A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS33.THE GROWTH OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Now this new Roman power which arose to dominate the western world in the second and first centuries B.C. was in several respects a different thing from any of the great empires that had hitherto prevailed in the civilized world. It was not at first a monarchy, and it was not the creation of any one great conqueror. It was not indeed the first of republican empires; Athens had dominated a group of Allies and dependents in the time of Pericles, and Carthage when she entered upon her fatal struggle with Rome was mistress of Sardinia and Corsica, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and most of Spain and Sicily. But it was the first republican empire that escaped extinction and went on to fresh developments.
The centre of this new system lay far to the west of the more ancient
centres of empire, which had hitherto been the river valleys of
Mesopotamia and Egypt. This westward position enabled Rome to bring in
to civilization quite fresh regions and peoples. The Roman power
extended to Morocco and Spain, and was presently able to thrust
north-westward over what is now France and Belgium to Britain and
north-eastward into Hungary and South Russia. But on the other hand it
was never able to maintain itself in Central Asia or Persia because
they were too far from its administrative centres. It included
therefore great masses of fresh Nordic Aryan- speaking peoples, it
presently incorporated nearly all the Greek people in the world, and
its population was less strongly Hamitic and Semitic than that of any
preceding empire.
For some centuries this Roman Empire did not fall into the grooves of
precedent that had so speedily swallowed up Persian and Greek, and all
that time it developed. The rulers of the Medes and Persians became
entirely Babylonized in a generation or so; they took over the tiara of
the king of kings and the temples and priesthoods of his gods;
Alexander and his successors followed in the same easy path of
assimilation; the Seleucid monarchs had much the same court and
administrative methods as Nebuchadnezzar; the Ptolemies became Pharaohs
and altogether Egyptian. They were assimilated just as before them the
Semitic conquerors of the Sumerians had been assimilated. But the
Romans ruled in their own city, and for some centuries kept to the laws
of their own nature. The only people who exercised any great mental
influence upon them before the second or third century A.D. were the
kindred and similar Greeks. So that the Roman Empire was essentially a
first attempt to rule a great dominion upon mainly Aryan lines. It was
so far a new pattern in history, it was an expanded Aryan republic.
The old pattern of a personal conqueror ruling over a capital city that
had grown up round the temple of a harvest god did not apply to it.
The Romans had gods and temples, but like the gods of the Greeks their
gods were quasi-human immortals, divine patricians. The Romans also
had blood sacrifices and even made human ones in times of stress,
things they may have learnt to do from their dusky Etruscan teachers;
but until Rome was long past its zenith neither priest nor temple
played a large part in Roman history.
The Roman Empire was a growth, an unplanned novel growth; the Roman
people found themselves engaged almost unawares in a vast
administrative experiment. It cannot be called a successful
experiment. In the end their empire collapsed altogether. And it
changed enormously in form and method from century to century. It
changed more in a hundred years than Bengal or Mesopotamia or Egypt
changed in a thousand. It was always changing. It never attained to
any fixity.
In a sense the experiment failed. In a sense the experiment remains
unfinished, and Europe and America to-day are still working out the
riddles of world-wide statescraft first confronted by the Roman people.
It is well for the student of history to bear in mind the very great
changes not only in political but in social and moral matters that went
on throughout the period of Roman dominion. There is much too strong a
tendency in people’s minds to think of the Roman rule as something
finished and stable, firm, rounded, noble and decisive. Macaulay’s
_Lays of Ancient Rome_, S.P.Q.R. the elder Cato, the Scipios, Julius
Cæsar, Diocletian, Constantine the Great, triumphs, orations,
gladiatorial combats and Christian martyrs are all mixed up together in
a picture of something high and cruel and dignified. The items of that
picture have to be disentangled. They are collected at different
points from a process of change profounder than that which separates
the London of William the Conqueror from the London of to-day.
We may very conveniently divide the expansion of Rome into four stages.
