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 THE CAUSES 
 
 « OF THE 
 
 DECLINE OF THE ROMAN 
 
 * 
 
 COMMONWEALTH 
 £be Hrnoto ff>ri3c Essap for 1887 
 
 HERBERT W. BLUNT, B.A. 
 
 LATE SCHOLAR OF ORIEL COLLEGE 
 
 MOLE RUIT SUA 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 DG 254.3.B65 
 
 Causes of the decline of the Romman comm 
 
 3 1924 028 296 600 • 
 
 B. H. BLACKWELL, 50 & 51 BROAD STREET 
 
 LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO. 
 
 1887 
 
Cornell University 
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 the Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028296600 
 
THE CAUSES 
 
 OF THE 
 
 DECLINE OF THE ROMAN 
 COMMONWEALTH 
 
 Zhe Hrnolfc piu3e JZssty for 1887 
 
 HERBERT W.' BLUNT, B.A. 
 
 LATE SCHOLAR OF ORIKL COLLEGE 
 
 MOLE RUIT SUA 
 
 B. H. BLACKWELL, 50 & 51 BRQAD STREET 
 
 LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO. 
 
 1887 
 
 3i 
 
THE CAUSES OF THE DECLINE OF THE 
 ROMAN COMMONWEALTH. 
 
 The fall or decline of a body politic, as it has often been pointed 
 out, is solely the result of its own defects ; and violence, to be truly 
 successful, must be only the outward expression of internal mis- 
 chief. Save under this condition, victory in reality rests with the 
 vanquished even in their hour of defeat, — with the Gallo-Roman, for 
 example, in France, and in Norman England with the Saxon. 
 Though the statement is doubtless a commonplace, the fact is of 
 the highest importance ; and specially so where, as in the case of 
 Republican Rome, the proximate cause of downfall is a genius such 
 as that of Gaius Julius, supplemented by the only less original 
 talent of Octavian, and where accordingly causes of revolution 
 less personal, and therefore more radical, are only too easily over- 
 looked. We are too apt to forget that that imperialism in which 
 republican ideas found their euthanasia was not in any true sense 
 the destroyer, and that Pharsalus, Thapsus and Munda, Philippi and 
 Actium were in fact battles fought over a dead Commonwealth. We 
 stand in need of the reminder that the history of the decline of the 
 elder Rome is a study in pathology. 
 
 But in thus limiting the inquiry we have really accomplished very 
 little. 'Death from natural causes' is a large verdict which can never 
 satisfy science. The autopsy, too, of a political organism is a process 
 which has no perfect parallel in the details of the dissecting-room. 
 Diagnosis indeed is easy ; for the symptoms of governmental paralysis, 
 and of the derangement of economic and social functions, are in 
 general but too obvious in discontent, lawlessness, and destructive 
 agitation. But the problems which rise next in order are far more 
 complex than in the case of the individual. 
 
 The reasons for this are plain. Subjects for demonstration are 
 rare and seldom presented in their entirety. Experimentation is 
 impossible, and the inductions made from necessarily incomplete 
 historical records are of very uncertain application to any particular 
 pase. Causes are never simple and hardly ever merely composite. 
 And finally, reciprocal causation often makes the discovery of separate 
 efficients impossible, and confines investigation to very special com- 
 binations. In truth the data are neither fully adequate nor indepen- 
 
 A 2 
 
dent. Such drawbacks, which show in some sort the limitations of 
 any political subject, are very apparent in the case of Republican 
 Rome. 
 
 And yet the analogy of vital organisation is most pertinent and 
 most helpful. It directs our attention to the more essential points ; 
 hints at congenital defects of constitution, at imperfect adaptation to a 
 changing environment, at the results of strajn and of excess, at irregu- 
 larities of diet and. assimilation — in fine, at any and every error in the 
 nature or the nurture of the Roman state which can possibly have 
 proved fatal. 
 
 Following" then the lead of physical analogies, we propose to ask 
 whether there was any fatal imperfection in the nature of the Common- 
 wealth which must have infallibly led to its decline, and we shall 
 endeavour to show that its constitution was all but irretrievably de- 
 fective, and cure hardly conceivable. We shall proceed to inquire 
 whether the environment and history of the Republic — her external 
 circumstances — were not of a kind to precipitate rather than to arrest 
 disease, and whether things political and social and, above. all, facts 
 economic, did not accentuate the decadence ; while, finally, we shall 
 attempt to make it manifest that there was no power in the Common- 
 wealth able and willing to regenerate it and to save it, that its death 
 was a necessary condition of its resurrection in a modified and 
 changed form. 
 
 We would not raise the question whether the empire was the 
 youth or the old age of Rome. We would leave as it stands the 
 controversy as to the possibility of an earthly immortality for nations 1 . 
 We would wish, however, to demonstrate that the Roman constitution 
 was in its essential nature wholly unworkable ; that remedies' were 
 at the first not applied and from an early date even inapplicable; 
 that Rome's extended suzerainty, howsoever acquired, hastened, though 
 it did not originate, her decline; while economic causes co-operated 
 with constitutional, if they co-operated only. Primarily the cause of 
 downfall was the normal development of the Roman Constitution. 
 
 The Roman Constitution is of course not to be described in its 
 length and breadth and height, within the narrow limits of this essay. 
 But its main defects are not hard to define. It was not a rigid con- 
 ■ stitution, still less a flexible one ; and, with the faults of both, it pos- 
 sessed the advantages of neither. It progressed, but always and 
 necessarily in the direction of utter incompetence. It failed to progress, 
 but its stereotyping was always of a false tendency. Its liberalism was 
 inefficient or harmful, even when sincere. Its conservatism was fraught 
 with perhaps even greater danger. It is the standing monument in 
 history of logical inconsistency, unredeemed by practical efficiency. 
 . These allegations we shall proceed to make good. ' As long/ says 
 Mommsen, ' as there was a Roman community, in spite of changes of 
 form, its settled principles were : — that the magistrate had absolute 
 
 1 On one solution of which depend Lucan's primary causes of Rome's decline.: 
 Jnvida.fatorum series summisque negatum Stare diu. Phars. I. •ja. i. 
 In se magna ruunt, lb. I. 81. 
 
command;" that the council of elders was the highest authority in the 
 state ; and that every exceptional resolution required the' sanction of 
 the sovereign, or, in other words, of the community of the people '.' 
 The constitution was, as Sallust puts it, imperium legitimum 2 , a contra-* 
 diction in terms, a congeries of anomalies. 
 
 How then did the Republic for nearly 500 years preserve her con- 
 stitution? Simply by shelving it. The magistrate was autocratic, but 
 hedged in with such restrictions that he in general ignored his great, 
 position and was content to act as a vestry-clerk. The senate had 
 no potestas, but, through the magistracy, secured much potentia-. And 
 the sovereign-people, — really sovereign in Rome, on the Austinian 
 theory or any other — being incapable and moreover good-natured, 
 shut its eyes and ignored speculative politics. Every factor in the 
 government enjoyed either more or less than its constitutional rights,: 
 never those rights themselves. No factor in the state renounced its- 
 rights ; conservatism barred the way. No factor performed its duties; 
 liberalism obstructed. And the natural consequence was that when a 
 time of strain came, there came also an era of factious legislation, whicb 
 upset all things constitutional, save and except the pernicious customs 
 and charters on which the three orders based their incompatible 
 rights. 
 
 The machinery broke down like the constitutional systems of Poland 
 and of the Holy Roman Empire. The constitution proved to be ' con- 
 stituted anarchy ' ; its elements were all so absolute as to be out of 
 relation one to another; and abstract freedom from limitations is con- 
 crete amorphism. To borrow a metaphor, the branches of the tree 
 were severed, and, when in complete disjunction from their common 
 life, had only rottenness before them. 
 
 The main theory of Roman government was false. A vestry where 
 the chairman decides absolutely, and where the members of the vestry, 
 have absolute authority, and, moreover, are appointed by some method 
 which is neither nomination by the .chairman nor election by the rate- 
 payers, nor anything which will in any way bring them into harmony 
 with chairman or parish, represents with some fidelity this republican 
 system. But this is not all ; there are the ratepayers to be reckoned, 
 with, who also have an absolute voice in the policy of the board. They 
 elect the chairman, but they elect him on the nomination of his pre- 
 decessor, who may refuse or accept candidates apparently at his own 
 sweet will. Further, there is not one chairman only, but at least two ; 
 each with a power, more or less under control of custom and tradition 
 it is true, but still absolute. And finally the negative of any chairman 
 is more powerful than the affirmative of a colleague. There is no 
 mutual responsibility, and no common action, and accordingly there 
 js no policy in the stricter sense. And, alas ! no higher power from 
 without can come down upon the vestry and compel it to reform 
 itself, for this paradoxical board rules the whole known world. 
 
 1 Hist. Rom. (Eng. Trans., Popular Edition) I. cap. 5. vol. I. p. 86. 
 1 Sail. Cat.' 6:~ " " " 
 
That all this is no mere extravagance may be easily shown from 
 the facts. Take, for example, the procedure of legislation. Apart 
 from the curiate assembly, which, except as an instrument of obstruc- 
 tion to measures not purely legislative, was, before Rome attained her 
 highest prosperity, a mere formal survival, there were three powers to 
 be reckoned with — magistrate, senate and people ; the last in its 
 centuries, or in its tribes according to certain traditional regulations 
 apparently based on the nature of the bills in question 1 . Legislation 
 proper was in its substance vested conjointly in the senate (or rather 
 in the magistrate in council) and in the people. How then did each 
 factor in government bear its part in legislation ? 
 
 In practice, though not in theory, every bill was first submitted to 
 the senate. A bill could only be introduced by a magistrate, for the 
 senate was a council of advice merely, and could not originate. But 
 suppose it submitted ; it was discussed, of right, by the princeps senaius 
 and the principal magistrates, and, of privilege, by such other senators 
 as the presiding magistrate thought fit to call on for an opinion, and 
 so to distinguish from the pedarii or silent members. Amendments 
 might be directly proposed by the speakers, and irrelevant views on 
 general politics ventilated. The bill itself might be dropped by its 
 proposer, or he might constitute any of the sentenliae offered a sub- 
 stantive motion. If the meeting were not adjourned by the approach of 
 night, and the motion escaped the veto of the tribunes of the commons 
 or the arbitrary discretion of the president, it might proceed to a 
 division formal or informal, and if adopted by discessio or otherwise, it 
 attained, if stopped, the extra-legal position of a senatus auctoritas 2 , or, 
 if not stopped by intercessio, became something analogous to a Greek 
 jrpo^ouXeu/xa, a senatus consullum which, if it concerned matters of mere 
 temporary administration, was law, provided that a magistrate would 
 and could enforce it 3 - If, however, the bill dealt with constitutional 
 and not administrative questions, it was referred to the people. 
 
 It was 'promulgated' — exposed for a legal trinundinum to public 
 criticism, and then referred to the comitia where it was introduced by 
 a magistrate. If the comitial meeting was not prevented by the 
 speclio* of some higher magistrate who volunteered de caelo servare 
 and so by a religious fraud postponed the assembly sine die — and 
 dies comitiales were few and far between — if possible a vote was taken. 
 If possible : for the auspices might be unfavourable, the weather 
 report ominous, some one might fall with epilepsy, or a preceding 
 
 1 The distinction of populi comitia Iributa and pkbis comitia tributa wonld 
 appear untenable — (a) because the authority of a late jurist has no weight as against 
 the inference from contemporary silence ; (b) because Festus s. v. populi scitum 
 may be held as a positive authority against the distinction ; (c) because the use of 
 populi scitum by writers under the empire (e. g. by Tac. Ann. III. 58) seems its 
 normal one. 
 
 '' Cf. Cic. ad Fam. I. 2, a motion vetoed by C. Cato tamen est perscripta. 
 
 3 E. g. the restriction on liberae legationes, passed Cicerone cos,, though only a 
 Senatus consultum, was fully binding. 
 
 / » Bibulus' spectio against Caesar and Sestius' proposal to carry on a permanent 
 spectio are notorious. 
 
toncio might be prolonged till sunset, or a fraud might be perpetrated 
 like that which saved Rabirius in 63 b.c. However, these dangers 
 tided over, the populus, which had no representation, and, except in 
 conciones dominated by an unenfranchised mob and dependent on a 
 magistrate's will 1 , no discussion, might vote, iributim and not viritim, 
 its simple Uti rogas or Antiquo, and still the bill was not safe. 
 
 For here too, before the results of the voting were declared, the 
 interposition of a tribune sufficed not merely to suspend but to stop 
 the motion. In fact the whole system was one of negation, and with 
 such legislative machinery constitutional reform was naturally im- 
 possible. Not only had the old order a prescriptive and presumptive 
 superiority; by its very weight it blocked reform-schemes. And 
 uniformly Roman government worked on the block system. 
 
 Practically no doubt the senate could and did find a magistrate 
 willing to make the relationes it desired, and to select for divisions 
 such of its sententiae as were acceptable to the majority. It could 
 further find magistrates to enforce its consulta, i.e. to make them law; 
 for the magistrates were annual, and, even if not senatorian at heart, 
 a magistrate knew that his future, when his year of office closed, was 
 largely dependent on his harmonious co-operation with the senate. 
 But, given a magistrate hostile to the senate, he could paralyse the 
 supreme council throughout his political career. His edicts e.g. as 
 praetor ran as law, when Senatus consulta which he refused to enforce, 
 did not run. His veto as tribune or his collegal intercession 2 stopped 
 their action completely. Positively he could perhaps do little, for he 
 had colleagues who might be won; but one negative countervailed 
 many affirmatives. If others were absolute, so was he. The col- 
 lective responsibility of a cabinet was as yet unevolved, and the 
 magistracy was anything but unitary. The system was in fact, as 
 Niebuhr notes, not unlike that of Prussia before the rise of Harden- 
 berg and Stein; and as the latter resulted in Auerstadt and Jena, so, 
 did the former in Pharsalus and Actium. For the senate, de facto 
 supreme in legislation, was exposed to the negative of any tribune, 
 a weapon secure, save in the face of national danger, to any party, 
 or any adventurer — an incongruity which might have wrecked a 
 system stronger than the Roman. 
 
 The evolution indeed of the tribunate of the commons from the 
 right of individual redress, and from the personal inviolability of the 
 leges sacraiae was a natural one and on the lines of general con- 
 stitutional progress. If, too, plebeian consuls as leaders of opposition 
 might exercise a constitutional veto, 3 why not extend this power ? but 
 once granted the tribunal power was looked upon as the Palladium 
 of the people and could never be recalled. 
 
