PART V.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE (THE GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD).

Rome was the whole world, and all the world was Rome.

Even now a sovereign who should thus hold all the lands round the Mediterranean Sea, and whose borders should be the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates, would be incomparably the strongest ruler in the world; yet now America and Australia are in the scale altering the balance of power, the great Slavonic Empire of the North rules over territories practically unknown to the Roman, and China and Japan have come forth from the seclusion of centuries. As has been often pointed out, when Rome ruled she was not only the greatest, but practically the only Power of which the statesman and the philosopher took any cognisance.

- HODGKIN, in Contemporary Review, January, 1898, p. 53.

Republican Rome had little to do either by precept or example with modern life; imperial Rome, everything. —STILLÉ, Studies, 17.

CHAPTER I.

FOUNDING THE EMPIRE: JULIUS AND OCTAVIUS, 49 B.C.-14 A.D.

I. THE FIVE YEARS OF JULIUS CAESAR.

Α. THE MORAL QUESTION.

439. Monarchy at Rome Inevitable. Three conditions of the past century made monarchy now imperative: (a) the corruption of the populace in the capital; (b) the military danger on the frontiers; and (c) the maladministration of the provinces. As a result of the first, in Rome itself, the tremendous power of

the tribunes had grown into occasional dictatorships (i.e. Gracchus and Sulpicius). From the second, it had come to pass abroad that special commissions in times of peril extended the mighty authority of a one-year proconsul of a single province into unlimited sovereignty over vaster areas for indefinite time (i.e. Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar). To make a monarch needed but to unite these two new powers in one person.

440. Monarchy Right: Caesar the Hope of the Subject Nations. Thus the first two conditions of themselves made a monarchy inevitable; the third condition made it right. There might have arisen a purely selfish despot. It is Caesar's peculiar honor that he, more than any other statesman of the time, felt the third need, and that he rose to power as the representative of the suffering subject-populations. He had undoubtedly come to see that in any case the only government for that age was one-man rule; the existing commonwealth he called "a body without a soul." But his special aim was to mold the distracted Roman world into a mighty empire under equal laws. His monarchic faith was not a renunciation of the old democracy, so much as a broadening of it. From the champion of the city mob against an aristocratic ring, he had become the champion of wide nationalities against the same narrow circle and the mob of a single city. Already, as proconsul, he had admitted the Cisalpine Gauls to all the privileges of citizenship, on his own authority. In the midst of arduous campaigns, he had kept up correspondence with leading provincials in all parts of the empire. He had expended vast sums, too, in adorning and improving provincial cities, not only in his own. districts of Gaul and Spain, but also in Asia and Greece. His army itself was drawn from Cisalpine Gaul, and indeed partly from Gaul beyond the Alps. The subject nationalities were learning to look to him as their best hope against senatorial rapacity; and the great body of them wished for monarchy as the only legitimate government and the only escape from anarchy. It was no longer possible to regard only the inhabit

ants of the degenerate capital. It was right, as well as needful, for statesmen to consult the interests and views of the vaster populations of the provinces. Caesar aimed to make himself the interpreter and guide of that new imperial will, as opposed to the will of the petty, selfish clique that demanded to sway the world in its own paltry interests.

"Whatever we think of his personal morality, we must acknowledge that it was well a man of genius should arise at such a crisis to direct the general sentiment and to show how it could be realized." 1

441. The Question Relative, not Absolute. - Of course, to call Caesar right in his day, is not to call "Caesarism" right in all times and places. The study of history should teach that all such questions are relative. No institution can be judged apart from the surrounding conditions. A "Caesar" in Rome in 200 B.C. would have been a criminal; the real Caesar in 50 B.C. was a benefactor.