The first stage began after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 390 B.C.
and went on until the end of the First Punic War (240 B.C,). We may
call this stage the stage of the Assimilative Republic. It was perhaps
the finest, most characteristic stage in Roman history. The age-long
dissensions of patrician and plebeian were drawing to it close, the
Etruscan threat had come to an end, no one was very rich yet nor very
poor, and most men were public-spirited. It was a republic like the
republic of the South African Boers before 1900 or like the northern
states of the American union between 1800 and 1850; a free- farmers
republic. At the outset of this stage Rome was a little state scarcely
twenty miles square. She fought the sturdy but kindred states about
her, and sought not their destruction but coalescence. Her centuries
of civil dissension had trained her people in compromise and
concessions. Some of the defeated cities became altogether Roman with
a voting share in the government, some became self-governing with the
right to trade and marry in Rome; garrisons full of citizens were set
up at strategic points and colonies of varied privileges founded among
the freshly conquered people. Great roads were made. The rapid
Latinization of all Italy was the inevitable consequence of such a
policy. In 89 B.C. all the free inhabitants of Italy became citizens
of the city of Rome. Formally the whole Roman Empire became at last an
extended city. In 212 A.D. every free man in the entire extent of the
empire was given citizenship; the right, if he could get there, to vote
in the town meeting in Rome.
This extension of citizenship to tractable cities and to whole
countries was the distinctive device of Roman expansion. It reversed
the old process of conquest and assimilation altogether. By the Roman
method the conquerors assimilated the conquered.
THE FORUM AT ROME AS IT IS TO-DAY
THE FORUM AT ROME AS IT IS TO-DAY
But after the First Punic War and the annexation of Sicily, though the
old process of assimilation still went on, another process arose by its
side. Sicily for instance was treated as a conquered prey. It was
declared an “estate” of the Roman people. Its rich soil and
industrious population was exploited to make Rome rich. The patricians
and the more influential among the plebeians secured the major share of
that wealth. And the war also brought in a large supply of slaves.
Before the First Punic War the population of the republic had been
largely a population of citizen farmers. Military service was their
privilege and liability. While they were on active service their farms
fell into debt and a new large-scale slave agriculture grew up; when
they returned they found their produce in competition with slave-grown
produce from Sicily and from the new estates at home. Times had
changed. The republic had altered its character. Not only was Sicily
in the hands of Rome, the common man was in the hands of the rich
creditor and the rich competitor. Rome had entered upon its second
stage, the Republic of Adventurous Rich Men.
For two hundred years the Roman soldier farmers had struggled for
freedom and a share in the government of their state; for a hundred
years they had enjoyed their privileges. The First Punic War wasted
them and robbed them of all they had won.
RELICS OF ROMAN RULE
RELICS OF ROMAN RULE
Ruins of Coliseum in Tunis
_Photo: Jacques Boyer_
The value of their electoral privileges had also evaporated. The
governing bodies of the Roman republic were two in number. The first
and more important was the Senate. This was a body originally of
patricians and then of prominent men of all sorts, who were summoned to
it first by certain powerful officials, the consuls and censors. Like
the British House of Lords it became a gathering of great landowners,
prominent politicians, big business men and the like. It was much more
like the British House of Lords than it was like the American Senate.
For three centuries, from the Punic Wars onward, it was the centre of
Roman political thought and purpose. The second body was the Popular
Assembly. This was supposed to be an assembly of _all_ the citizens of
Rome. When Rome was a little state twenty miles square this was a
possible gathering. When the citizenship of Rome had spread beyond the
confines in Italy, it was an altogether impossible one. Its meetings,
proclaimed by horn-blowing from the Capitol and the city walls, became
more and more a gathering of political hacks and city riff-raff. In
the fourth century B.C. the Popular Assembly was a considerable check
upon the Senate, a competent representation of the claims and rights of
the common man. By the end of the Punic Wars it was an impotent relic
of a vanquished popular control. No effectual legal check remained
upon the big men.
THE GREAT ROMAN ARCH AT CTESIPHON NEAR BAGDAD
THE GREAT ROMAN ARCH AT CTESIPHON NEAR BAGDAD
Nothing of the nature of representative government was ever introduced
into the Roman republic. No one thought of electing delegates to
represent the will of the citizens. This is a very important point for
the student to grasp. The Popular Assembly never became the equivalent
of the American House of Representatives or the British House of
Commons. In theory it was all the citizens; in practice it ceased to
be anything at all worth consideration.