 Accordingly, in the interests of order as against liberty, crime and 
 
 1 Cf. Cic. ad Att. IV. 1. 6, habui concionem ; omnes magistrates . . . dederunt. ■ 
 3 Collegal intercession was, however, extremely rare. Spectio, Obnuntiatio and 
 
 purchased tribunal intercessions took its place. Yet, cf. the case of the coss. of 
 
 51 B.C., and for praetorian intercession cf. Cic. in Verr. I. 46. 
 8 Cf. Mommsen, Hist. Rom. 11. eap. 2, vol. I. p. 286. 
 
murder, bribery and treachery were employed, and the Gracchi and 
 rhany after them, like some before them, perished in order to keep 
 the state-machinery from deadlock. They fell martyrs not so much 
 in the cause of great ideals as to the exigencies of government. 
 • For the rest, the union of senate and magistracy during Rome's 
 struggles • for hegemony in Latium, and for existence first and then 
 e'mpire against Carthage, enabled the government to go on. The 
 political faintance of the people, in its changing senses, during the 
 great wars of Rome, the financial supervision exercised by the senate, 
 and the impossibility of carrying on prolonged foreign wars without 
 an organised bureau for foreign affairs, such as was the senate, 
 humbled the fuglemen of the political sovereign, and they in many 
 cases took the pay of the nobility and did the senate yeoman's- 
 service 1 . The marked incapacity, too, of the popular favourites — 
 of C. Flaminius at the Thrasymene lake and of M. Varro at Cannae — 
 helped to make the senate de facto a strong oligarchy. It was the 
 old houses, the Fabii and the Scipiones, that made Rome's prosperity. 
 It was that Flaminius who had ignored the senate and appealed 
 directly to the tribes in 232 b. c, who failed ignominiously against the: 
 foe over whom the aristocratic victors of Metaurus and Zama pre- 
 vailed. And the precedent accordingly of Flaminius' home-policy 
 was not followed till the days of Ti. Gracchus. The fact however 
 remains, that it was always open for your Ti. Gracchus or other 
 socialist agitator to follow in a track along which the Lex Hortensia 
 gave a right of way. 
 
 No reform was carried, for none seemed necessary, when the de 
 facto sovereign could rule quietly. Men forgot to give the senate 
 a voice which could make itself heard, a power of self-movement. 
 It was not an dpxn Kivrja-tas, and accordingly, the de jure sovereign 
 was able, when it arose in its might, to convulse the Republic with the 
 struggle olpopolani and noUli. 
 
 The family-policy, too, of the conqueror of Zama, and again of the' 
 Metelli, hastened the end ; but, unless the senate should abdicate, or 
 occupy an unassailed throne, that end was clearly foreshadowed. The- 
 'Venetian Government' of le cabinet inie'rieur, which existed in Eng- 
 land just before the American War of Independence, was, by the: 
 nature of the case, bound to destroy the House of Commons or to 
 perish ; and it perished. But the House of Commons was organised 
 and had an administrative past ; and so there was something to take 
 the place of the Bute Cabal. In Rome there was nothing to super-' 
 sede the senate, save the ascendancy of individuals — of Ti. Gracchus, 
 of his brother, of Marius, of Saturninus, of Cinna ; possibly of Sul- 
 picius, of Lepidusj or of Catilina ; lastly of Pompeius or of Caesar, 
 and of Antonius or of Octavian. 
 
 So much for Senatorian government in its main department — 
 legislation. Its only hope was in some dictator who should make 
 
 ' Viam uttam dissoluendae tribuniciae potestatis per collegarum intercessionem. 
 Liv. IV. 48. ' 
 
it sovereign in very truth, and him it could scarcely have found 
 except perhaps in Camillus, Rome's Scharnhorst rather than her 
 Stein. The man was not to be found later. Scipio Aemilianus gave 
 most promise and he died. Sulla was too late. Others had not the 
 power, or not the patriotism, or not the inspiration. Dictators were 
 viewed with jealousy. The decemviral legislation was too early to- 
 substitute code for veto, and was moreover wrecked on the misconduct- 
 of its members. The only hope of senatorian government was a 
 Sulla before Sulla, a man to limit the magistracy, to abolish the' 
 tribunate, to swamp the comitia, to give strength and articulation- 
 to the senate, and all this without an overweening personal ambition. 
 
 Sulla, it is said, left the tribunate imaginem sine re 1 . That measure 
 alone might in earlier days have saved Rome. But the time had gone 
 by; the imperial period had come, and the economic ills of the ill- 
 nucleated commons were drawing to a culmination. There was an 
 ordo equester which in its shortsightedness preferred misrule and a 
 capitalistic Saturnalia to a strong government. There were pro- 
 consuls who in the provinces had got beyond senatorian control. 
 There was the army, too, of Marius — the professional army of 
 Napoleon, not the national militia of Camillus. And finally, the 
 secret had been divulged, in part by Sulla himself, that, in the 
 arbitration of Roman political controversies, 'heaven was on the 
 side of the big battalions.' The senate then had no outlook save 
 in the direction of a Caesar and his fortunes ; in the ascendancy of 
 a master, not a minister. 
 
 But if the possibility of a prolonged senatorian government was; 
 conditioned by the chances of an all but impossible reformation, what 
 hope was there elsewhere? Popular government in Rome had, if 
 feasible, much to recommend it, both as the restoration of a de jure. 
 sovereign, and as an advance in the direction in which the splendid 
 hopes of liberalism have always looked for their realisation. But was', 
 it ever possible ? The answer is, necessarily, No. 
 
 Consider the elections, as conducted, say, in the second century b.c 
 They represented very largely the powers and the possibilities of the 
 commons, and to what did they amount ? There was no election to 
 the legislature, save in so far as the magistrates were called to the 
 senate, during and after their year of office. The summons until the 
 time of Sulla, when concession was too late, rested with an officer 
 appointed by the curies, or, practically, and at last even nominallyj 
 by the senate. The legislature, except accidentally, showed no con j 
 cession to the principle of representation even in a rudimentary form. 
 Proposals for a representative senate after Cannae were rejected, and 
 perhaps rightly, but at any rate the senate gave no ground of hope to 
 the sovereign people. 
 
 And there were no elections to the Judicature, save in the single 
 instance of Silvanus' reconstruction of the Varian commission in b.c. 
 89. The populus had no interest in the judicia except through the 
 
 \ Velleius II. 30. 
 
praetors themselves. Judices were selected, principally from the senate 
 and the equestrian order, in proportions varying according to statutes 
 passed in the interests of one or other, while the tribuni aerarii, 
 whether they were ' district or ward presidents 1 ' or ' men of the 
 census originally requisite for the office of military pay-masters 2 ,' 
 were, even supposing their popular character to be beyond dispute, 
 of too late a date (b. c. 70) to subserve any popular pretensions. 
 
 There remain, then, only the magisterial elections. In how far 
 were these calculated to render the popular cause effective, and how 
 far did they promise well for a democratic reformation ? Little, if 
 at all. In theory, if not otherwise, the populus was regarded as the 
 sole creator of the permanent executive, but this availed nothing. 
 Of the censors we have spoken. Of the consuls, praetors, quaestors, 
 aediles and tribunes, we can only say that their popular character was 
 in the best days of Rome delusive, and, in the decline, even fatal. 
 
 It was in the best days delusive, for in the senate's day of power 
 the magistrate, the minister of that council, actually designated his 
 successor. The substantial vote of the populus was accounted only a 
 conge d'e'lire. Nominations were rejected. The majority-candidate 
 was in certain cases, e.g. in that of Marcellus after Cannae, com- 
 pletely ignored. Nay, so far did the theory go, that the legal position 
 of Cinna 3 , when from 87-4 b. c. he designated himself and his col- 
 leagues without comitial ratification, was unassailed and unassailable. 
 Under the king at the dawn of Roman history, or under the Empire 
 later, such procedure was natural. In the republican period it was 
 artificial, grotesque, anomalous. This theory made the task of the 
 masters of the state easy, and the constitution of the principate was 
 determined by it. But it made the pretensions of the populus to real 
 government ridiculous. 
 
 Nor did the tribal organisation and the plebeian tribunate, by 
 giving solidarity and definite articulation to the popular movement, 
 fit the commons for a ready evolution when their hour should come. 
 Tribal organisation, whether for elections or for general political 
 purposes, was local. The tribules varied in number throughout the 
 tribes. The number of tribules from any one tribe present at any one. 
 time in the comitium varied still more. Rome had outgrown primary 
 assemblies before she reached her zenith ; country-tribes were carried 
 by packing, and city-tribes by caucuses, sodalitates, or the operae of 
 a party-bravo. The respectable rustic, when he existed, was too, 
 occupied to appear. The respectable townsman was overawed by 
 the clubs and his vote was swamped. Country-members might and 
 did appear to support the candidature of a municipalis, or to secure a 
 favourite's recall from just exile, and no doubt there was an earlier 
 equivalent to the concursus Italiae of Cicero's day ; but in general an 
 imported and subsidised clique, resident in Rome, carried the rural 
 vote, and, at least as the decline advanced, a band of libertini the 
 urban. The voters were the outcome of economic causes, and 
 
 1 Mommsen. 5 Madwig. 
 
 3 Mommsen, Rom. Hist. IV. cap. 9. vol. III. p. 325. 
 
J 1 
 
 perhaps not even representation and an education as parliamentary 
 electors could have saved city and country from being swayed by 
 a mob which was all that the worst foes of the populiis alleged it 
 to be. At any rate representation only appeared with the municipal 
 system of the empire, and the tribal organisation seemed to demand 
 that Rome should be a city pure and simple, or else the head of an 
 imperial federation which admitted the representative principle. And 
 both were impossible. 
 
 The tribunate, too, was a delusion. It stopped the machine, but 
 could not put it in motion. It was a clog of formidable weight, but 
 it was not a motive-force. The people became, from economic reasons, 
 demoralised, and the possession of powers purely obstructive and not 
 under due control still further demoralised them. They were harmed 
 rather than helped by their protagonists. 
 
 Again, the centuries, which were nominal populus and theoretical 
 sovereign were not, until the very end, completely emancipated from 
 sena'.orian control. Even after the formal elt-ro-SijiiOTiKaTepoii remo- 
 delling 1 of 241 b.c, they were dominated by the wealthier classes. 
 The tribes might be managed by agents ; the centuries were managed 
 by interests. Both decayed together. 
 
 The enfranchisement of Italy swamped both — the tribes directly, 
 the centuries indirectly from the breakdown of their raison d'etre in 
 the citizen-army, which from a privilege became a burden, and from 
 a burden a burden shared and diffused with an extension of rights 
 which left the organisation hopeless. Sulla, accordingly, was right 
 in leaving populus and plebs to their natural atrophy. Only in restriction 
 within the pomoerium, or in representation throughout the empire was 
 there any hope for popular government. 
 
 And when the elections were real and popular, they were fatal. 
 While decent men stood aloof from politics, the mob elected adven- 
 turers. The elected sold themselves to the senate, from which alone 
 they had a career to hope for ; or they worked for private aims and 
 earned a fortune or received a quietus ; or they were sincere and set 
 themselves in antagonism to the system, and the clumsy machine 
 crushed them. Nor did the last benefit the state more than the first ; 
 for reform inevitably degenerated into open revolution — it was a dis- 
 turbance of that very unstable equilibrium which alone made any 
 government under the old constitution possible. Reform, from the 
 popular side, unless it took forms which Roman antiquity never 
 dreamed of, meant only the surrender of the state to the club-law of 
 a mob more unreasoning than the Parisians of Robespierre ; it de- 
 stroyed the ascendency of its Girondists, but it was to be convulsed 
 by any parti Thermidorien, and, when the sword superseded the club, 
 was to be mastered by its Napoleon. 
 
 What then were the possibilities of the populares ? To legislate by 
 plebiscites which senate and magistrate and army disallowed or over- 
 rode. To elect in farce, or to set up a traitor to his party, or, worst 
 
 1 Dionys. IV. 2 1 ; Livy I. 43. 
 
12 
 
 of all, to evoke a firebrand who found his logical policy in nihilism ! 
 To veto government-proposals through the tribunate, and to carry 
 none of their own. To be dominated by a mob or a coterie ; to 
 follow adventurers ; and to lose by every victory ! And finally, to be 
 dissolved by extension ; to be swamped by the alien interests of the 
 Italian townships ; to lose their own self-respect ; and to greet 
 with acquiescence and perhaps satisfaction the destruction of their 
 bauble sovereignty! The popular cause in Rome was barren or pro- 
 duced monstrosities. 
 
 The senatorian party was not unfruitful, but it found its fruits de- 
 stroyed. It had not the powers it assumed and it failed to legalise 
 them, or to indemnify itself for its usurpations. For a time it governed 
 well ; for it could govern, whereas the populus could not. But it 
 reigned through purchased ministers and borrowed powers. Hence, 
 when the populus attained political consciousness without political 
 maturity, a terrible reckoning was exacted for senatus consulta ultima,. 
 and for martyred tribunes, for wars which in the interests of a mer- 
 cantile aristocracy were slave-hunts, and for taxes which were violence 
 and robbery. The machinery of the two comitia was rusty and im- 
 potent to produce, but it could work by Mamilian rogations and the 
 like ; it could try Rabirius and could banish Cicero. The govern- 
 ment had always the awkward monster to reckon with, not as a volonte 
 ge'ne'rale, but as a factor in the actual regulation of political detail. 
 The populares destroyed the only strong republican government that 
 Rome had or could have. The time for any efficient power to step 
 in and demolish or transform at last came. 
 
 But what of the magistracy? and especially of the higher magis- 
 trates, consuls, praetors, censors? They had many advantages for 
 forming a strong government. The consuls were a collegium with the 
 absolute powers of the expelled kings, and the senatorian diet was 
 their concilium and only their concilium. The populus was in practice 
 dominated by the nobiles or patres, or, at the least, by the conscripti, — 
 senators enrolled from the moneyed classes, — whose interests and 
 whose power were in strict subservience to the council of state. What 
 was there then, in theory, which prevented these magistrates, even in 
 the very earliest times, from ruling Rome ? 
 
 There were, in the first place, certain limitations. Their imperiunii 
 i.e. their supreme poles/as, was legitimum or controlled by charter. 
 The appellatio to the centuries or citizen-army, in matters of life and 
 death, and dependence on the council (as reipublicae cuslos, or the 
 permanent element in the constitution), were drawbacks, but perhaps 
 salutary drawbacks to efficient autocracy. And beside these, there 
 were graver checks and counterchecks. The executive was not, as is 
 sometimes inaccurately stated, 'monarchy in commission,' for the 
 consuls were, co-equal and without the union of a common policy. 
 They were not a committee or cabinet appointed to carry out a cer- 
 tain political programme. They were rather Ishmaels, fighting each 
 for his own hand. They were two, and co-ordinate; a fatal number 
 even on a rural commission of the peace. The negative of either was 
 
*3 
 
 sufficient to paralyse the positive efficiency of the other. ' The only 
 practical solution therefore was a division of labour which left each 
 less absolute. Not that there was anything approaching to a' depart- 
 mental system, for each was judge, general, and everything else. But, 
 by a tacit agreement, one would take the war-department, the other 
 the home-policy; only, always with the consciousness that his colleague 
 might invade his sphere of public business, and, e.g., establish a rival 
 court of equity on the opposite side of the forum. It recalls irre- 
 sistibly the Prussian system of foreign politics in 1806, with two 
 ministers, one treating with France, the other with the Czar. In the 
 early days, too, it was often open war between the two absolute mon i - 
 archs. For a long time plebeian and patrician consuls were ipso facto 
 deadly enemies. Hence arose the senatorian ascendancy and the 
 triumphant policy of 260-167 b.c. The populus was many-headed 
 and puzzle-headed; the magistrates were rivals, or were forced into 
 rivalry; and the senate reigned. 
 
