Caesar and Christ

III. MORALS

What kind of morality emerged from this life in the family and among the gods? Roman literature, from Ennius to Juvenal, idealized these earlier generations and mourned the passing of ancient simplicity and virtue. These pages too will suggest a contrast between the stoic Rome of Fabius and the epicurean Rome of Nero. But the contrast must not be exaggerated by a biased selection of the evidence. There were epicureans in Fabius’ days and stoics in Nero’s.

From beginning to end of Roman history the sexual morality of the common man remained essentially the same: coarse and free, but not incompatible with a successful family life. In all free classes virginity was demanded of young women, and powerful tales were told to exalt it; for the Roman had a strong sense of property and wanted a wife of such steady habits as would reasonably ensure him against leaving his goods to his rival’s breed. But in Rome, as in Greece, premarital unchastity in men was not censured if it preserved a decent respect for the hypocrisies of mankind. From the elder Cato to Cicero ²⁵ we find express justifications of it. What increases with civilization is not so much immorality of intent as opportunity of expression. In early Rome prostitutes were not numerous. They were forbidden to wear the matron’s robe that marked the reputable wife, and were confined to the dark corners of Rome and Roman society. There were as yet no educated courtesans like the hetairai of Athens, nor such delicate drabs as posed for Ovid’s verse.

Men married early—usually by twenty; not through romantic love but for the sound purposes of having a helpmate, useful children, and a healthy sexual life. In the words of the Roman wedding ceremony, marriage was liberum quaerendorum causa—for the sake of getting children; on the farm, children, like wives, were economic assets, not biological toys. Marriages were often arranged by the parents and engagements were sometimes made for couples in their infancy. In every case the consent of both fathers was required. Betrothal was formal and constituted a legal bond. The relatives gathered in a feast to witness the contract; a stipula, or straw, was broken between the parties as a sign of their agreement; the stipulations—especially those concerning the dowry—were put in writing; and the man placed an iron ring upon the fourth finger of the girl’s left hand, because it was believed that a nerve ran thence to the heart.²⁶ The minimum age for legal marriage was twelve for the girl, fourteen for the man. Early Roman law made marriage compulsory;²⁷ but this law must have become a dead letter by 413 B.C., when Camillus as censor imposed a tax on bachelors.

Marriage was either cum manu or sine manu—with or without the handing over of the bride and her possessions to the authority of the husband or the father-in-law. Marriage sine manu dispensed with religious ceremony and required only the consent of the bride and groom. Marriage cum manu was by usus—a, year’s cohabitation; or by coemptio—purchase; or by confarreatio (literally, eating a cake together), which required religious ceremony and was confined to patricians. Marriage by actual purchase disappeared at an early date, or was reversed; the bride’s dowry often in effect bought the man. This dowry was usually at the husband’s disposal, but its equivalent had to be returned to the wife in divorce or on the death of the male. Weddings were rich in folk ceremony and song. The two families feasted in the home of the bride; then they marched in colorful and frolicsome procession to the home of the groom’s father, to an accompaniment of flutes, hymeneal chants, and Rabelaisian raillery. At the garlanded door the bridegroom asked the girl, “Who art thou?” and she answered with a simple formula of devotion, equality, and unity: “Where thou art Caius, there am I Caia.” He lifted her over the threshold, presented her with the keys of the house, and put his neck with hers under a yoke to signify their common bond; hence marriage was called coniugium—a yoking together. In token of her joining the new family the bride then took part with the others in worshiping the household gods.

Divorce was difficult and rare in marriages by confarreatio; marriages cum manu could be dissolved only by the husband; in marriage sine manu divorce was open to either party at will, without asking consent of the state. The first recorded divorce in Roman history is dated 268 B.C.; a suspicious tradition claimed that no divorce had previously occurred since the foundation of the city.²⁸ Clan custom required a husband to divorce an unfaithful or childless wife. “If you find your wife in the act of adultery,” said old Cato, “the law permits you to kill her without trial. If by chance she surprises you in the same condition she must not touch you even with the tips of her fingers; the law forbids her.”²⁹ Despite these distinctions there were apparently many happy marriages. The tombstones abound in post-mortem affection. One honored touchingly a lady who had served two husbands well:

Thou wert beautiful beyond measure, Statilia, and true to thy husbands! . . . He who came first, had he been able to withstand the fates, would have set up this stone to thee; while I, alas, who have been blessed by thy pure heart these sixteen years, now have lost thee.³⁰

The young women of early Rome were probably not quite so pretty as the later ladies whom the experienced Catullus would credit with laneum latusculum manusque mollicellas³¹—“little sides as smooth as wool, and soft little hands.” Presumably in those rural days toil and care soon overlaid this adolescent loveliness. Feminine features were classically regular, nose small and thin, hair and eyes usually dark. Blondes were at a premium, as were the German dyes that made them. As for the Roman male, he was impressive rather than handsome. A stern education and years of military life, hardened his face, as later indulgence would soften it into flabbiness. Cleopatra must have loved Antony for something else than his wine-puffed cheeks, and Caesar for some other charm than his eagle’s head and nose. The Roman nose was like the Roman character—sharp and devious. Beards and long hair were customary till about 300 B.C., when barbers began to ply their trade in Rome. Dress was essentially like the Greek. Boys, girls, magistrates, and the higher priests wore the toga praetexta, or purple-fringed robe; on attaining his sixteenth birthday the youth changed to the toga virilis—the white robe of manhood—as a symbol of his right to vote in the assemblies and his duty to serve in the army. Women wore, indoors, a dress (stola) bound with a girdle under the breasts, and reaching to the feet; outdoors they covered this with a palla, or cloak. Indoors, men wore a simple tunica, or shirt; outdoors they added a toga, and sometimes a cloak. The toga (tegere, to cover) was a woolen garment in one piece, twice the width and thrice in length the height of the wearer. It was wrapped around the body, and the surplus was thrown back over the left shoulder, brought forward under the right arm, and again thrown over the left shoulder. The folds at the breast served as pockets; the right arm remained free.

The Roman male cultivated a severe dignity (gravitas) as an uncomfortable necessity in an aristocracy that ruled a people, then a peninsula, then an empire. Sentiment and tenderness belonged to private life; in public a man of the upper classes had to be as stern as his statue, and hide behind a mask of austere calm the excitability and humor that cry out not only in the comedies of Plautus but in the speeches of Cicero. Even in private life the Roman of this age was expected to live Spartanly. Luxury of dress or table was reproved by the censor; even negligent tillage could bring some Cato down upon the farmer’s head. In the First Punic War the Carthaginian ambassadors, returning from Rome, amused the rich merchants by telling how the identical set of silver plate had appeared in every house to which they had been invited; one set, secretly passed about, had sufficed the whole patriciate. In that age the Senate sat on hard wooden benches in a curia, or hall, never heated even in winter.

Nevertheless, between the First and Second Punic Wars, wealth and luxury made a good beginning. Hannibal gathered a peck of gold rings from the fingers of Romans slain at Cannae;³² and sumptuary laws repeatedly—therefore vainly—forbade ornate jewelry, fancy dress, and costly meals. In the third century B.C. the menu of the average Roman was still simple: breakfast (ientaculum) of bread with honey or olives or cheese; luncheon (prandium) and dinner (cena) of grains, vegetables, and fruit; only the rich ate fish or meat.³³ Wine, usually diluted, graced nearly every table; to drink undiluted wine was considered intemperance. Festivals and banquets were a necessary relaxation in this stoic age; those who could not unbend to them became too tense, and showed their nervous fatigue in the portrait statues they left to posterity.

Charity found little scope in this frugal life. Hospitality survived as a mutual convenience at a time when inns were poor and far between; but the sympathetic Polybius reports that “in Rome no one ever gives away anything to anyone if he can help it”³⁴—doubtless an exaggeration. The young were kind to the old, but in general the graces and courtesies of life came to Rome only with the dying Republic. War and conquest molded morals and manners and left men often coarse and usually hard, prepared to kill without compunction and be killed without complaint. War captives were sold into slavery by the thousands, unless they were kings or generals; these were usually slaughtered at the victor’s triumph or allowed to starve leisurely to death. In the business world these qualities took on a fairer aspect. The Romans loved money, but Polybius (about 160 B.C.) describes them as industrious and honorable men; a Greek, said the Greek, could not be prevented from embezzling, no matter how many clerks were set to watch him, while the Romans spent great sums of public money with only rare cases of ascertained dishonesty.³⁵ We note, however, that a law to check malpractice at elections was passed in 432 B.C. Roman historians report that political integrity was at its height in the first three centuries of the Republic; but they arouse suspicion by their high praise of Valerius Corvus, who, after occupying twenty-one magistracies, returned to his fields as poor as he had come; of Curius Dentatus, who kept no part of the spoils he had taken from the enemy; and of Fabius Pictor and his associates, who handed over to the state the rich presents they had received on an embassy to Egypt. Friends lent one another substantial amounts without interest. The Roman government was guilty of frequent treachery in dealing with other states, and perhaps in foreign relations the Empire was more honorable than the Republic. But the Senate refused to connive at the poisoning of Pyrrhus, and warned him of the plot. When, after Cannae, Hannibal sent ten prisoners to Rome to negotiate for the ransom of 8000 others, and drew from them a promise to return, all but one kept their word; the Senate apprehended the tenth, put him in irons, and turned him over to Hannibal, whose joy at his victory, says Polybius, “was not so great as his dejection when he saw how steadfast and high-spirited the Romans were.”²⁷

In summary, the typical educated Roman of this age was orderly, conservative, loyal, sober, reverent, tenacious, severe, practical. He enjoyed discipline, and would have no nonsense about liberty. He obeyed as a training for command. He took it for granted that the government had a right to inquire into his morals as well as his income, and to value him purely according to his services to the state. He distrusted individuality and genius. He had none of the charm, vivacity, and unstable fluency of the Attic Greek. He admired character and will as the Greek admired freedom and intellect; and organization was his forte. He lacked imagination, even to make a mythology of his own. He could with some effort love beauty, but he could seldom create it. He had no use for pure science, and was suspicious of philosophy as a devilish dissolvent of ancient beliefs and ways. He could not, for the life of him, understand Plato, or Archimedes, or Christ. He could only rule the world.

IV. LETTERS

The Roman was formed not only by the family, the religion, and the moral code, but, in less degree, by the school, the language, and the literature. Plutarch dates the first Roman school about 250 B.C..; ³⁸ but Livy, perhaps romancing, describes Virginia, the desired of the Decemvir, as “going to a grammar school in the Forum” as early as 450.³⁹ The demand for written laws, and the publication of the Twelve Tables, suggest that by that date a majority of the citizens could read.

The teacher was usually a slave or freedman, employed by several families to instruct their children, or setting up his own private school and taking any pupil that came. He taught reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, history, and obedience; moral education was fundamental and unceasing; disciple and discipline were almost the same word. Memory and character alike were trained by memorizing the Twelve Tables of the law. Heine remarked that “the Romans would not have had much time left for conquering the world if they had first had to learn Latin”;⁴⁰ but they too had to conjugate irregular Latin verbs, and soon would be put to Greek. The boy familiarized himself, through poetry and prose, with the exploits of his country and its heroes, and received many a patriotic lesson conveyed through edifying episodes that had never occurred. No attention was given to athletics; the Romans thought it better to train and harden the body by useful work in the field or the camp rather than through contests in the palaestra or gymnasium.

The language, like the people, was practical and economical, martially sharp and brief; its sentences and clauses marched in disciplined subordination to a determined goal. A thousand similarities allied it, within the Indo-European family, with Sanskrit and Greek and the Celtic tongues of ancient Gaul, Wales, and Ireland. Latin was poorer than Greek in imagery, flexibility, and ready formation of compounds; Lucretius and Cicero complained of its limited vocabulary, its lack of subtle shadings. Nevertheless, it had a sonorous splendor and masculine strength that made it ideal for oratory, and a compactness and logical sentence form that made it an apt vehicle for Roman law. The Latin alphabet came from Euboean Chalcis via Cumae and Etruria.⁴¹ In the oldest Latin inscription known to us, ascribed to the sixth century B.C., all the letters are Greek in form. C was sounded like our K, J like Y, V like U or W, the vowels as in Italian. Caesar’s contemporaries knew him as Yooleoos Keyssar, and Cicero was Keekero.

The Romans wrote in ink with a slit metal reed (calamus, stilus), at first upon leaves (folia), whence our words folio and leaf (two pages); then upon strips of inner bark (liber); often upon white (album) tablets of waxed wood; later upon leather, linen paper, and parchment. As the written forms of Latin resisted change more than the spoken words, the language of literature diverged more and more from the speech of the people, as in modern America or France. The melodious Romance languages—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Rumanian—evolved from the crude popular Latin brought to the provinces, not by poets and grammarians, but by soldiers, merchants, and adventurers. So the words for horse in the Romance languages—caballo, cavallo, cheval, cal—were taken from the spoken Latin caballus, not from the written equus. In popular Latin ille (he) was one syllable, like French and Italian il; and final -s and -m were, as in those languages, dropped or not pronounced. The best came from a corruption of the worst: corruptio pessimi optima.

What literature did the young Roman read in those first three centuries of the Republic? There were religious hymns and chants, such as the song of the Arval Brethren, and there were popular lays of Rome’s historic or legendary past. There were official—usually priestly—records of elections, magistracies, events, portents, and holidays.^* On the basis of these archives Q. Fabius Pictor compiled (202 B.C.) a respectable History of Rome—but in Greek; Latin was not yet thought fit for literary prose and was not used by historians until Cato. There were farragoes of prose called saturae—medleys of merry nonsense and erotic banter—out of which Lucilius would forge a new form for Horace and Juvenal. There were boisterously obscene burlesques or mimes, usually acted by players from Etruria; some of these performers, coming from the town of Istria, were named istriones, and gave the word histrio (actor) to Latin, and its derivatives to modern tongues. There were also, on holidays or market days, crude, half-impromptu farces that gave their stock characters to thousands of Italian comedies, ancient and modern: the rich and stupid father, the extravagant love-entangled youth, the maligned virgin, the clever intriguing servant, the glutton always maneuvering for a meal, the rollicking, tumbling clown. Already the last flaunted the gaily colored patches, the long expansive trousers, the large-sleeved doublet, and the shorn head, still familiar to our youth. An exact likeness of Punchinello, or Punch, has been found on the frescoes of Pompeii.⁴²

Literature came formally to Rome about 272 B.C. in the person of a Greek slave. In that year Tarentum fell; many of its Greek citizens were slaughtered, but Livius Andronicus had the luck to be merely enslaved. Brought to Rome, he taught Latin and Greek to his master’s children and some others, and translated the Odyssey for them into Latin “Saturnian” verse—lines of loose and irregular rhythm, scanned by accent rather than quantity. Freed for his services, he was commissioned by the aediles to produce a tragedy and a comedy for the ludi, or games, of 240 B.C. He composed them on Greek models, directed them, acted the main parts, and sang them to the accompaniment of a flute till his voice gave out; then he had another sing the lines while he acted them—a method followed in many later plays at Rome, and influential in generating the pantomime. The government was so well pleased by this introduction of the literary drama that in honor of Andronicus it gave poets the right to incorporate, and allowed them to hold their meetings in the Temple of Minerva on the Aventine. Henceforth it became the fashion to present such ludi scenici, or scenic plays, at the public festivals.⁴³

Five years after this historic première a plebeian ex-soldier from Campania, Cnaeus Naevius, shocked the conservatives by producing a comedy in which he satirized with Aristophanic freedom the political abuses that were flourishing in the capital. The old families complained, and Naevius was jailed. He apologized and was freed, wrote another satire as sharp a the first, and was banished from Rome. In exile and old age he composed, with undiscourageable patriotism, an epic poem on the First Punic War, in which he had fought; it began with the founding of Rome by Trojan refugees, and provided Virgil with a theme and several scenes. His condemnation was a double misfortune: the vitality and originality of Roman comedy suffered from a censorship that made libel a capital crime, and Roman politics lost the purge of a public critique. Naevius wrote also a poetic drama based on Roman history; this experiment too ended with him, and thereafter Roman tragedy circled vainly in the cropped pastures of Greek myth. Only a few fragments survive to reveal Naevius’ quality. One describes a coquettish girl:

As if playing ball in a ring she skips from one to another, and is all things to all men with her words and winks, her caresses and embraces; now a squeeze of the hand or a pressure of the foot; her ring to look at, her lips to blow an inviting kiss; here a song, there the language of signs.⁴⁴

It is pleasant to see that women were then as charming as now, that not all Romans were Catos, and that under the shadow of the Porch even virtue might take a holiday.

Beyond the essentials of arithmetic, and enough geometry to plot a farm or plan a temple, science played as yet no part in the education or culture of the Roman citizen. The boy counted on his fingers (digita), and the figures he used were imitations of an extended digit (I), a hand (V), or two hands joined at their apexes (X); and he was content to form the other numerals by repeating these symbols (II, III), and prefixing (IV, IX) or suffixing (VI, XII) digits to V or X to lessen or increase them. Out of this manual arithmetic came the decimal system, constructed on parts and multiples of ten—i.e., the ten fingers. The Romans used geometry well in building and engineering, but added not one theorem to that rounded achievement of the Greek mind. We hear nothing of Roman astronomy in this period except in its presperous sister or mother—astrology.

Medicine, till the third century, was largely a matter of family herbs, magic, and prayer; the gods alone could heal; and to make cure certain a special god was invoked for each disease ⁴⁵—as one now invokes a specialist. Against the mosquitoes of the Roman campagna appeal was made to the goddesses Febris and Mephitis, as, until our century, the Romans petitioned La Madonna della Febbre, Our Lady of the Fever.⁴⁶ Healing shrines and sacred waters were as common as today. The temple of Aesculapius was a busy center of religious healing, where diet and hydrotherapy, peaceful surroundings and a quiet routine, prayer and the soothing ritual of worship, the aid of practical physicians and the cheerfulness of skilled attendants, conspired to restore confidence and to effect apparently miraculous cures.⁴⁷ Nevertheless, there were slave doctors and quacks in Rome five centuries before Christ; and some of these practiced dentistry, for the Twelve Tables forbade the burial of gold with the dead except where gold had been used to wire teeth.⁴⁸ In 219 we hear of the first freeman physician in Rome—Archagathus the Peloponnesian. His surgical operations so delighted the patricians that the Senate voted him an official residence and the freedom of the city; later his “mania for cutting and burning” won him the name of Carnifex, butcher.⁴⁹ From that time onward Greek physicians flocked to Rome, and made the practice of medicine there a Greek monopoly.

V. THE GROWTH OF THE SOIL

The Roman of those centuries had little need of medicine, for his active life in farming or soldiering kept him healthy and strong. He took to the land as the Greek to the sea; he based his life on the soil, built his towns as meeting places for farmers and their products, organized his armies and his state on his readiness to defend and extend his holdings, and conceived his gods as spirits of the living earth and the nourishing sky.