The common citizen of the Roman Empire was therefore in a very poor
case after the Second Punic War; he was impoverished, he had often lost
his farm, he was ousted from profitable production by slaves, and he
had no political power left to him to remedy these things. The only
methods of popular expression left to a people without any form of
political expression are the strike and the revolt. The story of the
second and first centuries B.C., so far as internal politics go, is a
story of futile revolutionary upheaval. The scale of this history will
not permit us to tell of the intricate struggles of that time, of the
attempts to break up estates and restore the land to the free farmer,
of proposals to abolish debts in whole or in part. There was revolt
and civil war. In 73 B.C., the distresses of Italy were enhanced by a
great insurrection, of the slaves under Spartacus. The slaves of Italy
revolted with some effect, for among them were the trained fighters of
the gladiatorial shows. For two years Spartacus held out in the crater
of Vesuvius, which seemed at that time to be an extinct volcano. This
insurrection was defeated at last and suppressed with frantic cruelty.
Six thousand captured Spartacists were crucified along the Appian Way,
the great highway that runs southward out of Rome (71 B.C.).
The common man never made head against the forces that were subjugating
and degrading him. But the big rich men who were overcoming him were
even in his defeat preparing a new power in the Roman world over
themselves and him, the power of the army.
Before the Second Punic War the army of Rome was a levy of free
farmers, who, according to their quality, rode or marched afoot to
battle. This was a very good force for wars close at hand, but not the
sort of army that will go abroad and bear long campaigns with patience.
And moreover as the slaves multiplied and the estates grew, the supply
of free- spirited fighting farmers declined. It was a popular leader
named Marius who introduced a new factor. North Africa after the
overthrow of the Carthaginian civilization had become a semi-barbaric
kingdom, the kingdom of Numidia. The Roman power fell into conflict
with Jugurtha, king of this state, and experienced enormous
difficulties in subduing him. Marius was made consul, in a phase of
public indignation, to end this discreditable war. This he did by
raising _paid troops_ and drilling them hard. Jugurtha was brought in
chains to Rome (106 B.C.) and Marius, when his time of office had
expired, held on to his consulship illegally with his newly created
legions. There was no power in Rome to restrain him.
With Marius began the third phase in the development of the Roman
power, the Republic of the Military Commanders. For now began a period
in which the leaders of the paid legions fought for the mastery of the
Roman world. Against Marius was pitted the aristocratic Sulla who had
served under him in Africa. Each in turn made a great massacre of his
political opponents. Men were proscribed and executed by the thousand,
and their estates were sold. After the bloody rivalry of these two and
the horror of the revolt of Spartacus, came a phase in which Lucullus
and Pompey the Great and Crassus and Julius Cæsar were the masters of
armies and dominated affairs. It was Crassus who defeated Spartacus.
Lucullus conquered Asia Minor and penetrated to Armenia, and retired
with great wealth into private life. Crassus thrusting further invaded
Persia and was defeated and slain by the Parthians. After a long
rivalry Pompey was defeated by Julius Cæsar (48 B.C.) and murdered in
Egypt, leaving Julius Cæsar sole master of the Roman world.
The figure of Julius Cæsar is one that has stirred the human
imagination out of all proportion to its merit or true importance. He
has become a legend and a symbol. For us he is chiefly important as
marking the transition from the phase of military adventurers to the
beginning of the fourth stage in Roman expansion, the Early Empire.
For in spite of the profoundest economic and political convulsions, in
spite of civil war and social degeneration, throughout all this time
the boundaries of the Roman state crept outward and continued to creep
outward to their maximum about 100 A.D. There had been something like
an ebb during the doubtful phases of the Second Punic War, and again a
manifest loss of vigour before the reconstruction of the army by
Marius. The revolt of Spartacus marked a third phase. Julius Cæsar
made his reputation as a military leader in Gaul, which is now France
and Belgium. (The chief tribes inhabiting this country belonged to the
same Celtic people as the Gauls who had occupied north Italy for a
time, and who had afterwards raided into Asia Minor and settled down as
the Galatians.) Cæsar drove back a German invasion of Gaul and added
all that country to the empire, and he twice crossed the Straits of
Dover into Britain (55 and 54 B.C.), where however he made no permanent
conquest. Meanwhile Pompey the Great was consolidating Roman conquests
that reached in the east to the Caspian Sea.