 There were also two further limitations to magisterial power, which 
 from the first played into the hands of the senate. Firstly, the con- 
 sulship was an annual office, and, for re-election, it was necessary to 
 gain either the assembly or the senate; while, further, the continuity 
 of a war-policy or a finance-scheme could only be secured by a rela- 
 tively permanent bureau. In the senate, the policy of Rome was 
 tralalicia. And, secondly, while absolute in the field, in Rome the 
 consul laid aside an important part of his imperium, the jus gladif, 
 and this restriction involved not only the appellate jurisdiction of the 
 populus, but also the defencelessness of the magistrate. Only in the 
 camp was a consul absolute ; at home, his absolutism was tempered 
 by his many dangers. Each consul enjoyed the position of the 
 Junior Sparlan King. 
 
 With the growth, too, of the senate's power, the poiestas of the 
 magistrate underwent further modifications. The veto of the tribunes 
 was a concession to the popular party against the senate, but other 
 restrictions came from the aristocratic side. A custom grew up of 
 suing for each successive - office at a certain age, with a practical pro- 
 hibition of re-election within certain periods. The usage also obtained 
 of recognising the eligibility, for the higher offices, of those only who 
 had passed the lower. These traditions, though not consolidated 
 into statute-law till the lex annalis of Tappulus (b c. 180), were current 
 long before, and controlled the magistracy, in the interests of the 
 senate. An obnoxious magistrate found himself blocked at each of 
 the lower stages. His candidature was rejected; his election vitiated ; 
 and so the senate vanquished him. 
 
 ' Again, the elections, since they had reference at once to civil and 
 military office, were often determined to the senate's advantage by 
 the exigencies of the time. The system which called Crassus_ from 
 the woolsack to take the field against Spartacus, while it obviously 
 made the creation of a Tyrannis more easy, favoured, in general, 
 senatorian ascendancy. A good soldier of the Moreau stamp would 
 take the lead in time of war, and would be content to receive his 
 
14 
 
 politics, cut and dried, from the council. A clever administrator of 
 the Rewbel type would take the helm in times of peace, but would, if 
 called upon to conduct a campaign, be only too glad to stand well 
 ■with the powers that were, and to have his shortcomings condoned at 
 home. 
 
 The magistrate, then, though, as king, superior to the other^aieces 
 on the board, was for the present harmless in aggression. >Wis royal 
 brother was his foe, and the pawns and higher authorises, though 
 powerless if the kings refused to play, threatened a chronic check- 
 mate. It was, to take another illustration, as pretty a state of deadlock 
 as the famous scene in ' The Critic' 
 
 But yet, in the consulship — for the censorship was, if first in dig- 
 nity, inferior in power, and the remaining magistracies were but step- 
 ping-stones — there were signs of a great future. The populus had 
 only jura without the power of political self-development. The 
 senate, though organised, had only auctoriias, and was obliged to 
 work through others — in fact through the magistrates; the consuls, 
 on the other hand, were only limited, and their limitations were obvious 
 and partial. If only circumstances favoured, limits might be tran- 
 scended. 
 
 And circumstances did favour. Continuous wars made consuls 
 more absolute, because more often in the field. The acquisitions of 
 war made provincial governors necessary, and who so fitted as the 
 ex-supreme magistrate ? The whilom vestry-clerk or lord-justice or 
 lord-mayor found himself now a pasha. He was still limited in time, 
 for his tenure of power was for one year, and in space to his province, 
 for in Rome he was only a civilian still. Moreover his army was civic. 
 He had to wait years between his first and second opportunities. He 
 was financed by the senate, checked by the quaesiiones, and only really 
 powerful among subjects. 
 
 How, then, to pass beyond the limits ? The decay of the national 
 army, due to economic causes, led to the formation of the cohortial 
 army by Marius. The needs of the Jugurthine and Cimbric wars 
 called for a relaxation of the lex annalis. The law was relaxed, and 
 armies became the instruments of their leaders. The financial control 
 of the senate was obviated by wholesale plundering — even by the 
 plundering of Rome. The quaestiones dared not treat a proconsul 
 militant as they treated a Rutilius. Armies moved from province to 
 province, and the tenure of commands was prolonged indefinitely. 
 A Strabo or a Sulla was absolute. Sulla legislated against the change, 
 and made the senate, once in Roman history, a power as well as an 
 authority ; and the new constitution lasted twelve years. Then came 
 the imperium coordinalum aequum, and finally the imperium majus, for 
 long periods or for life ; and the magistrate stood supreme and absolute, 
 with his full imperium, in and out of Rome. The elder Rome had 
 perished ; the Rome of the Caesars begun. 
 
 Surely the constitution of Rome was a paradox of the wildest kind. 
 Magistrates circumscribed and shackled, and hampered each by the 
 other, and yet the sole efficient power ; without any collegiate or 
 
i5 
 
 continuous policy, and yet absolute I The council powerless, and yet 
 dominus publici consilii ; in diplomacy and finance, the only repository 
 of tradition and experience, and yet unable to confer any plenary 
 powers ; unable to save a dictator from evBvnf, or to authorise a Cicero 
 to put to death a rebel ! And finally the populus, without political 
 dynamic and acting only as the tool of adventurers and charlatans, 
 and yet sovereign ! with a programme aiming not at political possi- 
 bilities, but at democratic ideals ; always struggling to carry the out- 
 posts of officialism against the nobiles, and ever finding its position 
 worse ; scaling the heights of the consulship and censorship at infinite 
 pains, and seeing its plebeian families ennobled, and forthwith solid- 
 arised with the old nobles into a new aristocracy of optimates, and 
 these no longer legally assailable ; and yet this, Populus Romanus, the 
 people that won Latium, and Italy and the world 1 
 
 The magistracy had before it the prospect of changed times, in 
 which, untrammelled, it should vindicate its absolutism. The senate 
 looked for an emancipator, who should be, at once, all-powerful and 
 all-subservient, and who should make its de facto sovereignty real and 
 its auctoritas articulate. And the populus looked to become a power 
 in a city-state or by its representatives in an empire ; the one ideal 
 was in the past, and history rarely retrogresses ; the other in the future, 
 and nature never anticipates. It was natural that the magistracy 
 should survive, for it was the fittest. But it survived transformed; 
 and in the struggle for existence the republic declined and fell. From 
 the nature of its constitution it was inevitable that Rome should cease 
 to be a republic. 
 
 The share of external history in the decline is easy to trace, and 
 need scarcely occupy us long. Decay was necessarily arrested by 
 every struggle with foes without. In the struggle for life, in Italy, 
 when Rome was still a city-state and the consuls went out to war, like 
 sheriffs, at the head of the city-trainbands, the collective wisdom of 
 the council of elders was of the greatest weight. Patriot leaders were 
 necessary, in order to carry out the counsels of the senate ; and, under 
 the shadow of martial law, the people forgot their rights. And again, 
 when Rome led more than one city in her train, the same exigencies 
 prevailed; for Italy was the battle-ground, not only of states but of 
 races. When, too, peace came with victory, and the burdens of the 
 poor meant slavery, luckily sovereign proprietorship came too, and 
 economic ills were for the time staved off; while, with sovereignty, 
 came the practical separation of the colleagues at the head of affairs, 
 with the vista of emancipation for each. 
 
 The senate seemed now likely to go to the wall, under the pressure 
 of economic troubles deferred but not remedied, and of the masterful 
 insubordination of magistrates, patrician and plebeian alike. But 
 again and again the patriciate, which knew ' neither how to yield nor 
 how to enforce ' its prerogatives, transformed by the decimation of the 
 curies into the most obnoxious of class-interests, was compelled by 
 the senate to give way. The government covered their retreat, closed 
 the ranks of the aristocratic party, healed its wounds and formed a 
 
i6 
 
 social stratum, from which alone officialism was to be recruited. 
 Opposition magistrates became rare, and were crushed with Machia- 
 vellian energy. The senate's rule became efficient and bade fair to 
 become permanent, when in -the midst of prosperity, in the lull that 
 preceded the Punic wars, the pride and selfishness of the caste of 
 . optimates seemed likely to bring' down the aristocratic power, and for 
 ever. 
 
 The state was exposed, on a sudden, to a critical movement, such 
 as has often destroyed even strong oligarchies. Novi homines had 
 almost established a Swaa-rda on the ruins of the senate, when fortune 
 saved the curia, and perhaps the republic. Fortune takes strange 
 shapes, and, in this case, it appeared in the shape of internecine war 
 for commercial primacy in the Mediterranean. The power that 
 threatened Rome was Carthage, a power constitutionally as impotent 
 as Rome ; and the struggle revived senatorian prestige. A first war 
 passed off successfully, and the result was a new care and a new 
 possession in Sicily. A second war ensued, and one which, but for 
 the senate, must have ended fatally. The second Punic war was one 
 of those struggles in which personal genius confronts national power, 
 and only the diplomatic ability and resolute demeanour of the senate, 
 and the unwearying patriotism of the senatorian champions, prevented 
 Hannibal from crushing Italy, as Napoleon did Germany. But where 
 a Flaminius, a Varro, and a Minucius failed, a Paullus, a Fabius, .a 
 Nero and a Scipio justified the senate's confidence, and carried out 
 the senate's policy, and, at Zama, , Rome conquered, and the two 
 Spains were added to her empire. The political ideal at that time 
 was senatorian rule, by means of ministers of state. Economic and 
 social grievances were hushed, and the voice of the tribunes was seldom 
 heard. The Scipiones, not men of original genius, but men of ad- 
 ministrative talents, carried out, in numerous family-consulships, the 
 senate's will. No one thought of reform, for, when all were agreed, 
 what need to abolish the effete and shelved constitution ? This absence 
 of reform and of party measures, as distinct from personal impeach- 
 ments, is the leading feature of Rome's constitutional history from 
 Zama .to Pydna. . .■ 
 
 But political shortsightedness was to find its punishment in the 
 revival of constitutionalism, and in the awakening of the dormant 
 populus and its sovereignty. Ti. Gracchus, in his renewal of the full 
 powers of the tribunate, and in his revival of long obsolete land-legis- 
 lation, was to show the senate, that its fancied security was not safety. 
 The burning question of the day, however, was not, for the present, 
 reform, but the vexed problem of nationalism as against imperialism. 
 Was Rome to be the head of an Italian nation, with a protectorate in 
 Sicily and the Spains, or was she to aim at world-empire ? 
 
 To this question the answer of the senate, and of the hereditary 
 officials of the Scipionic circle, was, that Nationalism was Rome's 
 truest policy. And rightly so ; but the answer of circumstances was 
 Imperialism. The importance of the solution rested in this : the 
 vestry or corporation could not undertake empire, for empire involved 
 
17 
 
 at once the emancipation of the magistracy and the dissolution of the 
 populus ; i.e. the great rival of the senate in the constitution would be 
 unchained, and the only countervail would be destroyed. This is, in 
 substance, the reason why the judgment of the Scipionic coterie, of 
 which, in the next generation, Polybius is the exponent, was radically 
 right; that Rome must remain urbs Roma, a city-state, mistress of 
 Italy, with an extended protectorate, but not an empire. For only 
 thus could the senatorian government subsist. History falsified the 
 hopes of the party, while it justified their decision. In the mouth 
 of Cicero the catchword imperium civile is claptrap and an anachronism, 
 for then the possibility of a government so confined that magisterial 
 ambition could form no dreams, so large that a popular mass-meeting 
 would be bewildered, was no longer a question of practical politics. 
 The third Punic war had settled the question for ever. 
 
 And so we return from our digression. In the third war with 
 Carthage new provinces were added. Wars in Greece augmented 
 the empire further, and then in rapid succession state after state fell in, 
 and the Roman Republic ruled the world. But the struggle exhausted 
 her. Her depopulation bade fair to prove fatal. Italy, therefore, be- 
 came, more and more, the recruiting-ground of Rome, and the sharers 
 of her conquests claimed to share her power. This was one of the 
 planks in Gaius Gracchus' platform — Italian franchise. And if he 
 knew what he meant, or if he meant representation of the municipia, 
 he was right ; but he failed. Then came the breakdown of govern- 
 ment, under the combined influence of economic troubles at home and 
 provincial mismanagement abroad, and Marius, called to the head of 
 Rome's army, found it necessary to make concessions. But more 
 was demanded ; and there ensued the Social war, which resulted in 
 the enfranchisement of Italy. And the enfranchisement was such as 
 to disorganise the populus without strengthening it. Now was the 
 senate's opportunity ; but the senatorian government, too, was dis- 
 organised. Marius had forced his way to the top in opposition to the 
 family officialism of the Metelli, and had, in rising, shown the weakness 
 of the senatorian party. And the reasons for Marius' ascendancy had 
 shown that the optimales had not the justification of good management. 
 In fact, the official-class had in provincia consoled themselves for 
 restrictions in Rome. Misrule, and consequent disaster ; wars pro- 
 voked by Rome, and made dangerous by Roman poltroonery and cor- 
 ruption ; — all this showed the inefficiency of the central bureau ; while 
 all its prestige had fallen with the elevation, by Gaius Gracchus, of 
 the ordo equester, the most mischievous class to entrust with political 
 power. 
 
 Accordingly, the civil war followed, and if, at its close, Sulla for a 
 moment revived the declining power of the senate, — and with the 
 senate republican government must stand or fall, — yet the death of 
 the dictator was the death-sentence of the commonwealth. No con- 
 cordia ordinum such as was Cicero's policy, no confession of faith 
 to the effect that office was nominally his, but really theirs, could 
 save the state ; for the time for the toga had gone by. The Marian 
 
 B 
 
i8 
 
 army had been levied ; the proconsulars had broken loose ; and no 
 respect to jus or auctoritas remained. The watchword of the future 
 was Imperium ; ' Republican Rome conquered the civilized world, but 
 kept it only by ceasing to be a republic V 
 
 ' It would be easy,' says Hume, in his essay ' Of Refinement in 
 the Arts,' ' to prove that writers mistook the causes of the disorders 
 in the Roman state, and ascribed to luxury and the arts what really 
 proceeded from an ill-modelled government and the unlimited extent 
 of conquests.' To the empire, for which the main problems were 
 depopulation and the gold-shrinkage, Hume's words do not apply, but 
 of the republic they are doubtless true. And the more essential part 
 of the review, 'ill-modelled government,' we have described. We have 
 narrated too, in part, how conquest modified and dissipated the civic 
 
 ideal of the commonwealth, — ov yhp £k Sera fivpiahasv nSKis m lariv 2 . 
 