As far back as we can reach into Rome’s past we find private property.⁵⁰ Part of the land, however, was ager publicus—public acreage usually acquired by conquest and owned by the state. The peasant family of the early Republic owned two or three acres, tilled them with all hands and occasionally a slave, and lived abstemiously on the product. They slept on straw,⁵¹ rose early, stripped to the waist,⁵² and plowed and harrowed behind leisurely oxen whose droppings served as fertilizer, and their flesh as a religious offering and a festival food. Human offal was also used to enrich the soil, but chemical fertilizers were rare in Italy before the Empire. Manuals of scientific agriculture were imported from Carthage and Greece. Crops were rotated between grains and legumes, and lands were turned periodically to pasturage to prevent their exhaustion. Vegetables and fruits were grown in abundance, and formed, next to grains, the chief articles of food. Garlic was already a favorite seasoning. Some aristocratic families derived their names in part from the vegetables traditionally favored in their plantings: Lentuli, Caepiones, Fabii, from lentils, onions, beans. Culture of the fig, olive, and grape gradually encroached upon cereal and vegetable crops. Olive oil took the place of butter in the diet and of soap in the bath; it served as fuel in torches and lamps and was the chief ingredient in the unguents made necessary for hair and skin by the dry winds and fiery sun of the Mediterranean summer. Sheep were the favorite herd, for the Italians preferred clothing of wool. Swine and poultry were raised in the farmyard, and almost every family nursed a garden of flowers.⁵⁴

War transformed this picture of rural toil. Many of the farmers who changed plowshares for swords were overcome by the enemy or the town and never returned to their fields; many others found their holdings so damaged by armies or neglect that they had not the courage to begin anew; others were broken by accumulated debt. Such men sold their lands at depression prices to aristocrats or agricultural capitalists who merged the little homesteads into latifundia (literally, broad farms), turned these vast areas from cereals to flocks and herds, orchards and vines, and manned them with war-captured slaves under an overseer who was often himself a slave. The owners rode in now and then to look at their property; they no longer put their hands to the work, but lived as absentee landlords in their suburban villas or in Rome. This process, already under way in the fourth century B.C., had by the end of the third produced a debt-ridden tenant class in the countryside, and in the capital a propertyless, rootless proletariat whose sullen discontent would destroy the Republic that peasant toil had made.

VI. INDUSTRY

The soil was poor in minerals—a fact that would write much economic and political history in Italy. There was no gold and little silver; there was a fair supply of iron, some copper, lead, tin, and zinc, but too scarce to support an industrial development. The state owned all mines in the empire, but leased them to private operators, who worked them profitably by using up the lives of thousands of slaves. Metallurgy and technology made few advances. Bronze was still employed more frequently than iron, and only the best and latest mines were equipped with the winches, windlasses, and chain buckets that Archimedes and others had set up in Sicily and Egypt. The chief fuel was wood; trees were cut also for houses and ships and furniture; mile by mile, decade by decade, the forest retreated up the mountainside to meet the timber line. The most prosperous industry was the manufacture of weapons and tools in Campania. There was no factory system, except for armament and pottery. Potters made not only dishes but bricks and tiles, conduits and pipes; at Arretium and elsewhere the potters were copying Greek models and learning to make artistic wares. As early as the sixth century the textile industry, in the design, preparation, and dyeing of linen and wool, had grown beyond the domestic stage despite the busy spinning of daughters, wives, and slaves; free and unfree weavers were brought together in small factories, which produced not only for the local market but also for export trade.

Industrial production for nonlocal consumption was arrested by difficulties of transport. Roads were poor, bridges unsafe, oxcarts slow, inns rare, robbers plentiful. Hence traffic moved by choice along canals and rivers, while coastal towns imported by sea rather than from their hinterland. By 202, however, the Romans had built three of their great “consular roads”—so called because usually named after the consuls or censors who began them. Soon these highways would far surpass in durability and extent the Persian and Carthaginian roads that had served them as models. The oldest of them was the via Latina which, about 370 B.C., brought Romans out to the Alban hills. In 312 Appius Claudius the Blind, with the labor of thousands of criminals,⁵⁵ started the via Appia, or Appian Way, between Rome and Capua; later it reached out to Beneventum, Venusia, Brundisium, and Tarentum; its 333 English miles bound the two coasts, eased trade with Greece and the East, and collaborated with the other roads to make Italy one nation. In 241 the censor Aurelius Cotta began the Aurelian Way from Rome through Pisa and Genoa to Antibes. Caius Flaminius in 220 opened the Flaminian Way to Ariminum; and about the same time the Valerian Way connected Tibur with Corfinium. Slowly the majestic network grew: the Aemilian Way climbed north from Ariminum through Bononia and Mutina to Placentia (187); the Postumian Way linked Genoa with Verona (148); and the via Popilia led from Ariminum through Ravenna to Padua (132). In the following century roads would dart out from Italy to York, Vienna, Thessalonica, and Damascus, and would line the north African coast. They defended, unified, and vitalized the Empire by quickening the movement of troops, intelligence, customs, and ideas; they became great channels of commerce, and played no minor role in the peopling and enrichment of Italy and Europe.

Despite these highways, trade never flourished in Italy as in the eastern Mediterranean. The upper classes looked with contempt upon buying cheap and selling dear, and left trade to Greek and Oriental freedmen; while the countryside contented itself with occasional fairs, and “ninth-day” markets in the towns. Foreign commerce was similarly moderate. Sea transport was risky; ships were small, made only six miles an hour sailing or rowing, hugged the coast, and for the most part kept timidly in port from November to March. Carthage controlled the western Mediterranean, the Hellenistic monarchies controlled the east, and pirates periodically swept out of their lairs upon merchants relatively more honest than themselves. The Tiber was perpetually silting its mouth and blocking Rome’s port at Ostia; two hundred vessels foundered there in one gale; besides, the current was so strong that the voyage upstream to Rome hardly repaid the labor and the cost. About 200 B.C.. vessels began to put in at Puteoli, 150 miles south of Rome, and ship their goods overland to the capital.

To facilitate this external and internal trade it became necessary to establish a state-guaranteed system of coinage, measures, and weights.^* Till the fourth century B.C. cattle were still accepted as a medium of exchange, since they were universally valuable and easily moved. As trade grew, rude chunks of copper (aes) were used as money (ca. 330 B.C.); estimate was originally aes tumare, to value copper. The unit of value was the as (one)—i.e., one pound of copper by weight; ex-pend meant weighed out. When, about 338 B.C., a copper coinage was issued by the state, it often bore the image of an ox, a sheep, or a hog, and was accordingly called pecunia (pecus, cattle). In the First Punic War, says Pliny, “the Republic, not having means to meet its needs, reduced the as to two ounces of copper; by this contrivance a saving of five sixths was effected, and the public debt was liquidated.”⁵⁶ By 202 the as had fallen to an ounce; and in 87 B.C. it was reduced to half an ounce to help finance the Social War. In 269 two silver coins were minted: the denarius, equal to ten asses, and corresponding to the Athenian drachma in the latter’s depreciated Hellenistic form; and the sestertius, representing two and a half asses, or a quarter of a denarius. In 217 appeared the first Roman gold coins—the aurei—with values of twenty, forty, and sixty sesterces. In metallic equivalence the as would equal two, the sesterce five, the denarius twenty, cents in the currency of the United States; but as precious metals were much less plentiful than now, and therefore had a purchasing power several times greater than today,⁵⁷ we shall, ignoring price fluctuations before Nero, roughly equate the as, sesterce, denarius, and talent (6000 denarii) of the Roman Republic with six, fifteen, and sixty cents, and $3600 respectively, in terms of United States currency in 1942.^*

The issuance of this guaranteed currency promoted the profession and operations of finance. The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples; and the state continued to the end to use its strongly built shrines as repositories for public funds, perhaps on the theory that religious scruples would help discourage robbery. Moneylending was an old business, for the Twelve Tables had forbidden interest above eight and one third per cent per annum.⁶⁰ The legal rate was lowered to five per cent in 347, and to zero in 342, but this Aristotelian prohibition was so easily evaded that the actual minimum rate averaged twelve per cent. Usury (above twelve per cent) was widespread, and debtors had periodically to be rescued from their accumulating obligations by bankruptcy or legislation. In 352 B.C. the government used a very modern method of relief: it took over such mortgages as offered a fair chance of repayment, and persuaded mortgagees to accept a lower interest rate on the others.⁶¹ One of the streets adjoining the Forum became a banker’s row, crowded with the shops of the moneylenders (argentarii) and money-changers (trapezitae). Money could be borrowed on land, crops, securities, or government contracts, and for financing commercial enterprises or voyages. Co-operative lending took the place of industrial insurance; instead of one banker completely underwriting a venture, several joined in providing the funds. Joint-stock companies existed chiefly for the performance of government contracts let out on bids by the censor; they raised their capital by selling their stocks or bonds to the public in the form of partes or particulae—“little parts,” shares. These companies of “publicans”—i.e., men engaged on public or state undertakings—played an active role in supplying and transporting materials for the army and navy in the Second Punic War—not without the usual attempts to cheat the government.⁶² Businessmen (equites) directed the larger of these enterprises, freedmen the smaller. Nongovernmental business was carried on by negotiatores, who usually provided their own funds.

Industry was in the hands of independent craftsmen, working in their separate shops. Most such men were freemen, but an increasing proportion were freedmen or slaves. Labor was highly differentiated, and produced for the market rather than for the individual customer. Competition by slaves depressed the wages of free workers, and reduced the proletariat to a bitter life in slums. Strikes among these men were impracticable and rare,⁶³ but slave uprisings were frequent; the “First Servile War” (139 B.C.) was not the first. When public discontent became acute, some cause could be found for a war that would provide universal employment, spread depreciated money, and turn the wrath of the people against a foreign foe whose lands would feed the Roman people victorious, or receive them defeated and dead.⁶⁴ The free workers had unions or guilds (collegia), but these seldom concerned themselves with wages, hours, or conditions of labor. Tradition credited Numa with having established or legalized them; in any case, the seventh century B.C. had organizations of flute players, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, fullers, shoemakers, potters, dyers, and carpenters.⁶⁵ The “Dionysian Artists”—actors and musicians—were among the most widespread associations in the ancient world. By the second century B.C. we find guilds of cooks, tanners, builders, bronzeworkers, ironworkers, ropemakers, weavers; but these were probably as old as the others. The chief aim of such unions was the simple pleasure of social intercourse; many of them were also mutual-benefit societies to defray the cost of funerals.

The state regulated not only the guilds, but many aspects of Rome’s economic life. It supervised the operation of mines and other governmental concessions or contracts. It quieted agitation among the plebs by importing food and distributing it at nominal prices to the poor or to all applicants. It levied fines upon monopolists, and it nationalized the salt industry to end a monopoly that had raised the price of salt beyond the reach of the working class. Its commercial policy was liberal: after overcoming Carthage it opened the western Mediterranean to all trade; and it protected Utica and, later, Delos on condition that they remain free ports, permitting the entry and exit of goods without fee. At various times, however, it forbade the export of arms, iron, wine, oil, or cereals; it laid a customs duty, usually of two and a half per cent, upon the entry of most products into Rome, and afterward extended this modest tariff to other cities. Until 147 B.C. it required a tributum, or property tax, throughout Italy. All in all, its revenues were modest; and like other civilized states it used them chiefly for war.⁶⁶

VII. THE CITY

Through taxes, spoils, indemnities, and inflowing population Rome was now (202 B.C.) one of the major cities of the Mediterranean ensemble. The census of 234 listed 270,713 citizens—i.e., free adult males; the figure fell sharply during the great war, but rose to 258,318 in 189, and 322,000 in 147. We may calculate a population of approximately 1,100,000 souls in the city-state in 189 B.C., of whom perhaps 275,000 lived within the walls of Rome. Italy south of the Rubicon had some 5,000,000 inhabitants.⁶⁷ Immigration, the absorption of conquered peoples, the influx, emancipation, and enfranchisement of slaves, were already beginning the ethnic changes that by Nero’s time would make Rome the New York of antiquity, half native and half everything.

Two main cross streets divided the city into quarters, each with its administrative officials and tutelary deities. Chapels were raised at important intersections, and statues at lesser ones, to the lares compitales, or gods of the crossings—a pretty custom still found in Italy. Most streets were plain earth; some were paved with small smooth stones from river beds, as in many Mediterranean cities today; about 174 the censor began to surface the major thoroughfares with lava blocks. In 312 Appius Claudius the Blind built the first aqueduct, bringing fresh water to a city that had till then depended upon springs and wells and the muddy Tiber. Piping water from aqueduct-fed reservoirs, the aristocracy began to bathe more than once a week; and soon after Hannibal’s defeat Rome opened its first municipal baths. At an unknown date Roman or Etruscan engineers built the Cloaca Maxima, whose massive stone arches were so wide that a wagon loaded with hay could pass under them.⁶⁸ Smaller sewers were added to drain the marshes that surrounded and invaded Rome. The city’s refuse and rain water passed through openings in the streets into these drains and thence into the Tiber, whose pollution was a lasting problem of Roman life.

The embellishment of the city was almost confined to its temples. Houses adhered to the plain Etruscan style already described, except that the exterior was more often of brick or stucco, and (as a sign of growing literacy) was often defaced with graffiti—“scratchings” of strictly fugitive verse or prose. Temples were mostly of wood, with terra-cotta revetments and decorations, and followed Etruscan plans. A temple to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva stood on the Capitoline hill; another to Diana on the Aventine; and others rose (before 201 B.C.) to Juno, Mars, Janus, Venus, Victory, Fortune, Hope, etc. In 303 Caius Fabius added to his leguminous clan name the cognomen of Pictor, painter, by executing frescoes in the Temple of Health on the Capitoline. Greek sculptors in Rome made statues of Roman gods and heroes in terra cotta, marble, or bronze. In 293 they erected on the Capitol a bronze Jupiter of such Olympian proportions that it could be seen from the Alban hills twenty miles away. About 296 the aediles set up a bronze she-wolf, to which later artists added the figures of Romulus and Remus. We do not know if this is the group described by Cicero, or if either of these is identical with the existing Wolf of the Capital; in any case, we have in this a masterpiece of the highest order, dead metal alive in every muscle and nerve.

While through painting and statuary the aristocracy commemorated its victories and recommended its lineage, the people consoled themselves with music and the dance, comedies and games. The roads and homes of Italy resounded with individual or choral song; men sang at banquets, boys and girls chorused hymns in religious processions, bride and groom were escorted with hymeneal chants, and every corpse was buried with song. The flute was the most popular instrument, but the lyre too had its devotees, and became the favorite accompaniment of lyric verse. When great holidays came, the Romans crowded to amphitheater or stadium, and pullulated under the sun while hirelings, captives, criminals, or slaves ran and jumped, or, better, fought and died. Two great amphitheaters—the Circus Maximus (attributed to the first Tarquin) and the Circus Flaminius (221 B.C.)—admitted without charge all free men and women who came in time to find seats. The expense was met at first by the state, then by the aediles out of their own purse, often, in the later Republic, by candidates for the consulate; the cost increased generation by generation, until in effect it barred the poor from seeking office.

Perhaps we should class with these spectacles the official “triumph” of a returning general. Only those were eligible for it who had won a campaign in which 5000 of the enemy had been slain; the unfortunate commander who had won with less slaughter received merely an nation—for him no ox was sacrificed, but only a sheep (ovis). The procession formed outside the city, at whose borders the general and his troops were required to lay down their arms; thence it entered through a triumphal arch that set a fashion for a thousand monuments. Trumpeters led the march; after them came towers or floats representing the captured cities, and pictures showing the exploits of the victors; then wagons rumbled by, heavy with gold, silver, works of art, and other spoils. Marcellus’ triumph was memorable for the stolen statuary of Syracuse (212); Scipio Africanus in 207 displayed 14,000 and, in 202, 123,000 pounds of silver taken from Spain and Carthage. Seventy white oxen followed, walking philosophically to their death; then the captured chiefs of the enemy; then lictors, harpers, pipers, and incense-bearers; then, in a flamboyant chariot, the general himself, wearing a purple toga and a crown of gold, and bearing an ivory scepter and a laurel branch as emblems of victory and the insignia of Jove. In the chariot with him might be his children; beside it rode his relatives; behind them his secretaries and aides. Last came the soldiers, some carrying the prizes awarded them, everyone wearing a crown; some praising their leaders, others deriding them; for it was an inviolable tradition that on these brief occasions the speech of the army should be free and unpunished, to remind the proud victors of their fallible mortality. The general mounted the Capitol to the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, laid his loot at the feet of the gods, presented an animal in sacrifice, and usually ordered the captive chieftains to be slain as an additional thank-offering. It was a ceremony well designed to stir military ambition and reward military effort; for man’s vanity yields only to hunger and love.

VIII. POST MORTEM

War was the most dramatic feature of a Roman’s life, but it did not play so absorbing a role as in the pages of Rome’s historians. Perhaps even more than with us his existence centered about his family and his home. News reached him when it was old, so that his passions could not be stirred every day by the gathered turmoil of the world. The great events of his career were not politics and war, but anxious births, festal marriages, and somber deaths.

Old age was not then the abandoned desolation that so often darkens it in an individualistic age. The young never questioned their duty to care for the old; the old remained to the end the first consideration and the last authority; and after their death their graves were honored as long as a male descendant survived. Funerals were as elaborate as weddings. The procession was led by a hired band of wailing women, whose organized hysteria was cramped by a law of the Twelve Tables⁷¹ forbidding them to tear out their hair. Then came the flute players, limited by a like Solonic law to ten; then some dancers, one of whom impersonated the dead. Then followed in strange parade actors wearing the death masks, or waxen images, of those ancestors of the corpse who had held some magistracy. The deceased came next, in splendor rivaling a triumph, clothed in the full regalia of the highest office he had held, comfortable in a bier overspread with purple and gold-embroidered coverlets, and surrounded by the weapons and armor of the enemies he had slain. Behind him came the dead man’s sons, dressed and veiled in black, his daughters unveiled, his relatives, clansmen, friends, clients, and freedmen. In the Forum the procession stopped, and a son or kinsman pronounced a eulogy. Life was worth living, if only for such a funeral.

In the early centuries Rome’s dead had been cremated; now, usually, they were buried, though some obstinate conservatives preferred combustion. In either case, the remains were placed in a tomb that became an altar of worship upon which pious descendants periodically placed some flowers and a little food. Here, as in Greece and the Far East, the stability of morals and society was secured by the worship of ancestors and by the belief that somewhere their spirits survived and watched. If they were very great and good, the dead, in Hellenized Roman mythology, passed to the Elysian Fields, or the Islands of the Blessed; nearly all, however, descended into the earth, to the shadowy realm of Orcus and Pluto. Pluto, the Roman form of the Greek god Hades, was armed with a mallet to stun the dead; Orcus (our ogre) was the monster who then devoured the corpse. Because Pluto was the most exalted of the underground deities, and because the earth was the ultimate source of wealth and often the repository of accumulated food and goods, he was worshiped also as the god of riches and plutocrats; and his wife Proserpina—the strayed daughter of Ceres—became the goddess of the germinating corn. Sometimes the Roman Hell was conceived as a place of punishment;⁷² in most cases it was pictured as the abode of half-formless shades that had been men, not distinguished from one another by reward or punishment, but all equally suffering eternal darkness and final anonymity. There at last, said Lucian, one would find democracy.⁷³

CHAPTER V

The Greek Conquest

201-146 B.C.

I. THE CONQUEST OF GREECE

WHEN Philip V of Macedon made an alliance with Hannibal against Rome (214) he hoped that all Greece would unite behind him to slay the growing young giant of the west. But rumors were about that he was planning, if Carthage won, to conquer all Greece with Carthage’s aid. As a result, the Aetolian League signed a pact to help Rome against Philip, and the clever Senate, before dispatching Scipio to Africa, used Philip’s discouragement by persuading him to a separate peace (205). The victory of Zama had hardly been won when the Senate, which never forgave an injury, began to plot revenge upon Macedon. Rome, the Senate felt, could never be secure with so strong a power at her back across a narrow sea. When the Senate moved for war, the Assembly demurred, and a tribune accused the patricians of seeking to divert attention from domestic ills.¹ The opponents of war were easily silenced by charges of cowardice and lack of patriotism; and in 200 B.C.. T. Quinctius Flamininus sailed against Macedon.

