state-religion, Hellenism, and on the other side superstition, sectarianism, the religion of the Orientals, The germs certainly of both, as indeed the germs of the politico-social revolution also, may be traced back to the previous epoch (iii. 109-117). Even then the Hellenic culture of the higher circles was secretly undermining their ancestral faith; Ennius introduced the allegorizing and historical versions of the Hellenic religion into Italy; the senate, which subdued Hannibal, had to sanction the transference of the worship of Cybele from Asia Minor to Rome, and to take the most serious steps against other still worse superstitions, particularly the Bacchanalian scandal. But, as during the preceding period the revolution generally was rather preparing its way in men's minds than assuming outward shape, so the religious revolution was in substance, at any rate, the work only of the Gracchan and Sullan age.

Greek Philosophy

Let us endeavour first to trace the tendency associating itself with Hellenism. The Hellenic nation, which bloomed and faded far earlier than the Italian, had long ago passed the epoch of faith and thenceforth moved exclusively in the sphere of speculation and reflection; for long there had been no religion there--nothing but philosophy. But even the philosophic activity of the Hellenic mind had, when it began to exert influence on Rome, already left the epoch of productive speculation far behind it, and had arrived at the stage at which there is not only no origination of truly new systems, but even the power of apprehending the more perfect of the older systems begins to wane and men restrict themselves to the repetition, soon passing into the scholastic tradition, of the less complete dogmas of their predecessors; at that stage, accordingly, when philosophy, instead of giving greater depth and freedom to the mind, rather renders it shallow and imposes on it the worst of all chains--chains of its own forging. The enchanted draught of speculation, always dangerous, is, when diluted and stale, certain poison. The contemporary Greeks presented it thus flat and diluted to the Romans, and these had not the judgment either to refuse it or to go back from the living schoolmasters to the dead masters. Plato and Aristotle, to say nothing of the sages before Socrates, remained without material influence on the Roman culture, although their illustrious names were freely used, and their more easily understood writings were probably read and translated. Accordingly the Romans became in philosophy simply inferior scholars of bad teachers.

Leading Schools Newer Academy Epicurus and Zeno

Besides the historico-rationalistic conception of religion, which resolved the myths into biographies of various benefactors of the human race living in the grey dawn of early times whom superstition had transformed into gods, or Euhemerism as it was called,(8) there were chiefly three philosophical schools that came to be of importance for Italy; viz. the two dogmatic schools of Epicurus (484) and Zeno (491) and the sceptical school of Arcesilaus (513) and Carneades (541-625), or, to use the school-names, Epicureanism, the Stoa, and the newer Academy. The last of these schools, which started from the impossibility of assured knowledge and in its stead conceded as possible only a provisional opinion sufficient for practical needs, presented mainly a polemical aspect, seeing that it caught every proposition of positive faith or of philosophic dogmatism in the meshes of its dilemmas. So far it stands nearly on a parallel with the older method of the sophists; except that, as may be conceived, the sophists made war more against the popular faith, Carneades and his disciples more against their philosophical colleagues. On the other hand Epicurus and Zeno agreed both in their aim of rationally explaining the nature of things, and in their physiological method, which set out from the conception of matter. They diverged, in so far as Epicurus, following the atomic theory of Democritus, conceived the first principle as rigid matter, and evolved the manifoldness of things out of this matter merely by mechanical variations; whereas Zeno, forming his views after the Ephesian Heraclitus, introduces even into his primordial matter a dynamic antagonism and a movement of fluctuation up and down. From this are derived the further distinctions--that in the Epicurean system the gods as it were did not exist or were at the most a dream of dreams, while the Stoical gods formed the ever-active soul of the world, and were as spirit, as sun, as God powerful over the body, the earth, and nature; that Epicurus did not, while Zeno did, recognize a government of the world and a personal immortality of the soul; that the proper object of human aspiration was according to Epicurus an absolute equilibrium disturbed neither by bodily desire nor by mental conflict, while it was according to Zeno a manly activity always increased by the constant antagonistic efforts of the mind and body, and striving after a harmony with nature perpetually in conflict and perpetually at peace. But in one point all these schools were agreed with reference to religion, that faith as such was nothing, and had necessarily to be supplemented by reflection-- whether this reflection might consciously despair of attaining any result, as did the Academy; or might reject the conceptions of the popular faith, as did the school of Epicurus; or might partly retain them with explanation of the reasons for doing so, and partly modify them, as did the Stoics.

Carneades at Rome

It was accordingly only a natural result, that the first contact of Hellenic philosophy with the Roman nation equally firm in faith and adverse to speculation should be of a thoroughly hostile character. The Roman religion was entirely right in disdaining alike the assaults and the reasoned support of these philosophical systems, both of which did away with its proper character. The Roman state, which instinctively felt itself assailed when religion was attacked, reasonably assumed towards the philosophers the attitude which a fortress assumes towards the spies of the army advancing to besiege it, and as early as 593 dismissed the Greek philosophers along with the rhetoricians from Rome. In fact the very first debut of philosophy on a great scale in Rome was a formal declaration of war against faith and morals. It was occasioned by the occupation of Oropus by the Athenians, a step which they commissioned three of the most esteemed professors of philosophy, including Carneades the master of the modern sophistical school, to justify before the senate (599). The selection was so far appropriate, as the utterly scandalous transaction defied any justification in common sense; whereas it was quite in keeping with the circumstances of the case, when Carneades proved by thesis and counter-thesis that exactly as many and as cogent reasons might be adduced in praise of injustice as in praise of justice, and when he showed in the best logical form that with equal propriety the Athenians might be required to surrender Oropus and the Romans to confine themselves once more to their old straw huts on the Palatine. The young men who were masters of the Greek language were attracted in crowds by the scandal as well as by the rapid and emphatic delivery of the celebrated man; but on this occasion at least Cato could not be found fault with, when he not only bluntly enough compared the dialectic arguments of the philosophers to the tedious dirges of the wailing-women, but also insisted on the senate dismissing a man who understood the art of making right wrong and wrong right, and whose defence was in fact nothing but a shameless and almost insulting confession of wrong. But such dismissals had no great effect, more especially as the Roman youth could not be prevented from hearing philosophic discourses at Rhodes and Athens. Men became accustomed first to tolerate philosophy at least as a necessary evil, and ere long to seek for the Roman religion, which in its simplicity was no longer tenable, a support in foreign philosophy--a support which no doubt ruined it as faith, but in return at any rate allowed the man of culture decorously to retain in some measure the names and forms of the popular creed. But this support could neither be Euhemerism, nor the system of Carneades or of Epicurus.

Euhemerism Not an Adequate Support

The historical version of the myths came far too rudely into collision with the popular faith, when it declared the gods directly to be men; Carneades called even their existence in question, and Epicurus denied to them at least any influence on the destinies of men. Between these systems and the Roman religion no alliance was possible; they were proscribed and remained so. Even in the writings of Cicero it is declared the duty of a citizen to resist Euhemerism as prejudicial to religious worship; and if the Academic and the Epicurean appear in his dialogues, the former has to plead the excuse that, while as a philosopher he is a disciple of Carneades, as a citizen and -pontifex- he is an orthodox confessor of the Capitoline Jupiter, and the Epicurean has even ultimately to surrender and be converted. No one of these three systems became in any proper sense popular. The plain intelligible character of Euhemerism exerted doubtless a certain power of attraction over the Romans, and in particular produced only too deep an effect on the conventional history of Rome with its at once childish and senile conversion of fable into history; but it remained without material influence on the Roman religion, because the latter from the first dealt only in allegory and not in fable, and it was not possible in Rome as in Hellas to write biographies of Zeus the first, second, and third. The modern sophistry could only succeed where, as in Athens, clever volubility was indigenous, and where, moreover, the long series of philosophical systems that had come and gone had accumulated huge piles of intellectual rubbish. Against the Epicurean quietism, in fine, everything revolted that was sound and honest in the Roman character so thoroughly addressing itself to action. Yet it found more partisans than Euhemerism and the sophistic school, and this was probably the reason why the police continued to wage war against it longest and most seriously. But this Roman Epicureanism was not so much a philosophic system as a sort of philosophic mask, under which--very much against the design of its strictly moral founder-- thoughtless sensual enjoyment disguised itself for good society; one of the earliest adherents of this sect, for instance, Titus Albucius, figures in the poems of Lucilius as the prototype of a Roman Hellenizing to bad purpose.

Roman Stoa

Far different were the position and influence of the Stoic philosophy in Italy. In direct contrast to these schools it attached itself to the religion of the land as closely as science can at all accommodate itself to faith. To the popular faith with its gods and oracles the Stoic adhered on principle, in so far as he recognized in it an instinctive knowledge, to which scientific knowledge was bound to have regard and even in doubtful cases to subordinate itself. He believed in a different way from the people rather than in different objects; the essentially true and supreme God was in his view doubtless the world-soul, but every manifestation of the primitive God was in its turn divine, the stars above all, but also the earth, the vine, the soul of the illustrious mortal whom the people honoured as a hero, and in fact every departed spirit of a former man. This philosophy was really better adapted for Rome than for the land where it first arose. The objection of the pious believer, that the god of the Stoic had neither sex nor age nor corporeality and was converted from a person into a conception, had a meaning in Greece, but not in Rome. The coarse allegorizing and moral purification, which were characteristic of the Stoical doctrine of the gods, destroyed the very marrow of the Hellenic mythology; but the plastic power of the Romans, scanty even in their epoch of simplicity, had produced no more than a light veil enveloping the original intuition or the original conception, out of which the divinity had arisen--a veil that might be stripped off without special damage. Pallas Athene might be indignant, when she found herself suddenly transmuted into the conception of memory: Minerva had hitherto been in reality not much more. The supernatural Stoic, and the allegoric Roman, theology coincided on the whole in their result. But, even if the philosopher was obliged to designate individual propositions of the priestly lore as doubtful or as erroneous--as when the Stoics, for example, rejecting the doctrine of apotheosis, saw in Hercules, Castor, and Pollux nothing but the spirits of distinguished men, or as when they could not allow the images of the gods to be regarded as representations of divinity--it was at least not the habit of the adherents of Zeno to make war on these erroneous doctrines and to overthrow the false gods; on the contrary, they everywhere evinced respect and reverence for the religion of the land even in its weaknesses. The inclination also of the Stoa towards a casuistic morality and towards a systematic treatment of the professional sciences was quite to the mind of the Romans, especially of the Romans of this period, who no longer like their fathers practised in unsophisticated fashion self-government and good morals, but resolved the simple morality of their ancestors into a catechism of allowable and non-allowable actions; whose grammar and jurisprudence, moreover, urgently demanded a methodical treatment, without possessing the ability to develop such a treatment of themselves.

Wide Influence of Stoicism Panaetius

So this philosophy thoroughly incorporated itself, as a plant borrowed no doubt from abroad but acclimatized on Italian soil, with the Roman national economy, and we meet its traces in the most diversified spheres of action. Its earliest appearance beyond doubt goes further back; but the Stoa was first raised to full influence in the higher ranks of Roman society by means of the group which gathered round Scipio Aemilianus. Panaetius of Rhodes, the instructor of Scipio and of all Scipio's intimate friends in the Stoic philosophy, who was constantly in his train and usually attended him even on journeys, knew how to adapt the system to clever men of the world, to keep its speculative side in the background, and to modify in some measure the dryness of the terminology and the insipidity of its moral catechism, more particularly by calling in the aid of the earlier philosophers, among whom Scipio himself had an especial predilection for the Socrates of Xenophon. Thenceforth the most noted statesmen and scholars professed the Stoic philosophy--among others Stilo and Quintus Scaevola, the founders of scientific philology and of scientific jurisprudence. The scholastic formality of system, which thenceforth prevails at least externally in these professional sciences and is especially associated with a fanciful, charade-like, insipid method of etymologizing, descends from the Stoa. But infinitely more important was the new state-philosophy and state-religion, which emanated from the blending of the Stoic philosophy and the Roman religion. The speculative element, from the first impressed with but little energy on the system of Zeno, and still further weakened when that system found admission to Rome--after the Greek schoolmasters had already for a century been busied in driving this philosophy into boys' heads and thereby driving the spirit out of it--fell completely into the shade in Rome, where nobody speculated but the money-changers; little more was said as to the ideal development of the God ruling in the soul of man, or of the divine world-law. The Stoic philosophers showed themselves not insensible to the very lucrative distinction of seeing their system raised into the semi-official Roman state- philosophy, and proved altogether more pliant than from their rigorous principles we should have expected. Their doctrine as to the gods and the state soon exhibited a singular family resemblance to the actual institutions of those who gave them bread; instead of illustrating the cosmopolitan state of the philosopher, they made their meditations turn on the wise arrangement of the Roman magistracies; and while the more refined Stoics such as Panaetius had left the question of divine revelation by wonders and signs open as a thing conceivable but uncertain, and had decidedly rejected astrology, his immediate successors contended for that doctrine of revelation or, in other words, for the Roman augural discipline as rigidly and firmly as for any other maxim of the school, and made extremely unphilosophical concessions even to astrology. The leading feature of the system came more and more to be its casuistic doctrine of duties. It suited itself to the hollow pride of virtue, in which the Romans of this period sought their compensation amidst the various humbling circumstances of their contact with the Greeks; and it put into formal shape a befitting dogmatism of morality, which, like every well-bred system of morals, combined with the most rigid precision as a whole the most complaisant indulgence in the details.(9) Its practical results can hardly be estimated as much more than that, as we have said, two or three families of rank ate poor fare to please the Stoa.