 Have we, however, done enough to demonstrate the utter hopeless- 
 ness of the position ? Surely we have as yet only touched on the 
 complex economic evils which acted on, and were reacted upon by, 
 constitutional deficiencies ; and we have as yet only told the story 
 of Rome's extended acquisitions without in any way proving their 
 necessity. To proceed, then. Of these two points the latter, perhaps, 
 should take precedence, as more immediately the determinant of con- 
 stitutional tendencies, and as earlier, historically, in reaching its cul- 
 mination. The former, too, will fall more directly into its place in 
 connexion with that demoralisation of Roman society which was the 
 beginning of the end. Without further justification, then, we go on to 
 treat of the natural character of Imperialism, as the outcome of Roman 
 history. 
 
 Rome starts in history as a city-state, rather commercial than 
 militant. We are not concerned to disentangle its origines from the 
 complexus of myths with which they are ravelled, but we seem to see 
 vaguely that it is as an emporium for Latium that Rome first be- 
 comes important. Now for a commercial city there is, especially in 
 its infancy, the greatest danger from competitors ; and unless it be 
 beyond the reach of competition, as was Corinth, it must perforce 
 become military. Athens and Aegina fought to the death, and Rome 
 had like deadly struggles. To preserve her trade, then, she became 
 other than a trader. She was fortunate to begin with. The Tuscan 
 power, which decimated her curies in many a campaign, and which 
 forced the burgesses to extend their burdens and rights to the cen- 
 turiate army and assembly, and which for a time established a suzerainty 
 over the little Roman community (X^ tjjs TvpfavLaS), luckily dwindled 
 and decayed before the Phoenicians, and left inland commerce to 
 Latium. The Latin cities yielded to Rome, and in the interests of her 
 commercial hegemony a military supremacy was evolved. 
 
 And Italy was left alone in the struggle. The Phoenicians of Car- 
 thage had, after the decline of Etruria, to struggle with the Western 
 Greeks ; and, before the great battle began, Rome had unconsciously 
 
 1 Fronde, Oceana, p. 3. a Arist. Nic. Eth. ix. 10. 
 
'9 
 
 become strong. The Gaul, the Italian races, the Greeks of the South 
 felt Roman ascendancy. The Samnites and Pyrrhus fought an irre- 
 concilable struggle for life against Rome, and the survivor, like the 
 Polynesian cannibal, appeared to gain the strength of the rivals de- 
 voured. In her worst early struggles Rome was left unassailed by the 
 strong nations. The Sicilian tyrants looked to Africa for their foe, 
 Alexander of Macedon to Asia ; while Punic jealousy saw in the 
 Greeks—old rivals of Tyre in the Aegean — the real pretenders to 
 primacy in the Mediterranean. Pyrrhus was but an adventurer, as 
 Brennus had been but a barbarian ; and the result of the isolation 
 of the Italian war-drama was, that Rome became a city at the head of 
 a nation— a metropolis which was the focus of all Italy Economic 
 troubles at home promoted colonisation ; Italy was conquered by the 
 plough as well as by the sword. It became inevitable that Rome 
 should lead Italy, and direct Italian policy. She might be protectress, 
 or suzerain in name ; she was certainly supreme in reality. 
 
 Not that Rome only fought on the defensive. She provoked many 
 wars, but the first casus belli was usually, nay almost always, from 
 the adversary. Once Roman jealousy or pride was engaged in a 
 conflict, war on any pretext for any quarrel ensued, and lasted till 
 Rome triumphed. It was not as in Greece, where Athens might 
 lead for half a century, fall, and again from time to time take the lead 
 till the absolute enslavement of her country, or where Sparta might 
 exercise an hegemony before and after, and all but efface herself in 
 the intervals. It was necessary that Rome should conquer or perish. 
 The temper of her people was of such a metal that, when involved in 
 war, they exhausted themselves in their effort, and could only yield 
 when dead or dying. Hence they often received the submission of 
 foes, less distressed and straitened than themselves ; and hence they 
 never made a disadvantageous peace, — for they could only do so when 
 the treaty should mean nothing more than an armistice between the 
 living and the dead. 
 
 Rome then became necessarily the powerful sovereign of Italy, and 
 that in isolation from the interests of Eastern and Southern powers. 
 The war with Pyrrhus, however, brought Roman arms southwards. 
 Roman commerce, too, guided Roman aims southwards. Italy ap- 
 peared incomplete and unsafe without Sicily : and in Sicily Rome 
 was brought face to face with Carthage. 
 
 The issue between Rome and Carthage was simply this : Etruria 
 has passed away ; Tyre and Sidon are decayed ; Egypt is not maritime 
 or commercial ; Greece, formerly terrible, is contracting towards her 
 centre, and dying in her extremities; Carthage and Rome alone 
 remain to dominate trade in the Mediterranean. Which is to have all 
 the profit and prestige of the commerce of the known world ? 
 
 And there seems to have been but one answer. Carthage had 
 reached the stage at which Rome is seen later, just before the 
 Jugurthine war. Her armies were composed of socii, or semi- 
 mercenaries, and, in many cases, of actual mercenaries. Her council 
 and suffetes were as inefficient as senate and consuls after the Gracchan 
 
 B 2 
 
20 
 
 disasters ; her people were, if possible, less a factor in politics than 
 the Roman. 
 
 Rome was just verging on such maturity as her constitution ad- 
 mitted of. Carthage was already on the decline, and the result was, 
 of course, the victory of maturity over decay. Had Jugurtha been a 
 Hannibal, or Hannibal appeared in the days of Scaurus and Albinus, 
 i.e. just before the reforms and ascendancy of Marius, the event might 
 have been otherwise. But that is to say: had Abdelkader been 
 Napoleon . As affairs stood, Rome conquered ; and the conse- 
 quence was, the undertaking of the interim-administration of each 
 several province which Carthage evacuated in her retreat upon her 
 bases, of" Sicily and Spain ; and Spain had to be maintained from the 
 second to the third Punic war, lest a new Hannibal should renew the 
 dangerous struggle. Eastward, too, arose troubles calling for inter- 
 ference. Rome, partly as the recipient of Carthage's reluctant con- 
 cessions inter vivos, partly as the heir to fallen Carthage's extensive 
 empire,' became, as it were, without intending it, an imperial power. 
 In the same half-conscious dream she seemed hurried into Greek ac- 
 quisitions, and she awoke to find herself queen of the Mediterranean 
 nations. 
 
 Imperialism was now a necessity. To lay down empire was ut altum 
 dormiret, to court the sleep of death. How then this necessary 
 imperialism — this iron crown which the commonwealth could not • 
 resign nor yet maintain — determined the destinies of Rome, has been 
 shown. Rome had not the political genius of Athens for her populus 
 to be successful in ruling her empire, nor had she the idea of the city- 
 state ingrain in her very life that she should be able in strict civicism 
 to carry out Aristotelian theory to the letter. Nor was Rome Venice 
 in her glory, to allow the commercial ideals of a mediaeval aristocracy 
 to guide and control her policy; for Rome's position was rather deter- 
 mined by circumstance, and Rome had to reckon with her constitution, 
 which had not the effectiveness of the Venetian, even for a petty 
 Venetian administration. Rome was Rome, and accordingly extended 
 conquest resulted in the utter downfall of senatorian usurpation and in 
 -the disintegration of even that little jurisdiction which rested with the 
 •populus, while the magistrate remained to assert himself uncontrolled, 
 and the empire was formed, the principate constituted from the disjecta 
 membra of the republic. Hence, too, because of the natural evolution 
 of the empire from the chaos of the revolution, the autocracy was 
 apparently ' a bundle of old offices,' ' Ce"sar gouverna d'abord sous 
 des titres de magistrature x ; ' ' Auguste voulut cacher une puissance 
 nouvelle sous des noms connu et des dignite's ordinaires Y and 
 succeeded. 
 
 But the success would have been of a very different kind but for the 
 co-operation of causes which may be classed as politico-economic, 
 i.e. as concerned with ' la bonne administration de la maison com- 
 mune' on the social side. For something else contributed to the 
 
 1 Montesquieu. 2 St. Evremond. 
 
21 
 
 making and expansion of Rome, besides her original constitution, and 
 her struggle for life. Without, indeed, the constant mooting of ques- 
 tions as to land-laws, and poor-laws, and population-policy and the 
 like, the progress of Caesarism is unthinkable. To mention one 
 essential point only, in which the modification of constitutional 
 tendencies is marked, the army of the revolution was created by 
 economic rather than by political decadence. In the shaping of 
 history, then, economics and politics go hand and hand; and to 
 economic elements in Roman maladministration we naturally next turn. 
 
 Economic disaster was, if possible, more inevitable than political ; 
 for the constitution was, though organic, in some senses an artificially 
 constructed state-machinery — a growth, indeed, and yet a creation; 
 while the economy of the state was absolutely organic. The one 
 might have been conceivably refitted, the other had to be reorganised. 
 Vitality was necessary to both, but less to the political than to the 
 economical, for the government was in one aspect an Spyavov, in which 
 mainspring, and cogwheels, and friction and adjustment were objects 
 of attention. The social life of the nation involved rather questions 
 of assimilation and growth and parasitism. But its rdgts was the 
 original idea of the state, and, organic or not, parasitism was not 
 a primary element in its life. To the noXirua then politics are of first, 
 economics of secondary importance; the first are its nature, the 
 .second are of its nurture. And yet the normal effect of an imported 
 virus is to kill. We shall expect to find then that economic dangers 
 tended in the same direction as political difficulties. 
 
 Rome, we must bear in mind, rose and fell in a pre-economic age. 
 ' Happy,' says Macintosh, ' is the nation that has no political philo- 
 sophy,' but the position is only clear when we understand by it, 
 ' happy is the state that has never felt the need of scientific solutions 
 to social problems, because it feels no pressure.' It was fatal to Rome 
 that she could not anticipate history and apply later science to 
 contemporary evils. Her errors were, for her, irretrievable. Her 
 reforms were empirical and superficial. Her reformers were often her 
 deadliest foes. In a word, a false Staaiswirthschaft was antecedently 
 her natural destiny. 
 
 At first, as we should expect, no social question as distinct from 
 politics appeared in Rome. The infant city under its kings might 
 agitate the questions how far the senate ought to be attended to, how 
 far the curies ought to have a voice in matters of state, and the like ; 
 but the king, the only real magistrate, called his own senate, and 
 it was his instrument, not his rival; he had in the senate the means of 
 a majority among the burgesses ; he was limited by his own charters, 
 but the fatal constitution had not appeared, and he governed, like our 
 mediaeval kings, without a thought of an economic revolution. He 
 felt political, he did not appreciate economic tendencies. The deci- 
 mation of the burgesses in war might lead him to the first revolution, 
 which constituted the centuriate army, but even depopulation needed 
 no population policy. There was folkland or bookland enough for 
 all. Rome's griefs had not begun, and ' every rood of land main- 
 
22 
 
 tained its man.' But in after times the quies secura of these days was 
 looked upon as a far back golden age. The revolution came. The 
 landless plebeii, who formed the bulk of the town populace, began to 
 grow, and to receive grants of folkland, such as placed them on a level 
 with the lower classes of the popular army. The war necessities of 
 the state solved the first land- question of Rome by introducing a free 
 policy of distribution, which gave rights in exchange for burdens. 
 And the military successes of the republic in the environs of the city 
 secured this policy, by rendering it innocuous to the burgesses, who 
 with every conquest received a quid pro quo. But war necessities 
 waxed, and victory was often anything but instantaneous. Rome 
 often indeed all but exhausted herself in the struggle. How fared the 
 small freeholders, whether of older or of newer tenure, under such 
 conditions ? 
 
 Naturally they fared badly. As yet the expedient of Sp. Cassius 
 was the only one that occurred to would-be reformers, and it was not 
 enough. The citizen was called on, not only 'to serve in purely 
 defensive operations, but also in aggressive warfare ; and he had to 
 pay a direct war-tax, the tributum — an advance, but an advance which 
 ruined the smaller ratepayers, and disordered society by involving the 
 peasant in debt, and by enabling the richer classes, senators, and 
 knights, to recoup their own expenditure in taxation by usurious 
 exactions from the poor. 
 
 And not merely did he pay this double tax, for himself and for his 
 usurious banker, in an advance he could not bear, and a compound 
 interest which made the advance a permanent charge ; but he left his 
 homestead for months and years to women and children and slaves. 
 The master's eye and hand, which make up that 'magic of property ' 
 which ' turns sand to gold,' were withdrawn by the state, and, if lucky 
 enough to escape ' the blood-tax,' the yeoman spent his best years in 
 the field, not of agriculture, but of battle. Peasant properties, valuable 
 as they are, if naturally evolved throughout a country, and when they 
 are a real possession ' to have and to hold,' were ineffective in such a 
 case. The wealthier orders could, through their bailiffs, manage large 
 farms with profit, even when themselves absentees on foreign service. 
 The poorer could not, nor could they forego without serious distress 
 the profits which failed them. The war-contribution, or rather the 
 interest paid at heavy rates to those who advanced it, would have 
 swallowed up their gains in any case. As it was, it ruined them. 
 
 At first the agricultural distress was met by the sale of small pro- 
 perties, which fell into the hands of embryo capitalists. But this only 
 made the lot of those farmers who held by their lands harder. The 
 small-holding system was doomed. 
 
 The spokesmen of the people attempted to maintain it ; the martyr 
 Cassius, the reformer Icilius, the unhappy Maelius and others. After 
 every success in war the policy was renewed. Veii fell, and the land- 
 scheme was pushed to the front by Camillus. Even the protagonists 
 of the senate essayed to bring into practice the grand system of 
 relief, and the result was M. Manlius. 
 
23 
 
 Manlius found the yeomanry, on whom Rome's victories depended, 
 in the most heartrending condition. Each new application of the 
 grand remedy of land-grants only made the peasant-occupier more 
 easy to enslave. He could sell out, on the chance of a new grant, 
 or he could be sold, addictus, to the claims of his creditor. As a 
 slave he might be treated kindly, for domestic, not capitalistic, slavery 
 was still in vogue, and he would not go to war. He might be left 
 to farm his own old lands, or he might be cut to pieces by his pitiful 
 creditors, a victim to a parasitic finance scheme of the state. 
 
 Manlius raised the standard of socialism and was executed ; but 
 he had introduced a new panacea — usury laws. An artificial system 
 of utterly ineffective land-grants had failed, in the face of an exchequer 
 which had but one expedient to raise its budget, the tributum. A new 
 cry was added to the popular vocabulary, and that was all. 
 
 The fall of Manlius was followed by a land-grant. The Praenestine 
 war turned the new coloni into mortgagees. Military colonisation 
 was the next step, and politically an effective one, forerunner of 
 empire. Economically it was but staving off the evil day. It made 
 latifundia more secure and for the time permanent. It induced mort- 
 gagees to take the surrender values of their possessiones, and capitalists 
 were often forced to become farmers on an extensive scale. It was a 
 good palliative, where radical change was needed. It was in fact a ver 
 sacrum, an expedient which never yet permanently benefited the 
 old country, though it emancipates the needier colonists. 
 