He was a youth of thirty, one of that liberal Hellenizing circle which was gathering about the Scipios in Rome. After some careful maneuvering he met Philip at Cynoscephalae and overwhelmed him (197). Then he surprised all the Mediterranean nations, and perhaps Rome, by restoring the chastened Philip to a bankrupt and weakened throne, and offering freedom to all Greece. The imperialists in the Senate protested; but for a moment the liberals predominated, and in 196 the herald of Flamininus announced to a vast assemblage at the Isthmian games that Greece was to be free from Rome, from Macedon, from tribute, even from garrisons. So great a cheer rose from the multitude, says Plutarch, that crows flying over the stadium fell dead.² When a cynical world questioned the sincerity of the Roman general he answered by withdrawing his army to Italy. It was a bright page in the history of war.

But one war always invites another. The Aetolian League resented Rome’s emancipation of Greek cities formerly subject to the League, and appealed to Antiochus III, the Seleucid king, to reliberate liberated Greece. Inflated with some easy victories in the East, Antiochus thought of extending his power over all western Asia. Pergamum, fearing him, called to Rome for help. The Senate sent Scipio Africanus and his brother Lucius with the first Roman army to touch Asiatic soil; the hostile forces met at Magnesia (189), and Rome’s victory inaugurated her conquest of the Hellenistic East. The Romans marched north, drove back into Galatia (Anatolia) the Gauls who had threatened Pergamum, and earned the gratitude of all Ionian Greeks.

The Greeks of Europe were not so pleased. Roman armies had spared Greek soil, but they now encompassed Greece on east and west. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and the poor complained that Rome everywhere buttressed the rich against the poor. In 171 Perseus, son and successor of Philip V as King of Macedon, having arranged an alliance with Seleucus IV and Rhodes, called upon Greece to rise with him against Rome. Three years later Lucius Aemilius Paulus, son of the consul who had fallen at Cannae, defeated Perseus at Pydna, razed seventy Macedonian towns, and led Perseus captive to grace a magnificent triumph at Rome.^* Rhodes was punished by the emancipation of her tributary cities in Asia, and by the establishment of a competitive port at Delos. A thousand Greek leaders, including the historian Polybius, were taken as hostages to Italy, where, in sixteen years of exile, 700 of them died.

During the next decade the relations between Greece and Rome moved even nearer to open enmity. The rival cities, factions, and classes of Hellas appealed to the Senate for support, and gave cause for interferences that made Greece actually subject though nominally free. The partisans of the Scipios in the Senate were overruled by realists who felt that there would be no lasting peace or order in Greece until it was completely under Roman rule. In 146 the cities of the Achaean League, while Rome was in conflict with Carthage and Spain, announced a war of liberation. Leaders of the poor seized control of the movement, freed and armed the slaves, declared a moratorium on debts, promised a redistribution of land, and added revolution to war. When the Romans under Mummius entered Greece they found a divided people and easily overcame the undisciplined Greek troops. Mummius burned Corinth, slew its males, sold its women and children into bondage, and carried nearly all its movable wealth and art to Rome. Greece and Macedon were made into a Roman province under a Roman governor; only Athens and Sparta were allowed to remain under their own laws. Greece disappeared from political history for two thousand years.

II. THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROME

Step by step the Roman Empire grew, not so much through conscious design as through the compulsions of circumstance and the ever receding frontiers of security. In bloody battles at Cremona (200) and Mutina (193) the legions again subdued Cisalpine Gaul and pushed the boundaries of Italy to the Alps. Spain, rewon from Carthage, had to be kept under control lest Carthage should win it again; besides, it was rich in iron, silver, and gold. The Senate exacted from it a heavy annual tribute in the form of bullion and coin, and the Roman governors reimbursed themselves liberally for spending a year away from home; so Quintus Minucius, after a brief proconsulate in Spain, brought to Rome 34,800 pounds of silver and 35,000 silver denarii. Spaniards were conscripted into the Roman army; Scipio Aemilianus had 40,000 of them in the force with which he took Spanish Numantia. In 195 B.C.. the tribes broke out in wild revolt, which Marcus Cato put down with a hard integrity that recalled the proud virtues of a vanishing Roman breed. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (179) adjusted his rule sympathetically to the character and civilization of the native population, made friends of the tribal chieftains, and distributed land among the poor. But one of his successors, Lucius Lucullus (151), violated the treaties made by Gracchus, attacked without cause any tribe that could yield plunder, and slaughtered or enslaved thousands of Spaniards without bothering to invent a pretext. Sulpicius Galba (150) lured 7000 natives to his camp by a treaty promising them land; when they arrived he had them surrounded and enslaved or massacred. In 154 the tribes of Lusitania (Portugal) began a sixteen-year war against Rome. An able leader, Viriathus, appeared among them, heroic in stature, endurance, courage, and nobility; for eight years he defeated every army sent against him, until at last the Romans purchased his assassination. The rebellious Celtiberians of central Spain bore a siege of fifteen months in Numantia, living on their dead; at last (133) Scipio Aemilianus starved them into surrender. In general the policy of the Roman Republic in Spain was so brutal and dishonest that it cost more than it paid. “Never,” said Mommsen, “had war been waged with so much perfidy, cruelty, and avarice.”⁴

The plunder from the provinces provided the funds for that orgy of corrupt and selfish wealth which was to consume the Republic in revolution. The indemnities paid by Carthage, Macedon, and Syria, the slaves that poured into Rome from every field of glory, the precious metals captured in the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul and Spain, the 400,000,000 sesterces ($60,000,000) taken from Antiochus and Perseus, the 4503 pounds of gold and 220,000 pounds of silver seized by Manlius Vulso in his Asiatic campaigns⁵—these and other windfalls turned the propertied classes in Rome in half a century (202-146 B.C..) from men of means into persons of such opulence as hitherto only monarchs had known. Soldiers returned from these gigantic raids with their pouches full of coins and spoils. As currency multiplied in Italy faster than building, the owners of realty in the capital tripled their fortunes without stirring a muscle or a nerve. Industry lagged while commerce flourished; Rome did not have to produce goods; it took the world’s money and paid with that for the world’s goods. Public works were expanded beyond precedent and enriched the “publicans” who lived on state contracts; any Roman who had a little money bought shares in their corporations.⁶ Bankers proliferated and prospered; they paid interest on deposits, cashed checks (praescriptiones), met bills for their clients, lent and borrowed money, made or managed investments, and fattened on such relentless usury that cutthroat (sector) and moneylender became one word.⁷ Rome was becoming not the industrial or commercial, but the financial and political, center of the white man’s world.

Equipped with such means, the Roman patriciate and upper middle class passed with impressive speed from stoic simplicity to reckless luxury; the lifetime of Cato (234-149) saw the transformation almost completed. Houses became larger as families became smaller; furniture grew lavish in a race for conspicuous expense; great sums were paid for Babylonian rugs, for couches inlaid with ivory, silver, or gold; precious stones and metals shone on tables and chairs, on the bodies of women, on the harness of horses. As physical exertion diminished and wealth expanded, the old simple diet gave way to long and heavy meals of meat, game, delicacies, and condiments. Exotic foods were indispensable to social position or pretense; one magnate paid a thousand sesterces for the oysters served at a meal; another imported anchovies at 1600 sesterces a cask; another paid 1200 for a jar of caviar.⁸ Good chefs fetched enormous prices on the slave auction block. Drinking increased; goblets had to be large and preferably of gold; wine was less diluted, sometimes not at all. Sumptuary laws were passed by the Senate limiting expenditure on banquets and clothing, but as the senators ignored these regulations, no one bothered to observe them. “The citizens,” Cato mourned, “no longer listen to good advice, for the belly has no ears.”⁹ The individual became rebelliously conscious of himself as against the state, the son as against the father, the woman as against the man.

Usually the power of woman rises with the wealth of a society, for when the stomach is satisfied hunger leaves the field to love. Prostitution flourished. Homosexualism was stimulated by contact with Greece and Asia; many rich men paid a talent ($3600) for a male favorite; Cato complained that a pretty boy cost more than a farm.¹⁰ But women did not yield the field to these Greek and Syrian invaders. They took eagerly to all those supports of beauty that wealth now put within their reach. Cosmetics became a necessity, and caustic soap imported from Gaul tinged graying hair into auburn locks.¹¹ The rich bourgeois took pride in adorning his wife and daughter with costly clothing or jewelry and made them the town criers of his prosperity. Even in government the role of women grew. Cato cried out that “all other men rule over women; but we Romans, who rule all men, are ruled by our women.”¹² In 195 B.C.. the free women of Rome swept into the Forum and demanded the repeal of the Oppian Law of 215, which had forbidden women to use gold ornaments, varicolored dresses, or chariots. Cato predicted the ruin of Rome if the law should be repealed. Livy puts into his mouth a speech that every generation has heard:

If we had, each of us, upheld the rights and authority of the husband in our own households, we should not today have this trouble with our women. As things are now, our liberty of action, which has been annulled by female despotism at home, is crushed and trampled on here in the Forum. . . . Call to mind all the regulations respecting women by which our ancestors curbed their license and made them obedient to their husbands; and yet with all those restrictions you can scarcely hold them in. If now you permit them to remove these restraints . . . and to put themselves on an equality with their husbands, do you imagine that you will be able to bear them? From the moment that they become your equals they will be your masters.¹³

The women laughed him down, and stood their ground until the law was repealed. Cato revenged himself as censor by multiplying by ten the taxes on the articles that Oppius had forbidden. But the tide was in flow, and could not be turned. Other laws disadvantageous to women were repealed or modified or ignored. Women won the free administration of their dowries, divorced their husbands or occasionally poisoned them, and doubted the wisdom of bearing children in an age of urban congestion and imperialistic wars.

Already by 160 Cato and Polybius had noted a decline of population and the inability of the state to raise such armies as had risen to meet Hannibal. The new generation, having inherited world mastery, had no time or inclination to defend it; that readiness for war which had characterized the Roman landowner disappeared now that ownership was being concentrated in a few families and a proletariat without stake in the country filled the slums of Rome. Men became brave by proxy; they crowded the amphitheater to see bloody games, and hired gladiators to fight before them at their banquets. Finishing schools were opened for both sexes, where young men and women learned to sing, play the lyre, and move gracefully.¹⁴ In the upper classes manners became more refined as morals were relaxed. In the lower classes manners continued to be coarse and vigorous, amusements often violent, language freely obscene; we get the odor of this lusty profanum vulgus in Plautus, and understand why it wearied of Terence. When a band of flute players attempted a musical concert at a triumph in 167, the audience forced the musicians to change their performance into a boxing match.¹⁵

In the widening middle classes commercialism ruled unhindered. Their wealth was based no longer on realty but on mercantile investment or management. The old morality and a few Catos could not keep this new regime of mobile capital from setting the tone of Roman life. Everyone longed for money, everyone judged or was judged in terms of money. Contractors cheated on such a scale that many government properties—e.g., the Macedonian mines—had to be abandoned because the lessees exploited the workers and mulcted the state to a point where the enterprise brought in more tribulation than profit.¹⁶ That aristocracy which (if we may believe the historians—and we must not) had once esteemed honor above life adopted the new morality and shared in the new wealth; it thought no longer of the nation, but of class and individual privileges and perquisites; it accepted presents and liberal bribes for bestowing its favor upon men or states, and found ready reasons for war with countries that had more wealth than power. Patricians stopped plebeians in the street and asked or paid for their votes. It became a common thing for magistrates to embezzle public funds and an uncommon thing to see them prosecuted; for who could punish robbery among his fellows when half the members of the Senate had joined in violating treaties, robbing allies, and despoiling provinces? “He who steals from a citizen,” said Cato, “ends his days in fetters and chains; but he who steals from the community ends them in purple and gold.”¹⁷

Nevertheless, the prestige of the Senate was higher than ever before. It had brought Rome successfully through two Punic Wars and three Macedonian Wars; it had challenged and overcome all of Rome’s rivals, had won the subservient friendship of Egypt, and had captured so much of the world’s wealth that in 146 Italy was freed from direct taxation. In the crises of war and policy it had usurped many powers of the assemblies and the magistrates, but victory sanctified its usurpations. The machinery of the cormtia had been made ridiculous by empire; the turbulent peoples who now submitted to rule by a Senate largely composed of seasoned statesmen and triumphant generals would have protested passionately against having their affairs determined by the few thousand Italians who could attend the assemblies in Rome. The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other. War demands superior intelligence and courage, quick decisions, united action, immediate obedience; the frequency of war doomed democracy. By law the Centurial Assembly alone had the right to declare war or make peace; but by its power to conduct foreign relations the Senate could usually bring matters to a point where the Assembly had no longer any practical choice.¹⁸ The Senate controlled the Treasury and all outlays of public funds; and it controlled the judiciary by the rule that all important juries had to be taken from the Senatorial list. The formulation and interpretation of the laws were in the hands of the patrician class.

Within this aristocracy there was an oligarchy of dominant families. Till Sulla, Roman history is a record of families rather than of individuals; no great statesman stands out, but generation after generation the same names occur in the higher offices of the state. Out of 200 consuls between 233 and 133 B.C.., 159 belonged to twenty-six families, one hundred to ten. The most powerful family in this period was the Cornelii. From the Publius Cornelius Scipio who lost the battle of the Trebia (218), through his son Scipio Africanus who defeated Hannibal, to the latter’s adoptive grandson, Scipio Aemilianus, who destroyed Carthage in 146, the history of Roman politics and war is largely the story of this family; and the revolution that destroyed the aristocracy was begun by the Gracchi, grandsons of Africanus. The saving victory at Zama made Africanus so popular with all classes that for a time Rome was ready to give him any office he desired. But when he and his brother Lucius returned from the war in Asia (187), the party of Cato demanded that Lucius should give an account of the money paid him by Antiochus as an indemnity to be transmitted to Rome. Africanus refused to let his brother answer; instead he tore the records to shreds before the Senate. Lucius was brought to trial before the Assembly and was convicted of embezzlement; he was saved from punishment by the tribunician veto of Africanus’ son-in-law, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. Summoned to trial in his turn, Africanus disrupted the proceedings by inviting and leading the Assembly to the Temple of Jupiter to celebrate the anniversary of Zama. Summoned again, he refused to obey the call, retired to his estate at Liternum, and remained there unmolested till his death. The emergence of such individualism in politics corresponded with the growth of individualism in commerce and morals. The Roman Republic would soon be destroyed by the unfettered energy of its great men.

The redeeming feature of this aristocracy and this age was their awakened appreciation of the beautiful. Contact with Greek culture in Italy, Sicily, and Asia had acquainted the Romans not merely with the appurtenances of luxury but with the highest products of classic art. The conquerors brought back with them world-famous paintings and statues, cups and mirrors of chased metal, costly textiles and furniture. The older generation was shocked by Marcellus’ adornment of Roman squares with the stolen sculptures of Syracuse; they complained not of the robbery, but of the “idleness and vain talk” among once industrious citizens who now stopped to “examine and criticize trifles.”¹⁹ Fulvius carried off 1015 statues from Pyrrhus’ collection in Ambracia; Aemilius Paulus filled fifty chariots in his triumph with the art treasures he had taken from Greece as partial payment for liberating her; Sulla, Verres, Nero, and a thousand other Romans were to do likewise through two hundred years. Greece was denuded to clothe the Roman mind.

Overwhelmed with this invasion, Italian art abandoned its native quality and styles and, with one exception, surrendered to Greek artists, themes, and forms. Greek sculptors, painters, and architects, following the line of greatest gold, migrated to Rome and slowly Hellenized the capital of their conquerors. Rich Romans began to build their mansions in the Greek manner around an open court, and to adorn them with Greek columns, statuary, paintings, and furniture. Temples changed more slowly, lest the gods take offense; for them the short cella and high podium of the Tuscan style remained the rule; but as more Olympians were domiciled in Rome it seemed appropriate to design their homes on the slenderer Hellenic scale. In one vital respect, however, Roman art, while still taking hints from Greece, expressed with unique means and power the sturdy Italic soul. For triumphal and decorative monuments, basilicas and aqueducts, the Roman architect replaced the architrave with the arch. In 184 Cato built in stone the Basilica Porcia; five years later Aemilius Paulus gave its first form to that Basilica Aemilia which his descendants would repair and beautify through many generations.^* The typical Roman basilica, designed for the transaction of business or law, was a long rectangle divided into nave and aisles by two internal rows of columns, and usually roofed with a coffered barrel vault—a development taken from Alexandria.²⁰ Since the nave was higher than the aisles, a clerestory of pierced stone trellises could be carved above each aisle for the admission of light and air. Here, of course, was the essential interior form of the medieval cathedral. With these vast edifices Rome began to take on that aspect of magnificence and strength which was to distinguish the city even after it ceased to be the capital of the world.

III. THE NEW GODS

How were the old gods faring in this age of reckless change? Apparently a rivulet of unbelief had trickled down from the aristocracy to the crowd; it is hard to understand how a people still faithful to the ancient pantheon could have accepted with such boisterous approval those comedies in which Plautus—with whatever excuse of following Greek models—made fun of Jupiter’s labors with Alcmena, and turned Mercury into a buffoon. Even Cato, so anxious to preserve old forms, marveled at the ability of two augurs to keep from laughing when they met face to face.²¹ Too long these takers of auspices had been suborned to political trickery; prodigies and portents had been concocted to mold public opinion, the vote of the people had been annulled by pious humbuggery, and religion had consented to turn exploitation into a sacrament. It was a bad omen that Polybius, after living seventeen years among the highest circles in Rome, could write, about 150 B.C.., as if the Roman religion were merely a tool of government:

The quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is, in my judgment, the nature of its religion. The very thing that among other nations is an object of reproach—i.e., superstition—is that which maintains the cohesion of the Roman state. These matters are clothed in such pomp, and introduced to such an extent into public and private life, as no other religion can parallel. ... I believe that the government has adopted this course for the sake of the common people. This might not have been necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men; but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, it must be held in by invisible terrors and religious pageantry.²²

Polybius could have justified himself, perhaps, by recent incidents tending to show that, despite Plautus and philosophy, superstition still was king. When the disaster of Cannae seemed to leave Rome defenseless against Hannibal, the excitable populace fell into a panic, and cried, “To what god must we pray to save Rome?” The Senate sought to still the commotion by human sacrifice; then by prayers to Greek gods; then by applying the Greek ritual to all the gods, Roman and Greek alike. Finally the Senate decided that if it could not prevent superstition it would organize and control it. In 205 it announced that the Sibylline Books foretold that Hannibal would leave Italy if the Magna Mater—a form of the goddess Cybele—should be brought from Phrygian Pessinus to Rome. Attalus, King of Pergamum, consented; the black stone which was believed to be the incarnation of the Great Mother was shipped to Ostia, where it was received with impressive ceremony by Scipio Africanus and a band of virtuous matrons. When the vessel that bore it was grounded in the Tiber’s mud, the Vestal Virgin Claudia freed it, and drew it upstream to Rome, by the magic power of her chastity. Then the matrons, each holding the stone tenderly in her turn, carried it in solemn procession to the Temple of Victory, and the pious people burned incense at their doors as the Great Mother passed. The Senate was shocked to find that the new divinity had to be served by self-emasculated priests; such men were found, but no Roman was allowed to be among them. From that time onward Rome celebrated, every April, the Megalesia, or Feast of the Great Goddess, first with wild sorrow and then with wild rejoicing. For Cybele was a vegetation deity, and legend told how her son Attis, symbol of autumn and spring, had died and gone to Hades, and then had risen from the dead.

