33.THE GROWTH OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 

BY 

H. G. WELLS

33.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.

32.ROME AND CARTHAGE | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

32.ROME AND CARTHAGE

It was in 264 B.C. that the great struggle between Rome and Carthage, the Punic Wars, began. In that year Asoka was beginning his reign in Behar and Shi- Hwang-ti was a little child, the Museum in Alexandria was still doing good scientific work, and the barbaric Gauls were now in Asia Minor and exacting a tribute from Pergamum. The different regions of the world were still separated by insurmountable distances, and probably the rest of mankind heard only vague and remote rumours of the mortal fight that went on for a century and a half in Spain, Italy, North Africa and the western Mediterranean, between the last stronghold of Semitic power and Rome, this newcomer among Aryan-speaking peoples.

That war has left its traces upon issues that still stir the world.

Rome triumphed over Carthage, but the rivalry of Aryan and Semite was

to merge itself later on in the conflict of Gentile and Jew. Our

history now is coming to events whose consequences and distorted

traditions still maintain a lingering and expiring vitality in, and

exercise a complicating and confusing influence upon, the conflicts and

controversies of to-day.

The First Punic War began in 264 B.C. about the pirates of Messina. It

developed into a struggle for the possession of all Sicily except the

dominions of the Greek king of Syracuse. The advantage of the sea was

at first with the Carthaginians. They had great fighting ships of what

was hitherto an unheard-of size, quinqueremes, galleys with five banks

of oars and a huge ram. At the battle of Salamis, two centuries

before, the leading battleships had only been triremes with three

banks. But the Romans, with extraordinary energy and in spite of the

fact that they had little naval experience, set themselves to outbuild

the Carthaginians. They manned the new navy they created chiefly with

Greek seamen, and they invented grappling and boarding to make up for

the superior seamanship of the enemy. When the Carthaginian came up to

ram or shear the oars of the Roman, huge grappling irons seized him and

the Roman soldiers swarmed aboard him. At Mylæ (260 B.C.) and at

Ecnomus (256 B.C.) the Carthaginians were disastrously beaten. They

repulsed a Roman landing near Carthage but were badly beaten at

Palermo, losing one hundred and four elephants there—to grace such a

triumphal procession through the Forum as Rome had never seen before.

But after that came two Roman defeats and then a Roman recovery. The

last naval forces of Carthage were defeated by it last Roman effort at

the battle of the Ægatian Isles (241 B.C.) and Carthage sued for peace.

All Sicily except the dominions of Hiero, king of Syracuse, was ceded

to the Romans.

HANNIBAL

HANNIBAL

Bust in the National Museum at Naples

_Photo: Mansell_

For twenty-two years Rome and Carthage kept the peace. Both had

trouble enough at home. In Italy the Gauls came south again,

threatened Rome—_which in a state of panic offered human sacrifices to

the Gods!_—and were routed at Telamon. Rome pushed forward to the

Alps, and even extended her dominions down the Adriatic coast to

Illyria. Carthage suffered from domestic insurrections and from revolts

in Corsica and Sardinia, and displayed far less recuperative power.

Finally, an act of intolerable aggression, Rome seized and annexed the

two revolting islands.

Spain at that time was Carthaginian as far north as the river Ebro. To

that boundary the Romans restricted them. Any crossing of the Ebro by

the Carthaginians was to be considered an act of war against the

Romans. At last in 218 B.C. the Carthaginians, provoked by new Roman

aggressions, did cross this river under a young general named Hannibal,

one of the most brilliant commanders in the whole of history. He

marched his army from Spain over the Alps into Italy, raised the Gauls

against the Romans, and carried on the Second Punic War in Italy itself

for fifteen years. He inflicted tremendous defeats upon the Romans at

Lake Trasimere and at Cannæ, and throughout all his Italian campaigns

no Roman army stood against him and escaped disaster. But a Roman army

had landed at Marseilles and cut his communications with Spain; he had

no siege train, and he could never capture Rome. Finally the

Carthaginians, threatened by the revolt of the Numidians at home, were

forced back upon the defence of their own city in Africa, a Roman army

crossed into Africa, and Hannibal experienced his first defeat under

its walls at the battle of Zama (202 B.C. at the hands of Scipio

Africanus the Elder. The battle of Zama ended this Second Punic War.

Carthage capitulated; she surrendered Spain and her war fleet; she paid

an enormous indemnity and agreed to give up Hannibal to the vengeance

of the Romans. But Hannibal escaped and fled to Asia where later,

being in danger of falling into the hands of his relentless enemies, he

took poison and died.

For fifty-six years Rome and the shorn city of Carthage were at peace.