 However, a time for more effectual remedies was coming. The 
 wealthy plebeian, enriched by the interest, simple and compound, of 
 his investments in mortgages and loans, was anxious to grasp at 
 something more dignified in the way of office than a mere tribunate. 
 What interest had he in bringing aid to an indebted plebeian against 
 an aristocrat? was it not a case for ' ka me, ka thee'? 
 
 The wealthier commoners were in heart patrician ; their ambition 
 was official ascendancy. But how to obtain it ? They were rejected 
 at the elections by the practice of nominatio of a partisan character 
 on the part of the nobles. They could only share the glories of the 
 consulship by a constitutional right to one place. They could only 
 get that right by a popular agitation. That popular agitation de- 
 manded for the leaders, ut alter consilium e plebe. crearetur ; for the 
 followers, ne quis plus quam D Jugera agri possideret 1 , and the lanx 
 satura, which tacked together these two dissimilar rogations, was the 
 manifesto of Siolo and Sextius, which, after ten years agitation, 
 resulted in the Sextio-Licinian legislation of 367 B.C. Sextinus was 
 the consul elected, and the once popular tribune was the first man 
 condemned for violation of the law which was the popular side of 
 his propaganda. Such a charter won by such a man transformed 
 the political and economic position of Rome. The aristocracy of 
 wealth and office succeeded to that of birth. The latter was assailable 
 as prerogative ; the former was unassailable, save by some law to the 
 
 1 Liv. VI. 35. 
 
24 
 
 effect that a novus homo must be elected. The result was that the 
 senatorian ascendancy was reinforced from the opposing camp. The 
 optimates succeeded the nobiles, and presented an impenetrable phalanx 
 to the populares who were all that were left of the plebeii. And so 
 with the economic change ; it was important because private property 
 and perpetual tenancy on a 'precarian' basis derived from the regal 
 period, though previously all but identical, now became thoroughly 
 differentiated. As in England bookland and folkland were all but 
 equally secure, though state or king never surrendered certain rights 
 in the latter and demanded thegn-service, so Rome in the greater 
 part of her state-land given in ' possession ' claimed still an interest, 
 while private land was not to be usurped by the state. It was the 
 domain-land which was affected by the Licinian scheme. Henceforth 
 it became important whether land were leased by the state-officers— 
 usually the censors— or granted 'in possession,' i.e. as revocable 
 grants for an indefinite period, or ' assigned ' as absolute property. 
 
 The laws of Licinius and Sextius limited possessiones ; i.e. the adding 
 of field to field, to be remunerative to the forecloser of mortgages and 
 loans, must be of bookland or ager assignatus, and not of folkland, 
 of which consisted by far the greater portion of the Roman territory, 
 and which should have been made a standing treasury for the nation. 
 It is, we see, the old panacea. The enforcement of the Sextian 
 limit relieved for a time, but not permanently. No regular machinery 
 for the management of the ager publicus was provided ; accumulation 
 went on unchecked, for the magistrates did not enforce the laws, 
 the senate did not insist authoritatively, the public did not agitate 
 persistently, and their spokesmen apostatised. Possessio still became 
 ownership by prescription, and laws contemned were worse than 
 evils unforbidden. 
 
 But it may be questioned whether an artificial reconstruction of 
 the older system would have availed, even if sincere and well carried 
 out. At the time and for a time peasant-proprietorship, reinforced 
 by military colonisation and well defined schemes of indirect taxation, 
 might have subsisted by the side of a growing and grasping capitalism. 
 But a renewal of the old troubles, tributum and military service, would 
 have resulted in the old distress. That the landwehr should serve 
 in offensive campaigns at a distance and still pay a property-tax at 
 home, is enough to prove that the yeomanry could not have made 
 their footing good as a class against capitalistic system. It was the 
 policy of a city-state pursued by a state which was no longer a city ; 
 the policy of a commercial state enforced by a state which should 
 have found its strength in agriculture. It could not have survived 
 the Hannibalic war, scarcely the war with Pyrrhus. The vis medi- 
 catrix naturae does not extend to maintaining classes which bear 
 the burden of war and fighting their battles against the competition of 
 enterprising non-combatants. The widow is ousted from her possessio 
 by fraud or force, or she sells ; or the bread-winner, returning laden 
 with debt, finds himself unable, war-worn and wounded as he is, to 
 make headway against his difficulties, and sells or dies, leaving 'his 
 
2.5 
 
 or-phans, if they be not enslaved,, at best paupers. The homestead is 
 in any case given up, and the survivors, if free, are to be found swell- 
 ing the capite censi of the capital. Rome swallowed up the broken 
 fragments of what once looked like successful country-life. 
 
 The political result of the Sextian bills was therefore more en- 
 during than the economic; and the consolidation of the ranks of 
 officialism made further land-agitation for the time useless. The new 
 leaders of the populares accordingly took up the heroic remedy of 
 Manlius, and essayed to enforce usury-laws. The evils of usury, 
 though decidedly overrated in antiquity, are exceedingly grave in a 
 non-industrial state ; but legislation is to be deprecated for the very 
 strong reason that if money must be found it will be borrowed, and 
 the greater the risk to the lender the greater the versura he hopes to 
 make, i.e. usury-laws raise the price of loans, and so aggravate the 
 ills they are intended to palliate. This did not occur to the Romans, 
 with whom at first capital was scarce and interest high ; and accord- 
 ingly the decemviral legislation forbade any higher rate than unciarwm 
 fenus, 10% per annum. When, moreover, debt became the grievance 
 of the popular party, this measure became far too moderate, and 
 usury was first greatly reduced and then entirely forbidden by the 
 tribunician law of Genucius (341 B.C.). The result was, of course, 
 that hinted at above. The debtor, provided he was relieved tempo- 
 rarily by a little ready money, was willing, with the sanguine tempera- 
 ment which characterises his class, to promise anything. The interest 
 was charged as principal, with the mortgagee's full consent, and 
 distress continued.. 
 
 The lex Paetelia, which dealt with such evasions— the so-called 
 nexum frauds — soon became a dead letter. Debts were accredited 
 to fictitious socii against whom common law did not avail, and the 
 sums were recoverable in the equity court of the praetor peregrinus. 
 Other evasions soon followed; the agitation was checkmated, and 
 like the land-laws, contemptu abolitae, usury laws waxed obsolete. 
 The evil was allowed to draw to a head and destroyed the industrial 
 classes in the interests of a moneyed aristocracy. The yeomanry, 
 and in general the lo wer middle classes of Rome, died out. A few 
 rising above their order went to swell the ranks of the oplimates. The 
 rest flocked to Rome to form the clientele of rich men, to clamour 
 for gtat-p aH to h i r e nl1t as hrav nes, and ultimately to rule the streets, 
 and hasten despotism by annihilating government and society. We 
 have the proletariat of Caesarean Rome in the germ, the ' permanent 
 possibility of revolution' which demoralised the metropolis; and one 
 of the main causes is th^__cajik£XJ2L_d^b£whrch 1 _ate out the heart of 
 the Roman fa rmer ^class. 
 
 Not that the party-cry ceased, but it was ineffectual. It took the 
 ' socialistic ' form of novae tabulae, and it came in too sophisticated an 
 age for a Solonian owax&ia. In 90 B.C. the praetor Asellio was mas- 
 sacred by indignant creditors when he endeavoured to enforce obso- 
 lescent usury laws ; Lucullus had to limit compound indebtedness to 
 one alterum tantum of the principal. Cato's Jurcm dupli condemnari 
 
26 
 
 faeneratorem quadruple was impossible of accomplishment. Caesar 
 had in 49, after the troubled times of misgovernment and non-govern- 
 ment, to allow of and to enforce a partial xp cS>v a^oKoirn, and yet this 
 could not save the state from the terrible financial crisis of a.d. 33, 
 which was only alleviated by the public spirit of Tiberius. 
 
 What a catchword was afforded by the usury laws to a Sulpicius, a 
 Catiline, a Milo, or a Dolabella, is obvious. The evil at bottom was 
 that of ( ur^ej^jalJaxatiQn, not deliberate as in France before '89, but 
 ill-judged ; imposed perhaps in all good faith by men who did not 
 understand that the essence of equality in taxation is equality of sacri- 
 fice. It created debt and distress, crushed the middle-classes, and 
 recruited the mob of Rome, while the remedy offered gave the prole- 
 tariat a rallying point, and helped on that anarchy which Rome's 
 ' mixed government,' so bepraised by Polybius, originated. The hege- 
 mony of Roman power and of Greek culture, which was that historian's 
 ideal, was not to be furthered either by that same 'mixed govern- 
 ment' or by its economic policy, whether initiatory or remedial. 
 The chapter of indebtedness is a bad one and the account may be 
 closed. It was one, b ut onlv gnerimportant factor in Roman decadence. 
 And yet in after times the period which directly followed the 
 Paetelian law was looked upon as the beginning of Rome's real 
 greatness. Necti desierunt, and for the moment the tribune was silent 
 and the popular cause dormant. The magistrate had become con- 
 scious neither of his need of emancipation, nor of its glorious possi- 
 bilities, and the optimates were a new oligarchy, as yet not disunited 
 by the mutual repulsion of partial interests, or by the clashing of in- 
 dividual self-seekings. Senatorian rule had become a reality. It was 
 the quiet before the storm. 
 
 For evil was as yet only in the germ, and an artificial or temporary 
 harmony appeared in Rome. The 'periodic volcano of agitation' 
 was seething indeed, but not at fever-heat. As yet the disintegration 
 of government was arrested, and the demoralisation of society checked. 
 Moribus antiquis slat res Romana virisque, and this at a time when 
 remedial legislation for admitted evils was at an absolute discount, 
 and the virus was looked on as ineradicable. 
 
 Internal history does not explain the unruffled calm ; on the eve 
 of the democratic charter, the Hortensian law, Rome was at peace 
 with herself. The cause is to be looked for in external politics ; 
 Rome is staking her very life in the Samnite wars, and patriotism, if 
 a state be not wholly dead, is a saving salt to arrest decay, if not to 
 heal internal wounds. Rome, like Austria, Prussia, Spain, in 1808, 
 postpones old quarrels to national calls for union, and the Samnite 
 war, sullied as it is by the national dishonour at Caudium, vitalises 
 Roman government by the intense need for self-assertion. Only a 
 disheartened race is unequal to the demand for courage, and Rome 
 never lost heart. Economics were put aside for politics, i.e. for his- 
 tory in the present ; and in the internal records of Rome there is little 
 matter of note save the mad Claudian schemes of pseudo-democracy, 
 and the wise conservatism of Q. Fabius. 
 
27 
 
 Thirty-seven years of war left Rome victorious, and then followed 
 fresh agitation, but in a political direction rather than economical. 
 The plebeian charter was renewed if not extended in 287. The con- 
 quest consummated at Sentinum gave land in plenty for state-grants. 
 The law of debt had been abrogated by disuse in the hard times and 
 amid the financial difficulties of prolonged war, and the dearth of 
 political ideas prevented any new attempt at a solution of the eco- 
 nomic problem. The payment of the soldiers which, though it dated 
 from very early times (406 B.C.) was only gradually adopted in shorter 
 campaigns, and the beginning of indirect taxation relieved the pres- 
 sure. Land-grants postponed its recurrence. The effective portion 
 of the lex Paetelia partially silenced agitation, and the acquiescence 
 of the farmers in their exploitation, which found some vindication in 
 a continued home-war with prospects often worse than dubious, 
 closed for the time the old economic question. How would it again 
 emerge f 
 
 The war with Pyrrhus still kept the attention of all parties fixed on 
 external history, rather than on internal politics, and the strength and 
 value of senatorian government could still be scarcely over-estimated. 
 The aims, often inordinate and always all but inarticulate, of the 
 populates only expressed themselves in old formulae now utterly voided 
 of meaning. Yet for a moment the success of the government 
 seemed scarcely an adequate guarantee for its permanency. The 
 wars with .Carthage saved the s enate for a long period, and sealed 
 the doom of senatorian government. With the recognition of Rome 
 as one of the great powers, and with her collision with Carthage, a new 
 economic era begins. 
 
 The farmer had been ousted, and in the end not utterly in opposi- 
 tion to his own will. The horrors of creditor-law had been mitigated 
 in the one respect of personal enslavement, and both land -question 
 and capital-question had apparently disappeared. So too the comiiia 
 and the consuls were in this period successfully, and all but by their 
 own consent shelved, and constitutional questions were apparently 
 also buried. To what end then this narrative? Because the old 
 questions revive transformed, as scotched, not killed. The wars with 
 Carthage show Rome in her grandeur ; and at the same time display 
 the tendencies which result in her decadence. Politically and econo- 
 mically Carthage gave to Rome ' the shirt of Nessus x ' in the problem 
 of empire, for a state whose ' idea ' was civic, and in the problem of 
 capitalistic competition for a people whose ideal was domestic, i.e. in 
 the difficulty of combining extension with fulness, and of making the 
 old respublica and familia still intelligible when the one meant the 
 Mediterranean civilisation, and the other the plantation system. 
 Rome's mismanagement in the provinces was often inherited. Her 
 false policy, which construed praedia as praeda, and which, with other 
 elements of degeneracy, found place in C. Gracchus' plan of campaign, 
 was bequeathed by Hiero and by Carthaginian viceroys. But the evil 
 
 1 Mommsen. 
 
KttT 
 
 ca 
 
 38 
 
 lio X v« which we find adopted by Rome from Punic economy is 
 apijdisfefilaiej^ The disease which was to destroy Carthage should 
 destroy"Rome. 
 
 An account of the Punic Wars and their political results is here un- 
 necessary. An account of the wars in Greece is also needless. Rome 
 found herself imperial in the face of ' the fundamental defect of anti- 
 quity — that it never fully advanced from the civic form of constitution' 
 to a higher conception of the nature of a state ; and Rome found 
 herself capitalistic and bourgeois; in antagonism to another funda- 
 mental principle of antiquity that the v6\is and the olda were the 
 true units, and not each and any Titius or Seius. 
 
 The effect of this change was that aggregation took the place of 
 organisation politically, and the constitutional system broke down ; the 
 first condition of successful action on the part of a magistrate was 
 tacit rebellion— a Spinther hesitated and did nothing, a Gabinius 
 ignored all authority, and became arbiter of the fate of a nation. _ And 
 individualism or moral atomism superseded association economically. 
 The self-will and self-seeking of a citizen came to constitute his 
 effectiveness. The homestead as a unit disappeared, and with it the 
 ' economy ' and the morality of the older familia, its patriarchal sim- 
 plicity and its patria potestas. The place thus left void was filled by 
 the plantation, with the morality and economy of slaves and slave- 
 masters, with the division of labour to a point at which the individual : 
 ceased to be more than a wheel in a machine, and with the govern- 
 ment of the ergastulum. 
 