In that same year (205) Hannibal left Italy, and the Senate complimented itself on its handling of the religious crisis. But the wars with Macedon opened the gates to Greece and the East; in the wake of soldiers returning with Eastern spoils, ideas, and myths came a flood of Greek and Asiatic captives, slaves, refugees, traders, travelers, athletes, artists, actors, musicians, teachers, and lecturers; and men in their migrations carry along their gods. The lower classes of Rome were pleased to learn of Dionysus-Bacchus, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of mystic rites that gave a divine inspiration and intoxication, of initiations that revealed the resurrected deity and promised the worshiper eternal life. In 186 the Senate was disturbed to learn that a considerable minority of the people had adopted the Dionysian cult, and that the new god was being celebrated by nocturnal bacchanalia whose secrecy lent color to rumors of unrestrained drinking and sexual revelry. “More uncleanliness was wrought with men than with women,” says Livy; and he adds, probably turning gossip into history, that “whoever would not submit to defilement . . . was sacrificed as a victim.”²³ The Senate suppressed the cult, arrested 7000 of the devotees, and sentenced hundreds to death. It was a temporary victory in the long war that Rome was to wage against Oriental faiths.

IV. THE COMING OF PHILOSOPHY

The Greek conquest of Rome took the form of sending Greek religion and comedy to the Roman plebs; Greek morals, philosophy, and art to the upper classes. These Greek gifts conspired with wealth and empire in that sapping of Roman faith and character which was one part of Hellas’ long revenge upon her conquerors. The conquest reached its climax in Roman philosophy, from the stoic Epicureanism of Lucretius to the epicurean Stoicism of Seneca. In Christian theology Greek metaphysics overcame the gods of Italy. Greek culture triumphed in the rise of Constantinople as first the rival and then the successor of Rome; and when Constantinople fell, Greek literature, philosophy, and art reconquered Italy and Europe in the Renaissance. This is the central stream in the history of European civilization; all other currents are tributaries. “It was no little brook that flowed from Greece into our city,” said Cicero, “but a mighty river of culture and learning.”²⁴ Henceforth the mental, artistic, and religious life of Rome was a part of the Hellenistic world.^*

The invading Greeks found a strategic opening in the schools and lecture halls of Rome. A swelling stream of Graeculi—“Greeklings,” as the scornful Romans called them—followed the armies returning from the East. Many of them, as slaves, became tutors in Roman families; some, the grammatici, inaugurated secondary education in Rome by opening schools for instruction in the language and literature of Greece; some, the rhetores, gave private instruction and public lectures on oratory, literary composition, and philosophy. Roman orators—even the mishellenist Cato—began to model their addresses on the speeches of Lysias, Aeschines, and Demosthenes.

Few of these Greek teachers had any religious belief; fewer transmitted any; a small minority of them followed Epicurus and preceded Lucretius in describing religion as the chief evil in human life. The patricians saw where the wind was blowing, and tried to stop it; in 173 the Senate banished two Epicureans, and in 161 it decreed that “no philosophers or rhetors shall be permitted in Rome.” The wind would not stop. In 159 Crates of Mallus, Stoic head of the royal library at Pergamum, came to Rome on an official embassy, broke a leg, stayed on, and, while convalescing, gave lectures on literature and philosophy. In 155 Athens sent as ambassadors to Rome the leaders of its three great philosophical schools: Carneades the Academic or Platonist, Critolaus the Peripatetic or Aristotelian, and Diogenes the Stoic of Seleucia. Their coming was almost as strong a stimulus as Chrysoloras would bring to Italy in 1453. Carneades spoke on eloquence so eloquently that the younger set came daily to hear him.²⁵ He was a complete skeptic, doubted the existence of the gods, and argued that as good reasons could be given for doing injustice as for being just—a belated surrender of Plato to Thrasymachus.²⁶ When old Cato heard of this he moved in the Senate that the ambassadors be sent home. They were. But the new generation had tasted the wine of philosophy; and from this time onward the rich youth of Rome went eagerly to Athens and Rhodes to exchange their oldest faith for the newest doubts.

The very conquerors of Greece were in person the sponsors of Hellenistic culture and philosophy in Rome. Flamininus, who had loved Greek literature before invading Macedon and freeing Greece, was deeply moved by the art and drama he saw in Hellas. We must lay it to the credit side of Rome that some of its generals could understand Polycleitus and Pheidias, Scopas and Praxiteles, even if they carried their appreciation to the point of robbery. Of all the spoils that Aemilius Paulus brought back from his victories over Perseus, he kept for himself only the library of the King, as a heritage for his children. He had his sons instructed in Greek literature and philosophy as well as in the Roman arts of the chase and war; and so far as his public duties permitted he shared in these studies with his children.

Before Paulus died, his youngest son was adopted by his friend, P. Cornelius Scipio, son of Africanus. Following Roman custom, the lad took the name of his adoptive father and added the name of his father’s clan; in this way he became the P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus whom we shall hereafter mean by Scipio. He was a handsome and healthy youth, simple in habits and moderate in speech, affectionate and generous, so honest that at his death, after having all the plunder of Carthage pass through his hands, he left only thirty-three pounds of silver and two of gold—though he had lived like a scholar rather than as a man of means. In his youth he met the Greek exile Polybius, who earned his gratitude and lifelong friendship by giving him good advice and good books. The boy won his spurs by fighting under his father at Pydna; in Spain he accepted the challenge of the enemy to single combat, and won.²⁷

In private life he gathered about him a group of distinguished Romans interested in Greek thought. Chief among them was Gaius Laelius, a man of kindly wisdom and steadfast friendship, just in judgment and blameless in life, and second only to Aemilianus in eloquence of speech and purity of style. Cicero, across a century, fell in love with Laelius, named after him his essay on friendship, and wished he might have lived not in his own turbulent epoch but in that exalted circle of Rome’s intellectual youth. Its influence on literature was considerable; through participation in it Terence developed the elegant precision of his language; and Gaius Lucilius (180-103) perhaps learned here to give a social purpose to the satires with which he lashed the vices and luxury of the age.

The Greek mentors of this group were Polybius and Panaetius. Polybius lived for years in Scipio’s home. He was a realist and a rationalist, and had few illusions about men and states. Panaetius came from Rhodes and, like Polybius, belonged to the Greek aristocracy. For many years he lived with Scipio in affectionate intimacy and reciprocal influence: he stirred Scipio to all the nobility of Stoicism, and probably it was Scipio who persuaded him to modify the extreme ethical demands of that philosophy into a more practicable creed. In a book On Duties Panaetius laid down the central ideas of Stoicism: that man is part of a whole and must co-operate with it—with his family, his country, and the divine Soul of the World; that he is here not to enjoy the pleasures of the senses, but to do his duty without complaint or stint. Panaetius did not, like the earlier Stoics, require a perfect virtue, or complete indifference to the goods and fortunes of life. Educated Romans grasped at this philosophy as a dignified and presentable substitute for a faith in which they had ceased to believe, and found in its ethic a moral code completely congenial to their traditions and ideals. Stoicism became the inspiration of Scipio, the ambition of Cicero, the better self of Seneca, the guide of Trajan, the consolation of Aurelius, and the conscience of Rome.

V. THE AWAKENING OF LITERATURE

It was a basic purpose of the Scipionic circle to encourage literature as well as philosophy, to mold the Latin tongue into a refined and fluent literary medium, to lure the Roman muses to the nourishing springs of Greek poetry, and to provide an audience for promising writers of verse or prose. In 204 Scipio Africanus proved his character by welcoming to Rome a poet brought there by Cato, the strongest opponent of everything represented by the Scipios and their friends. Quintus Ennius had been born of Greek and Italian parentage near Brundisium (239). He had received his education in Tarentum, and his enthusiastic spirit had been deeply impressed by the Greek dramas presented on the Tarentine stage. His courage as a soldier in Sardinia attracted Cato, who was quaestor there. Arrived in Rome, he lived by teaching Latin and Greek, recited his verses to his friends, and found admittance to the circle of the Scipios.

There was hardly a poetic form that he did not try. He wrote a few comedies and at least twenty tragedies. He was in love with Euripides, flirted like him with radical ideas, and plagued the pious with such Epicurean quips as, “I grant you there are gods, but they don’t care what men do; else it would go well with the good and ill with the bad—which rarely happens”;²⁸ according to Cicero the audience applauded the lines.²⁹ He translated or paraphrased Euhemerus’ Sacred History, which argued that the gods were merely dead heroes deified by popular sentiment. He was not immune to theology of a kind, for he announced that the soul of Homer, having passed through many bodies, including Pythagoras and a peacock, now resided in Ennius. He wrote with verve an epic history of Rome from Aeneas to Pyrrhus, and these Annales became, till Virgil, the national poem of Italy. A few fragments survive, of which the most famous is a line that Roman conservatives never tired of quoting:

Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque—

“the Roman state stands through its ancient morals and its great men.” Metrically the poem was a revolution; it replaced the loose “Saturnian” verse of Naevius with the flowing and flexible hexameters of Greek epic poetry. Ennius molded Latin to new forms and powers, filled his lines with the meat of thought, and prepared for Lucretius, Horace, and Virgil in method, vocabulary, theme, and ideas. To crown his career he wrote a treatise on the pleasures of the palate, and died of gout at seventy, after composing a proud epitaph:

Pay me no tears, nor for my passing grieve;

I linger on the lips of men, and live.³⁰

Ennius succeeded in everything but comedy; perhaps he took philosophy too seriously, forgetting his counsel that “one must philosophize, but not too much.”³¹ The people rightly preferred laughter to philosophy, and made Plautus rich and Ennius poor. For like reasons they gave little encouragement to the tragic drama in Rome. The tragedies of Pacuvius and Accius were acclaimed by the aristocracy, ignored by the people, and forgotten by time.

In Rome, as in Athens, plays were presented to the public by state officials as partial celebration of a religious festival or as the obsequies of some distinguished citizen. The theater of Plautus and Terence consisted of a wooden scaffolding supporting a decorated background (the scaena), and, in front of this, a circular orchestra, or platform for dancing; the rear half of this circle formed the proscaenium, or stage. These flimsy structures were torn down after each festival, like our reviewing stands today. The spectators stood, or sat on stools they had brought, or squatted on the ground under the sky. Not till 145 was a complete theater built in Rome, still of wood and roofless, but fitted with seats in the Greek semicircular style. No admission was charged; slaves might attend, but not sit; women were admitted only in the rear. The audience in this period was probably the roughest and dullest in dramatic history—a jostling, boisterous crowd of “groundlings”; it is sad to note how often the prologues beg for quiet and better manners, and how the crude jokes and stereotyped ideas must be repeated to be understood. Some prologues ask mothers to leave their babies at home, or threaten noisy children, or admonish women not to chatter so much; such petitions occur even in the midst of the published plays.³² If an exhibition of prize fighting or rope walking happened to compete, the play, as like as not, would be interrupted until the more exciting performance was over. At the end of a Roman comedy the words, Nunc plaudite omnes, or some variant, made plain that the play was finished and that applause was in order.

The best feature of the Roman stage was the acting. The leading part was usually played by the manager, a freeman; the other performers were mostly Greek slaves. Any citizen who became an actor forfeited his civic rights—a custom that lasted till Voltaire. Female parts were taken by men. As audiences were small, actors in this age did not wear masks, but contented themselves with paint and wigs. About 100 B.C.., as audiences grew larger, the mask became necessary to distinguish the characters; it was called persona, apparently from the Etruscan word for mask, phersu; and the parts were called dramatis personae—masks of the play. Tragedians wore a high shoe, or “buskin” (cothurnus), comedians a low shoe, or “sock” (soccus). Parts of the play were sung to the obbligato of a flute; sometimes singers sang the parts while actors performed them in pantomime.

The Plautine comedies were written in rough and ready iambic verse, imitating the meter as well as the matter of their Greek models. Most of the Latin comedies that have come down to us were taken directly, or by combination, from one or more Greek dramas; usually from Philemon, Menander, or other practitioners of the New Comedy in Athens. The author and title of the Greek original were usually named on the title page. Adaptations of Aristophanes and the Old Comedy were ruled out by a law of the Twelve Tables punishing political satire with death.³³ It was probably fear of this lethal legislation that led the Latin playwrights to keep the Greek scenes, characters, customs, names, even coins, of their originals; but for Plautus Roman law would have banished Roman life almost completely from the Roman stage. This police supervision did not exclude coarseness and obscenity; the aedile wished to amuse the crowd, not to elevate it; and the Roman government was never displeased by the ignorance of the multitude. The audience preferred broad humor to wit, buffoonery to subtlety, vulgarity to poetry, Plautus to Terence.

T. Maccius Plautus—literally, Titus the flat-footed clown—had made his first entrance in Umbria in 254. Coming to Rome, he worked as a stage hand, saved his money, invested it eagerly, and lost it. To eat he wrote plays; his adaptations from the Greek pleased by the Roman allusions scattered through them; he made money again and was given the citizenship of Rome. He was a man of the people and the earth, exuberantly jolly, Rabelaisianly robust; he laughed with everyone at everyone, but felt a hearty good will toward all. He wrote or refurbished 130 plays, of which twenty survive. The Miles Gloriosus is a jolly picture of a braggart soldier, whose servant feeds him hopefully with lies:

Servant: You saw those girls who stopped me yesterday?

Captain: What did they say?

Servant: Why, when you passed, they asked me,

“What! is the great Achilles here?” I answered,

“No, it’s his brother.” Then says the other one,

“Troth, he is handsome! What a noble man!

What splendid hair!” . . . and begged me, both of them,

. . . To make you take a walk again today,

That they might get a better sight of you.

Captain: ’Tis a great nuisance being so very handsome! ³⁴

The Amphitryon turns the laugh upon Jove, who, disguised as Alcmena’s husband, calls upon himself to witness his own oath and offers pious sacrifice to Jupiter.³⁵ The day after he seduces the lady she bears twins. At the end Plautus asks the god to forgive him and to take the lion’s share of the applause. The story proved as popular in the Rome of Plautus as in the Athens of Menander, the Paris of Molière, or the New York of our own time. The Aulularia is the tale of a miser’s hoard, told with more sympathy than in Molière’s Avare; the miser collects the parings of his nails, and laments the wasted water in the tears he has shed. The Menaechrm is the old story of twins and their climactic recognition—a source for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Lessing thought the Captivi the best play ever staged;³⁶ Plautus, too, liked it, and made its prologue say:

It is not hackneyed or just like the rest;

It has no filthy lines one must not quote,

No perjured pander, and no wicked wench.

It is true; but the plot is so intricate, so dependent upon improbable coincidences and revelations, that a mind allergic to dead history may be forgiven for passing it by. What made these comedies succeed was not their ancient plots but their wealth of humorous incident, their rollicking puns as bad as Shakespeare’s, their boisterous indecency, their gallery of precipitate women, and their occasional sentiment; in every play the audience could rely upon finding a love affair, a seduction, a handsome and virtuous hero, and a slave with more brains than all the rest of the characters put together. Here, almost at its outset, Roman literature touches the common man, and reaches, through Greek disguises, to the realities of daily life as Latin poetry would never do again.

Probably in the year of Plautus’ death (184), Publius Terentius Afer was born at Carthage of Phoenician, perhaps also of African, blood. We know nothing more of him until he appears as the slave of Terentius Lucanus in Rome. This senator recognized the shy lad’s talent, gave him an education, and freed him; the youth in gratitude took his master’s name. We get a pleasant note of Roman manners when we hear how Terence, “poor and meanly clad,” came to the house of Caecilius Statius—whose comedies, now lost, were then dominating the Roman stage—and read him the first scene of the Andria. Caecilius was so charmed that he invited the poet to dinner and listened admiringly to the rest.³⁷ Terence soon won a hearing from Aemilianus and Laelius, who sought to form his style in the polished Latin so dear to their hearts. Hence gossip said that Laelius was writing Terence’s plays—a report which the author, with tact and prudence, neither confirmed nor denied.³⁸ Moved perhaps by the respectful Hellenism of the Scipionic circle, Terence adhered faithfully to his Greek originals, gave his plays Greek titles, avoided allusions to Roman life, and called himself merely a translator³⁹—a modest understatement of his work.

We do not know the fate of the play that Caecilius liked so well. The Hecyra, which Terence wrote next, failed because its audience slipped away to watch a bear fight. Fortune smiled in 162 when he produced his most famous play—the Heauton Timoroumenos, or “Self-Tormentor.” It told the story of a father who had forbidden his son to marry the girl of his choice; the son married her nevertheless; the father disowned and banished him, and then, in self-punishing remorse, refused” to touch his wealth, but lived in hard labor and poverty. A neighbor proposes to mediate; the father asks why he takes so kindly an interest in the troubles of others; and the neighbor replies in a world-renowned line which all the audience applauded:

Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto—

“I am a man; I consider nothing human alien to me.” In the following year The Eunuch was so well received that it was performed twice in the same day (then a rare event), and earned Terence 8000 sesterces ($1200) between morning and night.⁴⁰ A few months later appeared the Phormio, named from the witty servant who saved his master from paternal ire, and became the model for Beaumarchais’ lusty Figaro. In 160 Terence’s last play, the Adelphi, or “Brothers,” was performed at the funeral games of Aemilius Paulus. Soon afterward the playwright sailed for Greece. On the way back he died of illness in Arcadia, in his twenty-fifth year.

His later plays had suffered in popularity because Hellenism had won in him too full a victory. He lacked the vivacity and abounding humor of Plautus; he never thought to deal with Roman life. There were no lusty villains in his comedies, no reckless strumpets; all his feminine characters were handled with tenderness, and even his prostitutes hovered on the brink of virtue. There were fine pithy lines and memorable phrases: hinc Mae lacrimae (“hence those tears”), fortes fortuna adiuvat (“fortune favors the brave”), quot homines tot sententiae (“as many opinions as men”), and a hundred more; but they required for their appreciation a philosophical intelligence or literary sensitivity which the African slave found wanting in the Roman plebs. It did not care for his comedies that were half tragedies, his well-built but slowly moving plots, his subtle studies of strange characters, his quiet dialogue and too even style, and the almost insulting purity of his language; it was as if the audience felt that a breach, never to be healed, had been opened between the people and the literature of Rome. Cicero, too near to Catullus to see him, and too prudent to relish Lucretius, thought Terence the finest poet of the Republic. Caesar estimated him more justly when he praised the “lover of pure speech,” but deplored the lack of vis comica—the power of laughter—in Terence, and called him dimidiatus Menander—“half a Menander.” One thing, nevertheless, Terence had achieved: this Semitic alien, inspired by Laelius and Greece, had molded the Latin language at last into a literary instrument that would in the next century make possible the prose of Cicero, and Virgil’s poetry.