THE COLUMN OF TRAJAN AT ROME
THE COLUMN OF TRAJAN AT ROME
Representing his conquests at Dacia and elsewhere
At this time, the middle of the first century B.C., the Roman Senate
was still the nominal centre of the Roman government, appointing
consuls and other officials, granting powers and the like; and a number
of politicians, among whom Cicero was an outstanding figure, were
struggling to preserve the great traditions of republican Rome and to
maintain respect for its laws. But the spirit of citizenship had gone
from Italy with the wasting away of the free farmers; it was a land now
of slaves and impoverished men with neither the understanding nor the
desire for freedom. There was nothing whatever behind these republican
leaders in the Senate, while behind the great adventurers they feared
and desired to control were the legions. Over the heads of the Senate
Crassus and Pompey and Cæsar divided the rule of the Empire between
them (The First Triumvirate). When presently Crassus was killed at
distant Carrhæ by the Parthians, Pompey and Cæsar fell out. Pompey took
up the republican side, and laws were passed to bring Cæsar to trial
for his breaches of law and his disobedience to the decrees of the
Senate.
It was illegal for a general to bring his troops out of the boundary of
his command, and the boundary between Cæsar’s command and Italy was the
Rubicon. In 49 B.C. he crossed the Rubicon, saying “The die is cast”
and marched upon Pompey and Rome.
It had been the custom in Rome in the past, in periods of military
extremity, to elect a “dictator” with practically unlimited powers to
rule through the crisis. After his overthrow of Pompey, Cæsar was made
dictator first for ten years and then (in 45 B.C.) for life. In effect
he was made monarch of the empire for life. There was talk of a king,
a word abhorrent to Rome since the expulsion of the Etruscans five
centuries before. Cæsar refused to be king, but adopted throne and
sceptre. After his defeat of Pompey, Cæsar had gone on into Egypt and
had made love to Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, the goddess
queen of Egypt. She seems to have turned his head very completely. He
had brought back to Rome the Egyptian idea of a god-king. His statue
was set up in a temple with an inscription “To the Unconquerable God.”
The expiring republicanism of Rome flared up in a last protest, and
Cæsar was stabbed to death in the Senate at the foot of the statue of
his murdered rival, Pompey the Great.
Thirteen years more of this conflict of ambitious personalities
followed. There was a second Triumvirate of Lepidus, Mark Antony and
Octavian Cæsar, the latter the nephew of Julius Cæsar. Octavian like
his uncle took the poorer, hardier western provinces where the best
legions were recruited. In 31 B.C., he defeated Mark Antony, his only
serious rival, at the naval battle of Actium, and made himself sole
master of the Roman world. But Octavian was a man of different quality
altogether from Julius Cæsar. He had no foolish craving to be God or
King. He had no queen-lover that he wished to dazzle. He restored
freedom to the Senate and people of Rome. He declined to be dictator.
The grateful Senate in return gave him the reality instead of the forms
of power. He was to be called not King indeed, but “Princeps” and
“Augustus.” He became Augustus Cæsar, the first of the Roman emperors
(27 B.C. to 14 A.D.).
He was followed by Tiberius Cæsar (14 to 37 A.D.) and he by others,
Caligula, Claudius, Nero and so on up to Trajan (98 A.D.), Hadrian (117
A.D.), Antonius Pius (138 A.D.) and Marcus Aurelius (161- 180 A.D.).
All these emperors were emperors of the legions. The soldiers made
them, and some the soldiers destroyed. Gradually the Senate fades out
of Roman-history, and the emperor and his administrative officials
replace it. The boundaries of the empire crept forward now to their
utmost limits. Most of Britain was added to the empire, Transylvania
was brought in as a new province, Dacia; Trajan crossed the Euphrates.
Hadrian had an idea that reminds us at once of what had happened at the
other end of the old world. Like Shi-Hwang-ti he built walls against
the northern barbarians; one across Britain and a palisade between the
Rhine and the Danube. He abandoned some of the acquisitions of Trajan.
The expansion of the Roman Empire was at an end.