 The slavery of earlier times was at least excusable if not justifiable, 
 for domestic slavery was probably a moral advance, a substitution of 
 a milder doom for the savage wholesale butchery of prisoners which 
 had theretofore obtained. The merciful dispensation of slavery, how- 
 ever, began to lose its favourable aspect with the rise of bondage for 
 debt, a corrupt development which became the grievance of a success- 
 ful agitation. The defect had disappeared before the period of the 
 great wars, and at the commencement of the magnificent struggle in 
 which the prestige of the senatorian rule secured it an unconstitutional . 
 probuleutic power and a strong potentia with the executive, only do- 
 mestic slavery existed in the Roman state. Capitalism had only just 
 won the upper hand on the land question, and had been nominally 
 defeated on the bankruptcy bills, and the commercial revolution had 
 only begun. At the close of the great wars plutocracy was rampant, 
 and a web of plantations overspread the whole Roman system. 
 
 And the reason is obvious. Carthage was as unfitted for empire 
 as Venice or Amsterdam, and ruled in the interest of a mercantile 
 cabal. Government was in the hands of and for the advantage of 
 the slave-holders in a joint-stock company ; and hence, wherever the 
 sovereignty or protectorate of Carthage extended, capitalistic pro- 
 duction by slave-gangs and the whole machinery of the later Roman 
 economy were in full vogue. Rome, as Carthage shrunk into her 
 inmost fastnesses, was forced to take up the reins of government, 
 and she had no organisation ready. She developed one, but it was 
 
2 9 
 
 necessarily imperfect, and she could not give the essential of new life, 
 a free population. Her victories, substantial or petty, gave her 
 prisoners in plenty, and she utilised them to carry out the Cartha- 
 ginian scheme. She could not maintain a peasantry in Italy, much 
 less in Sicily and provinces more remote. And the result was a 
 slavery which was worse than death to the slave, and which brought 
 a nemesis with it. From the time of the battle of Zama, transmarine 
 corn, produced by slave-labour and at small cost except in human 
 life, was extensively imported by the Roman government. It was in 
 many cases grown by Roman monopolists, not under provincial re- 
 strictions; and the cost of transportation was cheaper than from 
 middle Italy. The development of the Padane valley as the granary 
 of Rome was for ever rendered impracticable. The government 
 sold to the proletariat at under cost price, or left the corn, never paid 
 for but received as a tithe in kind, to the lessees of the tithe, who 
 could still undersell even the capitalistic home-grower. The market 
 was at the same time lessened, for the armies were supplied by the 
 corn-payments of subjects, and so was the metropolis. Small farm- 
 ing, on possessiones too small for pasturage, was not to be dreamed 
 of. From Sicily, 'the chosen land of the plantation system,' the 
 Capitalistic slave-farming invaded Italy. Latifundia with summer 
 and winter pastures became the economic order in Italy. Italy 
 was depopulated, and a competitive sauve qui peut ruled with no 
 hope for the vanquished ; neque ullus procedeniis finis est, nisi cum 
 in alterum divilem inciderit. 
 
 The rise too of that competitive struggle, which is always the 
 reductio ad absurdum of a bourgeois political economy, was assisted 
 by further considerations. The blood-tax of prolonged war was 
 only paid by the more than decimation of the staple recruiting classes, 
 and the burden now fell also on the Italian ' allies.' The farmer in 
 social territory — or in Roman where he still existed — was required 
 for foreign service, and competition, always futile, was made doubly 
 hopeless by a compulsory absenteeism. His acres were swallowed 
 up by capitalism, and the agrestia per longinquos sal/us et ferocia 
 iervitia \ which roused the Roman spirit in Ti. Gracchus, and were 
 the standing problem of the disorganised Republic and of the Western 
 empire, succeeded. 
 
 And actual legislation did its work also. Flaminius, a true dema- 
 gogue, introduced or instigated, during the course of the Second 
 Punic War, the law known as the Claudian, prohibiting senators 
 from commerce or trade of any kind 2 and forbidding a senator to 
 undertake state contracts 3 (redemptiones). The senator who was 
 wealthy became, accordingly, a capitalistic grazier, with sheep-farms 
 as extensive as those of Southern Australia in a country so straitened 
 as Italy. The ' knight,' i. e. the eques or non-senatorian capitalist, 
 harried the provinces, as tax-gatherer, banker, or usurer, and where 
 he obtained magisterial sanction or connivance, wrung money from 
 
 1 Tac. Ann. iv. 27. 2 Liv. xxi. 63. 
 
 3 Dio. Iv. 10. 
 
3° 
 
 the unfortunate subjects. The senator revelled in the profits of 
 his latifundia, and scarcely felt the evil of depopulation and of a 
 slave-system which was the growing danger of the state. But Pliny 
 was right when, reading the riddle which the senate had failed to 
 answer, and interpreting the antecedents in the full light of the con- 
 sequents, he declared that latifundia perdidere Italiam. They were, 
 however, but one cause in the destruction, and only found full scope 
 under the empire when the metayer-tenancy of the colonaius was 
 applied in partial solution of the problem. Rome had in republican 
 days no semi-emancipation of shepherds and fossores to offer, for the 
 rural slaves were not sufficiently denationalised to make such an 
 alleviation of their lot safe. She emancipated city-slaves, however, 
 and increased the proletariat by the accession of liberli, of an anti- 
 Roman culture, to their ranks. She imposed a tax on emancipations 
 because they were not safe, but she found them necessary, and she 
 accordingly added to the de'classfc descendants of the old yeomanry, 
 and to the sophisticated petty tradesmen, and the disaffected artisans 
 of the city, freedmen without patriotism for Rome, and without ' 
 interest in the government. The freedmen reinforced the already 
 growing rabble, and joined in the empty party-cries of their patrons 
 or. of the tribunes. They forced on the development of that spirit 
 which demanded ' bread and the games ' as the price of order, and 
 which transformed Vielkinderei into pauperism. The proletariat be- 
 came an element of disturbance which defied police and was only to 
 be quieted by arms. The demand for a military tyranny was ber ; 
 coming effective, for in Rome as in the provinces the needs of the 
 time ' necessitated the appointment of governors whose position was 
 absolutely incompatible . . . with the Roman constitution V A virtual 
 dictatorship was perforce conceded to the great general of the day, 
 and not all proconsuls would refrain, like Scipio Aemilianus, from 
 turning their arms against the government itself. The senate was 
 fortunate in being saved, once and again, by this the greater of the 
 Scipiones, and by Sulla; but the autocracy of Aemilianus, with his 
 taceani quibus Italia noverca, and his sound judgment of Ti. Gracchus, 
 was the last opportunity for the arrest of the decline before it 
 became downfall. 
 
 But the riches of the equites, just after an exhausting war, require 
 some explanation, and it would seem to be this. The enormous 
 gold agio of the Hannibalic wars 2 , which was a species of national 
 bankruptcy, was not also repudiation, and the redemptiones of enor- 
 mous nominal sums undertaken by those who had money were 
 liquidated in full at the close of the war. The monopolists of the 
 gold-supply doubled, trebled and multiplied beyond belief their whole 
 fortunes, in the unprecedented tightness of the money-market. Those 
 fortunes they invested, when the war was over, in the advancing of 
 taxes to the state. They farmed the taxes and turned over their 
 money again and again, and not always too honestly. And they 
 
 1 Mommsen, iii. cap. n, vol. II. p. 337. 2 Pliny, H. N. xxxiii. 13. 
 
3i 
 
 became a rival order to the senate and, though always ' ballasting 
 the restlessness of discontent with the salutary inertia of . . . self- 
 interest,' their ideal was a police under the influence of a moneyed 
 aristocracy, rather than a strong oligarchy. When C. Gracchus 
 licipiiem civitatemfecit x , and boasted that he had brought in an apple 
 of discord 2 , he was only making explicit an implicit rivalry which 
 must have resulted in disunion and struggle. By the judiciary laws 
 the ordo equester sat in judgment on those who were the only check 
 on the extreme operation of the joint-stock company principle of 
 imperial administration. C. Gracchus wittingly hastened the end, as 
 by his lex frumentaria he hastened the evolution of the rioters of 
 the reign of terror, as by his military law he dissolved the only natural 
 principle which could maintain the citizen-army united, and as by his 
 proposed Italian franchise he would have swamped the comitia 
 beyond salvation. That he was ' a political incendiary with a con- 
 suming passion for vengeance s ' is probably true, for all these 
 measures traversed the family-policy of agrarian reform. That ' he 
 wished ... to introduce ... a Tyrannis, that is ... a monarchy . . . 
 of the Napoleonic absolute type — in the form of ... an unlimited 
 tribuneship for life ' is almost certainly false, for he must have seen 
 that any proconsul could have crushed him in a week, or at most 
 a month. C. Gracchus is only important to us as rendering the 
 political government disunited, and exposing its weakness, when only 
 concentration and apparent strength could save it ; as showing, or at 
 least attempting to show, the impotence of democracy ' in a Common- 
 wealth which had outgrown collective assemblies and had no know- 
 ledge of parliamentary government ' ; as proving the impossibility in 
 a ' popular ' magistrate of carrying the state by a tour de force ; in 
 opening a way for economic evils to have free course, by pauperising 
 the proletariat and withal exhausting the treasury, and paying a 
 premium to idleness ; in fine, by making explicit each and all of the 
 evils, economic and political, which were at bottom responsible for 
 the state's decadence. C. Gracchus, according to this reading of his 
 character, is at first a socialist; at last a nihilist. He may have 
 honestly believed that the only solution of the problem of wealth and 
 want was a chaos which should in the fulness of time give way to 
 a new cosmos. But he was the Bakunin of Rome. 
 
 The digression is not unimportant, for C. Gracchus was, in a sort, 
 the projection of all the fatal tendencies of the decline, and their 
 embodiment in a personal influence. The proletariat was ready to 
 hand, and he made that underselling of the Italian farmer customary 
 which had been exceptional. He confirmed the demoralisation of the 
 city and the wasting of Italy. The senate was on the verge of de- 
 struction, and he lent it a hand for the leap into the abyss. The 
 army was declining and he destroyed it, leaving the stage clear for 
 the work of Marius. Discontent, and that 'cheap courage which 
 
 1 Varro. * Cic. Leg. iii. 9. 20. 
 
 3 V, Mommsen, iv. cap. 3, vol. III. pp. 119-120. 
 
32 
 
 risks the goods of others' were rife, and he gave them voice. He 
 presided over the baphometic baptism of the coming Terror. 
 
 In his brother we have a less original reformer, and a less able 
 man. Ti. Gracchus exposed the evil of the plantation system, but the 
 remedy he proposed was one which had been rejected as inadequate. 
 He was no nihilist, but he tried to revive the laid ghost of the con- 
 stitution in an appeal to the plebs, and the obsolete agrarianism of the 
 Licinian rogations by a family-commission for a yrjs dvaSaa-ftot. In his 
 first movement he was successful, for the senate, if materially right* 
 was formally wrong ; but he spoilt the whole effect of his programme 
 by the deposition of Octavius. He gave a precedent which justified 
 Gabinius in working on the faintheartedness of the tribune Trebellius, 
 and which carried the Gabinian law. He justified, again, the Vatinian 
 plebiscite, and emancipated Pompeius, and gave Caesar Gaul. &>s 
 
 airoKoiro Ka\ a\Xos oris TOtavrd ye pe£ot. 
 
 In his second movement he failed, except in giving temporary relief 
 to the distressed, and in raising for a time the census. Polybius had 
 said that a distribution of land, such as that carried into effect by 
 Agis III of Sparta, and by Ti. Gracchus, was the last evil of ochlo- 
 cracy ; but he had not seen the Gracchi, and he even underestimated 
 the effect. The revival of the Licinian bill against all prescription, in 
 an age when what was wealth in 367 was esteemed poverty, and when 
 peasant-properties had utterly failed, was not only absurd but iniquit- 
 ous. The senators had been forced by the lex Claudia to become 
 landowners in their own despite, and their vested interests should have 
 been valid. It was therefore a flagrant invasion of rights which was 
 moreover utterly ineffectual, and can only be treated as a dangerous 
 panacea offered by a charlatan. 
 
 This was not the means to use in the solution of the social problem. 
 The evil lay deeper in that proletariat which had been created by the 
 wars, taxation and usury of early days, and had been stereotyped by 
 the legacy of Carthage — an empire ruined by stock-broking, a stock- 
 broking system cursed with empire. The proletariat had been modi- 
 fied by the constant wars and the constant use of the vindicta. It 
 had been demoralised by prices permanently under cost of production. 
 It had been brutalised by the gladiatorial shows which made the lot of 
 the s\a.ve-/amlh'a harder. And with this monster Ti. Gracchus tried 
 the spell which had been proved powerless ages before. The first 
 Gracchan reform bill was directly occasioned by the first Sicilian slave- 
 war, and to this perhaps is owing the slight glimmer of understanding 
 which appears in the extension of possessiones by a sort of jus liberorum. 
 But the slave-system is not hinted at, much less controlled ; and in 
 that and in the city mob, or in their common causes lay the evil. 
 
 Ti. Gracchus was the socialist of the revolution, as his brother was 
 the nihilist. Though his socialism was not explicit, it appears in the 
 germ. He caused rich and poor to confront one another definitely as 
 in hostile camps. He showed the impotence of the individual who 
 had no property ' to interpret himself to himself.' He renewed the 
 democratic pretensions of the lower orders, and he directly caused a 
 
33 
 
 shaking or perplexing of public opinion in its feeling of right. And 
 all this without a positive propaganda. 
 
 Gaius followed and denied the necessity of any such propaganda, 
 burning simply for blood-letiing to clear the way for the evolution of 
 the state ab initio. The decline was accomplished, the facilis descensus 
 was changing into praeceps ruina, when the leaders of the Roman state 
 were such apostles of anarchy. 
 