VI. CATO AND THE CONSERVATIVE OPPOSITION

This Greek invasion, in literature, philosophy, religion, science, and art, this revolution in manners, morals, and blood, filled old-fashioned Romans with disgust and dread. Out on a Sabine farm a retired senator, Valerius Flaccus, fretted over the decay of the Roman character, the corruption of politics, the replacement of the mos maiorum with Greek ideas and ways. He was too old to fight the tide himself. But on a near-by homestead, just outside Reate, was a young plebeian peasant who showed all the old Roman qualities, loved the soil, worked hard, saved carefully, lived with conservative simplicity, and yet talked as brilliantly as a radical. He bore the names Marcus Porcius Cato: Porcius because his family had for generations raised pigs; Cato because they had been shrewd. Flaccus encouraged him to study law; Cato did, and won his neighbors’ cases in the local courts. Flaccus advised him to go to Rome; Cato went, and by the age of thirty obtained the quaestorship (204). By 199 he was aedile, by 198 praetor, by 195 consul; in 191 tribune, in 184 censor. Meanwhile he served twenty-six years in the army as a fearless soldier and an able and ruthless general. He considered discipline the mother of character and freedom; he despised a soldier “who plied his hands in marching and his feet in fighting, and whose snore was louder than his battle cry”; but he won the respect of his troops by marching beside them on foot, giving each of them a pound of silver from the spoils, and keeping nothing for himself.⁴¹

In the intervals of peace he denounced rhetors and rhetoric, and became the most powerful orator of his time. The Romans listened in reluctant fascination, for no one had ever spoken to them with such obvious honesty and stinging wit; the lash of his tongue might fall upon any man present, but it was pleasant to see it descend upon one’s neighbor. Cato fought corruption recklessly, and seldom let the sun set without having made new enemies. Few loved him, for his scar-covered face and wild red hair disconcerted them, his big teeth threatened them, his asceticism shamed them, his industry left them lagging, his green eyes looked through their words into their selfishness. Forty-four times his patrician enemies tried to destroy him by public indictments; forty-four times he was saved by the votes of farmers who, like him, resented venality and luxury.⁴² When their votes made him censor, all Rome shuddered. He carried out the threats with which he had won the campaign; laid heavy taxes upon luxuries, fined a senator for extravagance, and excluded from the Senate six members in whose record he found malfeasance. He expelled Manilius for kissing his wife in public; as for himself, he said, he never embraced his wife except when it thundered—though he was glad when it thundered. He completed the drainage system of the city, cut the pipes that had clandestinely tapped water from the public aqueducts or conduits, compelled owners to demolish the illegal projections of their buildings upon or over the public right of way, forced down the price paid by the state for public works, and frightened the tax collectors into remitting a larger share of their receipts to the Treasury.⁴³ After five years of heroic opposition to the nature of man, he retired from office, made successful investments, manned his now vast farm with slaves, lent money at usurious rates, bought slaves cheap and—after training them in some skill—sold them dear, and became so rich that he could afford to write books—an occupation he despised.

Cato was the first great writer of Latin prose. He began by publishing his own speeches. Then he issued a manual of oratory, demanded a rugged Roman style instead of the Isocratean smoothness of the rhetors, and set a theme for Quintilian by defining the orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus⁴⁴—“a good man skilled in speaking” (but was there ever union so rare?). He put his farming experiences to use by composing a treatise De agri cultura—the only work of Cato, and the oldest literary Latin, that time has saved. It is written in a simple and vigorous style, pithily compact; Cato wastes no words, and seldom condescends to a conjunction. He gives detailed advice on buying and selling slaves (old ones should be sold before they become a loss), on renting land to share-croppers, on viticulture and aboriculture, on domestic management and industries, on making cement and cooking dainties, on curing constipation and diarrhea, on healing snakebite with the dung of swine, and offering sacrifice to the gods. Asking himself what is the wisest use of agricultural land, he answers, “Profitable cattle raising.” The next best? “Moderately profitable cattle raising.” The third best? “Very unprofitable cattle raising.” The fourth? “To plow the land.” This was the argument that gave the latifundia to Italy.

The most important of his books was probably the lost Origines, a brave attempt to deal with the antiquities, ethnology, institutions, and history of Italy from the beginnings to the very year of Cato’s death. Nearly all that we know of it is that, to spite the aristocracy through its touted ancestors, the author named no generals in it, but lauded by name an elephant that had fought well against Pyrrhus.⁴⁵ Cato designed this work, and his essays on oratory, agriculture, sanitation, military science, and law, to form an encyclopedia for the education of his son. By writing in Latin he hoped to displace the Greek textbooks that were in his judgment warping the minds of Roman youth. Though he himself studied Greek, he seems to have been sincere in his conviction that an education in Greek literature and philosophy would so rapidly dissolve the religious beliefs of young Romans that their moral life would be left defenseless against the instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex. His condemnation, like Nietzsche’s, took in Socrates; that prattling old midwife, Cato thought, had been rightly poisoned for undermining the morals and laws of Athens.⁴⁶ Even Greek physicians irked him; he preferred the old household remedies, and distrusted the ever-ready surgeons.

The Greeks [he wrote to his son] are an intractable and iniquitous race. You may take my word for it that when this people bestows its literature upon Rome it will ruin everything. . . . And all the sooner if it sends us its physicians. They have conspired among themselves to murder all “barbarians.” ... I forbid you to have anything to do with physicians.⁴⁷

Having these ideas, he was a natural antagonist of the Scipionic circle, which thought the spread of Greek literature in Rome a necessary ferment in lifting Latin letters and the Roman mind to a fuller growth. Cato lent his aid to the prosecution of Africanus and his brother; the laws against embezzlement should be no respecters of persons. Toward foreign states, with one exception, he advocated a policy of justice and nonintervention. Despising Greeks, he respected Greece; and when the imperialistic plunderers in the Senate were for waging war upon rich Rhodes, he madea decisive speech in favor of conciliation. The exception, as all the world knows, was Carthage. Sent there on an official mission in 175, he had been shocked by the rapid recovery of the city from the effects of the Hannibalic war, the fruitful orchards and vineyards, the wealth that poured in from revived commerce, the arms that mounted in the arsenals. On his return he held up before the Senate a bundle of fresh figs that he had plucked in Carthage three days before, as an ominous symbol of her prosperity and her nearness to Rome; and he predicted that if Carthage were left unchecked, she would soon be rich and strong enough to renew the struggle for the mastery of the Mediterranean. From that day, with characteristic pertinacity, he ended all his speeches in the Senate, on whatever subject, with his dour conviction: Ceterum censeo delendam esse Carthaginem—“Besides, I think that Carthage must be destroyed.” The imperialists in the Senate agreed with him, not so much because they coveted Carthage’s trade, as because they saw in the well-irrigated fields of north Africa a new investment for their money, new latifundia to be tilled by new slaves. They awaited eagerly a pretext for the Third Punic War.

VII. CARTHAGO DELETA

Their cue came from the most extraordinary ruler of his time. Masinissa, King of Numidia, lived ninety years (238-148), begot a son at eighty-six,⁴⁸ and by a vigorous regimen kept his health and strength almost to the end. He organized his nomad people into a settled agricultural society and a disciplined state, ruled them ably for sixty years, adorned Cirta, his capital, with lordly architecture, and left as his tomb the great pyramid that still stands near the town of Constantine, in Tunisia. Having won the friendship of Rome, and knowing the political weakness of Carthage, he repeatedly raided and appropriated Carthaginian terrain, took Great Leptis and other cities, and finally controlled all land approaches to the harassed metropolis. Bound by treaty to make no war without Rome’s consent, Carthage sent ambassadors to the Senate to protest against Masinissa’s encroachments. The Senate reminded them that all Phoenicians were interlopers in Africa and had no rights there which any well-armed nation was obliged to respect. When Carthage paid the last of her fifty annual indemnities of 200 talents to Rome, she felt herself released from the treaty signed after Zama. In 151 she declared war against Numidia, and a year later Rome declared war against her.

The latter declaration, and the news that the Roman fleet had already sailed for Africa, reached Carthage at the same time. The ancient city, however rich in population and trade, was quite unprepared for a major war. She had a small army, a smaller navy, no mercenaries, no allies. Rome controlled the sea. Utica therefore declared for Rome, and Masinissa blocked all egress from Carthage to the hinterland. An embassy hastened to Rome with authority to meet all demands. The Senate promised that if Carthage would turn over to the Roman consuls in Sicily 300 children of the noblest families as hostages, and would obey whatever orders the consuls would give, the freedom and territorial integrity of Carthage would be preserved. Secretly the Senate bade the consuls carry out the instructions that they had already received. The Carthaginians gave up their children with forebodings and laments; the relatives crowded the shores in a despondent farewell; at the last moment the mothers tried by force to prevent the ships from sailing; and some swam out to sea to catch a last glimpse of their children. The consuls sent the hostages to Rome, crossed to Utica with army and fleet, summoned the Carthaginian ambassadors, and required of Carthage the surrender of her remaining ships, a great quantity of grain, and all her engines and weapons of war. When these conditions had been fulfilled, the consuls further demanded that the population of Carthage should retire to ten miles from the city, which was then to be burned to the ground. The ambassadors argued in vain that the destruction of a city which had surrendered hostages and its arms without striking a blow was a treacherous atrocity unknown to history. They offered their own lives as a vicarious atonement; they flung themselves upon the ground and beat the earth with their heads. The consuls replied that the terms were those of the Senate and could not be changed.

When the people of Carthage heard what was demanded of them they lost their sanity. Parents mad with grief tore limb from limb the leaders who had advised surrendering the child hostages; others killed those who had counseled the surrender of arms; some dragged the returning ambassadors through the streets and stoned them; some killed whatever Italians could be found in the city; some stood in the empty arsenals and wept. The Carthaginian Senate declared war against Rome and called all adults—men and women, slave or free—to form a new army, and to forge anew the weapons of defense. Fury gave them resolution. Public buildings were demolished to provide metal and timber; the statues of cherished gods were melted down to make swords, and the hair of the women was shorn to make ropes. In two months the beleaguered city produced 8000 shields, 18,000 swords, 30,000 spears, 60,000 catapult missiles, and built in its inner harbor a fleet of 120 ships.⁴⁹

Three years the city stood siege by land and sea. Again and again the consuls led their armies against the walls, but always they were repulsed; only Scipio Aemilianus, one of the military tribunes, proved resourceful and brave. Late in 147 the Roman Senate and Assembly made him consul and commander, and all men approved. Soon afterward Laelius succeeded in scaling the walls. The Carthaginians, though weakened and decimated by starvation, fought for their city street by street, through six days of slaughter without quarter. Harassed by snipers, Scipio ordered all captured streets to be fired and leveled to the ground. Hundreds of concealed Carthaginians perished in the conflagration. At last the population, reduced from 500,000 to 55,000, surrendered. Hasdrubal, their general, pleaded for his life, which Scipio granted, but his wife, denouncing his cowardice, plunged with her sons into the flames. The survivors were sold as slaves, and the city was turned over to the legions for pillage. Reluctant to raze it, Scipio sent to Rome for final instructions; the Senate replied that not only Carthage, but all such of her dependencies as had stood by her were to be completely destroyed, that the soil should be plowed and sown with salt, and a formal curse laid upon any man who should attempt to build upon the site. For seventeen days the city burned.

There was no treaty of peace, for the Carthaginian state no longer existed. Utica and other African cities that had helped Rome were left free under a protectorate; the remainder of Carthage’s territory became the province of “Africa.” Roman capitalists came in to divide the land into latifundia, and Roman merchants fell heir to Carthaginian trade. Imperialism became now the frank and conscious motive of Roman politics. Syracuse was absorbed into the province of Sicily, southern Gaul was subdued as a necessary land route to completely subjected Spain, and the Hellenistic monarchies of Egypt and Syria were quietly induced—like Antiochus IV by Popilius—to submit to the wishes of Rome. From the moral standpoint, which is always a window dressing in international politics, the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 must rank among the most brutal conquests in history; from the standpoint of empire—of security and wealth—it laid simultaneously the two cornerstones of Rome’s commercial and naval supremacy. From that moment the political history of the Mediterranean flowed through Rome.

In the midst of the war its chief instigators had died in the fullness of victory—Cato in 149, Masinissa in 148. The old censor had left a deep mark upon Roman history. Men would look back to him for many centuries as the typical Roman of the Republic: Cicero would idealize him in De Senectute; his great-great-grandson would reincarnate his philosophy without his humor; Marcus Aurelius would mold himself upon his example; Fronto would call upon Latin literature to return to the simplicity and directness of his style. Nevertheless, the destruction of Carthage was his only success. His war against Hellenism completely failed; every department of Roman letters, philosophy, oratory, science, art, religion, morals, manners, and dress surrendered to Greek influence. He hated Greek philosophers; his famous descendant would surround himself with them. The religious faith that he had lost continued to decline despite his efforts to reanimate it. Above all, the political corruption that he had fought in his youth grew wider and deeper as the stakes of office rose with the Empire’s spread; every new conquest made Rome richer, more rotten, more merciless. She had won every war but the class war; and the destruction of Carthage removed the last check to civil division and strife. Now through a hundred bitter years of revolution Rome would pay the penalty of gaining the world.

BOOK II

THE REVOLUTION

145-30 B.C.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

B.C.

139:

First Servile War in Sicily

133:

Tribunate and assassination of Tiberius Gracchus

132:

FL. Lucilius; Panaetius in Rome

124-123:

Caius Gracchus tribune

122:

C. Gracchus introduces state distribution of corn

121:

Suicide of C. Gracchus

119:

Marius tribune; 116: praetor

113-101:

Wars against Cimbri and Teutones

112-105:

The Jugurthine War

107, 104-100, 87:

Marius consul

106:

Birth of Cicero and Pompey

105:

Cimbri defeat Romans near Arausio

103-99:

Second Servile War in Sicily

103-100:

Saturninus tribune

102:

Marius defeats Cimbri at Aquae Sextiae

100:

Marius suppresses Saturninus; birth of Julius Caesar

91:

Reforms and assassination of M. Livius Drusus

91-89:

The Social War in Italy

88:

Sulla consul; flight of Marius

88-84:

First Mithridatic War

87:

Rebellion of Cinna and Marius; radical reign of terror

86:

Sulla takes Athens and defeats Archelaus at Chaeronea

86:

Marius and Cinna depose Sulla; death of Marius

85-84:

Third and fourth consulates, and death of Cinna

83-81:

Second Mithridatic War

83:

Sulla lands at Brundisium

82:

Sulla takes Rome; reactionary reign of terror

81:

Leges Corneliae of Sulla

80-72:

Revolt of Sertorius in Spain

79:

Resignation and, 78: death, of Sulla

76:

FL. Varro

75-63:

Third Mithridatic War; victories of Lucullus and Pompey

75:

Cicero quaestor in Sicily

73-71:

Third Servile War; Spartacus

70:

First consulate of Crassus and Pompey; trial of Verres; Virgil b.

69:

Titus Pomponius Atticus

68:

Caesar quaestor in Spain

67:

Pompey subdues the pirates

66:

Cicero Pro lege Manilia

63:

Cicero exposes Catiline; Octavius b.

63-12:

M. V. Agrippa, engineer

62:

Caesar praetor; misconduct of Clodius

B.C.

61:

Caesar gov. of Further Spain; return and triumph of Pompey

60:

First Triumvirate: Caesar, Crassus, Pompey

60-54:

Poems of Catullus; Cornelius Nepos

59:

Caesar consul; Lucretius’ De rerum natura

58:

Clodius, tribune, exiles Cicero; Caesar defeats Helvetii and Ariovistus in Gaul

57:

Return of Cicero; Caesar defeats Belgae

56:

Meeting of triumvirs at Luca

55:

Pompey and Crassus consuls; theater of Pompey; Caesar in Germany and Britain

54:

Caesar’s second invasion of Britain

53:

Violence of Clodius and Milo in Rome; defeat of Crassus at Carrhae

52:

Murder of Clodius; trial of Milo; Pompey sole consul; revolt of Vercingetorix

51:

Cicero governor of Cilicia; Cicero’s De re publica; Caesar’s De bello Gallico

49:

Caesar crosses Rubicon and takes Rome

48:

Battles of Dyrrachium and Pharsalus

48-47:

Caesar in Egypt and Syria; Vitruvius, architect; Columella, botanist

47:

Caesar’s victories at Zela and Thapsus; suicide of Cato the Younger

46:

Caesar appointed dictator for ten years; revision of calendar; Sallust, historian; Cicero Pro Marcello

45:

Caesar defeats the Pompeians in Spain; Cicero’s Academica and De finibus

44:

Assassination of Caesar; Cicero’s Disputationes Tusculanae, De natura deorum, De officiis

43:

Second Triumvirate: Antony, Octavian, Lepidus; murder of Cicero

42:

Brutus and Cassius die at Philippi

41:

Antony and Cleopatra at Tarsus

40:

Reconciliation of Antony and Octavian at Brundisium; Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue

36:

Antony invades Parthia

32:

Antony marries Cleopatra

31:

Octavian defeats Antony at Actium

30:

Suicide of Antony and Cleopatra; Egypt annexed to the Empire; Octavian sole ruler of Rome

CHAPTER VI

The Agrarian Revolt

145-78 B.C.

I. THE BACKGROUND OF REVOLUTION

THE causes of revolution were many, the results were endless, the personalities thrown up by the crisis, from the Gracchi to Augustus, were among the most powerful in history. Never before, and never again till our own time, were such stakes fought for, never was the world drama more intense. The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in the towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of 220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land. Conquered soil was sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, and eased urban strife; more of it was given to capitalists in part payment of their war loans to the state; most of it was bought or leased by senators or businessmen on terms fixed by the Senate. To compete with these latifundia the little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay; slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, tenancy or the slums. Finally, the peasant himself, after he had seen and looted the world as a soldier, had no taste or patience for the lonely labor and unadventurous chores of the farm; he preferred to join the turbulent proletariat of the city, watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheater, receive cheap corn from the government, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promiser, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass.

Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now rested more and more upon external plunder and internal slavery. In the city all domestic service, many handicrafts, most trade, much banking, nearly all factory labor, and labor on public works, were performed by slaves, reducing the wages of free workers to a point where it was almost as profitable to be idle as to toil. On the latifundia slaves were preferred because they were not subject to military service, and their number could be maintained, generation after generation, as a by-product of their only pleasure or their master’s vice. All the Mediterranean region was raided to produce living machines for these industrialized farms; to the war prisoners led in after every victorious campaign were added the victims of pirates who captured slaves or freemen on or near the coasts of Asia, or of Roman officials whose organized man hunts impressed into bondage any provincial whom the local authorities did not dare protect.¹ Every week slave dealers brought their human prey from Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, the Danube, Russia, Asia, and Greece to the ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It was not unusual for 10,000 slaves to be auctioned off at Delos in a single day. In 177, 40,000 Sardinians, in 167, 150,000 Epirotes, were captured by Roman armies and sold as slaves, in the latter case at approximately a dollar a head.² In the city the lot of the slave was mitigated by humanizing contacts with his master and by hope of emancipation; but on the large farms no human relation interfered with exploitation. There the slave was no longer a member of the household, as in Greece or early Rome; he seldom saw his owner; and the rewards of the overseer depended upon squeezing every possible profit from the chattels entrusted to his lash. The wages of the slave on the great estates were as much food and clothing as would enable him to toil from sunrise to sunset every day—barring occasional holidays—until senility. If he complained or disobeyed, he worked with chains about his ankles and spent the night in an ergastulum—a subterranean dungeon that formed a part of nearly every latifundium. It was a wasteful as well as a brutal system, for it supported hardly a twentieth of the families that once had lived on the same acreage as freemen.

If we remember that at least half these slaves had once been free (for slaves seldom fought in the wars), we can surmise the bitterness of these broken lives, and must marvel at the rarity of their revolts. In 196 the rural slaves and free workers of Etruria rebelled; they were beaten down by Roman legions and, Livy tells us, “many were killed or taken prisoners; others were scourged and crucified.”³ In 185 a like uprising occurred in Apulia; 7000 slaves were captured and condemned to mines.⁴ In the mines of New Carthage alone 4000 Spaniards worked as slaves. In 139 the “First Servile War” broke out in Sicily. Four hundred slaves accepted the call of Eunus and massacred the free population in the town of Enna; slaves poured from the farms and private dungeons of Sicily and swelled the number of the rebels to 70,000. They occupied Agrigentum, defeated the forces of the Roman praetor, and held nearly all the island till 131, when a consular army penned them into Enna and starved them into surrender. Eunus was taken to Rome, dropped into an underground cell, and allowed to die of hunger and lice.⁵ In 133 lesser uprisings resulted in the execution of 150 slaves in Rome, 450 in Minturnae, 4000 in Sinuessa. In that year Tiberius Gracchus passed the agrarian law that opened the Roman Revolution.