And meanwhile Rome spread her empire over confused and divided Greece,

invaded Asia Minor, and defeated Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch,

at Magnesia in Lydia. She made Egypt, still under the Ptolemies, and

Pergamum and most of the small states of Asia Minor into “Allies,” or,

as we should call them now, “protected states.”

Meanwhile Carthage, subjugated and enfeebled, had been slowly regaining

something of her former prosperity. Her recovery revived the hate and

suspicion of the Romans. She was attacked upon the most shallow and

artificial of quarrels (149 B.C.), she made an obstinate and bitter

resistance, stood a long siege and was stormed (146 B.C.). The street

fighting, or massacre, lasted six days; it was extraordinarily bloody,

and when the citadel capitulated only about fifty thousand of the

Carthaginian population remained alive out of a quarter of a million.

They were sold into slavery, and the city was burnt and elaborately

destroyed. The blackened ruins were ploughed and sown as a sort of

ceremonial effacement.

Map: The Extent of the Roman Power & its Alliances about 150 B.C.

So ended the Third Punic War. Of all the Semitic states and cities

that had flourished in the world five centuries before only one little

country remained free under native rulers. This was Judea, which had

liberated itself from the Seleucids and was under the rule of the

native Maccabean princes. By this time it had its Bible almost

complete, and was developing the distinctive traditions of the Jewish

world as we know it now. It was natural that the Carthaginians,

Phoenicians and kindred peoples dispersed about the world should find a

common link in their practically identical language and in this

literature of hope and courage. To a large extent they were still the

traders and bankers of the world. The Semitic world had been submerged

rather than replaced.

Jerusalem, which has always been rather the symbol than the centre of

Judaism, was taken by the Romans in 65 B.C.; and after various

vicissitudes of quasi- independence and revolt was besieged by them in

70 A.D. and captured after a stubborn struggle. The Temple was

destroyed. A later rebellion in 132 A.D. completed its destruction,

and the Jerusalem we know to-day was rebuilt later under Roman

auspices. A temple to the Roman god, Jupiter Capitolinus, stood in the

place of the Temple, and Jews were forbidden to inhabit the city.

31.ROME COMES INTO HISTORY | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

31.ROME COMES INTO HISTORY

The reader will note a general similarity in the history of all these civilizations in spite of the effectual separation caused by the great barriers of the Indian north-west frontier and of the mountain masses of Central Asia and further India. First for thousands of years the heliolithic culture spread over all the warm and fertile river valleys of the old world and developed a temple system and priest rulers about its sacrificial traditions. Apparently its first makers were always those brunette peoples we have spoken of as the central race of mankind. Then the nomads came in from the regions of seasonal grass and seasonal migrations and superposed their own characteristics and often their own language on the primitive civilization. They subjugated and stimulated it, and were stimulated to fresh developments and made it here one thing and here another. In Mesopotamia it was the Elamite and then the Semite, and at last the Nordic Medes and Persians and the Greeks who supplied the ferment; over the region of the Ægean peoples it was the Greeks; in India it was the Aryan-speakers; in Egypt there was a thinner infusion of conquerors into a more intensely saturated priestly civilization; in China, the Hun conquered and was absorbed and was followed by fresh Huns. China was Mongolized just as Greece and North India were Aryanized and Mesopotamia Semitized and Aryanized. 

Everywhere the nomads destroyed much, but everywhere they brought in a

new spirit of free enquiry and moral innovation. They questioned the

beliefs of immemorial ages. They let daylight into the temples. They

set up kings who were neither priests nor gods but mere leaders among

their captains and companions.

THE DYING GAUL

THE DYING GAUL

The statue in the National Museum, Rome, depicting a Gaul stabbing

himself, after killing his wife, in the presence of his enemies

_Photo: Anderson_

In the centuries following the sixth century B.C. we find everywhere a

great breaking down of ancient traditions and a new spirit of moral and

intellectual enquiry awake, a spirit never more to be altogether

stilled in the great progressive movement of mankind. We find reading

and writing becoming common and accessible accomplishments among the

ruling and prosperous minority; they were no longer the jealously

guarded secret of the priests. Travel is increasing and transport

growing easier by reason of horses and roads. A new and easy device to

facilitate trade has been found in coined money.

Let us now transfer our attention back from China in the extreme east

of the old world to the western half of the Mediterranean. Here we

have to note the appearance of a city which was destined to play at

last a very great part indeed in human affairs, Rome.

Hitherto we have told very little about Italy in our story. It was

before 1000 B.C. a land of mountain and forest and thinly populated.