State-Religion

Closely allied to this new state-philosophy--or, strictly speaking, its other side--was the new state-religion; the essential characteristic of which was the conscious retention, for reasons of outward convenience, of the principles of the popular faith, which were recognized as irrational. One of the most prominent men of the Scipionic circle, the Greek Polybius, candidly declares that the strange and ponderous ceremonial of Roman religion was invented solely on account of the multitude, which, as reason had no power over it, required to be ruled by signs and wonders, while people of intelligence had certainly no need of religion. Beyond doubt the Roman friends of Polybius substantially shared these sentiments, although they did not oppose science and religion to each other in so gross and downright a fashion. Neither Laelius nor Scipio Aemilianus can have looked on the augural discipline, which Polybius has primarily in view, as anything else than a political institution; yet the national spirit in them was too strong and their sense of decorum too delicate to have permitted their coming forward in public with such hazardous explanations. But even in the following generation the -pontifex maximus- Quintus Scaevola (consul in 659;(10)) set forth at least in his oral instructions in law without hesitation the propositions, that there were two sorts of religion--one philosophic, adapted to the intellect, and one traditional, not so adapted; that the former was not fitted for the religion of the state, as it contained various things which it was useless or even injurious for the people to know; and that accordingly the traditional religion of the state ought to remain as it stood. The theology of Varro, in which the Roman religion is treated throughout as a state institution, is merely a further development of the same principle. The state, according to his teaching, was older than the gods of the state as the painter is older than the picture; if the question related to making the gods anew, it would certainly be well to make and to name them after a manner more befitting and more in theoretic accordance with the parts of the world-soul, and to lay aside the images of the gods which only excited erroneous ideas,(11) and the mistaken system of sacrifice; but, since these institutions had been once established, every good citizen ought to own and follow them and do his part, that the "common man" might learn rather to set a higher value on, than to contemn, the gods. That the common man, for whose benefit the grandees thus surrendered their judgment, now despised this faith and sought his remedy elsewhere, was a matter of course and will be seen in the sequel. Thus then the Roman "high church" was ready, a sanctimonious body of priests and Levites, and an unbelieving people. The more openly the religion of the land was declared a political institution, the more decidedly the political parties regarded the field of the state-church as an arena for attack and defence; which was especially, in a daily-increasing measure, the case with augural science and with the elections to the priestly colleges. The old and natural practice of dismissing the burgess-assembly, when a thunderstorm came on, had in the hands of the Roman augurs grown into a prolix system of various celestial omens and rules of conduct associated therewith; in the earlier portion of this period it was even directly enacted by the Aelian and Fufian law, that every popular assembly should be compelled to disperse if it should occur to any of the higher magistrates to look for signs of a thunderstorm in the sky; and the Roman oligarchy was proud of the cunning device which enabled them thenceforth by a single pious fraud to impress the stamp of invalidity on any decree of the people.

Priestly Colleges

Conversely, the Roman opposition rebelled against the ancient practice under which the four principal colleges of priests filled up their own ranks when vacancies arose, and demanded the extension of popular election to the stalls themselves, as it had been previously introduced with reference to the presidents, of these colleges.(12) This was certainly inconsistent with the spirit of these corporations; but they had no right to complain of it, after they had become themselves untrue to their spirit, and had played into the hands of the government at its request by furnishing religious pretexts for the annulling of political proceedings. This affair became an apple of contention between the parties: the senate beat off the first attack in 609, on which occasion the Scipionic circle especially turned the scale for the rejection of the proposal; on the other hand the project passed in 650 with the proviso already made in reference to the election of the presidents for the benefit of scrupulous consciences, that not the whole burgesses but only the lesser half of the tribes should make the election;(13) finally Sulla restored the right of co-optation in its full extent.(14)

Practical Use Made of Religion

With this care on the part of the conservatives for the pure national religion, it was of course quite compatible that the circles of the highest rank should openly make a jest of it. The practical side of the Roman priesthood was the priestly cuisine; the augural and pontifical banquets were as it were the official gala-days in the life of a Roman epicure, and several of them formed epochs in the history of gastronomy: the banquet on the accession of the augur Quintus Hortensius for instance brought roast peacocks into vogue. Religion was also found very useful in giving greater zest to scandal. It was a favourite recreation of the youth of quality to disfigure or mutilate the images of the gods in the streets by night.(15) Ordinary love affairs had for long been common, and intrigues with married women began to become so; but an amour with a Vestal virgin was as piquant as the intrigues with nuns and the cloister-adventures in the world of the Decamerone. The scandalous affair of 640 seq. is well known, in which three Vestals, daughters of the noblest families, and their paramours, young men likewise of the best houses, were brought to trial for unchastity first before the pontifical college, and then, when it sought to hush up the matter, before an extraordinary court instituted by special decree of the people, and were all condemned to death. Such scandals, it is true, sedate people could not approve; but there was no objection to men finding positive religion to be a folly in their familiar circle; the augurs might, when one saw another performing his functions, smile in each other's face without detriment to their religious duties. We learn to look favourably on the modest hypocrisy of kindred tendencies, when we compare with it the coarse shamelessness of the Roman priests and Levites. The official religion was quite candidly treated as a hollow framework, now serviceable only for political machinists; in this respect with its numerous recesses and trapdoors it might and did serve either party, as it happened. Most of all certainly the oligarchy recognized its palladium in the state- religion, and particularly in the augural discipline; but the opposite party also made no resistance in point of principle to an institute, which had now merely a semblance of life; they rather regarded it, on the whole, as a bulwark which might pass from the possession of the enemy into their own.

Oriental Religions in Italy

In sharp contrast to this ghost of religion which we have just described stand the different foreign worships, which this epoch cherished and fostered, and which were at least undeniably possessed of a very decided vitality. They meet us everywhere, among genteel ladies and lords as well as among the circles of the slaves, in the general as in the trooper, in Italy as in the provinces. It is incredible to what a height this superstition already reached. When in the Cimbrian war a Syrian prophetess, Martha, offered to furnish the senate with ways and means for the vanquishing of the Germans, the senate dismissed her with contempt; nevertheless the Roman matrons and Marius' own wife in particular despatched her to his head-quarters, where the general readily received her and carried her about with him till the Teutones were defeated. The leaders of very different parties in the civil war, Marius, Octavius, Sulla, coincided in believing omens and oracles. During its course even the senate was under the necessity, in the troubles of 667, of consenting to issue directions in accordance with the fancies of a crazy prophetess. It is significant of the ossification of the Romano-Hellenic religion as well as of the increased craving of the multitude after stronger religious stimulants, that superstition no longer, as in the Bacchic mysteries, associates itself with the national religion; even the Etruscan mysticism is already left behind; the worships matured in the sultry regions of the east appear throughout in the foremost rank. The copious introduction of elements from Asia Minor and Syria into the population, partly by the import of slaves, partly by the augmented traffic of Italy with the east, contributed very greatly to this result.

The power of these foreign religions is very distinctly apparent in the revolts of the Sicilian slaves, who for the most part were natives of Syria. Eunus vomited fire, Athenion read the stars; the plummets thrown by the slaves in these wars bear in great part the names of gods, those of Zeus and Artemis, and especially that of the mysterious Mother who had migrated from Crete to Sicily and was zealously worshipped there. A similar effect was produced by commercial intercourse, particularly after the wares of Berytus and Alexandria were conveyed directly to the Italian ports; Ostia and Puteoli became the great marts not only for Syrian unguents and Egyptian linen, but also for the faith of the east. Everywhere the mingling of religions was constantly on the increase along with the mingling of nations. Of all allowed worships the most popular was that of the Pessinuntine Mother of the Gods, which made a deep impression on the multitude by its eunuch-celibacy, its banquets, its music, its begging processions, and all its sensuous pomp; the collections from house to house were already felt as an economic burden. In the most dangerous time of the Cimbrian war Battaces the high-priest of Pessinus appeared in person at Rome, in order to defend the interests of the temple of his goddess there which was alleged to have been profaned, addressed the Roman people by the special orders of the Mother of the Gods, and performed also various miracles. Men of sense were scandalized, but the women and the great multitude were not to be debarred from escorting the prophet at his departure in great crowds. Vows of pilgrimage to the east were already no longer uncommon; Marius himself, for instance, thus undertook a pilgrimage to Pessinus; in fact even thus early (first in 653) Roman burgesses devoted themselves to the eunuch-priesthood.

Secret Worships

But the unallowed and secret worships were naturally still more popular. As early as Cato's time the Chaldean horoscope-caster had begun to come into competition with the Etruscan -haruspex- and the Marsian bird-seer;(16) star-gazing and astrology were soon as much at home in Italy as in their dreamy native land. In 615 the Roman -praetor peregrinus- directed all the Chaldeans to evacuate Rome and Italy within ten days. The same fate at the same time befel the Jews, who had admitted Italian proselytes to their sabbath. In like manner Scipio had to clear the camp before Numantia from soothsayers and pious impostors of every sort. Some forty years afterwards (657) it was even found necessary to prohibit human sacrifices. The wild worship of the Cappadocian Ma, or, as the Romans called her, Bellona, to whom the priests in their festal processions shed their own blood as a sacrifice, and the gloomy Egyptian worships began to make their appearance; the former Cappadocian goddess appeared in a dream to Sulla, and of the later Roman communities of Isis and Osiris the oldest traced their origin to the Sullan period. Men had become perplexed not merely as to the old faith, but as to their very selves; the fearful crises of a fifty years' revolution, the instinctive feeling that the civil war was still far from being at an end, increased the anxious suspense, the gloomy perplexity of the multitude. Restlessly the wandering imagination climbed every height and fathomed every abyss, where it fancied that it might discover new prospects or new light amidst the fatalities impending, might gain fresh hopes in the desperate struggle against destiny, or perhaps might find merely fresh alarms. A portentous mysticism found in the general distraction-- political, economic, moral, religious--the soil which was adapted for it, and grew with alarming rapidity; it was as if gigantic trees had grown by night out of the earth, none knew whence or whither, and this very marvellous rapidity of growth worked new wonders and seized like an epidemic on all minds not thoroughly fortified.

Education

Just as in the sphere of religion, the revolution begun in the previous epoch was now completed also in the sphere of education and culture. We have already shown how the fundamental idea of the Roman system--civil equality--had already during the sixth century begun to be undermined in this field also. Even in the time of Pictor and Cato Greek culture was widely diffused in Rome, and there was a native Roman culture; but neither of them had then got beyond the initial stage. Cato's encyclopaedia shows tolerably what was understood at this period by a Romano-Greek model training;(16) it was little more than an embodiment of the knowledge of the old Roman householder, and truly, when compared with the Hellenic culture of the period, scanty enough. At how low a stage the average instruction of youth in Rome still stood at the beginning of the seventh century, may be inferred from the expressions of Polybius, who in this one respect prominently censures the criminal indifference of the Romans as compared with the intelligent private and public care of his countrymen; no Hellene, not even Polybius himself, could rightly enter into the deeper idea of civil equality that lay at the root of this indifference.

Now the case was altered. Just as the naive popular faith was superseded by an enlightened Stoic supernaturalism, so in education alongside of the simple popular instruction a special training, an exclusive -humanitas-, developed itself and eradicated the last remnants of the old social equality. It will not be superfluous to cast a glance at the aspect assumed by the new instruction of the young, both the Greek and the higher Latin.