Moreover, to say that imperial government was the happiest solution then possible is not to call it an unmixed good. No perfectly happy outcome was possible to that Roman world, indisposed to representative institutions and based on slavery and militarism. But a despotism can get along on less political virtue and intelligence than a free government can. The evils that were finally to overthrow the Empire five centuries later had all appeared in the last century of the Republic in forms deadly to the Roman world under that system. The change to the imperial system restored material well-being and staved off the final collapse for a time as long as separates us from Luther or Columbus. The interval was precious; for in it, under Roman protection, priceless work was to be done for humanity. But finally the medicine of despotism exhausted its good effect; its own poison was added to the

1 J. R. Seeley denies the uplifting of the provincials as an aim of Caesar, admitting it only as a result. See his Roman Imperialism for that view.

older evils; and the collapse, threatened in the first century B.C., came in the fifth century A.D.

B. THE CIVIL WAR.

442. Caesar crosses the Rubicon: Campaign in Italy.—Caesar had finished his work in Gaul in the nick of time, and was free to meet his enemies at Rome and to take up his greater designs. He still shrank from civil war. He hoped to secure the consulship, and he seems to have trusted, in that event, to his ability as a statesman to accomplish his ends without violence. Accordingly, he made offer after offer of conciliation, finally conceding all that his opponents had claimed; but he was rebuffed by Pompey and the senate, and his friends were driven from Rome.

Caesar's decision was finally taken. He had only one legion in Cisalpine Gaul; but, in January, 49 B.C., he led it into Italy. This was an act of war, and the story goes that as he crossed the Rubicon - the little stream between his province and Italy he exclaimed, "The die is cast!" He never again looked back. With audacious and characteristic rapidity he moved directly upon the much larger forces that ponderous Pompey was mustering at leisure; and in sixty days, almost without bloodshed, he was master of the peninsula.

443. Campaigns in Spain and Greece. Pompey was still in control of most of the empire, but Caesar had the prestige of the capital and the advantage of Italy's central position. Turning to Spain, in three months he had dispersed the veteran armies of Pompey's lieutenants there; and then, following Pompey himself to Greece, in the critical campaign of 48 B.C. he became master of the world.

The decisive battle was fought at Pharsalus in Thessaly. Caesar's little army, living for weeks on roots and bark of trees, numbered less than half Pompey's well-appointed troops. Pompey held his choice of positions, and he had never been beaten in the field. It looked for a time as though Caesar had

rashly invited ruin. But one commander, despite his successful career, was "formed for a corporal and forced to be a general"; while the other, though caring not at all for military glory, was one of the two or three greatest captains of all time. Almost as much the armies differed in real fighting power. For the vital forces of the contending camps, and their meaning, Warde-Fowler's summary is masterly (Caesar, 299):

"On one side the disunion, selfishness, and pride of the last survivors of an ancient oligarchy, speculating before the event on the wealth or office that victory was to bring them; on the other, the absolute command of a single man, whose clear mental vision was entirely occupied with the facts and issues that lay before him that day. The one host was composed in great part of a motley crowd from Greece and the East, representing that spurious Hellenic civilization that for a century had sapped the vigor of Roman life; the other was chiefly drawn from the Gallic populations of Italy and the West, fresh, vigorous, intelligent, and united in devotion and loyalty to a leader whom not even defeat could dishearten. With Pompeius was the spirit of the past, and his failure did but answer to the failure of a decaying world; with Caesar was the spirit of the future, and his victory marks the moment when humanity could once more start hopefully upon a new line of progress."

1

444. The Four remaining Campaigns. — Other wars hindered the great work of reorganization. Egypt and Asia Minor each required a campaign; and in Egypt, too, under the seductive wiles of the voluptuous queen, Cleopatra, Caesar seems to have wasted a few months. If so, he partly atoned by his swift prosecution of the war in Asia against Pharnaces, son of Mithridates. It was this campaign that Caesar reported pithily to the senate in the historic phrase, "I came, I saw, I conquered.” Meantime, Cato and the senatorial party had raised troops in Africa and called in the humiliating aid of the Numidian king. Caesar crushed them at Thapsus.2 Somewhat later,

1 Special report: siege of Caesar in Alexandria.

2 Cato, stern republican that he was, committed suicide at Utica, unwilling to survive the commonwealth. His death was admired by the ancient world, and cast an undeserved halo about the expiring Republican cause. More than anything else, it has led later writers to treat Caesar as the ambi