II. TIBERIUS GRACCHUS

He was the son of the Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus who had earned the gratitude of Spain by his generous administration, had served twice as consul and once as censor, and had saved the brother and married the daughter of Scipio Africanus. Cornelia gave him twelve children, all but three of whom died in adolescence; and his own death left upon her the burden of rearing Tiberius and Caius and a daughter—also named Cornelia—who became the wife of Scipio Aemilianus. Both parents shared in the Hellenistic culture and sympathies of the Scipionic circle. Cornelia gathered about her a literary salon, and wrote letters of so pure and elegant a style that they were reckoned as a distinguished contribution to Latin literature. An Egyptian king, says Plutarch, offered her his hand and throne in her widowhood, but she refused; she preferred to remain the daughter of one Scipio, the mother-in-law of another, and the mother of the Gracchi.

Brought up in the atmosphere of statesmanship and philosophy, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus knew both the problems of Roman government and the speculations of Greek thought. They were particularly influenced by Blossius, a Greek philosopher from Cumae, who helped to inspire in them a passionate liberalism that underestimated the power of the conservatives in Rome. The brothers were almost equally ambitious, proud, sincere, eloquent beyond reason, and brave without stint. Caius tells how Tiberius had the agrarian tragedy borne in upon him when, passing through Etruria, he “noted the dearth of inhabitants, and observed that those who tilled the soil and tended the flocks were foreign slaves.”⁶ Knowing that at that time only property holders could serve in the army, Tiberius asked himself how Rome could preserve its leadership or independence if the sturdy peasants that had once filled its legions were displaced by desolate and alien bondsmen. How could Roman life and democracy ever be healthy with a city proletariat festering in poverty, instead of a proud yeomanry owning and tilling the land? A distribution of land among the poorer citizens seemed the obvious and necessary solution of three problems: rural slavery, urban congestion and corruption, and military decay.

Early in 133 Tiberius Gracchus, elected a tribune of the people, announced his intention to submit to the Tribal Assembly three proposals: (1) that no citizen should be permitted to hold more than 333—or, if he had two sons, 667—acres of land bought or rented from the state; (2) that all other public lands that had been sold or leased to private individuals should be returned to the state for the purchase or rental price plus an allowance for improvements made; and (3) that the returned lands should be divided into twenty-acre lots among poor citizens, on condition that they agree never to sell their allotment, and to pay an annual tax on it to the Treasury. It was not a Utopian scheme; it was merely an attempt to implement the Licinian laws passed in 367 B.C., which had never been repealed and never enforced. “The beasts of the field and the birds of the air,” said Tiberius to the poorer plebeians in one of the epochal orations in Roman history,

have their holes and their hiding places; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy only the light and the air. Our generals urge their soldiers to fight for the graves and shrines of their ancestors. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar. You have no ancestral tomb. You fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. You are called the masters of the world, but there is not a foot of ground that you can call your own.⁷

The Senate denounced the proposals as confiscatory, charged Tiberius with seeking a dictatorship, and persuaded Octavius, another tribune, to prevent by his veto the submission of the bills to the Assembly. Gracchus thereupon moved that any tribune who acted contrary to the wishes of his constituents should be immediately deposed. The Assembly passed the measure, and Octavius was forcibly removed from the tribune’s bench by the lictors of Tiberius. The original proposals were then voted into law; and the Assembly, fearing for Gracchus’ safety, escorted him home.⁸

His illegal overruling of the tribunician veto, which the Assembly itself had long ago made absolute, gave his opponents a handle with which to frustrate him. They declared their purpose to impeach him at the end of his one-year term, as having violated the constitution and used force against a tribune. To protect himself he flouted the constitution further by seeking re-election to the tribunate for 132. As Aemilianus and Laelius and other senators who had defended his proposals now withdrew their support, he turned more completely to the plebs. He promised, if re-elected, to shorten the term of military service, to abolish the exclusive right of senators to act as jurors, and to admit the Italian allies to Roman citizenship. Meanwhile the Senate refused funds to the agrarian commission that had been appointed to execute Tiberius’ laws. When Attalus III of Pergamum bequeathed his kingdom to Rome (133), Gracchus proposed to the Assembly that the personal and movable property of Attalus should be sold and the proceeds distributed to the recipients of state lands to finance the equipment of their farms. The proposal infuriated the Senate, which saw its authority over the provinces and the public purse being transferred to an unmanageable and unrepresentative Assembly largely of servile origin and alien stock. When election day came, Gracchus appeared in the Forum with armed guards and in mourning costume, implying that his defeat would mean his impeachment and death. As the voting proceeded, violence broke out on both sides. Scipio Nasica, crying that Tiberius wished to make himself king, led the senators, armed with clubs, into the Forum. The supporters of Gracchus, awed by patrician robes, gave way; Tiberius was killed by a blow on the head, and several hundred of his followers perished with him. When his younger brother Caius asked permission to bury him he was refused, and the bodies of the dead rebels were thrown into the Tiber, while Cornelia mourned.

The Senate sought to mollify the bitter plebs by consenting to the enforcement of the Gracchan laws. An increase of 76,000 in the register of citizens from 131 to 125 suggests that a large number of land allotments was actually made. But the agrarian commission found itself faced by many difficulties. Much of the land in question had been obtained from the state years or generations back and its present possessors claimed rights established and sanctified by time. Many parcels had been bought by new owners, for a substantial price, from those who had bought them cheaply from the government. The landowners in Italian allied states, whose squatter rights were imperiled by the laws, appealed to Scipio Aemilianus to defend them against the land board; and through his influence its operations were suspended. Public opinion flamed out against him; he was denounced as a traitor to the already sacred memory of Gracchus; and one morning in 129 he was discovered dead in his bed, apparently the victim of an assassin, who was never found.

III. CAIUS GRACCHUS

Ruthless gossip accused Cornelia of conspiring with her daughter, Scipio’s deformed and unloved wife, to murder him. In the face of these calamities she sought consolation by devoting herself to her surviving son, the last of her “jewels.” The murder of Tiberius aroused in Caius no mere spirit of vengeance, but a resolve to complete his brother’s work. He had served with intelligence and courage under Aemilianus at Numantia, and he had won the admiration of all groups by the integrity of his conduct and the simplicity of his life. His passionate temperament, all the more vehement on occasion because so long controlled, made him the greatest of Roman orators before Cicero, and opened almost any office to him in a society where eloquence served only next to bravery in the advancement of men. In the fall of 124 he was elected tribune.

More realistic than Tiberius, Caius understood that no reform can endure which is opposed by the balance of economical or political power in the state. He aimed to bring four classes to his support: the peasantry, the army, the proletariat, and the businessmen. He won the first by renewing the agrarian legislation of his brother, extending its application to state-owned land in the provinces, restoring the land board, and personally attending to its operations. He fed the ambitions of the middle classes by establishing new colonies in Capua, Tarentum, Narbo, and Carthage, and by developing these as thriving centers of trade. He pleased the soldiers by passing a bill that they should be clothed at the public expense. He gained the gratitude of the urban masses by his lex frumentaria, or corn law, which committed the government to distribute wheat at six and one third asses per modius (thirty-nine cents a peck—half the market price) to all who asked for it. It was a measure shocking to old Roman ideas of self-reliance, and destined to play a vital role in Roman history. Caius believed that the grain dealers were charging the public twice the cost of production, and that his measure, through the economy of unified operation, would involve no loss to the state. In any case, the law turned the poor freemen of Rome from client supporters of the aristocracy into defenders of the Gracchi, as later of Marius and Caesar; it was the foundation stone of that democratic movement which would reach its peak in Clodius, and die at Actium.

Caius’ fifth measure sought to assure the power of his party by ending the tradition whereby the richer classes in the Centurial Assembly voted first; hereafter the centuries were on each occasion to vote in an order determined by lot. He appeased the business class by giving them the exclusive right to serve as jurors in trials for provincial malfeasance, i.e., they were hereafter to be in large measure their own judges. He whetted their appetites by proposing a tax of one tenth, to be collected by them, on all the produce of Asia Minor. He enriched contractors, and reduced unemployment, by a program of road building in every part of Italy. Altogether these laws, despite the political trickery that colored some of them, formed the most constructive body of legislation offered to Rome before Caesar.

Armed with such varied support, Caius was able to override custom and win election to a second and successive tribunate. Probably it was now that he sought to “pack” the Senate by adding to its 300 members 300 more to be chosen from the business class by the Assembly. He proposed also to extend the full franchise to all the freemen of Latium, and a partial franchise to the remaining freemen of Italy. This, his boldest move toward a broader democracy, was his first strategic error. The voters showed no enthusiasm for sharing their privileges, even with men of whom only a small minority could have attended their assemblies in Rome. The Senate acted on its opportunity. Almost ignored by Caius, and reduced to apparent impotence, it saw in the brilliant tribune only a demagogic tyrant extending his personal power through the reckless distribution of state property and funds. Suddenly finding an ally in the jealous proletariat of Rome, and taking advantage of Caius’ absence in establishing his colony at Carthage, the Senatorial party suggested to another tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus, that he should win over the new peasantry by a bill canceling the tax laid upon their lands in the Gracchan laws; and that he should at once please and weaken the proletariat by proposing the formation of twelve new colonies in Italy, each to take 3000 men from Rome. The Assembly readily passed the bills; and when Caius returned he found his leadership challenged at every step by the popular Drusus. He sought a third term as tribune but was defeated; his friends charged that he had been elected but that the ballots had been falsified. He counseled his followers against violence and retired to private life.

In the following year the Senate proposed the abandonment of the colony at Carthage; all sides interpreted the measure, openly or privately, as the first move in a campaign to repeal the Gracchan laws. Some of Caius’ adherents attended the Assembly armed, and one of them cut down a conservative who threatened to lay hands upon Caius. On the morrow the senators appeared in full battle array, each with two armed slaves, and attacked the popular party entrenched on the Aventine. Caius did his best to quiet the tumult and avert further violence. Failing, he fled across the Tiber; overtaken, he ordered his servant to kill him; the slave obeyed and then killed himself. A friend cut off Caius’ head, filled it with molten lead, and brought it to the Senate, which had offered a reward of its weight in gold.⁹ Of Caius’ supporters 250 fell in the fight, 3000 more were put to death by Senatorial decree. The city mob that he had befriended made no protest when his corpse, and those of his followers, were flung into the river; it was busy plundering his house.¹⁰ The Senate forbade Cornelia to wear mourning for her son.

IV. MARIUS

The triumphant aristocracy devoted its subtlest intelligence to undoing the constructive, rather than the demagogic, elements in Caius’ legislation. It did not dare eject the business class from the juries, or the contractors and publicans from their happy hunting ground in Asia; and it allowed the corn dole to stand as insurance against revolution. Into an otherwise attractive measure it inserted a clause permitting the recipients of the new lands to sell them; soon thousands of holders sold to the great slaveowners, and the latifundia resumed their growth. In 118 the land board was abolished. The masses in the capital raised no objection; they had decided that to eat state corn in the city was better than to sweat on the land or toil in pioneer colonies. Sloth combined with superstition (for the soil of Carthage had been cursed) to frustrate till Caesar the attempt to mitigate urban poverty by emigration. Wealth mounted, but it did not spread; in 104 B.C.. a moderate democrat reckoned that only 2000 Roman citizens owned property.¹¹ “The condition of the poor,” says Appian, “became even worse than before. . . . The plebeians lost everything. . . . The number of citizens and soldiers continued to decline.”¹² More and more the legions had to be filled out with conscripts from the Italian states; but these men had no stomach for fighting or no love for Rome. Desertions multiplied, discipline deteriorated, and the defense of the Republic sank to its lowest ebb.

Consequently it was soon attacked, almost at the same time, on north and south. In 113 two Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones, as if to give Rome a foretaste of its final fate, rolled down through Germany in a frightening avalanche of covered wagons—300,000 fighting men, with their wives, children, and animals. Perhaps the word had gone up over the Alps that Rome was in love with wealth and weary of war. The newcomers were tall and strong and fearless, so blond that the Italians described the children as having the white hair of old men. They met a Roman army at Noreia (now Neumarkt, in Carinthia) and destroyed it. They crossed the Rhine and defeated another Roman army; they poured west into southern Gaul and overcame a third, fourth, and fifth Roman army; at Arausio (Orange) 80,000 legionnaires and 40,000 camp followers were left dead on the field.¹³ All Italy lay open to the invaders; and a terror rose in Rome such as it had not known since Hannibal.

Almost at the same time war broke out in Numidia. When Jugurtha, grandson of Masinissa, tortured his brother to death, and tried to deprive his cousins of their share in the kingdom, the Senate declared war upon him (III), with a view to making Numidia a province and opening it to Roman commerce and capital. Jugurtha bought patricians to defend his cause and crimes before the Senate, and bribed the generals sent against him into harmless activities or a favorable peace. Summoned to Rome, he opened his royal purse more lavishly, and was able to return unhindered to his capital.¹⁴

Only one officer emerged from these campaigns with credit. Gaius Marius, born like Cicero at Arpinum, son of a day laborer, had enlisted in the army at an early age, had won his scars at Numantia, had married an aunt of Caesar, and despite, or because of, his lack of education or manners, had been chosen a tribune of the plebs. In the fall of 108 he returned from his services as lieutenant to the incompetent Quintus Metellus in Africa, and ran for the consulate on a platform proposing that he should replace Metellus and bring the Jugurthine War to a successful end. He was elected, took command, and forced Jugurtha’s surrender (106). The people did not learn at this time that the chief agent of this victory was a reckless young aristocrat, Lucius Sulla; they would hear from him later. Marius enjoyed a splendid triumph, and was so loved that the Assembly, ignoring a dying constitution, elected him consul year after year (104-100). The business classes supported him partly because his victories opened new fields for their enterprises, partly because he was clearly the only man who could repel the Celtic hordes. Rome already recognized in Caesar’s uncle the uses of Caesarism; the dictatorship of a popular leader backed by a devoted army seemed to many weary Romans the only alternative to the oligarchic abuses of liberty.

After their victory at Arausio, the Cimbri had reprieved Rome by crossing the Pyrenees and ravaging Spain. But in 102 they returned to Gaul, greater in number than before, and entered into an agreement with the Teutones for a simultaneous assault by separate routes upon the rich plains of northern Italy. To meet the peril Marius resorted to a new form of military enrollment, which revolutionized first the army and then the state. He invited the enlistment of any citizen, property owner or not; offered attractive pay, and promised to release volunteers, and give them lands, after a completed campaign. The army now formed was composed chiefly of the city proletariat; its sentiments were hostile to the patrician Republic; it fought not for its country, but for its general and for booty; in this way, probably without knowing it, Marius laid the military basis of the Caesarian revolution. He was a soldier, not a statesman; he had no time to weigh distant political consequences. He led his recruits over the Alps, hardened their bodies with marches and drills, and developed their courage with attacks upon objectives that could be easily won; until they were trained he could not risk an engagement. The Teutones marched unhindered by his camp, asking the Romans derisively if they had messages for their wives in Rome, with whom the invaders proposed soon to refresh themselves; the number of the Teutones could be judged from the six days they took to pass the Roman camp. When they had all filed by, Marius ordered his army to fall upon their rear. In the great battle that ensued at Aquae Sextiae (Aix in Provence), the new legions slew or captured 100,000 men (102). “They say,” Plutarch reports, “that the inhabitants of Marseilles made fences round their vineyards with the bones, and that the soil, after the bodies had rotted and the winter rains had fallen, was so fertilized with the putrefied matter which sank into it, that in the following season it yielded an unprecedented crop.”¹⁵ After resting his army for several months, Marius led it back into Italy, and met the Cimbri at Vercellae, near the Po (101), on the very field where Hannibal had won his first battle against Rome. The barbarians, to show their strength and courage, went naked in the snow, climbed over ice and through deep drifts to summits from which they tobogganed gaily along steep descents, using their shields as sleds.¹⁶ In the battle that followed they were nearly all slain.

Marius was received in the rejoicing capital as a “second Camillus” who had turned back a Celtic invasion, and another Romulus who had refounded Rome. Part of the spoils he brought was bestowed upon him as a personal reward; thereby he became a rich man, with estates big “enough for a kingdom.” In 100 he was elected consul for the sixth time. The tribune was Lucius Saturninus, a fiery radical who was resolved to achieve the goals of the Gracchi by law if possible, otherwise by force. He pleased Marius with a bill that bestowed colonial lands upon the veterans of the recent campaign, and Marius raised no objection when he lowered the price of state-doled corn from six and one third asses (thirty-nine cents) to five sixths of an as (five cents) per modius, or peck. The Senate sought to protect the Treasury and itself by having a tribune forbid the submission of these measures to a vote, but Saturninus proceeded with the voting nevertheless. Violence flared up on both sides. When Saturninus’ bands killed Caius Memmius, one of the most respected of the aristocracy, the Senate took its final resort and, by a senatusconsultum de re publica defendenda, ordered Marius, as consul, to suppress the revolt.

Marius faced the bitterest choice of his life. It seemed a miserable end to his long career of service to the common people of Rome that he should now attack their leaders and his former friends. And yet he too distrusted the appeal to violence, and saw in revolution more ills than it could cure. He led a force against the rebels, let Saturninus be stoned to death, and then fled to a gloomy retirement, despised alike by the people he had championed and the aristocracy he had saved.

V. THE REVOLT OF ITALY

The revolution was now passing into civil war. When the Senate asked for help against the Cimbri from the eastern kings allied with Rome, Nicomedes of Bithynia replied that all men of military value in his kingdom had been sold into slavery to satisfy the extortions of the Roman tax collectors. Preferring an army for the moment, the Senate decreed that all males enslaved for unpaid taxes should be freed. Hearing of this order, hundreds of slaves in Sicily, many of them Greeks from the Hellenistic East, left their masters and, gathering before the palace of the Roman praetor, demanded their freedom. Their owners protested, and the praetor suspended the operation of the decree. The slaves organized themselves under a religious impostor, Salvius, and attacked the town of Morgantia. The citizens there secured the loyalty of most of their slaves by promising to liberate them if they repelled the attack; they repelled it, but were not freed; and many of them joined the revolt. About the same time (103), some 6000 slaves in the western end of the island rose under Athenion, a man of education and resolution. This force defeated army after army sent against it by the praetor, and moving eastward, merged with the rebels under Salvius. Together they mastered an army dispatched from Italy, but Salvius died in the moment of victory. Still other legions crossed the straits, under the consul Manius Aquilius (101); Athenion engaged him in single combat and was killed; the leaderless slaves were overwhelmed; thousands of them died in the field, thousands were returned to their masters, hundreds were shipped to Rome to fight wild beasts in the games that celebrated Aquilius’ triumph. Instead of fighting, the slaves plunged their knives into one another’s hearts until all lay dead.

A few years after this Second Servile war all Italy was in arms. For almost two centuries now Rome—a tiny nation between Cumae and Caere, between the Apennines and the sea—had ruled the rest of Italy as subject states. Even some cities close to Rome, like Tibur and Praeneste, had no representation in the government that ruled them. The Senate, the assemblies, and the consuls meted out decrees and laws to the Italian communities with the same high hand as to alien and conquered provinces. The resources and man power of the “allies” were drained by wars whose chief effect was to enrich a few families in Rome. Those states that had remained loyal to Rome in the ordeal with Hannibal had received scant reward; those that had helped him in any way had been punished with so servile a subjection that many of their freemen joined the slave revolts. A few rich men in the cities had been granted Roman citizenship; and the power of Rome had everywhere been used to support the rich against the poor. In 126 the Assembly forbade the inhabitants of the Italian towns to migrate to Rome; and in 95 a decree of the jealous capital expelled all residents whose citizenship was not Roman but merely Italian.