Greek Instruction

It was a singular circumstance that the same man, who in a political point of view definitively vanquished the Hellenic nation, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was at the same time the first or one of the first who fully recognized the Hellenic civilization as-- what it has thenceforth continued to be beyond dispute--the civilization of the ancient world. He was himself indeed an old man before it was granted to him, with the Homeric poems in his mind, to stand before the Zeus of Phidias; but his heart was young enough to carry home the full sunshine of Hellenic beauty and the unconquerable longing after the golden apples of the Hesperides in his soul; poets and artists had found in the foreigner a more earnest and cordial devotee than was any of the wise men of the Greece of those days. He made no epigram on Homer or Phidias, but he had his children introduced into the realms of intellect. Without neglecting their national education, so far as there was such, he made provision like the Greeks for the physical development of his boys, not indeed by gymnastic exercises which were according to Roman notions inadmissible, but by instruction in the chase, which was among the Greeks developed almost like an art; and he elevated their Greek instruction in such a way that the language was no longer merely learned and practised for the sake of speaking, but after the Greek fashion the whole subject-matter of general higher culture was associated with the language and developed out of it--embracing, first of all, the knowledge of Greek literature with the mythological and historical information necessary for understanding it, and then rhetoric and philosophy. The library of king Perseus was the only portion of the Macedonian spoil that Paullus took for himself, with the view of presenting it to his sons. Even Greek painters and sculptors were found in his train and completed the aesthetic training of his children. That the time was past when men could in this field preserve a merely repellent attitude as regarded Hellenism, had been felt even by Cato; the better classes had probably now a presentiment that the noble substance of Roman character was less endangered by Hellenism as a whole, than by Hellenism mutilated and misshapen: the mass of the upper society of Rome and Italy went along with the new mode. There had been for long no want of Greek schoolmasters in Rome; now they arrived in troops--and as teachers not merely of the language but of literature and culture in general--at the newly-opened lucrative market for the sale of their wisdom. Greek tutors and teachers of philosophy, who, even if they were not slaves, were as a rule accounted as servants,(17) were now permanent inmates in the palaces of Rome; people speculated in them, and there is a statement that 200,000 sesterces (2000 pounds) were paid for a Greek literary slave of the first rank. As early as 593 there existed in the capital a number of special establishments for the practice of Greek declamation. Several distinguished names already occur among these Roman teachers; the philosopher Panaetius has been already mentioned;(18) the esteemed grammarian Crates of Mallus in Cilicia, the contemporary and equal rival of Aristarchus, found about 585 at Rome an audience for the recitation and illustration, language, and matter of the Homeric poems. It is true that this new mode of juvenile instruction, revolutionary and anti-national as it was, encountered partially the resistance of the government; but the edict of dismissal, which the authorities in 593 fulminated against rhetoricians and philosophers, remained (chiefly owing to the constant change of the Roman chief magistrates) like all similar commands without any result worth mentioning, and after the death of old Cato there were still doubtless frequent complaints in accordance with his views, but there was no further action. The higher instruction in Greek and in the sciences of Greek culture remained thenceforth recognized as an essential part of Italian training.

Latin Instruction Public Readings of Classical Works

But by its side there sprang up also a higher Latin instruction. We have shown in the previous epoch how Latin elementary instruction raised its character; how the place of the Twelve Tables was taken by the Latin Odyssey as a sort of improved primer, and the Roman boy was now trained to the knowledge and delivery of his mother-tongue by means of this translation, as the Greek by means of the original: how noted teachers of the Greek language and literature, Andronicus, Ennius, and others, who already probably taught not children properly so called, but boys growing up to maturity and young men, did not disdain to give instruction in the mother-tongue along with the Greek. These were the first steps towards a higher Latin instruction, but they did not as yet form such an instruction itself. Instruction in a language cannot go beyond the elementary stage, so long as it lacks a literature. It was not until there were not merely Latin schoolbooks but a Latin literature, and this literature already somewhat rounded-off in the works of the classics of the sixth century, that the mother-tongue and the native literature truly entered into the circle of the elements of higher culture; and the emancipation from the Greek schoolmasters was now not slow to follow. Stirred up by the Homeric prelections of Crates, cultivated Romans began to read the recitative works of their own literature, the Punic War of Naevius, the Annals of Ennius, and subsequently also the Poems of Lucilius first to a select circle, and then in public on set days and in presence of a great concourse, and occasionally also to treat them critically after the precedent of the Homeric grammarians. These literary prelections, which cultivated -dilettanti- (-litterati-) held gratuitously, were not formally a part of juvenile instruction, but were yet an essential means of introducing the youth to the understanding and the discussion of the classic Latin literature.

Rhetorical Exercises

The formation of Latin oratory took place in a similar way. The Roman youth of rank, who were even at an early age incited to come forward in public with panegyrics and forensic speeches, can never have lacked exercises in oratory; but it was only at this epoch, and in consequence of the new exclusive culture, that there arose a rhetoric properly so called. Marcus Lepidus Porcina (consul in 617) is mentioned as the first Roman advocate who technically handled the language and subject-matter; the two famous advocates of the Marian age, the masculine and vigorous Marcus Antonius (611- 667) and the polished and chaste orator Lucius Crassus (614-663) were already complete rhetoricians. The exercises of the young men in speaking increased naturally in extent and importance, but still remained, just like the exercises in Latin literature, essentially limited to the personal attendance of the beginner on the master of the art so as to be trained by his example and his instructions.

Formal instruction both in Latin literature and in Latin rhetoric was given first about 650 by Lucius Aelius Praeconinus of Lanuvium, called the "penman" (-Stilo-), a distinguished Roman knight of strict conservative views, who read Plautus and similar works with a select circle of younger men--including Varro and Cicero--and sometimes also went over outlines of speeches with the authors, or put similar outlines into the hands of his friends. This was instruction, but Stilo was not a professional schoolmaster; he taught literature and rhetoric, just as jurisprudence was taught at Rome, in the character of a senior friend of aspiring young men, not of a man hired and holding himself at every one's command.

Course of Literature and Rhetoric

But about his time began also the scholastic higher instruction in Latin, separated as well from elementary Latin as from Greek instruction, and imparted in special establishments by paid masters, ordinarily manumitted slaves. That its spirit and method were throughout borrowed from the exercises in the Greek literature and language, was a matter of course; and the scholars also consisted, as at these exercises, of youths, and not of boys. This Latin instruction was soon divided like the Greek into two courses; in so far as the Latin literature was first the subject of scientific lectures, and then a technical introduction was given to the preparation of panegyrics, public, and forensic orations. The first Roman school of literature was opened about Stilo's time by Marcus Saevius Nicanor Postumus, the first separate school for Latin rhetoric about 660 by Lucius Plotius Gallus; but ordinarily instructions in rhetoric were also given in the Latin schools of literature. This new Latin school-instruction was of the most comprehensive importance. The introduction to the knowledge of Latin literature and Latin oratory, such as had formerly been imparted by connoisseurs and masters of high position, had preserved a certain independence in relation to the Greeks. The judges of language and the masters of oratory were doubtless under the influence of Hellenism, but not absolutely under that of the Greek school-grammar and school-rhetoric; the latter in particular was decidedly an object of dread. The pride as well as the sound common sense of the Romans demurred to the Greek assertion that the ability to speak of things, which the orator understood and felt, intelligibly and attractively to his peers in the mother-tongue could be learned in the school by school-rules. To the solid practical advocate the procedure of the Greek rhetoricians, so totally estranged from life, could not but appear worse for the beginner than no preparation at all; to the man of thorough culture and matured by the experience of life, the Greek rhetoric seemed shallow and repulsive; while the man of serious conservative views did not fail to observe the close affinity between a professionally developed rhetoric and the trade of the demagogue. Accordingly the Scipionic circle had shown the most bitter hostility to the rhetoricians, and, if Greek declamations before paid masters were tolerated doubtless primarily as exercises in speaking Greek, Greek rhetoric did not thereby find its way either into Latin oratory or into Latin oratorical instruction. But in the new Latin rhetorical schools the Roman youths were trained as men and public orators by discussing in pairs rhetorical themes; they accused Ulysses, who was found beside the corpse of Ajax with the latter's bloody sword, of the murder of his comrade in arms, or upheld his innocence; they charged Orestes with the murder of his mother, or undertook to defend him; or perhaps they helped Hannibal with a supplementary good advice as to the question whether he would do better to comply with the invitation to Rome, or to remain in Carthage, or to take flight. It was natural that the Catonian opposition should once more bestir itself against these offensive and pernicious conflicts of words. The censors of 662 issued a warning to teachers and parents not to allow the young men to spend the whole day in exercises, whereof their ancestors had known nothing; and the man, from whom this warning came, was no less than the first forensic orator of his age, Lucius Licinius Crassus. Of course the Cassandra spoke in vain; declamatory exercises in Latin on the current themes of the Greek schools became a permanent ingredient in the education of Roman youth, and contributed their part to educate the very boys as forensic and political players and to stifle in the bud all earnest and true eloquence.

As the aggregate result of this modern Roman education there sprang up the new idea of "humanity," as it was called, which consisted partly of a more or less superficial appropriation of the aesthetic culture of the Hellenes, partly of a privileged Latin culture as an imitation or mutilated copy of the Greek. This new humanity, as the very name indicates, renounced the specific characteristics of Roman life, nay even came forward in opposition to them, and combined in itself, just like our closely kindred "general culture," a nationally cosmopolitan and socially exclusive character. Here too we trace the revolution, which separated classes and blended nations.

CHAPTER XIII

Literature and Art

Literary Reaction

The sixth century was, both in a political and a literary point of view, a vigorous and great age. It is true that we do not find in the field of authorship any more than in that of politics a man of the first rank; Naevius, Ennius, Plautus, Cato, gifted and lively authors of distinctly-marked individuality, were not in the highest sense men of creative talent; nevertheless we perceive in the soaring, stirring, bold strain of their dramatic, epic, and historic attempts, that these rest on the gigantic struggles of the Punic wars. Much is only artificially transplanted, there are various faults in delineation and colouring, the form of art and the language are deficient in purity of treatment, Greek and national elements are quaintly conjoined; the whole performance betrays the stamp of its scholastic origin and lacks independence and completeness; yet there exists in the poets and authors of that age, if not the full power to reach their high aim, at any rate the courage to compete with and the hope of rivalling the Greeks. It is otherwise in the epoch before us. The morning mists fell; what had been begun in the fresh feeling of the national strength hardened amidst war, with youthful want of insight into the difficulty of the undertaking and into the measure of their own talent, but also with youthful delight in and love to the work, could not be carried farther now, when on the one hand the dull sultriness of the approaching revolutionary storm began to fill the air, and on the other hand the eyes of the more intelligent were gradually opened to the incomparable glory of Greek poetry and art and to the very modest artistic endowments of their own nation. The literature of the sixth century had arisen from the influence of Greek art on half-cultivated, but excited and susceptible minds. The increased Hellenic culture of the seventh called forth a literary reaction, which destroyed the germs of promise contained in those simple imitative attempts by the winter-frost of reflection, and rooted up the wheat and the tares of the older type of literature together.

Scipionic Circle

This reaction proceeded primarily and chiefly from the circle which assembled around Scipio Aemilianus, and whose most prominent members among the Roman world of quality were, in addition to Scipio himself, his elder friend and counsellor Gaius Laelius (consul in 614) and Scipio's younger companions, Lucius Furius Philus (consul in 618) and Spurius Mummius, the brother of the destroyer of Corinth, among the Roman and Greek literati the comedian Terence, the satirist Lucilius, the historian Polybius, and the philosopher Panaetius. Those who were familiar with the Iliad, with Xenophon, and with Menander, could not be greatly impressed by the Roman Homer, and still less by the bad translations of the tragedies of Euripides which Ennius had furnished and Pacuvius continued to furnish. While patriotic considerations might set bounds to criticism in reference to the native chronicles, Lucilius at any rate directed very pointed shafts against "the dismal figures from the complicated expositions of Pacuvius"; and similar severe, but not unjust criticisms of Ennius, Plautus, Pacuvius--all those poets "who appeared to have a licence to talk pompously and to reason illogically"--are found in the polished author of the Rhetoric dedicated to Herennius, written at the close of this period. People shrugged their shoulders at the interpolations, with which the homely popular wit of Rome had garnished the elegant comedies of Philemon and Diphilus. Half smiling, half envious, they turned away from the inadequate attempts of a dull age, which that circle probably regarded somewhat as a mature man regards the poetical effusions of his youth; despairing of the transplantation of the marvellous tree, they allowed the higher species of art in poetry and prose substantially to fall into abeyance, and restricted themselves in these departments to an intelligent enjoyment of foreign masterpieces. The productiveness of this epoch displayed itself chiefly in the subordinate fields of the lighter comedy, the poetical miscellany, the political pamphlet, and the professional sciences. The literary cue was correctness, in the style of art and especially in the language, which, as a more limited circle of persons of culture became separated from the body of the people, was in its turn divided into the classical Latin of higher society and the vulgar Latin of the common people. The prologues of Terence promise "pure Latin"; warfare against faults of language forms a chief element of the Lucilian satire; and with this circumstance is connected the fact, that composition in Greek among the Romans now falls decidedly into the shade. In so far certainly there is an improvement; inadequate efforts occur in this epoch far less frequently; performances in their kind complete and thoroughly pleasing occur far oftener than before or afterwards; in a linguistic point of view Cicero calls the age of Laelius and Scipio the golden age of pure unadulterated Latin. In like manner literary activity gradually rises in public opinion from a trade to an art. At the beginning of this period the preparation of theatrical pieces at any rate, if not the publication of recitative poems, was still regarded as not becoming for the Roman of quality; Pacuvius and Terence lived by their pieces; the writing of dramas was entirely a trade, and not one of golden produce. About the time of Sulla the state of matters had entirely changed. The remuneration given to actors at this time proves that even the favourite dramatic poet might then lay claim to a payment, the high amount of which removed the stigma. By this means composing for the stage was raised into a liberal art; and we accordingly find men of the highest aristocratic circles, such as Lucius Caesar (aedile in 664, 667), engaged in writing for the Roman stage and proud of sitting in the Roman "poet's club" by the side of the ancestorless Accius. Art gains in sympathy and honour; but the enthusiasm has departed in life and in literature. The fearless self-confidence, which makes the poet a poet, and which is very decidedly apparent in Plautus especially, is found in none of those that follow; the Epigoni of the men that fought with Hannibal are correct, but feeble.