 We have thus far looked on the proletariat as the outcome of the 
 false economy of Rome. Let us now turn to the other side of the 
 medal, and review the ordo equester and their chattels in the same light. 
 The temporary emergencies of the Hannibalic war had created a class 
 such as was evolved under the empire by the permanent gold-shrink- 
 age, and with like tendencies and ambitions, those of a Crassus to 
 wit, or a Didius. But under the empire the question of depopulation 
 became important, not only in reference to the army and to morality, 
 but in respect to national existence ; and the appreciation of human 
 life prevented the horrors of slavery reaching to their present ex- 
 tent. Slaves they must have, for the Roman people would not work 
 for hire — they were the ' mean whites ' of Virginian civilisation almost 
 exactly, and bread was dear, flesh and blood cheap. The whip, the 
 ergastulum, and the cross became familiar. The slaves in desperation 
 rose in Sicily in 134 b. c, and again in 104. The gladiator-slaves 
 under Spartacus ravaged Italy, all but unchecked, and Crassus stepped 
 from the praetor's court to the praetor ium to -quell revolution. And 
 this in spite of daily emancipations restrained, perhaps wisely, by tax, 
 and in spite of — perhaps in consequence of — daily executions. Italy 
 was ripe for change, wherever the slave could hope for liberty, and 
 the free-man for quiet. The supply of the slave-market was scarcely 
 kept up by the slave-hunts — wars the triumphators styled them — of 
 Rome in the East. Every new slave brought with him an earnest 
 hatred to Rome and to the orders senatorius et equester, the incarna- 
 tion of the hateful system. The demand grew greater and greater ; 
 the lot of the chattel harder and harder. ' Slavery alone would have 
 wrecked Rome, had the slave-owners been a nobler race. But they 
 were essentially immoral. Their gains were sterile — commercial at 
 best, never industrial. They did not even fulfil the mission of modern 
 
 ' stock-exchange speculators, and equate supply and demand present 
 and future ; for supply was furnished without price, and demand was 
 glutted by corn and oil, and shows. They understood finance, but 
 they practised it solely for private ends. They turned money over the 
 
 •listophorus question, they established their bimetallic contracts on 
 a sound footing, they farmed taxes,- and a Verres was their patron and 
 intimate, a Rufus their scapegoat. They would starve out the corpo- 
 ration of an indebted township, and bring it to terms. They would 
 take advantage of Roman privilege in their dealings with subject-races, 
 and would expect Roman privilege to be permanent. They drew 
 
 ' their wealth from the provinces or the country, and they brought it all 
 to Rome. ' They centralised the commerce of the empire in the hall 
 of their stock-exchange, and they decentralised the government of the 
 
 c 
 
34 
 
 empire in order to scramble for the spoils. They had only self- 
 interest at heart, and self-interest is proverbially shortsighted. The 
 slaves turned against the old orders in the century of civil war, and 
 were the instruments of the proscription, and though the orders con- 
 tinued, they were decimated, their goods were depreciated, their 
 fortunes sapped. Julius, Octavian, and Tiberius struck a blow at in- 
 direct taxation per publicanos, and the or do equesler as well as the senate 
 were plundered freely. If there was a justification for the Roman 
 revolution, it is to be found especially in this, that it dealt out a richly 
 deserved humiliation and retribution to a blood-guilty capitalism. 
 
 We have referred often to the change which took place in the army. 
 It was the last step in the internal, the first in the external revolution. 
 The decay of the yeomanry before the Punic Wars was at their close 
 virtual extinction. The armies were then recruited from constantly 
 lower classes. The capite censi, once only summoned for naval or 
 inferior service, were called into the field. In the time of Polybius the 
 classis of from uoo to 4000 asses was called into active warfare, and 
 this despite depreciation and adulteration of the coinage. In the time 
 of C. Gracchus military service is no longer a privilege of the burgess, 
 but a burden to be shared, if possible, with the socii. All this tended 
 to demoralise the army, and to denationalise it, and consequently, 
 before Numantia, Aemilianus has to create his army : Metellus has to 
 make an army in Numidia. The aristocratic cavalry is a burden 
 rather than a service to the general. He establishes a volunteer 
 bodyguard in the praetoriani. The national army is doomed. 
 
 But the national army is the universus populus of the centuriate 
 comitia, and with the army must fall the populus. And the senate falls 
 with the constitution, only the new power will need an imperium 
 which is valid, and so a new army. 
 
 The slave-war of 134 B.C., and the disasters against Jugurtha and 
 against the Cimbri prove that the decline has in this direction run it's 
 .course. Had Viriathus lived, he would have saved Numantia, and 
 severed Spain from the empire, as Sertorius did, for his lifetime. Had 
 Jugurtha been a Masinissa, or still more a Hannibal, Africa would 
 have been torn from Roman hands, and Rome herself might have 
 fallen. Rome must have an army or abdicate her sovereignty in the 
 empire, in the nation, even in the city. Marius saves Rome by 
 inventing the instrument of her destruction, the cohortial army. 
 Milites scribere non more major um neque ex classibus, sed ubi cujusque 
 cupido .erat, capite censos plerosque \ The army is formed by enlist- 
 ment. A soldier's training is made common and professional. A 
 soldier serves and looks to his leader as a despotic chief whom he 
 must obey ; he learns to be orderly, and to submit to discipline ; he 
 sees the intolerable anarchy of Rome ; and he sees the necessity for 
 Marius, or Pompeius, or Caesar, their quick decision and their 
 power at the head of affairs. Marius made the army, and reaped 
 Metellus' laurels in Numidia. He defeated the Cimbri, and became 
 
 1 Sail. Jug. 86. 
 
35 
 
 virtual dictator. He had no political genius and he failed ; but others 
 would not fail. What matters it whether it were Lucullus, or a Pom- 
 peius, or a Caesar that was successful, a Moreau, a Joubert-Dumouriez 
 or a Napoleon? Much doubtless to the empire. Nothing to dying Rome'. 
 
 The army was evolved. The Quirites were dissolved. The social 
 war swamped them politically and, having no further military character, 
 they could be of no further effectiveness. The senate's mismanage- 
 ment was responsible for the troubles. Individuals reaped the laurels 
 of the restoration. The time was come, and Sulla seized it ; but for 
 his cause, not for himself. Pompeius was more selfish, but incom- 
 petent, and Caesar triumphed. 
 
 Could Sulla have saved the republic ? for if he could, the decline 
 must be traced through the Ciceronian age. He could -not. His 
 frivolity and his indifferentism in morals cause him to be suspected of 
 lack of thoroughness, but the suspicion is unjust. He left the slavery, 
 the proletariat, the freedmen, the Italians, the proscribed, the 
 politically annihilated ' ordo equester,' the discontented veterans ; the 
 marshals of the civil war; but could he have removed any of these 
 fatal obstacles to the reaction ? 
 
 After C. Gracchus, certainly not. The new army was a necessity 
 for any strong government; and the old scheme of land-grants, re- 
 duced to an absurdity by Ti. Gracchus, in opposition to the whole 
 trend of Roman history, was used wisely but in vain, to render it 
 quiescent. The marshals were a necessity, for Sertorius and Lepidus, 
 to say nothing of Mithradates, survived. The proletariat and the 
 slaves were made the constants of revolution by the Gracchan reforms. 
 The Italians were an irreducible element in the state after 89, and 
 were also necessary in Sulla's scheme to abrogate, potentially at least, 
 the comitia. The continued existence of the equites was necessary; 
 for they supplied the organisation of the empire more than the 
 senate itself, and should they have been totally massacred? And 
 finally the ' animadvei;sio in post futuros,' though to be deprecated, 
 seems to have been rather the expression of the undying hatred of 
 his party to the promoters of the civil war, than anything personal 
 to Sulla, and necessary for a generation at least in order to prevent 
 a new coup d'etat. On the constitutional side he perceived the mistakes 
 and the radical faults of the state-machinery, and remedied ihem ; 
 he had only failed in two things, he had not taken account of the 
 verdict of the Zeitgeist in favour of imperialism as against nation- 
 alism, or still more as against civicism. He still thought of imperium 
 civile; he had not reckoned with the inherent inadequacy of sena- 
 torian government to maintain itself under the new ' historic category'; 
 he could not see that it would be unable to control its pashas, and 
 that it could not exist except as ' the old constitution,' which under 
 Sulla it was not. 
 
 Or if he saw and recognised that the evils objected were ineradic- 
 able, and that restored by force it must be retained by force, he must 
 have shrugged his shoulders with Epicurean calmness and murmured 
 the Greek- equivalent for Apres woi le deluge. 
 
 C 2 
 
3« 
 
 To sum up, then, the economic side of Roman decadence, we 
 see the origin of the evil in the extinction of the middle classes— a 
 fact which brought with it its own punishment in the decline of the 
 landwehr and the necessity for those armies which became the 
 merely personal followings of great leaders, and which slew no less 
 than six leaders during the ' civil war,' notably Flaccus, Cinna, and 
 Carbo ; which enacted in fact the part of the praetorians under the 
 emperors. 
 
 From the decay of the middle classes dates the rise of the prole- 
 tariat. It became impossible for the man of small means to maintain 
 himself in the competition of capitalists, often assisted by direct 
 legislation in favour of the strong holder. The proletariat grew, 
 idled, and talked ; slaves did its work, and the plantation system 
 appeared. Emancipations changed the character of the proletariat 
 for the worse ; it became the grand cause of anarchy ; it was organ- 
 ised into clubs and claques ; it took bribes, and bullied and blustered 
 for pay. It showed the incompetence of the old government, and 
 became gradually an Adullamite party which was a good recruiting 
 ground for the army of an imperalor — the criminal, the spendthrift, 
 the profligate and the like constituted a nucleus of political discontent. 
 Ti. Gracchus faced the evils, and attempted to combat the Hydra with 
 the wooden sword of ' the vice in the old comedy.' For a time, if 
 statistics are reliable, he stopped depopulation, but he invented fatal 
 constitutional precedents and died a martyr in the cause of the im- 
 possible. And he left a socialistic negative propaganda to those who 
 might come after. 
 
 C. Gracchus, of malice aforethought, plunged the sovereign people 
 into the depths of dehumanised pauperism. He taught them to lay 
 their hands on provincial revenues; and to play off merchant prince 
 and hereditary noble one against the other. He abolished corporal 
 punishment anew, when it was most needed. He deposed the senate, 
 roused Italy to fierce agitation, and accomplished nothing but the 
 prelude to an amorphism which to the nihilist implies a perfect 
 irakiyycveoia. He gave a perfect exposition of the revolution, and died 
 to give it what it needed, a conscious martyr. 
 
 Marius made a new army out of the material to hand ; Gladiators, 
 slaves, Italians became soldiers and citizens during the bustling period 
 that followed. The nation longed for peace, the provinces for relief, 
 the less well-disposed longed for a struggle and a scramble. The 
 Struggle came, and after it the peace; a Cato is the caricature of 
 senatorianism, a Crassus of mercantilism, a Spartacus of the plan- 
 tation system, a Verres of provincial administration, a Clodius of the 
 mob-rule, a Pompeius of the new militarism ; and the onesided views 
 represented by all these gave way before Caesar's political and eco- 
 nomic genius, which yet failed to grasp all or nearly all the detail 
 of the decline of which he was the outcome. Victrix causa deis and 
 not too soon. 
 
 Such is the account of Roman decline which we have to offer. 
 But what, it may be asked, supposing this to be the whole account 
 
37 
 
 of the decay, — what shall we say of the judgment of Romans them- 
 selves 1 , that irreligion, luxury, cosmopolitanism, bribery, falsity, im- 
 morality, were the true causes of Rome's downfall ? 
 
 In our view they are rather effects and symptoms than truly efficient 
 causes. And they are symptoms of degeneracy from the good old 
 times, which are noted by historians haphazard, and each with an 
 exaggerated prominence, and an emphasis which the original writers 
 would probably disown. ' The man died of gout ' is a fair expression 
 of a certain fact, but on analysis it amounts only to this : he died of 
 that for which gout is the outward and visible sign, and of which gout 
 is even an outlet and a remedy. We will, however, consider them 
 briefly, in turn. 
 
 Doubtless it was an evil day for Rome when the Senates consultum 
 de Bacchanalibus was needed ; no doubt the introduction of eastern 
 orgiastic worships into the capital was in a sense the ruin of one more 
 pillar of conservatism. It is equally true, too, that the religious char- 
 latanism, which so infected society as to cause a Marius to advise with 
 his sorceress, a Sertorius to masquerade with his white doe, was a 
 sad sign of changed times. The scandals of 1 14 b. c. and of 61 were 
 similar symptoms of grave degeneracy, but to attach a serious im- 
 portance to them as efficients is, we think, to label antecedents as 
 causes much too hastily. 
 
 The adoption of Greek philosophy by the Scipionic circle, the 
 philosophical scepticism of Lucretius, the pantheism which we find 
 under the empire in Lucan 2 are politically not on a level with the 
 AufMarung expounded by Voltaire and Rousseau ; and in the same 
 way Isis and Cybebe might perhaps depose Jupiter, but their votaries 
 did not carry their propaganda into a war on Terminus. Such things 
 are to be regarded as proofs of the way in which Rome had become 
 a colluvies of the nations, and nothing more. 
 
 There was a really effective irreligion, but it was of an early intro- 
 duction. It was that which prostituted priestly offices and functions 
 to political purposes, and which brought in the Aelia et Fufia for its 
 palladium ; that desecration of the auspices and other spiritual sur- 
 vivals of the old Etruscan state-religion to purposes for which, after 
 the days of the first sacred wars, the Greeks 3 had seldom used even 
 oracles. It was, however, in the days of the most successful rule that 
 Rome ever enjoyed, — that of the Carthaginian war-time — that this 
 irreligious system of auspices and spectiones is found in its full 
 vitality. 
 
 And luxury, too, is at least as much an effect as a cause. Luxury 
 may have helped to destroy the empire, but it in no sense ruined the 
 republic — and this despite Montesquieu's judgment* that in a common- 
 wealth luxury is fatal because against equality — in a monarchy helpful 
 within limits as distinguishing classes. 
 
 1 V. Lucan Phars. i. 158-182 ; Sail. Cat. 10-13, etc - 
 
 2 E.g. ix. 580. 
 
 s For an instance to the contrary, see Thuc. v. 54. 
 4 Espr. des Lois, vii. 4. 
 
 C3 
 
3» 
 
 Doubtless the aviaries and fishponds, the entertainments and 
 spectacles, the villas and familiae which prompted that catena of 
 sumptuary legislation which begins with the lex Orchia and does not 
 close with the lex sumptuaria Augusti 1 show at the least the existence 
 of a grave evil. Legislators strove to preach it down and drive it 
 under cover, and yet we have the debts of Curio, of Antonius, of 
 C. Caesar himself. A Catiline, a Milo and a Dolabella essayed to save 
 themselves and the Jeunesse dore'e by a resort to novae tabulae. Never- 
 theless it is to be doubted whether, in a pre-industrial age, the 
 excesses were beyond legitimate expectation, and whether they were 
 really harmful in any marked degree. 
 
 We are not, of course concerned to offer an apology for luxury in 
 general, even as constituting a rational reserve fund for times of 
 exceptional distress; but surely there was much excuse for Rome. 
 Was not the luxury which prevented the capitalistic racking of the 
 provinces and the afforestation of Italy from an indefinite extension 
 even a blessing ? The Romans had not studied industrial policy, but 
 they at least understood usury, and the comes or attache of a provincial 
 governor was perhaps less of a curse than the respectable Atticus or 
 the moral Brutus. A Roman bill of fare as described by Macrobius * 
 or in ' Peregrine Pickle ' involved at all events a demand for labour in 
 the better sense, and ' enriched in passing many an industrious hand, 
 and supported more poor than philanthropy with its expenditure of 
 aims Y and many more than the capitalistic speculation of the second 
 century b. c. 
 
 With cosmopolitanism we need hardly deal ; for save through the 
 fatal capitalistic slavery of declining Rome, cosmopolitanism would 
 never have found a real inlet ; and with its cause we have already 
 become familiar. As an element in demoralisation it is a secondary, 
 not a primary cause. But what of bribery and corruption ? 
 
 Here, too, we see symptoms not causes of decay — ' invariable con- 
 comitants ' which are yet not important factors in the result, of which 
 they are, indeed, rather the creations. In so far as they are part and 
 parcel of the political system, they come under the economic develop- 
 ment of the proletariat, and so far only are they even of importance in 
 Roman history. A Verres is a plague-spot in a nation, but a Verres 
 and men like Verres are genuine products of Roman political and 
 economic civilisation. The emancipated magistrate who must face an 
 eiBwrj before publicani and negotiatores, if he have sufficient wicked- 
 ness in him naturally becomes a Verres. Verrinum jus is, in the 
 decline, a specialised version of jus Romanum. 
 