A member of the aristocracy paid with his life for trying to improve this situation. M. Livius Drusus was the son of the tribune who had rivaled Tiberius Gracchus; since his adopted son became the father-in-law of Augustus, the family bound the beginnings of the revolution with its end. Elected tribune in 91, he proposed three measures: (1) to divide more state lands among the poor; (2) to restore to the Senate its exclusive jury rights, but at the same time add 300 equites, or businessmen, to the Senate; and (3) to confer Roman citizenship upon all the freemen of Italy. The Assembly passed the first bill with pleasure, the second with indifference; the Senate rejected both and declared them void. The third never reached a vote, for an unknown assassin stabbed Drusus to death in his home.

Aroused to hope by Drusus’ bill, and convinced by his fate that neither the Senate nor the Assembly would ever peaceably consent to share its privileges, the Italian states prepared for revolt. A federal republic was formed, Corfinium was named the capital, and the government was vested in a senate of 500 men chosen from all the Italian tribes except the Etruscans and Umbrians, who refused to join. Rome at once declared war upon the secessionists. All parties in the capital co-operated in what seemed to them a defense of the union; and every Roman dreaded the revenge the rebel states would take if they won this fratricidal “Social War.”^* Marius emerged from his solitude, took command, and won victory after victory while all other Roman generals but Sulla met defeat. In three years of war 300,000 men fell, and central Italy was devastated. When Etruria and Umbria were on the verge of going over to the rebels, Rome pacified them by a grant of full Roman citizenship; and in 90 the Roman franchise was offered to all Italian freemen or freedmen who would swear fealty to Rome. These belated concessions weakened the allies; one town after another laid down its arms; and in 89 this ferocious and costly war ended in a sullen peace. The Romans nullified the franchise they had granted by enrolling the new citizens in ten new tribes, which voted only after the existing thirty-five, and therefore usually to no use; besides, only a few of the new citizens could attend the assemblies in Rome. The deceived and desolate communities bided their time. Forty years later they would open their gates in welcome to a Caesar who offered them citizenship in a democracy that was dead.

VI. SULLA THE HAPPY

After a few years of peace the strife of Italians against Italians was resumed, merely changing its name from “Social” to “Civil,” and its scene from the towns to Rome. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was chosen one of the consuls for 88, and took command of the army that was being prepared to march against Mithridates of Pontus. Sulpicius Rufus, a tribune, unwilling to put a conservative like Sulla in charge of so powerful a force, persuaded the Assembly to transfer the command to Marius, who, though fat and sixty-nine, was still rumbling with military ambition. Sulla refused to let his long-awaited chance for leadership slip by through what seemed to him the whim of an assembly spellbound by a demagogue and bribed, he was sure, by the merchants who liked Marius. He fled to Nola, won the army to his support, and marched at its head against Rome.

Sulla was unique in his origins, character, and fate. Born poor, he became the defender of the aristocracy, as the aristocratic Gracchi, Drusi, and Caesar became leaders of the poor. He took his revenge upon life for having made him at once patrician and penniless; when he conquered money he made it serve his appetites without qualm or restraint. He was unprepossessing—glaring blue eyes in a white face mixed with rough blotches of fiery red, “like a mulberry sprinkled over with flour.”¹⁷ His education belied his looks. He was well versed in Greek as well as Roman literature, was a discriminate collector of art (usually by military means), had the works of Aristotle brought from Athens to Rome as part of his richest spoils, and found time, between war and revolution, to write his Memoirs for the misguidance of posterity. He was a jolly companion and a generous friend, devoted to wine, women, battle, and song. “He lived extravagantly,” says Sallust, “yet pleasure never interfered with his duties, except that his conduct as a husband might have been more honorable.”¹⁸ He made his way rapidly, above all in the army, his happiest medium; he treated his soldiers as comrades, shared their work, their marches, and their dangers; “his only effort was not to allow anyone to surpass him in wisdom or bravery.”¹⁹ He believed in no gods, but many superstitions. Otherwise he was the most realistic as well as the most ruthless of the Romans; his imagination and his feelings were always under the control of his intellect. It was said of him that he was half lion and half fox, and that the fox in him was more dangerous than the lion.²⁰ Living half the time on battlefields, spending the last decade of his life in civil war, he nevertheless preserved his good humor to the end, graced his brutalities with epigrams, filled Rome with his laughter, made a hundred thousand enemies, achieved all his purposes, and died in bed.

Such a man seemed chemically compounded of the virtues and vices needed to subdue revolution at home and Mithridates abroad. His 35,000 trained men easily overcame the haphazard cohorts that Marius had improvised in Rome. Seeing his situation helpless, Marius escaped to Africa. Sulpicius was killed, betrayed by his servant; Sulla had the head of the tribune affixed to the rostrum that had lately rung with its eloquence; he rewarded the slave with freedom for his services, and death for his treachery. While his soldiers dominated the Forum he decreed that henceforth no measure should be offered to the Assembly except by permission of the Senate, and that the order of voting should be as in the “Servian constitution,” which gave priority and advantage to the upper classes. He had himself chosen proconsul, allowed Cnaeus Octavius and Cornelius Cinna to be elected consuls (87), and then marched off to encounter Mithridates the Great.

He had hardly left Italy when the struggle of the plebeian populares and the patrician and equestrian optimates was resumed. The conservative supporters of Octavius fought in the Forum with the radical followers of Cinna, and in one day 10,000 men were killed. Octavius won, and Cinna fled to organize revolt in the neighboring towns. Marius, after a winter in hiding, sailed back to Italy, proclaimed freedom to slaves, and led a force of 6000 men against Octavius in Rome. The rebels won, slaughtered thousands, adorned the rostra with the heads of slain senators, and paraded the streets with noble heads on their pikes as a model for later revolutions. Octavius accepted death calmly as he sat in his robes of office on his tribune’s chair. The carnage continued for five days and nights, the rebel terror for a year. A revolutionary tribunal subpoenaed patricians, condemned them if they had opposed Marius, and seized their property. A nod from Marius sufficed to send any man to death, usually by execution there and then. All of Sulla’s friends were slain; his property was confiscated; he was deposed from his command and was declared a public enemy. The dead were refused burial and were left in the streets to be devoured by birds and dogs. The freed slaves plundered, raped, and killed indiscriminately, until Cinna gathered 4000 of them together, surrounded them with Gallic soldiery, and had them butchered to death.²¹

Cinna was now (86) chosen consul for the second time, Marius for the seventh. In the first month of his new term Marius died, aged seventy-one, worn out with hardships and violence. Valerius Flaccus, elected in his stead, passed a bill canceling seventy-five per cent of all debts, and then left for the East with an army of 12,000 men to depose Sulla from command. Enjoying undivided power at Rome, Cinna changed the Republic into a dictatorship, nominated all successful candidates for major offices, and had himself elected consul for four successive years.

When Flaccus left Italy, Sulla was besieging Athens, which had joined Mithridates in revolt. Receiving nothing from the Senate for the pay of his troops, he had financed his campaign by pillaging the temples and treasuries of Olympia, Epidaurus, and Delphi. In March, 86, his soldiers broke through a gate in Athens’ walls, poured in, and revenged themselves for the city’s long-delayed welcome by a riot of slaughter and robbery. Plutarch tells us that “there was no numbering the slain; . . . blood flowed through the streets and far out into the suburbs.”²² At last Sulla called a halt to the massacre, remarking generously that he would “forgive the living for the dead.” He led his refreshed troops northward, defeated a great force at Chaeronea and Orchomenus, pursued its remnants across the Hellespont into Asia, and prepared to meet the main army of the Pontic king. But meanwhile Flaccus and his legions had also reached Asia, and Sulla was again informed that he must give up his command. He persuaded Flaccus to let him complete the campaign; thereupon Flaccus was killed by his lieutenant, Fimbria, who now declared himself commander of all Roman armies and advanced north against Sulla. Faced with this folly, Sulla made a peace with Mithridates (85), by which the King was to restore all the conquests that he had made in the war, surrender eighty galleys to Rome, and pay an indemnity of 2000 talents. Then Sulla turned south and met Fimbria in Lydia. Fimbria’s soldiers went over to Sulla, and Fimbria committed suicide. Master now of the Greek East, Sulla exacted 20,000 talents as indemnities and accrued taxes from the revolted cities of Ionia. He sailed with his army to Greece, marched to Patrae, and arrived at Brundisium in 83. Cinna tried to stop him but was killed by his troops.

Sulla was bringing to the Treasury 15,000 pounds of gold and 115,000 pounds of silver, in addition to money and works of art which he credited to his personal account. But the democratic leaders, still in power in Rome, continued to brand him as a public enemy, and denounced his treaty with Mithridates as a national humiliation. Reluctantly Sulla led his 40,000 troops to the gates of Rome. Many of the aristocracy went out to join him; one of them, Cnaeus Pompey, brought a legion recruited entirely from his father’s clients and friends. The son of Marius led an army out to encounter Sulla, was defeated, and fled to Praeneste, after sending instructions to the populares praetor to put to death all leading patricians still left in the capital. The praetor convoked the Senate, and the marked men were killed in their seats or their flight. The democratic forces then evacuated Rome, and Sulla entered it unhindered; but meanwhile a Samnite army of 100,000 men intent on avenging the Social War, marched up from the south and joined the democratic remnants. Sulla went out to meet them, and at the Colline Gate his 50,000 men won one of the bloodiest victories of ancient times. Sulla ordered 8000 prisoners shot down with arrows, on the ground that they could make more trouble alive than dead. The severed heads of the captured generals were displayed on pikes before the walls of Praeneste, where the last democratic army was standing siege. Praeneste fell, the young Marius killed himself, and his head was nailed up in the Forum—a procedure which frequent precedents had now made constitutional.

Sulla had no trouble in persuading the Senate to make him dictator. At once he issued a proscription list condemning to death forty senators and 2600 businessmen; these last had supported Marius against him, and had bought in at bargains the property of senators slain during the radical regime. He offered rewards to informers, and prizes up to 12,000 denarii ($7200) to those who should bring him the proscribed men, alive or dead. The Forum was adorned festively with the heads of the slain and with periodically renewed proscription lists which the citizens had to read at frequent intervals to know if they might still live. Massacre, banishment, and confiscation spread their horrors from Rome to the provinces and fell upon Italian rebels and the followers of Marius everywhere. Some 4700 persons died in this aristocratic terror. “Men were butchered in the embraces of their wives,” says Plutarch, “sons in the arms of their mothers.” Many persons who had been neutral, or even conservative, were proscribed, exiled, or slain; Sulla, it was said, needed their money for his troops, his pleasures, or his friends. Confiscated property was sold to the highest bidder or to Sulla’s favorites, and became the foundation of many fortunes, like those of Crassus and Catiline.

Using his powers as dictator, Sulla issued a series of edicts—known from his clan name as the Cornelian Laws—by which he hoped to establish a permanently aristocratic constitution. To replace dead citizens he enfranchised many Spaniards and Celts and some former slaves. He weakened the assemblies by adding these new members indebted to him and by again ruling that no measure should be put before the Assembly except by consent of the Senate. To stop the flocking of poor Italians to Rome he suspended the state distribution of corn; at the same time he eased the pressure of population in the city by distributing land to 120,000 veterans. To prevent the use of successive consulships as in effect a dictatorship, he re-emphasized the old requirement of a ten-year interval before the same office could be held a second time by the same man. He lowered the prestige of the tribunate by limiting its right of veto and making ex-tribunes ineligible for any higher office. He took from the business class, and restored to the Senate, the exclusive right to serve as jurors in the higher courts; and he replaced the farming of taxes to publicans with direct payments from the provinces to the Treasury. He reorganized the courts, increased their number for quicker trials, and carefully specified their functions and fields. All the legislative, judicial, executive, social, and sartorial privileges enjoyed by the Senate before the Gracchan revolt were returned to it, for Sulla was certain that only a monarchy or an aristocracy could wisely administer an empire. To renew the full membership of the Senate he allowed the Tribal Assembly to promote to it 300 members of the “equestrian” class. To show his confidence in this thoroughgoing restoration, he disbanded his legions and decreed that no army should be permitted in Italy. After two years of dictatorship, he resigned all his powers, re-established consular government, and retired to private life (80).

He was safe, for he had killed nearly all who could plan his assassination. He dismissed his lictors and guards, walked unharmed in the Forum, and offered to give an account of his official actions to any citizen who should ask for it. Then he went to spend his last years in his villa at Cumae. Tired of war, of power and glory, perhaps of men, he surrounded himself with singers, dancers, actors, and actresses; wrote his Commentarii, hunted and fished, ate and drank. Men had long since called him Sulla Felix, Sulla the Happy, because he had won every battle, known every pleasure, reached every power, and lived without fear or regret. He married five wives, divorced four, and eked out their inadequacy with mistresses. At 58 he developed an ulcer of the colon so severe that “the corrupted flesh,” says Plutarch, “broke out into lice. Many men were employed day and night in destroying them, but they so multiplied that not only his clothes, baths, and basins, but his very food was polluted with them.”²³ He died of intestinal hemorrhage, after hardly a year of retirement (78). He had not neglected to dictate his epitaph: “No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.”²⁴

CHAPTER VII

The Oligarchic Reaction

77-60 B.C.

I. THE GOVERNMENT

NEVERTHELESS, Sulla had erred twice on the side of generosity. He had spared the son and nephew of his enemies, the gay and brilliant Caius Julius Caesar, who was entering his twenties in the proscription years; Sulla had nominated him for death, but let him go on the importuning of their common friends; his judgment, however, was not mistaken when he remarked, “In that young man go many Mariuses.”¹ And perhaps he erred in resigning too soon and enjoying himself to an early end. Had his patience and insight equaled his ruthlessness and courage, he might have saved Rome a half century of chaos and given her in 80 B.C.. the peace and security, order and prosperity, that Augustus would bring back from Actium. He restored the old when he should have created the new.

Within a decade after his death his work was in ruins. Relaxed in the arms of victory, the patricians neglected the tasks of government to seek wealth in business and spend it in luxury. The struggle between the optimates and the populares continued with a bitterness that passionately awaited another opportunity for violence. The optimates, or “best people,” made nobilitas their creed; not in the sense of noblesse oblige, but on the theory that good government required the restriction of major magistracies to men whose ancestors had held high office. Anyone who ran for office without such forebears was scorned as novus homo—a “new man,” or upstart; such were Marius and Cicero. The populares demanded “career open to talent,” all power to the assemblies, and free land for veterans and the poor. Neither party believed in democracy; both aspired to dictatorship, and both practiced intimidation and corruption without conscience or concealment. The collegia that had once been mutual-benefit societies became agencies for the sale of great blocks of plebeian votes. The business of vote buying reached a scale where it required a high specialization of labor: there were divisores, who bought votes, interpretes, or go-betweens, and sequestres, who held the money until the votes had been delivered.² Cicero describes candidates as going about purse in hand among the electors in the Field of Mars.³ Pompey had his mediocre friend Afranius made consul by inviting the leaders of the tribes to his gardens and there paying them for the ballots of their groups.⁴ So much money was borrowed to finance candidacies that the campaigns raised the interest rate to eight per cent per month.⁵

The courts, now pre-empted by senators, rivaled the polls in corruption. Oaths had lost all value as testimony; perjury was as common as bribery. Marcus Messala, being indicted for buying his election to the consulate (53), was unanimously acquitted, though even his friends acknowledged his guilt.⁶ “Trials are now managed so venally,” wrote Cicero to his son, “that no man will ever be condemned hereafter except for murder.”⁷ He should have said “no man of means”; for “without money and a good lawyer,” said another advocate at this period, “a plain, simple defendant may be accused of any crime which he has not committed, and will certainly be convicted.”⁸ Lentulus Sura, having been acquitted by two votes, mourned the extra expense he had gone to in bribing one more judge than he had needed.⁹ When Quintus Calidus, praetor, was convicted by a jury of senators, he calculated that “they could not honestly require less than 300,000 sesterces to condemn a praetor.”¹⁰

Protected by such courts, the Senatorial proconsuls, the tax gatherers, the moneylenders, and the business agents milked the provinces at a rate that would have angered their predecessors with envy. There were several honorable and competent provincial governors, but what could be expected of the majority? They served without pay, usually for a year’s term; in that brief time they had to accumulate enough to pay their debts, buy another office, and set themselves up for life in the style befitting a great Roman. The sole check upon their venality was the Senate; and the senators could be trusted as gentlemen not to raise a fuss, since nearly all of them had done, or hoped soon to do, the same. When Caesar went to Farther Spain as proconsul in 61 he owed $7,500,000; when he returned in 60 he cleared off these debts at one stroke. Cicero thought himself a painfully honest man; he made only $ 110,000 in his year as governor of Cilicia and filled his letters with wonder at his own moderation.

The generals who conquered the provinces were the first to profit from them. Lucullus, after his campaigns in the East, became a synonym for luxury. Pompey brought in from the same region $11,200,000 for the Treasury and $21,000,000 for himself and his friends; Caesar took literally untold millions from Gaul. After the generals came the publicans, who collected from the people twice the amount which they remitted to Rome. When a province or city could not raise enough from its subjects to pay the demanded tribute or tax, Roman financiers or statesmen would lend them the necesssary funds at from twelve to forty-eight per cent interest, to be collected, if need be, by the Roman army through siege, conquest, and pillage. The Senate had forbidden its members to take part in such loans, but pompous aristocrats like Pompey, and saints like Brutus, skirted the law by lending through intermediaries. In some years the province of Asia paid Romans twice as much in interest on loans as it paid to the publicans and the Treasury.¹¹ The paid and unpaid interest on money borrowed by the cities of Asia Minor to meet Sulla’s exactions in 84 had swelled by 70 to six times the principal. To meet the charges on this debt communities sold their public buildings and statuary, and parents sold their children into slavery, for defaulting debtors could be stretched on the rack.¹² If any wealth still remained, a flock of entrepreneurs came in from Italy, Syria, and Greece, with Senatorial contracts for “developing” the mineral, timber, or other resources of the province; trade followed the flag. Some bought slaves, some sold or bought goods, others purchased land and set up provincial latifundia larger than those of Italy. “No Gaul,” said Cicero in 69, with his customary exaggeration, “carries through any business without the intervention of a Roman citizen; not a penny changes hands there without passing through the ledgers of a Roman.”

Antiquity had never known so rich, so powerful, and so corrupt a government.

II. THE MILLIONAIRES

The business classes reconciled themselves to the rule of the Senate because they were better prepared than the aristocracy to exploit the provinces. That “concord of the orders,” or co-operation of the two upper classes, which Cicero was to preach as an ideal, was already a reality in his youth; they had agreed to unite and conquer. Businessmen and their aggressive agents crowded the basilicas and streets of Rome and swarmed into provincial markets and capitals. Bankers issued letters of exchange on their provincial affiliates,¹³ and lent money for everything, even political careers. Merchants and financiers swung their influence to the populares when the Senate proved selfish, and back to the optimates when democratic leaders tried to keep their pre-election promises to the proletariat.