Tragedy Pacuvius

Let us first glance at the Roman dramatic literature and the stage itself. Tragedy has now for the first time her specialists; the tragic poets of this epoch do not, like those of the preceding, cultivate comedy and epos side by side. The appreciation of this branch of art among the writing and reading circles was evidently on the increase, but tragic poetry itself hardly improved. We now meet with the national tragedy (-praetexta-), the creation of Naevius, only in the hands of Pacuvius to be mentioned immediately-- an after-growth of the Ennian epoch. Among the probably numerous poets who imitated Greek tragedies two alone acquired a considerable name. Marcus Pacuvius from Brundisium (535-c. 625) who in his earlier years earned his livelihood in Rome by painting and only composed tragedies when advanced in life, belongs as respects both his years and his style to the sixth rather than the seventh century, although his poetical activity falls within the latter. He composed on the whole after the manner of his countryman, uncle, and master Ennius. Polishing more carefully and aspiring to a higher strain than his predecessor, he was regarded by favourable critics of art afterwards as a model of artistic poetry and of rich style: in the fragments, however, that have reached us proofs are not wanting to justify the censure of the poet's language by Cicero and the censure of his taste by Lucilius; his language appears more rugged than that of his predecessor, his style of composition pompous and punctilious.(1) There are traces that he like Ennius attached more value to philosophy than to religion; but he did not at any rate, like the latter, prefer dramas chiming in with neological views and preaching sensuous passion or modern enlightenment, and drew without distinction from Sophocles or from Euripides--of that poetry with a decided special aim, which almost stamps Ennius with genius, there can have been no vein in the younger poet.

Accius

More readable and adroit imitations of Greek tragedy were furnished by Pacuvius' younger contemporary, Lucius Accius, son of a freedman of Pisaurum (584-after 651), with the exception of Pacuvius the only notable tragic poet of the seventh century. An active author also in the field of literary history and grammar, he doubtless laboured to introduce instead of the crude manner of his predecessors greater purity of language and style into Latin tragedy; yet even his inequality and incorrectness were emphatically censured by men of strict observance like Lucilius.

Greek Comedy Terence

Far greater activity and far more important results are apparent in the field of comedy. At the very commencement of this period a remarkable reaction set in against the sort of comedy hitherto prevalent and popular. Its representative Terentius (558-595) is one of the most interesting phenomena, in a historical point of view, in Roman literature. Born in Phoenician Africa, brought in early youth as a slave to Rome and there introduced to the Greek culture of the day, he seemed from the very first destined for the vocation of giving back to the new Attic comedy that cosmopolitan character, which in its adaptation to the Roman public under the rough hands of Naevius, Plautus, and their associates it had in some measure lost. Even in the selection and employment of models the contrast is apparent between him and that predecessor whom alone we can now compare with him. Plautus chooses his pieces from the whole range of the newer Attic comedy, and by no means disdains the livelier and more popular comedians, such as Philemon; Terence keeps almost exclusively to Menander, the most elegant, polished, and chaste of all the poets of the newer comedy. The method of working up several Greek pieces into one Latin is retained by Terence, because in fact from the state of the case it could not be avoided by the Roman editors; but it is handled with incomparably more skill and carefulness. The Plautine dialogue beyond doubt departed very frequently from its models; Terence boasts of the verbal adherence of his imitations to the originals, by which however we are not to understand a verbal translation in our sense. The not unfrequently coarse, but always effective laying on of Roman local tints over the Greek ground-work, which Plautus was fond of, is completely and designedly banished from Terence; not an allusion puts one in mind of Rome, not a proverb, hardly a reminiscence;(2) even the Latin titles are replaced by Greek. The same distinction shows itself in the artistic treatment. First of all the players receive back their appropriate masks, and greater care is observed as to the scenic arrangements, so that it is no longer the case, as with Plautus, that everything needs to take place on the street, whether belonging to it or not. Plautus ties and unties the dramatic knot carelessly and loosely, but his plot is droll and often striking; Terence, far less effective, keeps everywhere account of probability, not unfrequently at the cost of suspense, and wages emphatic war against the certainly somewhat flat and insipid standing expedients of his predecessors, e. g. against allegoric dreams.(3) Plautus paints his characters with broad strokes, often after a stock-model, always with a view to the gross effect from a distance and on the whole; Terence handles the psychological development with a careful and often excellent miniature-painting, as in the -Adelphi- for instance, where the two old men--the easy bachelor enjoying life in town, and the sadly harassed not at all refined country-landlord--form a masterly contrast. The springs of action and the language of Plautus are drawn from the tavern, those of Terence from the household of the good citizen. The lazy Plautine hostelry, the very unconstrained but very charming damsels with the hosts duly corresponding, the sabre-rattling troopers, the menial world painted with an altogether peculiar humour, whose heaven is the cellar, and whose fate is the lash, have disappeared in Terence or at any rate undergone improvement. In Plautus we find ourselves, on the whole, among incipient or thorough rogues, in Terence again, as a rule, among none but honest men; if occasionally a -leno- is plundered or a young man taken to the brothel, it is done with a moral intent, possibly out of brotherly love or to deter the boy from frequenting improper haunts. The Plautine pieces are pervaded by the significant antagonism of the tavern to the house; everywhere wives are visited with abuse, to the delight of all husbands temporarily emancipated and not quite sure of an amiable salutation at home. The comedies of Terence are pervaded by a conception not more moral, but doubtless more becoming, of the feminine nature and of married life. As a rule, they end with a virtuous marriage, or, if possible, with two--just as it was the glory of Menander that he compensated for every seduction by a marriage. The eulogies of a bachelor life, which are so frequent in Menander, are repeated by his Roman remodeller only with characteristic shyness,(4) whereas the lover in his agony, the tender husband at the -accouchement-, the loving sister by the death-bed in the -Eunuchus- and the -Andria- are very gracefully delineated; in the -Hecyra- there even appears at the close as a delivering angel a virtuous courtesan, likewise a genuine Menandrian figure, which the Roman public, it is true, very properly hissed. In Plautus the fathers throughout only exist for the purpose of being jeered and swindled by their sons; with Terence in the -Heauton Timorumenos- the lost son is reformed by his father's wisdom, and, as in general he is full of excellent instructions as to education, so the point of the best of his pieces, the -Adelphi-, turns on finding the right mean between the too liberal training of the uncle and the too rigid training of the father. Plautus writes for the great multitude and gives utterance to profane and sarcastic speeches, so far as the censorship of the stage at all allowed; Terence on the contrary describes it as his aim to please the good and, like Menander, to offend nobody. Plautus is fond of vigorous, often noisy dialogue, and his pieces require a lively play of gesture in the actors; Terence confines himself to "quiet conversation." The language of Plautus abounds in burlesque turns and verbal witticisms, in alliterations, in comic coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations of words, pithy expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek. Terence knows nothing of such caprices; his dialogue moves on with the purest symmetry, and its points are elegant epigrammatic and sententious turns. The comedy of Terence is not to be called an improvement, as compared with that of Plautus, either in a poetical or in a moral point of view. Originality cannot be affirmed of either, but, if possible, there is less of it in Terence; and the dubious praise of more correct copying is at least outweighed by the circumstance that, while the younger poet reproduced the agreeableness, he knew not how to reproduce the merriment of Menander, so that the comedies of Plautus imitated from Menander, such as the -Stichus-, the -Cistellaria-, the -Bacchides-, probably preserve far more of the flowing charm of the original than the comedies of the "-dimidiatus Menander-." And, while the aesthetic critic cannot recognize an improvement in the transition from the coarse to the dull, as little can the moralist in the transition from the obscenity and indifference of Plautus to the accommodating morality of Terence. But in point of language an improvement certainly took place. Elegance of language was the pride of the poet, and it was owing above all to its inimitable charm that the most refined judges of art in aftertimes, such as Cicero, Caesar, and Quinctilian, assigned the palm to him among all the Roman poets of the republican age. In so far it is perhaps justifiable to date a new era in Roman literature--the real essence of which lay not in the development of Latin poetry, but in the development of the Latin language--from the comedies of Terence as the first artistically pure imitation of Hellenic works of art. The modern comedy made its way amidst the most determined literary warfare. The Plautine style of composing had taken root among the Roman bourgeoisie; the comedies of Terence encountered the liveliest opposition from the public, which found their "insipid language," their "feeble style," intolerable. The, apparently, pretty sensitive poet replied in his prologues--which properly were not intended for any such purpose--with counter-criticisms full of defensive and offensive polemics; and appealed from the multitude, which had twice run off from his -Hecyra- to witness a band of gladiators and rope-dancers, to the cultivated circles of the genteel world. He declared that he only aspired to the approval of the "good"; in which doubtless there was not wanting a hint, that it was not at all seemly to undervalue works of art which had obtained the approval of the "few." He acquiesced in or even favoured the report, that persons of quality aided him in composing with their counsel or even with their cooperation.(5) In reality he carried his point; even in literature the oligarchy prevailed, and the artistic comedy of the exclusives supplanted the comedy of the people: we find that about 620 the pieces of Plautus disappeared from the set of stock plays. This is the more significant, because after the early death of Terence no man of conspicuous talent at all further occupied this field. Respecting the comedies of Turpilius (651 at an advanced age) and other stop- gaps wholly or almost wholly forgotten, a connoisseur already at the close of this period gave it as his opinion, that the new comedies were even much worse than the bad new pennies.(6)

National Comedy Afranius

We have formerly shown(7) that in all probability already in the course of the sixth century a national Roman comedy (-togata-) was added to the Graeco-Roman (-palliata-), as a portraiture not of the distinctive life of the capital, but of the ways and doings of the Latin land. Of course the Terentian school rapidly took possession of this species of comedy also; it was quite in accordance with its spirit to naturalise Greek comedy in Italy on the one hand by faithful translation, and on the other hand by pure Roman imitation. The chief representative of this school was Lucius Afranius (who flourished about 66). The fragments of his comedies remaining give no distinct impression, but they are not inconsistent with what the Roman critics of art remark regarding him. His numerous national comedies were in their construction thoroughly formed on the model of the Greek intrigue-piece; only, as was natural in imitation, they were simpler and shorter. In the details also he borrowed what pleased him partly from Menander, partly from the older national literature. But of the Latin local tints, which are so distinctly marked in Titinius the creator of this species of art, we find not much in Afranius;(8) his subjects retain a very general character, and may well have been throughout imitations of particular Greek comedies with merely an alteration of costume. A polished eclecticism and adroitness in composition-- literary allusions not unfrequently occur--are characteristic of him as of Terence: the moral tendency too, in which his pieces approximated to the drama, their inoffensive tenor in a police point of view, their purity of language are common to him with the latter. Afranius is sufficiently indicated as of a kindred spirit with Menander and Terence by the judgment of posterity that he wore the -toga- as Menander would have worn it had he been an Italian, and by his own expression that to his mind Terence surpassed all other poets.