Aryan-speaking tribes had pressed down this peninsula and formed little

towns and cities, and the southern extremity was studded with Greek

settlements. The noble ruins of Pæstum preserve for us to this day

something of the dignity and splendour of these early Greek

establishments. A non-Aryan people, probably akin to the Ægean

peoples, the Etruscans, had established themselves in the central part

of the peninsula. They had reversed the usual process by subjugating

various Aryan tribes. Rome, when it comes into the light of history,

is a little trading city at a ford on the Tiber, with a Latin-speaking

population ruled over by Etruscan kings. The old chronologies gave 753

B.C. as the date of the founding of Rome, half a century later than the

founding of the great Phœnician city of Carthage and twenty-three years

after the first Olympiad. Etruscan tombs of a much earlier date than

753 B.C. have, however, been excavated in the Roman Forum.

In that red-letter century, the sixth century B.C., the Etruscan kings

were expelled (510 B.C.) and Rome became an aristocratic republic with

a lordly class of “patrician” families dominating a commonalty of

“plebeians.” Except that it spoke Latin it was not unlike many

aristocratic Greek republics.

For some centuries the internal history of Rome was the story of a long

and obstinate struggle for freedom and a share in the government on the

part of the plebeians. It would not be difficult to find Greek

parallels to this conflict, which the Greeks would have called a

conflict of aristocracy with democracy. In the end the plebeians broke

down most of the exclusive barriers of the old families and established

a working equality with them. They destroyed the old exclusiveness,

and made it possible and acceptable for Rome to extend her citizenship

by the inclusion of more and more “outsiders.” For while she still

struggled at home, she was extending her power abroad.

REMAINS OF THE ANCIENT ROMAN CISTERNS AT CARTHAGE

REMAINS OF THE ANCIENT ROMAN CISTERNS AT CARTHAGE

_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_

The extension of Roman power began in the fifth century B.C. Until

that time they had waged war, and generally unsuccessful war, with the

Etruscans. There was an Etruscan fort, Veii, only a few miles from

Rome which the Romans had never been able to capture. In 474 B.C.,

however, a great misfortune came to the Etruscans. Their fleet was

destroyed by the Greeks of Syracuse in Sicily. At the same time a wave

of Nordic invaders came down upon them from the north, the Gauls.

Caught between Roman and Gaul, the Etruscans fell—and disappear from

history. Veii was captured by the Romans, The Gauls came through to

Rome and sacked the city (390 B.C.A.D.) but could not capture the

Capitol. An attempted night surprise was betrayed by the cackling of

some geese, and finally the invaders were bought off and retired to the

north of Italy again.

The Gaulish raid seems to have invigorated rather than weakened Rome.

The Romans conquered and assimilated the Etruscans, and extended their

power over all central Italy from the Arno to Naples. To this they had

reached within a few years of 300 B.C. Their conquests in Italy were

going on simultaneously with the growth of Philip’s power in Macedonia

and Greece, and the tremendous raid of Alexander to Egypt and the

Indus. The Romans had become notable people in the civilized world to

the east of them by the break-up of Alexander’s empire.

To the north of the Roman power were the Gauls; to the south of them

were the Greek settlements of Magna Græcia, that is to say of Sicily

and of the toe and heel of Italy. The Gauls were a hardy, warlike

people and the Romans held that boundary by a line of forts and

fortified settlements. The Greek cities in the south headed by

Tarentum (now Taranto) and by Syracuse in Sicily, did not so much

threaten as fear the Romans. They looked about for some help against

these new conquerors.

We have already told how the empire of Alexander fell to pieces and was

divided among his generals and companions. Among these adventurers was

a kinsman of Alexander’s named Pyrrhus, who established himself in

Epirus, which is across the Adriatic Sea over against the heel of

Italy. It was his ambition to play the part of Philip of Macedonia to

Magna Græcia, and to become protector and master-general of Tarentum,

Syracuse and the rest of that part of the world. He had what was then

it very efficient modern army; he had an infantry phalanx, cavalry from

Thessaly—which was now quite as good as the original Macedonian

cavalry—and twenty fighting elephants; he invaded Italy and routed the

Romans in two considerable battles, Heraclea (280 B.C.) and Ausculum

(279 B.C.), and having driven them north, he turned his attention to

the subjugation of Sicily.

But this brought against him a more formidable enemy than were the

Romans at that time, the Phœnician trading city of Carthage, which was

probably then the greatest city in the world. Sicily was too near

Carthage for a new Alexander to be welcome there, and Carthage was

mindful of the fate that had befallen her mother city Tyre half a

century before. So she sent a fleet to encourage or compel Rome to

continue the struggle, and she cut the overseas communications of

Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus found himself freshly assailed by the Romans, and

suffered a disastrous repulse in an attack he had made upon their camp

at Beneventum between Naples and Rome.