Crassus, Atticus, and Lucullus typify the three phases of Roman wealth: acquisition, speculation, luxury. Marcus Licinius Crassus was of aristocratic lineage. His father, a famous orator, consul, and censor, had fought for Sulla and had killed himself rather than yield to Marius. Sulla rewarded the son by letting him buy at bargain prices the confiscated properties of proscribed men. As a youth Marcus had studied literature and philosophy and had assiduously practiced law; but now the smell of money intoxicated him. He organized a fire brigade—something new to Rome; it ran to fires, sold its services on the spot, or bought endangered buildings at nominal sums and then put out the fire; in this way Crassus acquired hundreds of houses and tenements, which he let at high rentals. He bought state mines when Sulla denationalized them. Soon he had inflated his fortune from 7,000,000 to 170,000,000 sesterces ($25,500,000)—a sum nearly equal to the total yearly revenue of the Treasury. No man should consider himself rich, said Crassus, unless he could raise, equip, and maintain his own army;¹⁴ it was his destiny to perish by his definition. Having become the wealthiest man in Rome, he was still unhappy; he itched for public office, for a province, for the leadership of an Asiatic campaign. He solicited votes humbly in the streets, memorized the first names of countless citizens, lived in conspicuous simplicity, and, to tether influential politicians to his star, lent them money without interest but payable on demand. With all his eager ambitions he was a kindly man, accessible to everyone, generous without limit to his friends, and contributing to both political parties with that bilateral wisdom which has always distinguished his kind. He fulfilled all his dreams: he became consul in 70 and again in 55, governed Syria, and helped to raise the great army that he led against Parthia. He was defeated at Carrhae, treacherously captured, and barbarously slain (53); his head was cut off, and into the mouth his conqueror poured molten gold.

Titus Pomponius Atticus, though of equestrian birth, was a truer aristocrat than Crassus and a higher type of millionaire: as honest as Meyer Anschel of the rot Schild, as learned as Lorenzo de’ Medici, as financially astute as Voltaire. We hear of him first as a student in Athens, when his conversation, and his reading of Greek and Latin poetry, so charmed Sulla that the bloodstained commander wished, in vain, to take him back to Rome as a personal companion. He was a scholar and a historian, wrote an outline of universal history,¹⁵ lived most of his life in the philosophical circles of Athens, and earned his cognomen from his Attic erudition and philanthropies. His father and his uncle left him some $960,000; he invested it in a great cattle ranch in Epirus, in buying and letting houses in Rome, in training gladiators and secretaries and hiring them out, and in publishing books. When good openings came he lent money at profitable rates; but to Athens and his friends he lent without interest.¹⁶ Men like Cicero, Hortensius, and the younger Cato entrusted him with their savings and the management of their affairs, and honored him for his caution, his integrity, and his dividends. Cicero was glad to have his advice not only in purchasing houses, but in choosing statuary to adorn them and books to fill his library. Atticus entertained frugally and lived with the modesty of a true Epicurean; but his genial friendship and his cultivated conversation made his house in Rome the salon of all political celebrities. He contributed to all parties and was spared in all proscriptions. At the age of seventy-seven, finding himself afflicted with a painful and incurable disease, he starved himself to death.

Lucius Licinius Lucullus, of high patrician family, sallied forth in 74 to complete Sulla’s war against Mithridates. For eight years he led his inadequate forces with courage and skill; then, as his campaign was nearing full success, his tired troops mutinied, and he guided their retreat from Armenia to Ionia through perils as great as those that had immortalized Xenophon. Relieved of his command by political intrigue, he returned to Rome and, with his patrimony and his spoils, spent the rest of his life in quiet but ornate luxury. He built on the Pincian hill a palace with spacious halls, loggias, libraries, and gardens; at Tusculum his estate extended for many miles; he bought a villa at Misenum for 10,000,000 sesterces ($1,500,000); and he turned the entire island of Nisida into his summer resort. His various gardens were famous for their horticultural innovations; it was he, for example, who introduced the cherry tree from Pontus to Italy, whence it was carried to north Europe and America. His dinners were the culinary events of the Roman year. Cicero tried once to find out how Lucullus ate when alone; he asked Lucullus to invite him and some friends to dinner that evening, but pledged Lucullus to send no word of warning to his servants. Lucullus agreed, merely stipulating that he be allowed to notify his staff that he would eat in the “Apollo Room” that evening. When Cicero and the rest came they found a lavish repast. Lucullus had several dining rooms in his city palace, each selected according to the splendor of the feast; the Apollo Room was reserved for meals costing 200,000 sesterces or more.¹⁷ But Lucullus was no gourmand. His houses were galleries of well-chosen art; his libraries were the resort of scholars and his friends; he himself was learned in both the classical literatures and in all the philosophies—naturally favoring that of Epicurus. He smiled at Pompey’s strenuous life; one campaign seemed to him enough for one life; anything more was mere vanity.

His example spread without his taste among the rich of Rome; soon patricians and magnates were competing in luxurious display, while revolt brewed in bankrupt provinces and men starved in the slums. Senators lounged in bed till noon and seldom attended sessions. Some of their sons dressed and walked like courtesans, wore frilled robes and women’s sandals, decked themselves with jewelry, sprinkled themselves with perfume, deferred marriage or avoided parentage, and emulated the bisexual impartiality of the Greeks. Senatorial houses cost up to 10,000,000 sesterces; Clodius, leader of the plebs, built a mansion costing 14,800,000. Lawyers like Cicero and Hortensius, despite the Cincian law against legal fees, competed in palaces as well as in oratory; the gardens of Hortensius contained the largest zoological collection in Italy. All men of any pretension had villas at or near Baiae, where the aristocracy took the baths, enjoyed the Bay of Naples, and declared a moratorium on monogamy. Other villas rose on the hills outside of Rome; rich men had several, moving from one to another as the season changed. Fortunes were spent on interior decoration, furniture, or silver plate. Cicero paid 500,000 sesterces for a table of citrus wood; a million sesterces might be paid for one of cypress wood; even the younger Cato, pillar of all Stoic virtues, was alleged to have paid 800,000 sesterces for some table spreads from Babylon.¹⁸

A horde of specialized slaves formed the staff of these palaces—valets, letter carriers, lamplighters, musicians, secretaries, doctors, philosophers, cooks. Eating was now the chief occupation of upper-class Rome; there, as in the ethics of Metrodorus, “everything good had reference to the belly.” At a repast given in 63 by a high priest, and attended incongruously by Vestal Virgins and Caesar, the hors d’oeuvres consisted of mussels, spondyles, fieldfares with asparagus, fattened fowls, oyster pastries, sea nettles, ribs of roe, purple shellfish, and songbirds. Then came the dinner—sows’ udders, boar’s head, fish, duck, teals, hares, fowl, pastries, and sweets.¹⁹ Delicacies were imported from every part of the Empire and beyond: peacocks from Samos, grouse from Phrygia, cranes from Ionia, tunnyfish from Chalcedon, muraenas from Gades, oysters from Tarentum, sturgeons from Rhodes. Foods produced in Italy were considered a bit vulgar, fit only for plebeians. The actor Aesopus gave a dinner at which songbirds were eaten to the cost of $5ooo.²⁰ Sumptuary laws continued to denounce expensive meals, and to be ignored. Cicero tried to obey, ate the legally permitted vegetables, and suffered ten days of diarrhea.²²

Some of the new wealth disported itself in enlarged theaters and extended games. In 58 Aemilius Scaurus built a theater with 8000 seats, 360 pillars, 3000 statues, a three-storied stage, and three colonnades—one of wood, one of marble, and one of glass; his slaves, rebelling against the hard labor he had exacted of them, burned down the theater soon afterward, netting him a loss of 100,000,000 sesterces.²³ In 55 Pompey provided funds for the first permanent stone theater in Rome—with 17,500 seats, and a spacious porticoed park for entr’acte promenades. In 53 Scribonius Curio, one of Caesar’s generals, erected two wooden theaters, each a semicircle, back to back; in the morning the two stages presented plays; then, while the spectators were still in their seats, the two structures were turned on pivots and wheels, the semicircles formed an amphitheater and the united stages became an arena for gladiatorial games.²⁴ Never had such games been so frequent, costly, or prolonged. In a single day of the games given by Caesar 10,000 gladiators took part, many of whom were killed. Sulla exhibited a fight involving a hundred lions, Caesar four hundred, Pompey six hundred. Beasts fought men, men fought men; and the vast audience waited hopefully for the sight of death.

III. THE NEW WOMAN

The increase of wealth conspired with the corruption of politics to loosen morals and the marriage bond. Despite increasing competition from women and men, prostitution continued to flourish; brothels and the taverns that usually housed them were so popular that some politicians organized votes through the collegium lupanariorum, or guild of brothelkeepers.²⁵ Adultery was so common as to attract little attention unless played up for political purposes, and practically every well-to-do woman had at least one divorce. This was not the fault of women; it resulted largely from the subordination of marriage, in the upper classes, to money and politics. Men chose wives, or youths had wives chosen for them, to get a rich dowry or make advantageous connections. Sulla and Pompey married five times. Seeking to attach Pompey to him, Sulla persuaded him to put away his first wife and marry Aemilia, Sulla’s stepdaughter, who was already married and with child; Aemilia reluctantly agreed, but died in childbirth shortly after entering Pompey’s house. Caesar gave his daughter Julia to Pompey in marriage as an item in their triumviral alliance. The Empire, growled Cato, had become a matrimonial agency.^25a Such unions were mariages de politique; as soon as their utility ended, the husband looked for another wife as a steppingstone to higher place or greater wealth. He did not need to give a reason; he merely sent his wife a letter announcing her freedom and his. Some men did not marry at all, alleging distaste for the forwardness and extravagance of the new woman; many lived in free unions with concubines or slaves. The censor Metellus Macedonicus (131) had begged men to marry and beget children as a duty to the state, however much of a nuisance {molestia) a wife might be;²⁶ but the number of celibates and childless couples increased more rapidly after he spoke. Children were now luxuries which only the poor could afford.

Under these circumstances women could hardly be blamed for looking lightly upon their marriage vows and seeking in liaisons the romance or affection that political matrimony had failed to bring. There was, of course, a majority of good women, even among the rich; but a new freedom was breaking down the old patria potestas and the ancient family discipline. Roman women now moved about almost as freely as men. They dressed in diaphanous silks from India and China, and ransacked Asia for perfumes and jewelry. Marriage cum manu disappeared, and women divorced their husbands as readily as men their wives. A growing proportion of women sought expression in cultural pursuits: they learned Greek, studied philosophy, wrote poetry, gave public lectures, played, sang, and danced, and opened literary salons; some engaged in business; a few practiced medicine or law.

Clodia, the wife of Quintus Caecilius Metellus, was the most prominent of those ladies who in this period supplemented their husbands with a succession of cavalieri serventi. She had a gay passion for the rights of women; shocked the older generation by going about unchaperoned with her male friends after her marriage; accosted people whom she met and knew, and sometimes publicly kissed them, instead of lowering her eyes and crouching in her carriage as proper women were supposed to do. She invited her male friends to dine with her while her husband absented himself with the chivalry of the Marquis du Châtelet. Cicero, who cannot be trusted, describes “her loves, adulteries, and lecheries, her songs and symphonies, her suppers and carousing, at Baiae on land and sea.”²⁷ She was a clever woman, who could sin with irresistible grace, but she underestimated the selfishness of men. Each lover demanded her entirely until his appetite waned, and each became her shocked enemy when she found a new friend. So Catullus (if she was his Lesbia) besmeared her with ribald epigrams; and Caelius, alluding to the price paid for the poorest prostitutes, called her in open court the quadrantaria—the quarter-of-an-as (one-and-a-half-cent) woman. She had accused him of trying to poison her; he hired Cicero to defend him; and the great orator did not hesitate to charge her with incest and murder, protesting, however, that he was “not the enemy of women, still less of one who was the friend of all men.” Caelius was acquitted, and Clodia paid some penalty for being the sister of that Publius Clodius who was the most radical leader in Rome and Cicero’s implacable enemy.

IV. ANOTHER CATO

Amid all this corruption and laxity one man stood out as an exemplar and professor of the ancient ways. Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger had violated a precept of his great-great-grandfather by studying Greek; from it he derived that Stoic philosophy which shared with his republican convictions the inflexible devotion of his life. He inherited 120 talents ($432,000), but lived in sedulous simplicity. He lent money, but took no interest. He lacked his ancestor’s rough humor, and frightened people by what seemed to them his obstinate incorruptibility and his untimely addiction to principles. His life was an unforgivable indictment of theirs; they wished he would sin a little, if only out of a decent respect for the habits of mankind. They must have rejoiced when, with an almost Cynical conception of woman as a biological instrument, he “lent” his wife Marcia to his friend Hortensius—i.e., divorced her and assisted at her marriage to the orator—and later, when Hortensius died, took her again to wife.²⁸ He could not be popular, for he was the relentless enemy of all dishonesty, the stern defender of the patria potestas, a more merciless censor moralium than Cato Censor himself. He seldom laughed or smiled, made no effort to be affable, and sharply reprimanded any who dared to flatter him. He was defeated for the consulship, said Cicero, because he acted like a citizen in Plato’s republic instead of a Roman living among “the dregs of Romulus’ posterity.”²⁹

As quaestor Cato made himself a terror to all incompetence and malfeasance, and guarded the Treasury ferociously from all political raids; nor did his watchfulness abate when his term expired. His indictments fell upon all parties and left him with a thousand admirers but hardly a friend. As praetor he persuaded the Senate to issue an order that all candidates, soon after election, must come into court and give under oath a detailed account of their expenses and proceedings in the campaign. The measure disturbed so many politicians, most of whom depended upon bribery, that they and their clients, when Cato next appeared in the Forum, reviled and stoned him; whereupon he climbed to the rostrum, faced the crowd resolutely, and talked them into submission. As tribune he led a legion into Macedonia; his attendants rode on horseback, he went on foot. He scorned the business classes and defended aristocracy, or rule by birth, as the only alternative to plutocracy, or rule by wealth. He warred without truce upon the men who were corrupting Roman politics with money, and Roman character with luxury; and he stood out to the last against every move, by either Pompey or Caesar, toward dictatorship. When Caesar had overthrown the Republic Cato died by his own hand, with a volume of philosophy by his side.

V. SPARTACUS

Misgovernment now reached a height, and democracy a depth, rare in the history of states. In 98 B.C.. the Roman general Didius repeated the exploit of Sulpicius Galba: he lured a whole tribe of troublesome natives into a Roman camp in Spain by pretending to register them for a distribution of land; when they had entered, with their wives and children, he had them all slaughtered. On his return to Rome he was awarded a public triumph.³⁰ Shocked by the brutalities of empire, a Sabine officer in the Roman army, Quintus Sertorius, went over to the Spaniards, organized and drilled them, and led them to victory after victory over the legions sent to subdue him. For eight years (80-72) he ruled a rebel kingdom, winning the affection of the people by his just administration and by his establishment of schools for the education of native youth. Metellus, the Roman general, offered a hundred talents ($360,000) and 20,000 acres of land to any Roman who should kill him. Perpenna, a Roman refugee in Sertorius’ camp, invited him to dinner, assassinated him, and made himself master of the army that Sertorius had trained. Pompey was sent against Perpenna and easily defeated him; Perpenna was executed, and the exploitation of Spain was resumed.

The next act of the revolution came not from the free but from the slave. Lentulus Batiates kept at Capua a school of gladiators—slaves or condemned criminals trained to fight animals, or one another, to the death in public arenas or private homes. Two hundred of them tried to escape; seventy-eight succeeded, armed themselves, occupied a slope of Vesuvius, and raided the adjoining towns for food (73). As their leader they chose a Thracian, Spartacus, “a man not only of high spirit and bravery,” says Plutarch, “but also in understanding and gentleness superior to his condition.”³¹ He issued a call to the slaves of Italy to rise in revolt; soon he had 70,000 men, hungering for liberty and revenge. He taught them to manufacture their own weapons, and to fight with such order and discipline that for years they outmatched every force sent to subdue them. His victories filled the rich men of Italy with fear, and its slaves with hope; so many of these tried to join him that after raising his army to 120,000 he refused further recruits, finding it difficult to care for them. He marched his horde toward the Alps, “intending, when he had passed them, that every man should go to his own home.”³² But his followers did not share these refined and pacific sentiments; revolting against his leadership, they began to loot the towns of northern Italy. The Senate now sent both consuls, with heavy forces, against the rebels. One army met a detachment that had seceded from Spartacus, and slaughtered it; the other attacked the main rebel body, and was defeated. Moving again toward the Alps, Spartacus encountered a third army, led by Cassius, and decimated it; but finding his way blocked by still other legions, he turned south and marched toward Rome.

Half the slaves of Italy were on the verge of insurrection, and in the capital no man could tell when the revolution would break out in his very home. All that opulent society, which had enjoyed every luxury slavery could produce, trembled at the thought of losing everything—mastery, property, life. Senators and millionaires cried out for a better general; few offered themselves, for all feared this strange new foe. At last Crassus came forward and was given the command, with 40,000 men; and many of the nobility, not all forgetting the traditions of their class, joined him as volunteers. Knowing that he had an empire against him, and that his men could never administer either the Empire or the capital, Spartacus passed Rome by and continued south to Thurii, marching the length of Italy in the hope of transporting his men to Sicily or Africa. For a third year he fought off all attacks. But again his impatient soldiers rejected his authority and began to ravage the neighboring towns. Crassus came upon a horde of these marauders and slew them, 12,300 in number, every man fighting to the last. Meanwhile Pompey’s legions, returning from Spain, were sent to swell the forces of Crassus. Despairing of victory over such a multitude, Spartacus flung himself upon the army of Crassus and welcomed death by plunging into the midst of the foe. Two centurions fell by his hand; struck down and unable to rise, he continued the fight on his knees; at last he was so cut to pieces that his body could not later be identified. The great majority of his followers perished with him; some fled, and became hunted men in the woods of Italy; 6000 captives were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome (71). There their rotting bodies were left to hang for months, so that all masters might take comfort, and all slaves take heed.

VI. POMPEY

When Crassus and Pompey returned from this campaign they did not, as the Senate wished and law required, disband or disarm their troops at the gates. Camping outside the walls, they asked permission to stand for the consulate without entering the city—again a violation of precedent; in addition Pompey demanded land for his soldiers and a triumph for himself. The Senate refused, hoping to play one general against the other. But Crassus and Pompey joined hands, made a sudden alliance with the populares and the business class, and by generous bribery won election as consuls for 70 B.C. The magnates entered the partnership for two immediate ends: to recapture power in the juries that tried them, and to replace Lucullus—who had ruled the Roman East with unprofitable integrity—by a man of their own class and views. In Pompey they recognized their man.

Pompey was now thirty-five, and already the veteran of many campaigns. Born of a rich equestrian family, he had won universal admiration by his courage and temperance, and his skill in every branch of sport and war. He had cleared Sicily and Africa of Sulla’s enemies, and by his victories and his pride had earned from the humorous dictator the cognomen Magnus, the Great. He had achieved a triumph almost before a beard.³³ He was so handsome that the courtesan Flora declared she could never part from him without a bite.³⁴ He was sensitive and shy, and blushed when he had to address a public gathering, but in battle he was in these days impetuously brave; in later life timidity and corpulence burdened his generalship, and he hesitated till lost. His mind had neither brilliance nor depth; his policies were made for him, not by him—first by the politicians of the populares, then by the Senatorial oligarchy. His great wealth lifted him above the coarser temptations of politics; amid the selfishness and corruption of his time he shone by his patriotism and his integrity; he seems to have sincerely sought the public good as well as his own. His outstanding fault was vanity. His early successes led him to overrate his abilities, and he wondered why Rome waited so long to make him in everything but name a king.