Atellanae

The farce appeared afresh at this period in the field of Roman literature. It was in itself very old:(9) long before Rome arose, the merry youths of Latium may have improvised on festal occasions in the masks once for all established for particular characters. These pastimes obtained a fixed local background in the Latin "asylum of fools," for which they selected the formerly Oscan town of Atella, which was destroyed in the Hannibalic war and was thereby handed over to comic use; thenceforth the name of "Oscan plays" or "plays of Atella" was commonly used for these exhibitions.(10) But these pleasantries had nothing to do with the stage(11) and with literature; they were performed by amateurs where and when they pleased, and the text was not written or at any rate was not published. It was not until the present period that the Atellan piece was handed over to actors properly so called,(12) and was employed, like the Greek satyric drama, as an afterpiece particularly after tragedies; a change which naturally suggested the extension of literary activity to that field. Whether this authorship developed itself altogether independently, or whether possibly the art-farce of Lower Italy, in various respects of kindred character, gave the impulse to this Roman farce,(13) can no longer be determined; that the several pieces were uniformly original works, is certain. The founder of this new species of literature, Lucius Pomponius from the Latin colony of Bononia, appeared in the first half of the seventh century;(14) and along with his pieces those of another poet Novius soon became favourites. So far as the few remains and the reports of the old -litteratores- allow us to form an opinion, they were short farces, ordinarily perhaps of one act, the charm of which depended less on the preposterous and loosely constructed plot than on the drastic portraiture of particular classes and situations. Festal days and public acts were favourite subjects of comic delineation, such as the "Marriage," the "First of March," "Harlequin Candidate"; so were also foreign nationalities--the Transalpine Gauls, the Syrians; above all, the various trades frequently appear on the boards. The sacristan, the soothsayer, the bird-seer, the physician, the publican, the painter, fisherman, baker, pass across the stage; the public criers were severely assailed and still more the fullers, who seem to have played in the Roman fool-world the part of our tailors. While the varied life of the city thus received its due attention, the farmer with his joys and sorrows was also represented in all aspects. The copiousness of this rural repertory may be guessed from the numerous titles of that nature, such as "the Cow," "the Ass," "the Kid," "the Sow," "the Swine," "the Sick Boar," "the Farmer," "the Countryman," "Harlequin Countryman," "the Cattle-herd," "the Vinedresser," "the Fig- gatherer," "Woodcutting," "Pruning," "the Poultry-yard." In these pieces it was always the standing figures of the stupid and the artful servant, the good old man, the wise man, that delighted the public; the first in particular might never be wanting-- the -Pulcinello- of this farce--the gluttonous filthy -Maccus-, hideously ugly and yet eternally in love, always on the point of stumbling across his own path, set upon by all with jeers and with blows and eventually at the close the regular scapegoat. The titles "-Maccus Miles-," "-Maccus Copo-," "-Maccus Virgo-," "-Maccus Exul-," "-Macci Gemini-" may furnish the good-humoured reader with some conception of the variety of entertainment in the Roman masquerade. Although these farces, at least after they came to be written, accommodated themselves to the general laws of literature, and in their metres for instance followed the Greek stage, they yet naturally retained a far more Latin and more popular stamp than even the national comedy. The farce resorted to the Greek world only under the form of travestied tragedy;(15) and this style appears to have been cultivated first by Novius, and not very frequently in any case. The farce of this poet moreover ventured, if not to trespass on Olympus, at least to touch the most human of the gods, Hercules: he wrote a -Hercules Auctionator-. The tone, as a matter of course, was not the most refined; very unambiguous ambiguities, coarse rustic obscenities, ghosts frightening and occasionally devouring children, formed part of the entertainment, and offensive personalities, even with the mention of names, not unfrequently crept in. But there was no want also of vivid delineation, of grotesque incidents, of telling jokes, and of pithy sayings; and the harlequinade rapidly won for itself no inconsiderable position in the theatrical life of the capital and even in literature.

Dramatic Arrangements

Lastly as regards the development of dramatic arrangements we are not in a position to set forth in detail--what is clear on the whole--that the general interest in dramatic performances was constantly on the increase, and that they became more and more frequent and magnificent. Not only was there hardly any ordinary or extraordinary popular festival that was now celebrated without dramatic exhibitions; even in the country-towns and in private houses representations by companies of hired actors were common. It is true that, while probably various municipal towns already at this time possessed theatres built of stone, the capital was still without one; the building of a theatre, already contracted for, had been again prohibited by the senate in 599 on the suggestion of Publius Scipio Nasica. It was quite in the spirit of the sanctimonious policy of this age, that the building of a permanent theatre was prohibited out of respect for the customs of their ancestors, but nevertheless theatrical entertainments were allowed rapidly to increase, and enormous sums were expended annually in erecting and decorating structures of boards for them. The arrangements of the stage became visibly better. The improved scenic arrangements and the reintroduction of masks about the time of Terence are doubtless connected with the fact, that the erection and maintenance of the stage and stage-apparatus were charged in 580 on the public chest.(16) The plays which Lucius Mummius produced after the capture of Corinth (609) formed an epoch in the history of the theatre. It was probably then that a theatre acoustically constructed after the Greek fashion and provided with seats was first erected, and more care generally was expended on the exhibitions.(17) Now also there is frequent mention of the bestowal of a prize of victory--which implies the competition of several pieces--of the audience taking a lively part for or against the leading actors, of cliques and -claqueurs-. The decorations and machinery were improved; moveable scenery artfully painted and audible theatrical thunder made their appearance under the aedileship of Gaius Claudius Pulcher in 655;(18) and twenty years later (675) under the aedileship of the brothers Lucius and Marcus Lucullus came the changing of the decorations by shifting the scenes. To the close of this epoch belongs the greatest of Roman actors, the freedman Quintus Roscius (d. about 692 at a great age), throughout several generations the ornament and pride of the Roman stage,(19) the friend and welcome boon-companion of Sulla--to whom we shall have to recur in the sequel.

Satura

In recitative poetry the most surprising circumstance is the insignificance of the Epos, which during the sixth century had occupied decidedly the first place in the literature destined for reading; it had numerous representatives in the seventh, but not a single one who had even temporary success. From the present epoch there is hardly anything to be reported save a number of rude attempts to translate Homer, and some continuations of the Ennian Annals, such as the "Istrian War" of Hostius and the "Annals (perhaps) of the Gallic War" by Aulus Furius (about 650), which to all appearance took up the narrative at the very point where Ennius had broken off--the description of the Istrian war of 576 and 577. In didactic and elegiac poetry no prominent name appears. The only successes which the recitative poetry of this period has to show, belong to the domain of what was called -Satura---a species of art, which like the letter or the pamphlet allowed of any form and admitted any sort of contents, and accordingly in default of all proper generic characters derived its individual shape wholly from the individuality of each poet, and occupied a position not merely on the boundary between poetry and prose, but even more than half beyond the bounds of literature proper. The humorous poetical epistles, which one of the younger men of the Scipionic circle, Spurius Mummius, the brother of the destroyer of Corinth, sent home from the camp of Corinth to his friends, were still read with pleasure a century afterwards; and numerous poetical pleasantries of that sort not destined for publication probably proceeded at that time from the rich social and intellectual life of the better circles of Rome.

Lucilius

Its representative in literature is Gaius Lucilius (606-651) sprung of a respectable family in the Latin colony of Suessa, and likewise a member of the Scipionic circle. His poems are, as it were, open letters to the public. Their contents, as a clever successor gracefully says, embrace the whole life of a cultivated man of independence, who looks upon the events passing on the political stage from the pit and occasionally from the side-scenes; who converses with the best of his epoch as his equals; who follows literature and science with sympathy and intelligence without wishing personally to pass for a poet or scholar; and who, in fine, makes his pocket-book the confidential receptacle for everything good and bad that he meets with, for his political experiences and expectations, for grammatical remarks and criticisms on art, for incidents of his own life, visits, dinners, journeys, as well as for anecdotes which he has heard. Caustic, capricious, thoroughly individual, the Lucilian poetry has yet the distinct stamp of an oppositional and, so far, didactic aim in literature as well as in morals and politics; there is in it something of the revolt of the country against the capital; the Suessan's sense of his own purity of speech and honesty of life asserts itself in antagonism to the great Babel of mingled tongues and corrupt morals. The aspiration of the Scipionic circle after literary correctness, especially in point of language, finds critically its most finished and most clever representative in Lucilius. He dedicated his very first book to Lucius Stilo, the founder of Roman philology,(20) and designated as the public for which he wrote not the cultivated circles of pure and classical speech, but the Tarentines, the Bruttians, the Siculi, or in other words the half-Greeks of Italy, whose Latin certainly might well require a corrective. Whole books of his poems are occupied with the settlement of Latin orthography and prosody, with the combating of Praenestine, Sabine, Etruscan provincialisms, with the exposure of current solecisms; along with which, however, the poet by no means forgets to ridicule the insipidly systematic Isocratean purism of words and phrases,(21) and even to reproach his friend Scipio in right earnest jest with the exclusive fineness of his language.(22) But the poet inculcates purity of morals in public and private life far more earnestly than he preaches pure and simple Latinity. For this his position gave him peculiar advantages. Although by descent, estate, and culture on a level with the genteel Romans of his time and possessor of a handsome house in the capital, he was yet not a Roman burgess, but a Latin; even his position towards Scipio, under whom he had served in his early youth during the Numantine war, and in whose house he was a frequent visitor, may be connected with the fact, that Scipio stood in varied relations to the Latins and was their patron in the political feuds of the time.(23) He was thus precluded from a public life, and he disdained the career of a speculator--he had no desire, as he once said, to "cease to be Lucilius in order to become an Asiatic revenue-farmer." So he lived in the sultry age of the Gracchan reforms and the agitations preceding the Social war, frequenting the palaces and villas of the Roman grandees and yet not exactly their client, at once in the midst of the strife of political coteries and parties and yet not directly taking part with one or another; in a way similar to Beranger, of whom there is much that reminds us in the political and poetical position of Lucilius. From this position he uttered his comments on public life with a sound common sense that was not to be shaken, with a good humour that was inexhaustible, and with a wit perpetually gushing:

-Nunc vero a mane ad noctem, festo atque profesto Toto itidem pariterque die populusque patresque Iactare indu foro se omnes, decedere nusquam. Uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti; Verba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose, Blanditia certare, bonum simulare virum se, Insidias facere ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes-.

The illustrations of this inexhaustible text remorselessly, without omitting his friends or even the poet himself, assailed the evils of the age, the coterie-system, the endless Spanish war-service, and the like; the very commencement of his Satires was a great debate in the senate of the Olympian gods on the question, whether Rome deserved to enjoy the continued protection of the celestials. Corporations, classes, individuals, were everywhere severally mentioned by name; the poetry of political polemics, shut out from the Roman stage, was the true element and life-breath of the Lucilian poems, which by the power of the most pungent wit illustrated with the richest imagery--a power which still entrances us even in the remains that survive--pierce and crush their adversary "as by a drawn sword." In this--in the moral ascendency and the proud sense of freedom of the poet of Suessa--lies the reason why the refined Venusian, who in the Alexandrian age of Roman poetry revived the Lucilian satire, in spite of all his superiority in formal skill with true modesty yields to the earlier poet as "his better." The language is that of a man of thorough culture, Greek and Latin, who freely indulges his humour; a poet like Lucilius, who is alleged to have made two hundred hexameters before dinner and as many after it, is in far too great a hurry to be nice; useless prolixity, slovenly repetition of the same turn, culpable instances of carelessness frequently occur: the first word, Latin or Greek, is always the best. The metres are similarly treated, particularly the very predominant hexameter: if we transpose the words--his clever imitator says--no man would observe that he had anything else before him than simple prose; in point of effect they can only be compared to our doggerel verses.(24) The poems of Terence and those of Lucilius stand on the same level of culture, and have the same relation to each other as a carefully prepared and polished literary work has to a letter written on the spur of the moment. But the incomparably higher intellectual gifts and the freer view of life, which mark the knight of Suessa as compared with the African slave, rendered his success as rapid and brilliant as that of Terence had been laborious and doubtful; Lucilius became immediately the favourite of the nation, and he like Beranger could say of his poems that "they alone of all were read by the people." The uncommon popularity of the Lucilian poem is, in a historical point of view, a remarkable event; we see from it that literature was already a power, and beyond doubt we should fall in with various traces of its influence, if a thorough history of this period had been preserved. Posterity has only confirmed the judgment of contemporaries; the Roman judges of art who were opposed to the Alexandrian school assigned to Lucilius the first rank among all the Latin poets. So far as satire can be regarded as a distinct form of art at all, Lucilius created it; and in it created the only species of art which was peculiar to the Romans and was bequeathed by them to posterity.

Of poetry attaching itself to the Alexandrian school nothing occurs in Rome at this epoch except minor poems translated from or modelled on Alexandrian epigrams, which deserve notice not on their own account, but as the first harbingers of the later epoch of Roman literature. Leaving out of account some poets little known and whose dates cannot be fixed with certainty, there belong to this category Quintus Catulus, consul in 652(25) and Lucius Manlius, an esteemed senator, who wrote in 657. The latter seems to have been the first to circulate among the Romans various geographical tales current among the Greeks, such as the Delian legend of Latona, the fables of Europa and of the marvellous bird Phoenix; as it was likewise reserved for him on his travels to discover at Dodona and to copy that remarkable tripod, on which might be read the oracle imparted to the Pelasgians before their migration into the land of the Siceli and Aborigines--a discovery which the Roman annals did not neglect devoutly to register.