 So, too, the long list of enactments de repetundis, and the very exist- 
 ence of the divinatio as a regular feature of judicial procedure, may be 
 and are ill-omened, but they are palliatives of an evil ingrain, of which 
 we have treated. For the rest, bribery did little or no harm. The 
 populus was proletarian, and without hope of becoming by reform 
 or by revolution an efficient in government, and the bribes of a 
 
 1 Tac. iii. 54; A. Gell.ii. 24. * hi. 13. 
 
 3 Mommsen, v. 11, vol. IV. p. 507. 
 
39 
 
 Crassus no more pauperised them than the frumentaria lex of a 
 Gracchus. Among a pauper-mob they might even do good, for they 
 might divert capital from the enslavement, by compound indebtedness, 
 of industrial subject communities \ 
 
 The really harmful bribery, then, was not that of the elections ; 
 while that of the law-courts was, until Rome was actually tottering 
 to its fall, only that of the extortion-^aawAo, and that was a product, of 
 the system. Nor was it otherwise with general political corruption. 
 The buying of elections, which called forth the law of 159, was, in the 
 complex of anomalies which went to form the Roman state, perhaps 
 even a postponement of the decline, for it might conduce to the 
 continuance of senatorian ascendancy. And when we reach the dis- 
 graceful private bribery of 54 b.c 2 , fully analysed by Montesquieu 3 , 
 republican Rome had really ceased to be. ' Bribery and corruption,' 
 then, and any ' ambition ' which went beyond liberalitas and lenignitas 
 according to the delicate phrasing of the laws, might and did affect the 
 discount rate i , but for anything else they were powerless. 
 
 Among the catchwords which we have taken haphazard the next 
 perhaps is of most importance. Falsity, by which we understand the 
 plus quam Punica fides of Rome, begins early with the Caudine disaster ; 
 but then it has some extenuating circumstances. Later, bad faith 
 had a precedent which might have taught the nations not to treat with 
 a magistrate, but only with Rome. But it is nevertheless impossible 
 to deny that the honour of Rome ' was permanently dragged in the 
 mire by a perfidy and faithlessness without parallel, by the most wanton 
 trifling with capitulations and treaties 6 ,' the most flagrant instances of 
 which are the treaty of a Pompeius with the Numantines in 139, and 
 the state-repudiation of Mancinus in 137, in which latter case not only 
 the consul — a man not received in the leading aristocratic coteries, 
 and therefore sacrificed as an outsider — but every officer who had 
 sworn to the treaty should have been given up. 
 
 There is no excuse, moreover, to be offered, save that ' international 
 law ceases just where universal monarchy begins,' i.e. that a Napoleonic 
 eagerness for victory blinds states to right, and makes them grasp at 
 every subterfuge on the ground that all is fair in love or war. As, 
 however, international conventions were scarcely recognised, and 
 Phoenician and Greek are tainted with the same fault, and as even in 
 modern times — notable in our own self-assertion against Denmark 
 which issued in Nelson's victory at Copenhagen — the rights of bel- 
 ligerents have often been held extremely doubtful, we may perhaps 
 dismiss ' bad-faith ' as a cause of Roman decline, or, at least, of 
 Roman decline specially ; though, no doubt, it avenged itself,— possibly 
 in the murder of Cn. Pompeius. 
 
 Our last formula still remains to be considered — the somewhat 
 wide term ' immorality.' Was immorality, then, in any large sense 
 
 1 Cf. Sail. Cat. 40 ; Tac. Ann. iii. 40 ; Dio. lxii. 2. 
 
 * Cic. ad Att. iv. 18. 3 Grand, et Dec. des Romains, cap. 10. 
 
 > Cic. ad Att. iv. 15. 
 
 5 Mommsen iv. cap. 1. vol. III. p. 61. 
 
4° 
 
 a vera causa of the fall of the Roman Republic ? We venture to think 
 not, though in its reflex action on the causes and occasions of the 
 decline it is of a graver importance than most of the elements with 
 which it has been classed. It deserves, therefore, a somewhat more 
 detailed attention. 
 
 The idea of immorality that is in the minds of those who hold 
 that the fall of a nation is usually a national judgment for a national 
 sin, is one which comprises in a single view that festering mass of 
 evil which appears, for example, in Cicero's speech on behalf of 
 Cluentius. We take it to mean unfaith and unchastity in all their 
 varied consequences ; and in respect of these the brief against Rome 
 is a grave one. 
 
 For the old Roman domestic ideals had, long before the days of 
 Caesar, died completely out. Before the revolution was well begun, a 
 censor could expound the cynical theory that si sine uxore possemus, 
 quiriles, esse, omnes ea moleslia careremus 1 , and the doctrine could 
 gain the adhesion of Cato of Utica 2 . Celibacy had to be dis- 
 countenanced by actual disabilities and by premiums on marriage, 
 such as were the old uxorium or bachelor-tax, the jus liberorum con- 
 ceded in the programme of Ti. Gracchus, the compulsory marriage 
 urged by Metellus 3 , and the nokvTraiSias adXa of Gaius Julius' first 
 consulship. Marriages de convenance and divorces were common, as 
 the cases of Pompeius, of Cicero, and of Caesar himself amply prove. 
 Women were emancipated, and their liberty was license ; Praecia, 
 the mistress of Cethegus, could appoint to provincial commands, as 
 in the case of Lucullus i ; Clodia had an equal or a worse influence ; 
 Fulvia and Sempronia 5 prove in the downfall how far moral cor- 
 ruption had spread. Isis worship, and the like, gained increasing 
 hold of Rome. The worst immoralities flourished, and openly. And 
 in the face of a threatening depopulation, all the sins of a sophisticated 
 metropolis ran their course. 
 
 But we think it would yet be a mistake to erect these vices of the 
 declining Roman people into the principal scourge which hastened 
 the revolution. It is not a case of the Theban clubs in the time of 
 Polybius, and it is an evil which has still to run its course under Nero 
 and Domitian. From the dates too of our examples it will be seen 
 that the most striking cases are of a date later than the consummation 
 of the decline, and the beginnings of revolution. We shall perhaps, 
 then, not be wrong in attributing the growth of Roman demoralisation 
 to that capitalistic system which imported the corrupter elements of 
 more infected societies as slaves, and which made Rome a Greek city, 
 full of pliant parasites and sycophants who won their freedom by their 
 supple complaisances and introduced libertinism. ' And if so, immo- 
 rality, like the rest, becomes a secondary element in the decadence. 
 
 1 Metellus Numidicus ap. A. Gell. i. 6. 2. 2 Lucan ii. 388 sqq. 
 
 3 Cf. Cic. de Off. ii. 21 Non esse in republica duo millia hominum qui rem 
 haberent, etc. Capitalism and the proletariat necessitated an artificial policy to 
 create a middle class. 
 
 4 Dio. xliii. 25. 5 Sall Cat 2g 
 
41 
 
 Why, then, mention elements in Roman demoralisation which are not 
 to be classed as causes or reasons for the decline ? There are many 
 grounds for so doing; firstly, they are noteworthy as showing the 
 effects of the Roman system, and, negatively, its sins of omission, 
 for ' in all moral machinery the moral results are the test V And 
 again, they are remarkable as showing that the state was sapped 
 down to its very foundation, since the principium of Rome was sternly 
 moral. They prove, too, the hopelessness of regeneration, when all 
 alike shared in the rottenness ; they demonstrate the need for a tabula 
 rasa when all things political, economic, social and moral are hope- 
 lessly blurred. Or again, they are of value, since though effects, 
 they must react, if a state be not merely mechanical but organic. And 
 if none of these reasons are adequate, yet ' distinguendo copulentur' 
 since they round off Roman life, by touching — lightly and superficially 
 perhaps, but still touching — on the sins and failures of every class. 
 For these reasons, then, a consideration of these so-styled factors in 
 the decline is not unjustified. 
 
 Leaving side-issues, however, the reason for Roman decline seems 
 to lie in this : the Roman constitution was compounded, but not 
 blended ; mixed, but not harmonised. It was a system of partial 
 expressions of the political will, of which each was artificially and mor- 
 bidly developed to limit the others, but none was in iiself efficient or 
 self-determinant. 
 
 The result was that reform was from the first incongruous and all 
 but inconceivable, for it meant reconstitution ; and all measures for 
 the prevention of decline were accordingly partisan, onesided, and 
 personal. Economic legislation appeared indeed, at an early date, in 
 the department of finance, and robbed one element in the state of 
 its vitality without destroying it; the populus was paralysed by the 
 tributum, only galvanised by the evolution of the tributa comitia and 
 the tribunate, and yet it dragged on an existence, objectless and 
 devoid of any true aim. The first proletariat which represented 
 it was a disorganised vKr\ • and later ensued a poisoning of the v\fi 
 itself. The protoplasm of the state was, from an early date, utterly 
 corrupted. 
 
 And yet the senate, which for the time controlled the magistrate, 
 could not reach a real organisation and self-determination. While it 
 prevented the upward evolution of populus and plebs, and made the 
 nucleation of the organic life of the community in the magistracy an 
 impossibility, it could not secure any permanent independent life for 
 itself. It did not assimilate, and therefore necessarily degenerated, 
 except when its environment called for a real self-assertion when 2 it 
 gained renewed vitality. It was not a ' tactical ' principle in govern- 
 ment, and it failed to form a consistent n^ikirda. The magistrates, too, 
 who might have formed the state, were long powerless, because of the 
 
 1 Burke. 
 
 * On Dcubleday's principle of population, which is in part a truism, if in part 
 untrue. 
 
42 
 
 disintegration, the non-unitary character of the magistracy as a centre 
 of organisation. They could not disencumber themselves of the dead 
 mass of popular tendencies, which they could nevertheless by no 
 means assimilate ; nor could they overcome the organised imperium 
 in imperio — the senate which was their council. 
 
 The magistrates were undoubtedly the only formative element in 
 the state, for only with the possibility of an effective dempcracy, 
 primary or representative, could the populus, and of course the plebs, 
 become more than vXij; and while lying between these two ideals — one 
 its Eden, the other its Paradise — the populus was extinguished. And 
 the senate was dumb and paralysed, except when it used other mouth- 
 pieces and hands ; it was in no sense formative. 
 
 And so when thepopulus became proletarian, and its hopeful elements 
 died out with the growth of agrarian distress and usury and taxation and 
 militarism, and when no ' Colbertism ' could prevent that decay of the 
 yeomanry which was the bane of antiquity, the senate attempting an 
 organic creation failed ; for it needed something more than its bastard 
 animation to enable it to convert matter into life. And there was left 
 only the magistrate. But there was schism in the magistracy, and a 
 double or multiple organisation seemed probable. The partition of 
 the true nucleus of imperial life was favoured by the senate, and as 
 the senatorian activity decayed, a dismemberment of empire might 
 have appeared feasible in which senalus or populus should acquire a 
 true vitality as a centre of national organisation. Such a development 
 however was checked by two influences, — the condition of the Medi- 
 terranean peoples external to Rome, and the fatal Roman conserva- 
 tism. 
 
 The first of these, which resulted in the constant augmentation of 
 the material elements of empire, by the accession of the devitalised 
 components of the anciens regimes of Carthage and of Greece, might 
 have seemed likely, taken with the constitutional primacy of thepopulus 
 in Rome, to issue in the premature evolution of nationalities. But 
 the reverse was in fact the case, for the Greek and Siceliot and African 
 power of self-determination had worn itself out, and the demoralisation 
 of the sovereign and subject-peoples could alike issue only in anarchy; 
 A Viriathus must fall by assassination ; a Sertorius could not maintain 
 a Rome of the west. The Gallic peoples had no efficient organisa- 
 tion ; the northern nations had scarcely arisen. No formation was 
 possible. The leges Salpensa et Maluginensis were the first origins of 
 a true nationalism, and they were not yet. Anarchy and its natural 
 event in autocratic rule were the only possible issues. 
 
 And when a magistrate escaped the trammels of senatorian routine, 
 he might conquer in east or west, but sooner or later he made his aim 
 and object Rome. St.. Peter's in mediaeval Rome was not more the 
 focus of all roads and all pilgrimages than was the Capitol under the 
 Commonwealth. Conservatism might yield to the superficial varnish 
 of Greek culture and foster the serpent of Punic imperial policy, 
 ibecause Rome had no real culture and no real political genius, but 
 it never gave way to any sentiment anti-Roman. It was perhaps 
 
43 
 
 Chauvinism and Jingoism, and not patriotism, but it looked to the 
 civic Rome as S/Kpahos of its world. 
 
 Anarchy, then, and a saturnalia of the dangerous classes were the 
 natural issue of the breakdown of the senatorian machinery and of 
 the economic system. The struggle of the orders ensued and a rush 
 for the spoils, and the fittest survived, i. e. the people as strongest. 
 But the people too were an element in the empire unfitted for 
 government, and they succumbed to the arms of the organisers of the 
 principate. The decline worked itself out, and ended in what 
 divus Augustus chose to call the restoration of the commonwealth in 
 B.C. 27, but which the historians term the Roman empire. 
 
 ' The old age of a polity is rarely venerable,' and the decline of the 
 Roman Republic is no exception to the rule. It is moreover a decline 
 which begins with the Republic itself, and developes throughout its 
 history. It is as a study of disease and decay therefore that Roman 
 history, and especially Rome's internal history, is scientifically valuable. 
 
 And scientific value in general implies artistic worthlessness. The 
 fall of the empire lends itself to expressipn in a work of art, for it is 
 the gathering of the nations round the dying lion. The fall of the 
 empire can be presented in the likeness of a spectacle in the 
 Coliseum. But the Republic's decline is not picturesque, for it is a 
 lingering death under internal disease ; no eagles gather round it, for 
 its physical strength is not burned out. It is the grim reality of some 
 Hogarth's picture representing in detail the horrors of a prolonged 
 struggle, in isolation, against the grip of inward pain and tribulation. 
 It is the death-agony, not in battle, but in the chamber, and it is 
 therefore thoroughly revolting. 
 
 But as a study, not from the studio but from the mortuary, it is 
 deeply and permanently interesting. It is the greatest example in 
 history of a constitution balanced, not harmonised — a constitution 
 doomed to perish because its unstable equilibrium will not allow of 
 its assimilating the necessary nutriment of life. And it is the grand 
 example of a state versed in the expedients of finance and commerce, 
 but dying because it did not and could not know that economics to 
 be real and wholesome must before all things consider men and their 
 needs. And finally, it is remarkable as the first empire or universal 
 dominion known to European history ; and the result is discouraging. 
 Rome verily in the freshness and purity of her early life had great 
 possibilities ; and the decline of her polity is the greatest political 
 and moral failure that the world has vet seen. Mole ruit sua. 
 
 FINIS 
 
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