And suddenly came news that recalled him to Epirus. The Gauls were

raiding south. But this time they were not raiding down into Italy;

the Roman frontier, fortified and guarded, had become too formidable

for them. They were raiding down through Illyria (which is now Serbia

and Albania) to Macedonia and Epirus. Repulsed by the Romans,

endangered at sea by the Carthaginians, and threatened at home by the

Gauls, Pyrrhus abandoned his dream of conquest and went home (275

B.C.), and the power of Rome was extended to the Straits of Messina.

On the Sicilian side of the Straits was the Greek city of Messina, and

this presently fell into the hands of a gang of pirates. The

Carthaginians, who were already practically overlords of Sicily and

allies of Syracuse, suppressed these pirates (270 B.C.) and put in a

Carthaginian garrison there. The pirates appealed to Rome and Rome

listened to their complaint. And so across the Straits of Messina the

great trading power of Carthage and this new conquering people, the

Romans, found themselves in antagonism, face to face.

30.CONFUCIUS AND LAO TSE | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

30.CONFUCIUS AND LAO TSE

We have still to tell of two other great men, Confucius and Lao Tse, who lived in that wonderful century which began the adolescence of mankind, the sixth century B.C. In this history thus far we have told very little of the early story of China. At present that early history is still very obscure, and we look to Chinese explorers and archæolologists in the new China that is now arising to work out their past as thoroughly as the European past has been worked out during the last century. Very long ago the first primitive Chinese civilizations arose in the great river valleys out of the primordial heliolithic culture. They had, like Egypt and Sumeria, the general characteristics of that culture, and they centred upon temples in which priests and priest kings offered the seasonal blood sacrifices. The life in those cities must have been very like the Egyptian and Sumerian life of six or seven thousand years ago and very like the Maya life of Central America a thousand years ago.

If there were human sacrifices they had long given way to animal

sacrifices before the dawn of history. And a form of picture writing

was growing up long before a thousand years B.C.

And just as the primitive civilizations of Europe and western Asia were

in conflict with the nomads of the desert and the nomads of the north,

so the primitive Chinese civilizations had a great cloud of nomadic

peoples on their northern borders. There was a number of tribes akin

in language and ways of living, who are spoken of in history in

succession as the Huns, the Mongols, the Turks and Tartars. They

changed and divided and combined and re-combined, just as the Nordic

peoples in north Europe and central Asia changed and varied in name

rather than in nature. These Mongolian nomads had horses earlier than

the Nordic peoples, and it may be that in the region of the Altai

Mountains they made an independent discovery of iron somewhen after

1000 B.C. And just as in the western case so ever and again these

eastern nomads would achieve a sort of political unity, and become the

conquerors and masters and revivers of this or that settled and

civilized region.

It is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was not

Mongolian at all any more than the earliest civilization of Europe and

western Asia was Nordic or Semitic. It is quite possible that the

earliest civilization of China was a brunette civilization and of a

piece with the earliest Egyptian, Sumerian and Dravidian civilizations,

and that when the first recorded history of China began there had

already been conquests and intermixture. At any rate we find that by

1750 B.C. China was already a vast system of little kingdoms and city

states, all acknowledging a loose allegiance and paying more or less

regularly, more or less definite feudal dues to one great priest

emperor, the “Son of Heaven.” The “Shang” dynasty came to an end in

1125 B.C. A “Chow” dynasty succeeded “Shang,” and maintained China in

a relaxing unity until the days of Asoka in India and of the Ptolemies

in Egypt. Gradually China went to pieces during that long “Chow”

period. Hunnish peoples came down and set up principalities; local

rulers discontinued their tribute and became independent. There was in

the sixth century B.C., says one Chinese authority, five or six

thousand practically independent states in China. It was what the

Chinese call in their records an “Age of Confusion.”

But this Age of Confusion was compatible with much intellectual

activity and with the existence of many local centres of art and

civilized living. When we know more of Chinese history we shall find

that China also had her Miletus and her Athens, her Pergamum and her

Macedonia. At present we must be vague and brief about this period of

Chinese division simply because our knowledge is not sufficient for us

to frame a coherent and consecutive story.

CONFUCIUS

CONFUCIUS

Copy of stone carving in the Temple of Confucius at K’iu Fu

_(From the records of the Archæological Mission to North China

(Chavannes))_

And just as in divided Greece there were philosophers and in shattered

and captive Jewry prophets, so in disordered China there were

philosophers and teachers at this time. In all these cases insecurity

and uncertainty seemed to have quickened the better sort of mind.