Historical Composition Polybius

In historical composition this epoch is especially marked by the emergence of an author who did not belong to Italy either by birth or in respect of his intellectual and literary standpoint, but who first or rather alone brought literary appreciation and description to bear on Rome's place in the world, and to whom all subsequent generations, and we too, owe the best part of our knowledge of the Roman development. Polybius (c. 546-c. 627) of Megalopolis in the Peloponnesus, son of the Achaean statesman Lycortas, took part apparently as early as 565 in the expedition of the Romans against the Celts of Asia Minor, and was afterwards on various occasions, especially during the third Macedonian war, employed by his countrymen in military and diplomatic affairs. After the crisis occasioned by that war in Hellas he was carried off along with the other Achaean hostages to Italy,(26) where he lived in exile for seventeen years (587-604) and was introduced by the sons of Paullus to the genteel circles of the capital. By the sending back of the Achaean hostages(27) he was restored to his home, where he thenceforth acted as permanent mediator between his confederacy and the Romans. He was present at the destruction of Carthage and of Corinth (608). He seemed educated, as it were, by destiny to comprehend the historical position of Rome more clearly than the Romans of that day could themselves. From the place which he occupied, a Greek statesman and a Roman prisoner, esteemed and occasionally envied for his Hellenic culture by Scipio Aemilianus and the first men of Rome generally, he saw the streams, which had so long flowed separately, meet together in the same channel and the history of the states of the Mediterranean resolve itself into the hegemony of Roman power and Greek culture. Thus Polybius became the first Greek of note, who embraced with serious conviction the comprehensive view of the Scipionic circle, and recognized the superiority of Hellenism in the sphere of intellect and of the Roman character in the sphere of politics as facts, regarding which history had given her final decision, and to which people on both sides were entitled and bound to submit. In this spirit he acted as a practical statesman, and wrote his history. If in his youth he had done homage to the honourable but impracticable local patriotism of the Achaeans, during his later years, with a clear discernment of inevitable necessity, he advocated in the community to which he belonged the policy of the closest adherence to Rome. It was a policy in the highest degree judicious and beyond doubt well-intentioned, but it was far from being high-spirited or proud. Nor was Polybius able wholly to disengage himself from the vanity and paltriness of the Hellenic statesmanship of the time. He was hardly released from exile, when he proposed to the senate that it should formally secure to the released their former rank in their several homes; whereupon Cato aptly remarked, that this looked to him as if Ulysses were to return to the cave of Polyphemus to request from the giant his hat and girdle. He often made use of his relations with the great men in Rome to benefit his countrymen; but the way in which he submitted to, and boasted of, the illustrious protection somewhat approaches fawning servility. His literary activity breathes throughout the same spirit as his practical action. It was the task of his life to write the history of the union of the Mediterranean states under the hegemony of Rome. From the first Punic war down to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth his work embraces the fortunes of all the civilized states--namely Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Carthage, and Italy--and exhibits in causal connection the mode in which they came under the Roman protectorate; in so far he describes it as his object to demonstrate the fitness and reasonableness of the Roman hegemony. In design as in execution, this history stands in clear and distinct contrast with the contemporary Roman as well as with the contemporary Greek historiography. In Rome history still remained wholly at the stage of chronicle; there existed doubtless important historical materials, but what was called historical composition was restricted--with the exception of the very respectable but purely individual writings of Cato, which at any rate did not reach beyond the rudiments of research and narration--partly to nursery tales, partly to collections of notices. The Greeks had certainly exhibited historical research and had written history; but the conceptions of nation and state had been so completely lost amidst the distracted times of the Diadochi, that none of the numerous historians succeeded in following the steps of the great Attic masters in spirit and in truth, or in treating from a general point of view the matter of world-wide interest in the history of the times.

Their histories were either purely outward records, or they were pervaded by the verbiage and sophistries of Attic rhetoric and only too often by the venality and vulgarity, the sycophancy and the bitterness of the age. Among the Romans as among the Greeks there was nothing but histories of cities or of tribes. Polybius, a Peloponnesian, as has been justly remarked, and holding intellectually a position at least as far aloof from the Attics as from the Romans, first stepped beyond these miserable limits, treated the Roman materials with mature Hellenic criticism, and furnished a history, which was not indeed universal, but which was at any rate dissociated from the mere local states and laid hold of the Romano-Greek state in the course of formation. Never perhaps has any historian united within himself all the advantages of an author drawing from original sources so completely as Polybius. The compass of his task is completely clear and present to him at every moment; and his eye is fixed throughout on the real historical connection of events. The legend, the anecdote, the mass of worthless chronicle-notices are thrown aside; the description of countries and peoples, the representation of political and mercantile relations--all the facts of so infinite importance, which escape the annalist because they do not admit of being nailed to a particular year--are put into possession of their long-suspended rights. In the procuring of historic materials Polybius shows a caution and perseverance such as are not perhaps paralleled in antiquity; he avails himself of documents, gives comprehensive attention to the literature of different nations, makes the most extensive use of his favourable position for collecting the accounts of actors and eye-witnesses, and, in fine, methodically travels over the whole domain of the Mediterranean states and part of the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.(28) Truthfulness is his nature. In all great matters he has no interest for one state or against another, for this man or against that, but is singly and solely interested in the essential connection of events, to present which in their true relation of causes and effects seems to him not merely the first but the sole task of the historian. Lastly, the narrative is a model of completeness, simplicity, and clearness. Still all these uncommon advantages by no means constitute a historian of the first rank. Polybius grasps his literary task, as he grasped his practical, with great understanding, but with the understanding alone. History, the struggle of necessity and liberty, is a moral problem; Polybius treats it as if it were a mechanical one. The whole alone has value for him, in nature as in the state; the particular event, the individual man, however wonderful they may appear, are yet properly mere single elements, insignificant wheels in the highly artificial mechanism which is named the state. So far Polybius was certainly qualified as no other was to narrate the history of the Roman people, which actually solved the marvellous problem of raising itself to unparalleled internal and external greatness without producing a single statesman of genius in the highest sense, and which resting on its simple foundations developed itself with wonderful almost mathematical consistency. But the element of moral freedom bears sway in the history of every people, and it was not neglected by Polybius in the history of Rome with impunity. His treatment of all questions, in which right, honour, religion are involved, is not merely shallow, but radically false. The same holds true wherever a genetic construction is required; the purely mechanical attempts at explanation, which Polybius substitutes, are sometimes altogether desperate; there is hardly, for instance, a more foolish political speculation than that which derives the excellent constitution of Rome from a judicious mixture of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, and deduces the successes of Rome from the excellence of her constitution. His conception of relations is everywhere dreadfully jejune and destitute of imagination: his contemptuous and over-wise mode of treating religious matters is altogether offensive. The narrative, preserving throughout an intentional contrast to the usual Greek historiography with its artistic style, is doubtless correct and clear, but flat and languid, digressing with undue frequency into polemical discussions or into biographical, not seldom very self- sufficient, description of his own experiences. A controversial vein pervades the whole work; the author destined his treatise primarily for the Romans, and yet found among them only a very small circle that understood him; he felt that he remained in the eyes of the Romans a foreigner, in the eyes of his countrymen a renegade, and that with his grand conception of his subject he belonged more to the future than to the present Accordingly he was not exempt from a certain ill-humour and personal bitterness, which frequently appear after a quarrelsome and paltry fashion in his attacks upon the superficial or even venal Greek and the uncritical Roman historians, so that he degenerates from the tone of the historian to that of the reviewer. Polybius is not an attractive author; but as truth and truthfulness are of more value than all ornament and elegance, no other author of antiquity perhaps can be named to whom we are indebted for so much real instruction. His books are like the sun in the field of Roman history; at the point where they begin the veil of mist which still envelops the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars is raised, and at the point where they end a new and, if possible, still more vexatious twilight begins.

Roman Chroniclers

In singular contrast to this grand conception and treatment of Roman history by a foreigner stands the contemporary historical literature of native growth. At the beginning of this period we still find some chronicles written in Greek such as that already mentioned(29) of Aulus Postumius (consul in 603), full of wretched rationalizing, and that of Gaius Acilius (who closed it at an advanced age about 612). Yet under the influence partly of Catonian patriotism, partly of the more refined culture of the Scipionic circle, the Latin language gained so decided an ascendency in this field, that of the later historical works not more than one or two occur written in Greek;(30) and not only so, but the older Greek chronicles were translated into Latin and were probably read mainly in these translations. Unhappily beyond the employment of the mother-tongue there is hardly anything else deserving of commendation in the chronicles of this epoch composed in Latin. They were numerous and detailed enough--there are mentioned, for example, those of Lucius Cassius Hemina (about 608), of Lucius Calpurnius Piso (consul in 621), of Gaius Sempronius Tuditanus (consul in 625), of Gaius Fannius (consul in 632). To these falls to be added the digest of the official annals of the city in eighty books, which Publius Mucius Scaevola (consul in 621), a man esteemed also as a jurist, prepared and published as -pontifex maximus-, thereby closing the city-chronicle in so far as thenceforth the pontifical records, although not exactly discontinued, were no longer at any rate, amidst the increasing diligence of private chroniclers, taken account of in literature. All these annals, whether they gave themselves forth as private or as official works, were substantially similar compilations of the extant historical and quasi-historical materials; and the value of their authorities as well as their formal value declined beyond doubt in the same proportion as their amplitude increased. Chronicle certainly nowhere presents truth without fiction, and it would be very foolish to quarrel with Naevius and Pictor because they have not acted otherwise than Hecataeus and Saxo Grammaticus; but the later attempts to build houses out of such castles in the air put even the most tried patience to a severe test No blank in tradition presents so wide a chasm, but that this system of smooth and downright invention will fill it up with playful facility. The eclipses of the sun, the numbers of the census, family-registers, triumphs, are without hesitation carried back from the current year up to the year One; it stands duly recorded, in what year, month, and day king Romulus went up to heaven, and how king Servius Tullius triumphed over the Etruscans first on the 25th November 183, and again on the 25th May 187, In entire harmony with such details accordingly the vessel in which Aeneas had voyaged from Ilion to Latium was shown in the Roman docks, and even the identical sow, which had served as a guide to Aeneas, was preserved well pickled in the Roman temple of Vesta. With the lying disposition of a poet these chroniclers of rank combine all the tiresome exactness of a notary, and treat their great subject throughout with the dulness which necessarily results from the elimination at once of all poetical and all historical elements. When we read, for instance, in Piso that Romulus avoided indulging in his cups when he had a sitting of the senate next day; or that Tarpeia betrayed the Capitol to the Sabines out of patriotism, with a view to deprive the enemy of their shields; we cannot be surprised at the judgment of intelligent contemporaries as to all this sort of scribbling, "that it was not writing history, but telling stories to children." Of far greater excellence were isolated works on the history of the recent past and of the present, particularly the history of the Hannibalic war by Lucius Caelius Antipater (about 633) and the history of his own time by Publius Sempronius Asellio, who was a little younger. These exhibited at least valuable materials and an earnest spirit of truth, in the case of Antipater also a lively, although strongly affected, style of narrative; yet, judging from all testimonies and fragments, none of these books came up either in pithy form or in originality to the "Origines" of Cato, who unhappily created as little of a school in the field of history as in that of politics.

Memoirs and Speeches

The subordinate, more individual and ephemeral, species of historical literature--memoirs, letters, and speeches--were strongly represented also, at least as respects quantity. The first statesmen of Rome already recorded in person their experiences: such as Marcus Scaurus (consul in 639), Publius Rufus (consul in 649), Quintus Catulus (consul in 652), and even the regent Sulla; but none of these productions seem to have been of importance for literature otherwise than by the substance of their contents. The collection of letters of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, was remarkable partly for the classical purity of the language and the high spirit of the writer, partly as the first correspondence published in Rome, and as the first literary production of a Roman lady. The literature of speeches preserved at this period the stamp impressed on it by Cato; advocates' pleadings were not yet looked on as literary productions, and such speeches as were published were political pamphlets. During the revolutionary commotions this pamphlet-literature increased in extent and importance, and among the mass of ephemeral productions there were some which, like the Philippics of Demosthenes and the fugitive pieces of Courier, acquired a permanent place in literature from the important position of their authors or from their own weight. Such were the political speeches of Gaius Laelius and of Scipio Aemilianus, masterpieces of excellent Latin as of the noblest patriotism; such were the gushing speeches of Gaius Titius, from whose pungent pictures of the place and the time--his description of the senatorial juryman has been given already(31)--the national comedy borrowed various points; such above all were the numerous orations of Gaius Gracchus, whose fiery words preserved in a faithful mirror the impassioned earnestness, the aristocratic bearing, and the tragic destiny of that lofty nature.

Sciences

In scientific literature the collection of juristic opinions by Marcus Brutus, which was published about the year 600, presents a remarkable attempt to transplant to Rome the method usual among the Greeks of handling professional subjects by means of dialogue, and to give to his treatise an artistic semi-dramatic form by a machinery of conversation in which the persons, time, and place were distinctly specified. But the later men of science, such as Stilo the philologist and Scaevola the jurist, laid aside this method, more poetical than practical, both in the sciences of general culture and in the special professional sciences. The increasing value of science as such, and the preponderance of a material interest in it at Rome, are clearly reflected in this rapid rejection of the fetters of artistic form. We have already spoken(32) in detail of the sciences of general liberal culture, grammar or rather philology, rhetoric and philosophy, in so far as these now became essential elements of the usual Roman training and thereby first began to be dissociated from the professional sciences properly so called.

