CHAPTER VIII.

NEW CIVIL STRIFE, 146-49 B.C.

I. PRELIMINARY SURVEY.

392. Summary of Periods under the Republic.'- Republican Rome falls into three broad divisions.

a. An internal struggle between plebs and patricians, resulting finally in a fusion of the old classes (a century and a half, 510-367 B.C.).

b. Expansion by this united Rome (two centuries): over Italy (367-266 B.C.); over the Mediterranean coasts (264146 B.C.).

c. A century of new class struggles - division between rich and poor, and between Italy and the Provinces, resulting in despotism (146-49 B.C.).

The period of growth comes between the fusion of patricians and plebeians and the fission of rich and poor. This period of renewed internal strife is the subject of this chapter."

393. The Roman Republic unprepared for World-dominion. Rome had left no state able to keep the seas or guard the frontiers of civilization. It was therefore her plain duty to police the Mediterranean lands herself. In her attempts to do this, she was drawn on from conquest to conquest, and became mistress of the world before she had learned how to rule it. Formerly she had devised a system fit for a free city

1 The relations of the periods of the Roman Republic to each other have been somewhat obscured by the introduction of chapter v. and by the subdivision of the era of expansion into three other chapters.

2 The student should note the vital differences between the class struggle treated in this chapter and the earlier one between patricians and plebeians. It is not hard to see which one bears more closely upon questions of our day.

as the center of allied Italy (§§ 336, 343); but now she failed to create a new system fit for a free city as the center of the world. The reaction of her conquests, too, lowered her own moral tone and contributed to her decay, economic and political, until she could no longer fulfill her old task of governing Italy, or even herself. From the path of empire there was no retreat; but to that empire the city-commonwealth was to sacrifice its own liberty.

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394. The Four Great Evils. There followed a miserable century of plunder in the provinces and of civil strife at home. The internal conflict was threefold: in Rome itself, between rich and poor; in Italy, between Rome and the "Allies"; in the empire, between Italy and the Provinces. At the same time, the police duty itself was neglected: the seas swarmed with pirate fleets, and new barbarian thunderclouds gathered unwatched on all the frontiers.

395. The Need of a New System (Preparation for the Empire). The irresponsible senatorial oligarchy proved incompetent and indisposed to grapple with these problems, and its jealousy crushed individual statesmen who tried to heal the diseases of the state in constitutional ways. A century later, the situation had become unbearable within, and the Roman world seemed on the verge of ruin from barbarian assault from without. But, after all, the vigor of the Italian race was unexhausted; and the break-down of senatorial rule, and the danger of a worse mob rule, bred the only resource, the military rule of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar.

These leaders began a new system. We call it the Empire. Its essence was to be the concentration of power and responsibility. It was to remedy much. For centuries it guarded civilization against attacks from without, while it secured order, good government, and prosperity within. Political life. for the people it could not restore. To combine liberty with imperial extent was to be left to a later race on a new stage.

The interest in the "third period" of the Republic, upon which we now enter, lies in the fact that it was a preparation for this coming Empire.

II. THE EVILS IN DETAIL.

A. IN ROME.

396. Economic and Moral Decline due to the Great Wars. A social revolution preceded the political revolution. A tendency to economic and moral decline is plain before the close of the Second Punic War. Even a glorious war tends to demoralize an industrial society to corrupt morals and to create extremes of wealth and poverty. Extreme poverty brings with it further lowering of the moral tone; quick-won and illegitimate wealth does so, too. And then moral decay shows in the state in political disease. The Second Punic War teaches this lesson to the full.

the flower of the citizen

Italy had lost a million lives body. The Roman burgesses alone fell off from two hundred and ninety-eight thousand to two hundred and fourteen thousand. Over much of the peninsula the homesteads of the rest had been devastated beyond recovery; while years of incessant camp life, with plunder for pay, had ruined the simple tastes of the old yeoman soldier. In the ruin of the small farmer, Hannibal had dealt his enemy a deadlier blow than he ever knew.

Legitimate trade, too, had stagnated, and illegitimate profits were eagerly sought. The merchants who had risked their wealth so enthusiastically to supply their country in her dire need after Cannae, began to indemnify themselves, as soon as that peril was over, by fraudulent war contracts and by scuttling their over-insured ships, supposed to be loaded with army supplies for Spain or Africa. Later conquests gave this class even greater opportunities. Alongside the impoverished farmer and the starving rabble, there sprang up a coarse plutocracy, based on rapacious plunder of the enemy's country,

fraudulent contracts with the government at home, reckless speculation, and unjust appropriation of the public lands. With this new order of wealthy Equites and with the senatorial class, sumptuous luxury replaced the old Roman simplicity. As the satirist Juvenal wrote later:

"Luxury has fallen upon us-more terrible than the sword. The conquered East has avenged herself by the gift of her vices."

The economic phenomena, good and bad, that had occurred in the Greek world (§§ 244 and 254) after the conquests of Alexander, were now repeated on a larger scale in Italy — with this significant difference, that the coarser Roman resorted too often to tawdry display and to gluttony or other brutal excesses, from which the more refined and temperate Greek turned with disgust.

397. The Continued Decline of the Yeomanry after the Wars through the working of "Economic Laws.''1

"Clearly a difficult point for government, that of dealing with these masses; if, indeed, it be not rather the sole point and problem of government, and all other points mere accidental crotchets, superficialities, and beatings of the wind."-CARLYLE, French Revolution.

In the ancient world, the land question was what the wage question is to our more complex industrial society. It had long been important at Rome. Now it became vital.

The rift between rich and poor, which war and unjust privilege had begun, went on widening. Especially were the surviving yeomanry squeezed off the land. This came about through certain economic tendencies that should have been checked. Sicily and other grain provinces supplied Italian cities with cheap corn that undersold the Italian farmer. The large landlord turned to more profitable cattle-grazing, or to wine and oil culture. The small farmer had no such escape, for all these forms of industry called for large tracts and slave labor. For grazing, or often simply for pleasure

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1 Mommsen, III. 304-308, 311-314; Ihne, IV. ch. xii.

resorts, the new capitalists wanted huge domains, and were ready to buy out the poor yeomen, whose lessened profits made them willing to sell. The wars in the East furnished an abundance of cheap slaves. Thus we have a group of factors, all tending to the same end: (a) the cheap grain from the provinces; (b) the introduction of a new industry better suited to large holdings and to slave labor; (c) the growth of large fortunes eager for landed investment; (d) the growth of a cheap slave supply. And so great ranches, with a few slave herdsmen and their flocks, took the place of many cottages on small, well-tilled farms, each once with its independent family of Italian citizens. The small farmers, formerly the backbone of Italian society in peace and war alike, drifted from the soil to form a degenerate town rabble at the capital. There they became the masters and the means of designing politicians, who amused them with festivals and gladiatorial shows, and who were finally to support them, at state expense, with free grain. The lines of an English poet, two thousand years later, regarding similar phenomena in his own country; apply to this Italy:

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay !"

398. Violence of the Rich as a Cause of the Decay of the Yeomanry. To war and natural economic causes were added force and fraud on a large scale, especially in the more secluded regions, where, despite all discouragements, the small farmers clung stubbornly to their ancestral fields. The Latin poet Horace (Odes, ii. 23-28) describes the violence and trickery of the great landlord toward his helpless victim in pathetic words that resemble those of Sir Thomas More in England in the sixteenth century regarding like conditions there.

1 In this case, decline in morals was essentially a result, not a cause, of the economic change.

2 Mommsen, III. 313.