Confucius was a man of aristocratic origin and some official importance

in a small state called Lu. Here in a very parallel mood to the Greek

impulse he set up a sort of Academy for discovering and teaching

Wisdom. The lawlessness and disorder of China distressed him

profoundly. He conceived an ideal of a better government and a better

life, and travelled from state to state seeking a prince who would

carry out his legislative and educational ideas. He never found his

prince; he found a prince, but court intrigues undermined the influence

of the teacher and finally defeated his reforming proposals. It is

interesting to note that a century and a half later the Greek

philosopher Plato also sought a prince, and was for a time adviser to

the tyrant Dionysius who ruled Syracuse in Sicily.

Confucius died a disappointed man. “No intelligent ruler arises to

take me as his master,” he said, “and my time has come to die.” But

his teaching had more vitality than he imagined in his declining and

hopeless years, and it became a great formative influence with the

Chinese people. It became one of what the Chinese call the Three

Teachings, the other two being those of Buddha and of Lao Tse.

The gist of the teaching of Confucius was the way of the noble or

aristocratic man. He was concerned with personal conduct as much as

Gautama was concerned with the peace of self-forgetfulness and the

Greek with external knowledge and the Jew with righteousness. He was

the most public-minded of all great teachers. He was supremely

concerned by the confusion and miseries of the world, and he wanted to

make men noble in order to bring about a noble world. He sought to

regulate conduct to an extraordinary extent; to provide sound rules for

every occasion in life. A polite, public- spirited gentleman, rather

sternly self-disciplined, was the ideal he found already developing in

the northern Chinese world and one to which he gave a permanent form.

THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA

THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA

As it crosses the mountains in Manchuria

_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_

The teaching of Lao Tse, who was for a long time in charge of the

imperial library of the Chow dynasty, was much more mystical and vague

and elusive than that of Confucius. He seems to have preached a

stoical indifference to the pleasures and powers of the world and a

return to an imaginary simple life of the past. He left writings very

contracted in style and very obscure. He wrote in riddles. After his

death his teachings, like the teachings of Gautama Buddha, were

corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the most complex and

extraordinary observances and superstitious ideas grafted upon them.

In China just as in India primordial ideas of magic and monstrous

legends out of the childish past of our race struggled against the new

thinking in the world and succeeded in plastering it over with

grotesque, irrational and antiquated observances. Both Buddhism and

Taoism (which ascribes itself largely to Lao Tse) as one finds them in

China now, are religions of monk, temple, priest and offering of a type

as ancient in form, if not in thought, as the sacrificial religions of

ancient Sumeria and Egypt. But the teaching of Confucius was not so

overlaid because it was limited and plain and straightforward and lent

itself to no such distortions.

EARLY CHINESE BRONZE BELL

EARLY CHINESE BRONZE BELL

Inscribed in archaic characters: “made for use by the elder of Hing

village in Ting district;” latter half of the Chou Dynasty, Sixth

Century B.C.

_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_

North China, the China of the Hwang-ho River, became Confucian in

thought and spirit; south China, Yang-tse-Kiang China, became Taoist.

Since those days a conflict has always been traceable in Chinese

affairs between these two spirits, the spirit of the north and the

spirit of the south, between (in latter times) Pekin and Nankin,

between the official- minded, upright and conservative north, and the

sceptical, artistic, lax and experimental south.

The divisions of China of the Age of Confusion reached their worst

stage in the sixth century B.C. The Chow dynasty was so enfeebled and

so discredited that Lao Tse left the unhappy court and retired into

private life.

Three nominally subordinate powers dominated the situation in those

days, Ts’i and Ts’in, both northern powers, and Ch’u, which was an

aggressive military power in the Yangtse valley. At last Ts’i and

Ts’in formed an alliance, subdued Ch’u and imposed a general treaty of

disarmament and peace in China. The power of Ts’in became predominant.

Finally about the time of Asoka in India the Ts’in monarch seized upon

the sacrificial vessels of the Chow emperor and took over his

sacrificial duties. His son, Shi-Hwang-ti (king in 246 B.C., emperor in

220 B.C.), is called in the Chinese Chronicles “the First Universal

Emperor.”

More fortunate than Alexander, Shi-Hwang-ti reigned for thirty-six

years as king and emperor. His energetic reign marks the beginning of

a new era of unity and prosperity for the Chinese people. He fought

vigorously against the Hunnish invaders from the northern deserts, and

he began that immense work, the Great Wall of China, to set a limit to their incursions.