Philology

In the field of letters Latin philology flourished vigorously, in close association with the philological treatment--long ago placed on a sure basis--of Greek literature. It was already mentioned that about the beginning of this century the Latin epic poets found their -diaskeuastae- and revisers of their text;(33) it was also noticed, that not only did the Scipionic circle generally insist on correctness above everything else, but several also of the most noted poets, such as Accius and Lucilius, busied themselves with the regulation of orthography and of grammar. At the same period we find isolated attempts to develop archaeology from the historical side; although the dissertations of the unwieldy annalists of this age, such as those of Hemina "on the Censors" and of Tuditanus "on the Magistrates," can hardly have been better than their chronicles. Of more interest were the treatise on the Magistracies by Marcus Junius the friend of Gaius Gracchus, as the first attempt to make archaeological investigation serviceable for political objects,(34) and the metrically composed -Didascaliae- of the tragedian Accius, an essay towards a literary history of the Latin drama. But those early attempts at a scientific treatment of the mother-tongue still bear very much a dilettante stamp, and strikingly remind us of our orthographic literature in the Bodmer- Klopstock period; and we may likewise without injustice assign but a modest place to the antiquarian researches of this epoch.

Stilo

The Roman, who established the investigation of the Latin language and antiquities in the spirit of the Alexandrian masters on a scientific basis, was Lucius Aelius Stilo about 650.(35) He first went back to the oldest monuments of the language, and commented on the Salian litanies and the Twelve Tables. He devoted his special attention to the comedy of the sixth century, and first formed a list of the pieces of Plautus which in his opinion were genuine. He sought, after the Greek fashion, to determine historically the origin of every single phenomenon in the Roman life and dealings and to ascertain in each case the "inventor," and at the same time brought the whole annalistic tradition within the range of his research. The success, which he had among his contemporaries, is attested by the dedication to him of the most important poetical, and the most important historical, work of his time, the Satires of Lucilius and the Annals of Antipater; and this first Roman philologist influenced the studies of his nation for the future by transmitting his spirit of investigation both into words and into things to his disciple Varro.

Rhetoric

The literary activity in the field of Latin rhetoric was, as might be expected, of a more subordinate kind. There was nothing here to be done but to write manuals and exercise-books after the model of the Greek compendia of Hermagoras and others; and these accordingly the schoolmasters did not fail to supply, partly on account of the need for them, partly on account of vanity and money. Such a manual of rhetoric has been preserved to us, composed under Sulla's dictatorship by an unknown author, who according to the fashion then prevailing(36) taught simultaneously Latin literature and Latin rhetoric, and wrote on both; a treatise remarkable not merely for its terse, clear, and firm handling of the subject, but above all for its comparative independence in presence of Greek models. Although in method entirely dependent on the Greeks, the Roman yet distinctly and even abruptly rejects all "the useless matter which the Greeks had gathered together, solely in order that the science might appear more difficult to learn." The bitterest censure is bestowed on the hair-splitting dialectics--that "loquacious science of inability to speak"--whose finished master, for sheer fear of expressing himself ambiguously, at last no longer ventures to pronounce his own name. The Greek school-terminology is throughout and intentionally avoided. Very earnestly the author points out the danger of many teachers, and inculcates the golden rule that the scholar ought above all to be induced by the teacher to help himself; with equal earnestness he recognizes the truth that the school is a secondary, and life the main, matter, and gives in his examples chosen with thorough independence an echo of those forensic speeches which during the last decades had excited notice in the Roman advocate-world. It deserves attention, that the opposition to the extravagances of Hellenism, which had formerly sought to prevent the rise of a native Latin rhetoric,(37) continued to influence it after it arose, and thereby secured to Roman eloquence, as compared with the contemporary eloquence of the Greeks, theoretically and practically a higher dignity and a greater usefulness.

Philosophy

Philosophy, in fine, was not yet represented in literature, since neither did an inward need develop a national Roman philosophy nor did outward circumstances call forth a Latin philosophical authorship. It cannot even be shown with certainty that there were Latin translations of popular summaries of philosophy belonging to this period; those who pursued philosophy read and disputed in Greek.

Professional Sciences Jurisprudence

In the professional sciences there was but little activity. Well as the Romans understood how to farm and how to calculate, physical and mathematical research gained no hold among them. The consequences of neglecting theory appeared practically in the low state of medical knowledge and of a portion of the military sciences. Of all the professional sciences jurisprudence alone was flourishing. We cannot trace its internal development with chronological accuracy. On the whole ritual law fell more and more into the shade, and at the end of this period stood nearly in the same position as the canon law at the present day. The finer and more profound conception of law, on the other hand, which substitutes for outward criteria the motive springs of action within--such as the development of the ideas of offences arising from intention and from carelessness respectively, and of possession entitled to temporary protection--was not yet in existence at the time of the Twelve Tables, but was so in the age of Cicero, and probably owed its elaboration substantially to the present epoch. The reaction of political relations on the development of law has been already indicated on several occasions; it was not always advantageous. By the institution of the tribunal of the -Centumviri- to deal with inheritance,(38) for instance, there was introduced in the law of property a college of jurymen, which, like the criminal authorities, instead of simply applying the law placed itself above it and with its so-called equity undermined the legal institutions; one consequence of which among others was the irrational principle, that any one, whom a relative had passed over in his testament, was at liberty to propose that the testament should be annulled by the court, and the court decided according to its discretion.

The development of juristic literature admits of being more distinctly recognized. It had hitherto been restricted to collections of formularies and explanations of terms in the laws; at this period there was first formed a literature of opinions (-responsa-), which answers nearly to our modern collections of precedents. These opinions--which were delivered no longer merely by members of the pontifical college, but by every one who found persons to consult him, at home or in the open market-place, and with which were already associated rational and polemical illustrations and the standing controversies peculiar to jurisprudence--began to be noted down and to be promulgated in collections about the beginning of the seventh century. This was done first by the younger Cato (d. about 600) and by Marcus Brutus (nearly contemporary); and these collections were, as it would appear, arranged in the order of matters.(39) A strictly systematic treatment of the law of the land soon followed. Its founder was the -pontifex maximus- Quintus Mucius Scaevola (consul in 659, d. 672),(40) in whose family jurisprudence was, like the supreme priesthood, hereditary. His eighteen books on the -Ius Civile-, which embraced the positive materials of jurisprudence--legislative enactments, judicial precedents, and authorities--partly from the older collections, partly from oral tradition in as great completeness as possible, formed the starting- point and the model of the detailed systems of Roman law; in like manner his compendious treatise of "Definitions" (--oroi--) became the basis of juristic summaries and particularly of the books of Rules. Although this development of law proceeded of course in the main independently of Hellenism, yet an acquaintance with the philosophico-practical scheme-making of the Greeks beyond doubt gave a general impulse to the more systematic treatment of jurisprudence, as in fact the Greek influence is in the case of the last-mentioned treatise apparent in the very title. We have already remarked that in several more external matters Roman jurisprudence was influenced by the Stoa.(41)

Art exhibits still less pleasing results. In architecture, sculpture, and painting there was, no doubt, a more and more general diffusion of a dilettante interest, but the exercise of native art retrograded rather than advanced. It became more and more customary for those sojourning in Grecian lands personally to inspect the works of art; for which in particular the winter- quarters of Sulla's army in Asia Minor in 670-671 formed an epoch. Connoisseur-ship developed itself also in Italy. They had commenced with articles in silver and bronze; about the commencement of this epoch they began to esteem not merely Greek statues, but also Greek pictures. The first picture publicly exhibited in Rome was the Bacchus of Aristides, which Lucius Mummius withdrew from the sale of the Corinthian spoil, because king Attalus offered as much as 6000 -denarii- (260 pounds) for it. The buildings became more splendid; and in particular transmarine, especially Hymettian, marble (Cipollino) came into use for that purpose--the Italian marble quarries were not yet in operation. A magnificent colonnade still admired in the time of the empire, which Quintus Metellus (consul in 611) the conqueror of Macedonia constructed in the Campus Martius, enclosed the first marble temple which the capital had seen; it was soon followed by similar structures built on the Capitol by Scipio Nasica (consul in 616), and near to the Circus by Gnaeus Octavius (consul in 626). The first private house adorned with marble columns was that of the orator Lucius Crassus (d. 663) on the Palatine.(42) But where they could plunder or purchase, instead of creating for themselves, they did so; it was a wretched indication of the poverty of Roman architecture, that it already began to employ the columns of the old Greek temples; the Roman Capitol, for instance, was embellished by Sulla with those of the temple of Zeus at Athens. The works, that were produced in Rome, proceeded from the hands of foreigners; the few Roman artists of this period, who are particularly mentioned, are without exception Italian or transmarine Greeks who had migrated thither. Such was the case with the architect Hermodorus from the Cyprian Salamis, who among other works restored the Roman docks and built for Quintus Metellus (consul in 611) the temple of Jupiter Stator in the basilica constructed by him, and for Decimus Brutus (consul in 616) the temple of Mars in the Flaminian circus; with the sculptor Pasiteles (about 665) from Magna Graecia, who furnished images of the gods in ivory for Roman temples; and with the painter and philosopher Metrodorus of Athens, who was summoned to paint the pictures for the triumph of Lucius Paullus (587). It is significant that the coins of this epoch exhibit in comparison with those of the previous period a greater variety of types, but a retrogression rather than an improvement in the cutting of the dies.

Finally, music and dancing passed over in like manner from Hellas to Rome, solely in order to be there applied to the enhancement of decorative luxury. Such foreign arts were certainly not new in Rome; the state had from olden time allowed Etruscan flute-players and dancers to appear at its festivals, and the freedmen and the lowest class of the Roman people had previously followed this trade. But it was a novelty that Greek dances and musical performances should form the regular accompaniment of a genteel banquet. Another novelty was a dancing-school, such as Scipio Aemilianus full of indignation describes in one of his speeches, in which upwards of five hundred boys and girls--the dregs of the people and the children of magistrates and of dignitaries mixed up together--received instruction from a ballet-master in far from decorous castanet-dances, in corresponding songs, and in the use of the proscribed Greek stringed instruments. It was a novelty too-- not so much that a consular and -pontifex maximus- like Publius Scaevola (consul in 621) should catch the balls in the circus as nimbly as he solved the most complicated questions of law at home-- as that young Romans of rank should display their jockey-arts before all the people at the festal games of Sulla. The government occasionally attempted to check such practices; as for instance in 639, when all musical instruments, with the exception of the simple flute indigenous in Latium, were prohibited by the censors. But Rome was no Sparta; the lax government by such prohibitions rather drew attention to the evils than attempted to remedy them by a sharp and consistent application of the laws.

If, in conclusion, we glance back at the picture as a whole which the literature and art of Italy unfold to our view from the death of Ennius to the beginning of the Ciceronian age, we find in these respects as compared with the preceding epoch a most decided decline of productiveness. The higher kinds of literature--such as epos, tragedy, history--have died out or have been arrested in their development. The subordinate kinds--the translation and imitation of the intrigue-piece, the farce, the poetical and prose brochure--alone are successful; in this last field of literature swept by the full hurricane of revolution we meet with the two men of greatest literary talent in this epoch, Gaius Gracchus and Gaius Lucilius, who stand out amidst a number of more or less mediocre writers just as in a similar epoch of French literature Courier and Beranger stand out amidst a multitude of pretentious nullities. In the plastic and delineative arts likewise the production, always weak, is now utterly null. On the other hand the receptive enjoyment of art and literature flourished; as the Epigoni of this period in the political field gathered in and used up the inheritance that fell to their fathers, we find them in this field also as diligent frequenters of plays, as patrons of literature, as connoisseurs and still more as collectors in art. The most honourable aspect of this activity was its learned research, which put forth a native intellectual energy, more especially in jurisprudence and in linguistic and antiquarian investigation. The foundation of these sciences which properly falls within the present epoch, and the first small beginnings of an imitation of the Alexandrian hothouse poetry, already herald the approaching epoch of Roman Alexandrinism. All the productions of the present epoch are smoother, more free from faults, more systematic than the creations of the sixth century. The literati and the friends of literature of this period not altogether unjustly looked down on their predecessors as bungling novices: but while they ridiculed or censured the defective labours of these novices, the very men who were the most gifted among them may have confessed to themselves that the season of the nation's youth was past, and may have ever and anon perhaps felt in the still depths of the heart a secret longing to stray once more in the delightful paths of youthful error.

NOTES FOR VOLUME IV

Chapter I

1. III. VII. The State of Culture in Spain.

2. Italica must have been intended by Scipio to be what was called in Italy forum et -conciliabulum civium Romanorum-; Aquae Sextiae in Gaul had a similar origin afterwards. The formation of transmarine burgess- communities only began at a later date with Carthage and Narbo: yet it is remarkable that Scipio already made a first step, in a certain sense, in that direction.

3. III. VII. Gracchus

4. The chronology of the war with Viriathus is far from being precisely settled. It is certain that the appearance of Viriathus dates from the conflict with Vetilius (Appian, Hisp. 61; Liv. lii.; Oros. v. 4), and that he perished in 615 (Diod. Vat. p. 110, etc.); the duration of his rule is reckoned at eight (Appian, Hisp. 63), ten (Justin, xliv. 2), eleven (Diodorus, p. 597), fifteen (Liv. liv.; Eutrop. iv. 16; Oros. v. 4; Flor. i. 33), and twenty years (Vellei. ii. 90). The first estimate possesses some probability, because the appearance of Viriathus is connected both in Diodorus (p. 591; Vat. p. 107, 108) and in Orosius (v. 4) with the destruction of Corinth. Of the Roman governors, with whom Viriathus fought, several undoubtedly belong to the northern province; for though Viriathus was at work chiefly in the southern, he was not exclusively so (Liv. lii.); consequently we must not calculate the number of the years of his generalship by the number of these names.

5. IV. I. Celtiberian War

6. III. VII. Massinissa

7. III. VI. Peace, III. VII. Carthage

8. The line of the coast has been in the course of centuries so much changed that the former local relations are but imperfectly recognizable on the ancient site. The name of the city is preserved by Cape Cartagena--also called from the saint's tomb found there Ras Sidi bu Said--the eastern headland of the peninsula, projecting into the gulf with its highest point rising to 393 feet above the level of the sea.

9. The dimensions given by Beule (Fouilles a Carthage, 1861) are as follows in metres and in Greek feet (1=0.309 metre):--

Outer wall 2 metres = 6 1/2 feet. Corridor 1.9 " = 6 " Front wall of casemates 1 " = 3 1/4 " Casemate rooms 4.2 " = 14 " Back wall of casemates 1 " = 3 1/4 " ------------------------ Whole breadth of the walls 10.1 metres = 33 feet.

Or, as Diodorus (p. 522) states it, 22 cubits (1 Greek cubit = 1 1/2 feet), while Livy (ap. Oros. iv. 22) and Appian (Pun. 95), who seem to have had before them another less accurate passage of Polybius, state the breadth of the walls at 30 feet. The triple wall of Appian--as to which a false idea has hitherto been diffused by Floras (i. 31)--denotes the outer wall, and the front and back walls of the casemates. That this coincidence is not accidental, and that we have here in reality the remains of the famed walls of Carthage before us, will be evident to every one: the objections of Davis (Carthage and her Remains, p. 370 et seq.) only show how little even the utmost zeal can adduce in opposition to the main results of Beule. Only we must maintain that all the ancient authorities give the statements of which we are now speaking with reference not to the citadel-wall, but to the city-wall on the landward side, of which the wall along the south side of the citadel-hill was an integral part (Oros. iv. 22). In accordance with this view, the excavations at the citadel-hill on the east, north, and west, have shown no traces of fortifications, whereas on the south side they have brought to light the very remains of this great wall. There is no reason for regarding these as the remains of a separate fortification of the citadel distinct from the city wall; it may be presumed that further excavations at a corresponding depth--the foundation of the city wall discovered at the Byrsa lies fifty-six feet beneath the present surface--will bring to light like, or at any rate analogous, foundations along the whole landward side, although it is probable that at the point where the walled suburb of Magalia rested on the main wall the fortification was either weaker from the first or was early neglected. The length of the wall as a whole cannot be stated with precision; but it must have been very considerable, for three hundred elephants were stabled there, and the stores for their fodder and perhaps other spaces also as well as the gates are to be taken into account. It is easy to conceive how the inner city, within the walls of which the Byrsa was included, should, especially by way of contrast to the suburb of Magalia which had its separate circumvallation, be sometimes itself called Byrsa (App. Pun. 117; Nepos, ap. Serv. Aen. i. 368).

10. Such is the height given by Appian, l. c.; Diodorus gives the height, probably inclusive of the battlements, at 40 cubits or 60 feet. The remnant preserved is still from 13 to 16 feet (4-5 metres) high.

11. The rooms of a horse-shoe shape brought to light in excavation have a depth of 14, and a breadth of 11, Greek feet; the width of the entrances is not specified. Whether these dimensions and the proportions of the corridor suffice for our recognizing them as elephants' stalls, remains to be settled by a more accurate investigation. The partition-walls, which separate the apartments, have a thickness of 1.1 metre = 3 1/2 feet.

12. Oros. iv. 22. Fully 2000 paces, or--as Polybius must have said--16 stadia, are=about 3000 metres. The citadel-hill, on which the church of St. Louis now stands, measures at the top about 1400, half-way up about 2600, metres in circumference (Beule, p. 22); for the circumference at the base that estimate will very well suffice.

13. It now bears the fort Goletta.

14. That this Phoenician word signifies a basin excavated in a circular shape, is shown both by Diodorus (iii. 44), and by its being employed by the Greeks to denote a "cup." It thus suits only the inner harbour of Carthage, and in that sense it is used by Strabo (xvii. 2, 14, where it is strictly applied to the admiral's island) and Fest. Ep. v. -cothones-, p. 37. Appian (Pun. 127) is not quite accurate in describing the rectangular harbour in front of the Cothon as part of it.

15. --Oios pepnutai, toi de skiai aissousin--.

16. III. III. Acquisition of Territory in Illyria, III. IX. Macedonia

17. III. X. Macedonia Broken Up

18. This road was known already by the author of the pseudo- Aristotelian treatise De Mirabilibus as a commercial route between the Adriatic and Black seas, viz. As that along which the wine jars from Corcyra met halfway those from Thasos and Lesbos. Even now it runs substantially in the same direction from Durazzo, cutting through the mountains of Bagora (Candavian chain) near the lake of Ochrida (Lychnitis), by way of Monastir to Salonica.

19. III. X. Greek National Party

20. III. IX. The Achaeans

21. III. IX. The Achaeans

22. At Sabine townships, at Parma, and even at Italica in Spain (p. 214), several pediments marked with the name of Mummius have been brought to light, which once supported gifts forming part of the spoil.

23. III. III. Organization of the Provinces

24. III. VIII. Final Regulation of Greece

25. The question whether Greece did or did not become a Roman province in 608, virtually runs into a dispute about words. It is certain that the Greek communities throughout remained "free" (C. I. Gr. 1543, 15; Caesar, B. C. iii. 5; Appian, Mithr. 58; Zonar. ix. 31). But it is no less certain that Greece was then "taken possession of" by the Romans (Tac. Ann. xiv. 21; 1 Maccab. viii. 9, 10); that thenceforth each community paid a fixed tribute to Rome (Pausan. vii. 16, 6; comp. Cic. De Prov. Cons. 3, 5), the little island of Gyarus, for instance, paying 150 --drachmae-- annually (Strabo, x. 485); that the "rods and axes" of the Roman governor thenceforth ruled in Greece (Polyb. xxxviii. l. c.; comp. Cic. Verr. l. i. 21, 55), and that he thenceforth exercised the superintendence over the constitutions of the cities (C. I. Gr. 1543), as well as in certain cases the criminal jurisdiction (C. I. Gr. 1543; Plut. Cim. 2), just as the senate had hitherto done; and that, lastly, the Macedonian provincial era was also in use in Greece. Between these facts there is no inconsistency, or at any rate none further than is involved in the position of the free cities generally, which are spoken of sometimes as if excluded from the province (e. g. Sueton. Cats., 25; Colum. xi. 3, 26), sometimes as assigned to it (e. g. Joseph. Ant. Jud. xiv. 4, 4). The Roman domanial possessions in Greece were, no doubt, restricted to the territory of Corinth and possibly some portions of Euboea (C. I. Gr. 5879), and there were no subjects in the strict sense there at all; yet if we look to the relations practically subsisting between the Greek communities and the Macedonian governor, Greece may be reckoned as included in the province of Macedonia in the same manner as Massilia in the province of Narbo or Dyrrhachium in that of Macedonia. We find even cases that go much further: Cisalpine Gaul consisted after 665 of mere burgess or Latin communities and was yet made a province by Sulla, and in the time of Caesar we meet with regions which consisted exclusively of burgess-communities and yet by no means ceased to be provinces. In these cases the fundamental idea of the Roman -provinicia- comes out very clearly; it was primarily nothing but a "command," and all the administrative and judicial functions of the commandant were originally collateral duties and corollaries of his military position.

On the other hand, if we look to the formal sovereignty of the free communities, it must be granted that the position of Greece was not altered in point of constitutional law by the events of 608. It was a difference de facto rather than de jure, when instead of the Achaean league the individual communities of Achaia now appeared by the side of Rome as tributary protected states, and when, after the erection of Macedonia as a separate Roman province, the latter relieved the authorities of the capital of the superintendence over the Greek client-states. Greece therefore may or may not be regarded as a part of the "command" of Macedonia, according as the practical or the formal point of view preponderates; but the preponderance is justly conceded to the former.

26. III. X. Intervention in the Syro-Egyptian War

27. A remarkable proof of this is found in the names employed to designate the fine bronze and copper wares of Greece, which in the time of Cicero were called indiscriminately "Corinthian" or "Delian" copper. Their designation in Italy was naturally derived not from the places of manufacture but from those of export (Plin. H. N. xxxiv. 2, 9); although, of course, we do not mean to deny that similar vases were manufactured in Corinth and Delos themselves.

28. III. X. Course Pursued with Pergamus

29. III. IX. Extension of the Kingdom of Pergamus

30. III. X. Course Pursued with Pergamus

31. Several letters recently brought to light (Munchener Sitzungsberichte, 1860, p. 180 et seq.) from the kings Eumenes II, and Attalus II to the priest of Pessinus, who was uniformly called Attis (comp. Polyb. xxii. 20), very clearly illustrate these relations. The earliest of these and the only one with a date, written in the 34th year of the reign of Eumenes on the 7th day before the end of Gorpiaeus, and therefore in 590-1 u. c. offers to the priest military aid in order to wrest from the Pesongi (not otherwise known) temple-land occupied by them. The following, likewise from Eumenes, exhibits the king as a party in the feud between the priest of Pessinus and his brother Aiorix. Beyond doubt both acts of Eumenes were included among those which were reported at Rome in 590 et seq. as attempts on his part to interfere further in Gallic affairs, and to support his partisans in that quarter (Polyb. xxxi. 6, 9; xxxii. 3, 5). On the other hand it is plain from one of the letters of his successor Attalus that the times had changed and his wishes had lowered their tone. The priest Attis appears to have at a conference at Apamea obtained once more from Attalus the promise of armed assistance; but afterwards the king writes to him that in a state council held for the purpose, at which Athenaeus (certainly the known brother of the king), Sosander, Menogenes, Chlorus, and other relatives (--anagkaioi--) had been present, after long hesitation the majority had at length acceded to the opinion of Chlorus that nothing should be done without previously consulting the Romans; for, even if a success were obtained, they would expose themselves to its being lost again, and to the evil suspicion "which they had cherished also against his brother" (Eumenes II.).

32. In the same testament the king gave to his city Pergamus "freedom," that is the --demokratia--, urban self-government. According to the tenor of a remarkable document that has recently been found there (Staatsrecht, iii(3). p. 726) after the testament was opened, but before its confirmation by the Romans, the Demos thus constituted resolved to confer urban burgess-rights on the classes of the population hitherto excluded from them, especially on the -paroeci- entered in the census and on the soldiers dwelling in town and country, including the Macedonians, in order thus to bring about a good understanding among the whole population. Evidently the burgesses, in confronting the Romans with this comprehensive reconciliation as an accomplished fact, desired, before the Roman rule was properly introduced, to prepare themselves against it and to take away from the foreign rulers the possibility of using the differences of rights within the population for breaking up its municipal freedom.

33. These strange "Heliopolites" may, according to the probable opinion which a friend has expressed to me, be accounted for by supposing that the liberated slaves constituted themselves citizens of a town Heliopolis--not otherwise mentioned or perhaps having an existence merely in imagination for the moment--which derived its name from the God of the Sun so highly honoured in Syria.

34. III. IX. Extension of the Kingdom of Pergamus

35. III. IX. Extension of the Kingdom of Pergamus

36. III. IX. Extension of the Kingdom of Pergamus

37. III. X. Intervention in the Syro-Egyptian War

38. III. IX. Armenia

39. From him proceed the coins with the inscription "Shekel Israel," and the date of the "holy Jerusalem," or the "deliverance of Sion." The similar coins with the name of Simon, the prince (Nessi) of Israel, belong not to him, but to Bar-Cochba the leader of the insurgents in the time of Hadrian.

40. III. III. Illyrian Piracy

41. IV. I. New Organization of Spain

42. III. X. Intervention in the Syro-Egyptian War